OK, welcome to another chapter! Please leave a review letting me know what you like, don't like, etc. Thank you!
At least, Barry Allen reflected, life with the Doctor was seldom dull. When he wasn't onboard a bigger on the inside time- and space ship, he was dealing with shop window dummies, clockwork robots, Slitheen, or giant space worms; saving the world with a pot of pasta; or, in this case, being attacked by an army of gas-mask zombies in a hospital during the Blitz.
"Mummy. Mummy. Mummy!"
Nowhere to run! Barry thought, pressing himself against the wall. Having landed in London following an alien spaceship, they'd discovered a zombie child whose injuries spread like the plague. And they'd met Doctor Mid-nite, an actual real-life superhero, who was taking care of the patients. Barry had asked for an autograph in a very mature and manly way. Okay, there might have been a little bit of squeeing, and possibly a bit of jumping up and down, but who was counting?
Then, he too had been turned into a replica of the child, and now every one of the patients were advancing on Barry, the Doctor, and an incredibly handsome Time Agent (whatever that was) turned conman named Captain Jack Harkness. Then he heard the Doctor say possibly the least expected last words ever:
"Go to your room! Go to your room. I mean it. I'm very, very angry with you. I am very, very cross. Go to your room!"
Slowly, like children, every one of the patients stopped, turned and shuffled away. Barry gasped out a breath, and the Doctor turned to look at him.
"I'm really glad that worked. Those would have been terrible last words."
"So why are they all wearing masks?" Barry asked.
They're not. Those masks are flesh and bone," the Doctor said grimly, then turned to Jack. "How was your con supposed to work?"
"Simple enough, really," the man shrugged. "Find some harmless piece of space junk, let the nearest Time Agent track it back to Earth, convince him it's valuable, name a price. When he's put fifty percent up front, oops! A German bomb falls on it, destroys it forever. He never gets to see what he's paid for, never knows he's been had. I buy him a drink with his own money, and we discuss dumb luck. The perfect self-cleaning con."
"Yeah," the Doctor snapped. "Perfect."
"The London Blitz is great for self-cleaners. Pompeii's nice if you want to make a vacation of it though, but you've got to set your alarm for volcano day. Getting a hint of disapproval," he added.
"Take a look around the room," the Doctor ordered. "This is what your harmless piece of space-junk did."
"It was a burnt-out medical transporter. It was empty."
As they headed upstairs, Jack followed, protesting that he knew nothing about what was happening.
"I'll tell you what's happening," he said over his shoulder. "You forgot to set your alarm clock. It's volcano day."
Jack used his gun to open the room where the boy had been taken after the accident.
"Sonic blaster," the Doctor noted. "Fifty first century. Weapon factories of Villengard?"
"You've been to the factories?" Jack queried.
"Once."
"Well, they gone now, destroyed," the Captain told them. "The main reactor went critical. Vaporized the lot."
"Like I said. Once. There's a banana grove there, now. I like bananas. Bananas are good."
Barry rolled his eyes, then threw one more glance down the hallway for good measure.
Inside, they found a mess. Papers were strewn all over, electronic equipment was shattered, and an observation window was in pieces.
"Something got out of here," Jack noted. "Something powerful and angry."
"What are you, Captain Obvious?" Barry snarked as he looked around at the child's crayon drawings scattered on the floor, along with a teddy bear.
"How could a child do this?" he asked. The Doctor reached over and turned on the tape machine.
"Do you know where you are?" Mid-nite's voice asked.
"Are you my mummy?"
"Are you aware of what's around you? Can you see?"
"Are you my mummy?"
"What do you want? Do you know…"
Only more repetitions of "Are you my mummy?" answered.
"Why doesn't he know?" Barry asked. "What happened to him?"
The Doctor shook his head and began pacing.
"Doctor?"
"Can you sense it?"
"Sense what?"
"Coming out of the walls. Can you feel it? Funny little human brains. How do you get around in those things? There are these children living rough round the bomb sites. They come out during air-raids looking for food."
"And one of 'em got hit by the bomb? I mean, the medical capsule thing?"
It was a med-ship. It was harmless!" Jack insisted.
"Yes, you keep saying harmless. Suppose one of them was affected, altered?"
"Altered how?" Barry asked.
"I'm here!"
"It's afraid," the Doctor breathed. "Terribly afraid and powerful. It doesn't know it yet, but it will do. It's got the power of a god, and I just sent it to it's room."
"Doctor…" he muttered.
"I'm here. Can't you see me?"
"What's that noise?"
"End of the tape. It ran out about thirty seconds ago."
"I'm here, now. Can't you see me?"
"I sent it to its room," the Doctor breathed. "This is it's room."
They spun around…and the child was there.
"Okay, on my signal make for the door," Jack ordered. "Now!"
Jack aimed his blaster at the child…except he was holding a banana. The Doctor pulled out Jack's gun and made a perfectly square hole in the wall.
"Now! Go! Don't drop the banana!"
"Why not?"
"Good source of potassium!" the Doctor called, and Barry snorted as he squeezed through.
"Just what the Doctor ordered."
No matter what they did, the zombies just kept on coming, but they eventually managed to lock themselves in a cement room with a barred window. The two men almost immediately started snarking at each other, until Jack disappeared the moment their backs were turned.
"Great," Barry said, rolling his eyes. "Just ran and saved himself."
As if on cue, the radio crackled to life.
"Barry? Doctor? Can you hear me? I'm on my ship. Used the emergency teleport. Sorry I couldn't take you. It's security-keyed to my molecular structure. I'm working on it. Hang in there."
Jack explained that he was using something called Om-Com to call anything with a speaker grill. "Now there's a coincidence," the Doctor said, noting that the child could Om-Com too. "Anything with a speaker grill. Even the TARDIS phone."
"What, you mean the child can phone us?" Barry asked, looking around on instinct.
"And I can hear you," the child's voice came through. "Coming to find you. Coming to find you."
"I'll try to block out the signal," Jack promised. "Least I can do."
Glenn Miller came over the radio.
"Would've gone with Lady Gaga myself," Barry muttered, while the Doctor took his sonic screwdriver to the wall. It took a few minutes, but the world shimmered around them, and when he blinked and looked around, he was in a tiny spaceship.
"Sorry about the delay," Jack waved from the pilot's seat. "I had to take the nav-com offline to override the teleport security."
"You spend ten minutes overriding your own protocols?" the Doctor raised an eyebrow. "Maybe you should remember whose ship it is."
"Oh, I do," the ex-Time Agent said wistfully. "She was gorgeous. Like I told her, be back in five minutes."
"This is a Chula ship."
"Yeah, just like that medical transporter," he agreed. "Only this one is dangerous."
The Doctor snapped his fingers and a golden glow enveloped his hands.
"Nanogenes," he said in answer to Barry's inquiring look. "Sub-atomic robots. There's millions of them in here, see? Burned my hand on the console when we landed. All better now. They activate when the bulkhead's sealed. Check you out for damage, fix any physical flaws. Take us to the crash site," he added to Jack. "I need to see your space junk."
"As soon as I get the nav-com back online. Make yourself comfortable."
"Hang on a sec, though," Barry said to Jack. "You used to be a Time Agent and now you're trying to con them? Who are the Time Agents, anyway?"
"Time police, kinda," he shrugged, tapping away at a control. "We—they—kept time on track, stopped paradoxes and stuff. Founded by a guy called Rip Hunter."
"Okay, so why'd you leave?" Barry asked as the ship hummed into motion.
"Woke up one morning with two years' worth of memories gone," Jack explained, serious for almost the first time. "Your friend over there doesn't trust me, and for all I know he's right not to."
Later, the unlikely threesome stood outside the bomb site, trying to figure out how to get past the guard.
"If we had Kara here, we could speed past the guards," Barry muttered, and the Doctor shot him a look.
"I'll take care of it," Jack promised, striding right towards the man. "Don't wait up!"
"Relax," the Doctor said to Barry, who was raising his eyebrows. "He's a fifty first century guy. He's just a bit more flexible when it comes to...dancing."
"How flexible?"
"Well, by his time, you lot have spread out across half the galaxy."
Barry thought back to Cassandra and how she'd dismissed other humans as "mongrels."
"You mean…"
"So many species, so little time," the Doctor raised his eyebrows in turn.
"What, that's what we do when we get out there? That's our mission? We seek out new life, and, and…"
"Dance," the Doctor nodded.
They headed after Jack, discovering that the guards had succumbed to the gas mask plague.
"The effect's become airborne, accelerating," the Doctor noted grimly.
"What's keeping us safe?" Barry asked as the air-raid sirens started up.
"Nothing."
"Oh, great. And didn't you say a bomb was going to land here?"
"Never mind about that. If the contaminant is airborne now, there's hours left."
"For what?" Jack inquired.
"Till nothing, forever. For the entire human race…And can anyone else hear singing?"
They found their friend Nancy sitting, handcuffed inside the guard hut, and after freeing her, they headed for the spacecraft. Jack keyed in an access code, but it didn't work, and an alarm went off.
"Captain, secure those gates!" the Doctor snapped, and threw Barry the sonic screwdriver to reattach the barbed wire Nancy had cut through on her way in.
They rejoined the Doctor as he and Jack got the capsule open.
"It's empty," Jack exclaimed. "Look at it!"
"What do you expect in a Chula medical transporter?" the Doctor snarked. "Bandages? Cough drops? Barry?"
"Oh, uh, nanogenes!"
"It wasn't empty, Captain," the Doctor continued with an approving nod for his companion. "There was enough nanogenes in there to rebuild a species."
"Oh, God," Jack breathed.
"Which is exactly what they're gonna do," Barry breathed, running his hands through his hair. "There were nanogenes in the ship when it crashed."
"Exactly. Getting it now, are we?" the Doctor asked. "Billions upon billions of them, ready to fix all the cuts and bruises in the whole world. But what they find first is a dead child, probably killed earlier that night, and wearing a gas mask."
"And they brought him back to life?" Barry asked wistfully. "They can do that?"
"What's life? Life's easy," the Doctor explained. "A quirk of matter. Nature's way of keeping meat fresh. Nothing to a nanogene. One problem, though. These nanogenes, they're not like the ones on your ship. This lot have never seen a human being before. Don't know what a human being's supposed to look like. All they've got to go on is one little body, and there's not a lot left. But they carry right on. They do what they're programmed to do. They patch it up. Can't tell what's gasmask and what's skull, but they do their best. Then off they fly, off they go, work to be done. Because, you see, now they think they know what people should look like, and it's time to fix all the rest. And they won't ever stop. They won't ever, ever stop. The entire human race is going to be torn down and rebuilt in the form of one terrified child looking for its mother, and nothing in the world can stop it!"
"I didn't know!" Jack protested. The zombies approached, as the Doctor explained that the ship thought it was under attack, so it was calling in reinforcements. Reconditioned humans, ready for the battlefield. Now they were just waiting for their commander, the little boy.
"Jamie," Nancy said. "Not the boy. Jamie."
"So how long until the bomb falls?"
"Seconds."
"There isn't a little boy born who wouldn't tear the world apart to save his mummy," the Doctor breathed. He cast a side glance at Barry, who blushed and looked at the ground. "And this little boy can."
"Doctor, what do we do?"
"I don't know."
"It's all my fault," Nancy insisted as the chanting of "Mummy" grew louder.
"How can it be your…" the Doctor broke off. "Nancy, what age are you? Twenty? Twenty one? Older than you look, yes?"
"Oh," Barry breathed. Jack teleported out to deal with the bomb, as Barry realized the truth. She wasn't Jamie's older sister…she was his mom. "Oh God, Nancy, I'm so sorry."
The gate opened, and Jamie—or what was left of him—approached.
"Tell him," the Doctor insisted. "Nancy, the future of the human race is in your hands. Trust me and tell him."
"Are you my mummy? Are you my mummy? Are you my mummy?"
"Yes! Yes, I am your mummy," she told him as the boy came closer, followed by his army, repeating his question over and over.
"Are you my mummy? Are you my mummy?"
"He doesn't understand, there's not enough of him left."
"Are you my mummy?"
"I am your mummy. I will always be your mummy. I'm so sorry. I am so, so sorry."
A cloud of golden nanogenes erupted around them, and Barry tensed.
"Doctor, it's changing her, we should…"
The Doctor shushed him. "Come on, please. Come on, you clever little nanogenes. Figure it out! The mother, she's the mother. It's got to be enough information. Figure it out."
"What's happening?" Barry asked.
"See? Recognizing the same DNA."
The cloud dissipated, and Nancy fell back. The Doctor approached Jamie, slowly, cautiously, reached out a hand…and lifted the mask, revealing the face of a bemused little boy with an epic case of hat hair.
"Ha-ha!" the Doctor beamed, lifting him up in the air. "Welcome back! Twenty years 'till pop music, you're gonna love it!"
Grinning from ear to ear, he explained that the nanogenes had recognized her DNA as the parent and undone the damage.
"Doctor, that bomb," Barry started, but his friend waved him to silence.
"Taken care of it!"
"How?"
"Psychology."
And then, as the bomb approached, a spaceship swung out of nowhere and encased it in an energy field. Jack appeared out of nowhere, sitting on top. He promised to get rid of it safely, and waved a cheerful goodbye.
"Take care, handsome," he called, and Barry was never sure whether he'd meant the Doctor, himself, or both. A golden glow appeared around the Doctor's hands.
"What're you doing now?"
"Software patch," he smirked. "Emailing them the upgrade."
He threw his arms forward and sent the cloud whistling through the air into the other zombies, who collapsed.
"Just this once, Barry. Just this once, everybody lives!"
He approached Doctor Mid-nite, now rising from the ground.
"Back on your feet, Doctor Cross. Still got a lot of adventures left to go. These are your patients. All better now."
"Right, you lot. Lots to do. Beat the Germans, save the world. Don't forget the welfare state! Setting this to self-destruct, soon as everybody's clear. History says there was an explosion here. Who am I to argue with history?"
"Usually the first in line," Barry muttered, sotto voce.
"The nanogenes will clean up the mess and switch themselves off, because I just told them to. Nancy and Jamie will go to Doctor Midnite for help, ditto. All in all, all things considered, fantastic!"
"Look at you," Barry smiled, patting his friend's arm. "Grinning away like you're Santa Claus."
"Who says I'm not, red bicycle when you were twelve?" the Doctor winked.
"What?"
"And everybody lives, Barry! Everybody lives! I need more days like this."
"Doctor."
"Go on, ask me anything. I'm on fire!"
"What about Jack? Why'd he say goodbye?"
"Ah," the Doctor paused, and his smile froze, then returned bigger than normal. "C'mon!"
"What's happening?"
"He's taken the bomb onboard his ship, but if he tries to jettison it, it'll detonate. And the Chula never really went in for escape pods."
"So what do we do?"
"We save the day."
One quick trip in the TARDIS later, and they arrived in the stern of the Chula ship, watching Jack sip a martini and talk to his computer.
"Last time I was sentenced to death, I ordered four hyper-vodkas for my breakfast. All a bit of a blur after that. Woke up in bed with both my executioners. Mmm, lovely couple. They stayed in touch. Can't say that about most executioners. Anyway. Thanks for everything, computer. It's been great."
"Whenever you're ready," Barry called, leaning against the wall, and Jack's expression was a sight to behold. If anything, it got even better when he saw the interior.
"Close the door, will you?" the Doctor called from the console. "Your ship's about to blow up, there's gonna be a draft."
"What I think the Doctor's trying to say is, welcome aboard," he added.
Jack smirked, and Barry smoothed his hair and cleared his throat.
"Much bigger on the inside."
"You'd better be," the Doctor nodded. "Welcome aboard, Captain."
Quick note: The clockwork robots are a reference to the fantastic novel "The Clockwise Man" by Justin Richards, where the Ninth Doctor and Barry meet clockwork alien robots in 1920s London. While Barry isn't quite as attracted to Jack as Rose is, well, this is Captain Jack we're talking about. As he notes in "Miracle Day," it's basically his mission to turn everyone gay.
See you next week for Boom Town, when things will change...forever.
