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Clearing up the Picture.
The Doctor watched as the gas mask people drew closer and closer to her and Captain Harkness, forcing the two time travellers closer together until they were literally back to back. The infected patients were almost within touching distance before the Doctor was hit by a burst of inspiration. "Go to your room," she said firmly, recalling the tones she had used when she had been in her first incarnation whenever Susan, Vicki, or Dodo had been truculent. The Doctor resisted the urge to grin in delight when the patients in the ward suddenly went very still.
X
At the Lloyd house, Nancy was stunned when Jamie went still.
X
The Doctor, emboldened by her successful experiment carried on while Jack watched on in surprise, "Go to your room. Go on now, all of you. You have been very, very naughty and I want you to go to your room now! I mean it. I'm very, very angry with you. I am very, very cross. Go to your room!"
The patients hung their heads in shame as they were being scolded and they shuffled away to their beds.
X
To Nancy's growing shock, Jamie left the Lloyd's house, looking down with shame as he walked out down the streets.
X
The Doctor sighed with relief when the last patient went to bed and she almost laughed, but she didn't because she didn't know how the patients would respond to the sound. "I'm really glad that worked. Those would have been terrible last words."
"What did you do?" Captain Jack asked, looking around in confusion.
"Wait a moment, I want to see if they are really going to obey," the Doctor held up her hand before she cautiously took a few steps toward the patients before she relaxed and she walked back to Captain Jack.
"Just a basic little experiment; this all started because a boy was infected with something in that crash. All of these patients and everyone inside this hospital has been touched by the essence of a boy searching for his mother, and some aspects of that persona have spread to them. To the infected patients and the child, they have a childlike demeanour," the Doctor smiled.
"Oh, so they would respond like children," Captain Jack replied.
"That's right. But now," the Doctor's cheerful manner vanished completely and she turned seriously to the Time Agent. "I want to know exactly what you did. I want to know what was in that so-called ambulance. And I want to know now."
Captain Jack Harkness was left unnerved by the Doctor's stare. Not only was her gaze cold and hard, unyielding in its willpower, but the Time Agent sensed if he made some flippant remark or did the wrong thing, he would regret it. But staring into the Doctor's face. Jack was an experienced time and space traveller who had visited many worlds, many places, many times. He knew only too well that some human-looking aliens could look and mimic a human, either by natural design or by disguise, could possess a longer lifespan. The longer he was in the Doctor's company, the more convinced he was becoming she was impossibly old and extremely dangerous.
X
In the Lloyd's dining room, Nancy watched the child walk away down the street from the window. He wasn't moving very fast. Nancy noticed that he was heading in the direction of the hospital or the crash. Nancy's emotions got to her as they always did whenever she watched Jamie as he was now. "Jamie," she choked. Sliding to the floor, Nancy let it all out and she sobbed. Nothing mattered to her at that point. To her, the war and the Lloyds at this moment meant nothing to her. She was too upset to care. How had this happened? How had Jamie become like this? What was happening? Nancy knew this was all her own fault, her and her darkest but happiest secret.
X
In the Albion Hospital ward, the Doctor and Captain Jack were deep in conversation. The Time Agent had apparently arrived in the period some time ago, taking the identity of a man named Captain Jack Harkness, an American pilot assigned to the RAF during the war, and so conveniently died. This man had simply taken his place. That was bad enough. But the Doctor wanted to know more.
"This con of yours, what was it? How did it work?" The Doctor folded her arms.
"It was simple enough, really. Find some harmless piece of space junk," Captain Harkness was saying, "let the nearest Time Agent track it back to Earth, convince him it's valuable, name a price. When he's put fifty percent upfront, oops! A German bomb falls on it, destroying 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."
The Doctor snorted, wondering if the man was even capable of registering her contempt. She wasn't surprised a Time Agent was running cons like this. The Time Agency was not a pleasant organisation. They were a true, perfect example of a government authority who had grown to misuse their own powers. Like all Time Lords, the Doctor felt nothing but disgust for them since their meddling since their inception had caused a lot of damage, but what made it worse was how the Agency had zero interest in the wellbeing of sentient life or even to the Laws of Time.
Over the years the Doctor had come face to face with the number of paradoxes the Agency caused or interfered with, and she was amazed they were still operating. To her, the Agency was dangerous and should be stopped. This man's actions proved it. "Yes. Perfect."
"And you still have no idea how your…ship picked it up and triggered the programming?"
"No," the Doctor replied.
She was telling the truth, although a part of her wondered if in her immediate future or in a future regeneration she remembered the trap and triggered it, forcing her to deal with it in the 1940s. The scepticism on Harkness' face was clear, but the Time Agent didn't let it bother him so much. "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," Captain Jack chuckled a little bit.
The Doctor glowered at him, not even hiding her disdain now.
Fortunately for her state of mind, he stopped laughing and threw his hands up in mock worry. "Getting a hint of disapproval."
"Disapproval? Take a look around the room. This is what your harmless piece of space junk did. It is clearly not harmless if it does something like this," the Doctor gestured around the ward.
"It was a burnt-out medical transporter. It was empty," Harkness snapped, getting annoyed with having all of the blame dumped on his shoulders, but the Doctor did not care, she turned to walk away. "Where are you going?"
"We're going upstairs."
Harkness was surprised. "Why? What's upstairs? Look, I even programmed the flight computer so it wouldn't land on anything living. I harmed no one. I don't know what's happening here, but believe me, I had nothing to do with it." The Doctor turned to stare back at him, studying him deeply. She could sense he was telling the truth, but he knew more than he was telling her. "I'll tell you what's happening. You forgot to set your alarm clock. It's the London Blitz. It's volcano day." A siren sounded outside like a wailing animal.
"The all clear," Harkness observed.
"I doubt it," the Doctor replied as she thought about what was going on. "Come with me, if you want to learn what is going on."
X
The sound of the All-Clear siren jolted Nancy out of her reverie. She had spent the last ten minutes in a guilt-ridden state, her mind full of memories of Jamie and her. But the sound of the All-Clear reminded her where she was, and what she was doing here in the first place. Nancy got up and tried to leave the house….only to jump in fright when she was suddenly confronted by a boy in a gas mask.
Nancy let out a gasp….and the boy took his gas mask off. Nancy sighed with relief although she wondered who this boy was. He looked vaguely familiar. "I thought you were Jamie," Nancy walked past the boy and headed into the Lloyd's garden. Nancy quickened her step, hoping to get to the back wall of the garden so she could get out before the Lloyds even left their homemade bomb shelter. She heard the boy behind her yell, "Dad! Dad!"
The door to the bomb shelter flew open and the red-faced Mr Lloyd grabbed hold of her. "Ruddy kids!"
"Get off of me!" Nancy struggled but Lloyd surprised her; she had assumed the man was just fat, but he clearly had something in his muscles. "Get your hands off me now!"
No matter how much Nancy struggled, Mr Lloyd was able to manhandle her to the house. Nancy flinched when Mrs Lloyd's spittle sprayed across her face. "Oi, you! Get in! Get her in there. She's nicked!"
X
"Doctor?" Captain Jack yelled as he ran after the woman, running to the staircase and he looked up in surprise when he saw she was the next flight up.
"I'm here. Do you have a blaster?" The Doctor asked.
Captain Jack gave her a surprised look before he realised the question was rhetorical. She clearly knew enough of Time Agents to know they were armed thanks to their training, to say nothing of their personal experiences."Sure!" The pair of them rushed through the darkened corridors - from quick looks at the wards, the gas-mask patients were currently lying in their beds, fully inert for now - before they arrived at a secure metal door. "What are we doing here?" Jack demanded.
"On the night your space junk landed, someone was hurt," the Doctor explained solemnly. "This was where they were taken."
Harkness studied the door. "What happened?"
"I don't know, but let's find out. Get it open," the Doctor stood back and waited for the Time Agent to give her a look while he took out his blaster, and pointed it at the lock. There was nothing wrong with her sonic screwdriver, but she wanted to see what the Time Agent could do. It might come in handy later on. She watched as Jack's blaster disintegrated the lock. The Doctor gently took the weapon from the Time Agent and studied it.
"Sonic blaster, 51st century. Weapon Factories of Villengard?"
Harkness gave her a surprised look. "You've been to the factories?"
"No," the Doctor replied.
"Well, they gone now, destroyed," the Time Agent waved the blaster around with a grimace of regret that such a wonderful weapons factory was gone. "The main reactor went critical. Vaporized the lot."
"Nothing to do with me," the Doctor shrugged indifferently, realising her previous selves' attitudes to guns and weapons had not changed with this new regeneration. "Nice blast pattern, though."
"Digital." The Time Agent smirked.
"A Squareness gun."
"Yeah."
"The digital function means a digital rewind. The power pack of the blaster draws too much power for it to work, so it's often rendered useless. Apart from that, I like its features even if I despise weapons," the Doctor commented and she walked into the room. The room was divided in two by an observation window, which was broken, and the devastation had followed with the filing cabinets, the electronic equipment used for monitoring and observation wrecked beyond repair.
"What do you think?" The Doctor turned to the Time Agent. Harkness was examining the room with his eyes, seeing the observation window.
"Something got out of here."
"Yes. And?"
Harkness gave her a look, he was trying to work out what could do something like this. But he wasn't having a lot of luck. There was nothing in his experience in this moment in history, to say nothing of what he had known about the Chula that could do this. "Something powerful. Angry."
"Yes. Powerful and angry. And," the Doctor walked over to the observation window and took a look inside.
"It was a child. Come and take a look for yourself."
The Time Agent walked over to the observation window. Inside were a number of a child's crayon drawings scattered on the floor and stuck to the walls and there was a small teddy bear. All abandoned. The little cubicle since it was far too small to qualify it as a room of any kind was a shambles. "A child? I suppose this explains Mummy," Harkness said thoughtfully as he looked at the Mummy themed pictures, they were virtually the same, "But how could a child do this?"
"I don't know," the Doctor murmured before she turned on a tape machine. The tape crackled into life and the croaky voice of Constantine spoke clearly through the recording.
"Do you know where you are?" Constantine was asking, clearly, the boy had just recovered enough to be judged fit to speak even if the gas mask had posed problems.
"Are you my mummy?" The child asked.
"Are you aware of what's around you? Can you see?" Constantine's voice was filled with concern as well as professional curiosity, clearly believing that the gas mask had been fused to the skin somehow and that it was causing the child problems (the Doctor wondered for a moment how the humans had taken the gas mask, but she pushed it out of her mind as she focused on the recording. Her mind might have recovered somewhat from her regeneration, but she was still foggy about what this strange plague was, never mind how it had been caused).
"Are you my mummy?"
The Doctor frowned, wondering again how this pre-programmed loop worked and why it was even happening in the first place. For the first time, Constantine changed his tack as he realised the standard medical questions were just not going to work. "What do you want? Do you know-?"
The child, sensing a change in the manner, suddenly began panicking. "I want my mummy. Are you my mummy? I want my mummy! Are you my mummy? Are you my mummy? Mummy? Mummy?"
"I've heard this voice before. I first heard it when I arrived," the Doctor commented.
"Mummy?"
The Doctor went on. "It's the same thing; Always are you my mummy?. Like he doesn't know who he truly is, and he seems stuck on a perpetual loop," the Doctor mused.
"Mummy?"
Harkness shook his head. "Why doesn't he know?"
The Doctor shrugged even as the child spoke again. It was the same thing all over again.
"Are you there, mummy? Mummy?"
X
In the Lloyd dining room, Nancy was sitting on one of the chairs seething with frustration in herself. She knew she had only herself to blame for being caught, and now she was waiting for the Lloyds to come and tell her what they were going to do with her, and her mind was racing as she tried to think of a way of escaping.
Nancy had just wondered if she could get away with breaking a hole in the window when Mr Lloyd strode in, glaring at her maliciously. She looked away, knowing the fat pig would think she was looking down out of fear or shame. The truth was the man was so ugly and he didn't smell very good.
"The police are on their way," Lloyd snapped angrily. "I pay for the food on this table. The sweat on my brow, that food is. The sweat on my brow."
Nancy snorted under her breath, and she made up her mind about what she was going to do next.
"Anything else you'd like?" Lloyd fell right into it and gave Nancy her opportunity. "I've got a whole house here. Anything else you'd like to help yourself to?"
Nancy lifted her head. While Lloyd wasn't even remotely nice, or even interesting to look at, she could handle it for a few minutes. "Yeah," she answered with a smirk. "I'd like some wire cutters, please. Something that can cut through barbed wire. Oh, and a torch," she added before she smiled mockingly back at Lloyd, who was looking at her in astonishment. "Don't look like that, Mr Lloyd. I know you've got plenty of tools in here. I've been watching this house for ages. And I'd like another look round your kitchen cupboards. I was in a hurry the first time. I want to see if there's anything I missed."
Lloyd got over his astonishment quickly. "The food on this table-!" He began in outrage, only for Nancy to interrupt him. She didn't care if he thought he had run into Berlin and punched Hitler on the nose to earn half of it.
"It's an awful lot of food, isn't it, Mr Lloyd?" Nancy said pointedly as she looked around the room before she turned her stare back at him. "A lot more than on anyone else's table. Half this street thinks your missus must be messing about with Mr Haverstock, the butcher. But she's not, is she? You are, and we both know it, and I have the proof." Nancy smirked again as she stood up, but this was a nastier smirk than before. Lloyd was too much of a coward to do anything to her, and they knew it.
"Wire cutters. Torch. Food. And I'd like to use your bathroom before I leave, please," she requested politely before she caught sight of the drops of sweat rolling down the fat man's face. "Oh, look. There's the sweat on your brow."
X
"Mummy? Please, mummy? Mummy?"
Jack Harkness ground his teeth together in frustration while the Doctor paced up and down the small observation room, or whatever it was doctors in this primitive, barbaric age called them. They had been in this damn room for half an hour now and the tape recording was just driving him crazy. It was all the same, the child was constantly calling for mummy, and there was nothing different.
"Doctor? What are we gonna do?" Harkness demanded.
"Can you sense it?" The Doctor ignored the Time Agent's growing desperation.
"Sense what?" Harkness shook his head in frustration.
"The voice coming out of the walls. Can you feel it?" The child's voice asked.
"Mummy?"
The Doctor ignored the child's voice. "Alright. There are these children living rough around the bomb sites. They come out during air raids looking for food. They break into people's houses, they steal whatever they can while they avoid the authorities and they avoid the bombings."
"I guess that makes sense," Jack mused as he thought about what he had seen in the 1940s so far.
The Doctor sent him a look before she said, "Let me put it this way-."
"Mummy, please?"
The Doctor finished her question. "What if these children were there when this thing, whatever it was, landed?"
Instantly Jack was protesting, tired of constantly being blamed for this mess. "It was a med-ship. It was harmless."
The Doctor closed her eyes for a second before she said patiently, "Yes, you keep saying that it was harmless. But let's move on, shall we? What if… one of them was affected, altered?"
"Altered how?" Harkness asked, ignoring the strange noise in the room that was coming from the tape machine.
"I'm here!" The Child's voice was sing-song now, and it sent a chill down Jack's spine.
"It's afraid," the Doctor realised. "The child….he's afraid. The child is terribly afraid and extremely 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 its room."
Jack realised something was wrong. The strange noise in the room was giving him the creeps and the direction of the Doctor's voice had shaken him.
"Doctor."
The child's voice spoke again, only adding to the air of menace in the room. "I'm here. Can't you see me?"
Suddenly Jack couldn't take it anymore. "What's that noise?" He demanded; if the Doctor wanted to be relaxed, she could clear off to somewhere else. But he watched in horror as the Doctor's expression changed to one of worry.
"That sound is the end of the tape. It ran out about thirty seconds ago."
"Thanks for being observant!" Jack threw his hands up.
"I am trying to stop something from going wrong, and since it's likely your fault in the first place you're hardly in any position to tell me what to do!" The Doctor snapped back angrily.
Jack was gearing himself up for the mother of all retorts when the Child's voice spoke again, "I'm here, now. Can't you see me?"
The Doctor closed her eyes sheepishly as she realised something terribly important. "I sent it to its room," she remembered, kicking herself now for being so stupid, for hanging around this stupid room for so long when they should have left ages ago, but she had been so determined to think things through in her mind, she had ignored and forgotten the risk. "This is its room." Slowly the Doctor turned around. She wasn't surprised when she saw the child was there in the room staring right at them.
"Are you my mummy? Mummy?"
Jack licked his lips and turned to the recently regenerated Time Lady "Doctor? Doctor, what do we do?" He asked, inwardly amazed that despite everything he had been through, all the close calls, everything he had done all the way to the moment where he lost two years of his memory and nobody told him what he had done, he was instantly deferring to this woman who didn't trust him one little bit.
Finally, Jack had enough. He decided to take charge. "Okay, on my signal make for the door."
The child repeated its loop. "Mummy?"
Jack aimed his blaster at the child. "Now!"
The Doctor glanced at the blaster. "Don't be a fool. We don't know if the blaster will work on the child, and I don't want to put it to the test," she snapped. She wasn't sure if the blaster could even harm or even injure the child; until they found out what had happened to the boy, they had to assume the boy was as vulnerable as they were.
"So what do we do?" Jack grimaced and lowered his pistol, and the Doctor saw that he hadn't been as happy about using the blaster anymore than the Doctor was. "Mummy?"
The Doctor grinned. "We try something else," she said before she snatched the blaster away from Jack and she pointed it at the wall. Miraculously a hole appeared in the wall. "Come on, we need to go!" The Doctor grabbed the other time traveller's wrist and pulled him through. They jumped through the hole and they jumped into the corridor outside.
"Mummy. I want my mummy," the child was saying as Harkness reset the blaster and triggered the blaster. "Digital rewind," Harkness explained, not realising the Doctor wasn't particularly surprised. Sonic blasters had a complicated number of features that were easy to pick up on just holding them.
The Doctor studied the wall closely and she turned to the Time Agent. "We'd better go," the Doctor said before jumping in surprise when the wall started to crack.
"Doctor!" Harkness said in surprise and amazement at how powerful the child's blows were. The Doctor growled and flipped open her vortex manipulator. "It's time to get out of here."
"So, what's your story, then? You're clearly not a Time Agent but you have a vortex manipulator," Jack commented.
The Doctor had no intention of telling this man anything about herself or where she was from. The Time Agency had likely dozens of stories about the Time Lords, and she didn't know if some of them had any personal experience with anyone who'd left Gallifrey. "Oh, I stole it!" She gave him a bright grin. "You'd better step closer. I'm setting it for your ship."
"How long have you known I was here with my ship?"
"Oh not long, just for a few hours, but it was more than enough time for me to hijack your ship and take it to the 51st century and I stole a handful of manipulators so I can get my own timeship working again!" The Doctor chuckled when she saw the other time traveller's face. "Step closer. NOW!"
X
Nancy was relieved to finally return to her hideout after she had calmed down from being held by the Lloyds although she was still edgy since she was going to go somewhere she truly did not want to go to. But ever since she had met that woman, that strange blonde with the union jack flag on her chest, Nancy had been hearing a voice telling her to go back to the bomb site and get some answers, and the more she tried to ignore that same voice, the louder it got.
While she was happy to be back at the hideout so she could get some thinking time, or at least she'd hoped so, she wasn't best pleased when she saw the kids were there. She had told them time and time again to hide in a different house each night. Why was it so hard for them to realise that the more times they hid here, there was a greater chance they'd be caught?
Nancy bit her lip when she heard the already irritating sound of the typewriter keys clacking and she saw Jim sitting in front of it and pressing the keys. "Thought as much," she snapped, the edginess returning full blast. It wasn't the kid's fault, and it wasn't fair she was taking it all out on them, but she could not help it. "What are all of you doing here? Different house every night, I told you."
Jim turned defiantly, "We thought you were dead, or you'd runoff."
Nancy could see where they'd gotten that logical argument from, although she liked it less than the alternative. "I didn't. I knew you'd come back for us," Ernie said.
Sometimes, Nancy thought as she emptied out her sack of loot, I wonder if being a mum to all these kids is worth it in the long term. But I don't want them to die, or become like Jamie. Ernie pointed at the typewriter. "Found that old thing in the junk," he explained although Nancy couldn't have cared one bit where they had found the typewriter. "Thinks he can write now." Jim added, "I'm writing a letter to me dad."
"You don't even know where your dad is," Ernie pointed out. "And how're you going to send it?" J
im took the bait. "I don't know, stick it in an envelope?"
Nancy sighed. She wasn't in the mood for some stupid teasing, and she could feel her blood pressure rising. She didn't need this. She wanted to be alone so she could think. Sadly Ernie was too obtuse to see she wanted silence.
"You can't even read or write."
"I don't need to," Jim continued to rise to the bait. "I've got a machine."
The sound of the typewriter keys, the stress of the night, the constant running from Jamie, the challenging attitude of the Doctor and this petty little argument caused Nancy to snap. "Will you stop making that noise!" She shrieked, and everyone stopped and stared at her. Nancy sighed when she realised what she had done wrong and she took a moment to regain some of her control and her patience. "I'm sorry, Jim. On you go. You write a letter to your dad if you want to."
Ernie, realising that Nancy had snapped for the petty teasing, changed the subject. "I know we should've went somewhere else, but we need you, see, for the thinking."
Nancy closed her eyes. This was one of the problems she had doing what she did when one of the things she had tried to do was make the kids fend for themselves. They had to. With everything going to hell, they had only themselves to rely on. "And what if I wasn't here?" She asked pointedly, letting some of her frustration bleed through. "What if one night, I didn't come back for you? There's a war on. People go out they don't always come back. It happens. What would you do then?"
It was a good question and it was one of the primary reasons why Nancy went out of her way to make sure the kids didn't spend too much time with her. One of her worst fears was she would get too attached, and one or more of the kids - Jim or Ernie, or one of the young'n's would get themselves killed. It was something Jenny wanted to avoid. Ernie turned his attention to the loot.
"They're wire cutters," he said confused.
Nancy stared at him seriously. "I need you to think about that. Someone's got to look after this lot."
"Why?" Ernie asked with an edge to his voice as he realised something was really off. "Are you going somewhere?"
Nancy sighed when she realised she would have to come clean. "The bomb site," she told them, and in an instant, they were protesting. They all knew what happened there but her mind was made up. "The one at the railway station."
Ernie stared at her as if she had just gone mad. "Why?"
Nancy bit her lip as the memories of baby Jamie filled her head. She had sworn to look after the little bloke, but all she had done was run away. It was time to change that now, for good. "The child. That's where he was killed. That's where it all started. And I'm going to find out how," she told everyone, looking each kid in the face before she stretched her legs.
"He'll get you, and then he'll come for us," Ernie pointed out while he looked at her desperately, looking like he was on the verge of grabbing her shoulders and shaking her to shake some sense into her. "He always comes for us."
Here she knew she could clear up the details. "No. Ernie, he doesn't. He always comes after me. There are things I haven't told you. Things I can't tell you. As long as you're with me, you're in danger. Even now, sitting here, you're in danger because of me." Ernie stared at her in disbelief, in fact, all of them were. They were just too frightened to say anything lest Jamie appeared.
"You're the one what keeps us safe."
Nancy stood up, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up when she noticed something horrifying out of the corner of her eyes. "You think so, Ernie? Then answer this. Jim is sitting there right next to you. So who's typing?"
Everyone turned and saw that she was right. Jim had moved away from the chair, but there was nobody in front of the typewriter. The keys were moving by themselves. Finally, it stopped and Nancy ripped the paper off, and her heart seized when she saw the last few lines. "Is he coming?" Ernie asked, scared.
Nancy shook her head at the naive question. "Ernie, as long as you're with me, he's always coming," she said, knowing the history between her and Jamie meant she was his only target, and he was never going to stop. She had made the mistake of running away from him before. No more. She threw the paper down. "Plenty of greens," Nancy looked around at each of the kids, her heart-tugging at the sight of them all. "And chew your food."
With a sigh, Nancy left the hideout after gathering the cutting tools. After she left, Ernie picked up the paper. Ernie was one of the few kids who could read, and underneath Jim's gibberish was Are You My Mummy. Mummy.
X
"I still can't believe you hijacked my ship," Jack was complaining even as he took the pilot controls.
The Doctor rolled her eyes. "I brought it back, didn't I?"
"So why didn't you just take this one?" Jack asked in confusion. The Doctor paused as she considered it a good question, but she had just as good an answer.
"My own time machine isn't functioning properly," she said at last without giving too much away as the last thing she wanted to do was to give this careless man any news of the TARDIS. "But I'm rather fond of my own ship and I think the vortex manipulators could make her functional again. Where did you get this one? Did you steal it?"
"Oh, I did. She was gorgeous. Like I told her, be back in five minutes."
The Doctor nodded thoughtfully as she looked around. She hadn't really bothered the last time. "So you stole this Chula ship? From what I know about them, the Chula don't just let anybody steal their ships," the Doctor pointed out.
"Yeah, just like I took that medical transporter," Harkness told her. "Only this one is dangerous."
Something about Chula warships, something she had learnt a long time ago occurred to the Doctor, and she took out her sonic screwdriver and waved it through the air. Instantly tiny dots of light swarmed around her. "Nanobots?" The Doctor quickly shook her head, knowing the technology was more genetic than that. "Nanogenes?"
"Yeah."
"Sub-atomic robots," the Doctor said wonderingly. "There are millions of them in here, see? They activate when the bulk head's sealed. They check you out for damage on a genetic level, fix any physical flaws," the Doctor trailed off when she realised something vital, and suddenly many of the pieces of the puzzle slotted into place for her. "Take us to the crash site. I need to see your space junk. I've got a good idea of what's happened."
"Sure thing," Jack said as he set the controls. "So what's happening?"
"I'll let you know when I get a look at this ambulance," the Doctor said; she had a feeling this new body, a lot like her prior two selves, would sleep their suspicions to themselves and only divulge them when they were sure.