Solipsism

Ten: Drifting in the Darkness

"What are we going to do?" Jack asks me.

I answer him more petulantly than I should, "Ask me something I already know."

Jack raises his eyebrows and I immediately regret snapping at him. He'll get over it, though.

"Okay, how about," he proceeds, "where are we?"

I nod and motion for him to look at the display monitor. "We're in an unnamed solar system of the Eris galaxy. Eris is quite distant, respectively speaking; it does not lie within the Milky Way's Local Group. We're at present located outside the system's Kuiper belt, and the Newhope is drifting in the darkness beyond the frosty edges of planetary space. Her orbit, and she actually is in orbit around the system's dwarf brown star, is steeply inclined, almost forty-five degrees above the plane in which the planets and dwarf planets orbit."

I scrutinize the Captain worriedly. I am consciously speaking in cold, dispassionate academese. I'm doing it for me, you understand – I'm trying the best way I know how to keep my emotions at bay – but I'm fairly certain that Jack isn't going to like what I'm saying, nor is he going to like the way I'm saying it. I wait patiently for him to respond. I can tell that mentally he's working very hard right now.

One never knows how Jack Harkness is going to react. That's one of his attractions – one of the things I find so appealing about him. He's exciting – even to me – and as many times as I've been around the old cosmic block my excitement threshold is pretty damned high. Why walk when you can run? But the volatility can be a liability, too. There is always a hidden danger lurking there in his unpredictability.

"What would she be doing out here?" he finally asks.

I withstand the desire to make another snide remark about questions to which I have no answers. Instead I offer a reflection, "Its attributes make it an ideal place for those who don't want anything to do with the inner system, or who want to do something spectacularly dangerous, or who want to commit some sort of crime, or who just don't want to be seen or bothered. There's nothing out this far other than your random, boring dwarf planet composed primarily of frozen-solid methane lakes. In other words…"

"In other words," he says, "it's not a very friendly or hospitable place, but it's remote."

I nod silently.

"Okay, having established that," he goes on, "when are we?"

"According to the TARDIS, our relative position in the timescape hasn't changed significantly. Well… apart from the amount of time it took us to get here, which is negligible."

Jack smiles thinly at me. "Do you know," he asks, "if the TARDIS had anything to do with bringing the Newhope to this location? As I recall, when we left John and Varna the two ships had come to some sort of agreement, or arrangement, on eventually returning the Newhope and John back to their proper time when the crew's tasks were completed."

I feel a flush of anger at the insinuation. "That," I motion toward the doors, "is not my ship's doing."

"Doctor," Jack interrupts me, "that isn't what I'm implying." Then he shakes his head and frowns, "But maybe I am. Look, I don't know what I'm saying here. It's just I'm wondering, generally speaking mind you, if the TARDIS has anything at all to do with any of this."

I'd actually been wondering the same thing myself. "I'm not sure. The old girl is strangely quiescent right now. I'm sure you sense it too. It's possible she brought us here because she knew what we'd find. But I don't know that. There's nothing to empirically prove it either way. Not to belittle the question, because it is interesting to be sure, but I suspect we have more important mysteries to solve than what the TARDIS does or doesn't know, and why at present she's not talking much."

Jack strokes the console with his fingertips, "Maybe she's just sad?"

I nod glumly. At first I merely think it to myself, but then I say it out loud, "There seems to be a lot of that going around at the moment."