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Chapter 6
By the time Brennan and Booth reached the bone room where the Doctor had been working, all of the others had returned. The mood in the room was grim.
"What? What's wrong?" asked Brennan.
"Well, unless you tell us that there isn't giant swarm outside the east wing, we are surrounded," said the Doctor.
"There's a giant swarm outside the east wing," Booth reported reluctantly.
There was a barely-audible, collective groan.
Cam went directly to the phone and picked it up, dialing an extension. Everyone waited to see what she would say.
"Hi, Harry," she said. "Yeah, thanks. Listen, will you please post a security guard at each window on the landings of the north, south, east and west wings? Give them my portable extension, and tell them to call me when they get there. I'll instruct them as to what to do next."
There was a long pause, and then Cam said, "It's a long story. If I live to tell about it, I'll give you the whole scoop sometime over coffee. Yep. Thanks." Then she cut off the call.
"Okay. What do we do now?" Sweets asked the Doctor.
"Well, the last time I dealt with the Vashta Nerada, I was able to reason with them," said the Doctor.
"How?" asked Cam.
"It combined its consciousness with... well, for lack of a better, less confusing, way to put it, a human voice. I asked it just to give us time to get out of its way, then it could have the run of the planet."
"The planet?" Brennan asked, before she could stop herself.
"Yes, the planet," said the Doctor. "Don't worry, it wasn't a well-inhabited planet. Anyway, I don't think that's going to work this time."
"Why not?" asked Angela.
"Because," said Sweets, cutting across the Doctor's answer. "If they are surrounding the Jeffersonian because they know that we, or more accurately, you are looking to take them down, then reason won't matter. It wants to kill us. You."
"Great," she sighed.
"Taking a very good stab at extra-terrestrial psychology there, Dr. Sweets. I think you might be right. But also, it won't work because..." he said, turning on the screen for everyone to see. "...I have found microscopic scoring on the bones, indicating a bite pattern. I've identified the strain, and it is not the same sub-species that I dealt with before. I don't know much about the different sub-species - I'm still learning - but I know that this one is mean. Like actually malevolent. The ones I met before before, they were just hungry, just doing what they do. These actually probably want to kill us, for their own survival, yes, but also perhaps for sport. For the hunt."
"How..." Dr. Brennan was asking, drifting forward toward the screen, unconsciously reaching out with one hand. "I scoured these bones!"
"I told you," said the Doctor. "I have an instrument that augments almost anything." He actually showed her the sonic screwdriver, but she wasn't paying attention.
She frowned and seemed to inspect the skeleton itself, just with her eyes. "It's the same skeleton, I'm sure of it! How are you doing this?"
The Doctor sighed. "Blimey, it's like talking to a lump of clay... that has turned to rock."
"Yep, sometimes," agreed Booth.
Brennan didn't hear either one of them.
"Doctor, I'm having a thought," said Sweets.
"Undoubtedly," said the man in pin-stripes. "Thrill me, Dr. Sweets."
"Do the Vashta Nerada know you?"
"Me?"
"Yes, if they're thinking, seeing, hearing, feeling, scheming..."
"Then, they must know you," Hodgins exclaimed. "You're famous! You've got to be, like, the scourge of the alien underworld!"
"I suppose," the Doctor conceded. "I try to keep a low profile."
"Yeah, well, you fail," Hodgins dismissed. "The question is, do they know you're here?"
Before the Doctor could answer, the portable phone on Cam's hip rang. "Hi, who's this?" she asked, answering the phone. The person on the other end seemed to answer, then she said, "All right, thanks for calling. I want you to listen carefully, and don't ask questions. Are you standing in front of the window on the landing? Do you see an anomalous shadow outside, like a big black area where a shadow doesn't belong? Okay, keep watching it. If it moves at all, let me know. I mean at all. Yes, I'm serious. Please call the other three sentries and have them do the same thing. This is life and death, do you understand? Thank you."
When she finished, she gestured for the conversation to continue.
"Well, I was thinking, if they know you, can they see you? If you made yourself known to them, what would happen?"
"I don't know," the Doctor said, with wide eyes. "And I kind of don't want to find out."
"Would they move faster or more slowly, if they knew you were here?" asked Angela.
"If they know you, and they're smart, they'll get the hell out of Dodge," Hodgins said.
"But if they want to kill me, they'll start advancing faster and they'll consume everyone in their path to get to me," the Doctor argued. "So, on that note, Agent Booth has asked a very good question: can the Vashta Nerada be incapacitated? Preferably incapacitated, swept into a dustbin, and then transported to their ancestral planet before they can eat us."
"I might have an idea about that, but I wouldn't know how to deploy it," said Hodgins.
"What's your idea?" the Doctor wondered.
"Galernia marginata."
"Mushrooms?" asked the Doctor. "It's a nice idea, but Galerinas would kill them. I want to try and avoid that if at all possible."
"Why?" Angela asked, incredulous.
"Because it's what I do. Killing is not my thing. Not as a rule anyway."
"Didn't you tell me that these things hitch rides in wood spores on just about every planet? Galerinas are wicked common, and grow especially at the bases of trees. The Vashta Nerada would have lived in close proximity to the Galerinas... wouldn't that give them some kind of leg-up? Like, the mushroom is still poisonous to them, but not deadly?" Hodgins reasoned.
The Doctor looked at Hodgins for the first time with a crooked-browed skepticism. "Maybe. Possibly, Dr. Hodgins. It's not out of the realm of..."
"I mean, assuming that these things act like any other flesh-eating microscopic organism, it wouldn't be hard to find something to kill them. But if all you want to do is incapacitate them, then this is our best bet: something they've had some exposure to. The Jeffersonian has an ample stash of the stuff, all clean and labeled, and in my own lab. We wouldn't even have to go to pharmacology to find it."
"That's assuming that these particular swarms have been cooling their heels on this particular planet - I mean, if they had heels. Galerinas only grow here. We'd have to run some tests, and we can't do that without..."
"Okay, what about Psilocybin?"
The Doctor's jaw dropped, and he couldn't help but smile. "Psilocybin? Shrooms? Actual... wait, you want to get the Vashta Nerada stoned?"
"Why not? I've got samples of those in my ookie room as well," Hodgins said, reverting to his giddy, excited air. "Always wondered when I'd have occasion to break those babies out!"
"Actually, that's not a bad idea," said Cam. "If you're looking to incapacitate, but not kill. If all we have to go on is what we know of Earthly creatures, and the Doctor's somewhat... fragmented knowledge of the Vashta Nerada..."
"Do you think if we get them high and disorient them, maybe give them little sub-microscopic hallucinations, it will buy us time?" Sweets asked the Doctor, excitedly.
The Doctor sighed. "I have no idea. I'm not willing to risk all of your lives to find out."
"If you think about it logically," Brennan chimed in, to everyone's surprise. "Psilocybin's influence, or in the vernacular, tripping, causes distorted perception of time and slowed motor function. If these beings react in the way that every other organic thing on this planet would react, then it would, in fact, buy us time. We might be able to slip past or through the malevolent shadows before the organisms notice, or think to feed."
"Dr. Brennan, have you seen or experienced just how quickly a healthy Vashta Nerada swarm can strip a body of its flesh?" the Doctor asked, leaning forward, hands in pockets.
"I have not."
"Then I invite you to extract that rotisserie chicken we found in the guard's lounge from its bag, and toss it out into the night. I think you'll find that even with motor function slowed by half or three quarters, it still would feel like the blink of an eye to us."
"Listen, Doctor," Cam said. "You know what you said to us before about how we had no other options, so we might as well go with the one and only thing that offered any solution? Well, I'm about to say that to you. Unless you've got a better idea, let's go with the 'shrooms."
"I hate to say it, Doctor, but I think she's right," offered Angela.
The Doctor looked contemplative. He paused slightly before saying, "Yes."
"Yes, what?" asked Cam.
"Yes, we go with the 'shrooms plan," he said. "But not because they'll slow up enough to let us walk past them without killing us dead in less than two seconds. But because... it just might make them temporarily stupid."
"Stupid?" asked Sweets.
"Yeah," the Doctor shrugged. He sauntered toward the table against the wall, that held Charles Hasbrook's skeleton, then back again. "That was actually a pretty brilliant idea, Dr. Hodgins. The Vastha Nerada... okay let's assume they know me. They know what I look like, what I do, what I'm capable of, and why I'm here. If that's so, then they've done their homework. Either that, or there's some kind of psychic field that links up all of the swarms and species across the galaxies... which actually seems the more likely scenario, so forget what I said about homework, eh? Anyway, if they know me, then they also know my TARDIS."
"Your what?" Agent Booth wanted to know.
"The TARDIS," Hodgins said. "It's his spaceship thing."
"You have a spaceship?" Booth asked with a smirk.
"Yes, I do," the Doctor answered quickly, still pacing, making no eye-contact. "Smirk all you want, won't make it not-true. It's the one thing about me that has stayed outwardly the same since... well, since the beginning. They couldn't know about me and not know the TARDIS. So, that begs the question, with a sentient species, as Dr. Sweets pointed out, seeing, hearing and feeling, how the hell would I ever get them aboard the TARDIS to bring them home, unless they were incredibly stupid? They'd never fall into a trap like that, unless..."
By the time the Doctor reached this point, his eyes were wide and maniacal and his teeth were bared a bit. It was a side of himself that he'd been careful not to show these people, as they didn't much trust him as it was. But he was onto something, and he was excited, thanks to Jack Hodgins.
"Oh yes!" he continued. "I'll be able to get them out of here, out of Washington, off this planet, into their own domain, and no one else has to die! Not even them! Oh, you people are beautiful!"
"Okay," said Dr. Brennan, suddenly deciding that her word counted in this matter. "I think it's a good plan."
"One question," Booth said. "If these things aren't stupid, and they only eat flesh, how do we get them to take 'shrooms?"
"I think I know," said the Doctor, looking at each person in the room, in turn, with darkened eyes. "And it's going to take all of us."
"Erm, I have a question too," said Angela. "What do we do with all that food we stole? Do you still want us to make a meat perimeter?"
"No," the Doctor told her. "I have other plans for it now."