TWELVE
Feeno stayed in the Doctor's room to keep watch over Martha. Jack and the Time Lord went to the control room.
Maude was still perched atop the Doctor's stool, this time, however, she was munching on a large head of lettuce. Seeing this, Jack realised that he, nor the Doctor, Martha nor Feeno, had eaten in quite a while. Perhaps some protein and electrolytes would do Martha some good...
"So, I see you've made yourself comfortable," the Doctor said, striding in. "And here I was fretting that I'd forgotten to invite you to help yourself to anything in the fridge. Looks like I needn't have worried."
"Doctor!" she hissed, setting her food down on the console, standing up.
"I hope that doesn't have any water on," the Doctor replied. "The TARDIS is a sensitive soul – she can't take water in her circuits. She'll short out and we'll all be stuck here, unable to move." That last line he delivered with a clever, knowing raising of the eyebrows.
She didn't budge. His tone and expression had suggested that he knew already what she and her compatriots wanted from him, but she was unfettered by his warning. However, about ten seconds later, she took her lettuce and moved it to the stool, never taking her eyes off the Doctor.
The Doctor muttered, only audible to Jack, "Was that you?" Jack nodded subtly, indicating that he had, in fact, directed a thought at her that caused her to move the lettuce off the TARDIS console.
"So, I don't mind at all your taking my food, eating it in my control room, sitting in my chair... though holding me and my friends hostage is a thing I could do without..." he said, almost cheerfully. "But I've got to know: why lettuce? Didn't you see that there was waffle mix from breakfast yesterday? And syrup and sausages. I've got to wonder what caused you to pass over the good stuff and go for lettuce?"
"We gain a tremendous amount of nutrients and strength from lettuce," she told him coldly. Then she snarled, "All the better to out-think the Time Lord."
"Of course you do, because..." he lowered his voice, and spoke only to Jack. "... because lettuce has no nutritional value to humans."
A voice from behind came through the arched doorway that led to the body of the TARDIS. "Captain Harkness – he lives! How can this be? And ah, the Doctor," Plexaphedros mused. "I see you've made the wise decision. Though we never thought it would take you so long, considering your love for the negress. Undoubtedly you'd like to see her survive this ordeal."
"Her name is Martha," he said angirly, emphatically, his mock-whimsy having left the room as quickly as it had come. "And if she weren't dying from bubonic plague at the moment, she and I would both likely have your eyeballs in a juicer for calling her that. Now what is it that you want?"
"Oh, I'm sure you already know, Doctor, because you're so clever," Plexaphedros said, his hands gesturing in false excitement, his feet mimicking a cheerful little dance, as he crossed to the chair previously occupied by Maude.
"Well, I've worked out that you need to get somewhere, sometime. Now let's all just cut our losses, and you tell me where and why."
"In due time, my dear Time Lord," Ahedruma was saying, as she entered the control room, holding the same Class-4 Carrio-Incendio-Particulator that had killed Jack previously.
"Oh good, now the whole family is here," Jack said, rolling his eyes and leaning on one hip.
"I don't have due time," the Doctor snarled at the three humanoids. "Stop wasting Martha's life, and tell me!"
"What's your hurry? You've already wasted this much, what's a few more minutes?" Ahedruma asked, lazily setting her weapon down on one of the railings, and leaning casually against it.
The room was quiet for a few moments, and then Plexaphedros began to speak. Jack shot a devilish look at the Doctor, indicating that once again, he had aimed a thought at the Namuh aliens, causing them to act.
"If you must know, we wish to go to the early twenty-first century," Plexaphedros sighed. "Say, 2007 or so... I believe that's a year quite close to your heart, is it not, dear Doctor? The year from which your Martha was extracted and brought into the TARDIS and out of time?"
He said Martha's name with a sarcastic contempt that caused the Doctor to gnash his teeth and find it necessary to hold himself back from pummeling the bastard.
"Why?" he asked, in lieu of pummeling.
"Isn't it obvious?" asked the smug Plexaphedros. "To invoke a phrase often used by your own organisation, Captain Harkness, the twenty-first century is when everything changes."
"Your organisation says that?" the Doctor asked Jack, incredulously forgetting his rage for an instant. "What the hell does that even mean?"
"I don't know, I don't know... can we focus, please?" Jack asked, desperately gesturing toward their captors.
"In the year 2057, the human race reaches what it will deem to be a new period of enlightenment. And it will be, by human standards. It has, in Martha's time, already discovered that it is not alone in the universe, but fifty years hence it will discover the broadening effects of technological collaboration between the planets. Shortly thereafter, it will collaborate intergalactically. Human minds will open up in a way never before known to them... they will experience, as they say, a renaissance!"
"So why do you need to be there fifty years before it happens?"
"We do our best work in periods of the deepest ignorance, and in the time just before a great burst of discovery, man is at its dimmest," Ahedruma explained.
"And that's why you're here now, in 1350" the Doctor said, almost without moving his lips. "Because in fifty years' time (give or take), the Italian Renaissance begins, and will sweep across Europe, causing an explosion of art, music, philosophy, travel..."
"Exactly," Maude said, her face crinkled, shuddering. "Just the thought of that..."
"Oh right," the Doctor feigned boredom. "Can't thrive where the humans do, must bask in their misery."
"Hence the plague," said Jack, now deadly serious. This time unconsciously, he thought what could you possibly have to gain from wallowing in a plague state, just before the Renaissance?
Plexaphedros' gaze turned to Jack. The alien looked him up and down, and said, eerily, "Mankind at its most helpless brings us to new heights of power." He waited a beat, and then asked Jack, "Have you ever heard of zed waves, Captain?"
Having just finished a major ordeal on the planet Korr, and having donated his own zed waves to his home planet, Jack answered, "Yes. They are a kind of encoded transmission of personality attributes."
"Precisely. Did you know that a society, a population, emits a different kind of collective zed wave?"
"No, I didn't know that," Jack answered honestly. He looked at the Doctor. The Doctor had known.
"When a population is at its weakest, most dire, most miserable, it sets off these waves... we absorb them. Zed wave number 903670 is the one we like the most. It is utter misery. All the others – grief, sickness, despair, fear, anger – are just dessert after the meal." Plexaphedros said slowly. "Things were going swimmingly, we thought, and then a few months ago, the humans started fornicating in the streets like mad! The plague spread even faster! It was like – what do you call it? – Christmas for us!"
As he spoke, he laughed smugly.
"And then inexplicably, it began to wane, then wane more, and now the plague has almost faded. No effort on our part has been able to recreate the trauma," Ahedruma chimed in.
"So that's why you just happened to have a syringe full of the stuff to jab into Martha. That's why you happen to have some kind of antidote which you're holding over our heads like the dangling carrot! You have found a way to foster the plague?" the Doctor asked angrily. "To keep it going?"
The three Namuh Gnieb looked at each other with confusion.
"Antidote, Doctor?" Plexaphedros asked. "We have no antidote."
"And we didn't just foster the plague," Ahedruma revealed. "We created it."
