Martha held onto the Doctor's arms as he cried out again and started convulsing. She tried to remain detached, the way she'd been trained, but she couldn't.
This was the Doctor, not some anonymous patient in A&E. She'd voiced her opinion on what Dr Michaels was going to do. She hadn't like it, not one bit, but she didn't have a choice.
She let go of the Doctor's arms when he finally stopped convulsing and once again fell into an uneasy semi-consciousness.
She looked over at Dr Michaels whose was filling a hypodermic with a blue fluid.
"And that stuff is?" she asked, placing a protective hand over the Doctor's chest.
"It's not poison, it's the next stage of the antidote. If I give him the antidote all at once in his weakened state, it will kill him. It's painful and it may cause some permanent damage, but at least he'll be alive."
Martha looked sharply at her when she said 'permanent damage'.
"What kind of damage?" she said, moving round the bed and standing in front of the stricken Doctor.
Dr Michaels walked over to the bed , the hypodermic filled with the not so benign looking liquid in her hand.
She stood as close to Martha as she dared before speaking again.
"This won't do any more damage than that virus already has. Did you think that when this is over, he'd be the same as he was? I helped design that thing, I know what it will do to him. You really don't have any choice. I designed the chemical to kill within two to three hours, but it's been eight hours, too long. I'm not giving him the antidote to the chemical, I'm trying to kill the thing inside."
Martha looked at her in surprise. "But it was dying, I saw it!"
"No Dr Jones, what you saw was the transition from the second stage to the third stage. The virus has three stages. Stage one, infection, it takes over the host, attacks the body, symptoms include cataracts and blindness and partial paralysis. Stage two, it infects the brain, symptoms include violence towards anyone who gets in the way, which drives the host insane, leading to suicide or at least attempting suicide. But this virus, it needs a live host, so the victim can't kill themselves, no matter what they do. Tell me, did he beg anyone to kill him...he has, I can tell by the look on your face..."
"Stop, just stop!" Martha spat. "Don't talk about him like he's a lab rat. You said three stages?"
Dr Michaels sighed. "We never had a test subject make it to stage three. So I'm not too sure about the symptoms, but we can assume one of them is signs of the virus dying off. The virus will be fully entrenched, if I can't kill it within twenty-four hours, then it won't matter if the good captain out there kills me, we'll all be as good as dead."
"The virus, it needs to spread...but that means..."
"What, your precious Doctor dies, if only. Your friend is patient zero, the carrier. Your friend only has to touch another person and they're infected. That Dr Jones is the real Reichenstien Paradyme, that's why he needed clones of him. No human could carry the disease, in fact no-one but this man and an exact duplicate can carry it. The Reichenstien Paradyme is the ultimate weapon, and White Coat was going to sell it to the highest bidder."
"But the Cynrog?" Martha said.
"White Coat needed money, the Cynrog wanted the Doctor, so he made a deal," Sarah said. "He never intended to hand him over. He's just a common thief, that all he is, he's just a little smarter than your common thief who wants to be a bigger fish than he is."
Martha couldn't take it all in, the lies Dr Michaels had told, the need to sedate Jack to stop him interfering, and the now hopeless chance of curing the Doctor now laying in tatters.
She backed away from the bed the Doctor was lying in and saw for the first time the reality of it all.
She'd thought the Doctor was fighting the virus, now she knew that there was no hope of him recovering.
Now her hopes crumbled like a sandcastle too close to the sea...there was no hope.
She was pulled from her little world by Dr Michaels speaking.
"There's nothing more I can do, it just a matter of wait and see. Now, is it possible for me to actually be treated like a human and have something to eat and a shower?"
Martha nodded. "Sure," and moved past the bed and towards the door.
She stopped and turned. "How long before we know?"
Dr Michaels shook her head. "I don't know, but I do know one thing. If this doesn't work, you'd better be prepared to kill him."