A Captain And A Madman

Chapter Eleven: Detroit

It took a little while for the Doctor's smug satisfaction, and his burning anger, to fade away... he had initially set a course back for the Alcheron V colony, fully intending to stop the newest catastrophe before it could take root. Hell, he'd go back to the Enterprise and seek Picard's help if he had to, for he had no doubt the starship captain wouldn't turn down the opportunity to save thousands of lives yet again. But as the hundreds and hundreds of plots and plans whirled through the Doctor's mind, a grain of something far less welcome began to wriggle its way in. The TARDIS had very nearly reached its destination when, suddenly, the Doctor pulled her to a stop, leaving her in deep space a few dozen light years, and a score of temporal years, from its destination.

Pragmatism had settled in because, put simply, he knew there was no point.

He could have stopped that asteroid, yes, he had no doubt. But this wasn't just some natural disaster to be averted... this wasn't even a lone alien attack to be thwarted. This was a coordinated, concentrated effort by a group of beings capable of Time Travel- more or less- and determined to ensure history came to pass the way they intended. The resulting struggle could last, from the perspective of those fighting it, forever, with both sides constantly changing time in a strategic battle waged in the shadows...

Indeed, as much as the Doctor hated to admit it, they had the advantage in such a situation. He couldn't risk crossing his own timeline too much, knowing the disaster that such a paradox would bring; but the future Starfleet had dozens, if not hundreds, of 'Time Agents,' all ready to go back and contribute to the destruction of the colony in a variety of exciting ways. It didn't matter how good you were at chess; if the other player got to move five pieces every time you moved one...

And this wasn't an enemy he could simply cast out, or destroy. They were humans, the future of mankind, and as much as he found their practices despicable, he also could see- very grudgingly- where they came from. They would kill him, if they had to, to end this. He didn't think he'd be able to do the same to them.

So it didn't matter how many times he saved that colony. The Starfleet of the future would just destroy it again.

Sighing softly, the Doctor ran his hands down his face, drawing in a shuddering breath as he all but forced himself to let go of his piqued temper, his hurt pride... because he had to admit, some of his ire was because they had interfered in the Doctor's actions, something he never really enjoyed. Instead, he turned his attention to what, if anything, had troubled him even more than the fate of the colony.

The fate of the other Doctor.

A perusal of the files he had 'borrowed' from the Relativity's computers confirmed much of what Ducane had said. These agents had devoted a rather flattering amount of resources to tracking him- the other him- down, traveling to points in time and space where the mysterious Doctor had been said to make an appearance. But every attempt had been a failure, with the catastrophe in question either having been averted by some other means or, in some cases, the catastrophes simply never having happened. So many incidents that, on the Enterprise-D's computer, had been claimed as fact had, by the twenty-ninth century, been complete debunked.

Indeed, a poor bloke named Gary Seven in the late nineteen-sixties had been accosted by these wankers for just that reason, which would have made it the second time he'd clashed with humanity's future. He had apparently hospitalized two Time Agents before everything was finally settled.

Perhaps one could have explained the lack of solid Doctor encounters as time being rewritten at some point, these disasters erased by a madman in a box, but if that were the case, why did the reports of them persist? It was as if the stories simply came from nowhere...