Notes: No excuses. I've used wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey to explain the plot.

Chapter Seven

90 minutes previously.

Captain Picard sat in the command chair watching the main view screen. It showed Yautja Prime with tactical markers indicating ships rising from the surface and assembling a fleet in orbit.

A quiet wheezing sound to the left of the view screen slowly increased in volume as the TARDIS materialised on the bridge. One corner of Picard's mouth raised in a crooked smile.

A quiet wheezing sound to the left of the view screen had slowly increased in volume as the TARDIS materialised on the bridge. One corner of Picard's mouth raised in a crooked smile.

The door flipped open and the Doctor stepped out with some urgency, followed by Jamal-Nanak and Garak-Salak. He saw the Captain and grinned.

"Ah! Captain. Brilliant. Just the man I need. We don't have much time and I need a few favours," he said, his mouth and brain in overdrive.

Picard calmly smiled. "Of course you do Doctor," he replied.

The Doctor's mouth was open and it snapped shut. That wasn't the response he was expecting.

Looking past the Doctor, Picard addressed the Yautja. "Gentlemen, welcome back aboard the Enterprise." The Yautja gave a short bow of greeting.

A little puzzled, the Doctor continued. "Oh. Right. Well. Data, could you perform a…"

"Detailed scan of the council chamber in the government building?" Data finished for him. "Already done Doctor."

"What?!" he said looking completely baffled. "Really? Okay. Thank you," he said absent-mindedly.

He was almost afraid to ask for the next favour. "Er, Geordie..."

"The data has been downloaded to a vacant holo-ship and is ready to run," Geordie said with a grin.

The Doctor was doing a very good impression of a Goldfish as his mouth opened and closed without speaking. For once in his long life, he was lost for words.

Deanna walked forward from her chair and held his arm. "All the avatars have been downloaded and are also ready to run," she told him with a smile.

"Okay! Okay. Time out," he said making a 'T' symbol with his hands. "What's going on?"

Picard smiled warmly. "I'm afraid I have strict instructions not to tell you," he said.

"Whose instructions?" the Doctor challenged.

"Ah, that I can tell you," Picard answered. "Yours."

"Oh!" is all the Doctor could think of saying.

The Captain looked reluctant to speak again. "I have to tell you it's a bit timey-wimey," he said wincing.

Deanna tried unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle. Will and Geordie were grinning and Data, with his deadpan expression looked at the Captain and repeated. "Timey-wimey?"

The Doctor let out a laugh. "Hah! Oh I'm good," he said to anyone who wanted to listen.

The communications officer spoke up. "Captain. I have managed to establish a link to the council chamber. We can now hail them."

Picard looked over his shoulder at the officer and nodded. "Good work Ensign. Make it so."

A view of the Yautja council chamber appeared on the screen. "I am Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Star Ship Enterprise. I would like to speak with the leader of the Yautja to negotiate a peaceful settlement of our differences," the Captain said in calm, reassuring voice.

A scarred, elderly Yautja spoke. "Hah! Peaceful! You send a spy to give away our location so that you can sneak up on us and attack us, and expect us to negotiate." He spat the words out with contempt.

"I assure you we have sent no spies," Picard replied with a puzzled look on his face.

"The thin, brown coated spy who talks too much. His corpse hangs in the interrogation centre as we speak," Palak-Satak smirked.

"Ah, yes, um, that would be me I think Captain." The Doctor moved to stand behind Picard.

"What treachery is this?" Palak-Satak roared.

The Doctor leaned forward and frowned on the screen. "Hang on; I'm getting the hang of this. Is that rage? No not quite. Anger? No, not enough." He bounced on his toes and pointed at the screen. "Outrage, that's outrage on his face. Brilliant!"

"Doctor, please." Picard shot the Doctor a disapproving look. "Yautja, we have not come to fight we have come to discuss a mutually agreed compromise."

Palak-Satak laughed. "There will be no settlement. There will be no compromise. There WILL be a fight, and we will prevail." The council chamber was replaced with a view of the planet and the tactical markers of the Yautja fleet.

"I think that's your cue Doctor," Picard said. "Good luck." He held out his hand to the Doctor. The Doctor shook his hand and pulled him in to a hug.

The Doctor's final request was for multiple target teleports in to the holo-ship as the TARDIS materialized.

At the door to the TARDIS he said goodbye and told them that no one should interfere or try to help him if it all went wrong. The Captain pondered on the fact that for a man with a time machine, time seemed to be the one thing the Doctor didn't have.

Data ended the wait with his report. "Captain, I am detecting high levels of chroniton and tachyon particles in the conference lounge. It appears there is temporal disturbance."

Picard leapt to his feet. Down the corridor, through closed doors, the faint wheeze of the TARDIS could be heard.

He looked at Will seated to his right, and Deanna to his left and was about to ask them to join him when a familiar voice crackled over the intercom. "Hello, it's the Doctor here… Oh, you have probably realized that already. I'm in the conference room… Ah, you probably already know that as well. Can we all meet and do that thing you do after a mission, y'know brief or debrief, whatever you call it." He rambled. "I like debrief, a bit of innuendo, a bit cheeky," he chuckled.

Deanna laughed out loud while Will and the Captain smiled. "Mr. Data, Mr. La Forge, Mr. Worf, would you join us in the conference lounge please?" The Captain asked.

In the conference room, the senior staff were assembled for a de-briefing of the Doctor's mission.

Captain Picard spoke first. "So Doctor, can you tell me what the hell is going on?" he asked.

"Wellll, it's a bit complicated, it involves time lines, fixed points, temporal flux etc, but I'll do my best," he told them. "Where to start?" he muttered.

"Okay. First of all you've got to understand Yautja society. The closest Earth analogy is of the 12th century Japanese Shogunate. A strict, feudal society with lots of rules, traditions, honour, and respect for authority. Add to that an almost paranoid xenophobia and you have a formidable adversary," he started.

He ran his hand through his hair. "Remember the Klingons before the Khitomer Accords and the Treaty of Alliance? Well, the Yautja are ten times worse because of their xenophobia. Well, it's not really xenophobia. They're not afraid of other species; they have a complete disregard for them."

"I found their planet listed in the TARDIS star charts and paid them a visit, hoping to open a friendly dialogue," he continued. "That didn't go too well. In fact it didn't go at all. In fact it was a complete disaster. They didn't even give me chance to say hello."

"I found myself hanging upside down in a torture chamber trying to convince an interrogator, who had probably been bullied as a child, that I wasn't a spy. That's when you lot turned up."

"Fortunately for me, my two gaolers were our old friends Jamal-Nanak and Garak-Salak. They probably heard about my arrival and made sure they were in the right place at the same time," he speculated.

"When our old friends rescued me, I realised that talking wasn't going to work. I was going to have to use actions to challenge centuries of established tradition." The Doctor ran his fingers through his hair and scratched his head in that puzzled fashion that he always did when he was thinking temporally.

"Now, the next bit hasn't happened for me yet, so I'm going to have to work out what I did next," he told the assembled group. "I knew I was going to need some help so I would have sent instructions to you Captain Picard."

He stopped and thought about it. "How would I do that? I know. An electronic data pad with time locked instructions. Right?" he looked at the Captain with raised eyebrows. Picard smiled and nodded.

"Now. How would I travel back to then without the internal sensors detecting the TARDIS and me running into myself?" He turned to look at Data.

"Data. What do the internal sensors routinely scan for on the Enterprise?" he asked.

Data raised his eyebrows. "I think I can see where you are going with this and help you," he told the Doctor. "The internal sensors routinely monitor crew comm-links, levels of oxygen, carbon dioxide, radiation, temperature and humidity. Public areas, corridors and 'turbo-lifts' also have audio and video monitoring. He emphasized the word turbo-lift.

"There is one area of the ship that is not routinely monitored for any of these due to the partial vacuum normally present," he finished.

The Doctor frowned as he thought about this information and then grinned. "The lift shafts!" he exclaimed. "Nobody in those, so no need to monitor them. I materialise the TARDIS undetected in the shaft nearest to the Captains quarters, probably while I'm in the holodeck with Rose." He was on a roll.

"The rest of it I have just experienced. When I escaped from the dungeon, I realised that I needed to challenge the Chief Adjudicator to a duel. I knew I wouldn't stand a chance against an experienced warrior like that, so I needed a stunt man and some 'special effects'," he continued.

"The first part was easy. I needed an exact copy of the council chamber in a holo-ship for the stunt man and special effects to work. Data told me that he had already scanned the chamber and uploaded it to a vacant ship."

"Next, Deanna told me that profiling was her speciality and her rendition of Rose was truly superb." He flashed his eyebrows at her and she grinned. "As we had already shared a mind-meld when saving Rose from the Borg, she would be well placed to create an accurate avatar of me. That would have been my first request as it would take a long time to assemble." Deanna continued to grin and nodded in agreement.

"To impress the clan leaders in the council I would need to do something they couldn't. Domesticating a Xenomorph and having it as an obedient pet would certainly get their attention," he said.

"My avatar would need to learn from the Chief Adjudicator so that it could eventually beat him. Also, because of their xenophobic nature, the final beating should come from one of their own." It was Geordie's turn to nod. He had created those avatars from archived sensor logs from the Borg ship.

"Finally, you would need to know where to find me. The last message would have been the coordinates of Yautja Prime with instructions to talk to them but not take any action," he concluded. "How did I do?"

Picard smiled and shook his head in amazement. "Literally word for word," he said. The Doctor then gave an account of what had happened in the council chamber and how he had used the avatars.

"Captain, it might be an idea to tell the Chief Adjudicator that we are leaving and that you will respect their desire privacy if they respect your desire for peace," the Doctor suggested. "Although I don't think you'll need that leverage now."

He suddenly had an afterthought. "Oh, and Geordie. It might be an idea to wipe any Federation species from the holo-ships if you're going to leave them there. We don't want them falling back into old habits," he said with a grin.

Data made an observation after hearing the Doctor's account of his mission. "Doctor, I believe that your actions may have brought about the beginning of a new religion among the Yautja."

The Doctor smiled. "It wouldn't be the first time," he said, waggling his eyebrows again. "Who'd you think advised Emperor Constantine to amalgamate pagan festivals with Christian ones to unify the various factions?"

The entire group stared, open-mouthed.

With that the Doctor stood and made his way to the TARDIS in the corner of the room. The Captain walked over and shook the Doctor's hand and pulled him in to a hug. The look of surprise on the Doctor's face was priceless.

"Once again Doctor we are in your debt," Picard said as he released him from the hug.

"Hardly. It was my mistake, my problem, my responsibility," he said with a shrug.

Will, Data, Worf and Geordie each came up to shake his hand and say goodbye. Deanna held back so that she could have him all to herself.

She gave him a long hug and the Doctor rested his chin against her head, kissing her hair and rubbing her back in an affectionate embrace.

"I'm going to miss you," she told him.

"Oh, I don't know, you'll see me around," he said mysteriously. He reached inside the door and grabbed his long brown coat and shrugged it over his shoulders.

"Doctor, I believe you will be needing this," Data said, holding out an e-pad.

"Ah yes. I've got a small detour to make," he said with a grin. "See you around sometime." From a Time Lord, that phrase had more meaning than it did from anyone else.

He stepped in to the TARDIS and closed the door. The door opened slightly and his head popped out. "Deanna, check out your London program in the holodeck," he said with a grin, waggling his eyebrows for the last time.

The door closed and the TARDIS started to wheeze as it slowly disappeared.

Deanna went straight to the holodeck and started the London simulation. She created this program for Rose when she was feeling home sick. They had shopped, had coffee, eaten chocolates and enjoyed Baileys Irish cream while admiring the cute barman's bum.

She had been back many times with Rose and Jackie, enjoying the company of the avatars and the world they inhabited. It felt different now, knowing that she would never see the real Rose again.

She entered the holodeck in the wine bar where they enjoyed drinking and eyeing up the talent. She was immediately grabbed in to a hug by Rose.

"Deanna!" she squealed. "I've missed you! How are you?" she asked.

Deanna was taken by surprise. Something was different about Rose. She was more 'vibrant' and alive. "I'm fine Rose. I've missed you to," she laughed.

"C'mon," Rose said. "Let's get a drink. I understand there's been a change of staff. Apparently they've got a new barman," she said with a wink.

They made their way past a few customers and arrived at the bar.

"Two Baileys please," Rose called out to the barman.

He turned around and they both squealed with laughter. Rose leaned over the bar, grabbed his tie, pulled him forward and gave him a big wet snog.

Deanna burst out laughing. The new barman had unruly brown hair, gorgeous brown eyes and apparently very kissable lips.

It lifted her mood enormously to see the Doctor and Rose together again.

And he did have a very nice bum!

The End