B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  The Heritage residents overlooked Wakeling’s act of murder, believing his experiments could restore prosperity to the hard-up colony. Ben Heyworth’s attempt to seek justice by alerting offworld authorities was discovered. Wakeling further persuaded the townsfolk to favour his experiments, and the locals tore Ben to pieces with their bare hands before torching his house. Wakeling took Sweetness into his own home.

  A shuttlecraft arrived on Heritage - the first in years - and two visitors wanted to see the Heyworths, causing quite a stir. The buried memories of the Heyworths’ deaths began to surface among the locals. The seventh Doctor and Ace gatecrashed an interstellar video conference and revealled Wakeling as a murderer, destroying the man’s chance to reveal his success at cloning. Wakeling and two other inhabitants fell to their deaths when some of the old mineshafts collapsed under them. Cole, the Heritage town barman, adopted Sweetness.

  c 6050 - Half-Life [1489]

  Two races, the parasitic Makers and the Oon, had been at war for centuries. The organic spaceship Tain, a Maker construct, fled the war but was infected with an Oon-made Trojan program. Tain crashed onto the planet Espero, and his personality remained in conflict. The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Trix received Tain’s distress signal. Tain thought that the TARDIS heralded the Oon’s arrival and unleashed its ultimate weapon: a wavefront designed to disintegrate and reconstitute a planet under Tain’s control. Tain’s internal struggle threw the wavefront into chaos, but the Doctor purged the Trogan program and ended the wavefront. Tain prepared to leave Espero afterwards.

  High Catholic doctrine came to forbid use of matter transmitters, stating it was impossible to teleport a soul.

  The last colonist left Heritage in 6057. None of the ex-colonists ever discussed their reasons for departing. [1490] On 8th December, 6064, former Heritage colonist Lee Marks, now head of the Ellershaw Foundation, died in a fire deliberately set at his home. [1491] A grown-up Sweetness Cole penned an autobiography entitled First of a New Breed. [1492]

  The New Dark Age

  In 6198, the Federation Scientific Executive funded a research project into genetic experimentation. The geneticist Maximillian Arrestis hired a team of consultants to develop the Lazarus Intent, a religion that he hoped would become a moneymaking venture. His “miracles” were publicised for three years, and his predictions of disasters all came to pass. The Codex of Lazarus was published early in the sixty-third century, and for nearly a decade he reaped the financial rewards of being the “Messiah”.

  Not content with this, Arrestis began to sell defence secrets to the Cybermen, Sontarans and Rutans. The Federation was fighting a war with the Sontarans at the time. In 6211, Sontarans launched a stealth attack that wiped much of the Federation DataCore on Io. Three weeks later, an earthshock bomb - sold by the Cybermen to the Sontarans - destroyed Tersurus. This didn’t stop the Federation from winning the war. When the Sontaran Emperor suspected that Arrestis had double-crossed him, the traitor was brought to the Sontaran throneworld and executed. “Lazarus” became a martyr, the saviour of the galaxy, and it was the Intent of his followers to resurrect him.

  Alexhendri Lassiter built a time machine and did rescue Arrestis moments before his death. Later, Arrestis escaped the destruction of the Crystal Bucephalus restaurant by fleeing through time, only to arrive back on Sontara right before his execution, which proceeded as planned. [1493]

  Every small publisher in the universe had been bought out, and by “the end of time”, this would give rise to one dominating, monolithic publishing house. The company owned the rights to all of the authors throughout history, especially the lazy ones who hadn’t fulfilled on their contracts. Publisher’s robots from the sixty-fourth century were equipped with time travel. Armed with laser cannons, they went throughout history to “remind” these writers to finish their texts. One such robot visited the fifth Doctor in 1597. [1494]

  6558 - “Ground Control” [1495]

  The tenth Doctor was stopped by Mister K of the Safety Patrol Interstellar Traffic Division in a space station forty clicks from the Antarean third moon, and forced to account for a number of safety violations he had made flying the TARDIS. He was shown a previous adventure where panda-like Cobalites chased him and Donna. One Cobalite was holding on to the TARDIS when the Ship dematerialised, and ended up in the Vortex. The Doctor realised this was all a trick to distract him while the TARDIS’ energy was drained, and left.

  c 6700 - Return of the Krotons [1496]

  Humans now received electronic identity implants at birth.

  Some centuries after the solar flares ravaged Earth, two Euro Comgen ships bearing human colonists in cryo-sleep arrived at the dead planet Onyakis. They spent a year mining the energy-rich K-7 crystal there. The dormant Krotons on Onyakis reformed within K-7 solutions, and attempted to create an energy-transference network that would power Kroton vessels, enabling them to enslave several human outposts. Thousands of Krotons were re-generated on Onyakis, but the sixth Doctor and Charley intervened, killing them.

  Around 6976, the Vardans who invaded Earth in 1976 arrived back home. They discovered there had been a revolution, and that the military had lost power. [1497]

  ? 7000 - Wirrn Dawn [1498]

  The humanoids on Korista VII lived like peasants and farmers, but were at peace with the Wirrn. Every season, the Wirrn were summoned at dawn by the striking of a metal shard across an altar, and the humanoids would offer up one of their own to be converted into a new Wirrn queen. So long as the queens gestated in people, they had enough intelligence to restrain the swarm. The grandfather of Delong, a soldier, was one of the last colony bosses to oversee this practice.

  The old ways waned, and the arrival of the Galsec colonists created open warfare with the Wirrn. New Wirrn queens were gestated in senseless herbivores, and were born with limited brain power. The Wirrn stripped whole planets clean of crops and cattle. The Galsec colonists incorporated some of the natives - including Delong - into their infantry, but scornfully so. Such add-ons were referred to as “indigs” (short for “indigenous”), which became a by-word for anyone who didn’t fit in, a scrounger, a criminal, etc.

  The eighth Doctor and Lucie were present as the Galsec-Wirrn conflict encroached upon Korista VII. Admiral Farroll, who commanded a fleet of sixty-eight Galsec spaceships, was turned into a Wirrn queen. Delong knew that the Galsec colonists would never agree to continue the tradition of sacrifice, and so the Farroll-queen took her swarm into space, staving off a major bloodbath.

  After a thousand years, the Star Pioneers had destroyed all the Wirrn breeding grounds, making Andromeda suitable for colonisation. One Wirrn Queen survived and travelled through space towards the Earth. She reached Nerva Beacon, but the station’s automatic defences killed her. Before her death, the Queen damaged the systems that would have revived the humans, and laid her eggs within one of the sleeping Nerva engineers. [1499]

  While those aboard Nerva slept, human colonies such as Galsec carved out an empire, with bases across half the galaxy. They retained legends of Nerva, “the lost colony” from the time of the Expansion, but most didn’t believe that it really existed. In time, the colonies grew to distrust talk of Mother Earth. [1500]

  c 7190 - Patient Zero [1501]

  A virus rendered Charley Pollard comatose, and she remained in the TARDIS’ Zero Room for years while the sixth Doctor searched for a cure. She awoke just as the Doctor traced the virus to “one of the remotest parts of space-time the TARDIS had ever travelled to”. A war had nearly destroyed the galaxy in question, and the Great Armistice Treaty had enabled the creation of Amethyst Viral Containment Station - the biggest stockpile of uncureable viruses in the universe, located on a lava planet. Amethyst was protected by the Viyrans - the ultimate authority of this galaxy. They were tasked with destroying the viruses in the heart of Amathustro, Amethyst’s sun.

  A Dalek time squad from the future arrived on Amethyst, seeking both the viruses there and Patient Zero: the person who had
infected Charley. The Doctor thwarted the Daleks from moving Amethyst through time, but the resultant temporal explosion - which destroyed Amethyst and the Daleks - spread the viruses throughout space-time.

  Patient Zero was actually Mila - a former Dalek captive subjected to Amethyst virus No. 7001, which could rewrite the DNA of those infected to mirror that of the carrier. This left Mila invisible, untouchable and dimensionally out of phase. She had stowed aboard a Dalek time machine, then the Doctor’s TARDIS, where she had remained for centuries. The TARDIS protected its passengers from Mila’s virus, but Charley’s anomalous status as someone travelling with a past incarnation of the Doctor deprived her of that immunity. Mila became a corporeal copy of Charley and left with the Doctor.

  The Viyrans cured Charley of Mila’s virus and let her travel with them, putting her into cryogenic suspension for long journeys. [1502] The Dalek Time Controller also survived, and rode the temporal explosion back to twenty-second century Earth. [1503]

  The Cybermen and Time Travel

  On the desert planet Chronos, a race of beings built a time machine. This enabled them to travel into their world’s future, when it had become a water planet and was far more habitable. In the distant future, only a handful of Cybermen survived. They fled to the water world Chronos and exterminated the beings who lived there, acquiring their time machine in the process. The Cybermen used it to travel back to 3286, but a temporal blast from that era surged here and aged them to death. [1504]

  Advanced Cybermen from the far future had a Cybership which contained a fragment of the Time Vortex, and so could travel in time. They used it to attack Earth in the early twenty-first century. [1505]

  In the far, far future, the Cybermen were nearly extinct. A surviving Cyber-Leader held the Doctor responsible for his race’s destruction, and had access to Cyber-race’s entire history banks. The Cyber-Leader found an abandoned time-ship - the product of Gallifreyan technology - on a planet nearly destroyed by fire, and decided to lay a trap for the Doctor in 1984. The time-ship proved difficult to pilot; the Cyber-Leader arrived two years early in 1982. [1506]

  7382 - The Time Vampire [1507]

  On a mission for the Time Lords, the third Doctor and his companion Joshua Douglas dined with H’mbrackle, the emperor of the Z’nai - a race of philosophers and magnificent architects who built hanging fountains and sky cities. H’mbrackle had arranged a trade agreement, and Z’nai representatives arrived on Westrope III to finalise it. The Westropian Embassy was a sea fort that had been used back in the Krypterian wars.

  The emperor’s son, H’mbrackle II, seized power and marshalled his people to war. H’mbrackle II sought to “purify the lesser species” by slaughtering billions - millions died when a Z’nai sky city incinerated Westrope III. Joshua released a virus the Z’nai themselves had developed, nearly wiping them out and ending their empire. The act of near-genocide ended the Doctor and Joshua’s friendship, and the Doctor took him home. H’mbrackle II, now carrying the virus, was placed in a quarantine tesseract accessible from both the TARDIS and Joshua’s home.

  The fourth Doctor re-visited the Westrope III disaster with Leela, whose future self was present as a time vampire - a gestalt creature able to experience the majesty of time and creation. The time vampire dispatched K9 centuries ahead in the TARDIS to retrieve the aged, imprisoned Leela as she was dying. When K9 returned, the proximity of the aged and younger Leelas paradoxically facilitated the time vampire’s creation. Leela’s younger self left the Doctor, having no memory of these events, and her older self merged with the time vampire.

  Some Z’nai survived, and a few of their number used the time capsule to venture back to recover their emperor. [1508]

  c 7432 - The Time Vampire [1509]

  An interplanetary tourist board coordinated visits to what remained of Westrope III. Leela was briefly tussled through time from 7382, and visited the disused Westropian Embassy. Gustav Holland, a tour guide, had used a temporal suspension cage he stole from the Doctor’s TARDIS in 7382 to imprison a time vampire, thinking he could profit from the creature’s abilities. The time vampire - Leela’s future self - aged Holland to death, and Leela returned to the past.

  (=) The sixth Doctor and Mel failed to prevent nuclear warfare on the Federation planet Maradnias. A group of Chronovores and Eternals, grateful for the Doctor’s help in the Bophemeral affair, changed history to prevent Maradnias’ destruction. [1510]

  Maradnias would become the centre of the Union. [1511]

  ? 7500 - The Skull of Sobek [1512]

  The eighth Doctor and Lucie arrived on Indigo 3, a world with a blue sea, blue moons, a renowned blue desert and eighty-three different words for the colour blue. By coincidence, a torrential storm would flood the desert every eighty-three years, causing ultra-marine flowers to cover the region a few days afterwards. The storm wasn’t due for another twenty years, but the Doctor swore he felt rain coming on.

  The Sanctuary of Imperfect Symmetry on Indigo 3 was a place of pilgrimage, devotion and deliberate disparity. The old prince of the dead planet Sobek had paid for the construction of the sanctuary hall - the very foundations of which were actually the prized Skull of Sobek. General Snabb engaged the prince in personal combat for the Skull, and both perished when it collapsed on top of them.

  The Triumphs of Sobek contained tales of that world.

  & 7500 - Dalek Empire II: Dalek War [1513]

  The Galactic Union had been established, and was enjoying a time of peace. Technology, however, was inferior compared to what was available more than three thousand years prior.

  The historian Saloran Hardew found Kalendorf’s burial chamber on Velyshaa, and accessed his telepathic accounts of the Great Catastrophe by sleeping there. Siy Tarkov, an envoy from the Galactic Union, arrived with a military escort to examine Hardew’s findings. It had taken Hardew five years to reach Velyshaa, but technology had improved since then, and Tarkov made the trip in one. Tarkov and Hardew decrypted a transmission conveyed via a freak wormhole, and concluded that the Daleks had refortified in the Seriphia galaxy and were once again mobilising for war. Hardew remained on Velyshaa while Tarkov’s group left to warn the Union about the Dalek threat.

  Tarkov’s ship stopped to refuel on the planet Scalius, where his crew were amongst the first to contract a devastating plague: Neurotransmitter Failure Syndrome (NFS). Tarkov entered hibernation to survive, and his audio warning about the Daleks was ignored. He remained in stasis when the ship was later broken up for salvage. [1514]

  Some years later, the security agent Giorgi Selestru located the Alliance Daleks’ space station in the Plowik system. He found within a cryogenic tube containing the augmented human Galanar, who awoke and became one of Selestru’s most loyal operatives. [1515]

  & 7520 - Dalek Empire III: The Exterminators / The Healers / The Survivors / The Demons / The Warriors / The Future [1516]

  The NFS plague became rampant amongst the border worlds. Millions died, and billions more were threatened. The plague increased political tensions, and the border worlds increasingly broke ties with the Union. As part of this, the border worlds rescinded the Union’s claim to the Graxis system - possibly the most peaceful and undeveloped sector of the galaxy.

  The Galactic Union had failed to act upon Tarkov’s sketchy audio warning of the Dalek menace, and now received word that the Daleks had arrived in the Scalani system and were distributing a cure for the plague. The Daleks established “healing zones” throughout the Graxis system - ruining the ecology there - and on planets such as Tantalus and the formerly uninhabitable Scalanis VIII. The Daleks began treating patients with the plague-cure, which was designated Variant 7.

  The Daleks’ ranks had never recovered from the Great Catastrophe. Lacking the numbers for outright invasion, they had secretly released the NFS plague as part of a scheme to create the largest Dalek army ever assembled. Variant 7 contained an extra genetic code which, in conjunction with a unique type of radiation, would mutate
the plague-survivors into Dalek embryos. Dalek munitions factories stood ready to arm the new Daleks.

  Siy Tarkov awoke from stasis, and reported his concerns about the Daleks to Giorgi Selestru, who was now the Union’s security commander. Galanar, as one of Selestru’s operatives, accompanied Tarkov on a six-month trip to Velyshaa to retrieve Kalendorf’s records, and thereby goad the Union into action. The Daleks pursued them. On Velyshaa, the Daleks killed Saloran Hardew, but Tarkov transmitted a copy of Kalendorf’s accounts to Selestru. It was believed that Selestru would convince the Galactic Union Security Committee and its chairman, Bulis Meitok, to mobilise against the Daleks.

  The NFS plague mutated Tarkov into a Dalek. Galanar was captured and brought before the Dalek Supreme - which in part had Susan Mendes’ personality. The Dalek Supreme gloated that humanity would literally become Daleks, or at the very least would emotionally become like Daleks while fighting them. Galanar maintained that humans would always have a quality that the Daleks lacked, and that the Daleks therefore had no real power over them.

  Dalek X believed that the astronic radiation on Hurala would keep it alive until the planet’s communications seal expired, and its appeal for help was received. The tenth Doctor promised to be waiting if this occurred. [1517]

  In the seventy-eighth century, the planet Caligaris Epsilon Six was one of the most renowned holiday planets of the Third Great and Bountiful Human Empire. It was designed to look like a medieval fantasy land, complete with unicorns, elves and dragons.

  The Empire fell into decline, experiencing war, famine, plagues and confrontations with the Sycorax, Drahvins, Sontarans and Chelonians. Aethelred, the chief administrator of Caligaris Epsilon Six, sought to protect the children of that world from the wider conflict - on 19th April, 7711, he reprogrammed the planet’s biofilter to stop screening for recombinant yersinia pestis, “The Pest”, which killed 7,564 adults but spared everyone under the age of ten. The children of Caligaris Epsilon Six grew up with no knowledge of the outside universe, and the planet was placed under quarantine per Imperial Order 54567. Aethelred - who became the children’s king - used modern medical techniques to extend his lifespan. [1518]