Engines of War

by George Mann

  After a while the passage branched to the right, splitting into a number of narrow tunnels that appeared to lead deeper into the ship. The Doctor – who seemed to be arbitrarily deciding which way to go – led her down one of these smaller, tributary corridors with a wave of his hand.

  Here, there was a row of panels in the wall resembling doors; large metal sheets inset into archways. They didn’t appear to have any controls. Or, Cinder considered, any handles. Well, that answered that question, at least.

  ‘Are these cells?’ asked Cinder. ‘Might there be prisoners inside?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s hard to tell from out here, although I imagine they’re keeping them all together on the other saucer, or in some of the buildings nearby.’

  ‘We should check,’ she said. ‘How do I open the door?’

  ‘Walk towards it. They’re motion activated,’ he replied.

  Cinder crept towards the door, but nothing happened.

  ‘No, not like that,’ said the Doctor. ‘Walk at it with purpose, like a Dalek.’ He strode forward confidently, puffing out his chest. There was a click and a mechanical whirr, and a second later the door whooshed open, sliding up into the roof.

  The room revealed beyond was a relatively large chamber, filled with all manner of bizarre equipment and technological ephemera. The stench that wafted out, however, was almost enough to cause her to keel over and vomit. Immediately, she wished she’d kept on walking.

  The Doctor stepped inside, and she followed, wrinkling her nose at the smell. It was foul, like rancid, rotting meat. Something inside the room was very wrong indeed.

  Five glass structures stood against the rear wall. They were transparent, but shaped in the archetypal form of a Dalek, complete with a glass manipulator arm and weapon.

  Cinder hefted her gun, expecting them to swing into action at any moment. She backed up, glancing from side to side.

  The Doctor held out his hand, reassuring her. ‘They’re not living Daleks,’ he said. ‘At least not yet. Take another look.’

  Still a little unsure, she crept closer. Through the glass walls of the casing she could see the organic matter inside, a heaving, glutinous mass of flesh and tubing, steadily inflating and deflating like a sticky, diseased lung.

  The room was some sort of incubation chamber.

  This in itself was enough to cause another involuntary gag, but it was when she looked at the second of the incubation chambers that she realised the true extent of the horror. In this one, the organic component still had a human face.

  It had once been a woman, but now, if there was anything left behind the darting, yellow eyes, it was only madness. The head had mutated, becoming hairless, misshapen. The flesh had blistered and bubbled, caked in gnarled tumours. The woman’s limbs had been removed, and cables extruded from her chest, wiring her into the incubation housing.

  Cinder staggered back, looking away, unable to process exactly what she was seeing. It was simultaneously the most disgusting and most pitiful thing she’d ever seen.

  ‘This is what they’re doing here?’ she said. ‘Experimenting on the prisoners?’

  ‘Turning them into Daleks,’ said the Doctor, his voice grim.

  ‘Turning humans into Daleks?’ echoed Cinder, unable to adequately display her disgust.

  ‘Yes, it rather seems they’re not quite as concerned with racial purity as they used to be,’ said the Doctor. ‘Funny how ideals go out the window when your back’s against the wall.’

  ‘But why? What could they possibly have to gain?’

  ‘They’re making foot soldiers,’ he said. ‘Cannon fodder. They’re dousing people in radiation so that their cells mutate into forms resembling the mutant Kaleds. Once they’ve altered them physiologically, they’ll remove all of the emotion, effectively lobotomising them, and re-house them in normal Dalek casings. They’ll take orders as well as any other Dalek, and if they’re destroyed, well – at least they weren’t a real Dalek.’

  ‘It’s obscene,’ said Cinder.

  The Doctor nodded. ‘It’s just the tip of the iceberg,’ he said.

  Cinder looked around the room. Besides the five incubators there was little else worthy of note: a bubbling vat containing something that looked disgustingly like melting flesh, and a web work of trailing cables hooked up to the incubators, that disappeared into the ceiling and walls. Clearly, it was these that carried the power and nutrients needed to keep the human mutants alive during their transition.

  She glanced at the Doctor, a question in her eyes. He nodded his understanding, and crossed to the door to keep watch.

  Cinder dropped her gun, allowing it to swing loose on its shoulder strap, and grabbed a bundle of wires in both hands. She yanked down on them hard, using all of her weight to try to tear them free of their ceiling mounts. On the third attempt at least half of them sheared, ripping loose, horrible black fluid spraying in gouts from the frayed ends like blood spurting from a fresh wound. Cinder dropped the frayed ends to the floor. She continued like this for a few moments, ripping all of the cables out of their sockets, allowing her anger to burn brightly and violently in her chest.

  When she was finished, she crouched down before the incubator housing the once-woman, and stared into the thing’s eyes. Its pupils fixed on her, but the look was vacant, disturbing. ‘Find peace,’ said Cinder. She got to her feet and walked over to the Doctor. He was still waiting just inside the doorway, keeping watch for Daleks.

  ‘Let’s see what else they’ve got here,’ he said. He stepped from the room and immediately leapt back, catching Cinder in the chest with his arm and almost bowling her over. ‘Daleks,’ he whispered.

  They fell back, one on each side of the open doorway, pressing flat against the wall as three Daleks slid past. They moved almost silently, their eyestalks swivelling, their manipulator arms twitching as if feeling the air for disturbance.

  Cinder held her breath, waiting for them to pass, assuming at any minute one of them would note that something was wrong in the incubation chamber and turn to investigate.

  Thankfully, they didn’t appear to be paying attention, and trundled on, heading deeper into the ship.

  She waited for the Doctor to indicate the all-clear before she allowed herself to exhale. ‘Do they live aboard these things?’ she said, when she was sure they would not be overheard. ‘The saucers, I mean. Is this their home?’

  ‘In as much as a Dalek does live,’ said the Doctor. ‘They don’t sleep, eat, or drink. They don’t have a concept of friendship, companionship. They’re single-minded, relentless in their pursuit of their end goal – to eradicate all life in the cosmos save for their own.’

  ‘Yeah, I pretty much got that,’ said Cinder, with a crooked smile.

  They moved on, continuing their circuit of the ship.

  ‘The flight deck is at the heart of the ship,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s where most of the Daleks will be. I’m far more interested in what’s going on elsewhere.’

  He walked towards another door, which slid open as he approached.

  The contents of this room were just as disturbing – and, Cinder noted, just as foul smelling – as those of the last. Here, experiments were clearly being carried out on the Degradations.

  The casing of a Glider lay in pieces on the floor, while the torso had been removed from inside the glass chamber and was splayed open on a metal slab. It looked as if the Daleks had been carrying out an autopsy investigation, and had simply abandoned it part way through. Excised organs sat in metal bowls, slowly turning putrid, and the uncovered carcass was drying out and beginning to rot.

  Components from other unusual-looking Daleks were strewn about the room: an elongated eyestalk, the bottom half of a travel unit in which all of the sensor globes were transparent and flickered with an exotic blue light, a golden head dome with four radiation valves.

  ‘Is it true,’ said Cinder, covering her mouth and refusing to look at the corpse, ‘that these ar
e the result of Time Lord experiments, attempts to re-engineer Dalek history and evolution?’

  The Doctor shrugged. ‘There’s some truth in that,’ he said, ‘of course there is, but only inasmuch as it gave the Daleks an idea, a means of experimenting on and adapting themselves. They’ve taken it to far greater extremes than the Time Lords ever did.’

  ‘You mean they’re doing this to themselves?’ said Cinder. The very idea of it appalled her.

  The Doctor nodded. ‘A Dalek eugenics programme,’ he said. ‘Dipping into as many alternative realities as they can find and tampering with their own DNA, trying to nurture the perfect killing machine to deploy against the Time Lords.’

  ‘You must be quite the fearsome enemy,’ said Cinder, ‘to inspire that.’

  The Doctor looked away, unable to meet her gaze. ‘We’re not going to find what we’re looking for here,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time we checked one of the other saucers. These are just experimental laboratories.’

  Cinder wanted to ask him exactly what he was looking for, but before she had the chance he’d set off again, disappearing out into the passage. Her questions would have to wait – trying to engage in conversation as they crept around the ship only risked bringing the Daleks down on top of them. She hurried to catch up.

  They continued with their reconnaissance around the outer passages of the ship, until they happened upon an access ramp leading to the upper level. They hurried up it, spurred on by the sound of muffled Dalek voices, echoing through a doorway behind them.

  The upper tier of the vessel appeared very much the same as the one below, although they found themselves facing a large, open hatchway as they emerged from the top of the ramp. Here, the metal walkway jutted from the hole, neatly spanning the open space to the opposing saucer.

  It was makeshift; it looked as if it had been lashed up in nearly as much of a hurry as the temporary buildings that had served as her home for so long. It didn’t look particularly safe – there were no handrails or lips, just a smooth band of metal, about four metres wide, stretched between the two vessels for the Daleks to glide over. Unlike a Dalek, however, if Cinder fell, she wouldn’t be able to fire a quick burst from her thrusters to stabilise herself or fly away.

  She inched to the opening and peered down, while the Doctor checked there were no Daleks coming from the other directions. It was quite a drop. Below them, the courtyard now appeared to be empty, the prisoners and the Daleks having returned to one of the other saucers.

  ‘It doesn’t look particularly safe,’ hissed Cinder, as the Doctor joined her at the foot of the metal bridge.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ said the Doctor, in what sounded like an attempt to reassure her. He didn’t, however, sound particularly sure himself. He tapped the metal gantry with the edge of his boot, and then lurched out, trying it with his weight. ‘See, fine,’ he said. He set off in the direction of the other ship.

  Feeling rather too exposed, and decidedly unsafe, Cinder followed him across the bridge, trying not to look down. If she focused on the Doctor’s back, and hurried, then it wasn’t quite so bad …

  Too late, they realised that in the eerie stillness of the base their footfalls sounded like gunshots, ringing out against the metal plating with every step.

  Halfway across, the Doctor stopped for a moment, looking back. ‘Better hurry,’ he whispered. ‘Any minute now, one of them is bound to come investigating. We’re not being terribly inconspicuous.’

  Cinder gave him her best ‘you don’t say’ look and carried on, simultaneously trying to walk faster while making sure she remained upright on the polished metal surface. She almost went over on her backside as she reached the point where the bridge bowed, leading down into the other Dalek ship, and wheeled her arms frantically, trying to keep her balance. Her gun swung loose on its shoulder strap and caught in the crook of her elbow, threatening to slip free and over the edge.

  ‘Hang on!’ said the Doctor. He reached for her, fumbled for a moment, and then finally managed to get hold of her arm. He waited for a moment, still clinging onto her, as she regained her footing and hitched her gun strap back up onto her shoulder, and then guided her to safety, bundling her through the hatchway. She was glad to have her feet back on solid ground, even if it was onboard a Dalek ship.

  ‘Where are they all?’ she said a moment later, once she had her breath back.

  ‘There’ll be fewer here than you think,’ said the Doctor. ‘They’ll have other bases elsewhere on the planet, similar to this one, and patrols out in the ruins like the ones you’ve encountered before. Most of them will have moved on, though, deploying to the other battlefronts, or joining their attack fleets up there near the Eye.’

  ‘I just assumed there’d be a whole army of them,’ said Cinder. ‘Thousands and thousands of them. I mean, look what they’ve done to this place. Look at the devastation they’ve wrought. And yet here we are, sneaking around their base, and we’ve hardly seen sign of them.’

  ‘This is what they do,’ said the Doctor, ‘Move in, destroy, and move out. They’ve no interest in the planet itself. I think I’m starting to realise that it’s more to do with Moldox’s proximity to the Eye. I think that’s why they’re here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Cinder.

  ‘That temporal radiation I talked about,’ said the Doctor, ‘the thing that causes the aurora in the sky?’

  Cinder nodded.

  ‘It leaks from the Eye, a constant discharge. The Eye is an anomaly, a structure that shouldn’t exist. It’s a wrinkle in space-time: a hole, if you will, between universes. Those temporal weapons, the dematerialisation guns, I think they’re being powered by it. The Daleks have found a way to harness the radiation and bend it to their will.’

  Cinder looked up involuntarily, as if searching for the Eye. All she saw, however, was the inside of the Dalek saucer. ‘What about the prisoners, then?’ she said. ‘Why keep them here?’

  The Doctor shrugged. ‘Biological matter they can use to construct new, mutant Daleks, or fodder to test their experimental weapons. That’s all, I’m afraid.’ The sheer callousness of it was staggering to Cinder. To have such blatant disregard for life – it seemed anathema to her. ‘And this is what they’ll be doing on all those other planets in the Spiral?’

  ‘Probably,’ said the Doctor, ‘or they’ll have sunk mines and enslaved people to dig, harvesting minerals and precious metals for their war effort. They don’t have a great deal of imagination, unless it’s to do with killing people.’ He smoothed down the front of his waistcoat. ‘Come on, there’ll be plenty of time to talk later.’

  The interior of the second saucer looked much the same as the first: identical almost, except for the fact there was a series of doors facing them almost immediately as they went in.

  ‘I want to find one of their computer terminals,’ said the Doctor. ‘Let’s try in …’ he waggled his finger back and forth as if counting out ‘eenie, meenie, miney, mo’, ‘… here.’ He strolled purposely towards one of the doors and, just as before, it slid open to accommodate him.

  This one opened into a large chamber from which a series of other doors stemmed off into adjoining rooms. It appeared to be a laboratory, with a bank of nine monitors set into the far wall, all of which were displaying complex sequences of numbers, animated to form twisting double helixes against a faint green background.

  Two tables were laid out with an array of vicious-looking surgical tools and equipment, although thankfully, thought Cinder, this time none of them bore the remains of a Dalek experiment.

  ‘Watch the door,’ said the Doctor. He crossed to the bank of screens and began tapping on the glass, calling up strange-looking sigils and dragging them around to create unusual patterns. It looked like utter gobbledegook to Cinder, but she supposed it must have meant something to the Doctor.

  ‘Can you read that?’ she said.

  ‘A little,’ replied the Doctor, but he was distracted, paying attention to the da
ta scrolling before his eyes. Now schematics were blinking across the screens, wireframes that appeared to describe a building or other massive construction. She wondered if they were maps of the saucer or the base.

  Cinder waited just inside the doorway, holding the gun across her chest so that she was able to cover the passageway outside, as well as the entrance to the ship. Her heart was still juddering, and her palms were slick with sweat. Despite the bravado, she was feeling somewhat terrified, and the initial surge of adrenalin was beginning to wear off.

  ‘It’s worse than I thought,’ said the Doctor, suddenly. She glanced over her shoulder to see what was wrong, but he still had his back to her, reading from the screens. ‘They’re cloning Dalek mutants here, and through there,’ he looked over his shoulder to see if she were paying attention, pointing to one of the doors, ‘that’s a hatchery. They’re breeding Daleks so that they can put their new paradigm into full production.’

  ‘The ones with the cannons?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ confirmed the Doctor. ‘But it gets worse. They’re building something else, too.’

  ‘What?’ hissed Cinder.

  ‘A planet killer,’ said the Doctor. ‘A mega-weapon. They’re planning to turn the Tantalus Eye itself into one, massive energy cannon, and fire it at Gallifrey.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Cinder.

  ‘The end of everything,’ growled the Doctor. ‘They’ll erase Gallifrey entirely, remove it from existence, rewrite history as if the Time Lords never existed. They’ll condemn the universe, overrun everything.’ For the first time since arriving at the Dalek base, the Doctor actually looked worried.

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘We can start by giving them something else to worry about,’ said the Doctor. He returned to playing with the icons on the monitor screens, and one of the door panels on her right slid open to reveal a small antechamber.

  She swung around, half expecting to see a Dalek emerge from the doorway, but there was nothing there. She backed up, keeping her gun pointed at the main door, until she could take a glance inside the newly revealed room.