As the Doctor and the children reached the bottom of the stairs, the motive power sounds of the Daleks echoing down the stairwell transformed into something even more worrying. The Doctor knew this sound only too well. The Daleks were taking off, flying. They were about to hover down the steps after them.
‘Ollus, Sabel, Jenibeth! Come on!’ barked the Doctor, dashing to the TARDIS, unlocking the doors and flinging them open again. He turned to make sure the children were safely on their way … Then his hearts went cold in shock. Where was Jenibeth?
‘Jenibeth? Jenibeth, where is she?’ he said to Ollus as the little boy passed him.
Sabel had already entered the TARDIS. Ollus turned back to look as he reached the doorway.
And then they both saw that Jenibeth had somehow tripped at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Jenibeth!’ shouted little Ollus with all his might.
Confused and dazed, Jenibeth staggered bravely to her feet. She rubbed her head and looked down at her grazed knees and started to cry.
Knowing she was too stunned to move quickly enough, the Doctor began to launch himself towards her. But he felt a tiny hand on his sleeve. He looked back. It was Ollus, trying to stop him.
‘Ollus?’ the Doctor asked, bewildered.
Ollus was staring to where Jenibeth was. The Doctor turned back to look again.
A Dalek had landed right beside Jenibeth. Still dazed, she seemed hardly aware of this deadly killing machine as its suction cup arm extended towards her.
‘No!’ yelled the Doctor, overwhelmed by a sense of utter futility.
More Daleks landed around Jenibeth.
‘It’s too late,’ said Ollus. ‘This is a time machine. You can come back to get her.’
The Doctor could not think of a single word to say that would make sense or help in this situation. When he had foolishly decided to break the Laws of Time before, to try to reunite the children with their parents, he had truly opened a can of temporal worms. The Doctor drew breath, not knowing quite what he was going to say, but—
‘We’ll come back for you! We’ll come back for you! I promise!’ Ollus shouted out to Jenibeth, just as the first Dalek’s suction cup made contact with her. She let out a confused squeal, suddenly realising she was surrounded.
‘Surrender or the girl will be—’
With all his might, Ollus pulled the Doctor into the TARDIS and slammed the doors shut before they could hear the final, fatal word from the Dalek. He turned to the Doctor, leaning his little head on the door, his fingers in his ears, his eyes red with tears.
‘We can go back. We can go back. We can go back,’ he was almost chanting to himself.
The Doctor reached out to Ollus, still not knowing what to do. He put a reassuring hand on the little boy’s head and smiled as best he could. Then he broke away and rushed up the steps to the console. Sabel was already standing there.
‘You won’t go back, though, will you?’ she said.
The Doctor looked at her and, for a moment, felt he could not move.
‘Not this time,’ she said. ‘You won’t, will you?’
The Doctor turned away and operated the TARDIS controls. The engines started to heave and the shapes within the central column propelled themselves up and down as the ship dematerialised from Gethria and headed into the Vortex.
The Doctor could hear Ollus’s little feet frantically patter up the steps towards him. He tripped just as he reached the top. The Doctor heard him fall and cry out. Sabel ran to the little boy to help him up. Rubbing his shins and fighting back tears, Ollus walked right up to the Doctor.
‘You will go back, though, won’t you?’ he said. ‘You were going to do that before, you were.’
‘I was,’ nodded the Doctor. ‘But it’s different this time.’
‘How is it different?’ asked Ollus, starting to get cross.
‘Last time, something had pushed the TARDIS and me away from getting to your parents on time. Something or someone had already interfered in the flow of time.’
‘So it was all right for you to interfere then, to put that right?’ asked Sabel.
‘Well …’ the Doctor ran a hand through his hair. Why did humans always ask about this? he thought to himself. Then he realised how stupid a question it was. Who wouldn’t ask? Ask to go back and save the ones they loved …
‘It’s … complicated,’ said the Doctor, feeling that was one of the worst answers he had ever given. ‘But if I kept going back and changing things every time something bad happened, I’d spend my life going round in circles creating dangerous paradoxes and time eddies that would damage … well, everything … eventually.’
‘But—’ started Ollus.
The Doctor knelt down close to the boy, putting his hand on his tiny shoulders. ‘There are rules, Ollus,’ he said. ‘Ancient rules. And I have to stick to them.’
Ollus shrugged away and hit the console with all his might. ‘But I promised her! I told Jenibeth we’d come back for her!’
‘I know,’ said the Doctor. ‘But it wasn’t your promise to make.’
Ollus yelled, ‘No!’ in unrestrained anger and flew at the Doctor with the clear intention of hitting him. The Doctor closed his eyes, expecting and ready to accept the fierce little blows, but they did not come. He opened his eyes and saw Sabel restraining Ollus, holding his forearms. Ollus twisted and groaned angrily.
‘No, Ollus,’ Sabel was saying. ‘No hitting. Hitting is a bad thing and the Doctor is a good man!’
The Doctor did not feel like a good man at this precise moment in time. At this precise moment, he felt that he should have never responded to the distress call from Alyst and Terrin. Someone else would have eventually rescued the children. He should never have got involved. He must stop doing this, he thought. Stop getting involved in things he could not put right. Things he only ever seemed to make worse.
‘But the Daleks will kill Jenibeth,’ said Ollus, sobbing, finally letting his arms fall to his sides. Sabel hugged her little brother, enfolding him tightly in her arms, squeezing him, starting to cry herself.
‘No,’ said the Doctor, suddenly, grasping at a thought. ‘They threatened to kill her.’
The two children looked at the Doctor, clearly confused.
‘Threatening and doing are not the same thing,’ continued the Doctor. An idea was forming in his mind. He wasn’t quite sure exactly what the idea was, but it was beginning to grow. ‘No, the Daleks love to threaten and they love to take hostages too.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Sabel.
‘I mean,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s still a chance for Jenibeth.’
Jenibeth saw the TARDIS disappear from sight, groaning like a great yawning monster, and felt empty inside. She tried to pull herself free from the Dalek sucker stuck to her back. She couldn’t. It wouldn’t let go.
It hurt.
‘Ow!’ she complained out loud. But the Dalek still didn’t let go.
Another Dalek hovered quickly to where the TARDIS had been, its dome spinning round, its eye stick waving up and down in a rage.
‘The Doctor has escaped!’ it shouted in its horrible voice.
There was the noise of another Dalek hovering. Jenibeth looked round to see it coming down the stairs. Its eye stick moved to look at her, the blue light in it shining brighter, hurting her eyes to look at it.
‘How did you activate the Cradle?’ it asked in a voice far less noisy, but just as horrible. ‘Answer! Answer! Answer!’
Then Jenibeth remembered what Sabel had said to her in the orphanage back home. Try to think of your favourite thing … jelly blobs. So she did. She imagined she was eating a jelly blob; the juiciest jelly blob there had ever been. She bit into it and the lovely sweet flavour flowed out into her mouth, and for a moment all the scary feelings went away. She looked straight back at the Dalek looking at her … and smiled.
Then suddenly this Dalek looked up.
Jenibeth looked up too. All around her, the spa
rkling lights that had been filling this big room ever since they had arrived started to go out. After a little while, all the lights had gone, apart from the ones on metal sticks that had been here before.
‘Cradle power deactivated!’ said another Dalek in a low, grumbling sort of voice.
Jenibeth could hear a deep rumbling sound that made her tummy feel funny. Then she remembered, this noise had been made by the big rocks moving, up in the desert. She thought hard and realised this noise probably meant these rocks were moving back to the way they had been, before all the lights and the fizzy stuff.
‘What have you done?’ asked the Dalek who had spoken in the less noisy voice.
‘I’m having a jelly blob,’ Jenibeth answered.
‘The child is too undeveloped to comprehend,’ said the same Dalek.
Jenibeth thought this sounded funny and smiled back, unable to stop herself giggling a bit.
The Dalek continued. ‘But she may yet prove to be a useful hostage. Secure her in a detention cell in the ship.’ It moved to face the other Daleks and carried on droning away in its horrible voice.
‘Now that we have seen the Cradle power activated, we know for certain that it will serve our purpose. And when the Daleks take control of it, we will activate it again. The Cradle of the Gods will make the Daleks masters of the universe. Masters of the universe! Masters of the universe!’
The other Daleks all started repeating those words, their voices getting higher and higher.
‘Masters of the universe! Masters of the universe! Masters of the universe!’
Not even the sweet taste of her imaginary jelly blobs could shut out the terrible noise. It echoed all around the chamber, making her ears buzz painfully. She put her hands flat onto her ears, but it was no good, the horrible noises from the Daleks and their shouting went on and on and on until Jenibeth felt her head would burst.
Chapter Ten
Sunlight Secrets
Lillian Belle stepped into her apartment after another long, hard day reporting news to an ever-dwindling holo-TV audience. Today, she had presented features on drainage facilities and the issue of sun protection for the populations of the four hundred Sunlight Worlds. She had put as much of her heart and soul into it as she could muster, given that she knew that the vast majority of the Sunlight audience would most likely opt to watch one of the hundreds of ‘reality’ programmes or quizzes.
She gleaned what job satisfaction she could and smiled her tight, restrained smile to her bosses whenever they asked how things were going. She was a fairly big fish in the evaporating pond of current affairs in the world of Sunlight television. She knew that many industry people looked on with a mixture of pity and confusion as she batted away all offers to move over into live ‘info-tainment’. They viewed her as a kind of slowly self-destructing crusader in a reality where there was nothing to crusade about any more.
And that was just what she wanted them to think.
Lillian gently closed the front door behind her, took off her light little jacket and hung it on the wall. She breezed gently into her kitchen and made herself a cool, refreshing fruit drink. She then went into her lounge and moved towards the wide, floor-to-ceiling window that looked out onto her small, neat garden area, just big enough for two chairs, a table and a sun shade. A sun shade so vital on a planet constantly soaked in artificial sunlight, courtesy of the Dalek Foundation’s life-giving artificial satellites.
As she reached the window, she absently placed a hand against it, letting the warmth of her body temperature mix with the air-conditioned coolness of the plastic glass. Satisfied that she had left her hand there just long enough, she moved back and relaxed onto a sofa.
But her eyes never left that spot on the window where she had rested her hand.
If anyone had been watching her over a period of weeks, they might have noticed that Lillian carried out this little ritual every third day. On the other days, she touched other windows in her apartment, or stroked the lid of her garbage incinerator or brushed her hair against the light fitting in her bedroom. All seemingly pointless little moments in the life of someone entirely unremarkable.
And that was exactly what she wanted them to think.
Her eyes still stayed fixed upon the window.
Just a little more time …
Some months back, she had covered one of the few dramatic events to take place on a Sunlight planet. There had been a train crash. A terrible, freak accident. She had investigated it. She had been told the drivers had survived. But she had never been able to find those drivers or the medics who attended them.
Never one to give up, she had kept on trying to trace them. She had contacted the local government authorities and had been pushed from department to department. She had even attempted contact with the Dalek Foundation itself. All to no avail. But the more she got nowhere, the more she found she wanted to push further. The more she knew that something was really wrong here, because she had always had a strange, uneasy feeling about life here on Sunlight 349.
Then, one day, she had noticed someone looking at her across the street. It was a secret but pointed sort of a look. When she had attempted to cross the street to talk to this person, a skimmer had ‘accidentally’ got in her way and, when it had cleared, the person had gone.
The next day, she had spotted someone else looking at her. Again, she couldn’t quite get to them before they vanished. This time, an automatic streetlight-fixing unit had trundled in front of her.
And the next day, something similar had happened. And the day after that and the day after that. She had started to think she was becoming paranoid or going insane.
Then, one day, Lillian had returned home after a hard day’s work at Sunlight 349 Holo-News to find a complete stranger sitting in her lounge. He had worn commonplace clothes, dark glasses and had a commonplace kind of face. When she had got close to that face, she had realised there was something … artificial about it.
‘This isn’t my face,’ he had said. ‘It’s a disguise. You can’t see my real face. It’s too dangerous.’
‘Are you really that ugly?’ she had joked.
He had laughed, but it was a brittle, artificial laugh, like bad acting in one of the many ‘real-life’ dramas on TV.
The man had told her not to push any further on the truth about the train crash.
‘Are you something to do with the government?’ she had asked.
‘We’re nothing to do with the government,’ he had said. ‘We are the resistance.’ And then he had told her about the adjustments that had been made to her apartment. The technology implanted into the floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto the small garden, the lid of the garbage incinerator, other windows in the house, the light fittings … He had told her what to do and when to do it and what signs to look for when she had done it. This was to be the means of her receiving instructions, she had been told. This was how she could help to bring down the rule of the Daleks.
And then he had injected her with something. Without warning, he had leapt forward and jabbed her with a tiny needle. She had had no time to react or stop him. The effect of it had knocked her unconscious. And then she had fallen ill for about three days. It was like some kind of flu virus. Her bosses had understood. Things were not exactly busy at Sunlight 349 Holo-News, she could be spared for a few days.
When she recovered, Lillian remembered what the man had told her and started to touch the windows, the incinerator and the other things in the patterns he had specified. For a long time, nothing had happened.
Then, one day, something did happen. After waiting for five or so minutes, a small yellow mark had appeared on the incinerator lid. As she had been instructed, she touched the mark with her index finger. It had made her feel sick, but it had also given her information. Suddenly, she had known where to look for a clue as to the fate of the freak train-crash drivers.
Three days later, she had managed to find, misfiled in a Medical Department Records Office, a
report marked for deletion on the discovery of several bodies from the site of the train crash. The bodies of people who had not died from the effects of the crash, but who had died from massive internal disruption, the result of some form of energy projection, the report had concluded.
She had had no idea what to do with this information; but now at least she knew for certain that something was not right in the Sunlight Worlds. That persistent doubt she had harboured for years, that guilt that had festered because of how grateful her parents had been about it all, her single-minded dedication to finding out the truth, a dedication that had left her cold and alone in her life … Now she knew there really was a justification for it all. It was not just paranoia and depression. And there were other people out there who felt the same way. She was now working for them. Working, in some unfathomable way, to bring the truth to people. It may take time, she thought, but she was part of something important and, most significant of all, something that would reveal the truth about the Dalek Foundation …
Whatever that truth was.
So, as she stared at the window, she expected nothing to happen, just as nothing had happened so many times before. She knew she had to be patient.
Then, a small, deep orange mark appeared on the glass. A thrill of excitement running through her, she got up and calmly placed her finger on the mark. When she withdrew her finger, the mark had gone, but she was already feeling sick and, most importantly, learning something new.
Her mind was starting to receive information from the microscopically minute artificial memory cells in the orange mark. Memory cells programmed to travel straight to her brain.
Her mind was beginning to learn … gradually …
Something …
About …
The Doctor.
When Lillian Belle finally found the Doctor, he was walking around one of Sunlight 349’s large, open shopping areas. The central shopping mall, in fact. She saw that he had two children with him. A girl, who was probably about 12 years old, and a boy, who was maybe 5, possibly younger.
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