‘That ship has weapons capable of cracking this planet open like an egg.’
Allison and Mike banged through the doors with armfuls of junk. ‘We got the parts you wanted, Doctor,’ said Allison.
‘Put them on the table.’
Rachel winced as delicate circuit boards tumbled onto the billiard table amid strips of metal, wires and unidentifiable components.
The Doctor pulled up a chair and sat facing the pile. Delicately he unrolled a wide suede strip on the table to reveal interesting looking tools that were held in place by loops and pouches. The Doctor picked up a circuit board and selected one of the tools.
‘Is the mothership the Daleks’ main base?’ asked Gilmore.
‘For one group at least,’ said the Doctor, prising a transistor out of its socket. ‘I suspect we are dealing with two possibly antagonistic Dalek factions.’
‘Two?’ queried Allison.
‘But both come from outer space?’ asked Gilmore.
‘From another planet,’ said the Doctor, ‘and the distant future. We must try to contain both factions and let them destroy each other.’
Gilmore looked at the maps again and the big red circle that defined the evacuation zone. ‘Shouldn’t we bring in reinforcements?’ he asked. ‘Armoured units…’
The Doctor cut him off. ‘Haven’t you listened to me, Group Captain? The ship up there has surveillance equipment that can spot a sparrow fall fifteen thousand kilometres away. Any sign of a military build up and they may decide to sterilize the area.’
Rachel suppressed a shudder at the word sterilize. It brought sudden pictures of Hiroshima to her mind: fabric patterns etched into flesh, people burnt away to nothing with only their shadows left to mark their existence.
‘And we have no defence,’ said Gilmore. It was a statement, not a question.
‘Frightening, isn’t it,’ said the Doctor, ‘to find that there are others better versed in death then human beings.’
The Doctor was making final adjustments to his contraption. It was an ungainly mixture of parts: there was the parabolic reflector of an electric fire at the front, from which wires led back into a maze of tubing.
‘What does it do?’ asked Rachel.
‘At best it will interfere with a Dalek’s internal controls,’ said the Doctor. ‘I rigged up something similar once on Spiridon.’
‘And at worst?’
‘It will do absolutely nothing.’
Spiridon, thought Rachel, fine.
Allison called over from the radio. ‘Red Nine reports an increase in modulated signalling.’
The Doctor asked where. As Allison talked back to Red Nine the Doctor beckoned Mike over. ‘Call Ace and tell her that someone will pick her up.’
‘The signal emanates from Coal Hill School,’ called Allison. ‘Multiple signals in close proximity.’
‘Multiple?’ said the Doctor. ‘The transmat must be operational again.’
‘Transmat?’ asked Rachel. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Daleks,’ said the Doctor.
Gilmore strode into the room, ‘There’s no reply from my men at the school.’
The Doctor stood up suddenly and started stuffing tools into his pockets. ‘Get a vehicle ready and load it up with plastic explosives with integral detonators.’
Gilmore nodded and left.
‘Why explosives?’ asked Rachel.
The Doctor held up his contraption. ‘This just disables them. What do you expect us to do then? Talk to them sternly?’
‘Doctor,’ said Mike, hanging up the phone, ‘my mum says that Ace left ages ago.’
The Doctor was suddenly running for the door. Rachel and Mike looked at each other for a moment and ran after him. They caught up at the stairwell; the Doctor was taking the steps three at a time. He turned at the bottom and yelled up that Ace must be at the school.
‘What makes you think she’s got herself in danger?’ gasped Rachel as she reached him.
The Doctor looked at her with such ferocious intensity that she recoiled. ‘Of course she’s got herself in danger,’ he snapped, ‘they always do.’
8
SATURDAY, 14:15
THE DREAMERS AWOKE. Crab-shaped servo-robots scuttled over polycarbide armour, testing for defects. Power cables disengaged and retreated into the floor, clamps retracted and the warriors began gliding to the staging post.
Command data-net came on line; instructions in microsecond pulses flashed from relays. The last of the servo-robots dismounted, leaping from the warriors into their wall niches with cybernetic precision.
Doors opened.
The Daleks entered their designated transmat broadcast zones. Power shifted from the mothership’s immense fusion reactor and energized the travelling field.
The first Dalek prepared to enter the combat zone.
Ace might have died.
Might have.
She had slipped into the quarantine zone, easily evading the squaddies who manned the checkpoints, and made her way to the school.
Outside a big Bedford truck sat untended; it was very quiet. Ace checked the cab: it was empty and the engine hood was cool and smelled of petrol. She assumed the soldiers were out patrolling or whatever it was that soldiers did when they were not saluting or shooting. She looked in the back just to be certain that they hadn’t left any goodies behind, but was disappointed to find it empty. There wasn’t even a whiff of explosives.
Ace found the tape deck where she had left it, on a bench in the chemistry lab. Just on the off-chance she flicked the selector to FM and switched on.
There was nothing but static at first. Then she heard a ghost of a metallic sound on the fringes of reception. Ace adjusted the frequency.
‘Attack squad in position,’ grated the unmistakable voice of a Dalek.
Ace froze. If the reception was that clear then the Daleks were close, possibly within the school itself.
Leaving the tape deck on, Ace ran for the stairs.
‘Lower area clear,’ the tape deck broadcast.
Ace collided with a wall and stopped, staring stupidly down the staircase. There was a movement on the landing below – a shadow.
A cream-coloured Dalek came round the corner.
Ace threw herself backwards just in time. An energy bolt carved a track through the space she had occupied and drilled a hole in the wall.
As she banged back into the lab, Ace heard the whine of the Dalek’s motor unit as the creature prepared to ascend the stairs. She needed a plan and she needed it yesterday.
A distraction, she quickly thought.
Ace slammed a cassette into the tape deck, hit the play button, and twisted the volume to maximum.
A weapon.
Ace heard the Dalek’s engine go into overdrive as it started up the stairs. She reached over her shoulder and felt the cool handle of the baseball bat. Ace slowly drew it out and backed behind the door.
The whine of the Dalek’s engine was abruptly blotted out by two hundred watts of percussion.
Ace remained poised, bat upraised. A single trickle of sweat ran down her cheek; she could feel her heartbeat battering at her ribs. There was fear, but mixed in with that was anger, exhilaration and the absolute conviction of the young that they will live forever.
A Dalek forced its way through the doors. It was close enough for Ace to see her distorted reflection in the burnished gold of the creature’s sensor pods. Even this close the Dalek made no noise as it zeroed in on the tape deck. Energy sprouted from its gunstick.
The tape deck exploded; a bench tap ruptured and water spewed out in a long arc.
The Dalek’s eyestalk swivelled to scan the room.
‘Small human female on level three.’
‘Who are you calling small?’ Ace brought the baseball bat down on the smooth dome. Neon blue tendrils of energy crackled as the bat hit, eating into the laminated surface. Slivers of armour exploded off the surface.
Ace struck the Dalek agai
n before it could react – a glancing blow off the side.
The Dalek began to turn, describing a circle that would bring its weapon to bear.
Ace desperately swung the bat at the vulnerable eyestalk: there was a shower of sparks and the whole assembly parted from the dome and bounced away across the floor.
The Dalek screamed but kept turning. Ace threw herself under a bench; a stool bounced off her shoulder. Glass flasks exploded as the Dalek shot at Ace, tracking her by sound. A plume of flame shot upwards as a gastap was blown away.
Instinct told her to keep moving, but she was running out of classroom. She vaulted onto a bench, hoping to run past the Dalek and through the door. The Dalek fired again; the cabinet behind Ace exploded.
The Dalek blocked the doorway.
Ace pounded along the bench, the partition window rushing towards her. At the last moment she flung her arms in front of her face, screamed and jumped.
There was an agonizing moment of stillness.
Her forearms and then her shoulders silently bore the impact, and then she felt her self falling. The sharp crackle of breaking glass somewhere behind her shattered the silence, and then she bounced off the corridor wall.
The Dalek continued to scream and glass rained onto the floor as Ace scrambled to her feet. Bat still in hand she ran for the stairway, ignoring a sharp pain from her left ankle.
There was another Dalek at the top of the stairs.
Woman and Dalek saw each other at the same time.
Ace screamed as she charged forward.
The Dalek hesitated.
Ace gave it a vicious backhanded swing as she went past, and fragments of polycarbide exploded off the Dalek’s casing. She took the staircase in two leaps, screaming again as she came down on her injured ankle.
She saw the dead soldier as she skidded into the entrance hall. Beside his sprawled body lay his gun and a rifle grenade. Ace grabbed the weapons and limped for the exit.
The commander of the Dalek attack squad had no name, yet it knew what it was. That was enough – it would always be enough. It puzzled over the reports from scouts one and two.
Scout one had sighted a small human female on level three. The commander had expected extermination details to follow, but scout one had instead registered severe damage. The female was using a weapon of advanced design and had disabled the scout. This was outside the parameters established for the operation.
Eight seconds after the attack on scout one, scout two sighted the female. It reported behaviour inconsistent with human response predictions.
The commander immediately tagged the female as an intruder human – one either not from this planet or from this temporal zone – or both. It recalled two undamaged warriors and assigned them intercept positions. Only one intruder was allowed for in the operational parameters – the Time Lord known as the Doctor. The commander issued a capture directive specified under the human section of Dalek battle tactics. The female was to be intimidated into surrender.
The commander entered the school entrance hall; it immediately sighted the female. The female now exhibited the expected reactions of fear and flight, accelerating away in the inefficient controlled fall of bipedal locomotion. The commander notified the two warriors to close in while it pursued the female.
As Ace entered the playground, the commander sprang its trap: it and the other warriors closed in on her. Again, the commander considered, the human deviated from normal human behavioural patterns, even as the intimidation took place.
‘Exterminate!’
The voices rebounded off the walls and crowded Ace’s mind; they made it difficult to think, harder to act.
‘Exterminate!’
Three Daleks. There was a sickness in her stomach as she realized that blind aggression was not going to save her now. But why had they not killed her?
‘Exterminate!’
The rifle was clumsy in her fingers; the grenade kept slipping off. She was determined to take one of them with her.
‘Exterminate!’
They were on every side – an alien wall of white and gold. She knew she was going to die.
The Doctor is going to be really angry this time, she thought.
The commander monitored the female carefully, wary of more unpredictable behaviour. It contacted the mothership through the communications relay in the transmat below and demanded reinforcements.
It had just finished when communications were drowned in static. Co-ordination systems suddenly malfunctioned; motor circuits failed to respond. With dimming vision the commander saw the female scuttle away. It tried to fire but its weapon failed. Wild power fluctuations disrupted the incubator, and it felt a sudden intense physical pain. There was a fleeting sensation of enemies, humans near itself.
Spiridon, it screamed silently, the Doctor.
Sudden heat and oblivion.
Ace fell down a few metres away from the Daleks. They were thrashing about, their gunsticks waving erratically. A weird moaning issued from somewhere deep within their shells.
Over the sound, Ace heard somone – was it Mike? – shouting orders. Then the Doctor cried: ‘It worked!’
Figures in uniform darted among the Daleks, sticking grey plastic blobs on to the casings. Then they were gone.
‘Get down,’ shouted Mike.
Ace understood what the grey blobs were and threw her arms over her head.
There was a deafening noise and it started raining bits of Dalek.
9
SATURDAY, 14:55
Perhaps the most notable of the Cambridge Group in the 1950s was Professor Rachel Jensen. Hardly recognized outside the scientific community despite her pivotal work with Turing during the war, she retired suddenly in 1964. Her autobiography The Electrical Dreamer is curiously vague as to why. She married a year later.
The Women That Science Forgot
by Rowan Sesay (1983)
THREE EXPLOSIONS OCCURRED in quick succession: smoke belched out of the entrance to the covered playground. Three white and gold Daleks had brewed up in the confined space. Rachel clutched a carbon dioxide extinguisher and dashed into the smoke. There was an unidentifiable stench that reminded her of burning fat.
The Doctor stared at the shattered Daleks, his face unreadable.
‘There were living beings in there,’ he said.
Mike looked at the smoking remains. ‘Not any more.’
Gilmore holstered his gun and turned to Mike. ‘Search the area upstairs.’
Mike took from the Doctor the device that had confused the Daleks and led a squad into the school buildings.
Rachel beckoned to Allison and they cautiously approached the trio of Daleks. The top dome of one had been blown off by the plastic explosive. Smears of carbon ran down the shoulder flanges, and vapour rose from the shattered bowl at the top. Rachel thought she saw something move amid the tangle of wiring.
‘Doctor,’ called Rachel, backing away and pulling Allison with her. ‘I think this one is still active.’
The Doctor hurried over. Something clattered under Allison’s foot – Ace’s baseball bat. The Doctor peered into the steaming interior of the Dalek.
Rachel heard something – a sharp scuttling movement in the interior.
‘Interesting,’ breathed the Doctor.
Rachel backed further away from the Dalek, picking her way through the metal and organic scraps scattered over the rough concrete.
The sound inside the Dalek ceased, and the Doctor leaned closer for a better look. Rachel suppressed the urge to scream.
A grey-green thing reared out of the Dalek and lashed out at the Doctor – it was a twisted claw. Rachel screamed. Grey ropy strands erupted around the claw as it fastened on the Doctor’s throat.
Allison fell backwards, fumbling for something on the ground. Tubes – or were they veins? – pulsed on the spindly wrist, the bony fingers clutching at the Doctor’s neck. His hands were pulling at the gripping claw, his face was beginning to mottle.
>
Then Allison was beside him, her arm swinging down, the baseball bat an arc of silver. Energy exploded from the shrivelled arm. The Dalek screamed. Allison hit it again and again. She kept on bringing down the bat, and each time liquid spattered her face and the walls.
‘Allison,’ said the Doctor.
Allison upended the bat and savagely ground it into the Dalek. There was a grisly crunching sound.
‘Allison,’ said the Doctor, restraining her. ‘It’s dead.’
Allison flinched. There was a clatter as the bat fell to the ground.
‘Thank you,’ the Doctor said softly, leading her away from the Dalek.
‘What was that?’ said Rachel. It seemed an inadequate thing to say.
‘They’ve mutated again.’ The Doctor calmly inspected the stinking cavity. ‘Here, have a look.’ He made space for her. ‘It’s all right, it’s dead now. Compare this with the destroyed Dalek at Totter’s Lane. Look at the differences.’
Ace checked herself for injuries. Her leg was painful and on her upper arm there was a nasty bruise which she had got when she smashed through the window. Her ribs hurt – she took a deep breath but there was no sharp pain. No ribs broken then, she thought. Carefully, Ace picked a sliver of glass from her jacket sleeve and considered getting up.
Just give it a few seconds, she decided, to get my breath back. She wasn’t yet ready to face the Doctor. She watched as Rachel stooped over the Dalek.
‘The other Dalek was underdeveloped,’ said Rachel, ‘with vestigial limbs and sensory organs, almost amoeboid. This is altogether different, it has functional appendages with some kind of mechanical prosthesis grafted on to its body.’
Functional appendages, thought Ace, remembering the claw, that’s one way of putting it.
Rachel’s face had collapsed in disgust. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
Ace decided to draw attention to herself. She tried to get up. ‘Don’t anyone give me a hand.’
Allison rushed over. ‘You’re hurt?’
‘I had an argument with a window.’
The Doctor was suddenly there kneeling beside her. He motioned Allison away. ‘You two had better check the cellar, but don’t touch anything.’
Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks: 50th Anniversary Edition (Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Collection) Page 7
