Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks: 50th Anniversary Edition (Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Collection)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Professor Jensen, Miss Williams,’ said Gilmore.

  ‘Ja wohl,’ said Allison quietly and stood up. ‘Coming, Professor Jensen?’

  Rachel put down her coffee and grabbed her coat. ‘Of course Miss Williams.’ I wouldn’t miss this for the world, she thought.

  ‘I wish Bernard was here.’

  ‘The British Rocket Group has its own problems.’

  Ace sidled over to the counter and pinched a piece of toast.

  ‘What’s so important about the school?’

  ‘Now that I’ve disabled the imperial Daleks’ transmat,’ said the Doctor, ‘absolutely nothing. The renegade Daleks have the Hand of Omega and all Dalek attention will be focused on that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The Doctor gave her a suspicious look. ‘Well?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The Doctor stood up.

  ‘There is one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘Ah,’ said the Doctor and turned to leave.

  I should have expected that, thought Ace. She decided it was time to look for more explosives.

  Ratcliffe’s yard was situated down Pullman’s Road, a narrow little backstreet. As the truck negotiated the tricky corner into the yard, Ratcliffe found himself whistling Wagner.

  In the back, with the rest of his men, was the Hand of Omega. Now he knew he had something to bargain with. Now he could ask for the world.

  For months ‘it’ had nestled in the corner of his office. He had just walked in one day and found it there masked by shadow – a vague mechanical shape, a voice that gave him secrets. It gave him secrets and the promise of power.

  He stepped down from the truck.

  ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Get the damn thing off the truck and put it over on the trestles.’

  ‘But it’s cold,’ said Charlie.

  ‘So wear your gloves.’ Charlie was loyal, but a few coupons short of a pop-up toaster.

  Ratcliffe slammed the sliding door over and went into the warehouse. There was a musty smell from the racks of timber – he hadn’t done much work recently. He hadn’t needed to, what with the money ‘it’ had supplied. He opened the door to his office and entered.

  ‘We have the Hand of Omega,’ he said. ‘It’s out in the yard.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  Ratcliffe sat down at his desk and picked up the telephone receiver. ‘I’ll tell my man. After all, he found it for us.’ He sat back in the chair and watched as the phone dialled itself.

  The sun had broken through the clouds, splashing light across the playground. Four soldiers were piling up sandbags by the front door. Ace glimpsed khaki boxes stacked against the wall. One big box was open, revealing a long tube nestling in straw. A recoilless anti-tank gun, she thought, classy.

  ‘If this place is so out of the way of the action,’ she asked the Doctor, ‘what are we all doing here?’

  ‘I want to keep an eye on the group captain,’ said the Doctor. He pushed open the doors.

  The entrance hall was full of noise. Field telephone cables snaked across the floor, disappearing through doorways. A soldier was nailing up signs indicating the operations room, the mess, and one crudely lettered ‘KHAZI’. Down the hall someone was swearing in a foreign language. Ace peered past a group of soldiers hefting ammunition boxes to see Rachel. She was gesticulating at two soldiers who were trying to lift a huge box of electronics up the back stairs. Allison was watching her colleague with an astonished expression. There was a smell of packing straw, sweat and overboiled tea.

  Rachel ran out of Yiddish profanities and resorted to glaring at the privates’ backs. Allison was wincing every time the computer banged against the floor.

  ‘This is stupid,’ said Rachel, ‘where’s Sergeant Smith?’ ‘I can see Ace,’ said Allison.

  ‘We want to move the thing,’ said Rachel, ‘not blow it up.’

  ‘There he is.’

  Mike emerged from a classroom. He saw Ace and stopped. His eyes followed her as she disappeared up the stairwell.

  ‘He fancies her, doesn’t he?’ said Allison.

  ‘It’s her Aryan looks.’

  There was a loud crash from behind them and the sound of delicate electronics breaking. Rachel didn’t bother to turn round.

  ‘Allison?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How’s your mental arithmetic?’

  ‘This reminds me of parties I used to go to,’ said Ace. She was sitting on the stairs with the Doctor. From below they could hear the sound of frantic military activity. ‘They’re really busting a gut down there.’

  ‘That’s the general idea,’ said the Doctor. ‘I want to keep the military fully occupied and out of the way.’

  ‘Out of the way of what?’ Ace kicked at a bit of loose paint on the wall. ‘Professor, you promised, remember?’

  ‘A long time ago, on my home planet of Gallifrey, there was a stellar engineer called Omega…’

  The prelaunch checks were complete. Omega settled his big frame into the shock webbing. The sound of the big engines could be heard despite the capsule’s layers of shielding. ‘What’s Rassilon doing?’ Omega asked the other with him.

  ‘Going over the data,’ said the other.

  ‘Again?’

  ‘He worries.’

  Omega was silent for a moment. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Stellar!’ said Ace. ‘As in stars – you mean he engineered stars?’

  ‘Ace.’

  ‘Sorry, go on.’

  ‘It was Omega who created the supernova that formed the initial power source for Gallifreyan time travel experiments. He left behind him the basis on which Rassilon founded Time Lord society, and the Hand of Omega.’

  ‘His hand? What good is that?’

  ‘Not his hand literally, no, it’s called that because Time Lords have an infinite capacity for pretension.’

  The engines were whining, the vortex could almost be felt eating away at the fabric of space and time. ‘Stop fussing and get out,’ Omega told the other.

  ‘I have doubts.’

  ‘You always have doubts.’ Omega’s grin was fierce. ‘You’re as bad as Rassilon.’ He flexed his great hands and placed them on the control interface. ‘Doubts will chain you in the end.’ The engines were screaming now. ‘We’ll see who’s remembered in the histories.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that,’ said Ace.

  ‘The Hand of Omega is the mythical name for Omega’s remote stellar manipulator – the device he used to customize stars.’

  Ace suddenly understood. ‘The Daleks want it so they can recreate the time travel experiments.’ She was missing something. ‘Hold on, you said both Dalek factions can already travel in time.’

  ‘They have time corridor technology,’ said the Doctor. ‘But it’s very crude and nasty. What the Daleks want is the power over time that the Time Lords have. That’s what the Hand of Omega will give them,’ he smiled, ‘or so they think.’

  ‘And you have to stop them.’

  ‘I want them to have it.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘My main problem is stopping Group Captain Gilmore and his men getting killed in the cross-fire.’

  ‘So all this is…’

  ‘A massive deception,’ said the Doctor. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s well devious.’ And it was, except why does he want the Daleks to have the Hand of Omega? If she asked him direct she would get an evasion. ‘So the Daleks grab the Hand of Omega and nobody gets hurt. Well brilliant.’

  Omega was screaming. The control room was silent – everyone knew he was dead; this was just the distant echo of his dying. A new star flared in the sky. One of the controllers made the ward sign against evil.

  ‘Stop that,’ screamed Rassilon at the controller. ‘No superstition.’ His face was contorted with emotion, and for a moment it looked as if he would strike the controller. ‘Do not profane his memory now –
not now.’ Rassilon’s voice broke and he stumbled away.

  The other looked at the new star on the main screen. The expanding shell of matter was picked out in red by computer enhancement – an accidental rendering of the regenerative circle, the ancient symbol of death.

  ‘You’ve got your place in the histories now,’ he said softly, and turned away.

  ‘There’s just one problem,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting two Dalek factions.’ He stood up. ‘Now we have to make sure that the wrong Daleks don’t run away with it.’

  This could be fun, she thought. ‘Shouldn’t we take Mike?’

  ‘No. Dalek hunting is a terminal pastime.’

  ‘So what are we doing then?’

  ‘Dalek hunting.’

  Ask a stupid question, Ace thought.

  *

  The assault team marshalled in the shuttle bay. They were the cream of the Ven-Katri Davrett warriors – imperial Dalek stormtroopers.

  The commander watched them as they loaded section by section, gleaming perfection after gleaming perfection. It felt something akin to pride.

  When they loaded the Abomination, the commander felt such distate that its gunstick involuntarily twitched. So strongly did it feel that it almost queried the loading order. But only almost – a Dalek did not query Tac-op orders more than once and remain functional.

  We shall win this battle without the Abomination, decided the commander, we shall prove our function.

  The shuttle prepared to launch.

  The supreme renegade Dalek had lived in the darkness of Ratcliffe’s warehouse for many months. Its secondary systems had been shut down all that time as it lived by proxy through its link with the battle computer.

  Sometimes it dreamed. They were frightening unnatural dreams – dreams in which it walked like a biped, naked to the environment, breathing unfiltered air.

  Psychological programs within the Dalek’s computer countered the dreams with increasing amounts of sedatives that left it agitated within its protective shell. Technical analysis made the source clear – battle computer feedback. This had not been foreseen at the planning stage – a great deal had not been foreseen. The arrival of the imperial warship, the destruction of the warrior at Totters Lane, the involvement of native military forces.

  They were pernicious these bipeds, these humans with their talent for violence and sudden improvisation. They made dangerous slaves.

  The battle computer reported that the Hand of Omega was in place. The Dalek Supreme snapped out of dormancy, power flushed through its systems – it felt alive again. The battle computer flashed a tactical update, and based on this the Dalek Supreme made decisions and issued orders. Around it, other warriors became operational. Sensitive aural sensors detected noise from the yard outside – the unlovely sound of human laughter. These were the native bipeds that had carried the Hand of Omega. They were now disposable.

  The Dalek Supreme fed power to its motor unit and slipped forward.

  ‘What people need,’ said Ratcliffe, ‘is a firm hand. It’s in their nature. They need a strong leader, someone who knows when to be lenient and when to be harsh…’

  He was cut off by the sound of men screaming.

  Outside, he thought, and lunged across the office and threw open the door.

  His men were lying smashed and broken on the cobbles.

  ‘What have you done?’ he screamed. ‘They were my men.’ There was movement from the shadow in the corner. ‘They were on our side.’

  The shadow rotated, and for the first time Ratcliffe could make out its shape. Something unfolded from the darkness and emerged into the glow from his desk lamp. Light glinted on pale hair, pale skin and blue eyes.

  ‘You are a slave,’ said the girl. ‘You were born to serve the Daleks.’

  11

  SATURDAY, 15:31

  The Movellan War was the most disastrous military campaign the Daleks fought. It is perhaps fitting that it took an android race to perceive the Daleks’ ultimate weakness. When the blow came it took the Daleks’ strategic planners by surprise. They had used biological weapons against many races, in the Spiridon campaign, for example. It never occurred to the Daleks that they might be vulnerable to bacteriological warfare.

  The Daleks suffered eighty-three per cent casualties. The great empire that had dominated so much of Mutter’s Spiral disintegrated overnight. Its great battlefleets were shattered, its industrial base gone like smoke, and the Daleks’ homeworld [Skaro] isolated. Remnants of the sector commands became the various factions that characterize Dalek politics to this day…

  … the Daleks attempted to use their time corridor technology to repair the damage but to no avail… it was Davros’s subversion of the imperial Skarosian Daleks that opened the schism between them and the renegades. The unthinkable became reality – civil war.’

  The Children of Davros, Vol XIX

  by Njeri Ngugi (4065)

  ACE FLATTENED HERSELF against the side of the car, cold metal under her palms. She could feel the Doctor as a tense presence beside her. Ace risked a look over the bonnet. A grey Dalek went silently past, followed by two more, moving quickly down the road.

  That makes six so far, thought Ace. Where are they coming from?

  The Doctor tapped her shoulder. ‘This way,’ he said, and moved off.

  Ace followed the Doctor away from the parked car. Gardens backed onto the street on one side, the other side was lined with warehouses. The Doctor led her towards a set of open gates marked in white letters:

  Ratcliffe and Co Ltd

  Roofing and construction

  ‘The main staging area must be in that warehouse,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Are we going to have a look?’ asked Ace.

  ‘Might as well,’ said the Doctor.

  Ace caught a glimpse of something moving behind one of the gates. ‘Look out.’

  There were no cars to hide behind here. The Doctor snagged her with his umbrella and pulled her back against the wall. There was a wooden door; the Doctor gave a sharp shove at the lock and the door sprang open. A small china sign warned them to beware of the dog.

  ‘In here,’ said the Doctor, hustling Ace through. She quickly closed the door behind them and turned around. They were in a long, narrow, well-kept garden. Washing was hung out on a white line, there was no sign of movement from the house. A large Alsation sat on the lawn and watched them.

  ‘Nice doggie,’ Ace said hopefully.

  The Doctor watched the street through a knot-hole.

  ‘I think that’s the lot,’ said the Doctor after a minute. He opened the door and stepped into the street. The Alsation watched them go with incurious eyes.

  ‘So where are they?’ Gilmore could feel things slipping out of his control.

  ‘I’ve checked the whole building, sir,’ said Mike. ‘They’ve gone.’

  Gilmore didn’t need this, not now, not with the Ministry of Defence breathing down his neck. A square mile of Shoreditch had been evacuated. They wouldn’t be able to keep a lid on events forever, whatever the cover story. And now the Doctor had taken it in his head to vanish, just when Gilmore needed him.

  He told Mike to deploy look-outs. ‘And then take a squad and sweep the area,’ he added. He caught Rachel’s eye; she looked worried. ‘I want the Doctor found and brought back here.’

  There was a tangle of bodies in the yard – four or five men in work clothes were sprawled on the cobbles, their limbs twisted in unnatural positions. The Doctor knelt quickly and lifted a man’s wrist.

  ‘Daleks,’ he said, and for a moment Ace saw a terrible anger in his face. The Doctor let go and the arm fell limply back. Ace heard a faint humming sound. Behind the bodies was a casket set on crude wooden trestles – the sound was coming from there. As the Doctor approached the hum grew in intensity. ‘Be quiet,’ he said to the casket; the sound diminished.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Ace.

&nb
sp; The Doctor placed a hand on the pitted metal and smiled. ‘The Hand of Omega – the most powerful and sophisticated remote stellar manipulation device ever constructed – is in here.’

  Ace glanced at the bodies. ‘Are you sure you want the Daleks to have it?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said the Doctor.

  Ace picked her way through the bodies and touched the casket with her hand. There was a tingling sensation in her fingertips and it was cold.

  ‘You know what to do, don’t you?’ The Doctor was talking to the casket. ‘Yes, of course you do.’

  He talks to it as if it were…

  ‘It’s alive?’

  The Doctor nodded. ‘In a manner of speaking.’ He walked to a big pair of sliding doors. ‘You don’t mess about with the interior of stars unless you have some intelligence.’ There was a normal sized door set into the larger sliding ones. ‘It’s less intelligent than the prototype, though. That one was so smart it went on strike for better conditions.’

  The Doctor opened the door and beckoned Ace in.

  Inside it was dim. She could make out a big storeroom whose shelves were piled with wooden planks, trays of nails and paint pots. Ace saw that it was all covered in a thin layer of dust; it smelt of resin and paint-stripper. Down a short connecting corridor she could see what looked like an office.

  The Doctor checked to see if anyone was about and stepped in. The office contained a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet and something else. Ace immediately recognized it as Dalek technology.

  Somebody sits in it, she thought, and the helmet fits over their head. She started to climb onto the seat. Whoever uses this thing is small – like a kid.

  The Doctor pulled her away. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  The Doctor looked at the chair thing. ‘Some kind of biomechanoid control centre,’ he said, ‘Adapted for a small human.’ He examined one of the connecting fibres. ‘Of course – it’s a battle computer.’

  ‘Why would a human need to sit in it?’

  ‘The Daleks’ major drawback is their dependence on logic and rationality.’ The Doctor grinned. ‘All you have to do is make a couple of irrational moves and the Daleks get confused.’

  ‘You mean they’re too clever by half?’

  The Doctor ignored her. ‘Their solution is to get a humanoid, preferably young and imaginative, plug him into the system and his intuition and creativity are slaved to the battle computer.’