The Doctor bolted upright, deftly snatching the cup from a startled Sergei, and took a quick sip. “Oh my,” he said, making a face. “I haven’t tasted tea this bad since the war. Nettles, is it?”
“Yes,” replied Cas, who sat perched on the edge of a pool table. “Haven’t had proper tea since India went dark.” An overhead light cast her in ghoulishly stark light. Beside her stood a short, stout man in a dirty lab coat. He wore thick bottle glasses and his hair was an unruly halo of white. “This is Professor Tallis.”
The man leaned forward and clasped The Doctor’s right hand, shaking it like a key. “Terribly, terribly pleased to meet you, Doctor,” babbled the man excitedly. “Whenever there’s a chance to meet another scientific mind, you know!”
Behind the pool table stood a crowd of dishevelled rebels, at the edge of illumination, their faces swathed in darkness.
Sergei had to admit it looked rather ominous, dream like. Or nightmarish.
Sergei yanked a stool out from under the pool table and plunked himself down. “We were worried about you, Doctor. That device–”
“So was I,” agreed the Doctor, rubbing his temples. “Where are we?”
“Basement. Old pool hall,” said Cas, gesturing at the support beams above. “We’ve been here about three weeks. Be moving again soon.”
“Oh?”
Cas shrugged and ran a hand through her jet black hair. “The Daleks have gotten a lot better. Developed infiltrators. Clones. We’ve cut off contact with other cells and operate independently now. Too risky not to.”
“This tea is undrinkable,” said The Doctor, taking another sip. “When did the clones show up?”
Cas furrowed her brow and looked at Tallis. “About six months ago?”
He nodded anxiously. “Fifty-seven… no, fifty-eight days now.”
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “And… how do you know I’m not?”
Tallis adjusted his glasses. “Ah, hmm, well, aspects of humanity are a consequence of method of birth. Not something aliens take into consideration.”
Sergei grinned and pointed at the Doctor’s stomach. “Clones have no belly button.”
“Ah,” said the Doctor. “Lucky I have that in common. Other cells know?”
Cas just shrugged.
Sergei leaned forward. “While you were out, Doc, I took them to your ship. That magical blue box of yours. It’s gone.” He made an explosive motion with his fingers. “Poof!”
The Doctor nearly spat out a mouthful of hot tea. “What?”
“It’s been moved, but not by any means I could discern,” said Professor Tallis. “Trails and footprints went in, several sets. Nothing exited. Just a square of crushed weeds. No sign of machinery, lifts. They have some kind of ‘anti-gravity’ technology’, but it compresses the ground beneath it. There should be traces.”
The Doctor nodded. “Gravitons are real. Quantum carriers. They can be manipulated.”
Tallis lit up at this: “I have so many questions! This ship of yours. A remarkably small footprint. Preposterously so, by my understanding of physics. Two meters at most, a side? And it travels through time and space? The mind boggles! It all seems so… so like a child’s fantasy!”
The Doctor grinned: “Perhaps a child-like mindset is necessary for unintuitive scientific breakthroughs, like temporal transcendentalism.” He slumped back into the chair and shut his eyes. For a moment Sergei thought he’d fallen asleep.
He noticed everyone was holding their breath.
Then the Doctor said, without opening his eyes, “Tell me everything the Daleks have been up to in the last six months.”
------
Red Dalek Gar, second-in-command of Task Force Terra, was enraged. It careened at top speed down polished metal corridors, leaving a trail of ozone and agitated drones in its wake.
It wanted, demanded, answers!
Gar had triumphantly landed the TARDIS in The Forge, thanks to the instructions provided by the Time Strategist. Possession of the last existing TARDIS was a great coup for the Dalek race, and took them one step closer to total victory.
Now the moment had been polluted: the Doc-Tor himself never reached the helipad!
The patrol’s visual feed showed an audacious rebel attack. Worse, they were armed with a new kind of rocket.
A rocket the rebels should not be capable of building!
This alone would have operational impact on city garrison protocols: patrols would have to be conducted in larger numbers, and with air cover whenever possible. Such tactical changes were manageable and expected in an alien combat environment. The larger issue was far more serious: Why had Omega Source failed? The attack should have been predicted and interdicted, easily!
This was the only successful rebel attack in six months, ever since Omega Source went online.
The Red Dalek swept into the vast temporal chamber, the metal blast door clanking shut behind it. The chambers walls were six meters thick, lined with hundreds of cylindrical tachyon trap indents a meter across. Not even neutrinos could get in when the chamber was sealed.
At the centre was a mound of machinery out of which rose a sleek metal framework. Upon it, enmeshed in tubes and straps, was a young human female. Her striking eyes stared blankly into space, and her short, jet black hair was streaked with white. She wore a silver jumpsuit dotted with electrodes wired into the machinery beneath.
Her name was Susan.
She was The Doc-Tor’s granddaughter.
The Time Strategist had abducted her from the future. A future timeline in which the Daleks had been, impossibly, defeated by the hated Doc-Tor. The very thought made the papillae on its mantle quiver in agitation. Yet with her knowledge, the time stream would be set right, and purified of alien contaminants.
It would be Dalek!
Drones tinkered about the base of the machinery stack, equipped with delicate instrument cluster pods, instead of the usual weapon and manipulator pairing. They were all of the science caste, their casing turrets iridescent blue.
Gar pinged the team leader and focused an accusing eyestalk on it: “A REBEL ATTACK HAS SUCCEEDED. EXPLAIN!”
“A FLAW HAS BEEN FOUND,” replied the scientist, surprisingly placid for a Dalek. “OMEGA SOURCE IS COLLUDING WITH REBELS.”
“IMPOSSIBLE! ITS MIND IS UNDER OUR CONTROL.”
“ONLY WHILE IN A CONSCIOUS STATE,” said the scientist. It spun round to the machinery pile and activated a holographic display. Jagged, glowing turquoise lines flowed through the air. “SPIKES IN PSYCHIC ACTIVITY DURING REM SLEEP HAVE BEEN DETECTED.”
“CONSEQUENCE?”
“ECHOES IN DALEK REVITALIZATION CYCLES, RESULTING IN SUBSTRATE CONTAMINATION.”
“CLARIFY!”
“MULTIPLE CASES OF NEURAL DEGENERATION. IT IS REWIRING DALEK MINDS INTO EXTENSIONS OF ITS OWN.”
The Red Dalek shook so furiously it thought it might explode; its undulating siphons involuntarily jetted waste material into its biotank. The fluid was quickly whisked away by the sanitation drains. “UNACCEPTABLE!” it blared, on the brink of hysteria. If Mission Supreme learned of this, they’d all be discarded! Even their fission-spawn would be sterilized!
“WE HAVE INITIATED STIMULANT INJECTIONS. PSYCHIC EMISSIONS HAVE CEASED. IT IS UNDER CONTROL.”
Gar considered a moment. No! That was nowhere near sufficient! A typically plodding and myopic response from the Science Division. They would have to be recycled. “QUARANTINE FROM PATH-WEB IMMEDIATELY! BEGIN FULL BIOCHEMICAL CONVERSION. ERADICATE IMPURITY AND ASSIMILATE.”
“THE TIME STRATEGIST HAS ORDERED IT BE KEPT AS INTELLIGENCE ASSET.”
“ORDER COUNTERMANDED!” The Strategist’s unorthodox methods could never be allowed to jeopardize Terra Command. Mission Supreme would be apoplectic! To have diseased Time Lord thought patterns running amok was a grotesque abrogation of hygiene! It recoiled in disgust, and scheduled a hundred rels of hate-purity hymns for end-of-rotation. “REVITALIZATION INFECTION RISK OVERRIDES! ESCALATE PURIFICATION! AUTHORITY RED BIPRIME. OBEY! OBEY!”
“AT ONCE!”
As the scientist flitted back to the floundering Omega Source, the Red Dalek settled back in its nutrient tank and sucked on a calming sedative feed. Whatever benefit this diminutive alien had provided in predictive intelligence was now clearly outweighed by its threat to the overall mission.
The proper path was pure and self-evident; no post-mission SKARCOM review could find fault.
Now Gar just had to survive telling Mission Supreme.
------
The Doctor leaned over a torn and faded map of the earth. It was still attached to a tube from which it once hung above a black board, labelled ‘Property of Coal Hill School’. The Doctor smiled wanly: how poetic.
Cas planted a slender finger with a ragged nail tip on Bedfordshire. The Doctor noted the bitten nails: anxiety had a nasty habit of seeping out around the seams. “This is their main headquarters for earth operations,” said Cas. “Over the last three months, they’ve opened up new mines acround the world. Five that we know of, they’re marked in red. What they’re mining for we’re not sure, except in Kazakhstan.”
“Uranium ore?”
Cas nodded. “In vast quantities. Cross-shipped to the other sites, to fuel fission power stacks they’re building like mad. Dirty as hell, too. Daleks don’t see much use for shielding.”
“Making themselves at home,” mused the Doctor quietly. “They’ll set off neutron bombs in the upper atmosphere when they get really serious about it.”
“On top of overwork and starvation, the poor souls working the mines have to worry about radiation poisoning now. Eight stacks in Bedfordshire at last count, three at each of the other mines, as of three months ago. Daleks move fast.”
“Where is Soviet Union?” interjected Sergei, waving a hand at the North Asian land mass. “They are all separate!”
“Long story,” said The Doctor, moving Sergei’s hand aside. “For another time. Cas, how’d you find out about the other sites?”
“Carrier pigeons, mostly. Some radio, but that’s pretty risky. They can triangulate signals. Don’t pay any attention to animals, though. We use dogs locally.”
The Doctor straightened up and rubbed his chin. “Pretty safe bet all these changes, strategy, clones, new sites, all of it, are thanks to the Time Strategist. Arrived six, maybe seven, months ago. He’s hijacked the entire invasion! But why?”
“Time Strategist?” asked Tallis, intrigued.
“A Dalek from the future, after they’d discovered the secret to time travel. Nicked some of the finer points from my lot. It’s installed BLENs, Blinovitch Limitation Effect Negators, allowing it to return to this point in time repeatedly. Typically you can’t, it collapses into paradox.”
Cas smiled wickedly. “So it’s come back to prevent us from defeating them? Then we are victorious in the end!”
It was the Doctor’s turn to shrug. “The Strategist’s not your ordinary, hysterically homicidal Dalek. It’s unorthodox. Canny. Wheels within wheels. It has a built-in emergency temporal shift generator, but it takes a long time to respool. So stuck here for now. It’ll want a future sensitive to predict probabilities, resistance moves. As well as mine.” He spun his fingers around in the air, lost his train of thought, then stared down at the map again. The BLENs would create a current in the time vortex, slowly drawing flotsam and lost travellers to this place… and into the not-so-delicate embrace of the Daleks.
All to power Project Infinity, whatever that was.
“But they’ve captured your time machine,” noted Sergei. “Took key.”
The Doctor nodded, not looking up. “True, and they can flit about, but the temporal lock’s on. That requires an encrypted password.” He ran a finger across the map, connecting the Dalek mining sites in the Northern Hemisphere. “There aren’t five sites. There are nine. All equidistant, all the same line of latitude. Same for the Southern Hemisphere.”
“But some of those would be in the ocean!” protested Tallis, squeezing in between The Doctor and Sergei. “Drilling in the middle of the ocean, logistically, why, it would be madness!”
“Child’s play… for them. Even in this time period.”
“Are locations significant?” asked Sergei.
“Dunno,” said the Doctor. “But it’d allow them to generate an implosion from multiple points simultaneously.” He made a quizzical face. “Why would they ever want to do that? I wonder…” He swept his finger back to Bedfordshire and gave it a sharp tap. “This spot is the key. Anything else that makes Bedfordshire unique?”
“It was their first installation,” speculated Tallis, rubbing his recessive chin with stubby fingers. “And, and, there are several radio transmission towers. Very powerful signal! They’ve heavily invested in the site.”
Cas shrugged. “They set up metal scaffolding, size of a football field, three months ago, then covered it with tarpaulin. Nobody that’s gone inside has ever come out, other than Daleks.”
“Photos?"
“We’ve tried. Spoiled by radiation.”
The Doctor nodded and chewed on the index finger joint of his right hand. He paced back and forth, then plopped himself down onto the tattered chair.
There was the sharp sound of footsteps on grit, descending concrete stairs from the floor above. Out of murky darkness stepped Fiona, her poncho streaked with black slime. She held a bloody plastic bag in one hand.
Cas looked at her with a mixture of relief and annoyance. “Fiona! Where on earth have you been, gyal?”
“I have some… pagan chum for the professor,” she said flatly, raising up the plastic bag. A single unblinking eye ringed by sucker pods could be seen faintly through white plastic.
“Oh, charming. Dalek giblets,” chortled The Doctor. “Taste rather like octopus, crossed with crab, if that’s your jam.”
Sergei and Cas winced. Fiona gave him a blank look and handed the bag Professor Tallis.
Tallis’s chubby cheeks flushed; his smile revealing crooked teeth: “Splendid, my dear! I’ll get this into the lab straight away! This, now this, ladies and gentlemen, is the most intact sample we’ve had yet! Erm, fascinating, quite. Fiona! Would you help me set up the equipment? This way…”
The Doctor watched Tallis totter away, like a child with a freshly captured frog. Fiona followed close behind. The Doctor noted that she seemed to have lost her usual light step.
The Doctor paused, waited until he heard a door close behind them, then leapt to his feet, thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and grinned. “We have all the questions, time for answers! How fast can we get to Bedfordshire?”
