Captured by the Daleks, Sergei and The Doctor seem doomed, and it's only chapter three.
Sergei’s face blanched as a chill shuddered through his stocky frame. Just who was he travelling with? Who was this Doctor?
Was he only seeing the surface of a deep ocean?
“Oh!” exclaimed Sergei’s new friend, disconcertingly delighted. “Begin what? I’m partial to Go, myself, how about you?” He thrust his hands down deep coat pockets and stalked around the Red Dalek, examining it. The Daleks' turret swivelled to follow him. “First wave casing, solar energy plates, beamed power reception disk… typical. Same for robomen. The clones, Dortmun, that’s new. Time Strategist’s work, yeah? Very slick. Love to meet him. But you! You seem to be getting the short end of the stick. Where’s your upgrade, eh, Red? Or is the Time Strategist holding out on you?”
“IN TIME. SEIZE HIM!”
Burly robomen shoved Sergei aside and brusquely seized the Doctor’s arms. The Red Dalek extended its manipulator arm; the inside of the sucker cup bubbled, thick black tendrils extending outward as the rim of the sucker contracted. It pushed under the Doctor’s jacket, tendrils digging into an interior pocket. It withdrew a gold key.
The Doctor seemed nonplussed. “Won’t do you any good, the TARDIS is biometric locked.”
Sergei felt a pang. That machine was his only way back home. If the Daleks took it…
“SCAN HIM,” ordered the Red Dalek. Another Dalek glided forward; the panel between its weapon whisk and the manipulator arm flipped up. Out of the recess extended two thin metal tentacles. A disk snapped open at the tip of one, which hovered around the Doctor’s head; the other tip extended a needle. It darted forward, lightning quick, and jabbed the Doctor in the neck.
“Ow!” exclaimed the Doctor, slapping a hand on his neck. He rubbed the fresh welt fiercely. “Don’t you know how many conventions there are against sampling DNA without consent?”
“DALEKS DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO CONVENTIONS OF INFERIOR SPECIES. WE ARE THE SUPREME LIFE FORM!”
“You keep saying that,” muttered the Doctor. “Makes you sound very insecure, you know.”
“VERBAL SPARRING IS IRRELEVANT. WE PROVE SUPREMACY THROUGH ACTION. YOU SHALL HELP US!”
“Not likely.” Doctor looked over his shoulder at Sergei. “They’re very smug, aren’t they?”
Sergei grunted in agreement. Fascists, even metal ones, were always arrogant. Strutting and preening like golden pheasants was in their nature.
“COMPLIANCE IS IRRELEVANT. OMEGA SOURCE HAS PREDICTED YOUR EVERY ACTION. COUNTERMEASURES HAVE BEEN PREPARED,” declared the Red Dalek smugly. “FIT THE NEURAL INHIBITOR.”
A roboman jerked forward, a sleek metal collar with electronics on the interior rim grasped in his gnarled hands. He snapped it tight around the Doctor’s neck, then placed two electrode patches on the Doctor’s temples. “The… inhibitor… is… in… place,” slurred the robot zombie, stepping back.
Red glided closer to the Doctor, stopping mere inches from his face. “THE INHIBITOR WILL SUPPRESS YOUR HIGHER BRAIN FUNCTIONING, NEGATING YOUR HIGH ADAPTIVE INTELLIGENCE.” The Red Dalek raised up the TARDIS key. “AN EYE OF HARMONY IS ESSENTIAL FOR PROJECT INFINITY. YOU HAVE PROVIDED US THE KEY TO VICTORY!”
“Grandiose. Didn’t I say they were grandiose?” remarked the Doctor to Sergei. “I know nothing of their plan, yet I know everything of their plan.”
The Red Dalek shook with uncontainable annoyance. “ACTIVATE THE INHIBITOR!” it shrieked.
Sergei tensed. Should he intervene? The Doctor was his lifeline! Without him, Sergei would be forever stranded in the ruins of the future. His eyes flitted across the arrayed Daleks and grim robomen, submachine guns levelled. No, he thought, it would be suicide. He had to wait for a better opportunity. Sooner or later, it would come. Of that he was certain.
A roboman turned a dial on a black, glistening hand-held control unit. The Doctor stiffened, every muscle tightening. Then he slumped, deflated; his face muscles went slack and his eyes grew unfocused.
“No!” Sergei reached out and shook the Doctor’s shoulder. “Tovarish! Are you alright? Tovarish!”
The Doctor slowly turned to Sergei, drool falling from a drooping lip, and let out a soft, meaningless moan.
“Fashistskie zveri!” swore Sergei, rounding on the Daleks. “Chto za huynya! Call yourselves superior, but you must neuter your foe! You’re afraid!”
The entrance guard twitched to life and struck Sergei between the shoulder blades with the butt of his submachine gun. Sharp pain ran through Sergei’s frame and he fell involunarily to one knee. He swore under his breath: these pitiless tin pots pay.
Red turned to its lieutenants: “PATROL FIVE: TAKE PRISONERS TO THE HELIPAD FOR PROCESSING. I SHALL RETRIEVE THE TARDIS WITH TASK FORCE OMEGA.”
“I OBEY!” grated a silver Dalek.
The Red Dalek swung its eye stalk back to the Doctor and blared, “YOU CANNOT STOP PROJECT INFINITY NOW!”
A third Dalek looked back at the humans seated at the work benches. “THESE CLONES HAVE SERVED THEIR PURPOSE. SHALL WE EXTERMINATE?”
“NO,” commanded Red. “SOME ESCAPED THE ARMOURY TRAP. THEY MAY STILL BE USEFUL. RE-ACTIVATE IN INFILTRATION MODE.”
“WE OBEY!”
The dishevelled entry guard swung open the steel door, and the Red Dalek glided out. As it neared the stairs, its lower casing emitted a high pitched whine. Dust and debris jetted out from beneath as it rose on an invisible cushion of wobbling, shimmering air.
Sergei watched, fascinated, as three more Daleks and six robomen followed it up the stairs.
The remaining Dalek patrol commander slid forward and addressed its subordinates. “ASSUME DEFENSIVE FORMATION AROUND THE DOCTOR. HE MUST NOT BE HARMED. MOVE!”
••••
Sergei trudged down the empty street, repeatedly shoved by a grim roboman holding a curled whip. At least he wasn’t using that, thought Sergei with chagrin. Ahead, three Daleks formed a triangle around three robomen, who ringed the Doctor. The last two robomen strode fifty paces ahead.
Sergei studied the robot zombie men. They were armed with human made weapons, not futuristic ray guns. And why not, thought Sergei: humans had thousands of years of experience designing weapons expressly for this purpose: to kill their fellow man. Typically in service of an exploitative and oppressive aristocracy.
Why equip robomen with anything that might harm a Dalek?
What could destroy these tin pots? Sergei’s mind flung back to his experiences in the Red Air Force, and even earlier to the Komsomol. A focused, tightly channelled explosion would be needed to puncture the Dalek’s outer casing. They were very small targets for anti-tank guns… an anti-tank mine on the hull might do it, but then you’d have to get awfully close. Sagger missiles, perhaps? Sergei snorted: he’d sooner hear a crayfish whistle on the mountain!
From what the Doctor had said, humanity was ravaged by meteor strikes and disease prior to the Daleks landing. The Red Army would have been in disarray, unable to offer coordinated resistance. Presumably the tin pots controlled the skies. They could target anything that moved from orbit.
Sergei ground his teeth.
Humanity hadn’t stood a chance.
Just when mankind was evolving past the trap of self-destructive, exploitative systems, too!
He wondered what state his beloved Soviet Union was in now, if anything of the grand social experiment remained, or if all hope had been extinguished. Had the reconstruction of Leningrad been in vain? Had they risen from the ashes of war only to be cast back down into ruin?
What more proof could you ask for that God did not exist?
At least his daughter would have grown old and died in peace, long before this catastrophe.
------
Cas crawled over the gritty concrete floor towards Ben and Craddock, who were crouched by a ragged window frame looking over the street. A detonator lay on the floor between them. “Did you say three?” she whispered. “Elliott reported seven!”
Ben flashed three fingers at her, and mouthed, “Five hundred yards.”
“Bloody Hell. I’m not giving word until I know where the others are,” hissed Cas, annoyed. The four missing Daleks could be circling behind them at this very moment, laying a trap that would get everyone under her command killed.
She couldn’t let that happen. Not after the disaster at the armoury.
Light footsteps sounded in the inner stairwell. Too light and swift for a roboman, but duplicates… Fiona appeared in the doorway, her red hair was tied back and partially concealed by a black headscarf; she wore a vinyl poncho over military fatigues and bright red sneakers. Cas relaxed and smiled at the young woman. Just seventeen, Fiona was the best scout they had. Cas smile faded as she reminded herself: scouts didn’t last long.
Fiona slipped down beside the group and whispered,“Three Mosleys and four stiffs coming this way. Two prisoners. Four pots went in the other direction, with six stiffs, red pot leading.”
“How far?”
“Maybe a kilo along the frog and toad, by now,” mused Fiona. “Going at a steady clip, down the centre. No barricades or drone cover.”
Cas considered. No counter-ambush, then. Too far away to interfere, provided her team acted quickly.
“You better be sure about this,” snarled Craddock, cradling a gleaming anti-tank rocket launcher. There were still bits of dried grease on it. “We’ll be wasting valuable ordnance.”
It was a fair point, thought Cas, eyes on the precious launcher.
It was only a few days ago they’d mounted a raid into the St. James armoury. Captain Pendergast had gotten a hot tip: weapons and explosives were still there, in a vault, and he’d been given the combination. It all seemed too good to be true. Pendergast was desperate for good news: his son had died of pneumonia in the spring.
There had been explosives all right—a booby-trap which killed Pendergast and a half-dozen other good people.
It’d been chaos after that: everyone made for the exits as robomen swarmed the building—even as it was being consumed in flames. The Daleks established a cordon outside, gunning down survivors. They didn’t care the robomen were being sent to their deaths: they could recover helmets from the rubble after and reuse them.
Her team had popped smoke bombs and fled underground, into the tunnels and adjoining buildings. The Daleks' beamed power couldn’t reach them in the tunnels, but they knew the sewers were infested with ravenous Slyther ‘pets’, as well as alligators and poisonous snakes. Dalek tacticians evaluated underground tunnels as impassable. Cas smirked: they were hazardous, to be sure, but not every tunnel linked to the sewers.
That’s when they’d had a stroke of luck: graffiti scrawled on a tunnel wall, in almost indecipherable handwriting, signed by a ‘Sergeant Balfour’. The good sergeant had cottoned on to armouries being invasion targets early on, and as civilization collapsed, squirrelled away a cache of Phoenix launcher prototypes in a nearby basement for safe keeping.
Only a human, or a doctor, could understand Balfour’s chalk note instructions.
A devastating defeat had turned into a costly coup.
God only knows what happened to the sergeant. Likely long dead now, mused Cas. And yet, his small act of prescience could help change history.
“I’m sure,” she said emphatically, as much to herself as to the others.
“A vision?” asked Fiona, wide eyed. “Did you have another?”
Cas nodded, and flushed. The way Fiona looked to Cas for answers, the faith she had, was a little unsettling. But she couldn’t let Fiona know that.
She couldn’t let anyone in her command know the gnawing doubt she felt inside, slowly eating her soul away.
“A vision,” scoffed Craddock. “Why’s this one so important then, eh? Who is he?”
“It was vision, not a mission briefing,” snapped Fiona, leaping to Cas’ defense. “The universe acts in mysterious ways!”
“It’s okay, Fiona. Craddock… that man out there, he could change everything. Bring about the end of the entire invasion.”
Craddock paused for a moment, then leaned back and gaped at her, incredulous. “Bollocks. You’re right delusional. Gone right round the bend, you have.”
Ben stuck a hand with three fingers between them, and hissed, “Mosley’s. Two hundred and closing.”
Craddock leaned down close to Cas’s face and hissed, “You’re going to get us all killed, and for what? Delusions! We should use the launchers to attack the helipad!”
Cas swiped a finger across her throat, the signal for silence. Dalek detectors could pick their whispering at a hundred feet.
She had no time to humour Craddock. The man was a pain in the neck, but also her best heavy weapons specialist. A former chemist, he was also a wizard with improvised explosives, and he had a clever, nasty way with booby-traps. Like the one set in the street below. On top of that, he was married to Cas’ older sister, Kate. He was good to their kids, and for that, as much as anything, she indulged his insubordination.
But time, and her patience, had run out.
She made a two finger double jab at Ben: the go signal. He nodded, and repeated the movement, his arm raised above the window sill, for their comrades across the street.
The mission was on.
“Fire!” shouted Cas, and all Hell broke loose.
