I think I made a mistake posting this in such large chunks. Everything these days is about bit sized morsels, so I'm breaking this down into smaller bits, like the old Target adaptations I read when I was little. Quick: back to the past!
Sergei trudged with Craddock alongside the M1 in a heavy downpour. Sergei had heard England got a lot of rain, but this was ridiculous. A Phoenix launcher was slung on his back; he pulled the strap taut over his rain poncho. It wasn’t doing much good, he thought sourly, he was soaked to the bones. It reminded him of boot camp in Siberia.
But it would make Dalek surveillance more difficult.
He’d insisted on Craddock giving him a Phoenix, along with a sack of rockets. Six in total. Sergei grinned in anticipation: he was going to deliver destruction to the fascist pepper pots.
And he was an excellent shot, having won multiple medals for marksmanship, including the Voroshilov Marksman Badge.
He’d made a deliberate effort to befriend Craddock, the weapons specialist. They exchanged tales of military life, training, and combat misadventures. He had to admit the man knew his stuff, despite no formal military training: IEDs, pipe bombs, improvised mortar Barracks Busters, Molotov Cocktails, and all manner of insidious booby-traps. The man had a truly diabolical mind, and had dedicated it for over a decade to disabling and killing Daleks.
“We once tried luring a triad into a cul de sac,” said Craddock. “We’d laid down power cables, then flooded it. Fried the stiffs. But the Morleys? Turns out their base is insulated. Ha! That was a right mess of a day. Live and die, as the saying goes. Poor Brand and Tilly… You have to hit the Daleks directly with power cables, you see. Ordinary tasers aren’t enough. If you enhance it, tie it to a generator, with a bit of luck you can fry it, or at very least disable the pepper pots long enough to plant a sticky bomb on the ringed grating. That’s their most vulnerable spot.”
“Perhaps there are other ways electricity can be used against them,” mused Sergei.
Craddock laughed. “I like the cut of your jib! Prof Tallis and I came up with a new EMP bomb; generates a powerful electromagnetic field. Won’t affect the Dalek mutant, but it’ll scramble their on-board battlecomputers, slow them down, ruin their aim, that sort of thing. Give us an edge.” Craddock grinned. “If it works; this’ll be our first chance to test it!”
Sergei nodded. This was exactly the sort of information he was interested in.
It did come at a cost: Craddock was an incessant complainer. He complained about everything: the food, the weather, the equipment, the wretched nettle tea, the Daleks, the Robomen, the ongoing, seemingly endless loss of loved ones, always being on the run.
“And that’s another thing,” groused Craddock. “There’s not been any good foot powder in ages. My feet itch like I’ve got fire ants in my bloody boots. Driving me round the bend, it is.”
“Try petroleum jelly, grease feet up. Old Soviet trick,” Sergei said, rubbing his hands together and giving Craddock a toothy grin. “Red Air Force has lot of marching.”
“Had,” corrected Craddock. “Hasn’t been any Soviet Union in over almost two hundred years, mate.”
“Ponyatno. So. What happened?”
Craddock shrugged. “Voted itself out of existence? History was never my area of study. Chemistry’s my thing. Studied at the Imperial College London, you know. Quite prestigious for a lower class boy.”
Sergei grunted. Class struggle was universal. “Yet London does not look much changed. Ruined, yes, but where are the futuristic towers? The rocket cars? The tinfoil?”
“London was a heritage site. They built Space City further up the Thames. Towers a kilometer tall. We even had a Space Elevator in Colchester!”
Sergei looked at Craddock quizzically. “I not see any towers…”
Craddock let out a bitter laugh. “You wouldn’t. Space City’s a cluster of craters. Meteor bombardment. And those modern composite metal vehicles? The ‘tinfoil’? First things the Dalek reclamation teams harvested. Never had flying cars, though. Insurance issues. Bloody bureaucrats.”
Now that was a sentiment Sergei could get behind.
Craddock grew pensive. “Still find it hard to accept you and that Doctor bloke are time travelers. But Cas believes in you and… Anyway. You’re all right.”
“Da. You too,” said Sergei, oddly pleased. “You too. We shall reclaim the power of the people, together!” And he gave Craddock a hearty slap on the back.
They continued on in silence. They’d been marching now for almost two days and Sergei had run out of words.
He peered ahead through the driving rain, and could just make out Ben, Cas and The Doctor. Three others trailed Sergei and Craddock, and rounded out the infiltration team: Alwin, Sanjay and Rueben. They were tough, seasoned fighters of few words.
Fiona was off somewhere scouting.
Missions to Bedfordshire usually took several large dogs, but Fiona insisted they’d be more useful in London. It was a fair point, and in the end Cas had agreed: the rebels needed every edge they could get in the city!
Sergei considered the resistance leader. She was a good commander: smart, adaptable, practical. Not hidebound by centralized command structures, hated bureaucracy, as Sergei’s superiors had once been. From what Craddock had said, she’d risen up thanks to ability, hard won experience, and attrition.
People obeyed her orders because she was their best chance of success.
Sergei would do the same.
The whole, after all, was greater than the sum of its parts.
He looked over at the abandoned highway, strewn with abandoned vehicles wreathed in weeds and bushes. Small trees had sprouted up through the gravel at the road’s edge.
Nature wasn’t wasting any time swallowing up human civilization.
Before long, it would be as if humanity had never existed, Sergei thought with chagrin.
As they reached a crest in the road, something in the sky to the east caught his eye. Heavily obscured by rain was a spindly spacecraft, an asymmetrical silver snowflake with bulbous joints. About a kilometer to the east. The air beneath it shimmered and glowed as spindle tips flared white. As it ascended, its body distorted and flickered. The air above somehow curved, warping down and rippling through the vessel, which vanished… only to reappear once more on the hilltop. The entire sequence then repeated.
The spectacle had brought the entire squad to a halt, as any good car accident would.
Sergei trotted up beside The Doctor. “Tovarish! What is it?”
The Doctor watched the sequence for a long moment, raindrops splashing against his face and dribbling from his chin. “Flotsam. Damaged time ship, drawn in by the vortex current they’re generating. But the Daleks haven’t calibrated their BLENs properly. Sloppy work. They’re operating beyond their technological comfort zone and making a right mess of it. Nearly derailed our landing.”
“It’s not any of the Dalek saucer types I recognize,” observed Cas, squinting.
“Not from this reality,” muttered The Doctor. “Rather nasty insectoid species. Not even from this reality. Which makes me wonder just which reality this actually is.”
They all watched the sequence repeat again in silence.
Then Cas broke the spell: “Well. Nothing we can do about it. Keep moving. We need to take advantage of this rain cover.”
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