Doctor Who

It was another beautiful, sunny day on the planet Sunlight 349, as Lillian Belle set off on her latest assignment.

If she was honest with herself, the fact that
every
day on Sunlight 349 was ‘another beautiful, sunny day’ was perhaps a little tedious. Mind you, whenever she had such thoughts, she would force herself to remember what life had been like for her parents. They had lived on the edge of starvation for the first thirty years of their lives. In squalor. On a freezing cold, polluted planet whose name no one even wanted to remember.

When Maizie and Alfred Belle had been given the chance to move to Sunlight 349, for them, it had truly felt like dying and going to heaven. Lillian knew this because, although she had been only seven months old at the time, her parents had, over the years, often told her how they had felt … And there had been tears in their eyes as they remembered.

Maizie and Alfred had died just about four years
ago now, within months of each other. They had been a devoted couple, proud to see their only daughter become a journalist. Moving to Sunlight 349 had brought them such incredible happiness. Every morning, they would stand on their tiny balcony and look out over the calm, ordered, pastel-shaded symmetry of the vast city in which they lived, and give thanks for the Dalek Foundation and the Sunlight Worlds.

The Dalek Foundation had given them another chance, another life. And although the ill effects of the squalid conditions their bodies had previously been forced to endure had ultimately meant that their lifespans were relatively short, they had both died contentedly in their early 60s.

So Lillian felt guilty when she found the pastel shades … dull. Cross with herself, when she longed for the temperature to vary by a few degrees now and again.

Sometimes she almost prayed for rain. She had never experienced it. She had seen it on screens, read about it in books. She had even stood in her shower, dialled down from hot to cold, closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it might be like if this were the weather outside – all day!

The skimmer-bus, touching down gently, jolted Lillian out of her daydream. The railroad official sitting opposite gave her a strange look. Lillian could not resist a smirk to herself. She realised she had been sitting with her face up, eyes closed and twitching at the imaginary impacts of those longed-for raindrops.

‘Something the matter?’ asked the official.

‘No,’ she said, still smirking a bit.

Then she felt guilty again. She glanced around at the grim faces of other officials on the bus and remembered there was a serious business in hand. She tried to suppress the fact that because it
was
serious, and perhaps even a little dangerous, she wanted to jump for joy. Everything was so smooth-running and happy on Sunlight 349; and that made a journalist’s job pretty uninteresting.

At last, there was the potential for bad news …

As she stepped out of the bus, she was only dimly aware of the door whirring shut and the soft hiss of the vehicle lifting off and flying away behind her. The concerned mutters of the crowd were also fading for Lillian.

She was transfixed by the disaster site before her.

Two trains had collided. At speed. The impact had torn into both vehicles, ripping them apart in the front sections, then scattering the rear carriages into each other; hammering, crushing, tearing them out of shape. Only the very last compartment of the left-hand train still retained any semblance of its original outline. The rest was just wreckage. A horrible snapshot of metal, plastic and fibres, twisted, bent and pulverised by unrelenting kinetic force.

People had died in this crash, Lillian knew there was no doubt about that. Then she realised, with some shame, that a number of the supposed ‘officials’ she had travelled with were in fact relatives of the survivors or victims. And she had allowed herself a warm grin of satisfaction at the exciting professional prospects such a
disaster offered her. For a moment, her own selfishness made her feel sick. But the exhilaration was still there, and she pressed on, seeking out security guards to get permission to inspect the wreckage.

She already had her tiny palm-holo-camera running. She panned across the entangled trains and pulled back for a wide shot of those looking on, many of them featureless with shock, some starting to cry, gulping in painful air in great heaving sobs. The sound of their grief flooded into her ear implants – perfect, stereo human suffering. She zoomed in on one old lady, for an instant thinking it was her mother. It could so easily have been, a few years back. It made her feel lucky … and guilty yet again. That old guilt about not feeling grateful enough for the Sunlight Worlds.

A security guard touched her on her elbow. It made her jump a little.

‘This way,’ he nodded, and led her down the slope to the track.

As she followed him, she saw emergency crews arriving and going about the morbid business of removing bodies. There was the smell of fire, scorched metal and worse. Electronic cutting gear was starting up; slicing into metal so that any survivors could be rescued. She heard cries of pain, of alarm, of relief. More emergency crews arrived, skimmer lights flashing, sirens wailing and then cutting off suddenly, as if in shock, as the vehicles descended gently beside the broken, twisted tracks.

She was still filming, drifting sideways, not sure if it was the gentle incline leading to the crash site or
her own insatiable curiosity that was pushing her on. She almost collided with a man in emergency service uniform. He was of some kind of supervisory rank, it seemed, from the insignia on his black, plastic-sheened uniform.

‘That’s far enough,’ he said, his voice muffled behind his helmet visor.

‘Lillian Belle,
Sunlight 349 Holo-News
,’ she said, still filming.

‘I know,’ he replied, somewhat emotionlessly. ‘Daniel Ash, site supervisor. You don’t want to go any further. Trust me.’

‘Will you talk on camera?’ she asked, focusing on him, the auto-systems of her camera struggling to fix on his visor or his obscured face behind it.

‘Sure. There’s been a train crash. Not much more to say. We don’t know how many are dead. We’re finding survivors. A lot of injured. All local hospitals are on full alert. Emergency protocols are working well. How am I doing?’

‘Any word on the cause of the crash?’ she asked, panning right onto the closest piece of wreckage. A survivor, in terrible pain, was being helped out through a half-collapsed window. She quickly defocused and returned to Daniel Ash’s troublesome visor. He was looking at her blankly.

‘What do you want me to say?’ he asked. ‘Two trains crashed. One of them shouldn’t have been on this track, I guess. We’re just worrying about who’s left alive so far.’

At that moment, Lillian felt the heat and vibration
of something powerful whooshing overhead. She instinctively tilted her camera view upwards into the sky, and caught the shimmering blue of the underside of an airborne Dalek as it flew over the crashed trains.

She and Daniel Ash simply paused for a moment, watching the Dalek come to a halt, as it suspended itself in mid-air. Then it descended; its bronze, metallic, conical armour glimmering in the constant sun as its mid-section and head-dome rotated. Scanning, watching, assessing …

Everyone on the Sunlight planets was familiar with the Daleks. They were not seen very often, but everyone knew them as the representatives of the great and good Dalek Foundation. The saviours of a generation that had been scarred and displaced by galactic economic and political collapse. There was always admiration for the idea of the Daleks, Lillian had grown up with that, but actually seeing them, encountering them, was always an oddly unsettling experience. No one was in any doubt that they were a force for good. No one.

But …

Squat, undeniably brutal in their outward appearance, these ambassadors of charity and philanthropy always seemed to tease at a sense of dichotomy in human minds. That these creatures who looked so ready for conflict should be the purveyors of such kindness and optimism seemed such a self-evident mismatch. And yet, it was true. The Daleks had saved and enhanced countless billions of lives.

‘Report!’

Lillian and Daniel heard the signature sound of the
Dalek’s voice echo across the wreckage; its staccato, electronic tone seeming peculiarly at home amongst the torn and shredded train remnants.