Doctor Who (3 page)

As the Doctor began to approach the stone for a closer look, he suddenly felt he was being looked at. Twitching a look to the right, he saw one of the mourners.

It was an old lady. She had clearly paused to turn and look at him.

Their eyes met. To the Doctor, it felt like she was waiting for something. A greeting? Recognition? Something … But for the Doctor, there was nothing. He did not know her.

Perhaps she sensed this, it wasn’t clear, but after a few seconds, she turned her head away and walked off, following the other mourners at a steady pace, making no attempt to catch up.

Shrugging, the Doctor turned his attention back to the embedded mementoes in glass. He found himself being drawn to what looked like a tiny spaceship. He
pushed his face close to the transparent casing around its miniature hull.

‘Hmmm,’ he mused. ‘Anyone at home?’

Crouching, he could see some lettering on the underside of the ship.

‘Made in Carthedia,’ he read aloud. ‘You’re a toy, aren’t you?’ The Doctor grinned his broad grin and ruffled his hair. He chuckled to himself. He knew the difference between a memory and the faint tingle he felt when something from his future was reaching back to him. He knew that sometimes the complexities of time travel meant he had to be patient.

‘Something for another day,’ he muttered to himself. ‘But I shall remember you, little spaceship. I shall remember you.’ And he pointed at it, chuckling again, moving closer and closer to the glass. So close now that the little ship started to blur and the microscopic flaws in the transparent ‘amber’ around it looked like the tracks of eternity, reaching out to tantalise the Doctor.

He snapped back up to his full height, swaying, inelegant, looking up at the giant monument. One day, this would mean something to him, he felt. One day …

But not today.

As the Doctor turned and left the graveside, striding off back to the TARDIS, he was being observed.

Deep within a vast, metallic complex, surging with the power of a terrifying, almost unimaginably superior technology, there seethed the hatred and determination of a single, powerful intellect. Contained within the bonded polycarbide armour of a Dalek, this creature
was the result of generations of genetic manipulation. Manipulation with but one aim: to furnish the Dalek race with a controlling force that could see into the frenzied chaos of the Time Vortex and read its unfathomable patterns.

This was the Dalek Time Controller.

The upper grating sections of its casing, just below its dome, were diagonally circled by revolving rings, like the whirling debris fields around a gas giant, appearing solid from a distance, but close up … Close up, they burned with the energy of the Vortex that unfolded in the open gateway in front of this ultimate form of Dalek life.

Its eyestalk twitched, agitatedly, as it followed the image superimposed in the centre of the Vortex. The Doctor was still moving towards his TARDIS on the planet Gethria.

Inside its casing, the mutant body of the Dalek Time Controller quivered with something very like anticipation and delight. Behind it, not daring to approach the open gateway into eternity, a squad of high-ranking Daleks eased a little closer to their soothsayer. They too had spotted the Doctor.

He was now entering the TARDIS. The door closed behind him. A few moments later, the TARDIS groaned the hoarse groan of its temporal engines and was gone.

In a voice infused with an almost exultant, dark determination, more guttural and yet more delicate than any other Dalek’s voice, the Time Controller finally spoke.

‘It is beginning …’

*

At another, precise point in the infinity of space and time, a young girl was terrified – and it was becoming more and more difficult for her to remember a time when she had not been. She sat, hunched, hugging herself as tight as she could, shivering in spasms of cold and fear so relentless and all-consuming that it felt to her as if the cold and the fear were becoming the same thing.

She squeezed her eyes tight shut again. But all she found in her mind were terrible memories she could almost not bear to think about. She remembered the shouting, running, an explosion … Sheer terror.

There had been a man. He was kind, she had thought. He had rescued her … Her and her little brother.

Her little brother!

She remembered him calling out to her. ‘We’ll come back for you! We’ll come back for you! I promise!’

The thoughts were too painful and she opened her eyes again. The memories faded into the grimy, grey-silver walls of her boxed, featureless cell. She stared at the angles of the walls, followed the lines where they met the low ceiling, looked down to where they met the hard, metallic floor. Not for the first time, she felt the rising panic within her that this would be all she would see for the rest of her life. Seized by the fear of this unending blankness, she found herself cherishing the dim hope that a Dalek might come again to feed her. Just one Dalek with some food. Just something to break through the nothingness.

But there was nothing. Just the low, muffled heartbeat of the Dalek ship’s power and the vibration of its engines.

Time flowed past, but she had no way of knowing how fast or slow. Was this just a minute? Or days? Was she a grown-up now? Had she spent her whole life here?

One of the walls suddenly slid to one side, revealing a Dalek behind it. Her heart leapt with anticipation. It was carrying a small tray in its sucker arm. Extending the sucker downwards, it dropped the tray onto the floor. A bowl of something disgusting-looking jumped violently on impact, spilling some of its grey, foul-smelling contents.

In that moment, she caught sight of her distorted reflection in the burnished bronze of the Dalek’s armour. The image was dull and warped, but she could see … she was still a little girl. She still had a lifetime of captivity ahead of her.

She started to sob, uncontrollably. Perhaps, she hoped, she would cry her life out and fade away from this horrible ordeal right now. She could almost feel the relief of it all being over.

‘Eat!’ shrieked the piercing electronic voice of the Dalek. ‘Eat!’

It was like a hard slap to her face. The tears dried up and she looked into the bowl. How could she eat
that
? And then she remembered …

Her favourite thing in the whole wide world …

Jelly blobs. Sweet, sweet jelly blobs. So bad for her teeth. But so utterly delicious. If she pretended this food was jelly blobs, she could eat it and the Dalek would stop shrieking.

She reached into the bowl and fished out the imaginary jelly blobs, believing with every bitter,
gritty, slimy mouthful that their sweetness was filling her mouth. And, for a moment, she could see how she might live through all this. If she could always find this one place in her mind, this one memory of her favourite thing, then she could see how she could carry on living.

‘Eat! Faster!’ shrieked the Dalek.

Having only recently set the TARDIS to dematerialise from the surface of Gethria, the Doctor was still pondering the mystery of his visit to the lonely funeral on that barren world. He was swinging in a hammock beneath the glass platform upon which the console sat. More and more these days, he found himself gently swinging here, mulling over things as the TARDIS drifted through the Vortex. Was he just becoming a brooding old Doctor in his old age? Or was he finally getting a real sense of perspective?

Launching himself out of the hammock and landing on the pockmarked coral of the control room’s lower floor, he tapped his impressive chin … pondering unabated.

So, he was thinking, the cube was definitely from the future, unless he’d somehow mysteriously forgotten something … which was always possible. But how could that’ve happened?

‘Hmmm,’ he found himself saying aloud.

He pondered further … Why was the cube so small? Made in a hurry? Possibly, yes. But still … Aha! Yes, the contents. The contents! Nothing too complicated. It was merely filled with an impression of something. And which species was mostly capable of mere telepathic impressions rather than complex telepathic messages? Humans! Of course!

He reached his conclusion … At some point in the future, he was going to make this simplified telepathic cube for a human to use.

Of course! Clever Doctor.

But then, he realised, he still had no idea why he was going to do this.

‘That’s the future for you,’ he concluded, dashing up the steps to his beloved console. He gazed at the controls in joyous anticipation. Even when nothing made sense and the future was a frustrating fog, the sheer beauty and ingenuity of the TARDIS always made him feel happy to be alive. Perhaps he would just head off somewhere nice and quiet to savour that thought – keep out of trouble.

Suddenly, however, the TARDIS appeared to have other ideas. The console scanner screen was flashing with fragmented images fighting with signal interference. There was the piercing sound of hissing static and the buzzing, electronic contortions of frequency modulation. Someone was trying to get in touch.

Rapidly flicking controls and tapping the side of the screen, the Doctor attempted to clarify the signal – but then it suddenly shut off. For a moment, he pouted in
defeat. The TARDIS was always passing through so many different possible destinations, it was almost inevitable that it would fly past one discrete transmission without any hope of finding it again … even if he managed to throw everything into reverse.

Nevertheless, he tried it. The control room shuddered violently, and smoke started seeping from the cracks in the console as the Doctor rapidly pulled levers and twisted dials. The engines groaned and creaked. Everything was juddering as if he had performed a handbrake turn in a vehicle far too frail to survive it.

Continuing with his rapid, emergency adjustments, the Doctor craned his neck to see if anything of the transmission had returned to the scanner … And there it was!

Or rather, there
the man
was. A desperate face, pleading, close up into the transmitter’s lens; his mouth distorting with silent anguish.

‘Sound, sound, sound!’ burbled the Doctor. ‘Got to get some sound on that picture!’

Satisfied that the TARDIS had now halted and was drifting back in time and space to the point where the signal had originated, the Doctor jabbed at some buttons. After each jab, he waited a second or two for a result. Nothing. Nothing. And more nothing. He glanced back at the face on the screen. The man was middle-aged and looked extremely upset. Like this was perhaps the worst moment of his life. The Doctor caught sight of a woman behind him. She was frantically busy operating controls.

‘Spaceship controls!’ the Doctor declared aloud. In
that instant, he knew these were people in trouble in a spaceship, calling desperately for help.

Flipping open the panel on which his recently pushed buttons were situated, the Doctor saw, with a growl of frustration, that some of the wiring had become disconnected. Bits of the TARDIS were always going well past their sell-by date. It was a nightmare trying to keep up with it. Instantly, he grabbed the wires and shoved them into the connectors beneath them. There was a fizz and a pop and a blinding light … and suddenly there was sound from the transmission.

‘I repeat!’ the terrified voice of the man was saying. ‘This is Terrin Blakely. Our coordinates are embedded in this transmission! We need help, urgently! We are under attack! We— It’s no good, Alyst!’

Terrin turned his back to the lens. The Doctor moved closer to the screen, his hands dancing across more controls. He was setting about reading the embedded coordinates. Something terrible was happening aboard this Terrin chap’s spaceship, but the Doctor couldn’t precisely see what – and then the transmission broke off in a fierce crackle of static. The screen was dead.

‘Don’t worry, Terrin,’ said the Doctor, isolating the coordinates in the transmission stream. ‘I’ll be there before you know it. Before you even sent the signal, if I get this right!’

And, triumphantly, the Doctor set the TARDIS in motion again. He had set a clear course right back to what he hoped were a few moments before Terrin made the call.

*

Deep within its gigantic command ship, the Dalek Time Controller twitched its appendages with instinctive delight as its eye lens narrowed on the image of the Doctor in his TARDIS. Satisfied that the time was right for drastic intervention, the Time Controller swivelled its dome 180 degrees so that its eyestalk faced the assembled Dalek hierarchy to the rear of it.

‘It is time,’ its voice growled in a fusion of guttural determination and electronic detachment. ‘One energy pulse, aimed at those precise space-time coordinates!’

One of the assembled Daleks recognised its area of responsibility and instantly responded.

‘I obey!’

It reversed, then glided to a control panel, quickly and efficiently, its sucker arm immediately attaching to a circular socket. A command impulse was instantly sent into the Dalek Time Control ship’s weaponry systems.

With a gigantic shudder, a precisely aimed energy pulse was fired into the Vortex.

Just as the TARDIS engines were engaging for materialisation on board Terrin Blakely’s ship, some huge, destructive force smashed into the ancient time ship. The control room seemed to flip upside down for a moment, and the Doctor had to hold on to a couple of levers to stop himself crashing downwards into the high ceiling. Hot sparks sprayed from every power outlet and ten or more dials exploded and melted.

‘This is sheer vandalism!’ cried the Doctor over the terrible din that engulfed the control room. He crashed back down to the floor as the TARDIS righted
itself. Whatever had hit now faded away and the ship completed its materialisation.

Staggering to his feet, the Doctor patted the console affectionately. ‘You clever, sexy thing,’ he whispered, still gasping from being winded by the shock of impact.

The TARDIS engines came to a halt as the ship landed. Activating the wall scanner, the Doctor felt a pang of worry. All he could see was the empty control room of Terrin’s spaceship. No signs of life. The atmosphere checked out as stale but breathable. Without further hesitation, the Doctor rushed to the door and stepped out.