Deceit

by Peter Darvill-Evans

  Earth had been driven by necessity to adopt these muscular measures and to enforce them. The need to organize and arm against the Dalek threat galvanized the normally quiescent and hedonistic population of the home planet. Perhaps inspired by government holovids of the Dalek invasion three centuries earlier, people from all walks of life on Earth – show business stars, corporation executives, pleasure seekers, politicians, the idle rich and retired tycoons – rallied to the cause of defending the planet. As often happens in times of crisis, some remarkably able men and women rose to the challenge; in this case of turning a loose association of disparate worlds with hardly any central control into a military machine able to withstand the Daleks.

  The moribund Colonial Office was reconstituted as Earth Central, which was made independent of the government and responsible only to the President. During the course of the war, and particularly quickly during times of Dalek successes, Earth Central became the only reliable financial clearing house and communications centre in human-occupied space.

  As the Dalek War fizzled out, the corporations attempted to re-create their old patterns of trade. However, Earth Central’s position as the commercial nexus of the colony worlds proved difficult to dislodge. Of course, the Earth government owed vast sums to the corporations for the materiel that had been leased during the hostilities, and at first sight it might appear that the corporations were in a much stronger position than Earth. The reverse was the case. It was widely known that war credits would never be redeemed other than at a fraction of their face value; if this were not bad enough for the corporations’ finances, their war-induced penury obliged them to pay court to the Earth government for whatever small tit-bits of debt repayment might be offered. The corporations became clients of Earth. The ‘Credits for Chits’ decree ensured that even the largest of the interstellar traders were obliged not only to write off most of Earth’s debts but also to pay substantial fees and taxes in order to trade through Earth Central and reap the benefits of Earth’s new technologies.

  Technological innovation was the second factor behind Earth’s new hegemony. Since the beginning of the twenty-second century, when the first faster-than-light propulsion systems were pioneered, the quickest way to send a message across an interstellar distance had been to send it in a starship. Communication was no faster than travel: as had been the case on pre-industrial Earth, when it was no quicker to send a letter than to saddle your horse and deliver it yourself. Radio waves, travelling only at the speed of light, were much slower than warp-driven vessels and were used to carry communications only within planetary systems. The corporations, who between them had a virtual monopoly of starships, thus had a stranglehold not only on trade between colonies, but also on communications.

  War often stimulates technological invention. The Povotsky Beam, which can best be understood as a self-generating feedback transmat that affects wave energy, was created by a team of scientists working under contract for Spacefleet in the early years of the Dalek onslaught. Ironically, in view of the non-military effects of their invention, most of them had been drafted in from research centres on Earth owned by various corporations. The beam, which allowed almost instant transmission of wave energy – including radio and other electronic signals – across interstellar distances, proved to be one of the decisive military advantages enjoyed by Spacefleet in its campaigns against the Daleks. Confined almost exclusively to military use, the Povotsky Beam passed almost unnoticed during the war years; however, it spelt the end of the corporations’ monopoly of communications. As the years after the war were to reveal, this one technological leap undermined the power of the corporations in several ways: they became reliant on Earth for the provision of new communications devices; their fleets of ships and private armies of security guards, often numerically superior to Spacefleet forces at a local level, were rendered strategically obsolete (while Earth’s new weapons technology had the same effect on a tactical level); and, eventually, as fast communications devices spread across the galaxy, the civilian populations of the corporations’ client worlds became able to bypass the corporations’ in matters of trade, finance and politics.

  The third factor – and the single most decisive factor in the specific question of the shift of power from the scattered colony-based corporations to the home planet, the Old World which for centuries had seemed to be in affluent but decadent decline – was Spacefleet itself.

  The fleet had been in existence ever since the Cyber Wars, but during the following centuries of relative peace it dwindled to little more than a squadron of obsolete craft patrolling the home system. An even smaller force, controlled by the Office of External Operations, performed some exploratory missions at the frontiers of human-occupied space, usually only where the corporations had already failed to detect any possibility of commercial gain.

  The relatively leisurely build-up to hostilities with the Draconian Empire – leisurely compared to the panic that followed the revelation of the Daleks’ intentions – gave the government of Earth the time and the continuing incentive to re-arm in depth. When the Dalek War began, Spacefleet had already been enlarged, reorganized and re-equipped; its personnel had some battle experience; and, perhaps most importantly, the government already had in place the legislation and the bureaucracy it needed to accelerate the re-armament programme.

  Thus, by the end of the Dalek War, Spacefleet was operating over ten thousand military starships, and many times that number of support craft. Such figures may seem small today, but we must always remember that at that time humankind had travelled only a few hundred light years from the home planet, and had colonized only a few hundred worlds. The balkanization of human-occupied space in that era was a result not of its size but of poor communications. The importance of Spacefleet’s numerical strength was not the absolute quantity of ships, but the comparative and unprecedented weakness of the corporations: even if they had had the will and the means to combine their forces, at the end of the Dalek War the corporations were outnumbered and outgunned by Spacefleet.

  The proliferation of Spacefleet ships and troops was, in itself, damaging to the authority of the corporations: isolated colonies that had been dependent on their controlling corporation for all news and goods from the rest of the galaxy suddenly found that visiting Spacefleet personnel could offer a different viewpoint and wider horizons.

  However, Spacefleet crippled many of the corporations in a much more direct manner: it co-opted their ships and troops. Driven by military necessity, Spacefleet and Earth Central combined to extort concessions from trading, mining and colonizing businesses of all sizes. Lease your ships and your security guards to Spacefleet, was the demand, or else you won’t be permitted to trade through the home planet’s markets and financial institutions, nor will you be given access to the new, fast communications. As the fighting had destroyed most of the pre-war financial system, the corporations had no option but to comply.

  It has been estimated that at the time of the decisive Second Rim Offensive, eighty per cent of Spacefleet’s support vessels and sixty per cent of its combat troops were being ‘leased’ from commercial organizations. In the later stages of the war, the percentage of leased ships fell, as new, purpose-built craft joined the fleet; auxiliary troops, however, made up the majority of the combat forces at least until the last of the major deep-space confrontations.

  Thus, as the tide turned in the war, and particularly after set-piece battles had given way to sporadic fire fights centred on single planets, many of the ships and some of the personnel reverted to their corporate owners and employers. Superficially, the corporations regained at least some of their strength. In fact, the battle-scarred tubs that were returned to the corporations were by now no match for the recently built and technologically advanced starships that Spacefleet retained; and the returning security forces, having seen more of the galaxy in a few years than their forefathers had seen in lifetimes, were no longer disposed to be unthinking and unquestioning ser
vants of their erstwhile masters.

  Nonetheless, Spacefleet was becoming a smaller force, and its operations were increasingly concentrated at the edges of explored space. Bases on colony planets which were safe from the receding Dalek threat were abandoned. The corporations might have thought that things were returning to normal. They had reckoned without the OEO.

  The Office of External Operations was still, at the ending of the Dalek War, a small organization. But its staff of 5000 represented a ten-fold increase over its pre-war establishment, and it had undergone a complete revitalization. Its personnel were now drawn in equal proportion from Spacefleet’s Special Academy, from the research, administration and security high-fliers in the corporations, and from the police forces of the few non-corporate-owned worlds. Its Director was made responsible to Spacefleet High Command, to the Earth President, and to the governing committee of Earth Central; this split responsibility, which might appear a recipe for bureaucratic muddle, divorced the OEO from any direct government influence and gave an astute Director a remarkably free hand. The OEO’s remit – to act as the Earth’s surveyors, official couriers, intelligence gatherers, customs officers and diplomats – was widened, almost as an afterthought, to include the enforcement of Earth law on colony planets. As the corporations began to look forward to business as usual, they found their trade, their financial records, their employment practices and their administration of colonists under investigation by the dedicated, capable and apparently incorruptible agents of the OEO. Although small in number, and subject at times to political machinations on Earth, the OEO’s operatives could usually rely on Spacefleet support. On many planets they enjoyed the active assistance of the colonists, who regarded the harsh but even-handed justice meted out by the OEO as preferable to the arbitrary rule of corporation executives.

  As the Second Dalek War drew to its untidy conclusion, it appeared that human-occupied space was reverting to its pre-war state. The corporations still dominated interstellar trade and travel; Spacefleet was shrinking in manpower and influence as the Dalek threat receded; Earth was still a playground and retirement home for the very rich, but the real wealth was still to be found in the corporation-owned planets and asteroid belts. Beneath the surface, however, the balance of power had altered permanently. Although, as the history of the second half of the millennium was to reveal, there were many political and military battles to be fought before the power of the corporations was finally broken, it can be seen that the seeds of the short-lived Alliance and of the later Empire were sown during the Second Dalek War. Although there were periods of retrenchment, and periods when Earth’s energies were re-directed to deal with the second bout of Cyber Wars and with another Dalek War, Earth’s continuing – if intermittently exercised – ability to exert its authority over its far-flung colonies remained based on two enduring factors: its monopoly of faster-than-warp communications and thus of interstellar money markets; and its control of Spacefleet and the OEO and their successor organizations in later centuries.

  AFTERWORD

  IN WHICH THE AUTHOR WEARS A DIFFERENT HAT

  This is not, I repeat not, just a case of insider dealing. OK? Sure, I’m my own commissioning editor: But hey – it’s not what you think.

  Thing is, see, as editor of the New Adventures, I got responsibilities. And I got authority. Rookie authors from all over, they come to me begging on their knees to write a Doctor Who story. They come crawling across broken glass. OK, so I exaggerate. You get the picture, anyhow.

  I’m the guy has to tell them what to do. And I’m telling you, it’s a lonely job. And I ain’t easy on those guys. Uncle Joe Stalin’s gulag maintenance programme got nothing on the guidelines I send out to writers.

  So what I say is –

  Hmm. Yes, well. That’s quite enough hard-boiled monologue. Goodness only knows how Mickey Spillane kept it up for novel after novel.

  What I’m trying to say is that as the series editor of the New Adventures I have to inflict rigorous guidelines on prospective authors, and it seemed both sensible and fair to subject myself to the same discipline.

  It was, it turns out, a very worthwhile exercise. So much so that I now think that any editor of a genre of fiction who hasn’t written a standard work in that genre shouldn’t be in the job.

  Writing Deceit has given me new insights into the New Adventures, particularly in practical matters: how many major characters can a New Adventure accommodate? How many plot strands are ideal? How many companions should the Doctor have?

  I was relieved that in writing a story according to my own guidelines I found that most of the advice and strictures I gave myself were to the point. I now know, however, that in a few areas I’ve been too rigid: it isn’t strictly necessary to introduce all the main characters within the first quarter of the book, for instance; and it doesn’t destroy all the drama and tension if you allow the reader occasional glimpses into the Doctor’s private thoughts.

  So it was useful for me. How was it for you? I ask in innocence. I really don’t know how to evaluate Deceit. One’s own writing is the most difficult to assess. Every other New Adventures author has had his work monitored by an editor. Not me.

  So I hope the story’s enjoyable. I’m aware that I’ve tried to cram a lot into it. Perhaps too much. I wanted it to be an action packed adventure; but with character development and interpersonal conflict; and leaving room for the reintroduction of Ace; while featuring Abslom Daak as guest star; nonetheless adhering to my own guidelines in the matter of interweaving of plotlines and use of several viewpoint characters; at the same time linking backward and forward to other New Adventures; and acting as a vehicle for explanations of the New Adventures versions of Doctor Who chronology and time travel theory.

  That’s a lot of functions for one medium-length novel to perform. I hope you didn’t notice it creaking under the weight of so many burdens.

  Not many authors get the chance to write an Afterword, and I must resist the temptation to use this space as a critique, or worse still a justification, of my own novel. If you didn’t like it, I’m sorry. Not much I can do about it now. There’ll be another one along in a minute, as we used to be able to say about London buses.

  Instead, I’d like to use these last few pages to talk – in my editor’s voice – about the New Adventures as a series. And as I’m writing these words six months before the publication of the book in which they’ll appear, there’s no point in me spilling the latest beans – by the time you’re reading this they’ll be cold potatoes (that chap Spillane’s been in here again, messing with my metaphors).

  There are, however, a number of questions about long-term policy that I am often asked, and that I can usefully answer here.

  I’ve just been reading issue 187 of Celestial Toyroom, the magazine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society. Well, someone’s got to do it. It contains the results of a readership survey, some questions of which related to the New Adventures.

  Six hundred readers responded – a high rate of return – and I think it’s safe to assume that they represent the opinions of the hardest of hard-core Doctor Who fans.

  Encouragingly, two-thirds had read at least one of the New Adventures, and almost half appeared to be reading them all.

  But when asked if they would like to see New Adventures novels featuring Doctors other than the seventh, over two-thirds – more respondents than had actually read the novels – said yes. When asked an open-ended question (’What single thing would most improve the New Adventures?’) less than a tenth replied ‘other Doctors’; however, this was still the most popular single improvement.

  It seems that, at least among die-hard fans, there is demand for novels that feature other Doctors. And therefore I feel obliged to explain why the New Adventures won’t do so.

  It’s simple, really. It’s because they’re the New Adventures. With the emphasis on New.

  At the moment, with the television series off the air, apparently for ever, and w
ith the feature film still no more than a draft script and a marketing plan, novels and comic strips are the only professionally produced, widely distributed, media for which new Doctor Who material is being written. As the publisher in charge of just about all books relating to Doctor Who, I’d be failing in my duty to Doctor Who if I didn’t make every effort to forge ahead, to keep the flame burning, to press on into the future. It is crucial to demonstrate that Doctor Who still has the potential and the adaptability to support new stories; that it’s a concept at least as fresh today as it was in 1963; that its supporters, are more than a dwindling band of trainspotter types who are content to pore over old video-tape.

  I believe that the novel is at least as suitable a vehicle as television for Doctor Who stories. I can’t claim that I dreamt up the idea of original Doctor Who novels; I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But having caught the ball as it dropped out of the sky, I’m determined to run with it.

  So: the New Adventures are not intended to be a support for the TV series, or a temporary substitute for it: we may never see Doctor Who on network television again, and in that case the New Adventures have to be ready to take most of the strain of pulling Doctor Who forwards.

  And that’s why the New Adventures won’t feature old Doctors.

  Having said all of which, I won’t rule out publishing novels with old Doctors, but they would have to be produced in a different series – the Missing Adventures, perhaps. And I won’t do it until in at least one medium, in the New Adventures or in a new television series, the forward direction of Doctor Who is assured. Personally, I still don’t like the idea: I take the view that the past is the past; that if the BBC have chosen to show us only a partial record of the Doctor’s life story, then that is the body of historical data with which we have to work; that if we spend time looking into the past of our favourite television series, we can hardly blame the BBC for failing to look to its future. But don’t worry: I won’t let my opinions stand in the way of commercial interests or the best interests of Doctor Who as a whole.