‘Esscape velocity achieved,’ called one of the pilots.
‘Hold,’ ordered Skaldak. ‘I want ramming sspeed! All Warriorss prepare for boarding!’
‘Grand Marshal, if we ram them we will ssimply be thrown off their hull,’ the science officer said. ‘We won’t be able to board.’
‘We will if we manoeuvre the nacelless to act ass grappling hooksss!’ Skaldak said. He sounded slightly crazed now and every Warrior knew he would taste blood that day, be it his own or the enemy’s.
‘Ramming sspeed,’ confirmed the pilot.
‘Now!’ Skaldak shouted and the battlecruiser lurched from the solar gravity well, hurtling towards the Dalek command ship at terrifying speed. Skaldak watched the screen unblinkingly as the saucer swelled in his sights. ‘All Warriorss prepare for boarding on the main assssault deck! And set autodestruct at ten minutess.’ Then the Grand Marshal stood and walked from his chair for the last time.
On the bridge of the command saucer, a Gold Dalek was being fed new streams of information by the second. Around it the dark – almost black – shapes of the other Daleks glided to and fro, making adjustments, fine-tuning the engines, trying to bring the external weapons arrays back online. When the battlecruiser suddenly appeared from the far side of the star, Samox, it was a totally unexpected scenario, and the battle computers struggled to counteract it.
As it was, the Gold Dalek had no time to issue a command to retreat or to avoid the oncoming Martian ship. The idea that the Ice Warriors would ram them had never been contemplated. This was something the Gold Dalek was determined to rectify upon his return to Skaro. As the two ships collided, many Daleks went careering across the deck, smashing into computer banks or bulkheads and sustaining damage.
‘Hull-breach. Levels-nine-to-seventeen,’ intoned a deep voiced Dalek.
‘Intruder-alert!’ screeched another. ‘Aliens-entering-air-locks: nine-delta, thirteen-lamda, sixteen-epsilon.’
‘All-Daleks-to-defensive-positions,’ ordered the Gold Dalek. Its voice was pitched slightly higher than the others. ‘Defend! Defend!’
All over the ship, Daleks broke off from their secondary jobs to converge on the section where the Ice Warriors had entered.
At the airlock, it was carnage. As Skaldak had suspected, the Daleks had not been prepared for such an unorthodox move. His Warriors had taken the Daleks already stationed there by surprise and were able to establish a bridgehead between the two craft. There were two entrances that gave onto the airlock entrance – both round and studded with a circular Dalek design. As the metal monsters poured through, so the Ice Warriors tore into them, the sonic blasters fitted to their forearms vibrating the Dalekanium skins and exploding the mutants housed within.
Skaldak was part of the vanguard in this battle, killing Daleks to his left and right, ploughing forward, taking more of the ship. Naturally the Daleks were fighting back hard, their battle cries of ‘Ex-ter-min-ate’ ringing throughout the saucer. Officers and Warriors fell as Dalek gun sticks bathed them in their negative radiation.
At one point, the Daleks withdrew and tried to use one of their chemical weapons on the Martians, but Skaldak was too canny for that. The moment the Daleks stopped trying to kill, the Ice Lord knew something wasn’t right and issued an order to all his Warriors to engage their faceplates. This was a special section of the Martian helmet that closed across the open mouth section, acting as both a space helmet and a respirator.
The Warriors penetrating the other airlocks lacked his battle experience and did not think to do this, which cost them dearly. One of the assault forces had been all-but wiped out. This allowed the Daleks to counterattack and board the Martian battlecruiser.
‘Penetrating-enemy-ship,’ reported one of the grey Daleks, his voice transmitted to the bridge of the saucer.
‘Find-the-command-deck,’ ordered the Gold Dalek. ‘Exterminate-all-resistance.’
‘I-obey!’
But there was no resistance. All the Martians had left to board the Dalek ship or to run interference as Skaldak called it. This involved selected units taking the mobile sonic cannons from the hold and floating them down to the saucer, magnetising the weapons to the Dalek hull and opening fire on any target that looked crucial: power nodes, communications relays and the like. The Gold Dalek had already dispatched hoverbout units to deal with them.
When the Daleks reached the Ice Warrior command deck, they found a large countdown on the viewscreen. The slightly panicked squad leader reported back.
‘Enemy-have-activated-cruiser-self-destruct! We-must-withdraw. Withdraw!’
By now, Skaldak had led his force through the core section of the saucer, directly beneath the bridge, which was housed in the dome on the upper surface. It was then that the Thassis exploded, taking a huge wedge of the saucer with it. The Dalek ship now hung in space like a round delicacy that had been bitten through by a hungry predator.
With the Dalek ship now falling into the twin stars, too, Skaldak led his Warriors to the bridge. They massacred all the enemies they found in the corridors. For every score of Daleks they killed, one Warrior was lost. Even with those odds, it was an uneven battle and there always seemed to be more Daleks, flooding in from every corridor, replacing those that had already fallen.
Finally, though, Skaldak and his troops reached the heart of the ship. They blew up the two Dalek guards stationed either side of the arched entrance and marched calmly onto the bridge. The Gold Dalek turned to face them as they entered. Two other dark grey Daleks opened fire on Skaldak’s two flanking warriors. The four enemies killed one another, leaving just the two leaders.
‘You-have-not-won,’ the Gold Dalek said, exaggerating every syllable, satisfaction evident in its voice despite the electronic filter.
‘Win?’ Skaldak strutted forward. ‘Thiss iss not about uss winning!’
‘The-ship-is-out-of-control. Soon-we-will-enter-the-radiation-field-of-the-star.’
Skaldak came right up to the Dalek’s eyestalk. ‘It iss about you losssing!’
‘Your-statement-is-illogical,’ the Gold Dalek said. ‘We-will-escape-using-temporal-technology-beyond-the-comprehension-of-Ice-Warriors.’
‘Whatever you call uss, we won’t let you esscape!’
‘You-have-no-choice.’ The Gold Dalek glided away. Its arrogance in the face of a Martian Ice Lord warrior was staggering.
Skaldak growled. ‘You murdered my daughter. Killed her right before my eyess. Thiss will mean nothing to you, I know. But you underesstimate uss, Dalek. We know about your bridge dessignss!’ Still the Dalek ignored him. ‘We know there iss a masster control for maximissing Dalekanium power feedss!’
Now the Gold Dalek swung back to face him, its gun stick raised. ‘Ext—’
But it was too late. Skaldak was already firing his own weapon. The Gold Dalek froze before beginning to vibrate, shaking from side to side as smoke poured from the vents above its weapon and manipulator arm. Finally its dome exploded and it lay still.
Skaldak came across the bridge and kicked the shell of the golden Dalek across the floor. Then he moved to the mechanism that controlled the Dalekanium power feeds. He could feel the temperature rising. They must be falling into the sun.
With a grimace and kiss of his fist in honour of Iclar, he turned them to maximum. Although every Martian had fallen by this point, there were a still a large number of Daleks throughout the ship. But each one now exploded as the power they fed on was overloaded.
Now there was no one else on the entire ship. The deck started tilting as the gyroscopic dampeners failed. Skaldak stood, watching the Dalek screen and on it the blazing surface of Samox. He would be happy to die the same way as his daughter. It was fitting.
As the Grand Marshal prepared for death, a message flashed on the screen informing him that the Time transmitter was prepared. A prompt followed, asking for space time coordinates.
Skaldak looked around at the bridge. The raised platform for the Gold Dalek, the
computer banks and control stations. The rounded door leading from it and to the left, a smaller, sealed door. A bright lift was coming from underneath it. Escape, the Dalek had said, using temporal technology. But the Dalek had been right: Skaldak had no idea how to operate it. He turned back to the message on the screen. It was now flashing.
The Grand Marshal found some controls beside the door and punched randomly at the keypad. A string of numbers and letters appeared on the main screen. Skaldak swayed slightly now, the heat was so intense he could barely concentrate. The door opened and Skaldak stepped inside.
He would live. For now. For her.
He just hoped that wherever this thing was sending him it was cold there …
THE MULTI-FACETED WAR
SKELLIS HAD BEEN there when her friend died. She had seen the monster take Gith’s head, and there had been nothing she could do about it. The planet Lerna was a damp world of marshes and muddy rivers that were prone to tidal flooding. Poisonous gasses belched from the mudflats in great bubbles that burst to free the acrid dirty brown mists. The two of them were simple soldiers, drafted in the war with the Great Vampires.
They had only met on Military Training Squad at a barracks outside Arcadia. They’d been at the Academy at separate times and came from different houses. They even lived on opposite sides of the world from each other. But they had become fast friends. They looked out for each other, had each other’s back.
Everyone knew the war against the Vampires was dragging on – an ever-burgeoning conflict. For every Vampire nest they destroyed, two seemed to spring up in its stead. The Public Register Video only covered the battles and skirmishes in light detail. It had once been headline news. Soldiers returned to Gallifrey traumatised by what they had experienced – what they had seen and done – but no one at home seemed to care.
Those who were lucky enough to stay on Gallifrey pretended the war wasn’t happening, or at least wasn’t their problem. The academics buried their heads in their books, while the politicians buried their heads in the sand. Only a very few of the lower-ranking Time Lords protested that the war had to stop; that veterans needed to be better cared for upon their return.
With Rassilon away, leading from the front as he always did, a power vacuum had formed. The High Council became a pantheon of the inadequate and self-serving. Naturally, whenever the President returned from the war he was given a hero’s welcome – parades, banquets – but he was never given a true picture of the situation or the sentiment of the Gallifreyan people.
Perhaps Rassilon was aware of the unrest and the political lethargy. Skellis didn’t know, but it might have explained why he never stayed long in the Capitol, why he rushed off again as soon as he could. It looked like heroism and bravery but it might just as easily have been an unwillingness to face facts.
Skellis and Gith had been posted to Lerna with the rest of their battalion to take the planet from a nest of Vampires, ruled over by a Great One. It was difficult. The locals were broad-footed and well versed at ‘bog-hopping’, as they called it. They had snout-like noses and dug around in the weed beds, searching for their diet of simple roots and grasses.
The Lernans were sentient but undeveloped. They lived in scattered simple villages of bamboo. Their grass huts were elevated off the damp surface and meant they were not swept away by the tidal floods that occurred whenever one of the planet’s three moons circled too close. Their simplicity made them an easy target for the Vampires.
The Time Lord squad knew that a Great One had made its nest on the driest part of the planet, in a place called the Long Kahn Hills. Of course a huge proportion of the hog-like Lernans had been bitten and turned into the Great One’s servants. They ruled the plant and brought sacrifices to the Hilltop shrines with their feeding pipes that took the slaughtered creatures’ blood down into the Vampire’s lair.
While it was true that the Long Kahn Hills represented high ground, militarily the Gallifreyan troops were better armed and better organised. Skellis and Gith – like the rest of their unit – believed themselves to be the better fighters, too. This would be an easy victory. And so it might have proved, had not the Vampires brought in help.
It was not a Vampire – not a Great One – that had beheaded Gith. It was a Macra – a crab-like being that fed on the poisonous gasses the planet offered up in bountiful supply. How the creatures had been brought there, no one knew. They had only discovered the alliance when they had killed the Vampires and villagers protecting the hills and breached the lair.
The Macra had made tunnels that led from the lair all the way out to the marshes. This also explained why an unusually high number of troops were going missing. Senior officers and those minor politicians on the ground blamed desertion or the sinking sand that peppered the landscape.
Gith and Skellis had been sent down one of the tunnels to flush out the Macra. The memories of that battle still kept Skellis awake at night. She tried not to think of them, to bury the images, but they came unbidden – especially at night.
They had crawled along the tunnel, but it did not go straight out into the marshes, it curved round and sloped downwards, taking them lower into the Vampire’s lair. They found nothing in the tunnel itself. It was only when the burrow opened up into a large chamber that they found the enemy.
‘General?’
Skellis woke from the dream of his former regeneration. An orderly was standing in the doorway, a dark figure against the light. Skellis mumbled. He could feel he had been sweating; the sheets were slightly damp and his skin was clammy.
‘You wanted waking early, sir.’
Skellis nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Breakfast in your ready room, sir,’ the orderly added and then left, shutting the door once again.
General Skellis closed his eyes. The memories of that day were truly etched on his subconscious. But then, if they had not been, he would not be waking to a ceremony that might see the end of the Vampires once and for all.
Skellis took a sonic shower and dressed quickly in the red and gold uniform that marked him as a General. How far he had come since those days as a woman in the trenches.
After his breakfast, Skellis was collected by air car and taken to the secret facility out on the Argolid plain. The Time Lords had set up facility on the hollow world of Phonida because it was suitably removed from the fighting, but still far from Gallifrey.
After his service on Lerna, Skellis had returned to Gallifrey and gone back to the Academy. He had been determined that Gith’s death – and those of so many other of his fellow soldiers – would not be in vain. He kept a close eye on Rassilon’s military campaign, but it was not going well. No matter how many fronts they fought on or how successful their operations were, the Time Lords never seemed to be able to eliminate the Vampire scourge from the galaxy.
By that stage of the war, even Rassilon himself was battle weary and it seemed to Skellis that everyone involved in the planning of the war had fallen back on tired strategies that only kept the beast at bay; it never dealt it the killing blow.
After what Skellis had witnessed in the lair on Lerna, he had glimpsed the solution to the problem. He had worked hard on his ideas, first in theoretical study at the Academy and now at the military’s ‘Golden Sword’ facility on Phonida.
It had taken Skellis almost twenty years to get there and, although some frowned on his experiments, they saw that he was the most driven of all the scientists there. Eventually Rassilon himself came to hear of his work.
He studied Vampires and their deaths and, ironically, for that he needed ‘live’ subjects. A special commando unit was set up with the sole purpose of capturing Vampires alive. At this point, no one imagined they could ever capture a Great One for experimentation. None had ever been captured. They either fled or died; their remains placed in dispersal chambers to ensure they could never be brought back to life.
Then the commandos started to capture victims. One or two at first, but over the years
more than a hundred were brought to the Golden Sword – to Skellis himself. By that stage, he had cast off the arcane titles of academia and embraced the military once more. But such an important contributor to the Time Lord war against the Vampires could not be a lowly trooper. Even Commander seemed beneath him. Instead he was given the rank of General and proudly had his armour adorned with the badge of honour that marked his campaigns across Amymone, Iolaus, Bashmu, Alluttu – and yes, Lerna.
Back then, though, Skellis was still clad in simple black and white robes. He had just finished setting up the dispersal chamber when the first Vampire POW was captured. It was a female Saturnyne – an amphibious creature that had been caught up in the crossfire and infected along with its entire species.
Unlike most Vampires, her eyes were not dark and sunken. Its former dark skin was however now pale blue and it certainly had the characteristic fangs. To weaken the subject, she had been kept in constant artificial sunlight and dosed with an allyl methyl sulphide. She did look listless when two guards brought her in.
The lab had been set up to exact specifications. It was a circular chamber, two storeys high, with an array of computers and monitoring equipment around the walls alongside extraction and filtration mechanisms. All these were linked to a molecular dispersal chamber that stood at the centre of the lab.
Time Lords had long used this process to execute those rare individuals who had tried to bring Gallifrey to its knees, to usurp their power or in some other way threaten the wellbeing of Time Lord society by their continued existence alone. The chamber was sealed, and powerful particle disseminators were used to break up the subject’s body into components no bigger than molecules. These were then dispersed across time and space using Time Lord temporal engineering. In this way it was ensured that the body and consciousness of the target could not be retrieved, reformed or in any other way brought back to life.
Doctor Who: Myths and Legends (Dr. Who) Page 18