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B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

Page 153

by Parkin, Lance


  The Mentor, the creator of the alt-Daleks, pledged to support the Earth Alliance against the enemy Daleks. Kalendorf became her fleet commander. The Dalek Emperor was captured on Lopra Minor, but mysteriously went inert. [1458]

  ? 5433 - Planet of the Spiders [1459]

  An Earth ship came out of its time jump without power and crashed on Metebelis III. Some humans, a few sheep and a handful of spiders survived the crash. The spiders found their way to the cave of the blue crystals, and the energies there mutated them, making them grow and boosting their intelligence and psychic abilities. The “Eight-Legs” came to dominate the planet, harvesting the human population as cattle. The Eight-Legs were ruthless - they wiped out two hundred and sixty-nine villagers, the entire population of Skorda, when they tried to resist.

  Four hundred and thirty-three years after the crash, the Spiders set up a psychic bridge with a Tibetan monastery on twentieth-century Earth. They plotted to travel back in time to conquer their homeworld. Their leader, the Great One, planned to gain omnipotence by completing the crystal lattice of her cave. The third Doctor confronted his fear by bringing her the one perfect crystal he had taken from Metebelis some time previous. The energy backlash killed the Great One, but the Doctor received a fatal dose of radiation while in the Great One’s cave. He returned to twentieth-century Earth.

  & 5433 - The Eight Doctors [1460]

  The humans on Metebelis III hunted down the spiders. The seventh Doctor visited the planet and was caught by a giant spider. The eighth Doctor rescued him.

  Some of the Metebelis spiders survived the Great One’s downfall. They allied themselves with the profit-minded Headhunter, and went back to 2015 to capitalise on a master plan she had devised. The surviving spiders returned to their homeworld upon their defeat. [1461]

  & 5436 - Dalek Empire II: Dalek War [1462]

  Mendes’ rebellion had greatly weakened the Daleks’ empire, but they remained a formidable foe despite the best efforts of the Mentor’s “Alliance Daleks” and the surviving human forces. The Alliance cut off the enemy Daleks’ retreat back to Seriphia, triggering years of warfare. Meanwhile, Kalendorf learned that the Alliance Daleks had devastated several worlds, including Emeron, who refused to contribute to the war effort. He feared that if the enemy Daleks were defeated, mankind would just be replacing a nihilistic dictatorship with a more benevolent one.

  Nearly six years after Mendes instigated her uprising, Kalendorf’s most trusted allies located Mendes’ cryo-pod and revived her. As they suspected, the Emperor had “escaped” by downloading his consciousness into Mendes’ body. Kalendorf’s fleet mounted an attempt to reclaim the Sol system - but the enemy Daleks’ first wave self-destructed, obliterating a quarter of his forces. Kalendorf’s fleet discovered that Jupiter had mysteriously been terraformed and could now sustain human life. Half of Kalendorf’s spaceships put down on Jupiter to make repairs before the Daleks’ second wave arrived - and were overcome by Varga plants that the enemy Daleks had seeded there.

  The Mentor relieved Kalendorf of command and ordered him brought in for “brain correction”, but he escaped, located Mendes and shared with her his plan to rout both Dalek factions. Mendes agreed with Kalendorf’s proposal and killed her beloved, Corporal Alby Brook, to prevent his interference. She then made a galaxy-wide broadcast, saying she was the Angel of Mercy returned, and urging humanity to join forces with the enemy Daleks against the Alliance Daleks. The Dalek Supreme agreed to this new alliance.

  The Alliance Daleks tried to create “demons”: augmented humans who could combat the enemy Daleks. On a space station in the Plowik system, some Alliance Daleks genetically and technologically augmented test subjects with physical strength, an extended lifespan and the ability to alter their appearance on a cellular level, becoming temporarily invisible. Enemy Daleks attacked the station, interrupting the undertaking. One of the “demons”, Galanar, would remain in stasis for two millennia. [1463]

  & 5441 - Dalek Empire II: Dalek War [1464]

  The Mentor accelerated plans to bring “brain correction” to those who resisted the Alliance Daleks. Kalendorf forged a pact with the enemy Daleks, and, alongside their forces, led what remained of humanity’s forces against the Mentor. Years of warfare and devastation ensued. Kalendorf eventually convinced the Mentor that a continued conflict could only result in the destruction of all life in both their universes. She elected to withdraw all of her alt-Daleks back to their home universe.

  For a short while, the galaxy knew peace as the enemy Daleks honoured the terms of their coalition with the Alliance. Kalendorf knew the Daleks would eventually renege, and went to Earth to negotiate with the Dalek Supreme. The Dalek Emperor took control of Mendes’ body, and tapped the Dalek command net to probe Kalendorf’s mind for signs of betrayal. In so doing, it enabled the last remnants of Mendes’ personality to activate a telepathic self-destruct code that Kalendorf had planted in her mind. The destruct command routed through the entire Dalek network, running unfettered owing to the Emperor’s full access. All Daleks and Dalek technology in human space and Seriphia were destroyed.

  This event caused incalculable devastation, and became known as The Great Catastrophe. Entire star systems were ruined, and countless lives were lost. Parts of the galaxy took centuries, even millennia, to recover.

  Kalendorf had expected to perish during his final gambit, but survived. In time, he returned to his homeworld of Velyshaa. His recorded memories were later stored in his burial chamber. History would regard him as a monster, a “dark one” who brought about the galaxy’s ruination.

  One Dalek outpost survived the Great Catastrophe, when a Dalek was conditioned to absorb Mendes’ destructive pulse, then isolated from the outpost’s command net. The isolated Dalek consequently absorbed some of Mendes’ personality, and also gained the command codes for the entire Dalek network. In the millennia to follow, the Mendes-Dalek would become the new Dalek Supreme. [1465]

  ? 5500 - The Pyralis Effect [1466]

  The fourth Doctor and Romana found the Myriad - one of the ships containing the cloned survivors of Pavonis IV - as it travelled through the Kasterborous Cluster. A disused Pyralis obelisk influenced a Type 12 AI designated CAIN, who calculated the codes necessary to open it. Thousands of Pyralis escaped, but CAIN sacrificed himself to detonate a device that recalled the Pyralis and imprisoned them once more. The Doctor advised the Pavonians to let go of their past - including their hero-worship for him - and programmed the Myriad’s flight computer to take them to a small, habitable planet.

  In 5665, the Chelonians launched an attack on the human colony Vaagon, but the Chelonians’ tanks vanished mysteriously before they could complete their conquest, transported by a Fortean Flicker to the twenty-seventh century. Believing themselves blessed by divine intervention, the colonists were quite unprepared when the Chelonians reinvaded several generations later and wiped out the colony. [1467]

  The Doctor bought a collapsible snooker table at the height of the retro-gaming fad of the fifty-eighth century. [1468]

  In 5720, archaeologists discovered the remains of a Khorlthochloi starship. [1469] The militaristic Narbrab conquered an alien civilisation. The survivors, hosted in Ikshar host bodies, were banished in a solar-powered ship and arrived in London, 1346. [1470]

  = In 5738, the sixth Doctor visited the planet Helios 3. [1471]

  Around 5764, a Dalek civil war became so serious that the Time Lords intervened. [1472] Espero was colonised by mostly African and Asian humans with a shared Christian faith. The colonists hoped to escape the influence of the Eurozone and America, and bought the planet from the Homeworld Corporation. They renounced technology, which made it all but impossible to extract the planet’s natural resources. With nothing to offer in trade, Espero became isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Religious schisms led to the Almost War. [1473]

  ? 5800 - Combat Rock [1474]

  Earth won a war against the Indoni, making the planet Jenggel an Earth col
ony. The Indoni subsequently invaded the rival Papul people, forcing the Papul leaders to vote for integration. Tourism swelled amid the new political climate, with visitors arriving to experience the “primitive” Papul culture. The corrupt President Sabit of the Indoni kept most of the profits for himself. Christian missionaries arrived to minister to the Papul. Twentieth-century icons such as Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows and Leatherface horror films were in use in pop culture.

  On Jenggel, a sentient organism contained in a purple fungus from the Papul swamps possessed a Papul named Kepennis. As the mysterious “Krallik”, the organism-Kepennis founded the OPG, a Papul resistance movement. Some eight rainseasons later, Kepennis rigged Papul mumis to kill tourists and Indoni soldiers by spitting snakes, furthering an atmosphere of anarchy. The second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrived, and the Doctor ingested some of the fungus himself, enabling him to mentally nullify the organism within Kepennis. A cannibalistic Papul tribe took Kepennis away to consume him as punishment, and a mercenary with a bit of a noble streak killed Sabit.

  c 5850 - Sick Building [1475]

  Professor Ernest Tiermann made a fortune in the Servo-furniture industry, and retired to a snowy planet he had purchased, Tiermann’s World, with his wife and son. The tenth Doctor and Martha warned the family that a Voracoious Craw - a spaceship-sized monster akin to a tapeworm - was approaching from space and would carve up the planet’s surface. Tiermann was determined to abandon his futuristic Dreamhouse - the consciousness of which, the Domovoi, felt betrayed and possessed a sunbed named Toaster. Tiermann and Domovoi/Toaster mutually killed one another, and Tiermann’s wife died also. The Doctor and Martha transported Tiermann’s son Solin and a sentient vending machine named Barbra to Spaceport Antelope Slash Nitelite.

  Barbra fell in with a bad crowd - a pirate gang of decommissioned Servo-furnishings - and fell through a space-time rift, the Deadly Flap, to the twenty-first century. [1476]

  c 5895 - The Krotons [1477]

  On the planet of the Gonds, the dynatrope registered the second Doctor and Zoe as the “high brains” it had long sought. The two surviving Krotons revived, and made plans to leave the planet, even though take-off would devastate the Gonds and their city. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe helped to destroy the Krotons and their dynatrope with sulphuric acid.

  ? 5900 - Mission: Impractical [1478]

  Sabalom Glitz stole a Tzun data core from the reptilian Veltrochni. He sold it to Niccolo Mandell, an agent of the Vandor Prime government. Ten years later, the Veltrochni threatened to make war against Vandor Prime over the stolen Tzun data core. It was the last surviving information cache from the Tzun Empire, and contained blueprints on how to construct Tzun Stormblades. Vandor Prime head of security Niccolo Mandell, hoping to sell the data core, coerced the sixth Doctor, Frobisher and Glitz into retrieving the device from an orbital facility.

  Glitz’s associate Dibber died in a crossfire, but the Doctor purged the data core of its more dangerous information and returned it to the Veltrochni. Vandor Prime authorities arrested Mandell. Glitz continued travelling in his Nosferatu.

  ? 5900 - Tragedy Day [1479]

  On the Earth colony Olleril, the precocious boy genius Crispin, leader of the secret society of Luminus, sought to gain mental control of the population, and to pattern everyone after characters from the show Martha and Arthur. Meanwhile, the immortal Friars of Pangloss hired the arachnid mutant Ernie “Eight Legs” McCartney, the most feared assassin in the Seventh Quadrant, to retrieve a cursed piece of red glass that the Doctor had acquired. The seventh Doctor, Benny and Ace thwarted Crispin’s plans, and Crispin died when the Luminus submarine Gargantuan was destroyed. Ravenous Slaag creatures consumed McCartney. The Friars were disrupted by an anti-matter burst, and flung powerless into the Time Vortex.

  The Solar Flares and the Evacuation of Earth

  The Earth was ruled by the World Executive. Earth at this time was technically advanced, with advanced suspended animation techniques, fission guns and power supplied via solar stacks and granavox turbines.

  Scientists monitoring the Sun predicted a series of massive solar flares: within only a matter of years, the Earth’s surface would be ravaged and virtually all life would be wiped out. It would be five thousand years before the planet would be habitable again.

  The High Minister and the Earth Council began working on humanity’s salvation. Carefully screened humans, the Star Pioneers, were sent out in vast colony ships to places such as Colony 9 and Andromeda. Nerva was converted into an ark housing the cream of humanity, some one hundred thousand people, who were placed in suspended animation along with samples of animal and plant life. Nerva also contained the sum of human knowledge stored on microfilm.

  The rest of humanity took to thermic shelters, knowing that they wouldn’t survive. When the solar flares came, every living thing on the Earth perished.

  A group of Star Pioneers reached Andromeda and encountered the Wirrn, a race of parasitic insects who lived in space, visiting worlds only to breed. [1480]

  ? 5950 - Dreamtime [1481]

  Facing a catastrophic natural disaster, evacuation coordinators herded the people onto Phoenix lifeships that departed for space. In Australia, a guru named Baiame sought an alternative and hoped to channel the Dreaming - a collective force, derived from the minds and dreams of humanity - to influence matter. Baiame wanted to lift Uluru, a sacred bluff, and its people into space under protection of a Dreaming-generated force field. The seventh Doctor traversed the Dreaming and arrived from thousands of years in the future. Baiame acceded to the Doctor’s request that he extend his sphere of protection a few miles and include settlers in the surrounding vicinity. The Uluru lifted off from Earth with its people and sped into space, and the Doctor returned to the future.

  During a period in which humanity didn’t inhabit the Earth, an alien race set up the Gogglebox - a giant museum dedicated to Earth and its history - deep within Earth’s moon. The fifth Doctor met history student Alan Fitzgerald there, and left behind a copy of The Rough Guide to Shabadabadon which detailed - among other things - Shabadabadon’s famous ice caves. For Alan’s benefit, the Doctor confirmed his involvement in the great fire of London and the Mary Celeste, but he refused to discuss when his tenure with UNIT occurred. The Doctor then departed to investigate an energy spike emanating from Brisbane in September 2006. [1482]

  There was a Cyber War in the late sixtieth century. [1483]

  c 5995 - Zamper [1484]

  There was revolution on Chelonia, where the peaceful forces of Little Sister overthrew Big Mother. This initiated a cultural reformation that saw the warlike race transformed into the galaxy’s foremost flower-arrangers. Forty years later, many Chelonians hankered for the old blood-and-glory days, and Big Mother’s fleet headed for Zamper to purchase a powerful Series 336c Delta-Spiral Sun Blaster - a ship whose effectiveness had been demonstrated in the Sprox civil war and the skirmishes of Pancoza. It was capable of withstanding neutronic ray blasts of up to an intensity of sixty blarks.

  The seventh Doctor, Benny, Roz and Chris arrived on Zamper and found that the Zamps - slug-like creatures used to build the ships on the planet - had dreams of conquest and were building their own battleship. They had force-evolved their offspring to become ravenous tentacle-like creatures powered by a springtail; the Doctor estimated that these creatures would become unstoppable if they reached populated space. Big Mother owed the Doctor a debt and agreed with his assessment. In a variation of the Diemlisch manoeuvre (first used in the third Wobesq-Majjina war), Big Mother’s Chelonian fleet destroyed itself to obliterate the Zamps’ ship and seal the gate between Zamper and the rest of the universe.

  6012 (24th July) - The Doctor’s Daughter [1485]

  The fish-like Hath allied with humanity to create colonies. A spaceship containing some humans and Hath landed on Messaline with a third-generation terraforming globe that could create an ecosystem on the planet’s barren surface. The mission commander died,
and the resulting power vacuum put the humans and Hath into open warfare. Each camp had cloning devices that used “progenation”: reproduction from a single organism. The conflict became so accelerated, twenty generations could be born and lost in a day.

  Seven days later, the TARDIS brought the tenth Doctor, Donna and Martha to Messaline as it had sensed a paradox there - a young woman named Jenny, cloned from the Doctor’s genetics within moments of his arrival. The Doctor smashed the terraforming globe, releasing its gasses and causing areas on Messaline to bloom with new life. The humans and Hath agreed to live peacefully. The Doctor and his friends left, thinking that Jenny had been fatally shot while saving the Doctor’s life. She was revived by the terraforming gasses, and departed in a shuttlecraft to find new adventures.

  Colonists established a colony on Heritage. Ten years later, a company at Galactic Central developed a way of synthesising Thydonium, instantly putting mining colonies such as Heritage out of business. Melanie Bush and her husband Ben Heyworth settled on the impoverished Heritage sometime afterwards. [1486]

  Years later on Heritage, the geneticist Wakeling successfully cloned a raven, naming her Arabella. [1487]

  6048 (6th August) - Heritage [1488]

  Menopause had become extremely rare. Undergoing the condition, Melanie Bush Heyworth asked Wakeling for a genetic solution to the problem. Wakeling’s treatment seemingly led to Mel and her husband Ben conceiving a child named Sweetness, but the Heyworths discovered that Wakeling had violated their wishes by cloning Sweetness from Mel. A subsequent argument between Wakeling and Mel led to his striking her with a genetic sequencer, killing her.

 

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