Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Four.

  The Doctor desperately zigzagged as bolts of energy flared around him…

  Five

  … reproaching himself for being in this ridiculous situation, he decided to blame the human race for it…

  Six.

  … rather then worry about the homicidal Dalek behind him…

  Seven.

  … or the vagaries of Ace’s chemistry or how many red bricks it takes to crack a Dalek or…

  A kilogram of nitro-nine exploded eight metres behind him.

  Luckily the ground broke his fall.

  He stayed where he was, his eyes focused on the dirt in front of his face: there he noticed two ants fighting for possession of a tiny fragment of leaf.

  Ace was shouting somewhere. Feet thundered towards the Doctor, and then hands tugged at his arm. Sighing quietly he rose to his feet. Ace was bounding agitatedly at his elbow. ‘You said ten seconds,’ he said slowly.

  ‘No one’s perfect, Professor.’ She moved back as the Doctor violently brushed dust off his coat. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ He sounded surprised. ‘Can you drive a truck?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Good, I thought so. Come on.’

  The machine lay cracked open. Something green oozed between shattered metal and bits of brick. Rachel started towards it.

  ‘I want a full emergency team here on the double,’ Gilmore was telling Mike behind her. ‘And put a guard on this site. I want a weapons team at Coal Hill School and I want them armed with ATRs.’

  Mike answered and left.

  Rachel carefully removed a chunk of brick from the upper casing; a fetid odour of zinc and vinegar invaded her nose. Allison passed her a metal probe which she used to poke out a sample of tissue.

  ‘It has an organic component.’

  ‘Or an occupant,’ said Allison.

  ‘What the devil is it?’ asked Gilmore.

  ‘A Dalek,’ said the Doctor.

  Ace gave the ignition key another savage twist, cursing stone-age technology under her breath.

  ‘Trouble is, it’s the wrong Dalek.’

  Aced looked over the primitive dashboard, hunting for something to start the van. ‘What would the right Dalek be like? Better or worse?’

  ‘Guess.’

  The engine turned over and juddered to a stop.

  ‘Choke,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘No thanks.’

  The Doctor reached over and pulled out a knob on the dashboard. Ace turned the key and the engine revved up. Ace made a stab at the gears and the van lurched forward. The driver’s door slammed backwards and Mike angrily stuck in his head.

  ‘Oi!’ he shouted over the engine noise. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Borrowing your van,’ the Doctor said cheerily as Ace put her foot down and the van roared away. Ace caught a glimpse of Mike’s astonished face as she veered the van out of the junkyard and left into Totters Lane.

  ‘These Dahliks?’

  ‘Daleks,’ the Doctor corrected.

  ‘Daleks, whatever. Where are they from?’

  ‘Skaro. Left here.’

  ‘When were they left here?’

  ‘No, no,’ cried the Doctor, ‘turn left here.’

  ‘Right,’ Ace heaved on the steering wheel and sent the van careering down a narrow street. That’s funny, thought Ace, I didn’t know they had one-way systems in 1963. Oncoming traffic started to behave in a peculiar manner.

  ‘Concentrate on where you’re going,’ shouted the Doctor.

  ‘I’m doing the best I can,’ Ace yelled. A narrow railway bridge loomed in front of them. ‘If you don’t like it, you drive.’

  The van plunged into darkness.

  They emerged into the light and the Doctor was driving. Ace stared at his umbrella which she was now holding. The seats, dashboard and steering wheel were all in the right positions – it was just that the Doctor was sitting behind the wheel and Ace was in the passenger seat. I think I’ll just decide that never happened, she decided.

  ‘The Daleks,’ resumed the Doctor, ‘are the mutated remains of a race called the Kaleds.’

  The Doctor remembered that time when he stepped out of a petrified forest and saw a city of metal spread out under an alien sky. He thought of Temmosus, the Thal leader, screaming for peace and friendship even as a Dalek gunned him down. Images of people, the last desperate rush to thwart the Dalek’s plan to mine the Earth’s core. Crawling among the thousands of dormant warriors in the ice caves of Spiridon, and then later, the Time Lords’ intervention and Davros.

  ‘The Kaleds were at war with the Thals. They had a dirty nuclear war in which evolution of the resulting mutations was accelerated by the Kaleds’ chief scientist Davros. What he created he placed in metal war machines and that is how the Daleks came about.’

  His mind again went back to Skaro, a planet wasted and broken by a centuries-long conflict – all rubble, death and mutations. From the debris rose the stench of corruption: Davros, rotting and grotesque, gloating over the death of his own people. ‘The Daleks will be all powerful! They will bring peace throughout the galaxy, they are the superior beings.’

  ‘So that metal thing had a creature inside controlling it?’ asked Ace.

  ‘Exactly. Ever since their creation the Daleks have been attempting to conquer and enslave as much of the universe as they could get their grubby little protruberances on.’

  ‘And they want to conquer the Earth?’

  ‘Nothing so mundane. They conquer the Earth in the 22nd century. No, they want the Hand of Omega.’

  ‘The what?’

  But the Doctor had said enough for the moment. ‘One thing at a time, Ace. First we have to discover what’s going on at the school.’

  3

  FRIDAY, 17:30

  UNIT had its roots in the Intrusion Counter Measures Group established in 1961, under the command of Group Captain Ian Gilmore of the newly formed Royal Air Force Regiment. Staffed with Royal Air Force personnel it was charged with the task of protecting the UK from covert actions by hostile powers and mounting intelligence operations against such a threat. In 1963 it was involved in what later came to be known as the Shoreditch Incident, details of which have never emerged, even to this day.

  The Zen Military – A History of UNIT

  by Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart (2006)

  MAYBURY HALL WAS a sprawling red brick building near the Hendon base. It was usually used for recreation, but Group Captain Gilmore had requisitioned it as his headquarters. Now in the billiard room the portrait of the Queen looked down on teleprinters, radios and field telephones; in the officer’s club the lower ranks sat with feet up on oak tables and stubbed out Woodbines in crystal ashtrays.

  Gilmore decided that he needed a field base closer to the area of operations. Sergeant Smith might be able to help on that: Smith had connections in the Shoreditch area, like that man Ratcliffe. Smith had brought him in, a short, broad-shouldered man with the unmistakable bearing of a soldier. Smith said that Ratcliffe ran the Shoreditch Association and that the manpower it could mobilize would be useful to them for ancillary tasks. Gilmore had agreed to notify him if they were needed. Something, however, nagged at Gilmore’s memory: Ratcliffe – I’ve heard that name before. But he had far more important things to occupy him.

  George Ratcliffe walked out of Maybury Hall into the weak sunshine. Mike escorted him past the guards on the gate. ‘Where are you parked?’

  ‘Just round the corner.’

  Once they were out of the gates Ratcliffe turned to him. ‘Your group captain,’ he said to Mike, ‘is he a patriot?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mike, ‘a good one.’

  Allison was sketching the machine’s innards from memory. Rachel looked over her shoulder and made the occasional suggestion.

  ‘The weapon stick,’ said Rachel as Allison’s pencil started marking out the curve of the complicated gimble joint, ‘what do you think?’

  ‘If it�
��s not a light-maser I don’t have any viable ideas. One thing, though,’ she flipped pages to show another sketch, ‘this seemed to be the control line, but…’

  ‘It wasn’t electrical wiring,’ finished Rachel. ‘No, it was something like extruded glass, a very pure glass fibre.’

  Concepts formed in Rachel’s mind: she envisaged bursts of coherent light modulated to carry digital signals down a net of pure glass fibre… The image broke up. I must be getting tired,’ she said. ‘I had an idea and then it just went out of my mind.’ She shrugged and looked at the sketch again. ‘We need to get it to a decent biology lab.’

  ‘And a half decent biologist,’ said Allison. ‘You think it’s extra-terrestrial, don’t you?’

  Rachel nodded. ‘The question is how much do we tell the group captain?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Allison archly, ‘you’re the chief scientific adviser; it’s your decision.’

  ‘Before I tell him anything I want to catch up with the Doctor.’

  ‘You think he knows something?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rachel, and she suddenly remembered the Doctor’s eyes, ‘and considerably more than he’s telling us.’

  ‘I thought you’d been here before,’ said Ace as she recognized a pub they had passed before. The Doctor ignored her, peering intently over the steering wheel.

  ‘There!’ he cried, and swung the van down a side street into Coal Hill Road. A minute later they pulled up alongside Coal Hill School. Ace grabbed her tape deck and jumped out, following the Doctor towards the gate.

  ‘Why are we here?’ she asked.

  ‘This is where Rachel detected the primary source of the transmissions. Come on.’

  Transmission of what? thought Ace as she hurried after the Doctor.

  The inside of the school was all cream-coloured brick and bright, crude pictures. Ace felt a shock of recognition: it wasn’t so different from the concrete palace in Perivale where she had spent five years serving out her adolescence – the same notice-board and the same deserted feeling once the kids had gone home. But there were differences. Murals decorated walls in Ace’s school of the 1980s: there were scenes from Africa and India, notices for Ramadan, Passover, Caribbean nights, and concerts by the school reggae ensemble.

  I bet they don’t teach sociology here, she thought, and suddenly she was nostalgic for the future. I hated school, didn’t I? she continued. It loomed up behind her, summer-term light glinting off glass set in concrete as she sat on the wall with Manisha, Judy and Claire. They were laughing and talking about music and what they wanted from life. They must have been fourteen because Ace remembered the way Manisha’s long black hair floated in the breeze, before she lost it in the fire. No! She wasn’t going to remember that – it hasn’t even happened yet. It’s still twenty years in the future.

  A man was pinning notices onto a board. He turned as the Doctor and Ace approached. He had a wide, bland face and watery grey eyes.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, ‘and you must be…?’

  ‘The Doctor. And you?’

  ‘I’m the headmaster.’ A flicker of puzzlement washed across his face. ‘Doctor, eh? You’re a bit overqualified for the position, but if you’d like to leave your particulars and references.’

  ‘References?’

  ‘You are here for the position as school caretaker?’

  ‘We’re here for a quite different reason.’

  ‘Oh.’ The headmaster stepped back slightly. ‘What can I do for you then?’

  ‘I’d like to have a quick look round your school, if you don’t mind?’

  The headmaster shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question.’

  ‘We have reason to believe that there is a great evil at work somewhere in this school.’

  That was a convincing line, thought Ace.

  The headmaster chuckled. ‘You’ll have to be a bit more specific, Doctor.’ The chuckle broke off, there was a pause and then: ‘But I don’t think it would do any harm if you were to have just a quick look round.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said the headmaster.

  Rachel watched as Mike reported the status of the units to Gilmore. More detector vans were being hurriedly rigged by artificers and deployed in central and east London.

  ‘Are the anti-tank rockets being issued?’ asked Gilmore.

  Mike checked his clipboard. ‘They’re being taken direct to the positions; the fire teams can pick them up there. I packed Kaufman off in a Land-Rover with half a dozen.’

  ‘Where’s he taking them?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Coal Hill School,’ said Mike.

  ‘On his own?’

  ‘Tell him to sit tight when he gets there,’ said Gilmore. ‘Any reports on the Doctor’s whereabouts?’

  Mike told them that Red Four, the van that the Doctor had borrowed, had been seen in the Coal Hill area.

  ‘They must be making for the school,’ said Gilmore. ‘We’d better get down there ourselves.’

  ‘What about the machine at Foreman’s Yard?’ asked Rachel.

  Mike turned to her and smiled. ‘Don’t worry, it’s under guard: it’s safe.’

  The two guards at Foreman’s Yard were unaware of anything amiss until the pickaxe handles crashed down on their skulls. Both men toppled bonelessly to the ground and lay still. Their attackers, two men in anonymous workmen’s jackets, grinned at each other – they enjoyed violence.

  A flatbed truck backed into the yard, and more men in jackets jumped out. They moved deliberately towards the ruined Dalek.

  Their leader gave directions and, clustering around the Dalek, the men began to haul it towards the truck.

  ‘Get a move on,’ called Ratcliffe. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

  Ace and the Doctor stopped at the top of the stairwell. ‘You were expecting these Daleks, weren’t you?’ asked Ace.

  The Doctor swiftly opened a door to a classroom and entered. The sweet welcoming smell of a chemistry lab met Ace as she followed the Doctor inside. Her eyes shopped quickly around the glass cabinets, looking for anything that might be useful.

  ‘The Daleks are following me,’ he paused, considering. ‘They must have traced this time-space location from records they captured during their occupation of the Earth in the 22nd century.’ He smiled. ‘The amount of effort expended must have been incredible.’ He opened a window and carefully leaned out.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so pleased if I had a bunch of Daleks on my case,’ remarked Ace, dumping her tape deck on one of the benches.

  ‘You can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies.’ The Doctor called her over to the window. ‘Have a look at this.’ Ace leaned out of the window and looked down. ‘What do you make of that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a playground.’

  ‘The burn marks, Ace. See them?’

  Ace looked again.

  ‘Well?’

  Ace considered. ‘Landing pattern of some kind of spacecraft, ain’t it?’

  ‘Very good,’ the Doctor commended in his best genial teacher manner.

  Thoughts occurred to Ace, disturbing thoughts. ‘But this is Earth, 1963. Someone would have noticed – I’d have heard about it.’

  ‘Do you remember the Nestene invasion?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness monster; the Yetis in the Underground?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Your species has an amazing capacity for self-deception matched only by its ingenuity when trying to destroy itself.’

  ‘You don’t have to sound so smug about it.’

  More things occurred to Ace as they left the chemistry lab. ‘If the Daleks are following you, what are they after?’

  The Doctor paused a moment in the corridor. ‘When I was here before I left something behind. It musn’t fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘You mean the Hand of Omega.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is the Ha
nd of Omega?’

  ‘Something very dangerous,’ said the Doctor. He started down the stairwell.

  George Ratcliffe watched as his men put the tarpaulin-shrouded mass down in the lumber storage area. He dismissed the men, instructing them to be ready when he called on them. Then, pulling aside a heavy sliding door, he walked into a dimly lit office. Against one wall lights pulsed on a console, in front of which sat a figure in shadow.

  ‘Report.’ Its voice was harsh and mechanical.

  ‘My men have recovered the machine. The Doctor is co-operating with the military.’

  ‘That is to be expected. I must be informed of his movements.’

  ‘Yes. We have certain contacts; I shall see that he is followed,’ Ratcliffe replied evenly. Then he voiced his concern. ‘That Dalek machine?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Ratcliffe spoke carefully: ‘I would like to know exactly what it is.’ He waited – this master could be difficult to work with.

  ‘A machine, a tool, nothing more.’

  Ace watched as the Doctor nosed around the ground floor. ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Whoever it was that landed their spaceship in the playground.’

  Ace considered this. ‘And they are?’

  ‘More Daleks.’

  ‘Oh good, I thought it might be something nasty.’

  The Doctor motioned towards a heavy iron door. ‘The cellar,’ he said, ‘it should be down there.’

  ‘Why the cellar?’ asked Ace apprehensively.

  ‘Good place to put things, cellars.’ He opened the door to reveal a flight of wrought-iron steps leading down into a well of darkness.

  ‘I wish I had some more nitro-nine,’ said Ace as she followed the Doctor down.

  ‘So do I,’ he agreed.

  Ace glanced round as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, but what she could see didn’t look any better. ‘What do you expect to find down here?’

  ‘The unknown.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ace. Reaching over her shoulder she drew a baseball bat out of her rucksack. The bat was made of plastic over rubber on an aluminium core and painted silver: it wasn’t much of a weapon, but it made her feel better. ‘Isn’t this a bit dangerous then?’

  ‘Probably,’ agreed the Doctor, ‘but if I knew what was down here, I wouldn’t have to look.’