Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also in the series
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One: Death on Gethria
Chapter Two: Distress Call
Chapter Three: Return to Carthedia
Chapter Four: Prisoners of the State
Chapter Five: The Orphanage
Chapter Six: On the Run
Chapter Seven: Dangerous Decision
Chapter Eight: Hogoosta
Chapter Nine: The Cradle Awakens
Chapter Ten: Sunlight Secrets
Chapter Eleven: The Resistance
Chapter Twelve: Start the Revolution
Chapter Thirteen: Dalek Litigator
Chapter Fourteen: Call the Doctor
Chapter Fifteen: Return to Gethria
Chapter Sixteen: A Billion Skaros
Copyright
Also in the series:
Plague of the Cybermen by Justin Richards
Shroud of Sorrow by Tommy Donbavand
For Steph and Ben,
my two favourite human beings
It was another beautiful, sunny day on the planet Sunlight 349, as Lillian Belle set off on her latest assignment.
If she was honest with herself, the fact that every day on Sunlight 349 was ‘another beautiful, sunny day’ was perhaps a little tedious. Mind you, whenever she had such thoughts, she would force herself to remember what life had been like for her parents. They had lived on the edge of starvation for the first thirty years of their lives. In squalor. On a freezing cold, polluted planet whose name no one even wanted to remember.
When Maizie and Alfred Belle had been given the chance to move to Sunlight 349, for them, it had truly felt like dying and going to heaven. Lillian knew this because, although she had been only seven months old at the time, her parents had, over the years, often told her how they had felt… And there had been tears in their eyes as they remembered.
Maizie and Alfred had died just about four years ago now, within months of each other. They had been a devoted couple, proud to see their only daughter become a journalist. Moving to Sunlight 349 had brought them such incredible happiness. Every morning, they would stand on their tiny balcony and look out over the calm, ordered, pastel-shaded symmetry of the vast city in which they lived, and give thanks for the Dalek Foundation and the Sunlight Worlds.
The Dalek Foundation had given them another chance, another life. And although the ill effects of the squalid conditions their bodies had previously been forced to endure had ultimately meant that their lifespans were relatively short, they had both died contentedly in their early 60s.
So Lillian felt guilty when she found the pastel shades… dull. Cross with herself, when she longed for the temperature to vary by a few degrees now and again.
Sometimes she almost prayed for rain. She had never experienced it. She had seen it on screens, read about it in books. She had even stood in her shower, dialled down from hot to cold, closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it might be like if this were the weather outside – all day!
The skimmer-bus, touching down gently, jolted Lillian out of her daydream. The railroad official sitting opposite gave her a strange look. Lillian could not resist a smirk to herself. She realised she had been sitting with her face up, eyes closed and twitching at the imaginary impacts of those longed-for raindrops.
‘Something the matter?’ asked the official.
‘No,’ she said, still smirking a bit.
Then she felt guilty again. She glanced around at the grim faces of other officials on the bus and remembered there was a serious business in hand. She tried to suppress the fact that because it was serious, and perhaps even a little dangerous, she wanted to jump for joy. Everything was so smooth-running and happy on Sunlight 349; and that made a journalist’s job pretty uninteresting.
At last, there was the potential for bad news…
As she stepped out of the bus, she was only dimly aware of the door whirring shut and the soft hiss of the vehicle lifting off and flying away behind her. The concerned mutters of the crowd were also fading for Lillian.
She was transfixed by the disaster site before her.
Two trains had collided. At speed. The impact had torn into both vehicles, ripping them apart in the front sections, then scattering the rear carriages into each other; hammering, crushing, tearing them out of shape. Only the very last compartment of the left-hand train still retained any semblance of its original outline. The rest was just wreckage. A horrible snapshot of metal, plastic and fibres, twisted, bent and pulverised by unrelenting kinetic force.
People had died in this crash, Lillian knew there was no doubt about that. Then she realised, with some shame, that a number of the supposed ‘officials’ she had travelled with were in fact relatives of the survivors or victims. And she had allowed herself a warm grin of satisfaction at the exciting professional prospects such a disaster offered her. For a moment, her own selfishness made her feel sick. But the exhilaration was still there, and she pressed on, seeking out security guards to get permission to inspect the wreckage.
She already had her tiny palm-holo-camera running. She panned across the entangled trains and pulled back for a wide shot of those looking on, many of them featureless with shock, some starting to cry, gulping in painful air in great heaving sobs. The sound of their grief flooded into her ear implants – perfect, stereo human suffering. She zoomed in on one old lady, for an instant thinking it was her mother. It could so easily have been, a few years back. It made her feel lucky… and guilty yet again. That old guilt about not feeling grateful enough for the Sunlight Worlds.
A security guard touched her on her elbow. It made her jump a little.
‘This way,’ he nodded, and led her down the slope to the track.
As she followed him, she saw emergency crews arriving and going about the morbid business of removing bodies. There was the smell of fire, scorched metal and worse. Electronic cutting gear was starting up; slicing into metal so that any survivors could be rescued. She heard cries of pain, of alarm, of relief. More emergency crews arrived, skimmer lights flashing, sirens wailing and then cutting off suddenly, as if in shock, as the vehicles descended gently beside the broken, twisted tracks.
She was still filming, drifting sideways, not sure if it was the gentle incline leading to the crash site or her own insatiable curiosity that was pushing her on. She almost collided with a man in emergency service uniform. He was of some kind of supervisory rank, it seemed, from the insignia on his black, plastic-sheened uniform.
‘That’s far enough,’ he said, his voice muffled behind his helmet visor.
‘Lillian Belle, Sunlight 349 Holo-News,’ she said, still filming.
‘I know,’ he replied, somewhat emotionlessly. ‘Daniel Ash, site supervisor. You don’t want to go any further. Trust me.’
‘Will you talk on camera?’ she asked, focusing on him, the auto-systems of her camera struggling to fix on his visor or his obscured face behind it.
‘Sure. There’s been a train crash. Not much more to say. We don’t know how many are dead. We’re finding survivors. A lot of injured. All local hospitals are on full alert. Emergency protocols are working well. How am I doing?’
‘Any word on the cause of the crash?’ she asked, panning right onto the closest piece of wreckage. A survivor, in terrible pain, was being helped out through a half-collapsed window. She quickly defocused and returned to Daniel Ash’s troublesome visor. He was looking at her blankly.
‘What do you want me to say?’ he asked. ‘Two trains crashed. One of them shouldn’t have been on this track, I guess. We’re just worrying about who’s left alive so far.’
At that moment, Lillian felt the heat and vibration of something powerful whooshing overhead. She instinctively tilted her camera view upwards into the sky, and caught the shimmering blue of the underside of an airborne Dalek as it flew over the crashed trains.
She and Daniel Ash simply paused for a moment, watching the Dalek come to a halt, as it suspended itself in mid-air. Then it descended; its bronze, metallic, conical armour glimmering in the constant sun as its mid-section and head-dome rotated. Scanning, watching, assessing…
Everyone on the Sunlight planets was familiar with the Daleks. They were not seen very often, but everyone knew them as the representatives of the great and good Dalek Foundation. The saviours of a generation that had been scarred and displaced by galactic economic and political collapse. There was always admiration for the idea of the Daleks, Lillian had grown up with that, but actually seeing them, encountering them, was always an oddly unsettling experience. No one was in any doubt that they were a force for good. No one.
But…
Squat, undeniably brutal in their outward appearance, these ambassadors of charity and philanthropy always seemed to tease at a sense of dichotomy in human minds. That these creatures who looked so ready for conflict should be the purveyors of such kindness and optimism seemed such a self-evident mismatch. And yet, it was true. The Daleks had saved and enhanced countless billions of lives.
‘Report!’
Lillian and Daniel heard the signature sound of the Dalek’s voice echo across the wreckage; its staccato, electronic tone seeming peculiarly at home amongst the torn and shredded train remnants.
‘I thought we might see them here,’ said Daniel, nodding.
‘Because this never happens?’ asked Lillian, pointedly.
‘Yes.’ And Daniel started to draw away, signalling to a subordinate nearby to take over supervising Lillian.
‘Any news on the drivers?’ Lillian pressed further, halting Daniel’s retreat. He paused for a moment, perhaps considering if it was wise to divulge something, she thought. And then she was sure. Yes, he was deciding whether or not to tell her something important. He clocked the look on her face and she fancied that he looked a little caught out.
‘They…’ he hesitated for an instant. ‘They both ejected. They’re safe. In shock, but…’ He trailed off as he hurried away, calling out to some medics tending to an injured passenger. Lillian filmed him as he was engulfed by the milling masses of emergency workers, wounded, dead and dying. She carried on, unflinching, even as Daniel’s subordinate put a firm, gloved hand on her shoulder.
‘OK, that’s it,’ she heard his muffled voice say, through another visor. She instantly turned to speak to him, but he clearly knew what was coming. ‘No,’ he said, firmly. ‘You go back up to the top.’
‘Will the Dalek be coming over here?’ Lillian asked. They both glanced round. It had now disappeared, over the other side of the wreckage.
Daniel’s subordinate gave her a ‘you must be joking’ look. ‘When was the last time you saw a Dalek give an interview?’ he asked, evidently not expecting an answer, as he pushed her up the incline, towards the rest of the onlookers.
It was a fair point, she thought. She had never seen a Dalek interviewed for holo-television.
As she reached the top of the incline, constantly recording the blank, drained faces of the onlookers, she heard, just for a moment, incoherent, muffled, grating echoes from the other side of the crash site. The Dalek was talking, but Lillian doubted she would ever find out what it was saying or to whom it was speaking.
On the other side of the wreckage, well shielded from the sights and sounds of the rescue operations, the Dalek waited, motionless. A security guard walked up to it, obediently, presenting it with a small, black sphere.
‘The journey recorder,’ said the guard, a little nervously.
Before the guard could hand the sphere over, some force from within the suction cup at the end of the longest of the Dalek’s metallic protuberances came into play. It sucked the sphere into contact with the cup. There was a faint, electronic, tingling vibration. Not so much a sound as a tangible needling of the air. The guard winced a little. The vibration stopped.
The bronze dome at the top of the Dalek swivelled slightly, its mechanisms purring with cool precision. The eyestalk twitched. The blue iris on the outward-facing edge of the black ball of the lens attachment seemed to squint with a narrowing disdain.
‘Where is the driver of this train?’ demanded the Dalek. ‘You said you would bring him to me.’
‘He’s on his way. He’s… he’s in… in shock,’ the guard found himself stammering to explain. There was something about the Dalek that made him feel he was under suspicion. ‘He’s had a terrible… Er, the medics are…’
‘Where is he?’ the Dalek demanded again, a fierce note of anger invading its electronic articulation.
The guard couldn’t think of anything else to say. He merely stared at the Dalek, ideas for words choking in his throat; veins beginning to stand out around his increasingly watering eyes.
The silence was broken by the sphere suddenly detaching from the Dalek’s sucker cup. It thudded onto the hard, baked soil, discarded. The guard started to kneel to pick it up.
‘Leave it there!’ commanded the Dalek, now swivelling its dome violently; tilting its eyestalk up and down impatiently.
Two medics arrived, gently ushering a shocked-looking young man forward.
‘I’m afraid Mr Sezman is suffering from shock,’ explained one of the medics.
The Dalek repositioned its eyestalk, focusing on the medic. It edged forwards a little, emitting a truncated metallic whine as it did so. The medic nearly stumbled backwards at this, but stood his ground.
‘He has to go to hospital immediately,’ he explained further.
The Dalek paused for a few moments, surveying the small group of four humans. Mr Sezman, the driver, swayed a little. One of his knees appeared to buckle under his own weight. The medics quickly strengthened their grip on his arms to support him.
But before they could fully straighten Mr Sezman up, a harsh burst of energy emitted from the shortest of the Dalek’s metal attachments. Funnelling towards them in a focused beam, the discharge burst around them all, burning bright, crackling and spitting like a shower of ice on white hot metal. All four of them contorted in terrible, silent agony for an instant, their jagged forms flickering painfully, caught in a photo-negative image, blue-tinged and merciless; so bright their skeletons bleached through it. Then the harsh light and sound faded fast as their lifeless bodies fell to the ground.
Unconcerned, the Dalek immediately took off; a directly vertical course at high speed, leaving its victims to be found amongst the wreckage. Unexplained deaths, to be referred to the Dalek authorities for investigation…
An investigation that would never happen.
Sunlight 349 is one of countless Dalek Foundation worlds, planets created to house billions suffering from economic hardship. The Doctor arrives at Sunlight 349, suspicious of any world where the Daleks are apparently a force for good – and determined to find out the truth. The Doctor knows they have a far more sinister plan – but how can he convince those who have lived under the benevolence of the Daleks for a generation?
But convince them he must, and soon. For on another Foundation planet, archaeologists have unearthed the most dangerous technology in the universe...
Nicholas Briggs has been a prolific Doctor Who contributor since 1999, when he began work on the Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas, for which he has written and directed extensively and is now Executive Producer. Nick is also an actor, and since Doctor Who’s return to television in 2005, he’s worked on set with all three of the new Doctors as the voice of the Daleks (also providing the voice of the Cybermen, and other aliens). Having spent most of his life in London, Nick now lives in Dorset with his wife and son, where he hopes life will be more peaceful... But, so far, London keeps dragging him back.
Whirling through the Vortex, dwarfed by the infinities of eternity and a limitless universe, a small, blue, cuboid object, with a glowing light atop and windows like white, squarish eyes squinting out into a dizzying, kaleidoscopic tunnel, propelled itself ever onwards.
It was the TARDIS, space-time craft of that most mysterious citizen of the universe, the Doctor. Inside that sturdy, blue exterior, exactly engineered to resemble a twentieth-century London police box’s modest dimensions, there was an Aladdin’s Cave of impossibly advanced technology and seemingly endless accommodation.
At its heart was the control room. Here, on top of a glass-floored platform sat the TARDIS’s multi-sided console. Dancing around it with a fevered intensity, punctuated by spectacularly carefree flourishes and pirouettes, was the Doctor himself. Making adjustments, tweaking an intricate imbalance here, absently flicking a switch or two there, he always took great pride in operating his beloved time and space machine. They had been together for many lifetimes. Many Earthly companions had come and gone, but the Doctor and the TARDIS… they were constants in each other’s lives.
His life’s work had been the accidental but well-meaning interference in the lives of others. He had illegally set off into the universe, defying the laws of his now extinct people, the Time Lords, because he wanted to explore… to seek out… anything and everything.
He had experienced the extremes of existence. There had been so much terror, so much delight… and everything in between.
He had made so many friends, fought as many enemies. There had been beginnings and ends, joyous meetings, sad farewells. And it was all etched across the face of this man who had had many faces. The one, unchanging facet of his appearance – the scope of his lives and deeds, there in his eyes. There, in the warmth of his ancient smile.
Even now, with the Doctor in his most outwardly youthful body, more than ever, there was something of the ancient about him. There was a weariness… Perhaps even a growing awareness of his place in all things, that made him concerned about the extent of the consequences of his wanderings.
Travelling alone now, he was intending to keep a low profile in the tracks of eternity. Those were his avowed, good intentions.
But the Doctor’s Achilles heel was his curiosity.
Standing back from the console, exuding that pride in his own, latest adjustments, he caught sight of himself in the glass column ascending from the centre of the hexagonal console. The unmistakable signs of his ship’s power were rising and falling encouragingly inside the glass. He beamed a broad smile at himself, tweaked his bow tie and smoothed down his tweed jacket.
‘Somewhere nice and quiet, I think,’ he said to his reflection. He twiddled his fingers, like a safe-cracker about to unlock a fortune. But before he could set a new course, something on one of the festooned hexagon’s opposite surfaces bleeped.
A single, faint bleep. Then another. And another, until the bleeping became insistent, bordering on the downright irritating.
The Doctor had already circled the console and was anxiously inspecting the source of the bleeping. A blinking amber light. He frowned and tapped it. The bleeping and blinking continued.
‘Are you sure, old girl?’ he whispered, moving his ancient, youthful face closer and closer to the amber light. This was not a light he had ever thought to see blinking again. Then, suddenly, it stopped. No blinking. No bleeping.
‘Oh,’ said the Doctor. He felt a sudden pang of sadness; but it was only momentary, because the silence was soon broken by a very distinct tapping on the outer side of the TARDIS’s wooden doors. Something was outside, in the surging Vortex, tapping on the TARDIS’s outer dimensions.
Checking that the ship’s force field was in place, the Doctor dashed from the console, down the steps to the rather quaint wooden doors set into the other-worldly architecture of the control room. He flung the doors open, and there, hovering before him was a small white, glowing cube.
‘Oh, you’re just a baby one, aren’t you?’ he said, beaming with his unique mix of surprise, delight and enthusiasm. In an instant, he had snatched the cube into his hands, thrown the doors shut and dashed back up the stairs to the controls. He held the cube in the light from the console, squinting, intrigued.
In dire emergencies, his people had used these strange, telepathic cubes to send messages. He had used one himself, many lifetimes ago – and not so long ago, he had been lured into a trap by one. But this little ‘fellow’ was a slightly different kettle of fish, he thought.
It was very small. About half the size of your standard Time Lord cube.
‘Looks like something I might have knocked up in a hurry,’ he said to himself. ‘Ah!’
And the thought hit him.
Or rather… the question. Was this one of those moments when something from his future had rocketed back into his past?
Time travel was fraught with these difficulties. He had no way of telling when and where the cube had come from just by looking at it. Best to press ahead and find out what this little messenger had to say to him, he thought.
Crouching down on the floor, with all the inelegance of a recently born gazelle, the Doctor placed the cube in front of him and began to concentrate his whole mind upon it. Would it work, he wondered? If it did, it would be a sure sign that he had indeed sent the message to himself.
At that precise moment, the cube unlocked itself and a fizz of sparkling, white energy rose from it. As the tiny walls fell gracefully apart and the cloud of particles dissipated, the Doctor’s mind was filled with the impression of something…
Something…
He couldn’t quite articulate the thought in his mind. All he knew was, he had to go to the console. He placed the opened pieces of the cube into his jacket pocket and jumped to his feet. His hands set to work, rapidly adjusting coordinates. The TARDIS was quick to respond, her engines groaning reassuringly. Moments later, they thudded to a halt.
The Doctor breathed a sigh of satisfaction. He patted the console and smiled.
‘Clever old thing. Well done.’
He pulled the console’s screen towards him, peering at the whirl of symbols and graphics on it. He’d never been here before, he knew that. But he had heard the name of the place.
‘The planet Gethria,’ he mouthed to himself.
All the readings showed the planet could support a wide range of life forms, so he decided to go outside, pausing only briefly to activate the wall scanner to see what he could expect to be greeted with. He frowned as he saw the barren, desert landscape and some kind of gigantic, ancient stone monument. Hard, grey, granite-like. Just below it, there was a small gathering of humanoids.
‘Bound to be friendly,’ he muttered, half-suspecting his optimism might be misplaced. But the same kind of compulsion that had led him to set the coordinates for Gethria seemed to be driving him now. He was possessed of a feeling that he couldn’t quite understand. He just knew he must set foot on this world.
The TARDIS had landed about half a mile away from the monument. This gave the Doctor plenty of time to survey the group of humanoids as he approached over the crumbling, dry surface of Gethria. He made no attempt to hide himself. He could, for example, have darted between rocky outcrops, alternately hiding and dashing for cover; but there was really no need, he thought.
The closer he got to the gathering, the more it became apparent to the Doctor that these people were not the slightest bit interested in anything other than whatever it was directly in front of them. He couldn’t see what that was for now; but they were all staring down at it.
As he got ever closer, some indistinct words drifted across to him on the dry, dusty breeze. Although he couldn’t quite make them out, they sounded sombre and respectful in tone.
And then, before he had reached the gathering, as if responding to some unspoken signal, the humanoids began to depart, walking slowly, heads bowed, around the monument, heading off in the opposite direction to the Doctor. He felt almost compelled to stop, finding himself instinctively bowing his own head, as if he were attending…
A funeral. That was it. It was a funeral. Yes. The dappled grey of the long, hooded cloaks these people were wearing… That was a popular form of funeral attire in… Oh, somewhere in the universe the Doctor had long forgotten about.
And there was the grave. Right where they had all been standing. It had a rather beautiful but stark, engraved, orange headstone – evidently imported from far away. Embedded in the curve of its upper edge were half a dozen small items, encased in glass or something very similar, like fragments of memory caught in clear amber. As with the dappled grey cloaks, the Doctor remembered, the encasing of a person’s chosen mementoes in a gravestone was an age-old tradition in many parts of the cosmos.
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.