Doctor Who: Engines of War (2 page)

She sensed movement in the ruins, and a quick glance told her that Finch was already on the move, dashing from cover to cover to draw the Dalek’s attention. The Dalek sensed it, too, and its eyestalk swivelled in Finch’s direction.

‘Cease! Show yourself! Surrender and you will not be ex-ter-min-ated.’ The Dalek’s harsh, metallic rasp sent a shiver down Cinder’s spine as it echoed along the otherwise empty road. She watched for Finch, trying to discern him in the ruins, to anticipate his next move. There was no chance he’d obey the Dalek’s order – even if it wasn’t lying, extermination had to be a better alternative to being enslaved by these monsters.

There! She saw him move again, near to the remains of a burnt-out homestead, and the Dalek swivelled, letting off three short, successive blasts with its weapon. The high-pitched wail of the energy discharge was near deafening. There was a flash of intense white light, followed by the crump of an explosion, and the remains of a damaged wall toppled into a heap, close to where Finch had been hiding only seconds before. Smoke curled lazily from the ruins in the still air.

‘Seek. Locate. Destroy!’ ordered the Dalek. ‘Find the human and ex-ter-min-ate.’

‘We obey,’ chorused the Degradations in their warbling, synthetic voices. The two Gliders rose up on spears of light, while the others fanned out, covering the ruins with their weapons.

The patrol had separated, and Cinder saw her chance. She pushed herself up onto her knees, hefting the Dalek weapon to her shoulder and sighting along the length of the notched barrel. She drew a bead on the head of the Degradation with the cannon, took a deep breath, and fired.

The weapon issued a short, powerful blast of energy, and the force of its discharge almost sent her reeling. She kept her shoulder locked in position, steadying herself. The air filled with the stench of burning ozone.

Her aim was true, and the energy beam lanced across the mutant’s bronze carapace, scoring a deep, black furrow and detonating one of its radiation valves. It did not, however, have the desired effect of causing its head to explode in spectacular fashion, instead eliciting an altogether more unwelcome response.

‘Under attack! Under attack!’ bellowed the Degradation, rotating its head a full 180 degrees to scan the top of the escarpment. ‘Human female armed with Dalek neutraliser. Exterminate! Exterminate!’

Panicked, Cinder glanced at the gun in her hands. What had gone wrong? She’d never known a Dalek to survive an energy blast from one of its own weapons. Did this new kind of mutant have specially reinforced armour? Whatever the case, all she’d succeeded in doing was broadcasting her own location.

She had to act quickly, take out the leader. She twisted, raising the gun and closing her left eye, drawing a line of sight on the Dalek as it shifted its own bulk around, preparing to return fire. She squeezed the makeshift trigger and the weapon spat another bolt of searing energy.

The shot found its mark, striking the Dalek just beneath the eyestalk. The casing detonated with a satisfying crack, rupturing the sensor grilles and spilling the biomass of the dead Kaled inside. Flames licked at the edges of the ragged wound as green flesh bubbled and popped, oozing out with a grotesque hiss.

Cinder didn’t have time to celebrate, however, as the egg-shaped Degradation opened fire in response. Its four weapons barked in quick succession, like chattering artillery guns, churning up the impacted loam along the top of the escarpment. She threw herself backwards, rolling for cover, but it was too late – the impact had destabilised the ground, and the edge of the escarpment collapsed in a crashing landslide of mud and soil.

Cinder felt the world give way beneath her. She screamed, clutching on to her gun for all she was worth, as she tumbled head over heels towards the assembled Degradations below.

Chapter Two

High above Moldox, a blue box folded into reality, sliding effortlessly out of the Time Vortex. It seemed incongruous, here on the outer edges of the Tantalus Spiral, a relic from ancient Earth that had fallen through time and space, only to appear here, its domed light blinking wildly as it returned to corporeal form. If sound had carried in space, its appearance would have been accompanied by a laboured, grating wheeze, but instead, there was only silence.

The arrival of this anachronistic object did not, however, go unnoticed, and the appearance of the TARDIS flashed up warning sigils on a thousand Dalek control panels. Dalek saucers stirred into action, gliding through the void to adopt combat formations, lights stuttering as they powered up to full readiness.

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor – or rather, the Time Lord who had, before now, lived many lives under that name – rotated a dial and stepped back from the console. He folded his hands behind his back, and waited.

Around him, the roundels on the walls glowed with a faint luminescence, causing the craggy lines of his face to be picked out in shadow: the map of a hundred years or more, worn thin through conflict and weariness.

The central column burred gently as it rose and fell, as if the machine was somehow breathing, in and out, in and out. The thought was comforting. It meant he was not alone. He sighed, and glanced up at the star field being projected through the de-opaqued ceiling of the console room.

Above him sat the ethereal form of the Tantalus Eye.

The Eye was an anomaly, a vast fold in space-time; an impossible structure that had no right to exist, and yet, nevertheless, did. How it had formed, whether it was natural or engineered – no one had ever been able to discern. All that the Doctor knew was that it predated the Time Lords, and that Omega, the great engineer, in those first, halcyon days of the Time Lord Diaspora, had written of the Eye and its many obtuse secrets – secrets that it still held to this day.

From this far out, on the edge of the Spiral, it had the appearance of an immense, gaseous body, a swirling human eye, encircled by a helix of inhabited worlds. It was pricked with the fading light of dying giants and the kernels of new, hungry stars, freshly reborn in an endless cycle of death of and resurrection; celestial bodies trapped within its event horizon and the influence of its temporal murmurations.

To the Doctor, it was utterly breathtaking. He had come here often in his other lives – particularly his fourth and his eighth, those of a more romantic persuasion – although now those days were like distant memories, dreams that had happened to somebody else. Now, there was nothing but the War. It had consumed him, remade him into something new. A warrior.

Just like the Doctor, the War had changed the Tantalus Spiral, too. Once a peaceful haven, it was now blighted by the Dalek occupation. It had become a war zone, like much of the universe – a staging post from which the Daleks could continue their crusade to populate eternity with their progenitors and wage their ceaseless campaign against the Time Lords.

That was why the Doctor had come to the Spiral – the Daleks were massing here, and he needed to get a measure of their strength.

There was one simple and effective way to do just that.

‘Right then,’ he growled. ‘Come and get me.’

Above the TARDIS, the Dalek saucers began to converge. They were not yet in range for their energy weapons, but the Doctor knew that at any moment he could expect a barrage. He stepped forward and took the controls once again.

‘Wait for it,’ he mumbled to himself. ‘Wait for just the right moment…’

He flicked a switch and opened the communication channel. A hundred or more Dalek voices were chanting in a riotous cacophony. Their words were barely discernible, but he knew very well what they were saying: ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ Even now, the sound of it made his skin crawl.

They were getting closer. Still, the Doctor waited.

The lead saucer finally moved within range, scudding overhead.

‘Now!’ bellowed the Doctor at the top of his lungs, cranking a lever forward and gripping the edges of the console so that his knuckles turned white with the strain.

The TARDIS shot straight up like a rocket. It caught the saucer completely unaware, colliding with its dome-encrusted belly and ripping through at an immense velocity, erupting through the top of the ship and spinning off, twisting on its axis.

The electrics inside the saucer fizzed and popped, visible through the ragged hole. It listed, spinning out of control, its weapons blazing indiscriminately. One energy beam took out a neighbouring saucer, while the damaged ship itself went spinning into another, which proved too slow to take evasive action.

On his monitors, the Doctor watched the shells of damaged Daleks drifting away motionless into the void as the ships themselves burned up.

‘That’s done it, old girl,’ he said, manipulating the controls once again to swing the TARDIS out of the path of another energy weapon. The Dalek saucers shifted like a flock of birds, swooping after him, their cannons spitting death all around him. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Follow me…’

Like the pilot of a stunt aeroplane – which he’d made a point of watching with the Brigadier, back in his UNIT days on Earth – the Doctor ducked and weaved the TARDIS, left, right, up, down, looping across the void, leading the Daleks on a merry chase, but always staying one step ahead of their guns.

All the while, the baleful glare of the Eye regarded them impassively.

‘Right, isn’t it about time…’ The Doctor broke off, grinning, as a hundred or more Battle TARDISes phased out of the Vortex behind the Dalek fleet. ‘Now we’ve got you,’ he crowed, rotating a handle and dipping the TARDIS, bringing it back around on itself so that he could zip underneath the oncoming wave of Dalek saucers to join his comrades.

Weapons transmuted from the outer skin of the Battle TARDISes – plain, white lozenges with an outer shell of living metal that could morph into shields, or any number of predetermined gun emplacements. The TARDISes scattered, shooting off in a hundred different directions as the Daleks attempted to reverse their course, coming about to face the enemy who had so easily outflanked them.

Time torpedoes launched in a wave, a score of them finding their mark and freezing their targets, trapping them in a temporal holding pattern, a locked second from which the saucers could not escape. The Dalek ships bloomed into silent balls of flame as the Time Lords followed up with a volley of explosive rounds.

The Daleks weren’t backing down, however, and as the Doctor’s TARDIS burst through the surface of another saucer, sending it spinning toward one of the planets below, they managed to set loose their own first volley, detonating TARDISes with every strike.

The Doctor watched as the dying time ships blossomed, their interior dimensions folding out into reality, unfurling like violent flowers to swell to their true size before burning up in the vacuum. His fingers danced across the controls and the TARDIS danced away, just as the Dalek ships spat a second volley.

‘Phase!’ he bellowed over the communications rig, and the Time Lords did as he commanded, their TARDISes blinking suddenly out of existence. They appeared again a moment later, having leapt two seconds into the future to avoid the crackling beams of the Dalek weapons, which faded away harmlessly into space.

Their return volley was far more effective, detonating countless Dalek saucers.

‘Retreat! Retreat!’ The chorus of Dalek voices, now diminished but still audible in the background, had changed. They were attempting to regroup, pulling back toward the Eye and using the wreckage of their fallen brethren as cover.

‘We’ve got them on the run, Doctor!’ called a satisfied female voice over the comm-link.

‘Stay with them!’ he replied. ‘Press the advantage.’

The Time Lords, now outnumbering the Dalek vessels two-to-one, did precisely that, surging forward, some going high, others going low, trapping the retreating Daleks between them.

The time torpedoes did their work, stuttering the Dalek retreat, and within seconds, space above the Tantalus Eye was filled with the wreckage of the remaining Dalek fleet.

‘Well done, Doctor,’ said the woman on the comm-link. She sounded jubilant. This was Captain Preda, Commander of the Fifth Time Lord Battle Fleet. ‘We led them on a merry dance indeed.’

‘Don’t count your victories too soon, Preda,’ replied the Doctor, his tone grim. ‘I’m not sure it’s over yet. There could be more of them, lurking in the shadow of those planets.’

‘Then let’s take a look,’ said Preda. The comm-link buzzed off, and the Battle TARDISes, assembling themselves into a spearhead formation, slid closer toward the Tantalus Eye.

Warily, the Doctor fell in behind them, keeping an eye on his monitors.

The ambush came without warning. There was no alarm, no indication that anything was awry, that they’d triggered some sort of trap. One second there was nothing, the next an armada of Dalek stealth ships had blinked out of the Vortex.

The Doctor had seen these ships only a handful of times before – sleek, ovoid vessels of the purest black, devoid of the usual winking lights that typically marked a Dalek saucer, and twice as dangerous. They were a recent and unwelcome development. They were said to sit in the Time Vortex like spiders at the heart of a web, detecting the vibrations of passing TARDISes. Only then would they make themselves known, shimmering into existence to catch the Time Lords unaware.

It was elegant and deadly and – the Doctor realised – Preda and her fleet had just been caught in their web.

The Time Lords had no time to react. Not a single one was able to dematerialise before the Dalek weapons cracked them open like tin cans, spilling their insides into the cold vacuum of space.

The Doctor roared, slamming his fists into the controls and sending the TARDIS spinning sideways in an evasive action that saved his life. Nevertheless, the TARDIS caught a glancing blow on her right flank and was sent into a wild spin. With the stabilisers unable to compensate, the Doctor slammed to the floor, rolling off the central dais as the ship juddered.

The TARDIS, out of control, hurtled headlong toward one of the planets below.