Doctor Who_ War Of The Daleks Part 22

'The Dalek Prime has sabotaged the killcruisers,' the Black Dalek reported. 'The captured ship was destroyed before it could fire on the tower.'

'We must destroy the tower!' Davros exclaimed. 'The Dalek Prime is there, along with the heart of his surveillance network. Once that is down, the loyalists will be split. Only then can we hope to defeat them! Order all forces to focus their attacks on the tower.'

'The unit at the power station is under a.s.sault,' the Black Dalek announced. 'They are unable to pull back.'

'Then tell them to fight and die there!' Davros cried. 'We need more troops to attack the tower.'

'All available units are being brought in,' the Black Dalek informed him. 'The battle will continue.' It paused. 'Our margin for success has been reduced.'

'Reduced, perhaps,' Davros growled. 'But not destroyed. We shall win through! It is my destiny to lead the Daleks to the complete conquest of the entire galaxy! I shall succeed!'

Chayn stared about her in awe. 'This is your s.p.a.ceship?' she asked.

'And home,' the Doctor added, beaming with pride. 'Do you like it?'

'Like it?' She turned to stare about the room. 'It's astonishing! How could I not like it?' She took in the central console, with the linkage up into the high ceiling. That was clearly where the craft was controlled. To one side were racks and racks of books; clearly the Doctor enjoyed reading. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of clocks cl.u.s.tered along one wall, and filing cabinets containing who-knew-what. Down the side opposite the library section was a row of columns that seemed very antique and out of place. It was an astonishing ship.

Sam leaned closer and added, 'This is just the control room. If you've a couple of years to spare, you might want to look at the rest of the ship.'

'It's too much to take in,' Chayn answered. She moved to the console, staring at the antique-looking controls. 'Very stylish,' she said with approval. 'And clearly a lot more sophisticated than it appears.'

'Yes,' agreed the Doctor. 'But machinery always seems more personable if it has a little whimsy, don't you feel?'

'Definitely,' Chayn agreed, somewhat breathlessly. 'So, what do we do in here?'

'Scan the Thal ship,' the Doctor replied, powering up the console. 'The Daleks couldn't have affected my machinery; it's far too sophisticated for them to muck about with. Besides which, they can't get into the TARDIS.'

'Except you dismantled the lock,' Sam pointed out. 'Anyone could push that door open. I told you it was a bad idea.'

'I'll fix it,' the Doctor promised. He had started to power up the machinery, and Chayn watched in fascination. She was a pretty decent engineer, but she didn't have a clue as to what most of the equipment in this TARDIS was for. 'Starting the scan... now.' He pressed home a lever that sighed. 'It should just take a moment or two.' He gave Chayn another delighted smile. 'I thought you'd like the old girl,' he said happily.

'The old girl is wonderful,' Chayn informed him. 'I'd love to take her apart to see how she functions.'

'Not you, too,' Sam complained. 'It's bad enough when the Doctor does it.'

There was a soft chime from the console, and the Doctor glanced down. 'Ah...' He suddenly looked rather worried.

'What? You've found it?' Sam asked, concerned.

'Yes,' he agreed slowly. He glanced at Chayn. 'The TARDIS interior is made possible because the Time Lords have mastered transdimensional engineering. Fitting big things into tiny packages. The Daleks can do something similar a lot cruder, taking a lot more power and with inherent instabilities. But they can do it. And they have have done it. They've hidden something inside this ship's storage bay, camouflaged by routine equipment.' done it. They've hidden something inside this ship's storage bay, camouflaged by routine equipment.'

'But what is it?' Chayn asked. 'A bomb?'

'No.' The Doctor looked terribly serious. 'Worse than that. It's the Odysseus Stratagem.' When he realised that they were both staring at him uncomprehendingly, he explained, 'The Trojan Horse. The Daleks have hidden a complete factory ship inside this craft. Potentially an entire army of Daleks. That's what we're taking back to Thal s.p.a.ce!'

CHAPTER 12.

CHECKMATE.

Sam stared at the Doctor. 'That doesn't sound good' was all she could say.

'It isn't,' he informed her. He shook his head. 'It's a brilliant idea, I'll have to say that. Have one of your enemies unwittingly transport away from Skaro a factory capable of turning out a Dalek army. Once it reaches its target, it begins operations and starts churning out fresh Daleks to begin their wars all over again when everyone a.s.sumes that they're dead. Brilliant, and very, very nasty.'

'So what are we going to do about it?' Chayn asked.

'Get rid of it,' the Doctor said simply. 'Toss it overboard.'

'Doctor,' Sam pointed out, 'it weighs too much to chuck it out of an airlock.'

'Well, that's one idea,' he admitted. 'I had thought that rigging the TARDIS up to dump it into the s.p.a.ce-time vortex might be a trifle more effective, to be honest.' He gave Chayn a wide grin. 'I'd appreciate some help.'

'Of course, Doctor,' the engineer agreed. 'I'd be delighted.'

'Good. Oh, Sam.' The Doctor turned to her. 'You'd better go and tell Ayaka that under no circ.u.mstances is she to jump to light speed. That'll trigger the awakening of the capsule. And dropping out of light speed at the other end of the journey finishes the job. As long as we're running slow, we're reasonably safe.'

'Reasonably?' Sam repeated.

He shrugged. 'It's the Daleks we're dealing with here, Sam. They have a tendency to b.o.o.by-trap everything as a matter of course. I'm sure we'll discover a few surprises as we work.'

'Wonderful,' Sam muttered. Leaving them to begin their work, she trotted to the doors. Then she hurried down the corridor towards the bridge.

The battle for the power room was winding down. The Gold Dalek's forces were slowly containing and annihilating Davros's fighters. The surrounding corridors were ablaze with Dalek sh.e.l.ls and incendiary devices. Sections of the walls had been destroyed, and rubble was littered everywhere. Scanning for the low-frequency recognition signal of Davros's troops, the Gold Dalek detected the final three. It had its forces encircle the rebels, and then destroyed them in coruscating electronic fire.

'The power room has been secured,' it reported back to the Dalek Prime. 'The corridors have been cleansed. No interruption of power has occurred.'

In the control room, the Dalek Prime received this news with satisfaction. Davros's forces in both the power complex and the s.p.a.ceport had now been exterminated. All through the city, battles were still raging, but Davros's forces were slowly, yet certainly, being decimated. Only one reasonably large grouping was now left the one escorting Davros. They were presumably seeking some safe retreat. But there was no safe retreat for Davros.

The war was almost over, and Davros was about to lose.

And then...

Davros was fuming quietly to himself. His third attack force had now been wiped out. They had all failed him, the s.p.a.ceport, the control room, and the power room were all still under the control of the Dalek Prime. All that was left to him was the force of a hundred or so Daleks surrounding him. He scanned the city for further signals from those Daleks loyal to him. Perhaps another hundred, as opposed to several thousand loyal to the Dalek Prime.

Fighting had been intense, and everywhere they went was scattered with wreckage and burnt-out casings. Thousands of Daleks had so far died in this battle. Davros felt no concern about that. It was what the Daleks were designed for, battle and death. They had achieved their purpose. But all of their deaths meant nothing if he was still not in power. There still had to be a way to salvage the situation. There had to be.

As they moved through an apparently deserted section of the city, past more ruins, doors all about the square suddenly slid open to reveal Daleks waiting for them. The doors through which they had entered crashed shut.

It had been a trap, after all! Davros's Daleks opened fire immediately, and the loyalists returned the stream of death.

The final battle, Davros realised, had just begun.

When Sam had delivered her message, Ayaka nodded. 'It is as the Doctor feared. The Daleks had hoped to make us their unwitting allies.' She gave Sam a compa.s.sionate stare. 'Tell the Doctor that if he cannot remove the Dalek construction, I will detonate the ship. Is it possible for his machine to take my crew to safety?'

'Of course,' Sam answered. 'We wouldn't even be crowded.'

'Good. Then Cathbad and I will prepare in case that eventuality is necessary.' Ayaka turned back to her work.

Sam left the bridge and headed back to the TARDIS. It was funny, really, but she had changed her mind completely about Ayaka. She thought of the Thal as a kind of homicidal older sister, really.

Back in the TARDIS, she saw that there were now long connecting cables trailing from the console towards the main doors. 'Looking for a jump-start?' she joked.

'Actually, yes,' Chayn said from the floor, where she was spot-soldering connections to increase the length. 'That's exactly what the Doctor's planning on doing. He wants to connect the TARDIS to the Dalek factory ship and then use the TARDIS to push the Daleks into the vortex.'

'And then what?' Sam asked. All this technical stuff was way over her head.

'I don't know,' Chayn admitted. 'From the way that the Doctor describes the vortex, it's a sort of maelstrom of destructive energies. Ships like the TARDIS can navigate there well enough, but the stresses will do all sorts of unpleasant things to the factory ship. The Doctor didn't have time to explain it all.'

'Well, I hope it rips it apart,' Sam said with satisfaction. 'I can't think of any better candidates for being ripped apart than the Daleks.'

Chayn grinned. 'You've changed your tune a bit,' she observed. 'You were the anti-war one here when all this started.'

'I know.' Sam collapsed on the floor beside Chayn. She realised that she was still holding onto the stupid rifle. 'It's so easy to say that war's wrong and should be stopped when you're not the one at war. It's just not that simple, is it?'

'No,' agreed Chayn. 'It isn't. Oh, sometimes it is. Sometimes you can tell the good guys and the bad guys apart. The big problem is that war tends to make everyone equal. And usually at a very low level. You start out thinking that the other side is evil, and that they're baby-killers and rapists and sc.u.m, and that you'll never sink that low yourself. Then you find that they've fire-bombed one of your cities, and the only retaliation is to fire-bomb one of theirs.' Chayn stared at Sam, her eyes haunted. 'My father told me before he died that he wished he'd done something else anything else rather than fight for a living. He couldn't forget all of the people he'd hurt and killed.' She gave a short, barking laugh. 'The ironic thing was that he never realised that my mother and I were two of his victims, too.'

Their musings were interrupted by the Doctor bustling out of the TARDIS, smiling. 'Ready, Chayn?'

'Ready,' she agreed. Taking the leads from him, she soldered them to her own rig. 'Right, that should do it.'

'Let's see, shall we?' The Doctor hurried over to the console.

The two cables snaked under the mushroom panel and into the innards of the TARDIS. He began to flick switches, carefully studying one of the screens. Chayn had her own eyes glued to a second. Feeling useless once again, Sam hung back slightly, watching them.

'Powering up,' the Doctor murmured, watching the grid rise. 'Ready to transfer energy to the vortex shift...'

A sudden thought struck Sam. 'Doctor?' she said hesitantly. 'The Dalek Prime knew you were likely to be back aboard this ship, didn't he?'

The Doctor's hands paused in mid-motion. 'Yes,' he agreed slowly.

'And he must know roughly what the TARDIS is capable of, surely?'

The Doctor's eyes opened wide. 'He'd be a fool not to.' Grimacing, he abandoned what he was doing and started a diagnostic running. 'Aha! Sam, you're a genius! There's a little subroutine in the factory ship for just this eventuality. If I try to tap it into the vortex, the power will feed back and blast this room there instead. Sneaky...'

'Can you get around it?' Chayn asked.

'Yes,' the Doctor a.s.sured her. 'But if Sam hadn't been even more suspicious than I am, we'd have been in serious trouble.' He fiddled with the equipment again, punching in new codes. 'There we go, that will subvert the subroutine, so it feeds off itself.' He grinned. 'And another quick check to make sure there are no more little surprises waiting for us.' He shook his head. 'That was the last trick. So...' He bent over the controls again, and shoved home the final levers.

The time rotor gave its familiar howl, but the TARDIS didn't move. Instead, the cables began to glow, as power flowed from the console and down to the Dalek stowaway.

'It's working,' Chayn reported. 'Power couplings are holding firm.'

'And there it goes,' the Doctor said, with a smug expression. 'The factory ship is entering the vortex now. The Thal ship is clean.' He cut the power, and the rotor fell silent. 'Let's reel these in, shall we?' He started to pull on the wiring.

'That's it?' Sam asked. 'Flick a few switches, and the Daleks are defeated? The factory ship's destroyed?'

'Yes and no,' he answered, jerking on the wires, as Sam and Chayn helped. 'Yes, the Daleks are defeated. For the time being. And no, the factory ship's not destroyed exactly. I rather think it's just been flung back through interst.i.tial time and s.p.a.ce.'

Chayn stared at him in horror. 'Then we've just sent it somewhere else! We've not solved the problem at all!'

'Chayn, in another time, and another place... I think I already have,' said the Doctor. 'Believe me. Please.'

Chayn almost collapsed. 'I do,' she admitted.

The battle raged all about Davros. He fumed, angry weaponless and impotent. His circuitry had been disabled by the Dalek Prime's scientists when he had arrived on Skaro. All he could do was to watch and curse as his followers were exterminated one by one.

The Dalek Prime's squad moved in. Daleks on both sides were being destroyed all around the battle zone, but the loyalists were still pouring in. Now that Davros's other thrusts had been defeated, more troops could be spared for this last offensive.

Davros winced as the battered Black Dalek beside him finally took several direct hits at once and then exploded. Other Daleks died, and the enveloping circle closed in. Finally, only Davros was left alive. Three Gold and two Black Daleks had him surrounded, their guns at the ready. Davros realised that he had finally been defeated. His power play had come to nothing.

'Do as you will,' he challenged them. 'Exterminate me! Seal your own sterile future! Without me, you are nothing!'

'You are not to be exterminated,' one of the Gold Daleks declared. 'You will accompany us. Your madness has run its course. The Dalek race has been purged of your insanity. We who are left are of one mind. You will see this, and then die.' It moved, allowing him an opening through which to proceed. With no other option, Davros moved as he was bidden.

The Dalek Prime was waiting for him in the matter-transfer chamber. His eye stalk surveyed him coldly. 'You have lost, Davros,' he stated. 'Your folly has taken part of the Dalek race with you. But we who survive are stronger for it. All that remains is to finally destroy you.'