Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks (4 page)

‘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 on to 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 topped 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 Hand 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.’

The stairs twisted down into an old boiler room. Ace could see through gaps in the surrounding wall tangles of piping and a huge boiler painted a flaking cream. An alien machine lay in a cleared space, backed against the grimy wall. It consisted of a small dais with two upright cabinets with severe alien lines on either side.

Ace immediately jumped onto the dais. ‘This is some severe technology,’ she said gleefully.

The Doctor pulled her off the dais and opened the nearest cabinet. Inside, matt black boxes nested in fibre optic connections.

‘Very elegant, very advanced – flux circuit elements.’

‘What does it do?’

‘It’s a transmat – a matter transmitter – but transmitting from where?’ He carefully traced the connections to the power regulator.

Ace realized she could hear a low threshold hum. She looked around the cellar for its source before focusing suspiciously on the dais. Its surface was definitely beginning to glow.

‘Professor?’

‘Range of about three hundred kilometres.’

The glow began to elongate upwards, forming a jelly mould shape one and a half metres high. Colours shot across its surface.

‘Professor,’ Ace called warily, ‘something is activating the transmat.’

‘Yes, very likely,’ mused the Doctor as he easily located the control node. ‘It has a remote activator.’ He turned sharply to Ace. ‘What?’

Ace nodded at the dais. The jelly mould shape had begun to fill up with shapes, and for a moment she saw something moving weakly among a cradle of translucent filaments.

‘You’re right!’ cried the Doctor. ‘Something is beginning to come through.’ He plunged back into the transmat circuits.

Ace hefted her baseball uneasily, watching as the shape solidified one layer at a time. In a moment the outer shell flowed together like coalescing globules of mercury.

‘It’s another Dalek,’ said Ace.

‘Excellent,’ said the Doctor.

The casing was almost fully formed. It was pale cream with gold trimmings, different from the one the Doctor had blown up earlier. Different wondered Ace, how different? ‘Will this one be friendly?’ she asked.

The Doctor looked surprised. ‘I sincerely doubt that.’

He quickly rigged two cables together. ‘Now if I can just cause the receiver to dephase at the critical point...’

The hum oscillated out of the range of human hearing.

Ace realized that the climax was approaching – the Dalek was slowly becoming solid – so she raised her baseball bat.

‘Doctor!’ Ace cried.

The Doctor twisted something inside the machine. ‘Get down,’ he shouted and pulled Ace away and on to the ground. The transmat howled as splinters of light arced from the dais. There was a vast grinding sound and the air filled with a blizzard of Dalek fragments.

Ace looked up to find herself staring at the twisted end of an eyestick. It was coloured gold and stared blindly back. She quickly got up and bent to examine the transmat.

Whisps of dust whirled around in the decaying transmission field before they too settled on the surface of the dais.

‘The controls have gone dead,’ she told the Doctor.

‘The misphase must have caused an overload.’

‘What did you do to it?’

‘I persuaded one half of the Dalek to materialize where the other half was materializing. They both tried to coexist at the same points and the resultant reaction destroyed them.’ He made an expansive gesture with his arms and then patted the top of one of the cabinets. ‘Dangerous things, transmats.’

‘So no more Daleks can be transported through here.’

‘Well,’ the Doctor said cautiously, ‘we seem to have slowed them down a bit, at least until the operator can repair the system.’

The word operator bounced about at the back of Ace’s mind for a moment. Hold on she thought ‘The operator?’

‘The Daleks usually leave an operator on station to deal with any malfunction.’

A very bad scenario started to occur to Ace. ‘And that would be another Dalek?’

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor.

There was a wrenching crash from behind the supporting wall.

I have a bad feeling about this, thought Ace as she and the Doctor turned towards the sound. A cream and gold Dalek was pulling away from the heating system’s pipes. It must have been there all the time – I looked right at it and ignored it, Ace berated herself. She had a sick certainty that it wasn’t going to be easy to ignore in about ten seconds. Ace shifted her grip on the bat and wondered if the Dalek had any weaknesses. She wasn’t too upset when the Doctor yelled at her to run for it.

‘Stay where you are,’ shrieked the Dalek. ‘Do not move.’

Ace made the stairs marginally ahead of the Doctor, but only because she vaulted the handrail. Bouncing off the rail as she turned the corner, Ace saw a rectangle of light above – the doorway.