Prologue

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This world, finally, was both habitable and uninhabited.

The planet circled closely to the sun-star of solar system 29-B8. The planet was so huge that it rivaled the sun – it was unclear which body orbited the other. It was like a patient predator, circling forever around its prey. The broad surface of the planet had a purply, shiny sheen – the color of an unsightly bruise. A poison in the air, called briothide, simmered in the heat of the nearby sun.

The planet was huge. It was unsightly. It was deadly.

But to a certain squadron of battle-beaten Daleks, this bruise of a planet was the definition of opportunity, a beacon of light in a black sky.

The squadron moved through space with quiet, demanding presence, three golden discs of ships gliding on toward the bruise hovering in space.

The ships descended onto the surface, each one glowing with a hot, golden heat as it passed through the membrane of thick atmosphere. With hissing steam rising off their surfaces, the ships landed on the ground.

Twenty-one armored shapes emerged from the ships, led by a single Dalek, stained gray by previous experience in warfare. The heaviest battle wound it carried was a shattered optic, a cold bright blue burning past white-cracked lines.

Its name glowed as a burnished, brassy symbol soldered to its front armor piece, nestled in the shallow dip between its gun-stick and sucker arm. It was the Greek symbol for Zeta – Ζ.

Zeta. It was the sixth letter in the Greek alphabet, but the Dalek still ranked higher than Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon, and Gamma because of its raw power alone.

Gliding silently, the Dalek leader led its squadron through the boggy swamps of the purple-tinted planet. Viewing the world through a shattered optic resulted in Zeta watching everything in multifaceted pictures, but it could still see well enough to judge the terrain around it. Head dome swiveling, Zeta's machine-methodical mind began mentally arranging the good aspects of the planet's terrain alongside the bad ones.

Soft and spongy mosses grew in, beside, and around swamps, of which there were many – there was more water than land here. Good. The waters, the atmosphere, the air itself, were all tinged with a taste of briothide – a chemical fatally poisonous to humans and almost all organisms, but livable for Daleks. Bad. But the possibility remained that Zeta's army could grow stronger if exposed to harsher conditions. The tree-like structures towering over every body of water were wide and tall, blocking the strongest of winds from the boggy surfaces of the ponds. Good.

This leader, Dalek Zeta – number six in the order of Greek alphabet, number one in command – glided slowly over the soggy terrain, its hover pad lighting the ground with a blue glow. Behind it followed its squadron – lacking slightly in number at twenty-one soldiers, instead of twenty-two – following dutifully in a triangular formation. Eyestalks swiveled around, searching the surface, some scanning the atmosphere with specialized tools in place of sucker arms. Every Dalek remained equipped with its gun-stick.

"Descend!" Zeta commanded, its hover pad decreasing its altitude. The soldiers behind it lowered to the ground. "Determine hazard level of any life forms," Zeta ordered. "Ex-terminate if they will not comply to the Da-leks' wishes!"

"I obey!" came the graveling of ten Dalek voices. They obediently branched off in search of inhabitants of the planet.

"Complete geographical scans!" Zeta turned to a different group of Daleks, the few who had specialized tools in replacement of sucker arms, and a few moments later Zeta was getting a full report of the geography of the planet.

"Report: surface temperature an even thirty degrees Celsius."

Another Dalek brandished a scanner, its eyestalk glued to the instrument to check the reading. Where a sucker arm attachment should have been was a glass-covered metal tube that glowed with pressure-sensitive orange fiber optics threaded into the glass. It made a whoeeeeo-vreeeow sound that crackled as it hovered over the ground.

Completing its scan, the Dalek pulled back the tube and repeated the readings. "Atmospheric makeup sixty-seven percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, twenty-three percent other. Mild traces of briothide detected. Habitable for Da-leks!"

Habitable – just the perfect word. Zeta rolled the idea around its mind with satisfaction.

The squadrons of Zeta branched off across the planet like golden ants, scouring the surface, demanding obedience from the life forms, exterminating when necessary.

Standing in the center of it all, Zeta lifted its cracked eyestalk. The sky was a pale sheen of purple, and the sun-star glowed hazily through the heavy atmosphere, tinted a steel gray.

"My new armada will soon scorch the skies!" Zeta growled, enjoying the words as they tinged out of its vocal processor. Enjoyment and pleasure were usually things that got in the way of other methodical thoughts and actions, but the Dalek allowed itself one rare moment to bask in its brilliance.

"The Bermuda ships are ready, Commander." Dalek Rho, Zeta's second-in-command, came up beside it.

"Ex-cellent!" The Dalek leader's earpieces lit up in hot, white flashes. "Project Independence shall commence and my armada will rise!"