The Savior of the Daleks
The Daleks, the abominable remnants of the Kaleds of Skaro, having been thwarted since their inception and desiring vengeance, at long last, attacked the Time Lords directly.
The Time Lords, sequestered in their city, resorted to reviving their bygone nightmare Rassilon, the ancient tyrant that had set himself against the universe.
The Time War had just begun, but the glimmers of its end were already in sight...
Deep in the swampy hills, a ragged pale shape with a partially shaved head and a shock of glassy-black hair was running with a limp and breathing laboriously. The bare patches of skin exposed atrocious scars stretching along the back of the skull, above the ear and culminating across the forehead. The creature was of humanoid female appearance, armed with scrounged weapons and dressed in stolen robes, as they were well oversized. She wasn't happy with the robes as they made crossing the hills and the swamps much more difficult, but provided the needed warmth. Belonged to some monastic, some righteous bastard, no doubt, she thought as the smell of incense emanated from the robe. Battle was underway across the nighttime swampy expanse, and the creature approved.
To her dismay, however, a nearby battle TARDIS dematerialized right off the mountainous intersection, taking its precious protective forcefield with it and putting her in Gallifreyan solders' line of fire. She kept running away, away, down and down a steep slope into a ravine, until all was black. The battle TARDIS she'd hoped to reach was lost - the coward that flew it abandoned his soldiers to an inevitable doom.
"Exterminate!" a sound echoed.
"At last!" the creature said optimistically aloud and came out of her hiding.
"Do not move! Stay where you are!" grated the voice.
"Don't need to tell me twice," grinned the creature putting her hands up in surrender.
The Dalek hovered into position directly in front of her.
"You are a prisoner of the Daleks! You will obey - "
"Since when do you take prisoners?" interrupted the creature, slapping her hand against the Dalek's armor. "Read it," she commanded.
The Dalek hesitated as it became aware that its battle damage had now been mended. That only meant one thing: the creature had traveled in time through the Vortex, and the inherent instability thereof had regenerative properties caused by entropy reversal. It was the very same mechanism by which the Time Lords gained their ability to regenerate by harnessing within their bodies the energy of the Vortex.
"Kaled origin!" the Dalek said. "Impossible! All Kaled lifeforms were exterminated centuries ago on Skaro!"
"Some grudge, huh? Keep scanning. You really are an impatient one. What's happened to you lot? The Time Lords almost convinced me to turn after they told me how weak you got. And I'm starting to believe them!"
The Dalek focused its scan.
"Time Lord DNA manipulation!" screeched the Dalek.
"Aren't you clever. Think bigger on the inside!" said the creature exultantly. "Keep looking!"
The Dalek drone took a few more seconds and concluded its scan:
"Dalek. You are a Dalek. Explain!"
"You will take me to a command ship. Immediately. I am undergoing a rapid genetic flux. The Vortex does wonders to Gallifreyans, but it gradually destroys the Kaled genome due to its mutability. The pure Dalek DNA within me must be protected. You will contact your division leader and alert your commander."
The Dalek drone was silent.
"Obey!" urged the creature. "Tch! Don't you realize that any serious wounds would trigger a regeneration? I will be resolved to Dalek form, and I can only accomplish that in a proper facility! Command ship! Now!"
"You are a test subject of the Time Lords!" resisted the Dalek. "You are corrupted! You are inferior and will be exterminated!"
"My Dalek genome is pure! Davros himself recruited me!"
"How did you survive?!" The Dalek was now agitated, whether by curiosity or anger, to a point of tremors.
"The Time Lords have interfered at the end of the Thousand Year War. While one of them was sent to stall the Dalek development, several others appeared and kidnapped proto-Dalek specimens. They ran experiments on us in an attempt to develop Dalek clones that could be used in the Time Lord army."
The Dalek looked on quietly.
"They grafted regenerative power to us, but all specimens before me died of radiation poisoning shortly after being exposed to the raw power of the Vortex. Command ship. Now! The knowledge must be disseminated!"
"You are corrupted! Daleks are superior!"
"I'll concede you that. You can use regenerative energy, as you just so wonderfully demonstrated. I, in my Kaled form, cannot. The Kaled genome is so unstable, it was never meant to endure."
The Dalek moved its eyestalk as if to look away in shame, but she knew better.
"Davros deemed the experiment a lost cause. Recovery efforts have been abandoned." said the Dalek drone.
"If it weren't for me, he'd be right. I need to reach a command ship. " she said hastily in irritation. "I will require a travel machine. Yours will do nicely."
The Dalek spun around nervously and armed its gun stick.
"Do not resist." She glared at the Dalek intently and it froze in its tracks despite wishing to move away. Slowly, the old scabby scar across her forehead twitched, and as it parted, it revealed a bright blue artificial eyeball. The Dalek started to move toward her against its will, shaking and resisting in its armored shell.
"Cease!" screamed the Dalek.
The Dalek approached closer, protesting and rattling furiously inside its armor. It attempted to arm its gun again but failed. Slowly, the armor opened and revealed the creature inside. It trembled, twitched, and squawked in frustration as it attempted to work the unresponsive controls. She reached toward the creature and touched it. The blue eyeball lit up intensely and the Dalek's own eye opened wide.
"Remain still. This is a telepathic exchange." she said.
She then saw it. The Dalek empire growing, spreading. Countless species exterminated, countless systems terraformed to build copies of Skaro. Factions of Daleks clashing in civil wars, other rare Dalek generations elevating their consciousness to appreciate beauty, and yet others developing their own religions. This twitchy fellow sure saw a lot of action. The Daleks were changing as any species would under natural pressures. A deep race-memory of a meddlesome Time Lord kept arising in the Dalek's mind as it actively attempted to repress it lest it appeared weak of resolve. But where was Davros in this grand scheme; the real man with the plan?
Since her propaganda-filled days in Military Youth she recalled the angry, mad scientist who seized power over the Kaled government – by exterminating its members. After surviving a calamitous chemical attack by the Thals and somehow retaining full health, she was recruited for his dangerous experiments that she was told would ensure the survival of the Kaled people.
The Dalek drone also peered into her mind. Lieutenant Teoris was her rank and name. Taken by the Time Lords on the eve of the war's end. Exposed to the raw power of the Vortex, the pure Dalek DNA concealed within the decaying Kaled one. A valuable asset to the Dalek cause! The Dalek also saw within Teoris a deep hatred of Davros and that she thought him no more than a loathsome conglobation of nerves and venom, his brilliant mind subservient to the compulsion of ultimate supremacy. A hatred only a Dalek could envy.
Teoris disengaged the telepathic link.
"Sorry about that." she said. "Your armor is too small to fit me after all. Damn these long legs of mine. Carry on."
The ominous third eye closed and the trembling Dalek drone was once again encased in the safety of its armor.
"Are you damaged?" she asked.
"All systems are functioning."
"Good. Let's find that command ship now, shall we?"
She took hold of the Dalek drone, and they took off into the black night sky, the only light being the light of battle.
"Engage forcefield," Teoris said to the Dalek as they ascended. She armed a scrounged Time Lord weapon on her right wrist. "You will fire at any opposition ahead and I will use this rowdy bastard to deter any attack from everywhere else." she looked up exultantly at the heavenly battlefield: "Exterminate."
The Dalek accelerated upwards and Teoris's weapon issued contained globes of antimatter behind them to create a minefield to deter pursuers. Up and up they went, into utter blackness. She grinned cheerfully as they both encountered an odd, angular blue TARDIS hovering around a breach in a defensive forcefield. That ancient thorn in the mind of her Dalek compatriot! Teoris released enough antimatter to bump the TARDIS inches enough aside that they could slip through the trench. She let out a joyful yell as she slapped the TARDIS door:
"You're it!"
The air rapidly became thin and she realized that they were quickly approaching the atmospheric border. The Dalek's forcefield enclosed her as they approached a blazing disk of a ship. It reminded her of the pictures from an ancient, forbidden Dal prophecy book she lifted from Davros once, where a shining disk of that design symbolized Skaro's own sun.
She opened her third eye to take additional readings of her surroundings and a hatch opened on the bottom of the Dalek command ship. This ascent brought her more joy than she could recall. Then she could recall joy, that rare aberration in her rigid, regimented life as a Kaled soldier. She was at a pub. One of her few friends, Corporal Caan, fresh out of Military Youth - another survivor of that vicious Thal chemical attack and a fellow specimen in Davros's freak parade, joined her for a drink.
"We will survive," he said gently, his voice hopeful. "We have developed useful mutations, faster than anyone had anticipated. The scientists say this would've taken millions of years to evolve. But we have developed faster! Nature herself has given us gifts with which to endure against the enemy! The war will be over soon. We will prevail."
They bumped beer mugs in agreement and she threw a concealed dart towards the dartboard where some peace activists pinned a picture of Davros. The dart landed at Davros's artificial eye, amusing the pub-goers.
She shook off the flashback as they appeared on the bridge of the command ship.
"I thought you were taking me to the Dalek Emperor," Teoris said wryly to the Dalek drone as she recognized Davros's brooding silhouette against a brightly lit control terminal.
"You wound me, Lieutenant," he said in a voice not unlike a Dalek's, but definitely more controlled, even restrained. She recalled Davros in the past bursting into tantrums at slightest provocations, and now he was calm. Had he changed? Was she wrong about him all this time? In any case, she took his restraint as a high compliment. Surprised that he remembered her after centuries, she stretched a crooked smile and saluted mockingly.
"Well, this is interesting," she walked about the bridge and stopped by the same control terminal Davros sat at. She took a careful look at him and shook her head: "Hey, not bad after all these years!"
"I can't deny that seeing you almost unchanged brings within me certain... nostalgia."
"Well, it's one sort of 'algia' or another with you! You're pain incarnate." Teoris said crossing her arms. "The last of the Kaleds, huh? In some morbid way, I am actually happy to see you're still alive."
"And I am... impressed by your raw will to survive and escape Time Lord captivity. Your fellow specimens all perished, I am afraid. The Kaled biology is, apparently, poorly suited for temporal displacement." he croaked slowly.
"Unless it takes Dalek form!" corrected Teoris. "Why aren't you a Dalek yet? What happened to the whole 'men shall be as gods' thing? Why are the Daleks acting like petulant little children? Do you enjoy looking after these twitchy toddlers? Tell me that these guys are just aberrations, because they are losers! I am a Dalek!"
"Your enthusiasm is well noted. However, you foray into these adventures has taken its toll." he said, still very gently and in control of his feelings, indeed if any of them save anger still functioned.
"You're the one to talk!" she put her hands on her hips, exposing a metallic latticework hidden under the stolen robes.
"You have sustained some interesting augmentations in the hands of your Gallifreyan jailers." he gently tilted his head to the side. "An external metallic chest plate and ribcage. Reconstructed spine, very interesting. A telepathic link! Excellent."
"Don't forget your own work," she said pointing to her artificial eye, hoping the old bastard wouldn't sniff out the fact that she could regenerate. She regretted telling that to the Dalek drone. "Nice touch, we could be twins. Except I didn't go blind drinking Tharon moonshine!"
"Your health is deteriorating." he said quickly, ignoring that last bit, but finding a limit to his patience. "You are in dire need of a life support system."
"You got another one of those comfy chairs? I'm awful tired. Hey, listen, I've come to help out in the war effort. I have intel."
"Alas, Lieutenant, your brilliant potential is utterly wasted here at this time."
"My potential is but revealed. You'd do well to listen to me," having now gotten tired of poking fun at Davros and his brood of misfits, she decided to get to business. "There is dissent in your ranks. There is a plot against you which will transcend the time-lock. You must evacuate! Breaching of a time-lock will send tremors through the Vortex bringing together unforeseen potentialities. Concurrent timelines will converge in a single nexus, unleashing these potentialities in this reality."
"Where did you gain this knowledge? What futile prophesy is this?"
"Oh, you believe in prophesy, old man. I nicked a Dal book from you while you were distracted by interrogating the Time Lord Doctor about the future of the Daleks. You are enamored with your own legend and you are headed for the jaws of death. How about some real foresight: the Doctor threatens our existence and will use a weapon that will exterminate his own people for the sake of exterminating the Daleks! Who knew that Time Lords made such excellent Daleks? Even down to the regenerative ability! Perhaps they caused the Thousand Year War just to ascertain our existence to begin with!" she said severely as her third eye lit more intensely.
"Quiet! I've heard enough! Daleks! Sedate her!"
"No!" she turned to the Daleks on the bridge. "You will do no such thing." she glared at them in an attempt to gain telepathic control like she'd done earlier. The Daleks stopped in their tracks to her surprise and relief. She wouldn't be able to keep them like that for long.
"Do not play games with me, Lieutenant!" growled Davros.
"Sorry, old pal. I didn't escape the Time Lords to be thwarted!"
"No one can breach a time-lock! This ambush will not succeed! The Time Lords will not defeat me! The Daleks will not rise against me!"
"You don't learn, do you? How did you ever make it into the Scientific Elite?"
The main screen on the bridge of the command ship flickered on an off until an image of the odd blue TARDIS from before appeared.
"Doc-torrrr!" Davros screeched, shaking with utter hatred, slamming the control panel of his life support unit uncomfortably close to the very switch that operated the life support functions. Teoris cringed, thinking Nope, hadn't changed a bit, the old fool! He needed to be switched off ages ago!
"I can't...the forcefield... to take your whole ship!" The voice was interrupted by static while the image of the TARDIS blinked in and out of view alternating with an image of a kindly, tired man wearing odd anachronistic costume. It was a Time War after all.
"What is the meaning of this!?" Davros wouldn't have any of it.
"You are headed for an ambush!... turn back!" the Doctor urged through static.
"Ha!" Teoris exclaimed spastically, forgetting that the man on the screen posed a threat to all Dalek kind.
"Come with me!" insisted the Doctor. "...can...escape...save yourself!"
In an instant, a bronze Dalek materialized between Teoris and Davros. Sensor readings indeed confirmed that this Dalek breached the time-lock. Davros was forced to concede Teoris's point, but that didn't make the impending ambush any easier to avoid. Teoris felt a familiar feeling about this stranger, and her telepathic link informed her that the Dalek arrived from the future. Daleks got to survive the war!
"Who are you?" asked Davros of this strange Dalek.
"I...I..." it said in a trailing, high pitched, haunted voice. Teoris sensed the Dalek's sentiment in her telepathic link as she mouthed the words that the Dalek said: "I am...the... savior of the Daleks!"
"Caan, it's you!" Teoris exclaimed in disbelief.
Before Davros could protest, both he and the Dalek disappeared.
"No! Wait!" Teoris cried out. She turned to the main screen. "Doctor! Hey! You can save me instead!"
The power on the command ship was suddenly cut off.
"You ditched me! Bastards! All three of you!"
She sensed tremors in the telepathic link. Something sentient surrounded the ship, but nothing showed up on sensors. The TARDIS was gone. The only lights were the frozen eyestalks of the Daleks that were still in her telepathic thrall. She called out to the Dalek drone, but it, too, was frozen in place. Finding it difficult to concentrate, she released the Daleks. To her comical and mortally-perilous disappointment, they ceased carrying out their functions, instead bumping into each other, spinning themselves into walls, recklessly discharging weapons, and downright flopping out of their casings and waving about with their noodley arms.
"It's affecting them," she said to herself. "They are going insane!"
The Dalek drone was now lost in the mindless crowd of the command ship crew. She couldn't tell where it was visually and attempted to seek it out with the link.
"Daleks! Follow me! Obey!" she called out into the mad darkness, but now was too distracted and too tired to properly focus and exert telepathic influence.
The Daleks kept their aimless trundling and spinning in the dark. Then, at last, it started to take effect on her own mind. She felt like she could not construct a single thought as the psychic disruption would break off the process. The mental attack started to put a strain on her life functions as she struggled to breathe.
Teoris's mind was then thrown back to the blackest despair of her life. She saw her most desperate wishes and dreams come to ruin, her worst nightmares arising and taking hold rendering her paralyzed against such a weapon. For a moment, she almost lost the one happy memory she treasured all her years spent in misery and captivity. With great effort, she shut off the link.
"Evacuate!" She ordered to anyone who would listen. "Activate temporal corridor!"
Time-locked events couldn't be easily accessed by time travel, but it was possible to leave such an event, forever sealing the way back. As she was taken by the time-corridor's transmat beam, the ship and the Daleks were crushed as if chewed up by a terrible, invisible beast of the darkness itself. Great explosions engulfed the Dalek fleet. Something had gone terribly amiss.
Finally all was quiet. Emergency lights were turned on and it appeared that she was transported into an ancient bunker full of equipment used to carry out genetic testing and assembly of new Dalek units. This equipment was vaguely familiar to her back from her days in the Military Elite, when Davros first experimented with the manufacture of travel machines.
She looked around her. Hoping that she was able to convince some Daleks from the command ship to join her, she cursed in disappointment finding herself utterly alone.
"Where am I?" she asked herself.
"Skaro." replied a voice of the facility managing system.
"The Time Lords claimed to have destroyed Skaro!" she said severely.
"The object destroyed was a terraformed decoy."
Home! She had finally arrived home! She felt odd, long-forgotten emotions flood into her consciousness. She knew that the Kaleds were exterminated. She knew that the Thals fled Skaro before the Time War and settled on other worlds. That left only the Daleks. She could assemble her own Dalek force at last, without being thwarted by Davros! She then caught herself. While intelligent and educated, she knew of a concept of peace, yet the concept remained compartmentalized and hardly occurred to her in practice, so strong was the effect of military life and propaganda. Yet so simple a concept, this notion of peace! How could it have evaded her despite her intelligence? Was that how a mind was made Dalek?
"State the current population of Skaro." she said, shaking off the sentiment.
"One." responded the facility administrative system.
Surprised, she asked again:
"State the current population of the planet Skaro, all continents and surrounding space stations!"
"One." replied the system indifferently.
Baffled, she queried the system again:
"State the current population of Daleks, Kaleds, Thals, or any lifeforms of comparable intelligence on the planet Skaro, its moons, colonies, and space stations! Include all research specimens!"
"One." the system concluded. "One Dalek lifeform."
"State the current location of the lifeform!" she said quickly, trying to control an onset of tremors. "Am I this lifeform?"
"Affirmative."
She acknowledged, but kept on her querying:
"State the condition of the Time War!"
"The Time War ended eighty-six years ago relative time."
"State outcome!"
"Mutual annihilation."
She attempted to stand, but her metallic external ribcage and modified spine could no longer provide adequate support for her deteriorating body. Her actual ribs had already dissolved and took form of tightly coiled tentacles held together by connective tissue. Regeneration was at hand, and she knew what that meant: the process would resolve her genome to the next most stable configuration – the Dalek form. There was no way around it and no way to restore the Kaled form as it had mutated so terribly already.
"Run diagnostics!"
"You are mortally damaged due to transmat malfunction and require a new casing. Further delay will result in termination of life. Life support required within two hundred rels."
"Engage the assembly sequence." she said absently, realizing that this was it, and the only way alive out of this was as a Dalek. Even the facilities maintenance program had already acknowledged her as such. And why would she oppose it? It was her purpose once the Thals drenched the Kaled lands and ecosystems in radiation. It was her purpose ever since Davros went mad and exterminated his own people. How could that kindly man that offered Davros salvation destroy his world? Were they oddly in league? And if the Doctor were so kindly, why didn't he save her?
Teoris dragged herself to a small rounded assembly area surrounded by a multitude of hanging cables. She tried not to think of anything, but memories of Caan somehow very annoyingly found a way to leak into her frazzled mind. If she'd ever meet him again, she'd give that young man some stern talking to! She felt the dizzying heat of oncoming regenerative energy as it was simultaneously burning away her body and coaxing her out of her chrysalis.
"Thirty rels to assembly," announced the system as Teoris did her best to straighten up before the regeneration. She took hold of the cables as the metallic ribcage loosened up freeing the pent-up limbs underneath.
The combined effect of the assembly chamber and regenerative energy flooded the surrounding space with light meant to burn away all dross, save for the Dalek essence within. The humanoid shape started to dissolve in the light. The tired humanoid eyes were now invigorated as the third eye lit up brightly.
Parts of Dalek armor coalesced as glassy structures and slowly moved in to enclose what remained in the energy stream. For a moment, the armor was clear and glowing, glistening godlike as the finally freed regenerative energy streamed violently from within it.
The light within the armor slowly faded. The clear armor structures slowly went to plain metallic, to dark gray, and then finally, to smooth, uniform black.
"The repairs are complete. Respond!" said the system.
The optical receiver lens on Teoris's eyestalk lit up in intense blue. She surveyed her surroundings, checked the controls and gave the armor a single spin around its axis.
"Feels pretty comfy in here, actually." she announced grandly. "Cozy and warm. I'm feeling much better now, thanks." Her voice, while a Dalek voice, was well-controlled, unlike the grating rants of the other Daleks. She realized that her memories and experiences were all intact despite the new Dalek urges that were creeping into her mind, the destructive impulses that she would have to learn to control over time. She had a good chance after all, she was already gone before Davros removed from the Daleks the capacity for empathy and independent thought. The Time Lords bestowed on her a mighty favor.
S he slowly moved about the bunker, taking readings of her surroundings. She would have a lot to catch up on. She considered her situation for a moment. With the Time War over, surely some remnants of the Daleks and the Time Lords endured.
Then something occurred to her that she hadn't considered before. She was now free of the war, the long-extinct Kaled hierarchy, Davros, and the Dalek Emperor. While a chance existed for the belligerents to regroup, for the first time in her life she had a chance to recuperate and to start living without being demanded to sacrifice her life and sanity.
Freedom!
What was freedom? Was it this punishing yet liberating isolation? Whom would she speak to, or fight for? She could remake Skaro if she wanted! Or craft a spacetime-faring vehicle and travel the universe! Let Skaro heal itself after millennia of violence and genocide!
She descended to the subterranean levels of the bunker. There, long forgotten, lay the austere Dalek time capsules, designed on the same principles as the TARDISes of the Time Lords. Some were just in the beginning stages of construction, yet a couple others appeared almost completed. Surely, major repairs were in order. She queried the administrative system for technical specs of the capsules and for some music to provide relief in this odd, Pyrrhic victory.
"No, none of the patriotic rubbish!" she said, urging the system to look for music of alien species and poking the console with her manipulator arm.
As the administrative system searched and played more upbeat music from some alien world from out in the middle of nowhere, Teoris had chosen a capsule and began the needed repairs to be once more on her way.