PROLOGUE
Federation Research Base Oppenheimer, Cygnus 7-A VI
Commander Laura McKinley, United Federation of Planets Starfleet, sighed. For the past three or four—she'd lost count—days, the people of FRB Oppenheimer and Cygnus 7-A VI in general had been at war with the—what do they call themselves? "Daaah-lecks?" She walked over to the terminal embedded in the wall on one side of the room and pressed the "record log" key. "Personal log of Laura McKinley, Stardate—"she checked the date—"1345.6. The mechanoid attack continues without an end in sight. Governor Sakamoto has ordered all research operations suspended and all Starfleet personnel to active duty in defence of the planet, so this is the last you'll be hearing from me for awhile." She tried to make herself sound cheerful, as though this was just some normal thing that happened in the course of a Starfleet career.
But...I didn't sign up for this! The McKinleys were one of the great scientific names of the Federation; her mother was a Cochrane-winning warp physicist, her father a perpetual nominee for the Zee-Magnees Prize—he'd even won it, once. Her grandfather, George, had been one of the 'Fleet's principal architects; he'd bragged that he had built the Science division single-handedly, and had had time to help with Ops and Ship's Services. He'd had a damn space station named after him, which had been embarrassing at the Academy—I'm Laura McKinley; no, not that Laura McKinley, that's mom; yes, my grandpa's the one Earth Station McKinley was named after—and forced her dad to print cards from sophomore year onward, at (he claimed) great personal expense. A Starfleet career had been the logical step for a McKinley, especially Henry McKinley's daughter Laura.
So Henry McKinley's daughter Laura had signed up for Starfleet Academy to become the next great McKinley scientist—and did it, too!—rose through the ranks to commander, published some papers that didn't exactly change the understanding of astrophysics and temporal anomalies, and hit a thirty-five-year-old crisis. When the opportunity to study the Cygnus rift had presented itself, Henry McKinley's daughter Laura had naturally signed on at the soonest possible opportunity, sealed everything outside her baggage allowance and a large sofa to which she had a certain sentimental attachment in a stasis locker in Sloan City, and headed out to the boonies, determined to make a name for herself as someone other than, well, Henry McKinley's daughter Laura. And...she hadn't been able to complain. Yes, the isolation from the rest of the galaxy was irritating, particularly after Centaurus, but there was a certain intimacy to there only being eight-hundred thousand souls on planet or so, and the opportunity to study a rift in the fabric of space and time had been amazing. And the Rift overhead at night...And Eric, oh, Eric...Then it had all gone to hell. The events of the past standard week flashed in her head like some terrible holofilm: the increased activity from the Rift—which had been excellent, at first; presented unknown research opportunities—then that bizarre message, the mechanoids coming down like rain, hundreds dead, then thousands, Eric...
A Security officer in full armour with lieutenant's stripes on his shoulders interrupted her reverie. "Ma'am", he said, "You should move out soon. The mechanoids have taken the central city and are heading towards here. It won't be much longer before they're here. We've managed to keep 'em pushed back to"—he paused; was obviously listening to an update of some sort on his communicator—"Tenth Street, but we can't hold them there for too long. At least arm yourself." He paused a moment, tried a different tack. "Ma'am, if you don't leave, not only will you be placing yourself in great danger, you'll also be disobeying a direct order from civilian authorities, which, as you know, is in direct violation of Article Seventeen, Section Three of the Federation Charter."
"Right, Lieutenant"—
"Menendez."
"Menendez." It couldn't do any harm to follow the governor's orders, and, as Menendez had just pointed out, to disobey them was a court-martial offence. "I'll come willingly. Just let me get a phaser."
"Good idea, ma'am." Menendez himself was armed to the teeth, carrying—so far as McKinley could tell—a phaser pistol and phaser rifle along with a knife and what appeared to be grenades. McKinley grabbed a phaser pistol "butt" from the weapons locker near the entrance, fitted her phaser I to it. She slipped the pistol into her belt, heeding Menendez's gesturing move! at her. At an unknown signal—probably his communicator—he said, "Yeah, got the last one out. Be there soon, sir." To his platoon: "Men, let's move."
"What's happening?" McKinley finally had the chance to ask the question that had been bugging her.
"Governor ordered that the main research station be cleared out. We've been sweeping it since this morning; you're the last one." They were moving, now, were in one of the large turbolifts originally designed for the transportation of scientific equipment too large to fit in a personnel 'lift but too small to justify beaming. "Ground level," Menendez told the 'lift, twisting the handle.
When they left the 'lift and stepped out into the bright sunlight of a Cygnan afternoon—double suns made one appreciative of climate control systems—McKinley was shocked at what she saw. Oppenheimer City was not that attractive to start with, but the mechanoid invasion had devastated the world. O-city was no exception; if anything, the carnage here was worse than the countryside. Three days of fighting between the mechanoids and Starfleet Security—the MACO unit stationed planetside had been wiped out in the first hour of the mechanoid invasion, leaving Security to defend—had destroyed the city centre, leaving it a maze of barricades, checkpoints, rubble, and crashed vehicles. Aircars and shuttlecraft littered the streets, mixed in with the remnants of buildings where either mechanoids or Security had levelled them in an attempt to constrain the other. "Keep your wits about you and your phaser ready," Menendez said to her. "The mechanoids have apparently taken a lateral route—over Spring to Seventh. No telling when they could catch us up."
"Sir! Mechanoids, sir!" a crewman yelled, gesturing in the things' general direction.
"How many?" Menendez asked.
"Can't tell, sir. A dozen at least, I'd say, probably more."
"Everyone, get down!" Menendez shouted. "Find some cover! It wouldn't hurt—at least, it'll prolong our lives a few more minutes!" He followed his own advice, ducking himself and McKinley behind an aircar that still bore signage advertizing it as property of Big Pete's Deep-Pan Pizza. He levelled his rifle; McKinley followed his lead with her phaser. Most of the platoon had taken up positions around what had once been a plaza. They were, for the most part, hiding behind the wreckage of the central control net going berserk and kamikaze tactics on the part of their comrades or—failing that—the ferrocrete remnants of a twelve-story building. There were about thirty men in the platoon; between them, they had the plaza pretty well covered.
When the "mechanoids" finally made their way to the ex-plaza, the platoon had been awaiting action for a minute fifteen seconds. By the two-minute mark, every single one of them would be dead. Seventeen "mechanoids" faced off against thirty-three trained Starfleet Security men and one scientist; despite the Starfleet officers' numerical superiority, the "mechanoids" won handily. Although no-one survived to tell the tale to Federation inspectors—indeed, only a few made it through the gantlet that the "mechanoids" made of Cygnus 7-A VI—security cam footage allowed them to reconstruct the events. The last stand of Gold Platoon, E Company, Battalion 6, 4th Regiment, Eighteenth Brigade, Starfleet Security Sector Four went something like this:
The "mechanoids" entered the square at around walking pace, apparently taking no notice of the thirty-some phaser emitters aimed in their general direction. If they did, they showed no sign of it until a trooper opened fire. That blast zinged off a force-field surrounding the lead "mechanoid" and it last registered the humans and Andorian laid-out in such a fashion that a lattice of nadion beams would completely skewer anything in its way. It spun around, searched for the blast's originator, and then—
"Exterminate." A bolt of blue fire lanced from the ray-gun about midway up its body, so bright that McKinley had to shield her eyes, and Corporal James Morgan fell over dead. What was that? Some kind of disruptor...but it was so alien...Everything about the mechanoids was alien in the extreme: Their shape, the way they moved...McKinley had had a roommate at the Academy who had come from a low-gravity world and had required an antigrav apparatus to work on Earth but she had stayed a meter off the ground. The mechanoids glided; so far as McKinley could tell, they had no special attachment to gravity; nor did they have any obvious means of locomotion. I thought part of the requirements for being a Starfleet officer was "lack of xenophobia". Clearly, I was wrong...Even their voices were alien. Computers, in McKinley's experience, had either a pleasantly neuter voice, a somewhat guttural masculine baritone, or, as was the case for the majority of, perhaps even all, Starfleet computers, a feminine soprano. Yes, they were all halting and mechanical, with the comprehension at times of a backward seven-year-old, but they at least tried to sound human and pleasant—or at least human in the case of the UEG's comps. The mechanoids shrieked, enunciating every syllable, misplacing accents; it was inhuman, terrifying, and above all wrong, as though a speech-synthesis program had been designed by someone who was partly deaf and been raised by robots with malfunctioning vocoders. Perhaps it's meant to be that way...Given the way the mechanoids acted, that didn't seem unlikely.
Another young man steeled himself and squeezed off a phaser blast; that touched off an all-out firefight—one in which, alas, the "mechanoids" had the upper hand. Still, most of the blasts managed to miss Menendez and McKinley. Sometimes by millimeters, yes, but they missed nevertheless. At last the commotion died down and they were the last humans standing—crouching, rather, having deigned it imprudent to move from their position, which afforded some cover, to someplace less safe. The mechanoids were now milling about, as if unsure what to do now that they'd wiped the bulk of a platoon of Security troopers out. Menendez aimed his rifle, muttered, "This is for Henry, you sons of bitches," and fired. The blast was completely ineffective except...
Except that it made the mechanoids stop milling about. Except that it made them notice the last two humans left kneeling behind a pizza delivery aircar strewn across Los Alamos Plaza. The mechanoid spun around, focused on Menendez. It aimed at him—and with a single "Exterminate!" Jorge Menendez fell over dead, the last of his platoon to fall to the mechanoids. That left Commander Laura McKinley, Starfleet Sciences Division. One woman, with a phaser, against fifteen killing machines, which had just wiped out a thirty-three-man platoon at a cost of only two mechanoids. She levelled her phaser at random, picked out one from the crowd. She tried to think of something witty—or at least pithy—to say, but couldn't come up with anything. No holoserial heroine she, able to take a life with nothing but a quip! She was a scientist, a woman who had spent the past fifteen years doing work in how the universe worked, someone more used to a tricorder than a phaser. "Eric," she breathed, thinking of the engineer she'd met on the transport, the kind, funny man with beautiful brown eyes and hair who always knew how to bring her out of a funk—a man who'd been murdered in the first wave of the attack. She fired. "You bast—"were the last words she'd ever speak, the thought of Eric Fletcher was the last one she'd ever have, the shriek of "Exterminate!" the last words she'd ever hear. Laura McKinley fell over, dead at thirty-five, a promising scientific career snuffed out by a Dalek ray-blast. Her killer moved away with the rest of its formation. It thought nothing of its deed; one human and another were (to a Dalek) indistinguishable, better off dead anyway. "How goes the conquest of this sec-torrr?" a Supreme rounding the bend in front of a section asked.
"Well!" the formation's leader replied. "We have con-trolll of the entire city centre; the native pop-u-lay-shun has proved..." Its tone was the closest a Dalek could come to confusion.
"Explain further!" The Supreme was impatient.
"They still re-zissst Dalek authority, Supreme! We have only just come from an en-gage-ment with one such pocket of resistance!"
"And they sub-mitted to the natural superiority of the Dalek race, of course?"
"Of course, Supreme! They were all exterminated!"
"That is to be ex-pected! No race has yet been able to withstand the Daleks! The Daleks reign supreme! The Daleks reign supreme! The Daleks reign supreme!"
At this point the formation leader joined in, as did the rest of the Daleks. At some point someone began chanting, "Daleks conquer and destroy! Daleks conquer and destroy! Daleks conquer and destroy!" That was picked up with equal vigour. "The Daleks reign supreme! Daleks conquer and destroy! The Daleks reign supreme! Daleks conquer and destroy!" In a city now essentially dead, the sound carried well. This world was—for now—conquered, dead, a shell. All life had been—or would be—exterminated. There was only one master on this world and its name was Dalek...