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The Survivors
I am a fighter. For as long as I can remember I have fought, whether it be our enemy, or merely the battle just to grow enough food our small group needs to survive. I, and all my kind, have had to fight for our very existence.
It was not always this way, but we have lived like this for so long that it may as well have been. Whether it was the Great War that ravaged our planet, or whether it was our final escape from that world and the subsequent hunt we have endured for centuries, for millennia, fighting in all its forms has become a way of life for my species.
Our history teaches us that on our home world we fought a war that destroyed everything, made the planet almost completely uninhabitable. We mutated in order to survive, a mutation accelerated because of the biological, chemical, and radioactive weapons that were used in the early days of that war. A mutation that through the use of drugs through the centuries brought our form full circle. We changed ourselves, and our enemy, forever.
We are told of a time, briefly in the scheme of civilisation, that we lived in peace, believing ourselves to be the only survivors on that planet, living a basic existence on that barren and unforgiving world of our creation. We were pacifists, so much so that even after the realisation of our enemy's survival and their wish to destroy us, we would not fight. That lasted such a short time. It was the visitors from another world that taught us, once again, to take up arms, to protect ourselves, and it was with their help we believed our enemy destroyed, exterminated once and for all. We were wrong.
What we had not realised was that they had survived. Few in number, but backup systems within their life support housings had allowed them to survive. We never found out how, or at least it was never recorded. All we do know for certain was that the response from those survivors was brutal.
They mercilessly annihilated all those that were now living in and around their city. Whereas before they were entombed within the confines of their city walls they learned how to modify their life support vessels and moved into the irradiated plains and forests that we called home, massacring any that stood in their way.
Our weapons were near useless, old and obsolete, they could not withstand the might of the creatures our ancestors might once have called friend. It was more luck than judgment that had allowed our survival and escape.
A small band of our "warriors" found that our enemies had invested in new technologies. It seemed that, not content with wiping out our species from the face of our planet, they now wanted to expand and travel off world. The arrival of our friends those years previous had alerted them to the fact that other people existed on other planets.
Was it possible they were afraid? Those others had looked similar to us, to my species. Two hands, two legs, two eyes, one head, they looked as we look now, as they had once done. If more of their kind, more aliens, came to our world and found our two species at war again, who would they likely side with? So it seemed our enemy came to their conclusion and decided not to wait for the aliens to come to them, but rather to seek out the aliens on their worlds and conquer them before they could conquer our enemy.
But it was their plan that allowed our survival. Our warriors stole the plans for their new "space ships" and reverse engineered them. We stole the parts we needed from our enemy and built five craft to take us away from our planet forever and start a new life somewhere else, somewhere out among the stars, but it was not to be so easy.
Of the five ships that took off that day, one failed almost before our journey had begun. Its engines overheated before it could reach escape velocity and crashed down to the surface killing all aboard.
Of the other four, two were destroyed by an orbiting enemy saucer. We did not believe them to have any around our planet, believing instead that all had left to conquer other worlds, but we were wrong. Even after destroying half our remaining fleet they still pursued us, wanting to eradicate our very existence from the universe itself. Those ships were saved only by luck, and a passing asteroid.
Our entire species was now ensconced on but two large ships. Our entire peoples now numbered but some ten thousand, and it was decided then that we should part for our own survival.
Our leaders knew that our enemy would follow us into the stars and they knew that they would never stop until every last one of us was destroyed, and so it was decided that each ship would head in a different direction to give our species the best chance of survival.
As the years passed we stopped at many worlds. Some inhabited, some not. We left people on some of those worlds, of all different types. Some lush and green, others barren and lifeless, but one thing we are, that we have been forced to be, are survivors. Our crops can grow in almost any soil, so long as there is sunlight and minimal water. We became adept at removing even trace amounts of moisture from the air and using that to grow our food.
And so our life became semi-nomadic. The centuries passed and we now live on tens of worlds and asteroids. We move using our ships as and when we need to. We even have, on occasion, fought back against our enemy, now the whole galaxies enemy, but we try to stay hidden whenever possible, for our very survival.
Over the millennia we have watched the galaxy become subjugated by our enemy, and seen those subjects overthrow them. We have watched them destroy and claim an entire galaxy just so they have the raw materials to continue to fight against anyone and anything they come across, but we stay hidden, apart from all that happens around us.
Some ask why, why do we not join with the other species and fight back against them, try and destroy our enemy once and for all. The answer is simple. Our enemy, when they find us, and occasionally they do, will stop at nothing to destroy us. Should they detect our presence, no matter how small, they change their course and attack us. It does not matter whether there is one of them, or a thousand. It does not matter whether they are damaged, or even fighting with another, they still come to destroy us just because of who we are, because of who they are.
However, it was on one such occasion that happened recently that changed everything forever. It was only a small outpost, a small farming colony of but two hundred on a small planetoid not much larger than that of a large asteroid. Our long distance rangerscopes detected a fleet of ships moving quickly through our sector. We paid little heed to it until it was noted they were under attack.
An entire fleet of saucers were pursuing them, some thirty ships. We don't know how we were detected, whether it was some stray sensor sweep that detected our power output, or whether it was an aimed scan of our planetoid, we will never know. All we do know is that the entire fleet, all thirty ships, changed course leaving their quarry to escape and headed toward us.
It took less than 200 rels for them to reach our position; such was the power of their ships. They must have burned out their engines to reach us before we had a chance to evacuate. We armed ourselves as best we could, but we knew it was a hopeless cause. There were but two hundred of us, twenty of whom were children, against six thousand of them.
They did not destroy us from a distance as one would expect, instead they launched their troops from their ships, preferring to eviscerate us "face-to-face".
The skies above us darkened as the transolar discs approached our position blotting out the Sun. We readied ourselves for the inevitable. Most of our kind are lucky enough never to have seen our enemy before. We're shown pictures from our history texts, but very few of us have ever come face-to-face with them, or at least and survived.
We stood together, all two hundred of us; weapons raised to the heavens, our children between us, ready for the inevitable.
It was then the impossible happened. They stopped. All of them stopped. Not an energy blast was fired, or a battle cry raised. And then they turned as one and returned to their ships. As we watched on in dumbstruck silence a strange iridescent light consumed all thirty vessels, lighting up the parsec with a light brighter than the largest star, and they were gone never to be seen again.
We soon learned that not only had those ships gone, seemingly disappeared from existence, but it seemed their entire race had gone. From all parts of the galaxy it was reported the same thing, one minute they were there, killing and destroying everything in their path. The next, nothing. They had just vanished from existence.
That was over thirty years ago. There are rumours of what happened. Some say they will come back, that it's all just a ruse. They will return and wipe us all out in one go, rather than the ad hoc way they have been for so many millennia.
Others say that they found a bigger more important enemy than us and that they would return even more powerful than before, ready to attack the galaxy anew.
A few even believe it was the Doctor, the man of a thousand faces, come to save us again as he had done that first time on Skaro, as he had done in many smaller ways subsequently, but finally saving our species completely as he believed he had done before.
Whatever the reason for their disappearance, for the first time in millennia my people, the Thal people, are free of them. My children do not have to fear that word, screamed out over a million battle grounds throughout the galaxy. My children do not have to fear extermination.
For the first time we are reaching out to the galaxy, making friends with other species rather than cowering in our own fear.
It seems the war is finally over, our long fight finally at an end. We, in a strange way, have won. By our very survival, we have defeated them.
We Thals, the last survivors of a dead world, of Skaro, have survived the Daleks.
A/N This is one of those stories that came to mind one day and I thought it would pass, with nothing having come from it. A week later, and the opening sentence was still in my mind, repeating itself ad nauseam and with it a whole, although short, idea for a story.
It was something Jack said in The Parting of the Ways: "one minute they're the greatest threat in the universe, next minute they vanish out of time and space" and so I decided that it might be interesting to hear about what happened from the Daleks oldest enemies, the Thals, point of view. Hopefully no-one's ever thought of writing this, or at least not like this (it's always nice to be original, at least occasionally) and I thought it might also be nice to pad Thal history out a little bit more, especially as they were never seen nor heard from again after Genesis of the Daleks (at least in the TV series) and that was based in the past.
And just for the record, the title was changed from Survival to The Survivors to link it back to the Thals first appearance in Doctor Who in the episode of the same name.
I hope you enjoyed reading, and please leave a review. If you have any queries or questions you can either put it in the review (hint, hint) or otherwise e-mail or pm me and I'll be happy to oblige.
Edit: this is a "re-upped" version of the story as it had been brought to my attention that although the listing still existed the story itself was longer present. So, here it is again (with a few corrections) for a new audience to enjoy!