'The Factory Workers'
Eight
"We need a name!" the Doctor declared, as Cassia's ship plunged upwards through the atmosphere.
The blonde girl turned in her seat beside him. Though her jaw was set tight, the Doctor saw the whiteness of her knuckles as she held the controls, the fine patina of sweat that had appeared on her forehead. As much confidence as she'd evinced in the craft when they were still on the ground, the actual experience of trying to break through Ford XVII's atmosphere was proving a bit too much for her to handle.
"What are you talking about, a name?" she demanded, her voice shaking.
The Doctor grinned. "Should have mentioned it before we took off, really. You always name a ship, for good luck."
She laughed nervously. "Um, how about Hopeless?"
The Doctor gave an exaggerated scowl. "Not very poetic."
A vibration that threatened to tear the tiny vessel nearly shook the Doctor from his seat. He pulled up on the controls. "I think a name is the least of our problems right now!"
"I think we could use all the luck we can get right now," the Doctor countered, and despite herself Cassia laughed.
The g-forces were starting to press them back into their seats, and the beleaguered little craft's salvaged and scrounged components were struggling even more than they had been already.
"Pick a name," the Doctor said, through gritted teeth.
Cassia was shaking, but she managed to say something.
"I didn't hear that, sorry," the Doctor repeated, raising his voice over the reverberating cacophony of the battered shuttle's quaking hull. "You'll have to speak up!"
Cassia was groaning, and then she screamed a name. "Lennia!"
As she spoke, the craft broke Ford XVII's atmosphere with one final shake, and Cassia burst into hysterical laughter, completely unable to believe that she was alive. She turned around and pulled the Doctor into an impromptu hug.
"We did it!" she cried, relief and excitement flooding her voice. "Oh my God, we actually made it!"
"Yes, we did," the Doctor agreed with a grin. "What was that name you said?"
Cassia considered, momentarily overwhelmed by the emotion of having survived their ascent from the planet's surface. Finally, she remembered what she'd said. "Oh, Lennia. My mother's name."
"Lennia," the Doctor said, as though tasting the character of the name, savouring the way it rested on his tongue. "Beautiful name. We really need a bottle of champagne for this, but what do you say we christen this bird Lennia, after the mother of its mother."
"I'm the ship's mother now?" Cassia repeated, snorting.
The Doctor just grinned. "You built her. You made her from scratch. Mother, creator, what's the difference?"
"Lennia," Cassia said, and she grinned. "Excellent. Now come on, we need to get this bucket of bolts to the moon. Find out what the Managers are up to."
"Absolutely," the Doctor agreed, nodding. "I'm activating the navigational computer now." The computer came to life slowly, in fits and starts; it was slow, old, its databanks barely strong enough to handle the relatively easy trip from planetary orbit to Ford XVII's one moon.
"Hang on, I'll give it some more power," Cassia said, tapping at a few controls. "Now that we've broken orbit we don't have to worry about the heat shields. I'm feeding that power into the engines and the nav computers."
The Doctor nodded. "Good idea. Don't overtax the conduits, though. The last thing we need right now is to burn out our power systems, end up a frozen hulk in the dead of space."
"Overly poetic, Doctor," Cassia said, but she looked uncomfortable. "They should be able to handle it."
The Doctor glanced over her shoulder to check her readouts. She and the movement's engineers had done amazing work, especially considering the incredibly limited resources at their disposal. Electro-proton accelerator engines, heat shields made out of stolen factory fire-fighting force fields, a hand-built, self-programmed nav computer. The little ship was an ode to human ingenuity, and the Doctor realised, much to his embarrassment, that he was glowing with an almost paternal pride.
Burying that feeling, he said to Cassia "I'm going to plot a course that'll take us around the dark side of Ford XVII. Give the engines one quick burn after I've set the course; it should be enough to slingshot us around the planet, and then we ride the gravity well all the way to the moon."
"And keep us off the manager's scanners," Cassia said, nodding, as she began to program the engines for their burn.
"Exactly," the Doctor said, smiling and nodding. He began to input his commands into the navigation computer, and on the screen before him a wire outline of Ford XVII appeared. The possible parabolic courses the shuttle could take around the curve of the planet were highlighted in red, and the one the Doctor selected was locked in a green hue. "Not as sophisticated the technology I'm used to working with, but it'll get the job done."
"Ready to execute the burn on your mark, Doctor," Cassia said, and he heard that the fear in her tone from earlier had been replaced with excitement.
"Course set," the Doctor said, and rechecked his calculations. "It all looks good. Are you ready, Cassia?"
"I'm ready, Doctor," she said, with a grin.
"Execute burn," he ordered, and she tapped a control. With a gentle shake, the craft began to accelerate; Ford XVII, its industrial surface hidden in places beneath layers of atmosphere smog, began to rotate past quickly as Lennia's small electroproton accelerator engines came to life.
The ship began to shake, and then, just as quickly as the acceleration started, it stopped, and Lennia sailed through the vacuum, maintaining its speed in the frictionless environment. Kept on its course by the planet's gravity, the ship began to clear the edge of the world. There, in the distance, the Doctor saw the planet's moon. Something about it, though, didn't seem right.
"That's odd," the Doctor said, and was about to check sensor readings when he remembered that the little ship didn't have anything much more advanced than a viewing scope and a Geiger counter.
"What is?" Cassia asked, but the Doctor was squinting through the viewport as the moon rushed up to greet the oncoming shuttle.
"The moon of a Ford-class factory planet is meant to be a terraformed tropical paradise," the Doctor reminded her. "Lush jungles, shallow lagoons, beaches. That moon looks like a wasteland."
Quite apart from the thick green growth the Doctor had expected, the moon before them was a small, off-white barren rock. The jungles looked to have been turned to ash and dust, the oceans long ago boiled away. Whatever atmosphere that was left was probably toxic.
"No one could live there," Cassia said, and the Doctor nodded.
"Not just that," he said, checking the Geiger counter, "but there's a great deal of radiation emanating from the moon. It was nothing natural that caused whatever calamity destroyed the surface."
"Then what?"
"My guess is some nuclear detonation," the Doctor explained, shaking his head.
"Raflog always told us that they lost contact with the personnel on the moon for no reason at all," Cassia responded, shaking her head. "Surely they would have said something about a nuclear bomb going off!"
"Maybe," the Doctor said, nodding, "unless that electromagnetic pulse that accompanies a nuclear explosion knocked their communications offline before they had a chance to contact anyone else."
"Surely they must have had equipment shielded against an EMP blast," Cassia said, the moon growing ever larger in the forward viewport. "I mean, a random solar flare would be able to knock out their comm. systems…"
"Which is what's making me think that it wasn't an accident," the Doctor said. "They were attacked. Wiped out." He shuddered as he said the next word. "Exterminated."
"By who?"
"I have a pretty good idea who's behind it," the Doctor said. "I don't want to believe it, truth be told, because whenever they show up, people die. I lose everything and they carry on, killing and maiming and destroying entire worlds."
"Who?" Cassia repeated, her voice thick with worry.
"The Daleks," the Doctor said.
Cassia blinked, clearly uninformed. She was about to ask a follow up question when a small indicator light on her control board notified her that they'd almost reached the endpoint of their course. They'd almost reached the moon, now, and it was blackened, pockmarked ball of rock. Looming large in the northern hemisphere, however, was a pyramidal structure, deathly black and reeking of malice and danger. It was a ziggurat, he realised.
"What the hell is that?" Cassia asked.
The Doctor shrugged. "I am not certain. I'm aiming the scope towards it, we'll see if we can't get a better look."
On his screen, the image of the course they'd travelled was replaced with an image of the structure. Studded with weapons, the Doctor realised that it resembled nothing so much as Dalek armour. He was looking directly at a fully armed and armoured Dalek citadel, a fortress; like the Norman castles in eleventh century Britain, a symbol of administration, control and domination. His blood ran cold at the sight of it.
His greatest enemies had returned once more, and he was looking at one of the very symbols of their dominion.
"We need to get out of here," the Doctor said, shaking his head. "Hang on, I'm going to reinitialise the burn, throw it into reverse, and get us back into orbit as soon as I can."
"But why?" Cassia asked. "Didn't we come here to see this?"
The Doctor shook his head. "I had my suspicions, but I wasn't certain. Now I am. Now I know for a fact that the Daleks are here. I need to find Sophie. No one is safe as long as these creatures exist."
Cassia blinked. "I can't believe I'm hearing this from you, Doctor. The way you spoke to Raflog when we were escaping the factory…"
"The Daleks are different," he said. "The Daleks are worse. They're monsters, pure and simple. They have a dislike for the unlike that goes far beyond anything you can rightly imagine. They are omnicidal killers, who murder for pleasure and because it has literally been written into their genetic code. They are unstoppable. They are deadly. They're here."
Tears had appeared in the corners of Cassia's eyes. "They're the Managers, aren't they?"
The Doctor nodded once. "They must be. And if they're…"
He trailed off, realising what had upset her.
"We need to get back to the planet now," the Doctor said, and immediately began manipulating controls. If the Managers were Daleks, and he was now positive that they were, they'd have known who he was the second Raflog had transmitted his biological data to him. They'd have secured the TARDIS, and probably brought it back to their ziggurat. They'd probably have sent at least one of their number to the surface to hunt him down. It would have followed his trail from the factory, directly back to the movement's colony.
"Everyone's dead," Cassia said, shaking her head. Her voice was hollow, tears now streaming down her cheeks. "The Managers would have found them and killed them."
"We don't know that," the Doctor said as he finished locking the course into the computer. "If they are, Cassia, I swear to you, we'll make them pay."
Cassia swallowed and nodded. The Doctor knew she was worried about Raflog, about Dextra and the kids, but his thoughts remained solely with Sophie. Though his hearts went out to the rest of the movement, Sophie's presence on Ford XVII was entirely his responsibility. She'd been put in danger entirely because of his actions.
"There's another ship out there," Cassia said, snapping the Doctor out of his reverie. A small vessel was speeding towards the moon, directly from the planet, not bothering with any of the parabolic plotting the Doctor had had to go through. Clearly, it didn't care about being detected and wasn't being powered by anything as primitive as homemade electroproton accelerator drives.
"It must be one of theirs," the Doctor said. "We don't have time to worry about that now. We've got to go."
Without even bothering to re-check his calculations, he activated the engines, and the little ship accelerated away from the moon, diving back down towards the planet. His hearts were pounding, and somehow he knew he was already too late.