Historian's Note: this story takes place immediately after the conclusion of 'The Factory Workers'
'Weapons of the Daleks'
Nine
The small shuttlecraft fell from orbit on a trail of blazing flame, riding a cone of white-hot fire. Its engines, cobbled together and only just made to work, struggled to slow down its descent, but as it carved a trail of steam across the upper atmosphere of factory planet Ford XVII, parting the multi-kilometre thick blankets of smog that coated the planet, it became clear to the two people inside that they'd be lucky to survive the coming seconds.
The woman in the pilot's seat, gripping the controls with white knuckles, was young, slim and blonde; barely out of her teens, her guile and cunning and raw cleverness had built the ship and her sheer determination had put it in orbit. The man beside her, indeterminately older but older nonetheless, had a thick mop of dark hair, and wore a coat that was black as night.
His jaw was set, and he was holding a thin, long device with a glowing light at its tip to the console in front of him.
"What are you doing?" the girl asked, her teeth chattering as the hull vibrated at an ever more violent frequency.
"Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow," the man, the Doctor, said with a tight grin.
Cassia was taken aback. "You're doing what?"
"Reversing the polarity!" the Doctor repeated, changing the settings on his sonic screwdriver and repeating the process.
"Doctor," Cassia said, "that doesn't make any sense."
"I know," the Doctor agreed, as another bout of atmospheric turbulence nearly shook the Trennia apart around them. Cassia had to shut her mouth and clench her jaw tight to prevent a sudden upchuck reflex, a sign of her disastrously upset stomach. "But if it works…"
Cassia frowned, despite the tremendous stress she was under. The Doctor's voice was strained even tighter than hers, and he'd lost a great deal of colour from his face. Despite the extremes of temperature they'd encountered on the planet below, during their escape from the turbocannon factory, he'd never shown any physical discomfort; she was sure he'd sprung a flop sweat, and she knew it had nothing to do with their precarious situation.
He was scared, she realised, all because of what they'd discovered on Ford XVII's single moon.
The shuttle tore through the atmosphere, its sonic boom echoing out behind it across half a continent. Ford XVII, the seventeeth of the Ford-class factory worlds, was covered from pole to pole in industrial facilities.
It should never have been populated by living, breathing people, but when the Doctor and his companion Sophie had arrived just a few hours before, they had discovered an entire culture on the planet; a culture of exploited slave-workers, toiling away in the depths of the planet's factories, which, far from the clean, robotic producers of consumer goods that history had recorded, relentlessly turned out weapons.
The Doctor and Sophie had been captured by Security Section, the humans that worked as soldiers and enforcers for the mysterious overlords of the planet, known only as the Managers. They'd found themselves in a factory dedicated to building turbocannons, powerful weapons capable of hurling projectiles across vast, indeed astronomical, distances.
Only with the help of a turncoat Security Section officer named Raflog, in reality a member of a secret resistance movement dedicated to overthrowing the Managers, and Cassia, had they managed to escape from the factory, eventually reaching one of the resistance's hidden colonies, deep beneath Ford XVII's surface. Cassia had shown the Doctor the small spaceship the resistance had been building, which they'd desperately named Trennia to gather together some last minute luck as they tried to break orbit.
The Doctor had finally gotten the craft to work, and he and Cassia had left Sophie behind with Raflog and the leader of the colony, a woman named Artraya, so that they could investigate Ford XVII's moon.
Long ago, that moon had been a terraformed tropical paradise, replete with lush jungles interspersed with warm, shallow lagoons. The legion of organic workers required to maintain the vast robotic factories had been houses there; Raflog had lived there, long ago, and had been on the planet when all communications to the moon had suddenly been knocked off-line. He and his team had never managed to return home.
The Managers had arrived, and they'd immediately seized control of the planet.
The Doctor and Cassia had just seen the moon themselves, and they'd found a ball of radioactive rock orbiting the factory world, a nuclear wasteland. The lagoons had been boiled away, just as the oceans of Ford XVII had long since been drained. The atmosphere had been stripped, the jungles turned to ash. All that remained was a wicked-looking citadel, armed to the teeth and terrifyingly familiar.
Despite the hell currently enfolding the little ship, the Doctor's hearts beat faster at the thought of that ziggurat, standing tall amongst the ruins of a dead world. He had recognised its builders immediately, and had realised seconds later the true identity of the Managers.
"The Daleks," he said to himself, and Cassia whipped her head around.
"What, Doctor?" the girl demanded.
"Nothing," he promised her, and he readjusted the settings on his screwdriver once again, plunging it in closer to the console. Almost imperceptibly, the pitch of the electroproton accelerators that acted as the ship's rudimentary propulsion system went up; suddenly, Cassia's console, which had become a mess of flashing lights, blinked off and then back on.
"I've got control!" she said, shock clear in her voice.
"Then decelerate the ship as quickly as you can," the Doctor told her, as he continued to press his sonic screwdriver into the console. "I can't keep this up for long."
"Right," Cassia said, and the Doctor felt the g-forces lessening on him as the shuttle began to slow down. The turbulence ceased, and the flames on the nose cone died away. Atmospheric drag and the electroproton accelerators, hampered as they were now by a feedback loop generated by the screwdriver, acted in concert to keep the craft aloft and stable.
The Doctor dared a glance out the forward viewport; in the distance, he could make out the enormous structures that made up the turbocannon factory precinct, and the enormous metal silos nearby that had once been the fuel tanks of an automated spaceport. Those silos housed the entrance to the resistance's colony, and a small warehouse hidden in the complex was the shuttle's landing zone.
"We're still coming in too fast," the Doctor chided Cassia. "Those silos are coming on a bit too quickly."
Below them now were rows upon rows of warehouses and hovels for the worker population. The Doctor come make out the tiny, gnat-like shapes of hovering robotic dones.
"I know, I know," Cassia said, through gritted teeth. "I'm doing the best I can."
"Come on, Cassia," the Doctor said, and he reached out to touch her shoulder. "You can do it. You can make it!"
"I know I can!" was all the young woman said, and with one hand still on the controls, she began flipping switches on her console at random. The shuttle shuddered like never before as the Doctor heard something detach from its belly.
"That was the main thruster assembly!" the Doctor protested.
"I know," Cassia repeated, "but most of them are broken, their throttles stuck open and we can't afford that much thrust driving us."
The Doctor nodded; yes, they were lighter now and more aerodynamic without the bulky thruster assembly bolted to the bottom of the ship, but they also had fewer engines powering them, and those engines were almost all functioning perfectly.
The Doctor shut his eyes, and without even looking he adjusted the settings on the screwdriver. He thumbed it into life again, and suddenly the ship stopped accelerating. The hull was no longer vibrating. Now, instead of piloting a flaming, broken brick, Cassia had a responsive, nimble craft at her fingertips.
"You did it!" Cassia cried.
"We're not out of the woods yet," the Doctor warned.
The ship shook again, and the Doctor could smell something burning. One of the thrusters had just worked its way free of the hull, and was probably well on its way to crashing into the city below. He found himself hoping that it wouldn't hit anyone on the way down.
"Damn it," Cassia cursed, "I've only got three functioning thrusters left."
The Doctor mumbled something under his breath, a choice curse from the backstreets of Yoralla Prime, and realised there was nothing left for him to do. The ship was, now, either going to crash and burn or make it, and it was all up to chance and Cassia's largely untested skill as a pilot.
"I can't do anything else," the Doctor warned her.
"It shouldn't matter," Cassia said, "airspeed is coming down. I have enough power left to get us into the hangar, but I'm not sure if we'll be in one piece."
A klaxon blared on the Doctor's console, and he checked the readouts. He swallowed, not impressed with what he was seeing. "That's not good," he muttered to himself, but Cassia heard him.
"What is it, Doctor?"
He found himself hesitating to tell her truth, but he reminded himself that he'd spent enough of his lives trying to shield people from hard truths. "Half the structural braces have started to splinter. You might be right; we might not make it in one piece."
Cassia gave a harsh, bitter laugh that made her sound far older, and far more cynical, than her years belied. "Oh, God, I knew it wasn't going to be that easy."
The Doctor sighed, and adjusted the settings on her sonic screwdriver again. He turned, and was about to use it to send vibrations up the structural braces to tighten the molecular structure of the metal and keep the ship together for a little while longer.
Just as he pressed the activation key, the ship hit another rough patch as a second engine came free from the craft. The screwdriver leapt from his hands and smashed against the bulkhead; the tip fractured and sparked, burning the Doctor's hands as he tried to grab it.
"Ouch!" he cried in shock.
Picking up the screwdriver, he saw that it was burnt out; he might be able to get some limited functionality out of it, but the device was all but useless now.
"My screwdriver," he whined.
"Doctor!" Cassia chided, "would you please focus?"
"But I love my screwdriver," he said, crestfallen.
"Doctor!" she roared, as the shuttle once again shook around then, seeming as though it was damn near about to finally fall apart.
"Right you are," the Doctor said, tossing the screwdriver over his shoulder. He heard it strike the rear bulkhead and clatter to the decking. "I'm going to feed the last of the power reserves to the engines."
"Why?" Cassia asked, as another screech filled the cabin.
"Because we just lost another engine," the Doctor said, and he continued to manipulate controls, trying to draw out every watt of power he could from the little shuttle.
They had just flown past the silos, and Cassia was beginning to reorient the craft, struggling to stay aloft on a solitary, failing engine. The Doctor could make out the small hangar they resistance had built the shuttle in. He found himself offering prayers to every deity he could think of, including the several he had met and the others he'd destroyed, hoping that they'd offer enough a spiritual boost to safely land the ship.
The hangar rose up to meet them, its doors already open. Within, the Doctor saw the makeshift workshop that had been used to build the ship; it was still coming up too fast.
"Full reverse on the last engine!" Cassia screamed, and flipped one last switch.
The ship finally fell apart; all at once, the eletroproton accelerator reversed its thrust entirely before being torn off the hull by the force of its own inertia. That same motion finally snapped the support braces, and the ship was torn in half with a horrendous cry of rent metal.
The two people inside slammed hard against the crash webbing that kept them strapped into their seats, and with cries of shock they were distracted from the fate made inevitable by velocity and gravity.
The forward half sailed cleanly into the hangar, with the rear half slammed with force into the roof, ploughing through it with abandon until it finally tore through the metal and sailed through the air, eventually coming to a rest lodged in the shell of one of the ancient, rusting silos. The forward half of the shuttle struck the floor of the hangar at speed, gouging a deep groove into the metal. It demolished the interior of the hangar, and finally came to a rest pressed against the rear wall of the chamber.
The ruins of the shuttle sparked for a few moments before the last of its power was exhausted and everything went dark.