I don't own Doctor Who or Sliders.
Please let me know what you think.
Parallel Worlds.
Dalek Invasion.
The TARDIS door opened and the Doctor came back out. Rose's eyes widened when she saw the gun in the Doctor's hands, but she didn't have time to say anything about it before the Doctor raised the gun and fired a few pulses of purple energy into the sky.
"What the hell are you doing, man?" Rembrandt demanded.
"Attracting the Daleks' attention; the Daleks are paranoid and obsessively cautious, they always investigate whenever someone fires a gun or uses a bomb. Besides we need to find out what they're doing on this Earth. The only way to do that is to hack its data core, and that's where this comes into it," the Doctor reached into his coat pocket and drew out a small laptop. "Now, quickly hide."
They almost didn't make it before two Daleks appeared in the sky. Surprisingly they flew towards the small group hiding on the ground with incredible speed.
"Was this part of your plan, Doctor?" Quinn asked quietly. He, Wade, and the Doctor were crouched down inside an old shop, waiting for the Daleks to arrive, but they could see the two pepper pot like alien tanks clearly as they came closer and closer.
"More or less," the Doctor replied just as quietly as he held the gun in his hands. It was clear to the two interdimensional travellers that the Doctor didn't like holding the weapon, but he was using pure willpower just to keep his grip on it. "I spent a few minutes trying to find a different way. Believe me, I did. I hate guns. I never carry weapons, but I couldn't think of any other way of attracting their attention."
Wade frowned as the Doctor tried to justify himself to them, but she was concerned by the self-righteousness in his voice. If he had just said "I hate guns" and left it there, she wouldn't give a damn, but she hoped he did not make a habit of giving out a holier than thou vibe. "So, what're you gonna do?"
"What do you mean?"
"When the Daleks arrive, what will you do?" Wade clarified.
"Shoot them both and hack into their data-cores. Every Dalek has one," the Doctor explained. "It's like a memory chip. I want to see if the Dalek occupation of this Earth is anything like the one of our universe," the Doctor replied, his expression going grim as he remembered the third encounter he'd had with the Daleks.
It was when he had been travelling with Susan, Ian and Barbara. In those days his ability to control the TARDIS was nonexistent and he had been travelling at random while his first self had been trying to get Ian and Barbara home to try to make up for his reckless moment of thoughtless panic after the two schoolteachers barged their way into the TARDIS; he had taken off with them on board without taking into account once he and Susan were gone, the evidence of their presence would long since be gone.
But when they had landed on Earth in the 22nd century and found the Daleks had conquered the planet and had enslaved the entire human race, the Doctor had been astonished by the level of the Daleks' plans. The Doctor made a face as he recalled Operation De-Gravitate, the insane plan of the Daleks to blast out the molten core of the planet and replace it with a Faster than Light engine capable of sending the planet anywhere in the universe.
The Daleks had hoped to use it as a giant warship, taking whole armies of Daleks throughout space while scattering Varga plant seeds everywhere.
While he missed the good old days where he had been able to pretend all he needed to do was to look after Susan and not get involved unless he and his friends had little choice if they were cut off from the TARDIS before coming face to face with the murderer of the people of Dido and a group of people who hadn't done him any harm in the first place, the Doctor wondered if the Daleks of this reality were doing the same thing or if this was just another pointless conquest in their desire to conquer and enslave the entire universe.
When the Daleks came close to landing in the middle of the street, the Doctor could see their eyestalks moving in every direction. This wasn't going to be easy, but then again very little was when it came down to the Daleks. All he wanted was for them to lower a little bit…
"The satellite uplink detected a blast of energy from this vicinity," one of the two Daleks informed the other.
"Infra-red scans do not indicate the presence of humans," the second Dalek countered. "We must continue to investigate."
Interesting; these Daleks seem to be more individualistic compared to the Daleks I've met before. In a way they remind me of the Daleks I first met on Skaro, the Doctor thought to himself before he lifted the blaster and aimed it at the Daleks. He opened fire in rapid succession, watching as the blasts of Artron energy seared through time and hit the Daleks and made them drop to the ground before they even had a chance to react.
The Doctor, ignoring Rose's expression, walked over to the Daleks and he opened up the casings using the sonic screwdriver to override the magnetic clamps holding the casing closed. He jumped back when the Dalek creatures shrieked in indignation, the fluid soaked tentacles flailing as they tried to reach him. The Doctor responded by shooting both creatures in the brain, wincing at the necessity but he needed to get to the data cores.
Once both Daleks were dead, the Doctor had little trouble downloading the information contained inside the cores and transferred them over to the small computer he'd pulled out of the TARDIS - he would need to really check the screwdriver later for viruses, and he quickly read the copied data.
It was as he thought; the Daleks were on Earth trying to create the Operation De-Gravitate, well their version of it at least. The Daleks of this timeline were more advanced than the ones in his reality at this point in their history. The engine they planned to use wasn't the warp engine from his reality, but a TRANSMAT engine similar to the one used by the Captain and Queen Xanxia.
Other things jumped out at the Doctor as he studied the flow of information; the Daleks were almost finished with the engines they were building at key points around the planet. Shipyards and missile platforms were under construction while metal from old ships, planes, cars, houses, factories, anything with high-grade metals were being melted down to create a fleet of warships while the Daleks took other humans to the asteroids to break up more of them; the missiles were a mix of antimatter, quantum, plasma, or nuclear weapons, but there were plagues, viruses, or bacterial weapons where the Daleks created them in labs on their ships without humans anywhere near them. Varga plants and Slythers, specially imported from Skaro were being cultivated and bred on the planet so when they travelled through space, they would be unleashed on unsuspecting planets. But the real horrors were the plague missiles which would be launched, carrying one plague after another to various targets.
The Doctor was reminded of the Dalek Time Controller's plan when the Daleks reconquered Earth decades after their original invasion, only this version was more brutal; instead of transforming the Earth into a plague world where it was infected by every plague collected by the Viryans and taken to the Amethyst station before the Daleks attacked, the Daleks planned on unleashing every different strain of bacteria on different worlds, turning the Earth into a terrible warship.
What made it worse was the Daleks were taking humans and they were experimenting with them, and creating what the Doctor saw were proto-Cybermen; living beings augmented with machines and computer circuitry, making them obey the Daleks and transforming them into weapons. The Daleks were not going to waste anything in this reality, and that made the whole thing sicker than anything else - he had seen them transform humans into Robomen in the past, but never anything like this. The problem was he just didn't know how different the Daleks were in this reality compared to the ones he had fought for so long. The Doctor continued checking through everything he had downloaded off of the data cores while he tried to think of plans to deal with the Daleks.
He pocketed the computer and headed back to the others.
"We can't leave yet; with the TARDIS and your Timer out of commission, we need to find the local resistance and join up. I need to get this," he held up the computer, "to them."
He hoped he sounded as optimistic as he sounded, but he couldn't. They were stuck in an alternate timeline where, it seemed, his original self wasn't even here and right now he couldn't find the time to find out why that was, or if his original self had even left Gallifrey in this universe. The TARDIS was still in a terrible state after his irresponsible prank on Mickey, and he needed to give her time to recover while she siphoned off energy from their own timeline to recover.
Right now, they needed to find the people of this Earth - he hoped there were some reasonably close by; they'd been out for too long, and the Daleks had likely been alerted by now their fellows were dead.
But the Doctor also felt sick. The last time he had gone on for a full-scale war against the Daleks had been during the Time War, and he prayed he did not have to relive some of the worst choices which had defined him in his wartime incarnation (he would not think of how his eighth self had run away, pretending to ignore the war even as the universe crumbled around him).
No, this time was going to be different.