I don't own Doctor Who or Quatermass - I wish I did because it would have been fascinating if a what if Doctor Who spin-off was written and produced by the BBC as they did with Big Finish's Doctor Who Unbound range. Hence the title.
What if... the Thirteenth Doctor left Sheffield alone after Grace's death and she didn't travel with Yaz, Ryan, and Graham?
Unbound Doctors: The Flying Saucer.
The door to the TARDIS's police box exterior shape opened and the Doctor stepped out of her ship curiously and cautiously before she closed the doors. Sticking her hands in the pockets of her new trench coat which was a brighter lilac-blue rather than the solid black preferred by her predecessor, the Doctor stood still for a moment, studying the old RAF base her ship had landed in. Its original structure was there; runways with large sheds and admin buildings, but there were so many changes with new buildings and gantries for supporting the rockets. As she walked around the expanded and refurbished base, the Doctor could see the rockets themselves were supported in large pits that formed bowls in the ground. It was a good design as far as the Doctor was concerned. The bowl would protect anyone on the ground from the exhaust blast, and it would also limit the area damaged should the rocket explode on blast off.
But it reminded her of something.
She had seen this place before, if only she could figure where and when that had been. That was one of the drawbacks of time travelling; you could travel anywhere and anywhen for thousands of years but when you actually arrived somewhere, it was possible you had been there before but you couldn't remember it.
"I have seen this place before, but where and when?" The Doctor asked herself, biting her lip in thought while she kept trying to work the memory of where she'd seen this place out of her mind but she wasn't having much luck. Inspired the Doctor sniffed the air, her Time Brain and temporal and spatial senses, sharpened by the sensitivity of her recent regeneration, instantly identified the time period.
"1959, so not that far off of the 60s. Good times, although that mess with Shoreditch could've been avoided. And it's Britain but that's obvious since this an RAF base," the Doctor muttered with her mind running as she looked around, "Still the date range gives me something to work with…."
Walking away from the TARDIS - the old girl still needed time to recover from the damage she'd sustained from the regeneration - the Doctor continued to explore the rest of the base to see if seeing more of it would inspire more clues as to where she was.
The Doctor bit her lip as she thought of recent events. After her predecessor was critically injured during the battle on the Mondasian colony ship where Bill was transformed into a Cyberman thanks to the Master, regeneration was inevitable.
But she had become tired of just regenerating constantly, being one person one century and then winding up as somebody else. For hours while she had been her predecessor for the last few hours of that incarnation's life, feeling the burn of regeneration energy beneath the surface, struggling to get out at a moment's notice… she had wanted to just die.
It wasn't until TARDIS took her back in time to the last place she expected to visit again. She had some very bad memories of Snowcap base when her original incarnation had visited the place as Mondas appeared, but it might have been because of how the place was where her first regeneration had taken place that she had bad memories in the first place.
Meeting her first self was a surprise, but looking back - her predecessor had been so befuddled with regeneration energy that she had forgotten that it was written into the fabric of the being of Time Lord that any meeting with a future incarnation was forgotten so when the Time Lord became the future incarnation they were not forewarned of the encounter - she guessed it made sense she had forgotten the whole thing.
But it also made sense that her original self would be so scared of losing what made him - him when he regenerated.
But it had to be done; the things they would do, especially in their second incarnation; the meetings with the Cybermen as they evolved gradually, the first meetings with the Ice Warriors, the Great Intelligence, UNIT… Alastair, all of it culminating in the big choice which would eventually define that incarnation best of all.
The choice of helping the human soldiers captured by the War Lords with the help of Magnus and whatever pieces of Time Lord technology he had brought with him; knowing helping them would result in their capture and punishment by the Time Lords.
Her future incarnations had always looked back with anger and resentment at what their people had done to her in that life, how the Time Lords had stripped away their memories of how the TARDIS worked, sending away Jamie and Zoe and knowing they'd never remember them, and the five years of long exile.
But at the same time the Doctor, in all of their lives, had known for a long time the decision had defined them as a character.
Inspiring themselves to go on, the two Doctors, both the first incarnations of their respective regeneration cycles, decided to regenerate. For the first time in thousands of years, the Doctor had regenerated into the body of a woman; she had considered the possibilities a few times in the past, of course, but she had always been uncomfortable with the idea of regenerating anyway and she hadn't wanted to make such a huge transition with a new gender.
She had always asked herself how Time Lords like the Monk when she remembered meeting his female incarnation who went - imaginatively under the name of the Nun - when her tenth self had found herself in a pre-Time War universe, Drax, and the Corsair, and now the Master, coped when they regenerated into female bodies.
But, while it was still early days, the transition seemed relatively easy.
She only wished the recent adventure had gone better, though. It was bad enough when she had regenerated the amount of energy she had bottled down had burst outwards and destroyed the TARDIS, throwing her out of her ship and she fell back to Earth while her ship dematerialised, but she had lost her memories as well during the fight with Tim Shaw, the Stenza warrior who came to Earth on ritual killings. She had met with four humans - Graham and Grace, Ryan, and Yaz. They'd banded with her, although looking back she was still subconsciously trying to bite back the pain she was still feeling with the loss of Nardole and Bill.
It was inevitable one of them would pay the price, and it fell on Grace, who had fallen to her death while she'd fought Tim Shaw when the warrior had hunted down Carl who was his target. After that, Graham and the others had asked - demanded - she left. The Doctor, respecting their wishes did as she was told, and she had left Graham and Ryan to mourn in peace. In the meantime, she had headed back to the warehouse where the Stenza pod was and she had spent hours constructing a teleporter to send her after the TARDIS.
Unfortunately, she had arrived in the middle of space in a rapidly shrinking atmosphere bubble before she was picked up by Angstrom who was in the middle of a race, and it led them to the planet known as Desolation, a world stripped of all life by Stenza biogenetic warfare research. The Doctor had tagged along with Angstrom and Epzo, whether they liked it or not when she discovered her TARDIS was on the planet, known as the legendary Ghost Monument.
After encountering a toxic atmosphere, sniper-bots, and weird pieces of animated cloth, the Doctor managed to recover her ship and she had left Desolation as a time traveller again, and now she was travelling alone, once more.
Maybe in the future, she would find someone to travel with, but not now.
X
Deciding to head for one of the rockets, the Doctor considered what she was going to do now. She supposed she should just do what her tenth self had done after Donna was…gone, and not travel with anyone; but it was not going to be easy, since she could already tell her new incarnation was geared for companionship given how much she had enjoyed being around Yaz, Graham, Grace, and Ryan. The Doctor sagged at the thought of what could have been, but she decided it could not be helped. She couldn't blame the humans for being resentful towards her for what had happened to Grace.
The Doctor sighed and pushed those thoughts aside as she reached the rocket launch pad. It was smaller than some of the rocket launch pads she had seen in other countries, and indeed on some planets where aliens developing space travel had looked to rockets as a primitive form of getting into space. All of it looked homegrown to her. The bowl was made from bricks of what looked like reinforced concrete and as she walked into the bowl and gazed at the rocket above, noting how small it was in comparison to the other rockets of this era, she saw the gantry and the searchlights fixed on them.
Searchlights?
Tensing the Doctor realised the mistake she had just made. Before she had been almost invisible, but now she had stepped into the light of the searchlights, anyone watching nearby would see her and she didn't know enough of this place to be sure where she was. Just as she was contemplating just walking back to the TARDIS and leaving, the Doctor suddenly heard the distant sounds of car motors. But they didn't get to her in time as the soldiers leapt out of nowhere.
"Oi, you! Stay where you are!"
The Doctor sighed as she saw the soldiers appearing, guns already at the ready. "It's okay, no need to be afraid," she said carefully, "I'm not going to hurt you."
"How did you get here? The gates to the Rocket Group are secure." One of the soldiers demanded.
The Doctor wasn't sure how to answer the question. While she was thinking about what to say, the car motor drew to a halt and there was the sound of a door opening but the light from the headlights made it impossible for her to see who was getting out.
"Corporal, what's going on here?" A voice demanded before its owner stepped forward revealing the tall figure of an army officer wearing the typical uniform of this point in history, absently saluting to his fellow soldiers when they crashed to attention while keeping watch on her in case she ran. But if they were expecting her to run while the officer was here, they were in for a disappointment. While she might have been able to use the brief moment to escape, the Doctor knew the soldiers would shoot her down before she got too far away and it wasn't worth it, not with it being so early in a new incarnation.
"Intruder, sir. We don't know how she got in. She won't answer our questions," one of the soldiers reported in that brisk way the Doctor knew only too well thanks to those days in UNIT which, relatively speaking, hadn't happened yet.
The Doctor just couldn't resist the chance to interrupt and criticise the military mind despite her respect for the Brigadier and Benton, and all the others she'd worked with from her second incarnation onwards. "Actually I was going to reply, but I was trying to think of the best way to word my answer to your question," she said in the direction of the corporal.
"Then why are you here? And how did you get inside? There's a perimeter patrol at all times," the officer demanded.
The Doctor licked her lips. She knew sooner or later they would find the TARDIS and they would know it was not supposed to be here if they knew the place well. But she decided to do what she normally tried to do, bluff her way through this. "Okay, I found a gap in the perimeter patrols and I snuck in from there," she said before she changed the subject. "I like the rocket."
The officer instantly stiffened. "Are you a spy?"
The Doctor sighed, kicking herself mentally for her mistake. Of course, in the 1950s and 60s, everyone was so paranoid about the Russians and that stupid short-sighted garbage. "No, I'm not," she snapped, her mind flashing back to the Time War where the Daleks made use of nano clouds and continuity viruses to warp their victims until they were unthinking slaves no better than Ogrons or Robomen. "I'm not a spy, I haven't got anyone to spy for and I don't care for any government."
The officer looked taken aback by the sharp reply, but he was willing to go along with this woman for the time being. Yes, he would give her a length of rope, and if she made one wrong move, he would transform that rope into a noose. "You're going to come with us, now," the officer said, "you are under arrest, under suspicion of espionage under- What in god's name is that?"
While the Doctor had been rolling her eyes at the statement, she was looking up in the air now. Something was hovering in the air, a ball of light. And it was landing.
"Quickly!" The officer, forgetting the Doctor, mobilised the troops and rushed for the light.
A few of the soldiers remembered the Doctor's presence and pushed her forwards since nobody had told them anything different. Personally, she didn't mind; she knew the soldiers would put her through a boring interrogation, send one stupid accusation after another at her, and because of her lack of contacts since UNIT wasn't running right now, and anyone else who was here who knew of her wouldn't recognise her anyway, she couldn't bluff her way past them.
X
The object that had landed was a glowing flying saucer, but that wasn't what was the most interesting thing about it. The saucer the size of a small transit van, and it was flashing a deep red light. One of the most fascinating things about the saucer was it glowed so brightly. As she drew closer to it, gauging the shock on the soldier's faces, the Doctor got a good look at the saucer.
It was shining in the dim light being shone on it, but she couldn't get enough of the details with the soldiers in the way. As she was ushered closer to the site, the Doctor caught sight of the look of shock written all over the officer's face.
He was the type of officer who liked things nice and routine. He led the boring kind of life she knew most officers like him lived, but she knew of another career by the book officers who were limited at first; Gilmore and, Gallifrey forgive her, Alastair, but they had grown and learnt from experience.
Somehow she had the feeling this guy was not going to be one of them, but she had been wrong in the past before, and so she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The Doctor was about to bluff and take charge of the matter by giving the officer what he craved right about now; direction. He needed somebody to tell him what to do about this latest development since he was way out of his league, but before she could even open her mouth another car drove in and the door opened revealing a middle-aged man who was pushing fifty or sixty in human years, his face alert and keen with eyes showing a continuing desire for knowledge and understanding.
"Colonel Collier, what's going on here?"
A surge of recognition was dawning in the Doctor's mind. She knew this man.
The officer sighed. "Please return to the main control complex, Professor Quatermass," Collier ordered.
Quatermass?! Oh, damn it! My brain really does need a rest, the Doctor thought to herself, resisting the urge to smack herself in the head for being so slow on the uptake. It was so obvious in hindsight, she should have recognised this place by the rockets alone.
Quatermass noticed her at last. "Collier, who's that?"
The Doctor spoke before Collier could. "Joh-Joanna Smith," she began, correcting herself at the last minute. "Doctor Joanna Smith, but some people just prefer to call me Doctor. It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Quatermass," she finished with a warm grin cantered on the rocket scientist whose theories on rockets helped shape future missions.
She had met Quatermass before in previous lives; her third self and the professor had frequently met in the same club, and they had met during a Cyberman attack, and the less said about the Sea Devils the better. But he didn't know her and in her current life that was probably for the best.
"What are you doing here?" Quatermass asked.
Collier spoke up before the Doctor could herself. "She's an intruder, Professor. We found her snooping around, and we will question her."
"Yes, but what do you think your superiors will be more interested in; me, or an alien ship?" The Doctor countered.
Collier scoffed and he wasn't the only soldier present who disbelieved her. "Alien ship? You call yourself a doctor?"
"Trust me, from what I saw, based on the speed of the ship thanks to its gravimetric engines - electromagnetic fields, by the way," she added with a smile aimed at the now intrigued and excited looking Quatermass who knew what that meant, "that's an alien ship, it wasn't a mini helicopter."
A sudden whirring stopped anyone from talking or from asking any more questions, and they turned. The top dome of the saucer had opened up and small tentacles were extended.
"Wha-?" One of the soldiers said, but it was too late. The tentacles flashed with light, and the soldiers screamed as they suddenly disintegrated.
"What's going on, what is that?" Collier demanded.
The Doctor, meanwhile, was watching the whole scene and a horrible realisation was creeping into her mind. "It's a Rutan fighter," she whispered in horror.
Collier swung around to face her. "A what?" He demanded, but then a flash of glowing silver shot out and grabbed hold of Collier.
"Look out!" The Doctor cried, but it was far too late as Collier began screaming as light crackled all over his body. Still screaming in horror, fear and pain, the Doctor and Quatermass watched on in horror themselves as Collier was pulled forwards and yanked into the ship.
There was nothing more she could do, although a cruel voice in her mind criticised her for not doing anything to stop any of this she shut it up quickly. This was no time for a mental war. She tugged the shaken Quatermass, and she pulled him back to the car.
"Where are we going?" Quatermass demanded.
"As far from that Rutan as we can get," the Doctor snapped grimly while she took the driver's seat and, after a bit of stumbling - it had been centuries since she had made use of a car from this period, but she quickly got the hang of it, and she sped as far from the landing site of the Rutan fighter as she could while her mind raced.
"What was that? And who are you?" Quatermass demanded.
"That was a Rutan. An alien from another world," the Doctor explained while she drove. "They're an intelligent race who evolved on a planet called Ruta 3; it evolved in an ocean, adapted to land, but it remained in the shape of a green blob, a green blob which can squash itself down into a ball of jelly. Some of them are shapeshifters; they need to perform autopsies on prospective races to get an idea of the anatomy of their intended subject. They kill by electrocution. That's what happened to Collier, and I've got no doubt the Rutan is dissecting Collier to learn more about his anatomy so it can take his appearance as its own."
Out of the corner of her eye, the Doctor could see Quatermass looking overwhelmed. "Don't worry, it's culture shock," she said, quoting the tall northerner when Rose stepped into the TARDIS for the first time. "Happens to the best of us."
Quatermass sent her a glare, and he mopped his brow with a stained handkerchief. "I'm just…confused; everything is happening so fast. I've faced conspiracies, learnt more about the occult than I would have cared wanted to, and encountered a plant organism, I never expected to learn more about an alien like this. How do you know so much about them?"
"I've met them before," the Doctor said, recalling her previous encounters with the Rutans.
"What does it want?"
"It's a soldier, likely a recon scout looking for a planet to use as a launching platform for a new battlefront against the Sontarans," the Doctor said shortly while she looked into the mirrors. She couldn't see any signs of pursuit, but she knew better than to underestimate the Rutans.
"Sontarans?"
"The Sontarans and the Rutans have been fighting a war across the universe for 50,000 years, Professor Quatermass. 50,000 years of bloodshed and destruction. The Sontarans and the Rutans are both warrior races who've been fighting against one another for so long, I doubt they even know what set the whole thing off," the Doctor bit out grimly shaking her head, "and it never ends; with the scale of space, it's not as if neither of them has no galaxies to fight in. Both races have seen this solar system's position as strategic. Now it looks like it's going to happen again."
"Again? You mean they've fought over Earth before?" Quatermass asked horrified at the thought.
"Several times, but they haven't exactly fought over Earth-like two armies fighting over a battlefield. No, they've always been driven off. Usually, the Sontarans and Rutans coming to the planet have come singularly or in small groups, and they are just fought off, and the higher-ups just wrote off Earth before some new reason for the planet's annexation comes in. It looks like its happening again; the Rutans are back, either this particular scout is being chased by a Sontaran fighter squadron or the Rutan High Command want to use this planet for something major," the Doctor spotted the Rocket Group's control tower, and she directed the car towards it.
She took another look out of the window, remembering all the encounters she'd had with the Sontarans and Rutans on Earth, from the encounter with Linx in the middle ages with Sarah, that meeting with the Rutan scout who'd massacred a whole lighthouse because they were in the wrong place and the wrong time, to that encounter with Styre who'd conducted those cruel experiments on those unfortunate enough to cross his path in Earth's far future when the planet was roasted by solar flares.
"Is that why you think it's here, to turn Earth into a gun platform?" Quatermass was horrified.
"It's possible, but either way, that Rutan is a recon scout; the empire use them to, well, reconnoitre and spy on enemy positions, scout out new places to conquer, well you get the drift," the Doctor stopped the car.
"What are we doing?" Quatermass asked even as he undid his seatbelt.
"I don't know just yet," the Doctor replied grimly.
X
Meanwhile back at the landing site, an army jeep arrived near the Rutan saucer. None of the men knew what had happened although they knew their commanding officer was personally overseeing the entire operation. As they arrived at the saucer, they almost crashed into it because it was so tiny but its shining crystalline exterior.
"Oh my god," one of the soldiers gasped.
"W-what is it?"
"Never mind that!" One of the soldiers, a corporal, barked in the hopes military bluntness and discipline would cover up their churning emotions. It didn't really work. "Where's everyone?"
"That… is not important," a familiar voice said from behind, and all three soldiers swung around at once.
"Colonel Collier, sir!" The Corporal snapped to attention, and likewise, the other men did the same.
Collier's expression, greyish white and gaunt, suddenly smiled at the men, and the colonel stepped closer….
X
The Doctor was wondering if her later lives were doomed to suffer from some kind of karma. When she had worked for UNIT in her third life, and her subsequent encounters with UNIT and other alien-fighting organisations on Earth, she had occasionally given her old friends a lot of grief due to her disdain for the military lifestyle.
They just annoyed her no end with their narrow views of the world and how hard it was to persuade them to listen to her; granted, a few were reasonable, which made the Doctor optimistic about their intellects although she sometimes had to accept it was more likely it was because they were simply strapped for options and they were only latching onto her advice and aid because they were out of their depths.
But right now the Doctor was having a very frustrating time working with Professor Quatermass to persuade the people working in the control room about what had happened to Collier, but the biggest problem was Collier was not the only military officer assigned to the Rocket Group. Major Reed was perhaps one of the most unflappable military officers she had ever met; in many ways, she was reminded of Cobb's arrogance on Messaline (she would not think of how she had abandoned Jenny, who had later gone off on her own), and so many others.
"I will ask you again, what happened to Colonel Collier and the other soldiers?" Reed demanded again.
The Doctor sighed, and out of the corner of her eyes, she could see Quatermass' frustrated look. "We've already told you seven times. Our answer has not changed once, and it won't change again. Look, is there a point to all of this?"
"I am trying to make sense of why a potential spy and saboteur who broke into the Rocket Group base is with the civilian head of the complex. I am also trying to understand how you can see me as a fool for giving me such a stupid story."
The Doctor groaned. Now she could see what the problem was. And so did Quatermass. "Major, if I was a spy, why would I be here, with Professor Quatermass, arguing with you about something like this?"
"That's what I'd like to know; perhaps you and Professor Quatermass dreamt it up together?"
The Doctor was now resisting the urge to scream and curse the primordial soup the humans came from if it developed their intelligence to this extent. "Major, forget who I am and how I got here," she mentally disembowelled the TARDIS for getting her into this mess, "think! You know Professor Quatermass, why would he be roped into this?"
"She has a point, Major," Quatermass pointed out.
"Professor Quatermass," a technician forestalled anymore pointless logical games, and all three turned in the direction of the technician. "Prototype Rocket 3 is being activated."
"What?" Quatermass shouted. "How did that happen? Shut it down."
The technician tried but the Doctor saw he wasn't having much luck. "I can't. Whoever it is has shut out the controls."
The Doctor had a good idea who was in the rocket. "What's so special about the rocket?" She asked Quatermass.
"It's going to become our lunar orbiter," the rocket scientist explained. "We designed it with the purpose of travelling around the moon and even facilitating landings, but there are plans of using it to land on the moon and perhaps other bodies in space. Do you think this Rutan is onboard?"
"It would be an enormous coincidence if it wasn't. But why? Is its ship too badly damaged and it needs some kind of replacement?" The Doctor muttered to herself while she put her hands on her hips to think. As she did, she thought she heard Quatermass say something about clamps, but her mind was racing as she tried to think of a way of dealing with the Rutan.
This was more than enough for Major Reed. He didn't have the first inklings about what was happening, but he had just about had enough.
"Enough of this. I don't know what your game is, but I'm putting a stop to it-," the officer drew out his gun and pointed it at the Doctor.
"You will release us," a cold, high, shrill warbling voice that sounded similar to Colonel Collier shrieked over the radio. Next to the radio, a large television screen turned itself on and a picture of Collier filled the screen. Everyone could see he looked terrible thanks to how his face filled the screen.
The Doctor walked over to the screen. "You don't look very well. You look like you're having trouble. It's not easy, holding onto a human shape is it?"
"What are you talking about, Doctor whatever your name is?" Reed demanded before he turned to the screen. "Colonel Collier, sir. I have no idea what is going on, but-."
Collier's mouth opened and said the words, but what came out of the mouth was purely alien."Be silent, Primitive. And as for our form, it's no longer necessary. We can abandon this ridiculous shape."
"Why don't you do it? You'll be comfier," the Doctor suggested with a kindly smile.
Collier's face and body began to glow and melt and change, reforming until the human shape was gone. It was replaced by a glowing shapeless mass as the Rutan returned to its real form. Once its transformation was finished, the Rutan let out a triumphant shrill shriek. At the sight of the pulsating glowing mass, Quatermass backed away and even the arrogant soldiers recoiled at the sight.
"What in the name of God is that?" Reed whispered.
The Doctor ignored him and she addressed the Rutan. "Feeling better now, Rutan?"
"You know of us?" The onboard camera onboard the rocket reflected off of the multifaceted eyes of the Rutan. The Doctor didn't comment on how the Rutan spoke in the plural. The Rutans had little to no concept of individual identity anyway, they all saw themselves as units of the all-conquering Rutan race.
"I've met your kind before, yes. What're you doing in this part of the galaxy? The war is nowhere near here," the Doctor said.
"That does not concern you."
But the Doctor had a secret weapon. "I know what you're here for, why you crashed; you're losing that war of yours with the Sontarans."
The Doctor just metaphorically leaned back and waited for the fireworks. She didn't need to wait long.
"That is a lie! It is impossible!" The Rutan crackled fiercely with electrical rage, and the Doctor was sure she saw sparks flying around the Rutan's jellyfish-like body.
The Doctor chuckled under her breath. Rutans and Sontarans, she mused, ask them point-black about their meaningless conflict, and they won't bother replying, but say that they're losing to their faces and they will spill the beans! It's crazy.
"We are a Rutan recon scout trained in the metamorphosis techniques, sent to locate Sontaran forts in this part of the galaxy before we destroy the star systems they are located in."
The Doctor stopped chuckling as she heard this. She went over what the Rutan had just said, reciting it over and over again before she asked quietly, "What do you mean by that? You shouldn't be able to do that, the Sontarans must be driving you closer to the Rim of the galaxy, and beyond. Besides, you don't have the strength to destroy star systems so quickly to do that."
"They are not. We are holding the line, thanks to the Dalek singularity beam."
The Doctor felt a chill of horror spread throughout her body, driving out what remained of the energy from her recent regeneration. "How did you get hold of that? Actually, how have the Daleks let you get away with it, they usually keep close tabs on their technology? Actually, you shouldn't be able to understand how it works; the Daleks had created those things in such a way only they can operate it?"
Like most things created by the Daleks, the singularity beam was something the Doctor had never had any problems despising. The beam combined gravity manipulation, time acceleration, and matter transference; the gravity side twisted the stars' gravity round and round like a pretzel while the temporal accelerator aged the core of the star before the transmat stopped all nuclear fusion and the star collapsed into a black hole as a result.
The Daleks had developed the weapon which had always made the Doctor wonder if they had been inspired by the Death Star, from Star Wars since it was so similar or even Death Star.2 from the later movies, but more realistically the Doctor suspected the Daleks had been trying to form an answer to the Hand of Omega. They had only discovered the technology existed during that mess back in her seventh incarnation, but even then she hadn't known the Daleks had likely been inspired at that point and they had come up with their own version.
When you make it more compact, take away the sentience of the original Hand of Omega, and you were left with a weapon of unthinking destruction. The thing had been invented during the years prior to the Last Great Time War, and when the Daleks had unleashed it upon the universe, they had managed to conquer hundreds of galaxies without scarcely firing a shot. All they needed to do was jump through hyperspace, arrive in orbit above several of the star systems inhabited by their enemies, and then they would destroy them with a single beam. It was a nasty final solution, and one the Daleks had used in the Time War to evenly match themselves against the Time Lords and their Battle TARDISes.
But how had the Rutans gotten hold of one?
The Rutans and the Sontarans were both technologically advanced, but how could they have gained control of a Dalek weapon since both sides knew only too well what would happen if they even thought of going for one. Both sides of the 50,000-year-old intergalactic conflict had always been an insane struggle, both sides passing through the different galaxies with one side winning before the other began to win and the other side fell back. Both sides needed and wanted an edge, and they didn't care where it came from.
Sometimes they tried to steal them from other races, and they had often looked at races like the Daleks who spread themselves through the universe, fighting every race they came across. But the Rutans and the Sontarans had tried acquiring their technology, but it always ended badly. The last time they had done that…. They had been lucky the Daleks had not killed them.
So how had they gotten away with it now?
Finally, the Doctor decided she didn't want to know. "So, you got hold of one of the most devastating weapons in the universe, and now you're using it against the Sontarans?"
"Yes, Earthling. Our glorious army is using the beam to destroy solar systems and fleets used by the Sontarans, and now our enemies are fleeing before us."
"So, why are you in this solar system? There aren't any Sontarans here," the Doctor asked, suddenly feeling worried the fate of the Earth could hang in the balance.
"The Sontarans are in full retreat, however, they are falling back to unconquered planets and attempting to re-group. We and other recon scouts and fighter squadron commanders are following their retreat. This solar system is strategic and the Sontarans are likely to conquer it and use it as a power base."
"And then you'll destroy the star, collapsing it into a black hole and destroy everyone here," the Doctor finished angrily and she wondered just how many other innocent races had been destroyed in this manner.
"Correct, Earthling," there was sheer callousness in the Rutan's voice. "The destruction of this solar system would serve the cause of the glorious Rutan Empire!"
The Doctor closed her eyes. When she had met Bill during that weird mess with the strange puddle, they had encountered one race after another that had their empires. Dalek. Movellan. The Monks. The Cybermen. The Stenza, and now she was caught in a galaxy-wide retreat against the Sontarans and the Rutans. And this time the threat towards Earth was greater than she had imagined. And she had had enough.
"But are you going to destroy this planet and everyone on it?" She asked quietly.
"No, Earthling. Our army needs a long-range base from which to launch our forces. This planetary system fits our purposes perfectly with its strategic position in this part of the galaxy. We shall not allow the Sontarans to overrun our glorious forces another time."
While she could understand the Rutan's point, the Doctor knew this fate was just as bad. The Sontarans were bound to strike back… and the Rutans were likely to transform the local star into a black hole, and they would probably destroy others in other solar systems where there was even the smallest Sontaran presence.
The Doctor leaned over the radio console and quickly scanned the bank of controls until she found the one which would shut off the connection, and she flicked the switch. Urgently she turned to the technicians and Quatermass, who had been listening with horrified shock at the threats levelled towards them and their world by the Rutan.
She sympathised with the humans, but she didn't have the time to reassure them all was not lost. "Does that rocket have some kind of failsafe where you can destroy it if it's about to crash into a city or something?" She demanded.
Quatermass needed to focus before he answered her question. "No, it doesn't. You wanted to destroy the rocket before it left orbit, I take it?"
The Doctor shut the connection between the Rutan and the control room - the alien thing didn't have anything to say that she particularly wanted to hear right now, and besides, she had learnt enough to get an idea of what the Rutan was going to do. "Yes. The Rutan is going to use your rocket to get into space, and then it will contact its people and they will make their move towards the solar system. But without that, there's no way out."
The Doctor paced up and down the control room lost in thought as she tried to think of a way they could stop the Rutan from completing its mission, but one of the biggest issues on her mind was how the Rutans had stolen such a serious weapon from the Daleks, and her oldest enemies hadn't yet discovered what the Rutans had done. There was little doubt in her mind when the Daleks discovered what the Rutans had done, the jellyfish-like aliens would pay a terrible and steep price since the Daleks had technology that dwarfed that of both of the Sontarans and the Rutans combined, and since the Daleks had fought both races until they were so soundly defeated it took centuries for both to come out of it, those mutated vermin would know how to fight the Rutans.
She remembered the fight with the Rutan scout during the early 1900s, decades and lifetimes ago and how she and Leela had needed to not only deal with the scout who'd killed everyone in that lighthouse on Fang-Rock but also deal with that mothership. On that occasion, the Doctor and Leela had been lucky the lighthouse was electrical, and they had been able to modify it to fire a powerful laser beam….
Wait.
"What's powering that rocket?" She asked the rocket scientist.
"The rocket casing is a prototype for a future design where we were hoping to install a nuclear-powered engine into it too, but its engines are just conventional rocket engines. Why?" Quatermass was confused by the question.
The Doctor nodded thoughtfully, her mind racing. She had been thinking of simply destroying the rocket in a carbon arc beam as she had in her fourth incarnation when she and Leela had destroyed that Rutan Mothership, but while it was tempting to do so she wasn't sure if the laser would be enough. But there was something she could do. "Oh, I'm just trying to think of a way of dealing with the Rutan. If we let it leave, then it will report to its superiors, and they'll destroy the entire solar system. We cannot let it leave."
Reed was still having trouble accepting all of this. To him, this was sounding like a plot from a science fiction film. "Are you really telling us there are little green men who will destroy this planet, Doctor?" He spat incredulously.
The Doctor ignored him and focused instead on Quatermass uncertainly - she was taken by surprise for a second by how she was suddenly more sympathetic in this new incarnation; the tall white-haired Scotsman had mellowed out when she had been him, helped by the realisation she was still the Doctor after spending so long on Trenzalore, but this new body's personality had something that certainly made her feel she was more emphatic this time around. "Professor, I know this is going to be hard for you, but is there any other way we can destroy your rocket?"
Quatermass looked down in pain. He had put a lot of his heart and soul into building the latest rocket. While he despised the military presence here, he had learnt to try to make the best of things. He had been looking forwards to seeing this rocket fly, the first step in the construction of nuclear-powered rockets which would be powerful and durable enough for long-range inter-system travel and exploration even with military ties.
To see it destroyed…but he knew he didn't have any choice. Quatermass hadn't really understood what the Rutan had been saying, but he had picked up enough to know the threat would destroy the solar system. If he had to destroy his work to save millions, then it would be a small price to pay, but it didn't mean it wasn't painful.
"The fuel tanks. They're built into the rocket's main body."
"That might not be enough, but thanks," the Doctor mused to herself, going over her current plans. "Keep the Rutan talking while I work, and whatever you do, don't let it leave this planet. Thanks very much, Professor," she said, moving towards the door.
"Doctor, where are you going-?"
"Wait, guards stop her!"
But they were too late. The Doctor was gone.
X
The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS and took a deep breath while she shifted the weight of the blaster she had found inside, and she patted the exterior shell of her ship, grinning as she felt the vibration of the faulty chameleon circuitry as she did.
"Never change, old girl," she grinned. "You're still the best."
When she had hurried back to the TARDIS after making up her mind to destroy the rocket, the Doctor had wanted to spend hours playing games with the rocket's fuel pumps or its tanks. The Rutan would either force the rocket to take off or it might even come out personally and put a stop to whatever she did if it wanted.
She had already regenerated after being shot at and electrocuted by Cybermen, she did not want to be forced to regenerate after taking the full charge from a Rutan so soon.
With that in mind, the Doctor had been planning to build a bomb or a few of them to destroy the rocket, but as soon as she entered her beloved TARDIS she had found the old girl was a step ahead of her. She had known about the Rutan and where it was and she was more than aware of the danger, so she had provided the Doctor with one of the old blasters her wartime self had used and then left inside the ship, however it was also probable the TARDIS had moved the gun to her point in the timeline for when she would need it. That was possible, and ever since that mess with House when she was floppy hair and bow tie, the Doctor had accepted that she had been underestimating TARDISes all of her lives.
The Doctor threw the blaster into the car and she drove off towards the rocket at breakneck speed - it was times like this she desperately wished that she was driving in Bessie; the Edwardian roadster had been fitted with inertial dampeners provided by her third incarnation during that exile, but she had equipped the car to go much faster than this. By the time she arrived the Doctor could hear the thrumming of the rocket's engines. And she could see the tell-tale signs of a rocket entering the final stages before blast off. She guessed the Rutan had become tired of waiting and was now trying to escape from Earth, and she was determined not to let that happen.
The Doctor took out her sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the rocket when a nasty thought entered her mind. The sensor diodes picked up the Rutans presence, much to her relief. She had been worried for a moment that the Rutan had gotten fed up when it found that the rocket was locked down, and it had decided to just try to return to its own ship. She guessed the damage done to the Rutan ship was so great it needed a replacement and had to make do.
As she approached the rocket, the Doctor hefted the blaster and skilfully adjusted the settings of the weapon. She was about to aim the rifle when she heard the sound of a car driving towards her. She turned curiously and watched as the car slowed to a stop right next to the one she'd borrowed. A figure opened the door and came out, and the Doctor saw it was Professor Quatermass.
The rocket scientist took one look at her with the gun and he visibly sagged. "I can't let you do this, Doctor."
The Doctor gaped at him in astonishment. "Excuse me? Have you gone insane? But didn't you hear what the Rutan said? It said if it returns to its fleet, then it will destroy this solar system and prevent the Sontarans from getting to Earth. They plan to transform Earth's sun into a black hole if the Sontarans come-."
"I want you to give me that gun, so I can end the threat myself."
The Doctor stared at him in astonishment. "What?"
"This rocket is my work, Doctor. I don't completely understand what the Rutans plan to do, but I understand enough to know the Rutan plans to use my rocket to get back to its people; I'm not one of those scientists who will stubbornly hold onto their work for their own ends, and ignore whatever danger is there, Doctor. Please, let me do this."
The Doctor saw he was being sincere. She gestured for the scientist to come closer and she handed over the blaster. "Here's the trigger," she said to forestall any questions about the weapon. "I've already set it up, you just have to point it and fire it. The sight will automatically compensate for the distance."
Quatermass nodded and he lifted up the gun and aimed it at the rocket. The Doctor saw a tear in his eye before he fired, and the rocket was destroyed as the energy pulse ripped through the casing. The Doctor and Quatermass staggered back as the shockwave of the explosion rocked past them, and the Doctor saw Quatermass look at the burning wreckage, his face twisted with sorrow.
"I'm so sorry, Professor."
Quatermass turned to her. "So am I, Doctor. But if there's one thing I've learnt over the last few years, it's that space is boundless, and there are things we haven't experienced. This isn't the first time I've been forced to destroy my work, but I hope it's the last."
X
The Dalek warship in the midst of Rutan motherships and an entire battlefleet was a bizarre sight; usually, whenever the Doctor witnessed races meeting in space, races with completely different mindsets and philosophies of space travel came together, she enjoyed picking out the differences. But this was not one of those times, and as the TARDIS followed the progress of the Rutan fleet with their captured Dalek warship, the Doctor took a moment to consider what she had just done while she stood in the doorway of her ship.
The Rutan fleet was massing near a solar system, while squadrons of Sontaran fighters and attack cruisers warped close to the fleet to meet their enemy. The Doctor watched as the Sontarans fired first, unleashing volleys of photonic missiles and disintegration beams, which slammed into the Rutan fleet. Some of the Rutan warships glowed and they seemed to shake as the Sontaran weapons hit them, but they were intact although some weren't so lucky, and they exploded into clouds of superheated crystalline shards. The Rutans fired back with their own weapons, but the captured Dalek warship turned and fired a volley of missiles.
The Rutan weapons had a moderate or destructive effect on the Sontarans, but the Doctor knew both sides had been spending 50,000 years coming up with stealth technologies, more powerful scanners to compensate, and on and on it went. They were bound to have near misses where they were only lucky to get a 40 to 50% lock on their enemies.
But as she expected the Dalek warship didn't have that problem.
The Sontaran fleet fell apart under the onslaught from the Dalek warship. The cloned warriors tried desperately to intercept the missile volleys, some of them even throwing themselves into the path of the missiles in suicidal runs, but it didn't work. Dalek missiles were programmed to take out a specific target - anything getting in the way, and the missile would just jump through hyperspace briefly and come out on the other side where it would then smash into the target.
No wonder they were losing. The Sontarans were doing their best, but they were simply no match for the Dalek weapons.
The Doctor was just grateful she had learned about this whole mess with the stolen Dalek warship, and she knew she would need to double-check to make sure that no more of Dalek technology had fallen into the hands of those who shouldn't even have it. She knew if she hadn't taken the steps she had then the Rutans would be virtually unstoppable should they suddenly decide to head for the heart of the Sontaran Empire. She knew if the Sontaran capital was destroyed, their main clone world production facilities, then future history would change until it swung in favour of the Rutans.
That was never meant to happen.
When the last of the Sontaran ships were destroyed, the Rutans moved closer to the solar system… only for large saucer-shaped ships to appear out of the Time Vortex.
Death Squad Dalek warships.
She had summoned them to clean up this mess. Normally the Doctor wouldn't have anything to do with the Death Squads; they were the SAS of the Dalek race, driven to ensure the purity of the species was not compromised, or copied as they had when Martez created a set of Daleks, and stupidly signalled the originals to birth the new race.
The original Daleks wiped them out and formed the Death Squads to ensure it never happened again, Daleks specially grown and conditioned to go for any imperfection. But their duties were also to ensure no Dalek technology was ever used by non-Daleks. It had been hard for her to call them in, but it needed to be done; this whole mess wouldn't have taken place if the Daleks hadn't allowed one of their own ships to be stolen. She turned to see if the TARDIS was still masking her signature, knowing the Daleks would attack them if they discovered their presence. The Doctor watched as the Death Squad Daleks attacked both the Sontarans and the Rutans while ignoring their captured warship.
It wasn't there for long.
The captured Dalek warship suddenly exploded. The Doctor knew the Daleks had programmed it to self destruct, but only after they had likely downloaded what was contained in its database to see if the Rutans had stolen any other pieces of their technology, which they likely had.
The Doctor clicked her fingers and closed the doors.