Hoo boy, I'd actually forgotten about this one. This story came at about the time I was actually into Mass Effect, the original game. I had this idea of a fusion between the Whoniverse and a Reaper-less Mass Effect universe. Fans of Doctor Who, particularly the classic series, will recognise that this was intended to be an AU of the Third Doctor story The Ambassadors...*TWANG!*...of Death. Sorry, that's an injoke given how they showed the story's title during the opening titles of this particular story.
Anyway, I got a little over two chapters in, before realising I couldn't continue. I sat on this, before realising I could post this in the Compost Heap. Hopefully, you might enjoy the two chapters I will be posting...
THE CHILDREN OF RANNOCH
CHAPTER 1:
MORALITY AND RELATIVE DIMENSIONS IN HUMANITY
The Doctor was not a happy man at the moment.
There were a number of reasons for his bad mood. The first, setting the baseline for all discontent to come, was that he was stuck on Earth.
Not that this was quite an appalling thing. He had become fond of Earth, visiting it and its past and future many a time. But he had also been free to leave. Whereas now, he was stuck. All part of a sentence passed by the Time Lords for meddling in the affairs of others. It could have been worse. They could have executed him outright instead of merely taking a single regeneration and sending his amnesiac companions back to their native times and place.
But he was a traveller at heart. And being stuck on Earth basically made it a prison planet to him.
Which led to the second reason for his bad mood: his need for employment. He had to join the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, led by his old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. Whether it was a side effect of his regeneration (and thus the subsequent personality change) or that Lethbridge-Stewart was becoming more and more rigid in his military bearing, the Doctor didn't know, but he found himself more and more irritated by the man. And the Doctor felt disquiet at working full-time for a paramilitary organisation, even if it was meant to defend the Earth against invaders.
The third reason sprang directly from the second. Recently, the Doctor and the Brigadier had been engaged in bitter rows over the conclusion of an operation. A race of intelligent prehistoric reptiles, dubbed the Silurians by one of the scientists working at a nearby research facility, had been awoken from stasis after millions of years. They were far from pleased to find that the apes that had plagued their people had evolved into the dominant species of the planet.
The Doctor tried to find a peaceful solution, and had even found an ally in the Silurian leader, Okdel. But Okdel's treacherous and impulsive second-in-command, Morka, had deliberately unleashed a plague, and while the Doctor worked to cure it, Morka led a coup d'etat, murdering Okdel. The Silurians were tricked back into hibernation after a back-up plan was thwarted by the Doctor, who hoped to eventually revive Silurians not under Morka's thrall. However, the Brigadier, under orders, went behind the Doctor's back, and sealed the cave forever with explosives, presumably collapsing much of the Silurian base(1).
Argument after argument had been raged since then, with the Doctor even threatening to resign at one point. It was a mostly empty threat, though. Like it or not, UNIT had the resources he needed. And he was a resource UNIT needed.
And, damn him, the Brigadier's justifications were logical, even if it didn't sit well with the Doctor. The Silurians and their pet dinosaur had murdered many of the Brigadier's own men, and the Doctor knew that the Brigadier did his best to look after them. He remembered the first time they had met, when the Great Intelligence had infested London and the Underground. At one point, the Brigadier had attempted to retrieve the Doctor's TARDIS to use to escape if their plans failed, only for he and his men to be ambushed by the Intelligence's robotic servants, the Yeti. Only the Brigadier, then a Colonel, survived the slaughter. And neither humanity nor the Silurians were ready to co-exist. Not yet.
But it didn't stop the Doctor from being angry, and rightly so. The Silurians were not the monolithic enemies that the Cybermen or the Autons were, intent on conquest and destruction. They could have been potentially persuaded to co-exist with humanity, and their technology could have benefited both species immensely. The Doctor felt that the Brigadier, and his pompous superiors in Whitehall, judged the Silurians based on the actions of Morka and his scientist crony, K'to.
Eventually, the Brigadier left to provide security at the British Rocket Group's Space Control(2), leaving the Doctor free to do what he wanted. And what he wanted to do was to finally get started on repairing the TARDIS, specifically the parts the Time Lords tampered with. And he had a very capable assistant in Doctor Elizabeth Shaw.
The Doctor was only peripherally aware of why the Brigadier was at Space Control. UNIT, besides being a defence against alien incursion, was also meant to provide security for sensitive projects and , it was while providing security at the Wenley Moor research facility that the Silurian fiasco happened. This time, the Doctor didn't want any interruptions, though at the time, he was interrupted as he was merely finishing some customisations to his car, Bessy.
In his third incarnation, the Doctor had a paternal, pointed face framed by a shock of white hair. He seemed to be in his fifties by human standards, though he was actually centuries old. When not working in the laboratory, he had a habit of dressing himself in velvet smoking jackets and cravats that wouldn't have looked out of place in either a gentleman's club or, save for his apparent age, in the high fashion of Carnaby Street.
His assistant, Doctor Elizabeth Shaw, AKA Liz, was very different. She was in her twenties, with a pretty face that was nonetheless somewhat sternly set, framed by red hair. A brilliant scientist with multiple degrees (and multiple doctorates), she was considered a prodigy back in Cambridge, before UNIT took notice of her, and hired her as scientific advisor. However, the Doctor arrived not long after she had been hired, and now she was his assistant.
Although a little close-minded at first, Liz soon adapted to life working alongside the Doctor. He certainly thought that her intelligence and adaptability would give many members of his own people, including many of his teachers, a run for their money. And while they were not quite equals in intelligence, she nonetheless had a different perspective on his scientific problems that allowed her to come up with solutions that he may never have thought of. While on paper she was his assistant now, in reality, he tried to treat her as an equal, never talking down to her. In a way, she reminded him of a grown-up Zoe, the teenaged genius who had travelled with him.
He felt a pang in his hearts at that. Zoe, like the loyal Jamie, a Scot survivor of the Battle of Culloden, had her memory erased. She would only remember her first encounter with the Doctor: an attempted Cyberman invasion, using the space station Zoe worked on as a staging post. And unlike Jamie, she hadn't been returned to him temporarily while he did some under-the-table missions for the Time Lords' Celestial Intervention Agency, after his trial, but before his exile(3).
He wasn't going to take his exile lying down. He'd done more than enough for the Time Lords not only commute his original sentence, of outright execution, to exile, but also to earn a pardon, he felt. And if the Time Lords expected him to sit quietly on Earth at their pleasure, then they were sorely mistaken. The Doctor wasn't going to abandon Earth or UNIT by any means, but he still wanted to explore when he wanted to, on his own terms.
Liz had set up a television in one corner of his ad-hoc laboratory as they worked on the console. The Doctor payed it little mind, as he worked on the console. The Brigadier was there, apparently to oversee the return of Mars Probe 7, an attempt to land two astronauts on Mars. Most of the scientific community had thought that the British Rocket Group had faked the mission after a number of public fiascos involving its founder, Professor Bernard Quatermass(4). Even NASA didn't believe it possible, though the Doctor did think that some of Mars Probe 7's technology looked disturbingly like Cybermen technology. Maybe the BRG had salvaged some technology from International Electromatics, the company led by Tobias Vaughn, who had believed himself to be capable of outwitting the Cybermen he was helping take over Earth(5).
The expedition had gone very much silent, apparently. Even so, telemetry suggested that the two astronauts inside, Frank Michaels and Joe Lefee, were still alive and in good health. The problem was, for some reason, the comms had been shut down, completely, save for autopilot and basic health telemetry. So what was going on?
The questions the news presenter was asking on the television only mildly intrigued the Doctor, as he was more engrossed in fixing his console. After a brief accident with the time warp field that sent both him and Liz intermittently and alternately brief periods into the future, the Doctor believed that they were on the right lines. The navigational part of the time vector generator was in danger of packing up, though, and if he pushed it too hard, it might pack up completely, causing the TARDIS interior to effectively vanish. The TVG was useful, but it integrated too many systems into it to be tinkered with safely. It was only with extreme difficulty and some tricky manipulation of the TARDIS doors that they were able to get the console out of the TARDIS, still connected to the interior by vast, constrictor-like cables.
Liz, while repairing part of the navigational circuitry, had turned the volume of the TV back up, and was listening. The Doctor was about to rebuke her when the presenter, a rather thin-faced man by the name of Wakefield, began to talk excitedly. "Wait a moment! Yes, I have just received word that the radio communications of Mars Probe 7 has just been reopened!"
The camera moved over to a communications console, where Professor Ralph Cornish, a man with a piercing gaze and an even sharper intellect, was speaking into the microphone, the familiar uniformed figure of the Brigadier, with his military bearing, moustache, and beret, looking on pensively. "Mars Probe 7, can you read me? Mars Probe 7, can you read me? Over," Cornish spoke, anxiously.
Eventually, through thick static, a voice spoke. "BRG Space Control, this is Mars Probe 7. We read you. Over."
Cornish and the Brigadier exchanged looks incredulously, but relieved. The Doctor smiled to himself. Maybe it wasn't so bad after all. Maybe it was just a communications problem that had only just been repaired.
Cornish then returned to the microphone. "Michaels, what happened to your radio communications? Over."
"Our communications systems were damaged. And…Professor Cornish?" Michaels' voice, distorted as it was by static, sounded apprehensive. "We found something. Or rather, someone. A couple of someones."
At this, the Doctor looked up sharply. Liz noticed his sudden interest. "Could they have found Martians, Doctor?" she asked.
"Unlikely," the Doctor said. "And I doubt that they would have left Mars alive if they had." He remembered his encounters with the Ice Warriors, former natives of Mars. Neither had been pleasant, and while he had since researched them and found claims that they had a noble culture, neither Varga's squad nor Slaar's invasion force were remotely noble(6).
It didn't discount other races using Mars, though. He had heard that the Osirans had structures on Mars, not to mention the Protheans, who, it was rumoured, were among the genocidal Osiran Sutekh the Destroyer's first victims(7).
But who was the aliens they were talking about? The Doctor knew enough about the Mars Probe's engineering to know that it could potentially carry four humans, so that ruled out a few potential suspects. But who did they have with them?
He would soon have his answer.
"Michaels? What do you mean, a couple of someones?"
"I'll put one of them on the phone, Cornish," Michaels said. Then, a series of noises, before finally, a strange voice spoke. It was high-pitched, feminine, but seemed distorted by more than just static. There was definitely an electronic quality to the voice, and it had an accent that seemed vaguely Eastern European.
"Please forgive the subterfuge, Professor Cornish of Earth. I am Tali'Zorah nar Entra, of the Quarian people. We greet the peoples of the Earth in the name of cooperation and peace."
CHAPTER 1 ANNOTATIONS:
Originally, I was going to do a cold open on Mars, where the Quarians would observe the Mars Probe with Carrington in it, but I had an inspiration for where the story would go that rendered the cold opening obsolete, so I changed it, for the better, I hope. I also changed many elements of the original story, The Ambassadors of Death, as vigilant Whovians will doubtless notice. More will come, as you will see…
1. A succinct summary of Doctor Who and the Silurians. The names of the Silurian characters (never actually named as anything other than 'Elder Silurian', etc) come from Malcolm Hulke's novelisation.
2. I decided to make (I think some fans have already beaten me to it in their fanon) the vaguely named Space Control organisation in the story part of the British Rocket Group, from the famous Quatermass serials of the 1950s (yes, my username comes from somewhere).
3. A reference to fan-theory 'Season 6B', a theory taken up by Terrance Dicks in his officially licensed Doctor Who novels (starting with Players). The theory is used to explain continuity errors with The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors, suggesting that, between his trial and his regeneration, the Second Doctor performed a number of missions for the Time Lords' Celestial Intervention Agency, with one of those missions being the events of The Two Doctors.
4. The main character of the aforementioned serials, and the one whom I take my username from. There have been cameos and mentions of Quatermass throughout the Whoniverse. In Remembrance of the Daleks, Dr Rachel Jenson and Allison reminisce on missing working under 'Bernard', and in Planet of the Dead, UNIT scientist Malcolm Taylor names a unit of measurement after him. I also stated that part about the hoax, given partly because of the BS around the Moon landings (yes, I believe man walked on the Moon. Get over it), and partly because Quatermass' reputation took knocks throughout Quatermass and the Pit.
5. This is stated in the novel Who Killed Kennedy, written as a journalist's exposé of UNIT and the Doctor.
6. A reference to the events of The Ice Warriors and The Seeds of Death. However, the Doctor would meet noble Ice Warriors in The Curse of Peladon, and would successfully talk down a more belligerent Ice Warrior in Cold War. However, he would meet more belligerent and evil Ice Warriors in The Monster of Peladon. He would meet Ice Warriors of both sorts throughout the spinoff media, even teaming up with one to mislead both enemies and friends in Legacy.
7. Thinking about other aliens who had used Mars gave me the inspirational spark I needed. In this hybrid of the Whoniverse and Mass Effect, the Protheans, instead of meeting their end at the hands (or tentacles) of the Reapers, they were killed by Sutekh the Destroyer, an Osiran who was paranoid about any form of life that could oppose him, potentially or actually. Thus, he destroys all life, although he relishes in their destruction.