8. Let's see some Daleks.
Chloe knows it would be normally almost impossible for anyone to find the Doctor. The Master manages to find him sometimes but has to try very hard to do so; frequently he sets a trap for him!
Yet she has a simple way of finding him - she still has her communication device, even if Meran left his behind! .
This isn't her top priority right now. She wants to know what's been happening in this Tardis!
Alyssa, her sister, is too aggressive just now and is unlikely to respond positively to anything.
Instead, Chloe takes her uncle Meran aside to the kitchen to ask him. There she learns of Trelim's likely demise at Alyssa's clumsy hands. Meran is very unhappy about it.
"It's alright, Meran, the Doctor can fix it. It can all be okay. I'm so sorry it all went wrong for everyone, but I think I can see how to patch things up with Alyssa now. But how did Rimba come aboard?"
"She's a friend of Alyssa's," Meran says. "She was just invited along. I couldn't do anything to stop her!"
"What do you know about Rimba?"
Meran feels he knows nothing about her.
"She just came with us immediately," he says.
"I want to know who took us to Cyberium One," Chloe says.
Meran groans. "It must have been Rimba," he says. "I left the Console room with Alyssa, and we were on Cyberium One when we came back to the Console room."
It's Chloe's turn to groan. She has a sudden realisation that Rimba has discovered how to fly the Tardis with Voice Control in double-quick time! .
"It's all fine, Meran, I don't want you worrying. I'll fix it all." Chloe knows the Doctor is always saying he'll fix everything, and in the absence of the Doctor, she feels that she must tell everyone that she will fix everything. She feels as if she might even manage it... Apart from Rimba, that is!
Meran looks at her. How could Chloe possibly say she'll fix everything? But maybe she can try. He feels he can't fix much, but he'd love to fix everything for everyone!
Chloe doesn't know anything about Rimba, but Alyssa must know all about her. But why did Alyssa bring her along? Chloe's longing to discover this, but still can't approach Alyssa.
As they wander back towards the Console room, Chloe has a favour to ask of Meran. "Meran, I want you to get Alyssa and Rimba out of the Console room - take them to the kitchen and ask them to make something nice to eat together."
This seems like a great plan. Clear the Console room and improve bonding at a meal together.
Meran goes to the Console room, while Chloe waits out of sight, in the corridor, listening.
"How did you get us to Cyberium One," Alyssa asks.
"I just asked about Cybermen and where they came from, and we went there!" Rimba says.
"Shall we make something to eat?" Meran says as he enters, clapping once to ensure their attention.
Alyssa is far too excited to listen to Meran. "We just went there? Voice activated?"
"Yes," Rimba says. "Let's see some Daleks! They should be fun!" .
Chloe hears this with dismay. These two will cause havoc in the Universe!
Quickly, she opens a maintenance access panel in the corridor and steps through it, closing it after her. She descends to the Maintenance deck and finds the Voice Control circuit.
Then she hears the zizz as the Tardis travels. She groans. She can guess where they've gone to.
She looks at the Voice Control circuit. If she disconnects it, they will have no way of leaving the Dalek planet, Skaro. If she doesn't they will go elsewhere and play havoc there, too.
Instead she simply deactivates it, so it can be easily re-activated using the Voice Control button on the Console. At least they don't know about that!
Returning to the access panel, Chloe steps out into the corridor and closes the panel.
These two girls seem to have no awareness of the danger they're leading all of them into! .
Chloe recognises she will have great difficulty preventing these two girls stirring up war.
The Daleks are bound to find them, interrogate them and dispose of them undesirably unless she rescues them. Then the Daleks may be able to see how easily she comes and goes using her "Tardis" on her wristwatch (ref. 29). Then her carefully arranged peace will be in jeopardy (ref. 31). What a balance!
Arriving in the Tardis Control room she finds it empty and the door open. Any Dalek might wander in! She closes the door aware that Alyssa and her friend might return and expect to get back in, but surely they'll knock if they need to. She has a moment of annoyance when she realises she might have simply disabled the Voice Control from the button on the Console, if she'd thought of it earlier, but she rapidly gets over it. The others were around the Console at the time, and she didn't want to show them!
Now there's work to be done!
"Tardis, can you show where Alyssa and Rimba are, please?"
Two dots appear on the screen in a plan view, along with video picture as the Tardis unobtrusively taps into the Dalek system. There are advantages in having an upgraded Tardis!
The two of them are walking along the Dalek corridors. She notices Meran following along behind them, very concerned.
"Tardis, could you enclose Meran, please, and disguise yourself?"
Nothing happens. "Bother, I'll have to re-enable Voice Control!" She presses the Voice Control button and repeats her request. .
Meran appears in the Tardis Control room. "Oh, what happened?" he says.
"I enclosed you with the Tardis."
"Oh, thank you," he says, grappling with what that might mean. "Are you going to grab those two?"
But it's too late, they've been noticed! .
"Halt. Resistance is useless!"
Alyssa and Rimba have no idea what they're dealing with. Alyssa carries on walking towards the Dalek, fearlessly, and steps to the side as she arrives close by and grabs onto the side of the rotating weapon band.
A moment later the eyepiece almost knocks her out as it rotates to face her.
The Dalek immediately recognises she is at a disadvantage, and repeatedly rotates its eyepiece to try to hurt and damage her. Then it rotates its weapon band sending her legs flying out towards the wall as she clings on to the Dalek.
She suddenly recognises she's in trouble. Then she knows she mustn't let go of the weapon band or she'll be sure to have fire power directed her way!
Alyssa used to spurn her mother's stories of these creatures and refused to believe them, but now that she's actually met one, some of the stories come flooding back to her along with her secret childhood thoughts of how she might defeat a Dalek... if they did exist!
She starts to try to unscrew the weapon, but it won't. That's one theory out if the window!
The Dalek isn't phased. It's covered with armour. One Human is no problem!
Rimba has her own theories about Daleks, having heard Alyssa deriding them. A fire blanket on the wall attracts her attention and she quickly acquires it and plans to cover the spinning Dalek, but Alyssa's feet threaten to kick her on every revolution. The Dalek appears to be fully aware of her plan and moves in her direction driving her backwards... into the path of two other Daleks that must have been quietly summoned somehow.
Quickly she throws the fire blanket over the nearest Dalek and pulls it tight, disabling that Dalek, but the other Dalek easily apprehends her!
The two girls are led away past a pillar in the corridor, leaving the Dalek still covered in the fire blanket.
"You will release me!" the Dalek says annoyedly as the other two Daleks escort their prisoners away.
One of the two escorting Daleks turns and fires at the blanket ties, missing! .
The blanket stays put.
"Did I miss?"
"No, but you missed the blanket!" .
Chloe and Meran watch in dismay.
Chloe suddenly dashes to the Tardis door and opens it just as Alyssa and Rimba are passing the pillar in the corridor.
Quickly, she grabs the two of them and bundles them into the Tardis which has disguised itself to be like other pillars in the corridor. Slamming the door shut, she faces the two miscreants.
"Never, never, wander around in a Dalek spaceship!" She's furious with them, endangering themselves and her in their ignorance. "You never used to believe Mum's stories. Do you believe them now?"
Indisputable evidence has been presented to them and Alyssa still has a painful bruise on her head.
But Chloe hasn't finished with them yet. "I managed to ensure a period of peace with these Daleks; do you think I did that by wandering aimlessly through their spaceship?"
Alyssa and Rimba are feeling crushed by Chloe's rant. But Chloe only persisted until she could see that they were sorry and now believed their parent's tales of valour against distant enemies.
"We should go now," she says more calmly. She encourages the two girls to go to the rest room. For her strategy, she doesn't want them seeing how to fly the Tardis, even with the Voice Control.
Meran seems pre-occupied looking at the Console monitor.
"There's a problem!" Meran says as Chloe approaches him after the girls have gone.
"What sort of problem?" Choe asks gently.
"I counted three Daleks earlier, but only two have rolled away."
"That's odd," Chloe says. Then she realises what might have happened. "One of the Daleks has suckered onto the outside of the Tardis, That's clever! They know the pillar's a Tardis!"
Chloe thinks for a while before acting...
"What are the options?" Meran asks after a while.
"We might materialise in space, but Daleks can cope with that."
"Not so good, then?"
"No. But I recall my mother telling me about a faulty portal, once. It destroyed whatever went through it!" (Ref. 7.)
"Oh," Meran sounds only vaguely interested. It doesn't sound very useful to him!
"Tardis, can you take us to planet PortinTrade and park as a pillar with the Dalek towards the faulty Portal, please? Then rapidly approach the faulty portal, squeezing the Dalek through it?"
The Console monitor goes red. The words "Contravenes your known stated directive of not killing anything" appear on the screen.
"Bother! I forgot about that!" Chloe's shaken by her own readiness to destroy the Dalek. Is this what the Doctor feels when he's up against Daleks? A sudden overriding urge to destroy them?
We all make mistakes, sometimes, in the heat of the moment, but hopefully not quite as serious!
However, a zizzing sound is heard, and a schematic diagram shows the Dalek on the other side of the Portal with the suction probe bisected by the portal.
"Tardis, can we leave the Dalek on the other side of this faulty portal?"
A zizzing sound confirms her request has been done.
Wherever the Dalek is now, at least it isn't suckered onto the side of the Tardis!
But the Dalek can now track its detached suction probe...
They'd better watch out!