Mystery of the Daleks

by sharpe85

When the TARDIS is dragged off course, the Sixth Doctor and Peri find themselves under suspicion as murderers. But who is really responsible for the steadily increasing death toll? And why are the Daleks suddenly so interested in the pursuit of justice? Can the Doctor solve the mystery before its too late?

MYSTERY OF THE DALEKS

PROLOGUE

Colonel Carlton stared over the precipice, leaning heavily on his cane as he peered into the churning wastes. The sea had lately darkened to a viscous green, a cold mire lashing spittle high against the rocks with stark, brazen contempt. Gaunt stone pillars pointed, like broken, pale fingers, into an auburn sky, flared with strands of lilac cloud that leached sluggishly towards the horizon. In the distance, a pair of crimson orbs glowered, the sweeping glint of the two suns the watching eyes of some primeval demon. A sliver of dark mist beneath gave the broad impression of a gaping, sneering mouth, twisted loose at the edges as if somehow faintly amused by the thought of some private joke.

Carlton shivered, moving a fragile hand to tighten the gold buttons of his heavy greatcoat. It was a delicate task, complicated by the fact that his limbs were utterly numbed by the freezing temperatures. At seventy-six, Carlton had begun to accept that the course of life was starting to draw towards an inevitable conclusion. That was simple fact. What infuriated him so readily, however, was that this would most likely be caused by the dreaded onslaught of cancer, or his bones becoming brittle, or any number of other invisible ailments that ravaged the mind and shattered the body. It was a cruel mockery, to have survived the stresses of the battlefield, the strains of command, and a multitude of assassin's bullets, only to be struck down by the grim passage of nature. But then again, reflected Carlton, his had at least been a fruitful life. A full life. How many men could you say that about, these days? How many others had led the first troops into the breach at Lisbon, or masterminded the fatal rout of the garrison at Balthazar? Who else was in receipt of both the Order of San Skopje, and the prized Salzyrian Medal of Merit? Carlton glanced briefly at the brace of glittering honours pinned to his chest, and felt an overwhelming sense of certainty. Yes, he was right about one thing. He had spent his time living to the fullest degree possible; and that was nothing to be ashamed of, surely. When Carlton returned from this evening's stroll, he would have Gardner fetch a warm smoked kipper supper, and lapse into drowsiness beside a roaring fire with a crisp glass of brandy. That would be all. Never mind the infernal party of guests he was supposed to be entertaining; they could decamp somewhere else for the moment.

Colonel Carlton was still smiling in delicious anticipation of a night well spent when a gloved fist struck him roughly between the shoulder blades and sent him sprawling forwards. For a few seconds Carlton staggered, digging his cane desperately into the sheer rock, before something small and tough just beyond his field of vision wheeled into his back again and he lost his footing completely. The old man fell, finding only hollow air, the swell of the sea closing in, roaring, and then everything turned a swift and empty black. Atop the cliffs, someone bent low and picked up Carlton's cane, examining the dark wooden staff minutely, intently, as if searching. Then they snapped it cleanly in two and without a second thought hurled the wreckage deep into the vast surging waters below.

It was another two hours before Carlton's dutiful butler grew curious about his master's whereabouts and, carrying a tray laden with fluted glasses of champagne, traipsed down to the headland on which the Colonel took his regular walks. Only at that stage did the vague human shape lying face-down in the sands raise any suspicion. But by then, of course, it was far too late.

CHAPTER ONE

"That ought to do the trick…" The Doctor leapt up from beneath the central console of the TARDIS, his face triumphant. He held a battered wrench-like tool in one hand and a complex maze of wiring in the other, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbow and spattered with black grease. Barely pausing to set the gadget aside, he immediately began tinkering with the controls, brows knitted in concentration below a shock of manic blond curls.

Peri watched from the other side of the room as the Doctor nimbly threw levers and flicked switches, to the accompaniment of a series of encouraging bleeps and whistles from the panel before him. "What are you doing, Doctor?" Peri's sharp American drawl cut through the staccato electronic cacophony. "I am trying," the Doctor said as he dashed around the console, "to perfect the trans-temporal equaliser, which regulates the proto-dimensional feedback loop." He glanced up briefly to beam cheerfully at his companion before returning to the task at hand. "But…" Peri spoke hesitantly, "…what does that do, exactly?"

"Clearly," said the Doctor, "your keen scientific curiosity has lost none of its penetrating edge, Miss Brown." With that he was back at work again, stabbing at buttons and twisting dials, retracing his steps around the hexagonal space. Peri folded her arms. "I was only trying to help, Doctor."

"Well, in that case, I suppose a little educational diversion wouldn't go amiss. You learn something new about the universe every day, you know." The Doctor said with mock gravitas, stepping away from the console to admire his handiwork. "You're telling me." Peri almost rolled her eyes yet, at a theatrical sigh from the Doctor, abandoned this small gesture of irritation. "Well, the trans-dimensional equaliser, in effect, allows the TARDIS to move fluidly through the vortex. It connects the external shell of the TARDIS to the physical environment, rather like the hull of a ship." Peri looked satisfied with this explanation. "Or the rubber tyres on a car?"

"An undoubtably crude and specious simile, though with a narrow grain of truth to it. The trans-temporal equaliser is essential to the TARDIS getting from point A to point B. Without it, we'd be nothing but an arbitrary assortment of drifting atoms, lost forever in the barren void of eternity…" the Doctor mused. A sudden air of detachment overtook him as he stared far into the distance, frozen in thought. "Doctor?" Peri's face was flushed with concern. "Are you sure you've fixed the TARDIS properly?" The Doctor spun round, one finger raised in admonishment. "Absolutely certain, which is why I propose to give the TARDIS a test run. An easy journey, something gentle to calm the nerves, the London Eye of interstellar travel. In fact, " he lurched towards the console, "I know just the place!"

"The London Eye?" Peri frowned. The Doctor finished punching in strings of co-ordinates, as a familiar wheezing and groaning sound stuttered into place. "After your time, Peri." He said dismissively. "Now, let's find out where-" That was as far as the Doctor got before an explosion tore through the console room, its deafening concussive shockwave knocking them off their feet. There was a blinding flash of white light, and Peri became aware of a strange warping and shaking, as if someone was operating a gigantic drill very close to her head. As she stood she felt a sour tinge of nausea, and patiently waited for the room to stop spinning. After a few seconds Peri became aware that something must have gone very wrong. For not only was the room still spinning, it was also shrinking. The walls were bulging inwards, the roundels curving into balloons, while the central console itself was arched like a bow, the glass column so deformed that it was melting into hundreds of glistening shards.

"The TARDIS is failing!" the Doctor's voice was very near, yet also miles away. "The repairs?" Peri asked, as a deep sonorous clanging echoed somewhere close by. The Doctor shook his head. "This is someone else's doing! We're being dragged off course!" He reached out, grasped a red handle, and with a crashing thump a bleak and total silence descended. Slowly the Doctor checked over the vital instruments, running a protective hand across the panelling. "What happened?" Peri looked around. " I instigated emergency landing procedures. We should be safe here for the moment." The Doctor strode over to the antique hat stand that waited in the corner and pulled on his garishly multi-coloured frock coat. "Come along, Peri. We might as well see what's outside." Peri shrugged in protest as she moved to follow. The Doctor pushed open the door and stepped through into the unknown.

It was nothing to write home about, thought Peri. Four identical walls, their bare brickwork painted a pale pastel cream and lit by a high ridge of halogen lamps that hung from the domed ceiling. A series of low benches stacked with crates surrounded them on all sides. Peri found herself instantly taken aback by a strong chemical stench, faintly sweet but carrying a biting, acrid aftertaste, like bottles of lemonade left out on a summer's afternoon. As she took a step further into the room a raised dais became visible, a simple granite block sloping a little off the tiled floor on which rested a large leather sack, long and wide enough to conceal a sleeping man. The Doctor sank his hands into the pockets of his coat and inhaled deeply. "Fascinating. Evidently some sort of artificial preservative has been introduced into the air system here. But why?" He knelt beside the wall, carefully smearing a layer of thick grey dust onto his outstretched thumb and holding it up to the light. Crouched in the dusk, he peered at the blotches of powder with a ferocious concentration. "Obviously, this is a cellar, a storeroom. Look at this. The floor is polished, but the walls are covered in dirt and damp. No-one's held any masked soirees here for a very long time."

"I kinda got that impression already." Peri muttered. It was quickly becoming colder, a brusque chill settling in now that she was outside the warm confines of the TARDIS. To make matters worse, the bright gingham blouse she'd donned was proving futile in warding off the local climate. "Doctor, can't I go find something to wear? My toes are turning to icicles out here." The Doctor adopted an imperious glare as he wandered towards the central slab of stone. "If you must, I suppose. Hardly a model of sartorial efficiency, are you?"

"Speak for yourself." Peri looked the Doctor over, who was on the brink of answering when something caught his eye. He approached the short dais, his face set with a tense caution, and Peri remembered with a thrill of horror her initial impression of the lumpen sack, long and wide enough to conceal a sleeping man. It all made sense now; the sparse white walls, the peculiar pungent odour of what was surely disinfectant, the cloying empty silence. As the Doctor opened the sack, a human hand, pale and shrunken with the first vestiges of a glossy grey sheen, fell into view and struck the floor with a resounding bang, operatic in its intensity. Peri caught sight of the narrow row of fingers curled together, their delicate bones grasping at whatever fragments of life remained, and let out a long scream.

In a brisk movement, the Doctor charged forwards and threw the rest of the leather covering aside. "It's alright, Peri. We're quite safe." Peri saw that the corpse was now completely still; the arm stirring into action had been some freak motion caused by the Doctor disturbing the body. "You mean…he's definitely dead?" Peri had seen slaughter before. She'd stood by as people were obliterated, disintegrated, mown down by bullets, torn from the pages of history in the most sickening and chaotic ways. But this was different. The figure lying on the table with receding white hair and an ornately waxed moustache could have been a puppet, its carcass bursting with wax or papier-mache. There was something innately fake, almost surreal, about an entirely natural death. The concept simply felt odd after months travelling with the Doctor, an idea Peri found remote and distant, like the rules of a second language learned in childhood and then forgotten.

"I'm afraid so." The Doctor squinted at the serenely wrinkled features. "Poor chap must have been about seventy. No obvious signs of external injury." He carefully lifted the skull, feeling around the hairline. Peri shuddered. "Wait…there's bruising around the frontal lobe…" The summit of the forehead twisted fully into view, a blackened web dappled with lurid flecks of scarlet. "Signs of multiple force trauma…" the Doctor's face darkened. "Make no mistake, this man was murdered. Bludgeoned to death, probably. We just need to find out who did this and why." He straightened up from the body as Peri tugged at his arm.

"I think we already know the answer to that." A tall man, dressed in country tweeds and sporting a neatly trimmed beard, stood in the doorway brandishing a double-barrelled shotgun.

"I'm the Doctor, and this is Peri. Delighted to meet you, Mister…"

"Dornier. Erich St. Lucas-Dornier." The voice was clipped and controlled, with the incongruous lilt of a German accent intruding on upper-class English nasal vowels. Dornier made a wild jab with the shotgun as the Doctor took a large step forwards, blocking him from drawing a clear bead on Peri.

"You killed him, didn't you?" Dornier's words were spoken lightly, with a steady and unnerving calm. "You're gravely mistaken." The Doctor stared him down with a piercing glower, one hand unconsciously straying towards the small silver cat that strutted proudly on his salmon-pink lapel. This was more out of force of habit than anything else, a silent attempt to summon the minutest iota of luck. "We were just passing through…" Peri added. Dornier regarded them both for a moment, his cool grey eyes utterly drained of passion, before letting the shotgun droop towards the ground, its slender barrel keeling like a tulip in the heat.

The Doctor seized the initiative. "Thank you. Now would you be kind enough to enlighten the more geographically challenged among us as to where exactly we are?" Dornier considered this request, his blank gaze betraying no indication of surprise, or confusion, or even good humour. "You're standing in the basement of Algarmore House, which until this evening was the country residence of the late Colonel Carlton. My uncle, in fact." The Doctor gave a respectfully understanding nod, his bold grimace softening. "I'm truly sorry for your loss. We both are. If I might ask, where is your uncle's body?" The question trailed off as Dornier pointed roughly to the corpse behind them. "Is it still your belief, " said Dornier stiffly, "that my uncle was murdered?"

"Yes." The Doctor spoke without hesitation. "If I can do anything to find out why this happened, I will. I can promise you that."

"You'll help us, Doctor? Very well. I think its time you met the other guests." Dornier turned on his heel and marched towards the door, expecting the visitors to trail in his wake.

"Be careful, Doctor. I don't think he trusts us." Peri whispered.

"That's quite the understatement, wouldn't you say?" the Doctor hissed archly. "Our new friend's about as readily decipherable as a page of Old Norse." Dornier led the way, up a flight of grimy brick stairs after which the prevailing architectural style came to an abrupt pause, flailing wildly between meandering gothic stonework and swirling baroque pomposity. Gilt-edged colonnades loomed, topped with hideous gargoyles, while ornate pillars sagged beneath the weight of lurid frescoes, each new scene taking on a heightened air of fantasy. Peri caught glimpses of troupes of heavily armoured gladiators, who progressed from fighting each other in one piece to grappling with tentacled sea monsters in the next. Eventually the frescoes began to draw inspiration from more obscure myths, ones she didn't remember being taught about at school, where a faction of elegantly robed warriors with the heads of crocodiles paraded alongside a race of hunch-backed demons, their red eyes and jagged horns resembling those of trolls. Giant shadows waved vicious axes and cleavers, their forked tails darting like snakes. Silver silhouettes thrust with crossbows, as vast purple beetles scuttled into the fray, their black pincers hooked like the talons of an eagle. "I don't understand any of these portraits." Peri murmured.

"No? I'm finding the interior decoration rather useful. It tells us that we're somewhere in the later decades of the sixty-fifth century. All of these frescoes depict wars of some description- between tribes, between city-states, and so on and so forth until we start to witness clashes between planets, solar systems, even entire galaxies." The Doctor was lost in thought. "History's a little like your moon, Peri. It moves through various phases, switches between light and darkness, reveals a different swathe of peaks and craters every time you care to look through a telescope. But underneath the surface, the path of orbit remains exactly the same as it was millennia ago. The chariot might be superseded by the hansom-cab or the space shuttle, yet the ultimate destination never changes. Can't you see? History always repeats itself. This is one of those moments, an indelible pattern etched into the collective memory too many times to count. Over the past hundred years, the Earth Empire has conquered or subjugated over a thousand different species. If I'm correct, we've managed to arrive just at the stage where the glorious rise ends and the slow fall begins, the days of drift and decay. Every dominant empire the universe ever recorded suffered the same fate. It's inevitable, sooner or later. A scientific principle, a basic fact of life. Now humanity is about to find that out for themselves…"

The Doctor fell silent as Dornier threw open a heavy oak door, which led to a furnished chamber dominated by a roaring fire set within a marbled hearth. Around this centrepiece were arranged several leather armchairs, a low barricade of turrets encircling the sputtering flames. Beyond that the room was taken up by rows upon rows of books, their musty stench wrestling with that of a ring of scented candles hanging in alabaster jars. The faint sweet aroma awakened some childhood memory for Peri; the distant notion of magenta clouds of cotton candy served by assistants in lime-and-white striped uniforms, the violet and azure of the shop's sign broken into a million shards by swelling puddles in the rain.

"We have guests." Dornier announced, and there was a uniform rustling as the party assembled in the room rose from their armchairs. "Doctor, Peri, allow me to introduce my sister, Charlotte Dornier…" A dark-haired woman in her forties bowed, "…General Brackmann…" at this an elderly man in formal dress uniform raised a hand in greeting, "Admiral Mackinlay…" a gaunt, prematurely grey-haired man in his fifties stood to attention, "Lieutenant-Commander Forster…" a young man in his mid-twenties, with an elaborately waxed moustache, gave a nod. It took Peri a moment to notice that all of them were anachronistically clad in Victorian clothes; starched shirts, high collars, Inverness capes and frock coats were the order of the day. Even the Doctor didn't look too out of place here.

"The Doctor has come to assist us with the preliminary investigations into my uncle's death." Dornier said. There was a slight pause before Brackmann spoke, his face a broiling scarlet. "But-this is absolutely preposterous! We've already sent a distress call to the galactic security service…we don't need this meddling amateur!" The Doctor clutched imperiously at his lapels. "A prodigiously accurate assessment, Admiral. I am indeed an amateur, and I have been known to meddle. Nevertheless, I believe I can offer some valuable advice-" Brackmann gave a pugnacious scowl, flecks of spittle flying as his patience snapped altogether. "For heaven's sake, man! You're blustering like an Atlantic hurricane!"

"Blustering?" the Doctor reacted with open-mouthed shock. "Please settle down, gentlemen-" Dornier interjected. At that moment there was a spectacular crash as the door swung open. "That will be the off-world police force. At last." Brackmann gave a sigh, his shoulders slumped in relief. "Well, it seems that soon we can be on our way, Peri…" the Doctor's hopeful voice trailed off as a fog of acrid smoke wreathed across the corridor. Something was coming through, a tall shape veiled by mist.

"I'm the Doctor, and you are…" His broad grin dissipated as the silhouette became distinct, a metallic domed structure moving into the light, flashes of gunmetal-grey, a constant mechanical whirring. "No…" The Doctor whispered, his expression one of abject, stultifying horror. Then he was shouting. "Get back, all of you! Back against the wall!" Nobody did so. "Is the fellow insane?" muttered Brackmann.

"Doctor!" Peri cried. For gliding serenely into the room, revealed under the soft light of the candles, was a Dalek. The Doctor stared straight into the blank gaping disc of the eyestalk, impassive, unrelenting. As the Dalek came closer, the Doctor's distorted face filling its field of view, it began to speak, a screeching guttural rasp the Doctor knew all too well. "Do not move! Do not move! Do not move! Do not move!"

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