Exterminate!
The Doctor knew it should not have been possible, but in hindsight, it had merely been improbable. The Daleks had been firing on his TARDIS as he had tried to escape, and with what he had learned so far, this "Empire" had been engaging in some kind of experiment at the exact same instant, or as "same" an instant as can be reckoned across infinite dimensions and timestreams. There had been some kind of resonance set up between these transit experiments, the Daleks' energy weapons, and the TARDIS' own time- and dimension-hopping engines. A rip had been formed between the Doctor's TARDIS and this Executor—they had become two opposing poles of a reality-warping energy field—and it had all gone downhill from there.
Vader observed the Doctor's reactions silently. He obviously knew of these creatures, these "Daleks," but they were equally obviously no allies of his. Interesting. Now the Sith Lord was presented with a novel opportunity. The Doctor would accompany him to the hangar bays, and Vader would observe. Either the Daleks would defeat the Doctor or vice versa, but either way, Vader would be poised to reap the rewards. "Come with me," Vader ordered, resuming his trek to the hangar bay. "We will see what these friends of yours want of us."
"They want us dead," the Doctor stated flatly. "I've known them nearly all my life and spent as long trying to defeat them forever."
"It seems your efforts are lacking."
The Doctor snorted. "My efforts are quite Herculean—although I admit they instead seem somewhat Sisyphean—often utilizing the very fabric of space and time and feats of engineering chicanery that have resulted in my being banned from several worlds and one pub in Hertfordshire, and on occasion have resulted in death, both mine and others. However, the Daleks themselves are incredibly resourceful and resilient and as there are currently several million of them and one of me, it will take me just a little while to figure out how to put a permanent stop to them."
Vader seemed darkly amused. "For all your blustering, you say very little. However, I can easily deduce your meaning: you have no idea how to topple their particular empire despite many attempts."
His lips pursed, the Doctor pondered this. "If you absolutely must distill the flower of my prose to its most basic, then yes."
Then there are more limits to what he knows than I had hoped. He is not the repository of knowledge he purports himself to be. Still, there is much to be gained from both sides of this little conflict, Vader pondered. Rebel or not, he possesses an unknown technology, as do these new invaders. It would be foolish to let either of them out of my grasp. "Speak to me of these 'Daleks' and what their capabilities are."
"Oh, so now it's speaking, not shushing. It's always that way when they realize they're outclassed."
"Neither I nor the Empire are 'outclassed,'" Vader stated, entering a lift that would take them near the hangar bay. "I wish to be prepared."
The Doctor's gaze lost its focus. "I doubt you can be. The Daleks have laid waste to thousands of star systems, slain countless numbers of sentient life forms, all so they can reign supreme. Their weapons simultaneously irradiate and disrupt the molecules of everything they touch, or they can be set to emit electricity, tachyon beams, plasma, nearly anything. They are armored and shielded, and precious little can penetrate either their chassis or their shields."
"What are they? Organic, cybernetic, sentient energy?"
The Doctor shook himself out of his fugue. "They're organic beings cradled inside robotic conveyances. They're bred from incubators and placed inside a chassis when they're mature enough, and they know only to kill. You cannot negotiate with them, you cannot reason with them. They feel neither fear nor mercy. Entire civilizations—or the last scraps of them—tremble in fear at the very mention of their name."
"Then they are more like me than I guessed," Vader noted, his voice a low rumble. He held his lightsaber out to the Doctor. "I will need this repaired immediately. If they are all that you say, I expect to face them in combat."
What he left unsaid was the nagging worry that he could not feel these Daleks in the Force any more than he could feel the Doctor. Without the Force, Vader could likely not detect their thoughts or intentions, nullifying one of his greatest advantages. In addition, he would be unable to use his Sith powers to injure them if the Doctor's response was any indication. It would relegate his combat to a more mundane, more physical, less certain level. And strangely, it satisfied him.
The Doctor took Vader's weapon from him and reluctantly applied the sonic screwdriver to it. Despite the lightsaber's complexity, it took only a few moments for the Doctor to repair it. He handed it back to Vader but did not let it go. "Use it on anything or anyone other than the Daleks, and I will take it away from you again."
"Should I choose to use it on you, rest assured you will not know it until you feel your head flying free of your shoulders," Vader rumbled, yanking the saber from the Doctor's grip. "What vulnerabilities do these Daleks possess?"
"None, really." The Doctor let Vader's remark pass; it was pointless to bait or debate him. "I've found their weaknesses only by analyzing their tactics. Operational flaws seem to be their only ones."
As the Sith Lord digested this information, the Doctor kept one vital tidbit to himself. During an earlier encounter, one in which the Daleks had emerged through the Void, he had managed to reopen the rift through which they had emerged. The Void's natural attraction to its own radioactive particles, particles which had saturated the Daleks during their transit, had sucked them all back into the trackless, lifeless Void. He intended to do the same here if only he could return to his TARDIS.
For now, for the last few minutes he had before the lift disgorged them into a nest of Daleks—although twelve was more a gaggle than a nest—the Doctor analyzed his antagonistic ally. The black-clad human was a mystery. His limbs from the knees and elbows outward moved like cybernetic constructs, like a Cyberman might, but his shoulders and hips, his head and torso, moved like a man. This "Lord Vader" was obviously some sort of cyborg, but his mind seemed untouched by the intrusion of circuitry. No cold logic tempered that bilious fury. It seemed that Vader lived only to hate, or more aptly, hated to live. "What are you a Lord of, anyway?"
"What?"
"You've been called a lord. I'm a lord of sorts, myself. A Time Lord. Have you heard of us?"
"I have not. I am a Lord of the Sith, apprentice to the Emperor and heir to his rule."
"Sith?" The Doctor frowned. "An Earth word? It means either 'peace' in Scottish or it refers to a big bug in old science-fiction serials. Hardly original. I'd have hoped for something with a little more pep. A little zing."
Vader fell silent again and the lift stopped. The door hissed open and uniformed officers and stormtroopers alike snapped to attention at the sight of Vader. One of them, presumably the senior in rank, strode to face the Sith Lord and resumed his position of ramrod-straight attention.
"Brilliant!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Discipline! Formality! With proper discipline and focus, anything is possible! It gives me great hope that we'll be able to get through this with a minimum of loss of life."
Vader held a hand before the Doctor's face. "I will be happy with a minimum of noise. Report."
"What, me? How can I report when you want me to shut up?"
"Not you."
The officer spared a panicky glance at the Doctor before returning his attention to his commander. "My Lord, there are only twelve of the invaders, but they control the hangar bay. Our weapons cannot penetrate their armor, although to me it seems they have some kind of personal shield generators."
"How do you know this?" Vader demanded.
"There is an absence of scorch marks or any kind of impact trauma to their armor, my Lord, and there is a brief flicker of reddish light around each of them when a blaster bolt strikes them."
The Doctor was impressed. "Very good. They do indeed have shield generators. They can also elevate themselves using repulsors in the bases of their chassis. And they can also override electronics using wireless communications, so I'd suggest…"
Vader had merely to twitch his head toward the Doctor and the Time Lord fell silent. It might just happen that Vader would kill someone other than the Doctor in anger, and the Doctor wanted no such deaths on his conscience. "Cut all power and communications to the hangar bay. Have technicians secure the doors and exits except this one." He pointed to a nearby door. "Disable the hydraulics or weld the doors shut if you must. We will control their means of egress and still provide our troops a means of attack."
"I have already done so, my Lord," the officer said. "We detected someone tampering with the local computer terminals, and the signatures indicated a foreign operating system. It seemed prudent to lock out the bay's terminals. Life support has also been cut to the hangar bay."
"Won't work," the Doctor said, shaking his head. "The Daleks have their own onboard life support. Oxygen, food, the whole lot. I've even seen a few of them moving about on airless asteroids and small moons. May as well leave it on to keep from incapacitating your own people."
The officer was confused. Who was this…civilian…who was standing by Vader's side and giving orders? Evidently one of the Sith Lord's advisors, so it would be best to pay the man respect and attention. Still, it was Vader who was in charge, and the officer knew it. "My Lord?"
Rather than admit that the Doctor had a good point, Vader asked his own questions. "Have you been able to monitor these Daleks' communications?"
"Yes, Lord, but only their verbal ones. It seems they only use wireless methods for manipulating or infiltrating electronics. Shall I open a channel to the hangar bay?"
"Immediately."
The officer strode to a terminal and spoke into a personal comlink. "Restore communications to terminal CB-1319-D only." A moment later, the screen displayed its boot-up status—phenomenally quickly, the Doctor noted with raised eyebrows—and opened an eye upon the darkened hangar bay. The glowing blue "eyes" of the Daleks' sensor stalks were plainly visible. Some were moving about the bay, but four of them remained clustered near the TARDIS, apparently "chatting" among themselves.
Vader took up a position directly before the monitor. "I speak to the intruders aboard my vessel. Send your commanding officer forward so I may speak with him."
"We have no officers," a Dalek replied, the two lights on its dome flashing in time with its words. "I command these units. Identify yourself."
"You are Daleks," Vader said. "What is your purpose aboard my ship?"
"You will identify yourself. Identify!"
Intriguing, Vader thought. The Doctor had indicated that the Daleks were organic inside their armor, but they behaved as if programmed. Much like our cloned troopers were at first. Perhaps they have similar weaknesses.
"The Daleks will destroy you and your vessel if you do not comply. Identify!"
"I am the commander of the Star Destroyer Executor," Vader answered. "That is all you need to know. What is your purpose aboard this ship? You will be…exterminated if you do not comply." Behind his faceplate, Vader frowned. He could no more detect the Daleks' minds than he could the Doctor's.
"You are incapable of defeating the Daleks," the command unit said. It seemed as though it were scoffing. "We have exterminated thirty-four of your soldiers and sustained no damage to ourselves. We are supreme. We will survive. Surrender your vessel and open its computer cores to us."
Vader shut off the terminal with a wave of his hand. The Force still worked to manipulate objects, at least. He paused. Why had he not thought of that before? "Give me your device," he ordered the Doctor.
"Which one?"
"The one you showed me in your cell," Vader said tautly. He would not dare make mention of what had happened in that cell, that much was certain.
Reluctantly, the Doctor withdrew it from his pocket and it flew from his hand to Vader's. "Give that back!"
The Dark Lord did so almost negligently, his theory proven. How careless of me, he chastised himself. The Force might not have any effect on the Doctor, but it worked wonderfully against inanimate objects, even those from the Doctor's alien reality. Vader did not know if it would affect the Daleks, but their robotic components were a different matter entirely. In a corner of his mind, a corner slightly less dark than the rest, Vader wondered why that was so. Perhaps because the Doctor was from a universe that existed outside the Force? It would have made an intriguing puzzle for the old Jedi Masters, had Vader and the Emperor not slain them all. But the time for idle speculation was long since past. He strode toward the door, his lightsaber ready for activation.
"Wait!" the Doctor protested, striding forward and putting himself between Vader and the door. "Let me talk with your technicians, the ones in charge of your transiting experiments. I'm sure I can find a way to send them back where they came from and keep more from coming in."
"More or less will not matter," Vader said. "They will be destroyed."
"Didn't you see what happened in there? All your men dead and nothing done to the Daleks in return? You let them loose in here and your entire crew will die! And more might be on their way now!"
"Not until and unless I order them to will my crew die," Vader said. "Commander. Take the Doctor to Engineering and see what he can do with the experiment. These Daleks are a nuisance and I would prefer to have no more of them appearing in my ship, any more so than I would tolerate vermin."
The officer who had greeted them stepped forth. "Right away, my Lord. Doctor? Please follow me."
The Doctor paused momentarily, looking up at Vader. "You may be making a mistake. I hope you know what you're doing, otherwise you'll unleash a terrible evil on your ship."
Vader stared at, or possibly through, the door. "The 'evil' you fear is already unleashed. Your 'Daleks are about to meet him. " A gesture of his black-gloved fist and the door slid open. Dalek eyestalks swiveled to focus on Vader as he strode in, his lightsaber blade shrieking into fiery existence.
The door closed behind him and the Doctor was obliged to follow his escort to the ship's engineering station. A series of lifts conveyed him to a transit car in a tube that ran the longitudinal axis of the ship. The Doctor was not surprised to see that it was waiting for him, evidently reserved for his use. Vader ran a tight ship and anyone who fell down on the job likely wouldn't be getting back up again.
"So," the Doctor began as the car began to move. "Are there refreshments on this tour? Tea would be nice. Or a banana."
-oOo-
Within the hangar bay, Vader walked fearlessly to the Dalek that had spoken to him. "You are intruders aboard my ship. I will give you one final opportunity to surrender yourselves before I destroy you all."
"You make hollow threats," the Dalek leader said. "We are Daleks. We do not surrender: we survive. You will be exterminated."
Though Vader could not sense the Daleks through the Force, he could sense the lack of existence where they were: five vacuums in the Force were moving behind him in an attempt to outflank him. He concentrated, summoning the Dark Side to him as he never had before. Unable to sense the Daleks' intentions to fire, he would be unable to use their thoughts or nerve impulses as indicators of their actions. He would, however, be easily able to sense their weapons bursts as they traveled through the air. It would not grant much lead time between firing and impact, but Vader was strong in the Force, stronger even than the Emperor. He would manage.
"Then by all means proceed," Vader invited. Behind his faceplate, now he was smiling, the anticipatory leer of a predator baring its fangs.
Five Daleks fired simultaneously. Through the Force, Vader felt the energy bursts roaring from the muzzles of the Daleks' weapons, but as the Force flowed through him, Vader felt time slow even as his reaction time increased.
He leaped into the air with barely a grunt of effort, his cybernetic limbs and the power of the Force propelling him several meters off the deck. He flipped backward and landed behind one of the Daleks that had tried to take him from the back. Even as two of the Daleks' energy bolts smashed into their comrades, Vader's lightsaber burned through a Dalek's shields and into the creature inside.
The Dalek's shields provided substantial resistance to Vader's saber. It was much like swinging a regular sword through thin concrete slurry. But the saber still penetrated, and that was all that mattered.
Instantly, the Daleks began screeching alarms and warnings to one another. As Vader's victim fell in two smoking, sparking, oozing pieces, the other two Daleks were trying to recover from their companions' errant shots. Idly, Vader wondered why, if the Daleks were in command of mechanical conveyances, that they still had to communicate verbally. Another weakness? Or the same one? One of the clone troopers' main failings had been an inability to adapt to new circumstances with sufficient speed to counter different threats. Subsequent versions of the clone troopers, as well as more-experienced older model clones, did not have that problem. The Daleks, however, seemed to be reliant on older, purely organic communications, perhaps a holdover from when they were entirely biological. Were the Daleks likewise newly-programmed? Were they as easily confused as the first-generation troopers, or those with insufficient experience?
In the end, it did not matter. Vader had found not only a means of defeating these invaders, but also of venting the tremendous pressures that had been festering within him for many long months. As his feet touched the deck again, his Force-enhanced senses saw the Daleks attempting to regroup and attack, moving as though in slow motion. He leaped again, lightsaber flashing.
In the Executor's engine room, the Doctor gaped. He had seen a lot of impressive sights in over nine hundred years of adventuring, but this…
"Impressed?" the commander asked.
"Only at the gross inefficiency on display here," the Doctor replied. "Your ship is obviously gigantic—I would have said 'titanic' but I have this aversion to icebergs, you see—but it seems you have only found a way to hammer it through space using brute force. You can't be using much more than a third of your engine's power for actual propulsion. How much of it is wasted energy?"
The commander seemed to bristle even as he deflated. "Not enough to worry about. We can still make Point Four easily enough. There is enough energy down there to supply both this ship and half of a good-sized planet."
"Precisely my point," the Doctor said. "If you could run this up to the efficiency I've seen on some other starships…oh, the wonders you could work."
"And how would we do that?"
Abruptly, the Doctor remembered where he was. How stupid could I be, giving technical support to an empire dedicated to death and mayhem? "Work on it," he said, avoiding the commander's question. "Is this what we're here for?"
Without waiting for an answer, the Doctor headed toward the only pieces of equipment that didn't seem to fit with the rest of the department's functions. Donning his glasses again, he pursed his lips and jammed his hands into his pockets. Trans-dimensional tesseracts? What in Time are they trying to do? Photonic acceleration, yes. Gravimetric field modulation, yes. Now this…oh. So that's how they're going about it.
"It works by…"
"By pressing a bunch of buttons, specifically those to initiate power flow; those to target the navigational arrays; a few of those to…oh, no. Not those. My mistake. Those are for coffee. Those buttons, then, to initiate the transit."
"How did you figure all that out?" the commander asked, amazed.
"I can sum it up in two words."
"Uh, 'military intelligence'?"
"No. 'I'm good'," the Doctor corrected. "This isn't so difficult to operate or deduce as it seems, but if we're going to use it to seal off the rift that you opened and keep the Daleks from coming out, we're going to have to get very, very technical."
"How much so?"
"I can't tell you."
"Classified?" Odaron smirked.
"No. Your head may explode. Can you show me the readings of your instruments at the time of your most recent experiments, please?"
The commander waved at a subordinate and relayed the Doctor's request. "I don't suppose it would be out of order if I asked you how you can just walk in here, presumably in that blue space capsule, gain Lord Vader's confidence, and deduce exactly what we're doing, would it?"
"Wouldn't be out of order at all." The Doctor peered intently into the innards of one of the larger modules and began working. While it was quite vital that he seal the rift and keep the Daleks' companions from following, it was also equally important that he do so while he was on the right side of it. And there was another chore that had to be done at the same time, so he figured he might as well be at it.
-oOo-
Four of the Daleks had fallen to Vader's lightsaber, but the other eight were still more than enough to keep him occupied. Quickly, he touched a control on his belt that cut off his external speaker. Another button opened a com channel to his bridge crew.
"Shut off power to this entire deck except for lights and minimal life support," he ordered. "Wherever these Daleks are, shut off power to the decks immediately above and below for a radius of three hundred meters. Do not allow them access to our computers, or to anything of any importance. Deactivate or destroy any compromised systems."
"Understood, Lord Vader," the bridge officer's reply came.
The distance of three hundred meters hadn't been an arbitrary decision; he had been monitoring his own troops' communications as he had fought and he had learned that the Executor's decking served quite well to hamper the Daleks' transmissions. Posts over three hundred meters away seemed unaffected by the intruders' attempted manipulations. Strangely, they continued to speak amongst themselves rather than via radio or subspace. Not that Vader minded, because it made the Daleks supremely easy to track and counter. Vader's Force-enhanced senses pinpointed each Dalek's position even as he sensed the disturbances in the air as their weapon bolts tore through the atmosphere. With the added power and speed that the Force added to his muscles, the Daleks' eventual defeat would not be too far off, he thought.
Then a Dalek energy bolt seared past his left shin. Nerve-shredding pain filled the organic part of his leg and for a moment, he fancied he could still feel pain in his lower leg as he had before Obi-Wan Kenobi had severed it so long ago. Thrown off balance, the Sith Lord stumbled behind the landing gear for an assault shuttle, using the Force to counter the shock of the injury.
At first.
Once the worst of the pain had subsided, Vader changed his focus from suppression to acceptance. As he breathed rapidly through his respirator, he concentrated on the pain, embracing it, feeding it. And the pain became rage, a rage directed at those who had dared inflict such suffering on him. The darkness Vader had summoned grew, swelled into an all-consuming abyss of anger and bile, and he welcomed it. The hatred and the fury fed the Dark Side and in return the Force fueled his body and his mind.
As he once more leaped into the fray, a dim, distant ember of his once-rational mind mused that he had been correct, now more than ever: the Dalek defeat was guaranteed.
-oOo-
The Doctor stood, replacing his sonic screwdriver in his pocket and giving his work a final inspection. "Well, that should take care of everything," he said with satisfaction.
"As in what, specifically?" his escort asked.
"Once I return to my TARDIS and finish the work, the rift will be sealed and the Daleks will no longer be a threat," the Doctor predicted confidently.
"And where will you be?"
"In the TARDIS."
"Will you be rejoining us, I mean?"
The Doctor opened his mouth briefly and bobbed his head in the affirmative. "Maybe."
As the Time Lord began to walk out of the engineering section, the commander who had been accompanying him paused to think. This talk of the Daleks appearing because of some "rift," implying that they came from somewhere else, coupled with the fact that this "Doctor" was the only one who knew anything about them led the officer to surmise that perhaps the Doctor was similarly from "somewhere else." But from where? Another universe? Another time? Or merely another world that the Empire hadn't encountered yet? He shook himself out of his reverie and strode quickly after the Doctor. The commander doubted now that the Doctor was one of Vader's advisors, but was obviously something entirely different, possibly dangerous. Certainly worth watching, in any case.
Hands deeply in his pockets, strutting as nonchalantly as he ever did or could, the Doctor began to trek back to the lift and transports that would return him to his TARDIS and his way home. Behind the manically affable façade of his wide eyes and softly whistling lips, the Doctor was feverishly working to resolve yet another problem that he had just noticed, although this was less technical and more of an ethical dilemma. Oh, for the simplicity of the Master's schemes, he lamented.
The remaining Daleks, all three of them, had discovered that they were unable to open any of the hangar bay doors except the one through which Vader had entered, but even that one was being secured against their use. They had spared the briefest of instants to focus their weapons on the door and simply blasted a Dalek-sized hole through the thick barrier. One by one, they made their way into the corridors and into the midst of the relatively vulnerable human crew and troopers.
"We have gained access to the ship at large," the command Dalek reported. It turned to look at a subordinate. "Disperse and infiltrate. Exterminate all life forms. We must assume command of this vessel immediately, but priority must be given to finding and exterminating the Doctor."
"We obey," the other Dalek replied, taking a separate route into the Executor's corridors. The command Dalek and its companion glided silently into the depths of the ship.
An unholy angel appeared in the hangar's doorway, a crimson rod of murder in its armored fist. Vader's breath came rapidly and raggedly. For all that the Force powered his body, the incredible levels of activity still took a toll on his mortal flesh. Smoke issued from hot armor where Dalek weapons had scored glancing hits. His cloak was tattered and his helmet scorched, but Darth Vader still stood.
It had been wise for the Daleks to flee, he knew. Their odds against the rest of the crew were infinitely better than against him. This way, they could conceivably take over the ship, destroy it, or Force knew what else. If they should happen to tamper with life support, they could easily kill his entire crew. It was even possible that they could hack into the Imperial networks and cause unknowable damage to the Empire.
But he was the Lord Darth Vader. No "Dalek" would get the better of him in this life or the next. Reaching out with his senses, he detected two dead spots in the Force heading to his right and a third to his left, angling to the rear of the ship. Choosing the two Daleks as the greater threat, Vader strode after them,
-oOo-
The transit car neared its destination but stopped several meters shy of it. The Doctor frowned as his escort opened his personal comlink. "Bridge, this is Commander Odaron. Why is my transport stalled?"
"We apologize, sir, but the Daleks have broken free of the hangar bay. Lord Vader ordered us to shut down all systems within three hundred meters of their position for fear that they might compromise our ship."
Which meant that one or more of those roving death machines was within three hundred meters of him right now, the Doctor sighed to himself. "Do they know how many are out there?"
"We count only three left," the bridge crewman replied after Odaron had relayed the question.
Whatever relief the Doctor might have felt at hearing the relatively good news was washed away by a wave of dread. Just what in the name of Time was this Darth Vader that he could slay nine Daleks alone? "Is Lord Vader still alive?"
"Yes, sir. He is pursuing two Daleks. The third seems to be on your level, heading your way. Relative to your position, he is bearing two two four, moving along corridor 7A-355-8D."
Odaron hefted his blaster, eyeing it critically. He had seen that the Daleks were impervious to weapons fire, and Lord Vader, the only person on the ship who had a chance of killing the Daleks, was somewhere else. Idly, he wondered how badly death by Dalek would hurt.
"I have a good idea what you're thinking," the Doctor said, getting out of the transit car. "In fact, I've probably wondered much the same thing myself over the years."
Odaron likewise left the car, keeping his blaster in his hand for comfort's sake if nothing else. "I was actually pondering how much pain was involved when you're hit with one of their weapons."
"I know. And like I said, I've pondered it myself." The Doctor palmed his sonic screwdriver yet again. "However, now I'm also pondering a few other things. How do you manage your artificial gravity? Graviton or meson manipulation in the deck plates' molecular makeup, or an actual energy field infusing the decks?"
"Something of both," the commander replied. As it turned out, the deck plating was specially forged with its molecules aligned a certain way and energized by the ship's power source. It was not exactly what the Doctor had been hoping for, but it might work. If he could do what he had to quickly enough.
"Get in touch with your bridge crew," the Doctor said, setting the screwdriver's controls. "See how long they can delay the Dalek by shutting down the doors and such, but make sure they can keep power going to the artificial gravity. That will give us what we need. I think."
"You think?"
"Yes, frequently." Agonizing moments were spent as the Doctor lifted deck plates, fiddled with conduits and connectors, then stood atop the transit car to reroute whatever lay in the ceiling panels. Every so often, he would reach into his pockets and pull out sundry devices that seemed far too large to fit inside them. The unidentifiable devices were then spliced into the circuitry and piping, never to be seen or referenced again.
"Commander, the Dalek is on the other side of the door immediately to your left," the bridge technician reported. "He's attempting to open it, but for now, we're able to keep him busy. I can't say for how long, though, sir."
"Just for another six to nine seconds," the Doctor reported cheerfully, dropping back down to the deck. "We should be ready by then. Commander, shoot when I say so. Whoever you are on the bridge, deactivate the current to the artificial gravity on this deck and throw full power into the force field projectors that I just found. Why didn't you tell me you had those?" This last was directed to Odaron.
Nonplussed, Odaron ordered the bridge staff to comply with the Doctor's orders, then turned his attention to the lanky alien. "Now what?"
"We open the door," the Doctor smiled. "You'll start shooting, our friends on the bridge will begin flipping switches, and the Dalek will begin blowing up. Well, not in that order. Rather, the door opens, switches are flipped, guns are fired, Dalek is blown up. And somewhere in there we're taking cover before it shoots back. How's that?"
Wondering yet again why an officer in the Imperial Navy was taking orders from a half-crazed civilian, Commander Odaron took up a position behind the transit car and aimed his blaster at the door. He consoled himself with the thought that Vader had put this newcomer in charge—sort of—and concentrated on the slowly opening door before him.
The Dalek's glowing blue central eye showed up clearly in the dimness of the corridor it was leaving, but as unnerving as that steady cold gleam was, the shape of the Dalek was even more so. In the clear light, Odaron could finally see what it was that the Doctor had brought with him. Like so many millions before him, he felt fear at the sight of the Dalek.
A misbegotten blend of biological and mechanical, the cold, emotionless exterior of the Dalek was strictly utilitarian, as fierce and fearless as any land assault vehicle ever was. Its purpose was unmistakable: to destroy. The gun on the unit's left side twitched back and forth as its targeting systems sought new victims; the suction-cup manipulator was retracted, yet it also slowly waved about as if sniffing the air; and the eyestalk efficiently scanned the Dalek's surroundings. Its side skirting, festooned with bumps of unknown purpose, reflected the corridor's lights dully as the once-polished but now tarnished metal sucked the radiance from the lights' glow. The faceless murder machine glided silently into the corridor in which the Doctor and Odaron waited.
Odaron silently keyed his comlink and at that instant, the bridge technicians initiated the Doctor's plan. The artificial gravity directly under the Dalek was cut off, and its repulsors, keyed to keep the Dalek levitated in normal gravity, shoved it toward the roof, rotating and somersaulting as it tried to right itself. The force field projectors snapped on, some acting as miniature tractor beams and others playing about the Dalek's shell, making its shields flare brilliant shades of scarlet.
"Alert! Alert! This unit's mobility impaired! Estimating fifty rels until equilibrium is regained! This unit requires assistance!"
Odaron didn't wait for the Doctor to give him an order. He simply began firing. The Doctor, meanwhile, began reading the tiny display on his sonic screwdriver. Some of the force field projectors were emitting pulses of energy at varying wavelengths and the Doctor needed to know which of them would neutralize the Dalek's shield. It was a simple law of physics that equal and opposite waves would cancel each other, at which point the Dalek would be vulnerable—somewhat—to Odaron's blaster. The question now became one of timing. Would the Doctor be able to find the correct frequency, and if he did, would it be soon enough?
It was. Nearly forty rels from the Dalek's initial distress cry, or just over thirty-five seconds, the scarlet glare of the Dalek's overstressed shields faded. The Doctor quickly dialed the projectors' output to the correct wavelength locked it in place. "Now! Aim for the eyestalk, or for one of the repulsor emitters underneath it!"
The Imperial commander wasted no time asking what was what, but increased his rate of fire, bathing the Dalek in red beams of supercharged plasma. The eyestalk came free of the dome with a flash of sparks and an anguished scream from the thing's vocal emitter. It immediately began broadcasting pleas for assistance mingled with cries of pain.
For all that the Doctor despised the Daleks, he still found himself wishing for another way to defeat them. Hearing the Dalek's suffering still caused him pain of his own. Despite the circuitry and hydraulics that moved the Dalek, it was still an organic being trapped inside, and the Doctor was the cause, however indirectly, of its suffering.
The lesser of the evils…it always is, the Doctor lamented. Even as the Dalek began firing wildly, spraying energy beams everywhere in the hopes of killing its attackers, the Doctor pitied it. Odaron's blaster finally found its mark and a red bolt of energy found one of the Dalek's repulsor emitters, overloading it and causing a sizeable explosion.
When the Doctor raised his head over the battered transport car, he saw the last remnants of the Dalek twitching in the ruin of its destroyed chassis. He stood and began to congratulate Odaron, but the words were stilled before they were voiced.
Shrapnel from the exploding Dalek had found Odaron, and the Doctor found himself alone in the corridor.