Sarah was sitting in her cell, her head in her hands. She was trying to puzzle out just what was happening, and dearly wished the Doctor was here to help.
The Red Hexagon were really called the Reflectionists. Aliens, and there were not five of them, but hundreds, maybe thousands of them. They had conquered the Kaled Dome, but had left the Elite and the Bunker alone, for some reason. They were here to do something to, or with, the Daleks.
The door to the cell slid open, and Sarah looked up. Standing in the doorway was Security Liaison, with a bundle of cloth under her arm. "May I come in?" she asked.
"I'm your prisoner, you can do whatever you want." Sarah stared down at the floor, then looked back up at the other woman. After a pause, she entered the cell and sat down on the floor facing Sarah.
"These are for you, if you wish," she said, extending the bundle of what was apparently clothing.
"What for?" asked Sarah.
"In case you happen to make an abrupt exit from the Bunker. Your current attire is not really suitable for a battlefield." Sarah looked down at her culottes and sweater, and decided the Red Hexagon woman did have a point there. And the implied suggestion that she might be escaping again was very welcome. So she accepted the green military-style trousers and jacket and set them on the bunk beside her.
"You're here to take over the world, aren't you?" Sarah had met plenty of world-robbers and alien dominators in her time with the Doctor, but few of them had sat on the floor and looked up at her with such glum eyes.
"No, Smith. I am only here to talk to you, for now."
"Why do you keep calling me Smith?" Sarah asked.
Security Liaison shrugged. "It's your family name. A family name is a novelty here. All of these," her gesture encompassed the Bunker, "have one name and one number."
"But how do they keep track of their own families?" asked Sarah.
"Families? There are no families here: there is the State, and there are its subjects. All women are fertilised by artificial insemination, with samples mixed from a hundred different genetically certified Kaled males: nobody knows who their father is. They are taken from their mothers to be raised in State crèches, taught in State classes. There is no bonding, no caring, there is the War, and what is necessary to win it."
"That sounds like a recipe for psychosis," said Sarah, thinking about what a hand-wringing issue 'children from broken homes' was back on Earth. How much worse here, where there were no homes at all!
"Insanities of all kinds are accepted, so long as they do not interfere with your duties for the war. This society currently tolerates a far higher proportion of madman than any sane society would. They are all a little mad." She sighed. "Poor empty things. They are raised like machines, this one to fight and this one to think. This one to lead, and all the rest to follow, oh yes! You know, they haven't known the simplest pleasures that you and I have; they've never walked outside and walked barefoot in the grass. No grass, too dangerous to go out barefoot."
"You and I," repeated Sarah. "The Doctor called you a Reflectionist. A thought pattern from another planet."
"Many other planets," she replied. "Many worlds."
"And you take knowledge, memories, from - from the dead?"
"Sometimes."
Sarah Jane swallowed, then spit out what she had been thinking of. "You remind me of bugs, you know that? These big alien bugs called the Wirrn, they thought like you. They ate people and absorbed their memories."
"I like bugs," said Security Liaison; Sarah could have sworn that her ears tilted forward in interest. "Perhaps the Wirrn are Reflectionists as well. And yes, we are taking memories from the dead, our own and theirs, but we have to. There is so little of these people left, so much that has been destroyed: we must save every scrap of memory, to pass it on to their descendants."
Her face drooped. "If there are descendants. I should hate to think that these are the last of them. That whatever heights they could have risen to, they would only be remembered as a checkmark in history, 'the race that became the Daleks'."
"You know that the Daleks are evil!"
"They could become very evil, true. They are tightly focussed, monomaniacal by design. It all depends what they are focussed on. We are totally focussed on what we have designed ourselves to do, and to be. Are we evil?"
Sarah answered the question with another question. "Are you - focussed on Nyder?" It would explain why she'd made herself into a little cookie-cutter copy of him, in mannerism if not appearance.
Security Liaison sat up straight, and raised her chin. "I am assigned to Security, and to Security Commander Nyder. He is the source of my title, and yes, he is the focus of my existence."
"How do you really feel about him, though?" Surely Security Liaison had to realise just what sort of a monster she was working with.
"My personal orientation towards the Commander was embedded in my personality before I was - since before I was, you would say born. But how I feel about him as a person …"
Security Liaison stood in one smooth motion, and touched her finger to her chin meditatively. "He is … some wild animal that has been born and raised in captivity. Beaten, abused, starved, caged, trained to serve its masters, to do tricks it has no understanding of. But when you look at that beaten, broken beast with pity, and think that it would be better off dead - it looks back at you. And snarls, and tells you without words, without sentience, 'I am alive and I will remain alive! I want to live! No matter what you do to me, I still want to live!' "
Her lip quivered, and for a moment she looked on the brink of tears. "He is a monster, a murderer, a traitor, a torturer. The State raised him to be a killer, and a killer he is. He is what his world has crushed him into being, like forcing hot lead into a bullet mould." She turned her face from Sarah, stared away at the wall. "And I would give anything I have, my life and beyond, to give him a chance to be more than that killer." She snorted through her nose. "But that's about as likely as lead turning into gold, spontaneously."
She turned back with her face as blank and bleak as frozen stone. Sarah looked into her empty expression, and couldn't think of anything more to say. So she went for the practical. "So, should I put on these clothes? Am I going to be leaving soon?"
"I would say that you should be ready to leave at the shortest notice. The Bunker seems stable, the Dome is doing well," Security Liaison paused, "I am sure the Dome is doing well. But if something goes wrong, you may be stuffed down another air duct in a hurry."
"What's Davros going to do if he finds his alien test subjects gone?" wondered Sarah aloud.
"Probably test the Daleks on someone else." Her expression suggested that she had a very good idea of who would be first in line to be that someone else. "Of course, his definition of passing such a test, and the Daleks' definition, may diverge a bit."
# # #
The Doctor was pacing back and forth in his cell, too keyed up to rest. Every once in a while he stopped and stared at the walls, trying to spot some irregularity, some pattern that would tell him there was a hidden door into this cell. He dearly wanted to rejoin his companions, especially Harry who seemed to be in a very vulnerable condition. There had to be some way to get out and warn people, to exploit what he knew about the Reflectionists.
When Security Liaison entered the cell (unfortunately through the normal door), he turned and scowled at her. "You must be regretting that slip of the tongue," he said caustically.
"I am."
"I don't suppose you'd care to share your Reflection source point with me?" he asked hopefully.
"Why? So you can go back and smother my mother's mother, therefore insuring that my source is never born? No, we know some of the paradoxes involved in time travel, Doctor. We have no wish to have you poking around." Security Liaison stood with her back to the wall, at rest but keenly alert.
"So," said the Doctor, sitting and stretching out his long legs. "Why don't we talk about a topic closer to home, as it were? Hif."
"Hif," she said, with no further inflection.
"A Kaled scientist, a Bunker scientist, who vanishes into thin air, and the results of his experiments just happen to come to life in their hundreds, and start popping up all over the place, like weeds. Now, isn't that interesting?"
"Fascinating."
"I think that Hif is working for you. If you didn't take him over directly, that is-"
Security Liaison's dark eyes snapped with sudden anger. "If you know us, you know that we do not take over able sentient minds. The almost-dead, the ones whose minds have been wiped by trauma, or infants too young to have consciousness: those are our hosts."
"I think of Reflectionists as being passive observers. What could possibly justify this level of active interference in Kaled affairs?"
"Justify?" she said, incredulously. "Doctor, this planet is on the brink of a total environmental collapse - if we don't stop the war now, nothing mammalian will survive. Not that I have anything against invertebrate or reptilian intelligence - except that I am not currently either one. If we just stopped the war and then left it at that, Doctor, there would be a massive die-off. This society, both societies, Kaled and Thal, would collapse. Both races would probably become extinct. And how do you justify your actions, Doctor? Working to kick the feet out from this society and not bothering where it lands?" She smirked. "No, of course not. You can't kick the feet out from under the Daleks, after all."
Blocked, the Doctor tried another tack. "I've seen the Reflectionist reaction to planetary-level destruction. I was on Noca Verino, before the sun went nova. I met one of your species there, Prime Tho'Po Mnee-Dumun."
Security Liaison bowed her head. "Prime Tho'Po," she said softly. "He stayed behind, that his children could escape. It is good to know," her eyes rose to the Doctor's face, "that memories of him live on, even apart from us."
The Doctor's eyes were sharp, his voice condemning. "You stripped that planet bare as you left, stripped the minds of its remaining inhabitants. You stole their memories, you raped their consciousness! They are dead now because of you!"
"The only ones," she coughed deeply, in the menacing manner of a lioness, "the only ones we quilled the memories out of in that fashion were the doomed, those who would rather make war on each other than flee. Even though they hated us, killed us, we saved a part of them. Would it have been better to leave them to burn with everything they knew? On other planets, millions of willing evacuees live in peace thanks to us. They live! And with us, even the memories of those who hated us goes on. Noca Verino goes on!"
"As a part of you."
"No, as a partner to us. We are their friends."
The Doctor frowned. "What will you make the Kaleds, I wonder? A reflection of a reflection? Your subject species? Your captives?" The Doctor was deliberately egging on Security Liaison, hoping that she would lose her temper and reveal more than she should.
"Husbands." She looked at him, eyes glittering. "We will make them husbands." Then she demurely folded her hands in front of her, and looked at the floor. "If they will have us, of course."
"How will they be able to resist?" the Doctor wondered bitterly. "I suppose this is how you cleared the battlefield so quickly."
"Actually those plans have been in place for some weeks; we've been moving the troops closer to home, and forging the reports of their actual locations. But you have to admit, if you're a scared cold boy-soldier and someone brings you stand-down orders, a housing chit and something to eat, and she just happens to be a pretty Kaled girl as well, off you go with her! Even if you don't believe the orders, you'll drag her back to the Dome so that she won't be contaminated in the Wastelands. And once you get there, you don't leave."
"They can't leave, you mean. They become your drugged slaves!"
"We are drugging them because our analysis was that they might well destroy each other en masse, and possible the Dome itself, in their revelry. They are a violent people, and you'd be amazed at some of the weaponry they have. Would you refuse to give painkiller to a wounded man, because it was unnatural? These people are broken, and we are putting some restraints on them until they heal. Like splinting a broken leg. And after they heal!"
She leaned forward, her face rapt with intensity. "Doctor, the twisted scalded remnants of the Kaled race, the Daleks, will leave this place and conquer the universe, destroying all life in their path. At least, that's what you say. So imagine what greatness the whole and healed Kaled race could achieve!"
"Perhaps they are only great warriors," the Doctor objected.
"We shall see. We will be taking them off the drugs tomorrow. All the drugs, including the ones fed to them by their own government to keep them under control. We are building a new world, and we need the people to participate in the process - not just sit there and take orders. It is their world. They are our hosts. We are only guests."
"I've known guests like you - creeping wisteria comes to mind. Looks pretty, then takes the place apart."
"After the Peace Accords are signed, we plan to start them off with an open election. Let them choose a new government and new laws." Security Liaison shrugged. "Of course Davros will win the election. Davros, the saviour of Skaro. Who would not vote for the hero who ended a thousand years of war? He is guaranteed to win."
She smiled softly, eyes half-shut. "And once he is in complete control, Davros can apply his matchless intellect to some of the really important problems we face like … industrial synchronization. Power distribution. Environmental rehabilitation. And education standards have slipped shockingly."
The Doctor laughed, teeth flashing. "So you think you can really turn Davros into a benign bureaucrat? Why do I find that hard to believe? He's more likely to exterminate you, then turn on the Thals!"
She shrugged. "He wants power, we'll give him power. With power comes responsibility. Blowing up the plumbing won't fix it. Pointing a gun at the ignorant won't make them learn. And if he declares that we are the enemies of the State, he will quickly discover that the State is made up of people - and that if those people decline to act on the State's behalf, then there is no State. And what about your role in all this?"
"What?" asked the Doctor, distracted by the sudden change in topic.
"Will you stay and help us rebuild this planet? Share your knowledge?" Security Liaison's voice was suddenly cool. "Of course I'm not certain we can trust you. Your obsession with destroying the Daleks is disturbing."
"Surely you can see what a spectacular tool they would be for your race. They are the perfect war machines. With the Daleks as allies, the Reflectionists could conquer the Universe."
Security Liaison silently laughed. "You did not talk to Prime Tho'Po for very long, did you?" She turned and went to the door; opening it, she turned and fired her last words over her shoulder. "I see no point in conquering the Universe. Where would I put it, once I had it?" And she left.
The Doctor sat frozen, his mouth open. The laugh that had lit in his eyes at her words suddenly spilled from him. He chortled aloud at the mad image of someone conquering the Universe and then fretfully not having anywhere to put it, because it was everything that could be put, or put upon. What a riddle!
Then he collected himself, and went back to his previous task. He had to find a way to escape. Patting the walls, he looked again for the passageway that might or might not get him out of this cell. But even as he did so, a part of him wondered if maybe the Reflectionists were right after all.
# # #
When Security Liaison stepped out of the Doctor's cell, she met a surprise. The Kaled guard had gone off duty, and been replaced with a Dalek.
"Security Liaison," it rasped. "You have considered our order that you build a matter disintegrator to exterminate the Reflectionists in the Kaled Dome, tonight."
"Yes, I have considered it."
"You will obey our order."
"No."
The Dalek came closer. "We will exterminate you unless you obey our order."
"You cannot force me to build a matter disintegrator. And if you built it, you cannot force me to use my neural array to activate it."
"We can exterminate every person in this Bunker - and we will, if you do not obey. Obey us!" The Dalek's voice was shrill with demand.
"I will not do it, because it would fail." Security Liaison appeared perfectly calm; inside she was holding back terror, the images of the Elite writhing and dying in the Daleks' heat rays. She was dying inside with them, but by an act of will she kept her heart rate steady, her muscles loose. She knew that the Dalek could see through her, could evaluate blood pressure and muscle tension as easily as it could count the strands of metal in her neural array.
"You will tell us how the plan will fail," the Dalek ordered.
"If you use the matter disintegrator to slice through the Dome, layer by layer; rake it through every building, every tunnel, the Command complex, slicing and tearing apart every living thing there, you will fail to destroy the Reflectionists."
The Dalek paused. Then it rolled forward, aggressively. "You are withholding information!"
"I do not know where every Reflectionist is," she said calmly, stepping forward as well; the Dalek's gun was almost touching her waist now. "I do know that even if you kill all in the Dome, all in the Wastelands, even all on the continent - the Reflectionists will survive on Skaro. And if you sterilised the entire planet's surface-"
"If we sterilise the entire planet's surface, what will be the result?" interrupted the Dalek.
"We have already sent out our messages, oh slowly! Very slowly! Radio only, and considering how dusty the general galactic environment is around here, it will take centuries for us to be heard. But the messages have gone, and they say 'Hello, we are here, come and meet us, come and meet our fine Kaled and Dalek comrades!' And when a Reflectionist hive, on some alien world or star cluster or deep space environ, decodes those messages and comes to share - and finds us all gone, and you here - well, there will be consequences." She stared directly into the Dalek's eyestalk. "Very deep consequences."
The Dalek's communication lights flickered for a moment. "I have communicated your answer to the other Daleks in the Bunker," it said. And rolled back to its guard post.
Security Liaison allowed herself to relax a degree further, in relief. "Alive another day, then," she whispered to herself.
# # #
She spent the least amount of time in the snoring Harry's cell. Only brushing his damp hair with her fingertips, she said softly, "Surely Heaven must be missing an angel." Then she slipped out the door softly, and left him undisturbed to dream.
