"Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!" Dav ordered, gesturing wildly at the terrified humans.
The Daleks did not move. They did not even seem to notice the order.
"Obey me!" Dav shrieked.
"You know what we forgot to put on that chair? A volume control," Ravon muttered to himself.
"Daleks?" Dav asked, tapping one of them with his metal fingers. Tap-tap-tap, but the Dalek did not react.
"What is going on!" he finally wondered aloud.
All of the Daleks were pointing their eyestalks at the portal into Eternity. Finally, one of them turned its dome. Slowly, very slowly, it turned and seemed to focus on its creator.
When the Dalek spoke, its voice was unexpectedly hushed. "There are Daleks in there."
Then it turned its dome away, quicker than a blink, to stare again into the flickering light.
Another Dalek spoke, its voice equally soft. "They are - they are perfect. Perfect Daleks. They are as far above us as we are above all other races. They...we..."
"I, I am - imperfect!" A third Dalek spoke, swivelling to stare at Dav. "I am inferior! I am inferior because I was made by you! A mere copy of the true Davros!"
"No. No, no, no!" Dav raged, but it was too late. All the Daleks turned and joined in the verbal assault.
"We are inferior!"
"We are defective!"
"We must - we must -"
"I must self-exterminate," one of them finally groaned, and levitated upwards (the two Eternals drifted to the sides of the sphere without seeming to notice). "But I have no orders. But I must, I must," it repeated.
"No!" Dav howled, straining upwards with his sole hand. Rose jumped into the opened spot on the deck and grabbed his arm, slamming it down against his chair console. She was close enough to him to smell the rotted medicinal stink of him, close enough to feel his breath on her face, but she did not flinch.
"You'll lose your arm!" she shrilled. "Everyone, get down, get away from it!" She knew what was going to happen next.
The Dalek's spheres separated from its casing, floating outwards to form a globe that crackled with alien energies. The humans desperately scrabbled to keep outside the deadly circle. Then lightning crashed and the Dalek was gone.
A second Dalek began to drift upwards. "I must be exterminated," it moaned.
"Let me off first!" Sarah Jane shouted, wriggling away and landing rather badly on Jackie. They both were driven to their knees. The humans were down on the deck now, watching as one Dalek after another rose and shouted in uttermost despair of its weakness, its flaws, and then died. The light of their passage flickered over Dav's face; he looked like he might cry, if he had eyes.
Throughout the Dalek fleet, the message was spreading. The doomed Daleks in the sphere sent their data as they died, and millions upon millions of Daleks had full knowledge of their utter worthlessness poured into the very core of their minds. And by the millions, they died. Only the strongest, the most determined, the most flexible, could hope to survive that crushing mental blow.
Dalek Caan was wailing thinly, "I cannot - I cannot die! I cannot die!" Its casing was probably too damaged for it to activate the self-destruct.
The humans rose warily to their feet. The Daleks were gone now, except for Caan; but outside the light still writhed and boiled against the walls of the sphere. Jack looked upwards and thought he could see stars; had the hull of the Crucible actually been burnt through? That might be a problem, once this protective sphere and its atmosphere were gone.
"Now what?" Mickey wondered, looking at Dav's chair controls. If it didn't have a mute button, maybe there was an off switch.
"Done, sir," said a weak female voice out of nowhere, and Esselle returned. Or rather, some of her returned.
Jack and Martha shared a look of sudden knowledge. They had seen something like this before: what an immortal being might look like, aged centuries beyond its normal lifespan. Esselle was a withered mannequin of herself, shrunken inside her uniform. Her dark eyes were huge in her face now, and her tiny gloved hands clenched tight to one another. She was visibly shivering.
"Twenty seven planets," she coughed, "are very heavy! I could not draw on Eternity out there. I had to use my personal energies."
"Draw on us, now, that's an order," Nyder snapped. He had not turned to look at her, and neither had Ravon, but it was clear they could sense what sort of a state she was in.
"No, sir," she contradicted him. "The sphere would be breached. But - it is done. The planets returned, and their moons nudged back into place, and their satellites, and the binary systems rebalanced, and all those annoying spaceships that would insist on parking right where the planet was supposed to be shoved aside. It is done."
She turned her head, which looked oversized on her too-thin neck, and gestured with one hand. Out of nowhere, three objects materialised and drifted to Rose, Mickey and Jackie. Two guns, and the dimension cannon.
"These are yours," she rasped. "And for the rest of you, good news. Mr. Harkness: Gwen and Ianto are safe. Tosh's plan worked."
Jack exhaled a breath of fear he didn't even know he had been holding, then straightened. "How do you know about them - and Tosh?"
She blinked at him, her eyelids translucent. "They are a part of you. I see you, your past and your friends, they are all a part of you. And Tosh - is gone, but her plan did work."
She looked at Sarah Jane. "Luke is all right," and then at Martha. "And your mother is dancing in her garden. And she is beautiful."
Martha smiled, and Esselle tried to smile back; it was more of a rictus. "But I do not know if there is much to dance about. Billions dead-"
"Billions!" Rose exclaimed. "But - that's all the Earth, that's everyone!"
"Billions spread between twenty seven planets," Esselle answered, casting a very cynical look at Rose. "Vehicle crashes, buildings collapsed, sinking ships...fires and floods...volcanoes and earthquakes. Famine and disease to come, changed weather...and madness, terrible madness, for those who have seen the impossible." She wrapped her arms around herself and twitched as if in pain.
The second Doctor stepped up to Rose. "So what happens now?" he said, his fingers slipping onto the dimension cannon almost casually.
"Now we hope that Davros' wrath runs out before our power does..." She drifted backwards through the air, and leaned on Ravon's red-clad shoulder, head drooping, seemingly exhausted.
The second Doctor did not take his eyes from Esselle as he lifted the cannon from Rose's slack grip and opened a control panel on it, quickly popping and resetting a series of micro-switches by touch.
"Isn't there anything we can do for you?" Jackie implored, her knuckles white on her own weapon. Whatever these Eternals were, they had put the Daleks in their place all right; and it was hard not to trust someone who handed you back your gun.
"I - wait, yes. But not you." She turned and stared down at Sarah Jane. "You."
She opened one of the pockets of Ravon's robe, pulling out a long loop of golden chain with a glowing gem suspended from it. She slid the chain across her palms, and then held her hands out.
Her eyes burned in her face like gems, or like the warpstar in her grasp. "You were willing to give this up to defeat the Daleks. Will you give it up to save the life of someone who serves Davros? If I do not absorb energy soon, I will be, well, in a very bad way."
Sarah Jane opened her mouth to answer, and was interrupted.
"I wonder what would happen if I shot a severely weakened Eternal with this," the second Doctor said, swinging the cannon up and aiming it directly at Esselle's wasted form.
The humans flinched, turning to stare at him with disbelief. Dav tilted his head in what might have been approval, or recognition. Nyder and Ravon seemed to stiffen with indignation in midair, but they did not turn round. Jack reached for the barrel and the second Doctor said "Nuh-uh!" and flexed his finger ostentatiously just above the trigger.
"You will not kill me, man who is not quite a Time Lord," Esselle droned. "But you could cripple me past the point of coherent sentience. I, or a part of me, would need to be brought back to Eternity to regenerate, which would take years, centuries even. But so long as the tiniest shard of me was returned to Eternity, I would survive and be reborn. And you would not know about any of it."
"And why not?" he challenged.
"Because if you pull that trigger, my husbands will drop this sphere in their rage, and leap on you to destroy you. The backwash of Davros' wrath will then kill everyone else here, except for you, who will be dying a far slower and more painful death. And the only reason that they do not turn and strike now is that if they did, their faces would turn you all to stone."
The sphere rippled, and suddenly silvered. Reflected in the walls of the sphere, they saw the wrath of Eternals, burning and blinding, turning the faces of Ravon and Nyder into creatures worse than devils: monsters in truth. Their eyes were pits to the bottom of fiery hells, and their features twisted with emotions too great to be expressed.
"So do not shoot me, Fred, if you want to live," she finished.
After a long pause, he took his finger from the trigger. Rose nearly ripped the gun from his hands, turning it over with shaking fingers and pulling the power pack out.
"Sarah Jane?" Esselle stared at her again, the warpstar's chain still draped across her hands. "You realise, this is a matchless opportunity for you, to have me in your debt. I have seen entire civilisations work for centuries just to try to catch the attention of an Eternal. A favour from us is worth - much."
"Luke - Luke is all right?" Sarah Jane asked again.
"He is, but he has eaten all the bananas in the house out of nervousness, and has started in on the prunes." She gave a faint smile. "He's going to regret that tomorrow, I imagine."
Sarah Jane gave half a laugh that was not quite a gasp. "Yes, take it. Please," she said, gesturing.
"How can you absorb-" Jack started to ask, and then stopped in absolute horror. Esselle had simply popped the warpstar into her mouth, and there was the unforgettable sharp crunch of the crystal breaking between her teeth.
She did not explode; instead she darkened, blackness streaking across her face and hands, clotting around her. Then she seemed to swell, and thicken, and fluoresce. Her uniform black as night, her face white as snow, and the only colour her glowing dark-brown eyes and her red insignia. She burned with darkness, her face lit with triumph, restored to herself.
Carefully, gently, she removed the chain from her mouth. She held it out to Sarah Jane; the glitter of the warpstar was gone from the crystal.
"Miss Smith," she said, in a voice that seemed to have the rumble of thunder in it, "I could put a little light in here, but I think it will be far more impressive just as it is. I owe you a very great favour. And if anyone asks you how close you were to the warpstar when it was released, you can say," she reached out with her other hand and brushed Sarah Jane's hair, "this close."
The chain was cool between Sarah Jane's fingers, and she touched the warpstar casing with one finger, feeling it cold as ice.
"Right!" Esselle snapped herself into the air, hovering now behind Ravon and Nyder, one hand planted familiarly in the small of each of their backs. "What's our status?"
"He seems to be winding down," Nyder said tersely.
"Hull is in ribbons, though," Ravon noted. "The TARDIS is intact, but we'll have to hold in the atmosphere and build up a floor if these people are to get to it."
Rose leaned to one side and pressed her forehead to the side of the sphere looking down: she could see deck upon deck punctured below her, the shattered remains of Dalek casings and machines.
Esselle nodded. "Well, as soon as we're ready to go we should."
Nyder turned his face to her, his expression back to its normal mild deadliness. "Why? Davros will probably want to examine the ship, perhaps dissect several of the crew-"
"I had to do something with the residual energy from moving the planets - I couldn't absorb it, it's of this dimension. So it's going to be moving this rather pretty stellar formation back one second in time. Back to its proper place. And that would best be observed from a distance - a great distance."
"So, you are not of this dimension," Dav snarled. "Therefore, you do not know that I am not the true Davros! What if-"
"What if I say a certain fifty-five syllable word that will put that chair into permanent shutdown?"
"You would not dare!"
Esselle just looked at him. Mickey stepped closer, and pointed his gun at Dav's head; if the word wouldn't kill him, Mickey would.