The Spider in the Web

Alpha Rose blinked hard, squinting past her fingers at the blinding light flooding out from the contained Rift. As it slowly faded, gathering up and sinking into a point a few feet before her at waist height, she realized she was somehow within the Rift itself.

Shadowy figures beyond and around the congealing object swam slowly into view. When she could finally make them out, she gasped – a single sound, multiplied by six: five mirror images of herself, and one male figure. The six Roses and Jack looked wildly at each other for a moment as the light continued fading. Standing behind all but one of them were other shadowy figures, seemingly not quite in the same dimension, but watching with matching, uncomprehending astonishment. Alpha Rose recognized Joel standing behind Jack, then took in an unknown man and a priest behind two of her twins, and then, astounded again, recognized teenaged versions of their former captor, Paul Corvantes, behind two of the others! Glancing quickly behind herself, she could dimly see Jared there, seeming to shout her name, although no sound came through the fog that cut them off. Nor could she reach back through it to him; the fog instantly contracted before her hand, trapping her as surely as a force field. He was trapped outside the Rift boundary as surely as she was trapped within it.

"Ulva?" squeaked Reich Rose. "What's going on? Did you bring us here?"

Alpha Rose shook her head, drawing breath to deny it, but before she could speak a word she was cut off, by an impossibly deep, gravelly voice.

"THIS IS NOT HER DOING. THIS IS MY CREATION."

"I know that voice..." Alpha Rose gasped out, shaken and suddenly frozen to her core.

"So do I," Jack replied. His face was bone white. "The Dalek Emperor..."

"YOU ARE CORRECT. WELCOME TO MY WOLF TRAP, BAD WOLF."

The voice was emanating from the thing between them. To her complete lack of surprise, it had finally congealed into a roughly Dalek-shaped metallic form, about half the size of a full Dalek. And nowhere near big enough to produce that booming voice.

"No," she denied, shaking her head. "This can't be. The Dalek Emperor was destroyed. I ripped you atom from atom back at Platform Five."

The top of the pint-sized Dalek swiveled around, bringing the eye stalk she hadn't seen before to bear upon her; she realized he hadn't known which one was her until she spoke.

"YOU TRIED TO DESTROY ME. YOU ONLY PARTIALLY SUCCEEDED. AN EMERGENCY TEMPORAL TRANSPORT TOOK PART OF MY BODY OUT OF DANGER – NOT ALL BUT ENOUGH. ENOUGH TO BEGIN REBUILDING, BEGIN PLANNING MY REVENGE."

"You set this whole thing up, didn't you?" demanded Jack, bringing the eye stalk around to him again. "But how?"

The Emperor seemed willing to boast, like all stereotypical villains, wanting his victims to understand how he had beaten them before they died.

"LONG BEFORE YOU CAME TO DESTROY US, BAD WOLF, ANOTHER HUMAN STUMBLED INTO OUR MOTHER SHIP, BRINGING A MOST EXTRAORDINARY GIFT."

^..^

Right in mid-transit of his final jump, Corvantes' arm was nearly wrenched out of its socket, when something seemed to grab the time jumper on his wrist and yank it – and him – sideways. He came stumbling out of the transport flash and went sprawling on an oily metal floor. Coughing from the greasy smoke immediately assaulting his lungs, he shook his head and began to gather himself up, only to be stunned into silent immobility at the sight which met his eyes, materializing through the haze: a dozen rolling robots were surrounding him, clamoring with their metallic voices for him to explain his presence.

And then the smoke cleared further, revealing a monstrosity: a huge spider-like metal body housing a gigantic, disembodied brain. Corvantes could only think, *so this is hell*.

The voice of the abomination boomed through its speakers, the same flat metallic voice as the others, deepened to an impossibly low register.

"BRING THE HUMAN TO ME."

"Emperor, he wears a vortex manipulator, of Dalek origin. He did not come from the human satellite."

Corvantes was forced to his knees before the Emperor, too witless to speak.

"EXPLAIN THIS, HUMAN."

The jumper was pulling on his arm again, this time forcing it to rise up before him, as if it were responding to an irresistible magnetic force, pulling it towards the Emperor's casing.

"I..." he spluttered, trying desperately to think. "I don't understand..."

"SILENCE. YOUR WORDS ARE CLUMSY AND INEFFICIENT. I WILL TAKE THE INFORMATION DIRECTLY FROM YOUR MIND."

An articulated arm was extending from the Emperor's undercarriage, which ended in a frighteningly ordinary-looking plunger. Corvantes could only gape as it swung up to his level, made a minute adjustment, and then swiftly attached itself to his face.

His last free thought was to realize the he was only a very puny, insignificant little being, after all.

^..^

The Dalek Emperor, realizing that the human had come from almost two hundred thousand years in the past, discarded most of the primitive mewlings his memories revealed, keeping only the details that seemed to relate to his coming to this time. He filed them away deep in the recesses of his labyrinthine mind: the date the eight vortex manipulators were found and where; the existence of the parallel worlds connected by branches of the odd little rift in time and space there on the Earth's surface; and the face of the woman abducted from each parallel, who seemed to be the root cause of it all.

Then he forgot it, and went on with the task at hand: rebuilding his army of Daleks from the detritus of the human race being dribbled to his hidden spaceship from his puppet, the Controller installed to manage the games on the nearby human satellite.

Decades passed, and his plans – and his army – were nearing completion, when without warning, the ancient nemesis of the Daleks appeared: the Doctor. The Emperor paid no attention to the pink-and-yellow girl accompanying his enemy; the Doctor had always surrounded himself with these humans. He sampled her DNA automatically, as he had done with all the other thousands of human victims, then concentrated instead on rushing the final steps of his plan, sending out the fleet, and rushing to defeat the despised Time Lord.

Even when the girl reappeared, eyes glowing, and began her mystical mumbo-jumbo about being "The Bad Wolf", he brushed it aside, ignoring the tiny twinge of recognition the words and her face were stimulating. He never believed she was a credible threat, any more than he believed the Doctor would carry out his mad "defense" of the planet below – right up till the moment she raised her hand and sent a wave of atomic destruction inexorably through his fleet. And his ship. And then, even himself. He saw the edges of his monstrous metal body begin to fray, and frantically activated the emergency temporal transport circuits to escape. Even then, he left part of himself behind, floating through space near Planet Earth as disconnected atoms.

And once more, the Emperor began the long climb up from nothing, with only his own formidable wits to help him – wits and implacable vengeance. But now, he had a new target: the human girl calling herself Bad Wolf. Where and when had she come from.

And that's when the memories of the out-of-time human came bubbling to the surface, and he connected her face with that of his seven victims. Finally, he managed to drag up the girl's name: Rose Tyler.

Armed with the date, and the other details, he set about laying the ultimate Wolf Trap, as he named it to amuse himself. First he sent agents back through the Rift to each parallel, whose task it was to ensure that each woman named Rose came into contact with each version of the human male, Corvantes. (From their reports, he was amused to learn that one even switched infants, so that she unknowingly became his "mother".)

Then, once he had sufficient raw materials, he constructed the eight vortex manipulators, hiding several additions away inside each: a core of pure Dalekanium, a few of his own brain cells as the heart of the device's processor. And some very special instructions:

First, if the device found itself near his old hiding place by the satellite, it would bring its wearer to his ship; thus ensuring the return of that human male.

And second, when the device came within a certain distance from the rift, its secondary program would activate. It would sample the DNA of its wearer, and compare it to that of Rose Tyler (extracted from that automatic sample), and if it matched: send the signal back through the rift to its master, waiting patiently in the dark.

^..^

"AND NOW THEY HAVE CREATED THE FINAL TRAP, BRINGING YOU TO THIS POCKET OF SPACE I CREATED IN THE THE RIFT THAT BINDS YOUR PARALLEL WORLDS TOGETHER – AND WILL BE GROUND ZERO FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ALL YOUR PUNY PLANETS CALLED EARTH."

In the echoing silence after that pronouncement could be heard a single gasp from seven human throats. Alpha Rose rasped out, "What do you mean?"

"THE MANIPULATORS ARE NOW LOCKED IN SYNCHRONIZATION WITH THE BOMB YOU SEE BEFORE YOU. THE COUNTDOWN HAS BEGUN. IN THIRTY RELS, THE CORE WILL DETONATE, SPREADING OUT THROUGH THE RIFT TO CONSUME EACH PLANET EARTH WITHIN EACH PARALLEL WORLD. IT WILL FINALLY SEE THE DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN MENACE.

"AND MY REVENGE WILL BE COMPLETE. BAD WOLF WILL BE DESTROYED, JUST AS YOU DESTROYED MY ARMY, AND TRIED TO DESTROY ME. NOW NOTHING AND NO ONE WILL STAND AGAINST ME."

" 'Manipulators'?" breathed Swedish Rose into the stunned silence that followed. "What does he mean?"

"The time jumpers," Jack told her. "They came from him." Then, "Rose, look!" He raised his hand holding the Dalek's jumper, and Alpha Rose saw a thread of light had spun between the jumper and the Dalek bomb. Glancing around, each of the other jumpers also had its thread – and even as she looked, more threads were spinning out between them, attaching each jumper to each other one, until a spiderweb of light criss-crossed the heart of the Rift.

Alpha Rose shook her head. There was no time to explain everything to her innocent twins. Half of the thirty rels – thirty seconds – was already gone. She started to turn to look at Jared one last time – but then whipped back as the answer burst across her brain.

"The jumpers!" she shrieked. "Quick! Take them off! Punch in coordinates – any time, any place, it doesn't matter! Just random!" The others, bewildered and terrified, followed her instructions, even as she wildly punched the buttons on her own.

"YOU WILL NOT PREVENT MY REVENGE – " the Emperor was puffing, ignored by all.

"Now attach them to the bomb! Anywhere! When I say Go, send it off!"

"Brilliant!" Jack yelled, but nobody was paying attention, as each of them darted forward to wrap their jumper around any protruding bit of the bomb they could find.

Rose didn't wait – the countdown, she saw from the little display, was already at five – and speeding up! "Three, two, one, GO!"

At the same instant, the Dalek's countdown reached zero, starting the detonation... and seven fingers stabbed seven buttons, hoping against hope to send the bomb in seven different random directions through time and space – through the Void.