Chapter 2: Living With The Enemy
The Daleks on the ship had returned to their posts. None of them questioned Clara. The possibility of another life form being inside one of their suits had never seemed to cross their minds.
She was left in the middle of the bridge, sat there. So they were taking her to report to the Dalek Supreme. She needed to risk finding more details. "Where is the Supreme… located?" She said. Direct, formal words, she remembered. No apostrophes or expletives.
"IN THE FLAGSHIP." Said one of the Daleks.
"And where is the flagship?"
"IN ORBIT. IT IS COMING ON SCREEN NOW."
On the screen, she saw the view of a Dalek ship at least ten times the diameter of the scout ship which had picked her up. "MANOUVER TOWARDS DOCKING PORT 5." The Daleks manoeuvred their ship towards a docking port on the top of the hull, touched down and clamped on.
"FOLLOW." One of the Daleks said to her.
She followed it into a lift, down into the ship, and then through endless lengths of bare metal corridors. Clara's heart was beating fast. Every inch deeper into the ship would make it harder to escape should the Daleks not believe her story.
Finally, they found their way to the bridge. On a console in the centre of the room, stood the Dalek supreme. Decked out in its red armour. Identical to the one she'd seen down on Scaro.
"WHAT IS THE STATUS OF DAVAROS'S DALEK-TIMELORD HYBRID EXPERIMENTS?" Said the Supreme.
That was helpful. Now she knew a bit more about what had been going on down there.
"CITY FOUND DESTROYED ON ARRIVAL." Said the Dalek that had brought her. "WE FOUND ONLY ONE SURVIVOR."
"REPORT." The Supreme said to her.
"Well…" Clara told them the story, as best she could, starting from the moment Colony Sarb had captured the Doctor in the middle ages. She made sure to tell it all from the Dalek's point of view. Any key moments she hadn't been present for, she made intelligent guesses at. It wasn't as though they could check. She also ended her part in it at the moment the Daleks had tried to disintegrate her. She told them they'd succeeded. She made sure to let them know Missy had survived though. Maybe the Daleks would hunt her down and do a string of nasty things to her.
"WHAT OF THE DOCTOR?" Said the Supreme.
"His TARDIS was destroyed." Said Clara. "He is presumed dead in the city."
"THE EXPERIMENT WAS A FALIURE. BUT IS HAD RID US OF THE DOCTOR." Said the Supreme. "SCARO 14 WILL BE ABANDONED. THE FLEET WILL RETURN TO THE OUTPOST ON THE BORDER WITH THE GALACTIC FEDERATION." It turned to the Dalek that had brought her. "YOU WILL RETURN TO THE SCOUT SHIP." It then turned to Clara. "YOU WILL REMAIN HERE."
"I OBEY." Said the other Dalek. Clara quickly repeated it.
The Supreme took a look at the console before it, then turned to her once more. "ENGINE 4 HAS DEVELOPED A FAULT. LOCATE AND CORRECT."
Clara was briefly stumped. How was she supposed to do that? She'd never seen a Dalek engine, nor did she have any idea where to find it. Or even how to turn a screw with this sucker arm.
Before she could think of a way a Dalek might express these problems, however, she felt a sudden pressure in her head, emanating from the probes. For a horrible moment, she thought they were burrowing in deeper, but then the pressure went and she realised what had actually happened. The Daleks had uploaded all the information she'd need to fix the engine straight into her head, along with a route she was to take to get there.
Realising they were waiting for a response from her, she said, "I obey."
Down in the engine room, she found a group of beings from various lifeforms stood to attention. These, the data cluster had informed her, were robomen. Creatures the Daleks had captured from various worlds and suppressed their minds so deeply that they would follow every command given as though operating under remote control. Even if they broke free, the shock would kill them. With the Daleks' lack of opposable thumbs, these were the being who did most of the fiddly jobs around the ship.
This was also what they would turn her into if they ever found her outside her suit. And they would find her. On her journey down, she'd had a chance to look around and seen security cameras on every square inch of the place. If there were blind spots, they would take a lot longer to find.
For now, she had to keep playing the part. That meant getting this engine fixed. She began issuing orders to the robomen. "You two. Remove the cover. You three, place the micromeson scanner on that mark there…" Once they'd all been assigned tasks, she noticed one was left standing there. She didn't need him for anything, so she asked him a few questions. "Do you remember your name?"
"I… do not." Said the roboman.
She thought for a moment. "This is not an order, but, hypothetically, if I were to ask you to disconnect me from this casing, would you?"
"I would not understand how." He said. The Daleks had wiped any knowledge of their internal workings from their heads, least one of them go mad and use it against them.
"Excellent. You've passed the test." Said Clara, now knowing that was another potential solution she'd need to discount.
After a lot of tinkering, they found the fault. One of the extreno particle feeds had become misaligned. Back on Earth, it would have taken a whole lifetime for her to work out what extreno particles were. Here, she understood it perfectly. With the fault found, she directed the robomen to realign it and reassemble the machinery. She thought about saying something like "Well done team." But decided against it. The robomen wouldn't understand and the Daleks might overhear. Instead, she went to a console, as her route map had instructed her to do upon completion, placed her sucker arm on a control bump and interfaced with the communication system to bring up a video feed of the bridge.
"Engine fault identified." She said, and described it to them briefly.
"GOOD." Came the reply.
Clara now felt a sucking sensation from the probes and found that all the information she'd been supplied with had gone, minus a few residual memories. She doubted she'd be able to even spell extreno particles now.
Seconds later, the Dalek supreme issued her with new orders. "THE ROBOMEN NEED FEEDING."
She felt another pushing sensation as they supplied the information about how to do it. This time she felt something she hadn't been aware of in the shock of the last jolt. In the brief time that it took to upload, she was briefly connected to the Daleks' hive mind. And she could hear all of them screaming. It ended the moment the upload was complete but it was a jolt to the senses.
Fortunately, Clara's previous experiences with mind-altering aliens had led her to take steps to combat unwanted intrusions. "I'm Clara Oswald." She thought. "My first pet was called Pixie. I like baking." This had the desired effect and the screaming sound was gone.
"I obey." She said, and went towards the hall, where the robomen would be served tasteless nutri blocks. Once more, she knew how to do that task, and only that task. She supposed every Dalek must, at any given time, understand only what it needs to to fulfil its orders. Once they're done, it was all extracted and replaced with new orders.
Worried that it might extract other things from her, she recited every poem she had time to in her head. That was a relief. The data cluster had only taken what it had put in.
The fear of the Daleks exterminating her on arrival was gone. But now she faced a potentially worse prospect. Becoming lost in the Daleks' war machine, doomed to carry out their tasks forever.
Few lifeforms had ever experienced what Clara soon found herself caught up in. Namely, what the Daleks did when they weren't invading worlds.
The simple answer was that they ensured they were always at the ready to invade worlds. A good chunk of the tasks she was assigned were simply checking machinery, looking for faults. Even if it had been checked only 1000 rels ago, they wanted to make sure.
The ship was huge, but contained a lot of empty space. She found there were only 32 Daleks on the ship, herself not included. This was all that was really needed since almost all the systems were automated, or handled by robomen. The Daleks were only there to issue orders and occasionally do the heavy lifting. Often literally. Clara found she could lift 6 tonnes with her sucker arm. And 32 Daleks were more than capable of handling these tasks since they never had to stop to rest or eat or sleep. They were each working round the clock.
Alongside inspections, maintenance and upgrades, she would also be assigned to work on research projects. Sometimes, these involved upgrading their engines, armour or life support. But mostly, they were searching for better weapons and tactics. Better ways to kill things. Strangely, being assigned here was a relief to her as it meant she could just pretend to work for a while and report failure. For a few hours, she wasn't helping the Daleks.
On other times, she'd be assigned to the war room. With the fleet kept in reserve, the only purpose this served was to monitor events. The Daleks had the capability to observe the movements of every ship in their empire, as well as a few hundred light years into their neighbours.
She only understood the full extent of the strategic situation when she was working there. But she made a special effort to retain the gist of it in her own memory, in the hope that it might reveal a way out at some point. The Daleks were at war with everyone around them. That was the way it had always been. But even they knew that they couldn't take on the whole universe at once. Instead, they would only launch a full invasion at one at a time. At the moment, they were at war with a race called the Morvellans.
The border with the Galactic Federation, which this fleet was patrolling, was relatively inactive. The Daleks were on the defensive to conserve resources. The two sides would raid each other, but the only time they'd launch a full attack was if the federation were preparing an attack on them, or if the Daleks needed something.
Clara hated doing work for the Daleks. But at least it kept her occupied. The guide she'd read into psychological torture had said that it was important to keep the mind busy. As well as focusing on the tasks, she recited every song she knew in her head. She created ranking systems for every planet she'd ever been on and she made plans for what she was going to do when she got out of there. And how badly she was going to kill Missy. She also ran her hands over any part of her body she could reach, just to reassure herself she wasn't a Dalek dreaming of being human.
It would have helped if these was some form of entertainment she could distract herself with, but that was asking a bit much of the Daleks. Even the basic idea of conversation was lost on them Not that she'd tried, but she'd never seen any of them conversing either.
The closest thing they had was a designated viewing room, where they would gather occasionally to watch footage of Daleks being destroyed right across the universe. For them, it was educational. A means to determine what that Dalek had done wrong so they could avoid the same mistake. For Clara though, it was very satisfying to watch Daleks being destroyed. It reminded her they weren't infallible.
She'd found out a few useful things with her time here. For instance, she'd strayed off her assigned schedule a few times and found that they weren't keeping too close a tab on whether she followed orders to the letter, as long as the job was done. The idea that a Dalek could ignore orders was too unbelievable to them.
Another useful fact was that they paid no attention to which Dalek was which, minus the Dalek Supreme. This caused them to discount any slip up she made as an isolated incident. No matter how many times she made them. It also meant that any Dalek could issue orders to another Dalek. Twice, she'd successfully ordered Daleks to assist her and they'd obeyed without question. Though she knew they'd never obey her if she ordered them to do something against their nature.
None of this would do her any good without an avenue of escape, and an ally who could remove these probes from her head.
She wasn't sure how long she'd been there. Besides a few specialised units for multidimensional time, the only unit of time available to her was the rel. This was all they needed, since minutes and hours are all subjective and keeping everyting to a single unit simplified calculations. The problem was, the chronometer measured the number that had passed since the Daleks' creation and it was a long number. The absence of sleep or a day/night cycle only made it worse.
Nonetheless, she'd kept track of time by remembering roughly what the last few digits had been at various points and calculating in her head, assuming rels and seconds were roughly the same thing. She therefore believed it had been roughly two weeks.
Today, she'd been assigned to upgrade a device known as a planetary engine. When the Daleks forced a surrender from a world, they would often use forced labour to dig a mine most of the way through the planet's crust. If, in the intervening time, the locals had shown total submission, they would be allowed to live as slaves. If there was too much resistance, the Daleks would knock out the planet's core and replace it with an engine. Thus wiping out life on the planet and allowing the Daleks to move the planet to their salvage yards, where every natural resource would be stripped, without the need to cart them across their empire.
Living with the enemy was supposed to make you realise that they were not as terrible as you'd imagined. The Daleks were the exception which proved the rule. Every rel she spent around them made her more sick at the sight of them.
She wondered once more if she could make a "mistake." But she knew she couldn't. They checked everything so regularly that they'd find it and trace the problem back to her. It was one thing to take an incorrect turning. Deliberate sabotage would not go unnoticed. They'd kill her, and fix the mistake anyway.
Little did Clara know that an opportunity was about to present itself. "ALL DALEKS TO THE WAR ROOM." Came over the tannoy, along with a map of how to get there injected into her head. It was never enough for them just to give her a map of the ship. She had to follow specific routes every time, to avoid colliding with another Dalek. It also meant she had to perform her mental exercises every time they sent her somewhere
In the war room, the Daleks were gathering in ranks. Clara manoeuvred herself into her assigned spot.
"A SPARKIAN PASSENGER LINER HAS STRAYED CLOSE TO OUR BORDERS." The Supreme said. "THE FEDERATION FLEET IS TOO FAR AWAY TO ASSIST IT. WE ARE THE CLOSEST DALEK SHIP. WE WILL INTERCEPT AND EXTERMINATE!"
"EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!" The Daleks chanted., with Clara quickly joining in, tough feeling horrified. They were about to attack a passenger liner without a rel's thought.
But still, someone on that ship could be persuaded to help her. She could help them in return. It was a vague hope in both cases. But a hope nonetheless.
Author's Notes: A big thanks to everyone who's reviewed and followed so far. I have most of this story planned out and will be posting more before too much longer, though as usual suggestions are welcome.