DAY 6,574
In the Hornet's Nest
Mickey
It was a testament to their dedication to rescuing Matilda as quickly as possible that they were both actually willing to trust the Master. At the very last second, he began worrying that the information and the coordinates she had provided may be grossly inaccurate, may leave them stranded in the vacuum of space – behind the moon as intended – to instantly die with all the air sucked out of their bodies. He almost tried to escape from the vortex manipulator in Martha's hands as it dragged them painfully back through time-space, Missy smugly waving them goodbye with a grin plastered across her porcelain face.
"No, no – wait, wait, WAIT!" he panicked.
But it was too late.
They dematerialised and then promptly arrived, feeling winded and a little bit seasick, in the shiny, bronze-coloured corridor of what was quite clearly a Dalek ship. It had those impeccably buffed floors and oddly organic-looking, curved walls. Plus, they had appeared directly behind a pair of slow-moving Daleks, that was the biggest giveaway. Their eyes widened as they tried not to make a sound to alert the Daleks to their presence; it took all of Mickey's willpower not to swear or accidentally fire the stupid Desert Eagle he was still carrying.
Horrified, Mickey and Martha tried to hurry away, looking for any possible outlet to get away from the creatures. As luck would have it there was a door nearby, just as one of the Daleks yelled at the top of its screechy voice modulator, "DID YOU HEAR SOMETHING!?" to its companion. The issue was the door was only accessible by Daleks, it had one of those spherical interfaces next to it meant to be interacted with via a plunger. It took Mickey that long to remember that for nearly twenty years he had been a technopath.
Placing his palm across the sphere the door opened in an instant, he and Martha ducking inside and into cramped darkness just as the Daleks rotated their heads enough to see a completely empty corridor.
"YOU ARE HEARING THINGS AGAIN," said the second Dalek as Mickey and Martha prayed that they didn't come to investigate. Mickey could probably prevent them from opening the door, but wouldn't put it past them to use one of their supposed deadly weapons to blow the door to pieces and kill them in the process. "YOU SHOULD GET YOUR EARS CHECKED."
"I DO NOT HEAR THINGS."
"IN WHICH CASE YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY GET YOUR EARS CHECKED."
"Sounds like if someone put Sally Sparrow into a Dalek," Martha whispered.
"They can be snarky when they want to be," Mickey muttered back.
"I HAVE SPENT TOO MUCH TIME LISTENING TO THE CHILD COMPLAINING," the first Dalek whined. It was very hard to distinguish which one of them was talking at a given moment.
"IT IS NOT OUR JOB TO LISTEN, WE ARE NOT THE NANNY," the second explained. The voices were getting quieter and quieter as they moved further away and out of earshot.
"IT SPEAKS IN TONGUES. WHAT IS A NOOT-ILLER?"
"Nutella," Mickey and Martha said together; their daughter's favourite food. Of course she would be asking for Nutella, even if she was stranded in outer space.
"NOT IMPORTANT."
"IT SHOULD BE EXTERMINATED."
"THE CHILD MUST BE ALIVE FOR THE HARVEST," the second Dalek finished. Sound was cut off from them completely after that; they must have passed through another door. Or maybe just shut up – though they could be obnoxiously talkative sometimes. Not unlike Sally Sparrow.
"How convenient of them to come past and provide us with all that exposition," Mickey quipped.
"Be quiet. What do you think they mean – 'harvest'?"
"Maybe… they've been growing some plants?"
"Growing some plants?"
"Missy said they were crazy, so maybe instead of world domination they're… gardeners."
"You think our daughter has been kidnapped by farmer Daleks?"
"Well, no, that sounds stupid, when you say it like that. Where are we, anyway?" It was pitch black and very small, he could see nothing. "A storage cupboard? Why are there always storage cupboards everywhere just when you need to hide from somebody? What could Daleks possibly be storing?"
"Seeds, for all their crops, probably."
"Yeah, alright, I was just… hoping for the best. Seriously, though." Martha made a noise of annoyance and moved in the dark, then heat and light wrapped itself around the room as she had summoned another fireball in her hand, alarmingly close to Mickey's head. He had to duck out of the way of it.
It certainly was storage, though; the high shelves and the walls lined with bronze orbs.
"These are the, uh…" he began.
"The…?" she prompted.
"The, you know. The eggs."
"The eggs?"
"The Dalek eggs."
"The Dalek eggs?"
"Rory calls them eggs. Those round things. They're all covered in them." Martha reached to pick one up. "I think they're explosive." She thought better of picking it up and retracted her fiery hand.
"Well, anyway, whatever this 'harvest' is, it's obviously not happened yet, which means we've still got time to…" Martha couldn't bear to finish her sentence and suggest that something bad might happen to Matilda. She was right though, Mattie must be safe – the question was for how long? "Look, we need a plan, okay? Neither of us are equipped to fight any Daleks, they're impervious to everything."
"Except massive guns," said Mickey.
"But we haven't got a massive gun; that pistol might be able to kill a human stone-dead, but those things are bulletproof," Martha said.
"Yes, but Missy said they're obsessed with war machines and advanced weaponry," he said, "Surely the Daleks have stuff here that can kill a Dalek? We just have to find their armoury."
"Not sure that, out of the entire ship of heavily-armed Daleks, the room with even more weapons it quite the best place to go."
"We just need to get one big weapon and then they're at our mercy," Mickey said.
"Yeah, unless we're in a situation where we're grossly outnumbered – oh wait, we are."
"Might not be. Maybe those two were the only Daleks here?" She glared at him. "Alright, it's unlikely, I'll admit, but you always have to hope for the best."
"And expect the worst. So, what do we do if we manage to find this alleged armoury and then there's a hundred Daleks in there all with their exterminators pointed at us?"
"Blag it."
"Blag it? A hundred armed, psychotic, alien mutants and you want to blag it?"
"It usually works for the Doctor," he shrugged, "We've got superpowers, a gun, and a teleporter; that's more than he's ever got. And the motivation of our daughter being in danger. I heard he once defeated the Daleks with a Jammie Dodger."
"Missy said these ones are angrier and more dangerous than normal ones, though," Martha whispered.
"Is it politically correct to say 'normal' Daleks? If they're mutated, isn't that a bit offensive?"
"Excuse me?"
"Like, ableist?"
"To the Daleks!?" Mickey didn't say anything more. "You're ridiculous. I'm leaving. If they try anything, I'll blow them up. They should know better than to mess with a mother looking for her missing child." Mickey touched the plunger-panel in order to re-open the door, revealing the now-empty corridor. Martha beckoned over her shoulder for him to follow her in the direction the pair of Daleks had come from earlier.
"Maybe we should ask somebody else for help?" Mickey hissed, beginning to panic in the face of the unsurmountable odds of the two of them versus an entire battalion of Daleks. "Strength in numbers, and all that."
"She's our daughter. Having all those numbers earlier didn't help her."
"But if that Master told us the complete truth and she's right about them stopping time, what could anyone have done?"
"Thirteen could've answered the bloody phone, for starters – given us some warning. Could have just gone and dealt with the Daleks before they resorted to kidnapping a defenceless child. Mickey, we have saved the world from alien threats just as many times as the rest of them. Twenty years of being a house-husband has made you forget that we are formidable. We're so formidable that both the Shadow and Missy said that taking Mattie wasn't worth it to have us come after them. Not Rose, not the Doctors, not Clara – the two of us. We can take a measly couple of Daleks, alright?"
"You'd better hope so…"
But it wasn't a 'measly couple of Daleks.' Not by a long-shot.
Once they came up against another door he only had to touch it to trick it into opening, which revealed the full might of the Dalek fleet hidden behind the moon. The room was enormous, a cavern in outer space, overflowing with floating platforms and layers of hovering, busy soldiers. The one thing it certainly was, however, was an armoury. Huge cannons, robots, guns – a goldmine of things they could use to get their daughter back.
"Over here," he took Martha's hand and led her towards a rack full of what were definitely firearms of some kind. They hid behind it, luckily unobserved by the many Daleks. It wasn't so hard to stay out of their sight though, they did all only have the one eye each and it was rather lacking in peripheral vision. Plus, everything they saw was blue. "Look at these, big guns." He lifted one off the rack and examined it.
"What is it?"
"Particle gun," he said, "Saw one of these at Torchwood. Torchwood One. God, that was a long time ago… You remember when they tried to destroy the entire universe with a reality bomb?"
"Do I remember how I met my husband, do you mean?"
He smirked, "Yeah, that. Anyway, this works like one of those, on a much smaller scale. It'll obliterate them with one shot, just wipe them out, vaporised. Eats through forcefields, too."
"Great. You've got one of those, I've got my pyrokinesis." The particle guns were huge, nearly three feet long.
"Problem is they'd only take one at a time. There must be a thousand in this room alone. We shoot one and the rest will get us before we can do any damage."
"At least we've got a last resort if we get cornered. I hope Matilda doesn't see us with guns, I don't want to set a bad example…"
"I think saving her life first is a bit more important," he said, crouching down and holding onto the enormous particle gun. "Alright, they said it was the nanny's job to look after 'the child,' so they're keeping her somewhere else – so we should try and get a map. Do you see a computer console around here anywhere?" With Daleks buzzing all around them it was difficult to see what else was in the chamber.
"Shit, no, I can't," she said, "But – hold on. Look at that." She pointed something out, something sitting on the floor nearly a hundred feet away. It looked like a regular Dalek, only with a body twice as big and even more formidable. It had six enormous, metal legs protruding from its body. It did not move, and its eyestalk hung low and dark, no light within. Other Daleks convened around it, some of them floating and others on the floor beneath its tall legs. Mickey could see the lights on top of these Daleks flashing as they talked, but they were too far away to be heard properly amidst the noise of the thousand other shouting Daleks in the chamber. "It looks like something out of War of the Worlds."
"I've got an idea," he announced, taking his mobile out of his pocket. He dialled simply the number '1' and then clutched the phone as it rang tightly in his hand, until he could divert the signal and intercept the Dalek comes with it. Martha couldn't hear the screeching of the entire Dalek ship which rang in his ears, but it was his job now to find the correct channel. It gave him a headache to fight through so much angry, robotic static, but finally (by pointing the phone in the direction of the many-legged Dalek monster) he cut through and heard only a few select voices.
"THE EXTERIOR IS COMPLETE, PREPARE FOR GENETIC IMPLANTATION."
"SUITABLE GENETIC MATERIALS WILL BE MATURED IN FIVE-HUNDRED RELS."
"It's empty, that thing up there," Mickey explained to Martha, "I think it's a mech. They haven't put the actual, Dalek alien inside of it yet." It was a one-way channel, so the Daleks couldn't hear him talking inside their heads.
"Oh yeah?"
"They said it needs 'suitable genetic materials' but it's going to take 'five-hundred rels.'" As he talked, the front panels of the mech split open, revealing the empty casing inside, all ready for the genetic implant it was shortly going to receive.
"Five-hundred rels is about ten minutes, I think," she said, "Ten minutes until that big, dangerous spider-mech full of weapons isn't empty anymore. And it really is quite big, you know."
"Mmm. Big enough for two, do you think, Dr Jones?"
"Mr Smith, you read my mind. Now, there's at least a hundred Daleks that could turn on us between here and there-"
"We need a distraction," Mickey decided, "You should blow something up on the other side of the room, keep them occupied. It must be full of explosives here. Make the right thing go bang and they'll all have to go and work out whether something malfunctioned." He put the phone back to his ear and began messing with which Dalek comms he was tapping into, trying to find an appropriate target for Martha since it was so tricky to actually see what anything was in that gigantic, overpopulated room. "That side of the room they're keeping fuel canisters. Flammable, but not flammable enough to blow a hole in the ship and kill everything."
"Yeah, I think I see them," said Martha, indicating some bronze cylinders with digital readouts – though the readouts themselves were illegible from such a distance. Especially now that Mickey suspected his eyesight was failing him in his old age.
Martha squinted and focused intently on the canisters far away from them. He usually told her she looked constipated when she actually tried to detonate anything; usually she only did it accidentally and had never had much time to practice at making things psychically combust. This time, however, her dedication to Matilda was lording itself over her chaotic superpower, and he instinctively ducked when the explosion of the canisters rocked the room.
"WHAT WAS THAT?"
"WHAT WAS THAT?"
"WHAT WAS THAT?"
A thousand voices rang out in unison, all of them turning to the source of the flames, many beginning to move in that direction and abandoning their posts.
"Go, go!" Mickey hissed. They made a break for it. They fled from the cover of the rack of particle cannons straight for the gigantic, empty mech. They would only have a few seconds to try and make it inside before the other Daleks began to swarm and attack them, but luckily for them the Daleks weren't even aware that they had a security breach. Too arrogant to think that anybody would be able to find them, probably – let alone a pair of insignificant human parents looking for their kidnapped child.
But it was taller than it looked from a distance when they finally drew close, right behind the hoard of Daleks flocking towards the explosion. Martha made a motion which he recognised as meaning she wanted him to give her a boost. Slinging the particle gun over his back he crouched down so that she could step onto his shoulders, a manoeuvre they hadn't needed to do for a long time.
"HUMANS!" The nearest Dalek screamed, finally blowing their cover.
"Shit!" Mickey exclaimed. He almost threw Martha upwards towards the mech, but she managed to grab onto its hull while he immediately ducked out of the green blast of the metal exterminator. Martha struggled to scramble inside while he rolled across the floor to dodge another blast that came straight after, the Dalek repositioning itself. He primed the particle cannon, but when he tried to fire it jammed.
"EXTERMINATE!" Quite honestly, faced with that many Daleks, Mickey thought it might be the end of him. Then the Dalek itself exploded, its top half ripped to pieces. He turned his back to it to shield himself from some of the shrapnel, realising that Martha had just saved his life after finally managing to get into the central capsule of the six-legged mech. The bottom half lay smoking, full of metal and the goop of the organic Dalek within.
"Get in here!" she shouted. He tossed her the particle gun and then climbed on top of the wrecked Dalek – the only way he could think of to gain the necessary height to make it into the mech with Martha. He leapt the short distance and grabbed onto the metal carcass, Martha holding onto his arms to keep him from slipping.
"EXTERMINATE!"
"EXTERMINATE!"
"EXTERMINATE!" Rang the Daleks around them. Green energy blasts whooshed past his flailing legs as Martha helped pull him in. He landed on top of her finally, his legs inside.
"How do we shut the door!?"
"Uh – here!" He managed to get onto his knees, elbowing her a few times in the process, and put his hand against the controls the Dalek embryo was supposed to be wired into. The doors closed themselves and they were plunged into hot, cramped darkness.
"Well," said Martha from somewhere right next to his head. He could feel her against him as he tried to work out how to use the controls with his technopathy. "This is intimate, isn't it?"
"It's enough to make me fancy you."
"You're very easy then, aren't you?" she quipped.
"Hey!" She laughed slightly, once.
"Come on, get the thing working."
"I'm trying." Finally, a blue screen lit up brightly in front of him; the visual feed from the eyestalk. With it, the comms also activated, allowing them to hear the conversations of the Daleks outside which had been mostly blocked out as the shell of the mech had closed on them.
"WE CANNOT ATTACK THE PROTOTYPE."
"THEY WILL HAVE TO LEAVE EVENTUALLY; A HUMAN COULD NOT PILOT THE MACHINE."
"IT IS NOT WORTH DAMAGING IT." Then they began talking about tracing the route of their security breach.
"That's good then, if this is the only one of these mechs," Martha whispered, "We've got a massive advantage."
"Yeah, they want to smoke us out."
"You can pilot it, right?"
"I… hope so?" he said uncertainly. He usually only used his talents to get rid of viruses from the computer or fix the smart fridge when it started acting up. Not for piloting gigantic, alien war-machines. "Uh-oh, here we go." The machine rocked as he finally got it to activate, standing up on its tall, long legs, whipping the Daleks into a frenzy. A few of them began to shoot at it, but the Daleks' own forcefield was more than a match for the exterminators. He supposed that was to stop friendly fire from being an issue in warfare, but it worked tremendously to their advantage.
Mickey kept both his hands firmly on the control panels on either side, having to communicate entirely telepathically with the ship to get it to obey him. He glanced at Martha by his side, bathed in the blue light of the camera feed.
"I reckon you'd better hold on tight."