(My tales treat the BBC TV series as the only canonical Doctor Who, ignoring whatever later depictions of these characters there may have been in other media - which I won't have read, anyway.)
- 1 -
The TARDIS hung in space at the Lagrange point between the planet Maxima-2 and its moon, well away from any shipping lanes. The Doctor had left Nyssa and Tegan down on the planet with enough credits to keep them busy in its many shops and bazaars while he carried out some necessary maintenance. He didn't expect anything to go wrong, but given the nature of that maintenance it seemed prudent to perform it by himself at some distance from Maxima-2, just in case. Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' was playing and as he worked the Doctor was musing on the riot that had accompanied its Paris premiere in May 1913 and his own part in those events, when the proximity alarm sounded. Pulling himself out from under hexagonal central control console, he activated the monitor.
"An escape pod!" he said. It was not a type he'd seen before but the basic form was familiar. Short hop escape pods were life rafts built on the basis of rescue coming quickly. Long haul pods were designed to keep its occupant alive for months, if not years. Since they couldn't carry enough food, air and water to sustain someone over that period, the passenger was put into cryosleep. This was clearly one of the latter type.
According to the console readings, it would drift by about a hundred away - virtually a collision in cosmic terms. Coming to a decision the Doctor moved the TARDIS into its path, matched velocities, then slowed slightly and opened the doors, allowing it to drift inside. Closing the doors as it settled onto the floor, the Doctor stood back and watched the steam rising from it as the thin coating of ice the pod had acquired in the frigid expanses of space quickly melted away.
When it was safe to do so, he ran his sonic screwdriver over the surface of the pod, activating the internal mechanisms that unsealed it. As it opened there was more steam, and its passenger was revealed as what appeared to be a young female. Humanoid, very pale-skinned, and with long silver hair, she had elfin features, pointed ears, and was dressed in a long diaphanous white robe the line of which was barely disturbed by her small, high breasts. The Doctor frowned, not recognizing her species. It would take a while for her to emerge from the stasis of cryosleep, so he...
Her eyes suddenly snapped open and in one fluid movement she somehow slithered out of the pod and into the air, floating near the ceiling on butterfly wings. She now had rows of protective spikes running along her forearms. Also she was bright red.
"Who...where...?" she said in a high, sweet voice, clearly disoriented.
"I'm the Doctor and this is my ship, the TARDIS," came the calm reply. "I corralled your escape pod when it drifted by."
"How long...?"
"According to the pod's instruments five of whatever years you set it to - those of your home planet, I imagine."
"A relief!" she replied. "We're extremely long-lived so five years is nothing."
"You can come down, you know," said the Doctor. "I have no intention of harming you."
She did as he asked while still keeping her distance, the wings and spikes being absorbed into her body and her skin tone returning to normal. Her every movement was delicate, almost ethereal.
"Lady Myrrhen Alynnhor," she said, bowing gracefully. "I thank you for rescuing me and apologise for my caution, an inevitable response when you've been hunted as long as I have."
"I don't recognise your species."
"I'm Synaloian, the last Synaloian. Are you alone on this... TARDIS?"
"I'm travelling with two companions, though at the moment they're visiting the planet below."
"Others of your species?"
"No, I'm Gallifreyan and they're both human."
"'Human'? So from the planet Huma?"
"No from a planet called Earth," chuckled the Doctor. "Others sometimes refer to them as Earthlings, but Human is what they call their species. Those were some impressive metamorphic abilities you demonstrated."
"Our joy and our curse. May I?"
She reached out a hand, and the Doctor nodded. Laying it gently on his forehead she frowned for a moment and then transformed, morphing into a copy of the Doctor. Not the Doctor as he was now but as he had been before this regeneration, complete with long coat and longer scarf.
- 2 -
The Doctor was rarely lost for words, but this time he was.
"That's odd," said Lady Myrrhen in her usual sweet voice, frowning down at herself. "I read your aura and should have become your twin, so who is this?"
"Me as I used to be," said the Doctor. "This is very disconcerting, could you...?"
"Oh, of course."
And just like that she was herself again.
"Your clothes transformed too. That's very impressive."
"Mine were a people who lived for poetry, music, and the arts, but we were gifted scientists too. Coming up with a material that could change when we did was one of our greatest achievements."
"You refer to your people in the past tense and yourself as the last of them. May I ask what happened?"
"I happened. It was my actions that led to the downfall of my people. I curse the day we answered that distress call."
She paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts.
"I was captain of the spaceship 'The Poet's Passion' and we were returning home with many new plant species after a successful mission of exploration when we received it, a call from a planet recently ravaged by war and now largely uninhabitable. There were survivors of that war, and they were begging for rescue by anyone who heard their call. We had never had contact with an alien race before but were a civilised people, so of course we responded. However, no sooner had we landed than they rushed aboard 'The Poet's Passion', overpowering the crew and seizing the craft. Learning its location from our astrogation charts they then set off for our homeworld. During that journey they experimented on several crew members. They seemed fascinated by our metamorphic ability and determined to isolate it from our genome. We would learn why later."
She paused again, the memories painful, and the Doctor waited patiently until she was able to continue.
"We had always known that the rays used to propel our spacecraft could also be used as a weapon but being pacifists had never used them that way. Not so our captors. They raked my homeworld with them from orbit, killing millions and ending our civilisation. Surviving Synaloians were herded into camps where the experiments continued until our captors had found what they considered the perfect form for a slave race and how to lock us into that form, our intellects subdued and now thoroughly subservient to them. When I said I was the last of my people I meant it. Hundreds of thousands survived the assault on our world, but I am the only still unmutilated Synaloian left anywhere. Even my beloved wife Lady Anyssha Aclynnhor, my soulmate since our boyhood days, has undergone that vile process. I'd no longer recognize her, nor she me. Over the years, while on the run, I learned more about our tormentors and how they hadn't even known there was life on planets other than their own until visited by another alien, one caught on a security recording preparing to destroy them, only to lose his nerve at the last moment."
The Doctor felt a sinking feeling in his stomach.
"The aliens you rescued from their ravaged planet," he said, "do they have a name?"
"They call themselves Daleks."
- 3 -
"And the alien who visited them, what do you know of him?" asked the Doctor, his mouth dry.
"Only that it is he who is ultimately responsible for everything, including the genetic rape of my people. He made the wrong decision in not destroying the Daleks at birth, and the universe may never forgive him; I know I won't."
"But to commit such an act of genocide...?"
"Would have been the right thing to do in this instance. Take it from the last survivor of a race of pacifists, Doctor - the Daleks are a disease. Destroying them was the right thing to do and, if the alien had any inkling of what they would become, the only moral decision. He compounded his sin by alerting them to the fact that intelligent life could be found on other worlds. If not for that revelation the Daleks would have been confined to the planet of their birth and so no threat to others. Instead, knowing the resources of their own world were exhausted and that even if this were not the case they lacked the technical knowledge required to build spacecraft, they began broadcasting a distress signal, one they knew would eventually bring them what they needed. I lay the blame at the feet of their alien visitor for everything the Daleks have done since. I wish I had seen that security recording so I could put a face to the being who spared them to bring death and destuction to billions. Before the Daleks hate was not an emotion Synaloians felt, Doctor, but I hate him with every fibre of my being."
The force of her feeling was so strong that the Doctor staggered backwards in the face of it. Lady Myrrhen was immediately solicitous.
"Oh I'm so sorry, Doctor," she said. "The empathic ability that enables us to read another being's aura also means that those with any telepathic sensitivity feel it when we exhibit strong emotion."
"It..it's quite alright," he said, wiping his brow, "I was just caught by surprise. What...what will you do now?"
"If you would kindly drop me off when you retrieve your humans, I'll use my metamorphic ability to blend into the native population of the planet below. I'll then do my best to counter the many lies the Daleks tell, the fake history they created to hide the truth about my people and what they did to our world. It used to be paradise, you know, a whole planet devoted to peace and to the arts. The Daleks care nothing for poetry, art or beauty. They razed our graceful cities, felled our magnificent forests, and replaced them with monstrous factories that serviced their war machine, belching out fumes and chemical waste that befouled everything. They now portray our world as having always been a brutal, primitive place, and the form they imposed on those they made slaves us as we've always been. And having derived what they wanted from our genome they now use it as the basis for every transformation they force on others, our legacy to the universe."
"I...I don't know what to say," said the Doctor, "but it's almost time for me to pick up Nyssa and Tegan, so let's get down to the planet and drop you off."
Never had the Doctor been more eager to see someone leave the TARDIS.
After they landed and Lady Myrrhen Alynnhor was exiting, the Doctor wished her well.
"I'm so, so sorry about Synaloia," he said, "and I hope that you're one day able to make your peace with what happened to her."
"Synaloia?" she said, frowning. "No, as with your humans that was our name for ourselves, not the name of our world. Ours was the planet Ogrus, so some among us occasionally referred to themselves as Ogrons."
When Nyssa and Tegan returned they found the Doctor in a very subdued mood, as he would be for many days to come.
The End