‘No, Davros,’ said the Doctor, ‘you tricked yourself.’
Minus ten.
‘Did you really think I’d let you have the Hand of Omega?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Do not do this, I beg of you.’
Minus nine.
‘Nothing can stop it now.’
‘Have pity on me.’
Minus eight.
‘I have pity for you,’ said the Doctor. ‘Goodbye, Davros, it hasn’t been pleasant.’
Minus seven.
The Doctor cut the connection. The main screen faded to black.
The Hand of Omega tore through the Eret-mensaiki Ska, ripping through armour and decks. All the energy it had collected from the supernova burst from it. The fusion heart that had driven the ship went critical.
The ship became a fireball which evaporated into space.
A small escape pod tumbled away, out of the Earth’s orbit.
Inside, a single lifeform, deformed and bitter, cursed as the temperature of the pod’s cabin fell towards zero.
Hate would keep him warm.
‘What happened?’ asked Rachel. The Doctor disconnected the cables and packed up the camera. Gilmore slowly let go of Rachel’s hand.
‘Oh,’ said the Doctor, ‘I programmed the Hand of Omega to fly into Skaro’s sun and turn it supernova.’
‘Super what?’ asked Gilmore.
‘He blew it up,’ said Allison.
‘The resulting feedback destroyed the mothership,’ said the Doctor. ‘The Hand of Omega is returning to Gallifrey.’
‘You planned this all along,’ said Rachel. ‘Right from the start, it was all a trap.’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor.
‘We won,’ said Gilmore. ‘It’s a victory.’
But the Doctor said nothing.
22
SATURDAY, 17:37
IT WAS BEGINNING to get dark by the time Ace reached Ashton Road. She jogged along the terrace looking into windows. A sign caught her eye. It read: ‘NO BLACKS OR DOGS’. She found Mike’s house. There were no lights in the windows.
Ace took the key from her pocket and turned the lock. There was no sound from the other side. She pushed open the door and stepped inside. Ace froze in the hallway, listening. The living room door was ajar. There was no noise.
I’d be a real wally to walk in there, she thought.
Ace took a deep breath and entered. The time controller was on the mantelpiece among Mrs Smith’s knick-knacks.
‘Hallo, Ace,’ said Mike.
Ace turned slowly. Mike slowly closed the door. He was pointing a gun at her. Light from the streetlamp outside fell on him. Half his face was in shadow.
‘Would you really shoot me?’ asked Ace.
‘If I had to,’ said Mike.
‘You might have to,’ said Ace.
The girl walked down Ashton Road. This close, she could feel the radiated signature of the time controller. It was in the habitation that the female target had just entered. There was a seventy-six per cent probability that the male target was with her.
A chilly breeze blew down the street.
The girl concentrated and sent her mind out to the Dalek Supreme.
The message struck the Dalek Supreme with unexpected force. Time controller located, reported the girl. The Dalek suddenly felt cold; its life support heating units stepped up.
Eliminate male and female targets and recover the time controller, ordered the Dalek Supreme and cut the link. The chill passed. The Dalek did a swift sensor-scan of the street. It registered no native activity. The Dalek Supreme moved out of Ratcliffe’s yard.
It would meet the girl and use the time controller to return home. There it would make its report to the renegade council. Perhaps then it would be allowed to commit suicide.
Suicide? The Dalek recoiled from the alien thought. It checked the link with the girl. There was residual activity – the Dalek could not shut the mind-gate completely. Parts of the girl’s personality continued to filter through.
There was activity at the extreme range of its sensors – the unmistakable output pattern of internal combustion engines. It swung its optical sensor round in an arc. Native transports were lumbering inelegantly towards it from both ends of the road.
At its depleted power levels the Dalek Supreme was incapable of sustained combat. The tactical computer assessment was bleak. The crude weapons of the humans would overwhelm it.
The Dalek Supreme prepared to make its last stand.
The doorbell rang.
‘Stay there,’ said Mike.
‘It could be the Doctor,’ said Ace as Mike stepped into the hallway. ‘Put the gun down, Mike, it’s too late for that.’
‘Just stay there.’
‘Come on, Mike, who’re you going to shoot with it anyway?’
Gilmore brought the van to a halt and pointed down the road. Rachel craned to see past the Doctor in the front seat. A hundred yards away, in front of Ratcliffe’s yard was a Dalek. Streetlamps cast highlights on its black livery.
One of the big Bedfords blocked the road behind it. Soldiers were beside the truck. They waited in the shadows, their weapons trained on the Dalek.
‘This is the last Dalek,’ said Gilmore. ‘I’ll call for reinforcements.’
‘No,’ said the Doctor, ‘not this time.’ He slammed back the van door and got out. ‘I started this…’
The doorbell rang continuously. Mike tucked the gun into his belt, out of sight behind his back. Mike reached for the doorknob. The ringing stopped. He could see a shadow on the stained glass of the front door. It was small, like a child. Mike opened the door.
The girl stood on the porch.
For a moment Mike stood frozen in confusion. It cost him his life. He recognized the girl. She worked for the Daleks, and was somehow almost like a Dalek herself.
Mike reached for his gun. The girl flung up her arms, hands curved like talons. Mike’s hand closed round the pistol butt.
Blue light seared his eyes, he felt himself smashed backwards into the bannisters. Wood splintered. There was a moment of agony before everything faded to black.
Now I’ll finish it, thought the Doctor.
He walked towards the Dalek, which swivelled to face him.
‘Dalek,’ he called, ‘you have been defeated. Surrender – you have failed.’
‘Insufficient data.’
It was strange, this impulse among organic intelligences to turn themselves into machines and ape the form and mannerisms of robots. Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans all sought perfection, but what did they find in the end?
‘Your forces are destroyed, and the planet of your birth is a burnt cinder circling a dead sun.’
‘There is no data.’
In the end they found nothing – nothing at all.
Ace flinched as blue light filled the doorway. There was a sharp smell of ozone. In the corner the television set turned itself on. Ace backed away from the doorway – the back of her knees banged into the sofa. The lightbulb overhead flared into double brightness, then shattered. Glass cut her cheek. Tinny music began to blare from the radio on the ironing board.
The girl stood in the doorway. In the flickering light of the television screen, Ace could see the girl’s eyes glitter.
‘You will have no more commands from your superiors,’ said the enemy of the Daleks, ‘because you have no superiors.’
The Dalek Supreme could feel the triumph leaking through from the girl. It was like a whirlwind battering at the Dalek’s mind, and at the storm’s eye, the Dalek could feel an icy bleakness.
Ace saw the girl move and threw herself backwards. Energy crackled over her as she tumbled over the back of the sofa. Glass shattered over the mantelpiece.
If you are going to lie, thought the Doctor, make it a big one.
‘No inferiors,’ he told the Dalek, ‘no reinforcements, and no hope of rescue. You are trapped a trillion miles and a thousand years from a disintegrated home.’
r /> He watched the Dalek carefully. Its gunstick twitched and its eyestalk described tiny circles in the air. Easy does it, thought the Doctor and stepped closer.
‘I have annihilated the entire Dalek species,’ he said.
The whirlwind of the girl’s emotions stormed the ramparts of the Dalek Supreme’s mind. A lifetime’s conditioning, from incubator to the present, was swept away by a child’s despair.
For a microsecond, the girl and the Dalek became one personality, both in the room of the house and both in the road outside Ratcliffe’s Yard. The girl shared the taste of power of the killings done under alien skies. The Dalek Supreme was assailed by the moment of birth, the scream of the newborn, the warm comforting arms of the female.
The commonality of mind and purpose that is the Dalek race.
The isolation and loneliness that is the human being.
The Dalek thrashed in its life support chamber, random neural spurts shot through its control systems. A logic gate closed. A failsafe was bypassed. The remaining power reserves were released.
The Dalek Supreme exploded.
Ace was hiding behind the sofa when she heard the girl scream.
It went on for a long time, rising over the noise of the radio. Then it stopped. The radio went quiet. The television turned off. It went very quiet. Ace tried to catch her breath.
Then she heard it. A low whimpering sob, the hiss of an indrawn breath and then another sob. The sofa quivered. In the darkness, the girl was crying.
Ace got to her feet and walked around the sofa. In the light from the hallway she could see the girl curled into a tight ball on the cushions. Ace sat down and took the girl in her arms. Through the doorway she could see Mike’s legs. They lay unmoving on the lino floor.
‘It’s all right,’ she told the girl, ‘it’s all over now.’
The girl buried her face in Ace’s shoulder and wept. The tears were easier and cleaner now. Ace looked away from the doorway and began to cry with her.
Nothing was left of the Dalek Supreme but ashes. Efficient to the last, thought the Doctor as he looked down on the remains. From nothing you came, to nothing you aspired, to nothing you went.
‘Ashes to ashes,’ said the Doctor, ‘dust to dust.’
May you rest in pieces forever.
23
THURSDAY, 11:30
DEAR JULIAN,
How are you? Just dropping a note to say I’m all right. It’s been five days since the excitement stopped and I suppose things are getting back to normal.
The Doctor disappeared with that creepy little girl shortly after we found her and Ace at Mike’s house. He brought her back yesterday and Gilmore’s got people looking for her parents now.
When I asked him what he’d been doing, all he said was ‘rewiring’. I didn’t ask him to elaborate – to be honest I’m not sure I wanted to know.
Rachel and Gilmore have been in each other’s company a lot. He calls her Rachel and she calls him Ian. I think they might have something going, but their faces seem so melancholy now.
Ace and I have been left to twiddle our thumbs here at Maybury Hall. Sometimes when she talks I don’t understand half the things she says. It frightens me a little. If she really is from twenty-five years in the future then our children could grow up to be like her.
Must dash – we’re burying poor old Mike Smith today. He won’t get military honours, but Gilmore said we all had to go anyway. The funeral is at the same cemetery where the Doctor buried the Hand of Omega, which I think is a bit of a coincidence, but the Doctor says it’s just the stitching in the fabric of reality showing at the seams. Hope to see you soon.
Love Allison.
This letter has been censored by order of the D-notice committee.
Six professional bearers carried Mike’s coffin up the path to the church. Mrs Smith clung to Gilmore’s arm, she was the only one crying. Behind them walked an elderly couple, introduced to Rachel as Mike’s uncle and aunt. Rachel and Allison walked behind them; Ace and the Doctor brought up the rear. Nobody else came.
Mrs Smith seemed to have trouble walking.
She lost her husband and now her only son, thought Rachel. All she has are her memories. On Remembrance Sunday will she sit by the radio and remember her son, who died on the wrong side of a war that never officially happened? What will I remember in twenty years’ time? As I watch the world rush headlong into the future, the world of the young, Ace’s world. A silver sea in 1940, the Dalek at Totters Lane, the spaceship landing in the playground perhaps? Or will it be Turing stammering out his theories or Ian’s warm hand on mine while we watched the Doctor engineer an act of genocide?
In the end that’s all we have: our memories – electrochemical impulses stored in eight pounds of tissue the consistency of cold porridge. In the end they define our lives.
The Doctor put his hand on Ace’s shoulder before they went into the church. ‘Time to leave,’ he said.
Ace looked into the Doctor’s grey eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Doctor?’
‘Yes?’
‘We did good, didn’t we?’
‘Perhaps,’ said the Doctor. ‘Time will tell – it always does.’
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First published in 1990 by WH Allen & Co plc.
This edition published in 2013 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.
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Main text copyright © Ben Aaronovitch 1990
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