The Road to Shalka Part 2: Old Friends

[Soldeed]

Jasmine was pleased to hear the Doctor singing.

Not because it was particularly tuneful but because it signalled the end of half an hour spent wandering aimlessly around the Tardis' crazed, twisting labyrinth of identical corridors. She was getting to the point where she could still see roundels when she closed her eyes.

Following the sound, she made her way into a capacious chamber she had never seen before, at its centre a jutting hexagonal structure of steel surmounted by a crystal column that rose and fell like a heartbeat, blue-white light burning at its core. A square metal panel had been removed from the console at floor level, and the Doctor's legs were all that was visible as he cheerfully murmured his song:

Every year is the same,
And I feel it again,
I'm a loser, no chance to win,
Leaves start falling,
Come down is calling,
Loneliness starts sinking in,
But...

"Hello, Jasmine." He broke off, and his hand emerged into view to wave his sonic screwdriver at her amiably. "Sleep well?"

"I got lost in the corridors," she said plaintively, pointing back at the door she had just come through.

"Did you?" For a few moments there was silence except for his continued tinkering. "I did tell you I was going to reset the internal configuration."

"You didn't tell me that meant I was going to get lost in the corridors."

"Oh. No, I suppose not."

He gripped the sides of the hatch and slid himself free of the console. He had taken his coat off to work but was still dressed up in a way of which Jasmine's beloved old Doctor would never have dreamed. His silky blood red shirt, gleaming silver tie pin and ornately embroidered black and gold waistcoat made him look exactly the kind of man her guardian and tutor had always warned her to avoid. His steady dark blue eyes inspected her with interest.

"Oh, you've picked something out at last. Good." He struggled up to his feet, dusting himself off, and took a closer look at her. "Very smart."

Jasmine shifted uncomfortably and looked down at her own outfit. The previous day, reflecting that her fine white dress was beyond help after their struggle with the Klavites, the Doctor had invited her to select whatever she wanted from his wardrobe which, to her astonishment, had been vast. But once she had eliminated everything that was either too short, too tight, too flimsy or all three she had been left with a very restricted range of options. Eventually she had ventured out in a pale blue trouser suit, the jacket a kind of tunic which she was able to button up fastidiously all the way to her throat.

"I don't know..."

The Doctor sighed.

"Jasmine, it completely covers you from wrist to neck to ankle."

This was true. It was hard to explain, but even though the trousers didn't actually show her legs they did admit to their existence. She was used to dresses in which, if you moved stiffly and evenly as you'd been taught, you could convey the illusion that you didn't have legs at all and were in fact rolling around on little wheels.

"Don't you have any proper dresses?" she asked.

The Doctor looked thoughtful as he went to retrieve his coat from the anachronistic antique hat stand in the corner.

"I used to have a formal Victorian type dress. But I think Sarah Jane may have swiped it. She certainly left with a lot more luggage than she had when she arrived."

"I don't like these shoes either," Jasmine persevered. "They were difficult to do up."

He peered over at them while shrugging on a long coat of vaguely military cut, jet black apart from a little gold braid about the cuffs and buttonholes.

"Trainers, good choice. What's the problem? I know you had a sheltered upbringing but I'm fairly sure you were introduced to the concept of shoelaces."

"Normal shoelaces. Not these big wide flat ones. They're strange."

The Doctor shook his head and knelt to replace the panel he had removed from the console.

"I'm sure you'll get used to them," he said, sounding bored with the discussion. "Anyway, they're very practical. You'll be glad of them next time you have to run away from something."

Jasmine's face registered alarm.

"I'm going to be running away from things?"

The Doctor straightened his lean frame to its full height, and linked his thumbs behind his back.

"I'm developing a theory."

"Oh no."

He ignored her and pressed on.

"In the overall fabric of spacetime, in which past and future are the same thing viewed from different perspectives, it's possible that significant events which result from the confluence of numerous disparate factors and whose effects or potential effects ripple out across the universal timelines, may give that time and place a certain cosmic weight, and therefore a distorting effect on the stuff of reality which causes an imprecisely programmed Tardis to gravitate towards them." He mulled this over for a moment and nodded approval of his own idea. "It would explain why there's always something going on wherever I happen to turn up."

Jasmine rolled her eyes skyward with a "tut" and changed the subject.

"So who's this Sarah James?"

The Doctor frowned, his train of thought broken, and looked at her resentfully.

"Who?" He spoke again before she could remind him what they had just been talking about. "Oh. Jane, not James. Long before your time. She travelled around with me for a while."

"Like I am now?"

He paused, and smiled faintly, his eyes becoming momentarily distant.

"In her own unique way, yes."

"So what happened to her?"

"Nothing," he said with a shrug. "She left."

"Why?"

"Oh..." He turned away and began a minute inspection of a line of circular glowing panels on the console. "They all leave me in the end."

Jasmine hesitated, but a moment later she was feeling far more uncomfortable about the uncharacteristic precision with which he was examining the controls.

"What's wrong with the machine anyway?" she asked. "Is it broken?"

He looked up and smiled.

"No, no. Well, not really. Um..." He rested his fingertips thoughtfully on the console top. "To be honest, after leaving it in one place for all those years I should really have spent a day or two checking the systems instead of just flicking the switch and setting off into the vortex like that. Seemed a nice dramatic gesture at the time."

At that instant the central column stopped dead and the light within dimmed to nothing like a snuffed candle.

"What's gone wrong?" asked Jasmine, eyeing the contraption warily. The Doctor checked a readout.

"Nothing. We've landed."

[Soldeed]

The Tardis door creaked open and Jasmine's face, framed by her dark ringlets, appeared in the gap.

"Eugh."

The Doctor's face appeared directly above hers.

"I'm forced to agree."

A hot, dusty wind blew across the desolate landscape laid out before them; nothing but brown sand and dull, mud-coloured rock stretching to the horizon.

Jasmine twisted her neck to look up at him.

"Can we go back in and try again? Perhaps we'll end up somewhere nice."

"Yes." He was pushing the door further open and strolling out past her into the wilderness. "Yes, of course. Just a quick look round first."

She folded her arms and kept her feet firmly inside the portal. She watched him push his coat back to thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, scan his surroundings, then wander off to the right, circling round out of view to the other side of the Tardis.

"Please can we go?" she shouted into the wind. "It's horrible here. There's nothing to have a quick look round at."

"Au contraire," came the Doctor's voice from somewhere out of sight. "Have a look at this."

Jasmine gave a deep sigh, but it was one of resignation. She ventured gingerly out, picking her way carefully through the loose rocks, and made her way behind the Tardis to join him.

The Doctor placed his hand on her arm to guide her forward and point her in the direction he was looking. With eyes screwed half shut against flying dust she took in the view.

"Now unless I'm mistaken," he remarked smugly, "That's something you haven't seen before."

A vast, crater-shaped dip in the terrain. Glinting in what sunlight penetrated the dirty grey clouds, a cluster of several dozen single storey metal buildings crouching low in its shelter. And illuminated by the blue flame of its thrusters stabbing at the ground, an ugly bulbous spacecraft lowering itself to the diamond shaped open space at the centre.

The nearest building was a good mile from where they stood, but the Doctor was stroking his chin, looking fascinated and intent. He glanced down at Jasmine.

"Up for a stroll?"

* * * * *

Twenty minutes later Jasmine was standing bewildered at the centre of a buzzing swirl of human activity. In the narrow, dusty streets between faceless steel structures, armed men in grey jumpsuits patrolled at a leisurely pace in groups of two and four, purposeful, official-looking people hastened along, perusing notes or deep in conversation, and chunky six-wheeled vehicles hummed powerfully by. She floundered for a moment, unable to find a place to stand that was not in someone's way, until the Doctor's hand on her shoulder drew her back into the shelter of a doorway.

"I don't understand," she complained. "If they've got a... a spaceship..." She waved a pointing finger at the looming form of the craft, visible above the rooftops. "... and they can go wherever they want, why do they all want to come here?"

The Doctor nodded briskly, looking around him with a lively curiosity.

"Intriguing isn't it? Well worth looking into. Now this looks like a sensible place to start."

He indicated the door behind them - a sturdy looking affair with the words "Authorised Access Only" printed in big red letters across the front.

"It looks a bit locked," commented Jasmine. "Can you open it?"

The Doctor had turned away from her and was looking up and down the street. He stepped away from the door, beckoning her to follow.

"I have a special technique for this," he said.

Stood against the wall on the opposite side of the street, Jasmine and the Doctor watched as a middle-aged woman with neatly close cropped hair and businesslike brown overalls walked up and swiftly tapped a complex sequence into a neat little keypad set into the doorframe. There was a low hum in response and the heavy door swung open willingly at a push of her fingertips.

"Now," said the Doctor.

Jasmine followed him as he stepped unhurriedly forward and favoured the woman with an ingratiating smile as she held the door open for him.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning," he replied.

They were in, and left alone as the door slammed shut behind them and the woman disappeared down a corridor without a backward glance.

"Right," said the Doctor. "This looks promising."

The sign over the sliding glass doors in front of them said "Main Lab Decontamination Zone". The Doctor strode ahead, the doors parting for him obediently, and on through the gleaming silver chamber with its array of hi-tech cubicles and neatly folded white clothing, through another set of doors, and into a vast room housing fully a hundred people, wrapped from head to foot in all-over body suits and breathing apparatus, bent over plastic workbenches and busily probing and dissecting countless different impossibly complex fragments of machinery.

"Now we're getting somewhere," the Doctor announced, taking in the scene. "This is what they're up to here. Question is, why set up a scientific research centre in this hellhole rather than anywhere else? It can't just be the low property prices and favourable tax situation."

Jasmine wasn't clear on whether he was talking to her or to himself, and hovered awkwardly by the door while he strolled over to the nearest table and plucked a chunk of gadgetry from under the nose of the startled technician who had been attempting to work on it.

"Hmm. Interesting." He gave the device a twist and opened it up to examine its innards. "Either a remarkable scientific achievement considering the mediocre technology I've seen here so far, or else..."

"Put that down!"

The technician, recovered from his initial astonishment and backed by several of his fellows, made a grab for the object with a white-gloved hand. The Doctor held it up out of his reach.

"This is a restricted zone," the man insisted. "Where is your identification?"

A hubbub of agreement with this demand emanated from the gathering crowd as all work in the laboratory came to a halt.

"Silence." With an athletic bound the Doctor was standing on top of the nearest workbench, a vantage point from which he could address the whole room. "Do you want my help or not?"

This question gave the lab workers pause, and he took this as an answer in the affirmative.

"Very well. Now then..."

"Halt!"

Jasmine started as the command was bellowed by a deep voice at her shoulder, and on either side guards came pouring in through the entrance. Working with rushed efficiency, a second later they had the Doctor hemmed in on all sides. They raised their energy weapons to shoulder height.

[Soldeed]

Standing tall on top of the work surface, the Doctor looked contemptuously down at the array of levelled weapons, one hand thrust deep into his coat pocket, the other balancing the unidentifiable futuristic gadget on his fingertips.

"Put that down!"

The owner of the thunderous voice brushed past Jasmine. He was a tall, heavy man in his forties, his razorblade widow's peak, dark brows, narrowed eyes, long nose and compressed mouth all combining to give the impression of a face which formed a determined, forward looking spearpoint. The Doctor watched disinterestedly as he stormed towards him.

"What do you think you're doing in here? This is a sterile area!"

"Oh, grow up. This is a null gravity field instigator. It's designed for knocking about in the roughest environments imaginable. My fingerprints aren't going to hurt it."

It was just for an instant, on hearing the device given a name, that the newcomer's eyes flickered down towards it, but the Doctor saw, and his face lit up with realisation.

"Oh!" He looked quickly about the lab, then back at the man who had now passed through the ring of guards and stood within touching distance. "Of course, I've been uncharacteristically dim. You're not making or repairing anything here, are you? You haven't even got as far as disassembling anything. You're just poking around trying to work out what it is." He tossed the fragile looking object up in the air and caught it a couple of times like a cricket ball. "What's the deal? Crashed flying saucer? Ancient alien city buried under the sands?"

The man scowled at him incredulously.

"Who are you?"

"Who are you?"

The Doctor's phlegmatic response brought a furious furrowing of brows and a booming response:

"I happen to be Max Strole! I am the administrator of this entire facility!"

"Pleased to meet you. This is my young friend Jasmine."

Jasmine started as, guided by the Doctor's gesture, all eyes in the room turned upon her. She gave them a weak smile and a little wave.

"And I," said the Doctor, "Am the Doctor."

"Doctor who?" asked Strole suspiciously.

"Don't start that. Now watch this."

Strole watched through intent, narrowed eyes as the Doctor jumped down from his perch and walked away, the guards parting to let him by. He was fiddling with the device, and talking constantly:

"Its power cells are dead, I'm afraid, but there should be enough static juice left in its circuits to do..." He turned. "... this!"

He threw it, high over everyone's heads, into the centre of the room. People gasped, expecting to see the precious object smashed to smithereens on the floor, then fell silent when, as if it had struck an invisible trampoline, it bounced to a halt and hung swaying three feet above the ground. A few seconds later, as if gravity had suddenly remembered its task, it sunk slowly down to settle on the floor. Strole stared avidly, like a hungry man shown a roast dinner.

"Well, Doctor." The smile of a crocodile. "I believe you've found yourself a job."

"You're very kind. At least I hope you are, because my expertise doesn't come cheap."

"No doubt." Strole gave him an appraising look. "Perhaps you'd like to accompany me to my office and we'll discuss your contract."

The Doctor accepted with a curt inclination of his head. Jasmine stood uncertainly and watched as the pair of them, heads close together in murmured discussion, exited the lab. The technicians either drifted back to work or clustered around the gadget on the floor, holding back from touching as if afraid it might bite. The guards trooped smartly out under the harshly barked orders of one whose uniform was slightly more decorated, a badge here and a stripe there, than the others'. He was a young man, not tall, suntanned with hard dark eyes, sharply formed, humourless features and a rigidly set jawline, but as his men disappeared from view a physical change seemed to come over him. The stiffness drained from his posture, his eyes warmed and softened and when he turned to Jasmine, white teeth flashing in a pleasant smile, his voice was mellow and relaxed.

"Jasmine, isn't it?" He indicated the door through which Strole and the Doctor had departed with a jerk of his head. "If I know the administrator they'll be into this for a while. He's quite the negotiator and I get the idea your friend isn't the type to roll over easily either. What would you say to a drink while we wait?"

[Soldeed]

Jasmine sipped cautiously at her unidentifiable drink. The food, essentially a tasteless lump of grey dough, she left alone. Her new friend Captain Kerrigan ("call me Sam") had claimed it was avocado flavour, but never having seen an avocado she was unable to judge this.

They were alone at a table in the corner of a deserted cafeteria just along the corridor from the lab, its large round windows giving access to what passed in this godforsaken place for a view. It was the same windswept expanse of brown dust Jasmine had seen before.

"I know, I know," said Kerrigan with an apologetic grin. "It's not pretty. But when they've been hemmed up inside a lab all day, crouching over some unidentifiable little scientific gizmo, they're grateful for any glimpse of sunlight." He shook his head. "Me, I'm glad I'm just a soldier."

Jasmine smiled back. His self-deprecating manner was a novelty to her. The few men she had known in her life had all tried to give the impression of being enormously knowledgeable and self-confident.

"You must have drawn the short straw to get sent here."

"Oh, yes," he admitted ruefully. "But it's only a two year posting, and if Strole pulls it off like he says he can it'll be promotions all round. I guess I'll look back on this and laugh when I'm in my comfy office back on Earth."

"What is it Strole says he can do?"

He raised his eyebrows.

"Woah. I'm the one who's supposed to be pumping you for information."

"What?"

"Ah." He frowned. "Now that came out a little more sinister than I intended. Okay, cards on the table, Strole doesn't really trust anyone so he tipped me the wink to go and chat to you. Guess he's hoping I'll find out something about this Doctor character before he spends the entire research budget hiring him." He looked anxious, almost flinching back as if afraid of what her reaction might be. "I was sort of hoping we might get that part out of the way early on and then I could just treat you to lunch."

Jasmine gave him a frosty look, mostly because she was trying to suppress the laughter bubbling up inside her at the young officer's tightly wound tension while he awaited her response.

"You might as well not have bothered," she said. "I don't know anything about the Doctor, I only met him the day before yesterday. He's a scientist, he travels around exploring, and I think he knows more or less everything."

"He certainly seems to know his stuff. They've been messing about with that gravity nil field thing, whatever he called it, for three weeks now. Nobody had a clue what it was for."

"So perhaps Mr Strole can't pull it off after all? Whatever it is."

He drew breath to reply, then grinned.

"Oh, you're doing it again. Still, I suppose I owe you one in return. Mr Strole found this place. There's this great treasure trove of abandoned alien technology. Years ahead of us. Centuries, probably. If the scientists can figure out how it works then it could change our whole way of life. That's why there are ships coming in every day with new staff, new equipment. There's nearly a thousand people working here now."

"And still no results?"

He waved this away.

"Strole will get it done. He has a few more tricks up his sleeve yet, believe me. But let's call it quits now and talk about something else. My problem is, all the women here are scientists. Try talking to them and they always end up bringing the conversation back to quantum mechanics."

"Quantum..." This was a phrase new to Jasmine. "... what?"

Kerrigan's look of yearning made him look on the verge of tears.

"You don't know how I've dreamt of hearing a girl say that." He leaned forward across the table. "Tell me, you and the Doctor... I mean, in the lab before, he didn't seem very..."

He cast about for the right word. Jasmine helped him out.

"Nice?"

"That's it."

Jasmine looked away, out through the window.

"No." Not for the first time, she felt a pang of regret for the kindly old gentleman the Doctor had been. "He's changed."

"So..."

"But he helped me," Jasmine spoke up, too quickly. "When we first met, he helped me."

"Are you going to follow him around for the rest of your life because of that?"

She looked round sharply and Kerrigan, fearing he had overreached himself, sat back apologetically. But she sighed.

"Things were confusing. He asked me to go with him. I couldn't think what else to do."

His brow furrowed in thought for a moment, and he began to speak carefully:

"Well..."

There was a hiss of sliding doors as the Doctor strode into the room.

"There you are," he said briskly. "Now... oh." Seemingly it was only at this point that he noticed Kerrigan. He didn't seem particularly pleased to see him. "I see you're here too."

"Er, yes." Kerrigan fidgeted in the awkward silence that followed like a boy caught in the gaze of a schoolmaster. "Perhaps... Perhaps I'd better be getting on." He stood, then reached out to touch Jasmine lightly on the hand. "See you later, Jasmine."

Jasmine watched him go. The Doctor did likewise, standing with arms folded and turning his head to follow his progress even as the young man had to pass within a foot of him to get to the door.

"What was he up to?" he asked, the moment Kerrigan was gone. Jasmine looked up innocently.

"Your new employer, Mr Strole, wanted him to ask me who you were."

"Did he now?" The Doctor walked over to sit opposite her in Kerrigan's vacated seat. "I'm starting to think my employer, as you call him, is slightly brighter than he looks."

"What's going on, Doctor? Why are you offering to work for these people? You're not really going to stay here and help them with these alien machines are you?"

"Hardly. Very unhealthy for any civilisation to gain access to new technologies without having to work for them. They end up with all kinds of new powers they haven't learned to control. Fortunately these artefacts they've found are far beyond anything Earth can come up with at this point. They'll never figure them out."

"Well, in that case, surely there's no problem? We can just slip off back to the Tardis and leave."

"Yes. Or rather, no."

"Oh."

"You see there's more to this than just digging up alien machinery out of the sand. Strole's up to something."

"How do you know?"

"I've met a lot of people in my time who were up to something, Jasmine. After a while you get to know the look."

"Hm." Jasmine digested this. "So you're going to pretend to be working for him while you find out what it is he's up to."

The Doctor's face cleared, momentarily giving him the look of a teacher pleased with a promising pupil.

"Spot on." He stood. "And now I'm supposed to go and chat to some of his top people about the direction their research should be taking. I'll give them a few little snippets. This is what we'll refer to as the trust-gaining phase of the operation."

"Can I help?" she called after him as he made for the exit.

"Possibly." He turned and kept backing away as the door slid open behind him. "Keep your eyes open. Talk to people. Smile. As long as we don't know what we're looking for everything's worth checking."

The door hissed shut and Jasmine was left alone. Talk to people, he'd said. With a thousand to choose from that shouldn't be too difficult, but where to start? She gazed thoughtfully out of the window and saw something that made her sit up straight.

Strole. And a group of guards. They were clustered round one of the black metal six wheeled vehicles she had seen trundling round the streets, but this one was outside the base, parked so its nose pointed out into the wilderness beyond.

Jasmine thought quickly. Two men were still loading cases of equipment aboard, and from the way Strole and the others were standing around it didn't look as if they were expecting to get started in the next few seconds. She had time. She jumped up and sprinted from the room.

* * * * *

When Strole's vehicle got under way a couple of minutes later it was carrying an extra passenger. The Doctor had been right, Jasmine reflected as she clung to the back. These "trainers" did have their uses.

[Soldeed]

The vehicle juddered to a halt just as Jasmine was starting to wonder if jumping on the back had been such a good idea after all. They were a good mile from the base now, and the brown sand was giving way to crumbling rock as they entered the shadow of a low ridge, forming the opposite rim of the great crater from the one on which the Tardis had landed. She quickly jumped down and dashed for cover amongst the stones as the vehicle's doors opened and Strole and his men, weighed down by their equipment, clambered out and made straight for a dark crack in the cliff face.

It was indistinguishable from any number of other fissures in the wall of stone which looked ready to collapse at any second under the monotonous pressure of the dust-filled wind, but all eight men vanished into it without trace. Jasmine gave them a couple of minutes to get well ahead and then, nerves flittering in her stomach, tiptoed cautiously into the blackness behind them.

Thankfully, she only had to feel her way along one narrow stone passageway in pitch dark before she turned a corner and there was light again, a soft bluish light issuing from the ruins of a thin metal door, set into the rock, which looked to have been smashed open with a sledgehammer. She crept through into a corridor built of some marble-like substance of such a perfect snowy white that it was hard to make out the join between wall and ceiling. Blessing the rubber soles of her new shoes, which pressed soundlessly against the metallic floor, she ignored a row of alternative openings and pressed on down the passage to peek around a doorway at the far end, from which Strole's booming voice was already clearly audible.

"Well now, Ceros, another session is upon us. Unless of course you're in a more cooperative frame of mind?"

The chamber was vast, built all of the same transluscent white substance and studded with thirty circular tables, each one six feet across and four feet high, illuminated by hazy beams of light projected from the ceiling far above. Jasmine stifled a gasp at the grotesque sight she saw squatting on each one. They were like green sacks of water, glistening wetly in the pools of black liquid filling the shallow round trays in which they sat seething. Yellow tendrils like the roots of uprooted plants wriggled and quivered in the air, and on each one a single great white eye swivelled in the direction of the eight intruders.

The rim of the table holding the creature Strole addressed pulsed with yellow light at each syllable as a gentle, harmonious voice, like that of an angel, filled the room.

"My answer must be the same, Max Strole. For the good of your own civilisation, we cannot give you the technology you seek. Nothing you do to us can change that."

"As you wish. Kerrigan."

Jasmine almost gave herself away, lurching forward to see, as a man with his back to her lifted his head from adjusting a bulky piece of equipment slung around his neck.

"Ready, Mr Strole."

His voice. She felt a heavy, sinking sensation as Kerrigan, his face hard and immobile as stone, advanced on the alien's table, the free end of a length of flexible cable, plugged at the other end into the contraption on his chest, held carefully up in front of him. She instinctively felt in no doubt as to what would follow.

"Please," came Ceros' beautiful voice. "I beg you..."

Jasmine clapped her hands over her ears and kept them pressed there with all her strength at the unearthly howl of agony that rang around the chamber and washed out into the corridor as Kerrigan touched the cable to the creature's soft flesh. Blue sparks crackled and spat from its shuddering body and its tendrils locked into broken, contorted shapes, on and on until the scream dried to a desperate, scraping croak and Kerrigan pulled the cable back. He held it there, ready for use, just inches away.

"You'll break in the end, you know," said Strole mildly, inspecting his fingernails. "Everyone does."

"Perhaps." The voice was as melodic as ever, but weak and quavering. "But I must try."

"Of course. But there's been a new development which might just make you look at things differently. You see, I've recently hired a man who understands all your gadgetry just as well as you do. I might just be able to do without your help entirely."

"There are no humans who understand our technology. You are lying to us."

Strole gave Kerrigan a nod and Jasmine turned and buried her face in the wall as a second soul-rending shriek echoed around the room. A small mercy, this one ended after a couple of seconds.

"Actually I'm not lying," said Strole, continuing as if nothing had happened. "Not this time. So you might like to consider, perhaps it would be for the best if you just gave me the little bit of help I'm asking, so that I can go home and leave you all in peace to do whatever it is you do in here. Because otherwise, I'll find out anyway from my new scientist, and then I might as well as just have you killed." He stepped forward and placed his hands on the rim of the table, leaning forward to stare into Ceros' single eye. "All of you."

"My answer must..."

"Remain the same. I know." Strole motioned one of the guards forward. "Well, I'll leave you to sleep on it. But perhaps this will stimulate your thinking."

"NO!"

The pain in Ceros' voice was worse than the screams of the torture as in a flash of silver light from the guard's handgun one of the creatures exploded in a shower of green slime and fluid. Its trembling body seemed to deflate and decay before Jasmine's eyes, melting into an empty heap of blackened lifelessness.

"Think about it," said Strole, and with a curt gesture led his men out. Jasmine sank back into the nearest side corridor while they tramped past.

She rested there for a moment, leaning against the wall, eyes tightly shut, but when she felt the tears coming she shook her head and stood up straight. What now? Her gaze first followed the men on their way out, but they were just heading back to the base and it would be safer to walk rather than try to hitch another lift. Well then...

Softly, she made her way into the aliens' chamber. Ceros' eye fixed on her instantly.

"Welcome."

Jasmine blinked. This was a reaction she hadn't anticipated.

"I..." She pointed vaguely at the exit. "I'm not with them."

"I know," came the voice, like the ringing of bells. "I've been watching you. You sympathise with our plight. I appreciate it."

Suppressing an instinctive revulsion for the creature's vile appearance, which grew stronger as she approached, Jasmine cautiously drew nearer.

"I saw what they did to you," she managed. "Are you all right? Can I do anything?"

"Please don't distress yourself. I've suffered no permanent injury. Max Strole is very careful in that respect."

Jasmine halted just short of the table, still unable to stomach the idea of moving within arm's length.

"Why do you let them do this to you? You have all this technology. Surely there's something you can do?"

"I'm afraid not. My people are proud of its scientific achievements, but ultimately they led us down this evolutionary dead end, and left us physically helpless and dependent on machines for our very survival. Over time, the machines failed, or developed their own intelligence and abandoned us, and now we thirty... we twenty-nine I should now say... are all that is left of my race. Clinging to this last handful of life support devices before entropy claims them as well." The voice paused, and Ceros' eye swivelled mournfully downwards. "It is sad."

Jasmine looked around at the immobile green blobs occupying their featureless tables spread about the room, the dead one a black spot in their midst. A few of them moved their thin, useless tendrils feebly.

"Listen," she said. "I'm going to leave now, but I have a friend and I know he'll want to help when I tell him about you."

"Please don't endanger yourselves on our behalf. There is nothing that can be done."

"Don't worry," said Jasmine, backing towards the exit. "The Doctor always knows what to do."

* * * * *

Seconds later, she was at the cavemouth, and stepping out into the heat and dust of the outdoors.

"Halt!"

She froze, a cold hand clutching at her innards as she found herself penned in by armed men. Strole walked towards her, his face engorged with anger.

"Stupid girl. Did you think we wouldn't see your footprints? You should have kept your nose out."

"The Doctor will find out what you're doing in there," she fired back with spirit. "He'll never help you!"

"He'll help," said Strole. He grabbed the cable attached to the torture device around Kerrigan's neck. "He'll help when it's you on the other end of this wire."

Jasmine shivered and stared at Kerrigan as two guards seized her arms. The young man looked down at the dust, unable to meet her eyes.

[Soldeed]

Jasmine sat glumly on the hard plastic bench which was the sole article of furniture in the little room Strole's men had turned into an improvised cell. There was nothing to do but watch the sky grow steadily darker through the securely locked window and shift constantly in search of a comfortable position.

Eventually she heard something. A voice raised in anger, the words indistinguishable at first, then becoming clear as the sound came nearer.

"... the Galactic Tribunal of Sentient Lifeforms' Rights, the Interplanetary Treaty on Detention of Minors, the Sirius Convention on Minimum Legal Representation, the Multidenominational Campaign for Universal Justice of which I happen to be a founder member, the..."

The furious, familiar tone burst in on Jasmine as the door slid open and two flustered, panicky-looking guards stumbled in backwards, hotly pursued by the fiery-eyed Doctor, shouting random phrases of interstellar law at them without so much as a pause for breath. He spotted her, and his voice instantly dropped to its normal volume.

"Ah, there you are." He turned back to the guards. "OUT!" he bellowed. They fled, and the door hissed shut behind them.

Looking enervated by the exercise, the Doctor thrust his hands deep into his pockets and looked down at her with a mock frown.

"Jasmine, what have you doing? I've just had to be very rude to those two men who only doing their jobs."

"How did you find me here?" she asked, breathless with relief at seeing him.

"Oh, it's no secret, the whole base is talking about it." He illustrated this concept with a wave of his hand in the general direction of the window. "I suspect it's the only interesting thing that's ever happened here. Apparently you broke into one of the secure labs and started messing with the equipment. Now, I know I said to keep your eyes open but..."

"I know what Strole's up to."

If she had been in a calmer frame of mind she would have taken satisfaction from his nonplussed expression.

"Do you?"

"Yes. They're not just digging up old machinery from an abandoned alien city. Some of the aliens are still alive in there, but they won't tell him how any of it works and they can't defend themselves and he's torturing them. He killed one of them while I was watching."

The Doctor's face grew expressionless while he listened, and he turned slowly to drop down onto the bench next to her. He rested his head back against the wall.

"Charming," he muttered.

"We'll help them, won't we? I sort of promised."

This broke his mood. He couldn't stifle a huff of laughter.

"Did you? Well, I suppose we'd better help them, then." He stroked his chin for a moment in thought. "These aliens. Did they say what they were called?"

"Um, no. Sorry, I didn't think to ask."

"Mm. Well, what did they look like?"

"Well..." Jasmine paused for thought and looked away, picturing the hideous but gentle creatures in her mind's eye to make this as accurate as possible. "They were green. Sort of soft, shapeless, lumpy things about a foot and a half across. They couldn't move about, or pick anything up, they just had lots of little thin yellow tentacles that didn't seem to be useful for anything. And they only had one eye. A big, white, round one."

There was silence. When Jasmine looked round at the Doctor to prompt him for a response, she was taken aback by what she saw. He stared at her, his mouth gaping half open, the flesh of his face drained to a corpselike pallor. It took her a moment to realise that this was the face of a horrorstruck, frightened man.

[Soldeed]

The window of the cell yielded swiftly to the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. It would have been quicker if his hands had not been fumbling in his haste.

"What's going on?" protested Jasmine, holding onto his hands as he helped her out into the open. "What's the matter?"

"No time," he said curtly, looking quickly around. They were in a narrow alley between two of the plain metallic single-storey buildings that made up the colony. Twenty yards away at either end pedestrians and vehicles were visible making their way along the streets. "We have to go. Right now."

She followed as he began striding at full speed along the alley, then after two paces stumbled to a halt, barely avoiding running into his back as he stopped dead.

"No," he said. "We can't."

Jasmine watched in concern as the Doctor wavered indecisively on the spot. He muttered to himself inaudibly, glanced agitatedly this way and that as if expecting to find an escape route in the bare walls, made as if to step in one direction or another, then changed his mind. His lips twisted in frustration and his fist slammed hard against the wall.

"Blast it!"

He placed his hands tensely over his mouth, his brow creased in worry, and steepled the fingers together as if in prayer.

"Right," he said at last. "Right, here we go. This is what we're going to do."

She perked up, waiting. He was silent for a moment longer, holding up one hand and rubbing the fingers agitatedly together in thought.

"Jasmine." Finally he looked at her and she straightened, almost standing to attention. "Go back to the Tardis."

Dismayed, she drew breath to protest, but he silenced her by grasping her right hand and slapping the Tardis key into her palm.

"No. This is serious, Jasmine. Do as you're told."

With that, he was away in a swirl of his coat, vanishing around the corner and leaving Jasmine alone.

She stood for a moment, confused and upset. There was something sinister happening, something that scared even the Doctor, and no one would tell her what it was. But there was nothing to do now except follow instructions and hope he knew what he was doing.

Mindful that she was supposed to be still locked up in her cell, Jasmine made a painstakingly cautious progress across the base, awaiting opportunities to dart from one alley into the next across the narrow streets, standing motionless in darkened corners while people flowed past, trotting in the shadow of slow moving vehicles. It was fully ten minutes before, arriving at last on the outskirts, beyond which the dusty wilderness sloped gradually up to where the Tardis stood, with a pang in her chest she saw him.

Kerrigan. Bereft of his subordinate guards, he seemed to be wandering aimlessly about the desert just twenty metres past the boundary of the settlement. He moved in circles, kicking at little stones.

She should wait, she knew. Let him finish whatever he was doing and then make best speed back to the Tardis. Instead she was breaking cover and walking out across the sands towards him.

"Jasmine!" He smiled, briefly delighted to see her before he remembered the situation and his face fell. "What are you doing here?"

"The Doctor got me out."

He hesitated, evidently uncertain whether this meant the Doctor had negotiated her release or simply broken her out of prison. But he had other concerns.

"Look, Jasmine. What you saw back at the cave..."

"Oh, tell me!" she burst out. "Tell me what your excuse is for torturing that poor creature. I thought you were a decent man. How could you?"

"Mr Strole is in command here," he muttered, looking away. "I have to obey his orders."

"No you don't. Of course you don't. You can say 'No, I won't do it'. It's easy!"

"You don't understand." His eyes implored her to do so. "Did you know I'm one of the youngest captains ever in the Service? I've worked so hard, I've given up so much. I go against Strole, he'll just have me dismissed and get someone else to do it instead. My career. My life. It's too much to ask."

"Listen to yourself! Your career? Your career as a torturer's lackey? What's that worth?"

The transformation at her words was instantaneous, like a hard mask closing down over his face. It was the same look he had worn when commanding his men or torturing Ceros.

"It's so easy for you, isn't it? Interplanetary vagrants. No worries, no responsibilities. Always moving on to the next place. It's easy to have ideals when you've got no stake in anything. Those of us who are stuck with the lives we've got sometimes have to make a few choices we're not happy with."

"And when Strole got me on the other end of that wire," she said softly. "What would your choice have been then?"

The mask cracked, and she felt an unwanted shadow of sympathy at the painful grimace brought by her words. Then a piercing beeping noise started up and with a despairing sigh he bowed his head to start muttering into a device built into the cuff of his uniform. The tinny little voice it emitted was inaudible but it was quickly obvious that something was terribly wrong. Kerrigan was at first irritable and distracted, but as he listened further the dawning terror in his face was plain to see. He let his wrist fall to his side and turned to stare at Jasmine, his eyes wide and haunted in sheer disbelief.

"Your friend, the Doctor," he whispered. "He's sabotaged the main power plant. Rigged it to overload and detonate. He's killed us all."

[Soldeed]

All else forgotten, Jasmine and Kerrigan sprinted back through the settlement towards the conical shape of the power plant rising at its centre. The news was visible rippling through the streets: the incredulity and rising horror of those listening to communicators, the shrill clamour of shocked, angry voices as the word was passed along. As they ran, they were aware of a gathering crowd running with them, building to a virtual stampede as they rushed in at the foot of the power plant and the tight knot of armed guards in front of the entrance.

Those at the front of the crowd dug their heels into the dust to skid to a halt, thrusting their shoulders back against those behind who kept trying to force their way onward. Jasmine found herself hemmed in and half suffocated by the seething press of humanity until Kerrigan, placing his arm around her shoulders and dragging people roughly aside with the other hand, got them through to the front and out into the open.

The Doctor was just barely visible, surrounded by guards and restrained by four separate pairs of hands, looking sullen with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He looked back at her and showed no evidence of surprise that she had failed to obey his instruction to return to the Tardis. His eyes briefly rolled skyward in resignation, then flicked away as Strole shoved his way through the crowd.

"You!" he boomed. "What have you done?"

The ring of guards loosened slightly to allow the Doctor to respond.

"Should be obvious," he said, calmly and seriously. "I've sabotaged your main reactor. You have a few hours before it goes up, I won't tell you how long exactly, and since it has enough stored energy to power this place for years that means it'll take the whole colony with it and everything else within twenty miles."

"Fanatic! You'd destroy everything we've built here just to stop me?"

The Doctor's look of contempt was withering.

"You pathetic buffoon. You think I'd have to resort to something this drastic just to foil your feeble schemes? You're nothing. You're a footnote to this whole affair."

Strole advanced on him, the fury in his face warring with an almost pleading look of distress.

"Then why? Why would you do this?"

The Doctor looked him in the eye.

"That's my secret."

"But my people! They'll all die!"

"Nonsense. You have that cargo carrier don't you? Fuelled and ready for the return trip if I'm not mistaken. There's plenty of time to evacuate."

"Are you mad? That ship won't take a thousand people!"

"Of course it will. Not in the passenger section, but there'll be room in the storage bays for everyone. It may be a little uncomfortable but they'll survive."

Strole was silent for a moment, teeth jammed together in frustration.

"Fix it!" he shouted suddenly. "You did the damage, you can repair it."

The Doctor stood immovable at the centre of his ring of guards.

"It's irreversible. This colony is finished and there's nothing you can do about it."

Strole's gaze shifted to a figure in a white tunic who appeared at the power plant entrance, and he asked the question with a jerk of his head. The grim-faced scientist shook his head, no.

"See what I mean?" said the Doctor, as if he'd read all that from watching Strole's face. "So tell the people, Mr Strole. Are you going to be responsible for the deaths of everyone here? Or not?"

The two men stood just a few feet apart, Strole's looming, bulky form locked at every muscle in impotent rage, the Doctor standing waiting, not gloating, not celebrating, betraying no emotion at all. At last Strole spoke:

"Captain Kerrigan!"

"Sir!" Kerrigan spoke up.

"All personnel are to board the carrier. Maximum of one small case of belongings per individual. All antimatter specialists are to remain behind and work on repairing the reactor."

The Doctor blinked at the exception, but looked satisfied, while the surrounding crowd murmured and shuffled as the order brought home the reality of their situation. Strole inspected him closely and then added:

"The military are to stay behind too."

At this the Doctor flared up.

"Soldiers? What do you expect them to do, shoot the explosion? What's the matter, can't you face the idea of not having any guns around you?"

"That's right, Doctor," said Strole sharply. "When someone has taken such extreme steps to clear the people out of this base, and won't give a reason why, I think it's a sensible precaution to keep some guns around to deal with whatever it is you're up to. We have a shuttlecraft here. If we rip out the seats then there'll be standing room for everyone we leave behind, so if it comes to it they'll all be able to get away. Then they can dock with the carrier once they're in orbit." He turned his back on the Doctor. "Now if you'll excuse me I have work to do."

He stalked away through the crowd, which parted for him and began to splinter as people disbelievingly realised the need to hurry back to their dwellings and collect their possessions.

"Oh, by the way," Strole turned suddenly and fired his parting shot from a distance. "In case you were in any doubt you and your little friend are staying too."

He left, and Kerrigan gently propelled Jasmine forward to join the Doctor in amongst his guards. The Doctor looked down at her and shook his head in exasperation.

"Why does no one ever do as I say? You nearly drowned in a Klavite spaceship for me, Jasmine. Why was going back to the Tardis so much to ask?"

It was impossible to tell how angry he really was. Jasmine could only shrug guiltily.

"I had to know what was going on."

"Yes, Doctor." Kerrigan stepped forward. "I don't believe you're insane, or stupid enough not to realise that the blast will wipe out the aliens in the cave along with everything else, so I assume there's something happening here that I don't know about. Since Strole's decided my men and I are going to be right in the middle of it surely you could tell us something about what to expect?"

The Doctor looked at him, coldly at first, then thoughtfully.

"Yes, all right. Why not?"

* * * * *

In the cave chamber where the sacklike, immobile green aliens sat on their tables, Ceros' beautiful, angelic voice rang out:

"It will soon be night. The time has come."

The featureless, marble-like tables split apart, sinking down into the floor to leave each creature squatting atop a narrow, skirt-shaped base of dark grey metal studded with black hemispheres. From above, blotting out the gentle beams of light, silver clamps lowered a second component towards them: a dully gleaming dome with a complex optical attachment, on top of a cylindrical metal grill around an impenetrable wire mesh, and an armoured belt sporting a computer plug-in system and an ugly, stubby energy weapon. With flawless simultaneity, the upper sections clicked and locked into place on the bases, entirely cutting the creatures off from view.

Ceros' base was slightly different to the others; with silver studs instead of black. He spoke again, but his voice was now amplified to a high-pitched, nerve-jangling electronic noise:

"Proceed to the settlement. All humans are to subjugated. Any who resist will be EXTERMINATED!"

[Soldeed]

"Daleks?"

Sitting beside Jasmine on the floor, the Doctor drew his feet up and clasped his hands around his knees.

"That's right."

They were on the upper storey of the power plant building, a circular glazed viewing platform overlooking the entire settlement. Strole, Kerrigan and fully a dozen armed guards stood clustered around the man and the girl who sat propped against the wall.

"The Daleks were destroyed," said Strole.

"Huh." The Doctor gave a bitter little laugh and a shrug of his shoulders. "If you say so."

Kerrigan and Strole exchanged glances.

"Weren't they?" asked Kerrigan. The Doctor looked up.

"The taskforce that invaded Earth in the twenty-first century was destroyed. But that's the thing about Daleks, they're like cockroaches. You can kill as many as you like but there are always more popping up from somewhere."

"I don't understand," Jasmine spoke up. "Even if the creatures in the cave are these Dalek things, there were only about thirty of them. What harm could they do? There are a thousand people here."

"But only about two hundred soldiers," the Doctor replied. As if retrieving a toy from a child he reached out and plucked the weapon from the hands of the nearest guard. Casually flipped it over to take a closer look. "And these popguns? Against Daleks?" He held it out dismissively. "Might as well use waterpistols."

The guard snatched the gun back and aimed it at the Doctor determinedly, glancing furtively around as if hoping no one would have noticed.

"Oh, this is absurd," Strole burst out. "Your story doesn't make sense, Doctor. Daleks are supposed to be lethal killing machines. Why would they have just sat there and let us treat them the way we did?"

The Doctor looked up at him with such derision that it was almost pity.

"Still don't see it, do you? It's a trap, Mr Strole. They tricked you. Daleks are good at killing people, yes, but they're quite limited physically, so they use a lot of slave labour. Skilled, intelligent slave labour if they can get it. And what have you done? You've transported nearly a thousand scientists and expert technicians to this forgotten mudball of a planet and offered them up to the Daleks on a plate. You know, a lot of men before you have been undone by their own arrogance and greed. Most don't get to take a thousand innocent people with them!" His voice had been gathering speed and volume as he spoke, and he stopped, gathered himself, and shook his head darkly. "Daleks are killers all right. It's easy to forget sometimes how crafty they can be."

Strole was boiling with silent anger as he listened, but as the Doctor's diatribe continued something else was creeping in: just a trace of worry.

"Why didn't you tell me? If this is true, why would you keep it a secret?"

"You'd have evacuated the entire colony on my say so, would you?" The Doctor took Strole's pause as an answer. "No, even if you did believe me all you'd have done would have been to send troops into the cave. The Daleks would have killed them and I'd have achieved nothing except to bring forward their attack." He looked out of the window at the vapour trail marking where the cargo carrier had taken off, taking with it the entire population of the base, minus the military and a handful of scientific specialists. "The only way I was going to make you do the right thing was to give you no choice."

"But at least after you sabotaged the power plant you could have told me why!"

"No. I knew you'd want to keep some scientists back to try and undo the damage, but I thought you'd let the soldiers go if you didn't think you were facing any kind of military threat. My mistake. I underestimated your paranoia."

The Doctor looked around the room.

"Any other questions?"

The silence was tangible. Strole was staring into nothing, lips moving soundlessly. The soldiers fidgeted, looking anxiously at one another for reassurance. Jasmine sat awkwardly, the only person in the room who had never heard the word "Dalek" but shyly afraid to ask just what was so terrible about them.

Kerrigan spoke up.

"If this is true, Doctor, then I have work to do. I'll organise the men to defend the perimeter."

The Doctor looked profoundly disinterested.

"Yes," he said. "If you like. Who knows, perhaps you'll slow them down a little. Take long enough dying to give someone else a chance to get to the shuttle." He looked over at Strole. "Unless of course you're ready to give the evacuation order."

Strole seemed to snap out of a trance, and lifted his head with a sneer.

"Abandon my colony on your say so, Doctor? As you so rightly guessed, I think not. I don't know what you're up to yet, but it'll take more than stories about extinct monsters to scare me off." He turned, and jabbed his finger into the face of one of the soldiers. "You. Stay here. Don't let these people leave. The rest of you, follow me."

He marched out and the troopers filed after him. All except Kerrigan who paused, looking anxiously after them, then down at the Doctor.

"Strole's wrong, isn't he?"

"Yes," said the Doctor simply. "But he's been wrong all along. You knew that."

Kerrigan nodded, withdrawing for a second into his own thoughts, then seemed unconsciously to take a step to follow the soldiers, as if attached to them by a length of elastic. He halted again.

"Jasmine. I hope we get a chance to talk."

"Yes," was all she could say.

He left.

The Doctor stood, ignoring the immediate levelling of their nervous guard's handgun, and leaned his palm against the window pane, gazing out, his face shadowed and set.

"Surely," Jasmine ventured tentatively, "It'll still be all right, won't it? I mean they'll have to evacuate soon anyway before the reactor explodes, and if the Daleks have waited all this time there's no reason to think they'll attack before then."

She thought at first he wasn't going to reply, but at last he murmured a response:

"Daleks don't feel pain. Not in the way we understand it, anyway. They'd have taken any amount of torture and not altered their plans. But the Dalek commander won't wait around now that Strole's started killing his crew. Their eyestalks give them far better night vision than humans. I imagine they're just waiting till sunset."

Jasmine stood up next to him, and together they watched the blaze of orange light against the clouds as the topmost rim of the sun slipped out of view behind the ridge.

[Soldeed]

Invisible in the utter blackness of a starless night, strung out five yards apart from one another in a single rank, twenty-nine Daleks glided soundlessly across the plain towards the bright lights of the colony. The sophisticated equipment packed into their eyestalks could make out every detail of the scene as if it were broad daylight. They were aware of every rock and hollow they passed over, and a quarter of a mile away they saw the tense face of every soldier awaiting them. In groups of half a dozen the men had taken up positions at street corners and on rooftops, weapons held close, exchanging talk and jokes with nervous bravado, still unsure what, if anything, they were about to face.

Hastily erected floodlights illuminated the desert two hundred metres beyond the perimeter of the buildings, and the Daleks slowed to a halt just beyond their range. The commander spoke, the distorted, cacophonous amplification of its voice audible throughout the colony:

"This settlement is now under the control of the Daleks. Surrender, and your lives will be spared. Resist, and you will be exterminated!"

The other Daleks chimed in, their chorus rising to a deafening volume:

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

The ancient battlecry had its effect: a visible tremor ran through the lines of soldiers as men flinched, licked dry lips and shrank back deeper into cover at a sound which seemed to drill into their very skulls. Then the Daleks opened fire.

Not at the men, but at the lights. The pinpoint accuracy of their built-in targeting systems sent streams of blue flame into the centre of the makeshift structures, reducing them in an instant to melting, burning wreckage, and the colony's defenders were forced to run and dodge simply to avoid being crushed by their own collapsing equipment. Then with the perimeter plunged into darkness but for the flickering light of the flames the Daleks moved in.

Dozens were killed in the first few seconds as Daleks coolly and unhurriedly selected their targets, the bodies incinerated instantly to greasy piles of ash, with nothing but a chunk of skull here, a few teeth there to prove that they had once been human. Those men who found the nerve to stand and shoot while their companions burned and died around them saw the metallic frames of their enemies briefly illuminated as the silver flares of their handguns rebounded from Dalek armour and hurtled away into the night. The flames grew and spread as the defensive line dissolved and blue fire tore chunks out of buildings and destroyed machinery. The surviving soldiers retreated, physically forced back by the intensity of heat from the inferno, and disbelievingly watched the Daleks follow them into the streets, their dome-shaped heads lit up bronze by the firelight, seemingly invulnerable as they moved steadily through the very heart of the flames.

The Doctor stood with arms folded at the window of the power plant's viewing platform, watching the scene, his face pinched and cold.

"This won't last long."

He turned and walked towards their sole guard, who instantly raised his gun to shoulder height. The Doctor halted, and contemplated the man for a moment, ignoring the gun barrel just inches from his face.

"Sir," he said, "You have a choice to make. You can go and join the battle, and fight and die with your friends, or you can head for the shuttlecraft, and live. But don't spend your last few precious minutes in this reality standing there pointing a gun at us because an idiot like Strole told you to."

The guard was a burly, square-faced man of about forty. He hesitated, stared out of the window at the red light of the flames, then back at the Doctor, then down at the gun in his hand. In an instant the decision was made and he turned and vanished down the stairs.

Jasmine tore her gaze from the vision of hell outside and ran up to the Doctor, clutching his arm to jolt him into action.

"What do we do now?"

He sighed wearily, rubbing the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

"There's nothing more to do. Those who are quick or clever enough will get to the shuttle and have a chance to escape. The others will be massacred. It's time to save ourselves."

"Good." She came round in front of him and found herself having to pull him along by the wrist to get him moving. "Let's go, then."

He let her drag him, and after a moment raised the motivation to run along with her down the steps and out into the deserted street, bathed in the yellow glow of illuminated orbs set into the walls of the buildings. Outdoors, the noise of gunfire sounded terrifyingly close now, and Jasmine realised it had spread out to the sides from the point of the Daleks' initial attack.

"They're splitting up," muttered the Doctor. "Aiming to cover the whole colony."

Jasmine gasped as, elongated by the street lights behind it, a hideous, unnatural shadow like nothing she had ever seen stretched its way into view against the wall of a nearby building. They ran, around the nearest corner and away, letting the battle recede into the background behind them. Then from somewhere there was a sharp, low booming sound and every light in the settlement snapped out.

Total darkness. Jasmine halted, turned this way and that, her head swimming as she stretched her eyes wide open and still could see nothing but inky, impenetrable black.

"It's all right." She felt the Doctor fumble at her wrist and then grasp her hand. "They must have hit the power hub. I know where we are."

She ran along with him, stumbling constantly in her inability to see her own feet, but seconds later there was somebody else there: she could hear laboured breathing, booted footsteps. Somebody blundered into her and she was knocked sideways, losing her grip on the Doctor's hand.

"Jasmine! Jasmine!"

She reached out blindly towards the sound of his voice.

"Doc..."

She was struck again, much harder this time by someone twice her size running full tilt into her, and she was flung bruisingly against the wall to slump to the ground and sprawl in the dust, all bearings lost. She sensed someone nearby.

"Doctor?"

The scene was suddenly illuminated by a painful, flaring blue light, and Jasmine found herself staring into the screaming face of a soldier as he was reduced to ashes before her eyes. Behind him, as his remains collapsed to the ground, in the instant before the light faded she had her first glimpse of a real live Dalek in all its faceless, armour-plated inhumanity.

Instinctively, Jasmine darted to the right, and a painful impact on her hip as she struck the corner of a building told her she had found an alleyway. She staggered along, arms spread out in attempt to feel her way along the walls with her fingertips, tense with the knowledge that at any instant the blue flame of the Dalek's gun could stream down after her and there would be no place to hide.

It didn't come. The sharp reports of the troopers' weapons were audible, followed by the whine of the Dalek returning fire. Jasmine stopped and leaned back against the wall panting for breath.

She was lost and alone in the dark with no possible means of finding the Doctor or of making her own way back to the Tardis. She swallowed back the first sob of despair, but then that effort too seemed futile. She buried her face in her hands as from all sides there closed in upon her the ongoing sounds of gunfire, explosions, and screams.

[Soldeed]

A line of weary, dishevelled, defeated men stood grim faced and silent in the dust of the open square at the centre of the colony, constantly guarded by lurking Daleks, weapons unwaveringly at the ready. Many had fought to the end, and when the sun rose again after a night that lasted just three hours, these thirty-two were all that were left. In the middle of the line, inches shorter than any of the others, stood Jasmine.

What now? She was dazed by the mayhem of the night, and by the endless succession of Dalek commands and threats. Monotonously she shuffled forward a step as another man was ordered through the door in front of which they were queuing. She was aware that it was the door to the largest of the many lab buildings in the settlement, and that the Daleks had brought down some bulky equipment from the cave on some kind of hovering vehicle, but what was actually going on in there she didn't like to contemplate. All she knew was that none of the men she had seen go through that door had yet reappeared, and there were now only eight in front of her in the line.

She watched three Daleks glide by in triangular formation and realised one was slightly different from those behind it. Silver studs instead of black. The leader, surely? Perhaps...

“Ceros!”

“Remain silent!” came the command instantly from one of the Dalek guards, its guttural electronic voice buzzing painfully in her ears.

But the Dalek commander had halted and turned, its eyestalk focussing directly on Jasmine’s face.

“That name is a fiction,” the mechanical voice ground out. “I am Leader, Shock Unit GA1738X.”

“Remember me?” she persevered. “I spoke to you yesterday? Back in the cave?”

“Yes,” came the reply. “You are an outside agent. You are not party to Max Strole’s activities.”

“That’s right!” Her voice rose in desperate hope. “Remember how we talked? How I… how I said I’d try to help you?”

“Yes.”

Faced with that single cold monosyllable, Jasmine faltered in her attempt to speak again and fell quiet, staring into the empty black hole of the creature’s eye. Seconds crawled by.

“This female is to be separated from the others,” the commander stated. “Place it in confinement in the communications centre. Guard it.”

“I obey.”

Jasmine sagged with relief as she was ushered from the queue by the commander's escort, but couldn't look in the eyes of the man who was forced to step forward and take her place in line. She hurried forward, following in the wake of the first Dalek, the rim of the second's base clipping her heels, and allowed herself to be shepherded along through a separate door into the building she had been queuing in front of. They brought her into an office, its drawers and cupboards hanging open, papers scattered about the floor in evidence of the occupant's hasty departure.

"Stand in the far corner," commanded one of her guards, and she wearily obeyed, ending up hemmed in by two heavy filing cabinets. The Daleks advanced on her.

"Er..." Jasmine looked nervously from one to the other of the identical creatures, her eyes flickering down to the weapons trained unwaveringly upon her. "Could I sit on that chair over there? I've been standing up for hours."

"Remain silent."

She did so, for several minutes, while the Daleks stood motionless just three feet away, keeping her firmly cornered. Eventually she could stand the lifeless gaze of their eyestalks no longer.

"Will you kill me if I just sit down on the floor here?"

"Remain silent."

"Yes. Um. But, is that a no?"

"If you speak again, you will be exterminated."

Jasmine leaned back against the wall in despair. She had no idea what they would do if she failed to keep standing, but she had had no sleep, and nothing to eat since the previous day, and her legs felt as if they were wasting away by the second. Before long, she felt, she would have no choice but to risk it.

There was a clink, in the far corner of the room. Through the narrow gap between her captors, Jasmine could see what looked like a small bronze coin bouncing along the floor.

The Daleks reacted like rattlesnakes. It took them a fraction of a second to wheel and unleash a stream of fire which annihilated both the coin and that entire corner of the room. Pressing herself as far back into the corner as physically possible from the wave of blistering heat that washed back at her, Jasmine was startled to find a human hand appear in front of her face.

She grabbed it. What else could she do? A second hand seized her wrist and she was plucked up from the floor through a square hole in the low ceiling. She drew her legs up after her and found herself deposited on a narrow metal girder while one of the hands disengaged and, even as the roar of Dalek gunfire faded, slipped a square metal plate neatly across the hole through which she had just been pulled.

In the half light of this cramped space, the Doctor's face was just about visible, his finger pressed to his lips.

"Shh."

Jasmine needed no encouragement. She crouched motionless, holding her breath, and watched through the pinholes in the ceiling below as the Daleks turned to face the empty corner where she had been seconds before. Their eyestalks twitched urgently from side to side.

"The prisoner has escaped!"

"It must be recaptured! It must be exterminated!"

They circled the room in a fruitless hunt for her, and then hurtled out through the door, splitting up to search each way down the main corridor.

"Ha!" The Doctor looked smug. "They're going to have some explaining to do."

Jasmine felt a warm pulse in her chest as she threw her arms round his neck, dizzy with gratitude. He briefly pressed his palm against her back in return before taking her wrists and disentangling her.

"All right, settle down. We still have an excellent chance of dying here."

She drew a deep breath and took in her surroundings. This gloomy space in the roof looked as if it spread across the entire area of the building, and was densely packed with a tangle of pipes and cables, the flimsy network of metal plates which made up the ceiling of the rooms below criss-crossed with steel girders like the one on which she was now balancing.

"For obvious reasons," the Doctor was saying, "The last place the Daleks would look. Sorry about last night. I really tried to find you again, but it got to the point where standing in the middle of the road shouting your name wasn't a sensible option."

"I know." Jasmine shook her head as if she could dislodge the memory. "I got lost."

"Well, then. Let's see how it comes out. This way. Keep your feet on the girders."

They crawled along a little way, but froze, and flattened themselves to the floor when a metallic clunk echoed out of the shadows. A square column of light struck upwards from one of the rooms below as one of the ceiling plates was removed.

"Must be a human," whispered Jasmine. "A Dalek could never get up here. Perhaps someone else has escaped."

The Doctor's violent fanning gesture could equally have meant either stay down, or be quiet. Jasmine did both, and watched an unmistakeably human figure, silhouetted against the light still pouring up from the room below, balance its way forward across the girders, bending at the waist to fit into the confined space. She had been right, she saw as he drew closer. She recognised the standard trooper's grey jumpsuit. He was even still carrying his gun. But this one was wearing a close fitting black helmet, his eyes obscured by a reflective visor, and he was coming straight at them.

[Soldeed]

The helmeted man was on the verge of stumbling across them when in an explosion of movement the Doctor sprang from hiding, seized the gun and dragged it from his grasp. The reaction was instantaneous. One gloved hand clamped over the barrel of the gun, the other around the Doctor's throat and the two of them fell struggling into a tangled batch of multicoloured wires. Jasmine hesitated, but the man behind the visor was heavily built, with shoulders like a gorilla, and soon grappled his way on top, his thumb questing for the Doctor's windpipe.

She cast about her, and seized a discarded length of metal pipe. It wasn't heavy, but the closest thing to a weapon available. Biting her lip, she closed her eyes and with a wild swipe felt it connect, glancing harmlessly off the man's helmet, the vibration rattling her more than it did him.

The helmet, then. She dropped the pipe to one side, and as the pinned Doctor gritted his teeth at the onset of asphyxiation, she grabbed on just above the man's ears, pulled, felt a deadening resistance, dragged with all her strength, and then stumbled back to clutch desperately for the support of the nearest cable, the helmet still clutched in one hand.

The man reared up, hand pressed against his temple and mouth gaping open, then sank slowly to his knees and rolled over, curled like a foetus, glassy eyes seeming to stare at her accusingly.

"Oh, God," she moaned, chills rippling through her. "What have I done now?"

"It's all right," said the Doctor hoarsely, regaining his feet while rubbing his bruised throat. "He was dead already."

He stepped carefully past the fallen soldier, who drooled and pawed at the floor like a baby, and took the helmet from Jasmine, flipping it over to show her the four inch needles on the inside, bloodied and bent where she had torn them free from the man's skull.

"He's been converted to what's known as a Roboman. The process leaves reflexes like blinking and breathing intact, but kills the higher thought centres of the brain and replaces them with simple instructions relayed via the helmet. They're effectively animated corpses." His face twisted bitterly as he looked down at the helmet, and in a sudden, violent move he flung the thing clattering away into the darkness. He hissed out the word: "Daleks!"

Jasmine glanced around anxiously, aware of the noise they had just made, but for now the poor, brain-dead trooper was their only company. The Doctor led the way through the tangle of machinery to a square hatch in the roof, which he knocked open with the heel of his palm. The weak, brownish sunlight of this planet came as a relief.

"One moment," he said quietly. "We just need a little diversion."

He set to work knotting together a selection of different cables, holding up each one as he grabbed it and turning it this way and that before deciding on its use. Jasmine moved back to give him room, and found herself looking down through the pinholes in the ceiling plates under their feet. There was something moving down there, and she knelt to place her eye close up to the holes.

It was a laboratory, much like the ones she had seen elsewhere on the base, but she also recognised the machine the Daleks had brought down from the cave. It was an arch of gleaming steel, seven feet high, encrusted with protruding spikes, wheels and clamps. An evil looking thing. Also in the room were two more Robomen and three Daleks. As she watched, the door slid open and, prompted by another Dalek which remained outside, in walked Max Strole.

He looked tired, his hair sticking up in tufts, and one side of his suit was thick with grime as if he had fallen heavily in the dirt, but he carried himself straight and looked around the room with a challenge in his eye.

"Are you in charge here?" he barked at the nearest Dalek.

The machine creature wheeled to face him.

"Step into the arch."

"This attack on a peaceful settlement is an act of war against the Terran Republic. In flagrant violation of all interplanetary treaties and galactic law. I demand the immediate release of myself and my men, I demand full compensation for this terrorist outrage, I demand..."

"Step into the arch or you will be exterminated."

Strole paused, looking furious at the Daleks' obduracy as one by one they levelled their weapons.

"I will accede to your request, but I warn you that any disrespect shown to my person will have serious consequences."

He walked stiffly over to the arch, turned, and took a step back so that he was between the two upright supports, facing out into the room and looking round suspiciously at the contraption now looming above his head.

Two clamps on stiff metal rods sprang out from either side and snapped shut about his throat, locking him into place.

"What?" Strole roared, struggling. "How dare you? Release me at once!"

The Daleks ignored him. One of them had plugged itself into the arch's control box via the hemispherical attachment on the end of its metal arm:

"Conversion process commencing," it reported.

Jasmine gasped, wanting to look away, but not doing so, as square metal plates emerged from the sides of the arch on multiple flexible steel supports and moved in to press against the sides of Strole's head, trapping it immoveably in position. The muscles of his jaw shifted and bulged with the effort as he continued to talk.

"Shtop." His words were muffled by the remorseless pressure. "Shtop immediately."

Gleaming, slender pins on the outside of the plates began to revolve, and then to sink millimetre by millimetre through the plates themselves, and on into the victim's skull. Strole's scream penetrated every fibre of Jasmine's consciousness. Her knuckles whitened, her lips stretched and parted, her muscles locked as if she were the one being tortured. The process was not quick. The pins made their slow, careful progress into the man's brain, and still he screamed and screamed and screamed.

The Doctor touched Jasmine on the shoulder.

"Nothing we can do," he whispered. "Time to go."

[Soldeed]

The Doctor and Jasmine scrambled up through the hatch and onto the roof.

"This way."

He started towards the edge of the building. Jasmine hovered where she was, looking towards the open square in which she had recently been penned up with the other prisoners.

"The other soldiers..."

He turned.

"I know. But sometimes you just can't save everyone. And we're running out of time now."

"There were still about thirty of them down there."

"Yes. Which means about a hundred and seventy dead so far. Believe me, I hadn't lost count."

He gave her no time, but with a fast run up leaped across the six foot chasm of the alleyway below to the roof of the next building. Jasmine could do nothing but follow. They repeated this in a zigzag pattern until they were almost at the perimeter of the settlement, blocked by broad roadways on either side.

"Now what?" she asked. The Doctor held up his hand.

"Just a second."

There was an ear-splitting crash from behind them, and Jasmine whirled to see a thick column of smoke rising above the building from which they had just escaped.

"What was that?"

"Nothing, it just means those cables I knotted together have finally melted through. It's only noise and smoke but it should get the Daleks scurrying over there. Meanwhile..."

Casually, he jumped over the side of the building and vanished from view. Jasmine rushed to see what had become of him and found him standing on the roof of one of the chunky six-wheeled vehicles she had seen the previous day rolling through the streets of the colony.

"... We can escape in comfort."

* * * * *

"Good thing, too," the Doctor was saying as they rolled to a halt at the top of the slope where they had left the Tardis. "The Daleks chose their spot carefully. Flat terrain and a steady upwards slope in all directions. They'd catch up with anyone trying to escape on foot in very quick time."

He switched off the engine and they clambered out. The Doctor glanced at his chunky steel wristhingych.

"Look at that. Safe, and with several minutes to spare. There's a novelty."

Walking up to the Tardis door, he pushed his hand into his coat pocket and his face grew still. Jasmine spent a few moments watching him scrabble in that pocket, then in others, before drawing the key from her own pocket.

"Oh." The Doctor glared at her sourly, and plucked the key from her fingers. "Right."

He opened the door, and they both walked tiredly into the comforting hum and bright light of the console room.

"Sorry your first trip wasn't more fun," the Doctor said, starting to circle the console and flick switches. Jasmine's attention turned to the image of the doomed colony on the monitor. "How about this time we head somewhere specific? The Eye of Orion, perhaps. Nothing terrible happened last time I was there, although..."

"There's someone out there."

The Doctor's head snapped up to stare at the corner of the screen as indicated by Jasmine's pointing finger. The antlike figure of a man was clearly visible scrambling up the slope towards them.

"Roboman?" he murmured. "Seems unlikely, on his own, this far out from the control centre. Well, we'll see."

He twisted a dial, and the display zoomed in on the figure. Jasmine felt she knew who it was long before his weary, desperate face came into focus on the screen.

"Kerrigan."

For a long moment the Doctor's eyes didn't leave the screen. Then he checked his watch again.

"I think he's just about going to make it. They must have spotted the Tardis yesterday and now he's realised it's his only hope of a way out. Jasmine, stand by the door control. It's that one there. I'll dematerialise as soon as he's inside."

Jasmine circled to place her hand on the red lever as instructed, always watching Kerrigan struggling his way towards them. She blinked as the display moved away from him, panning left to sweep across the landscape.

"Just checking," the Doctor said.

The screen showed vast expanses of empty dust, and the crumbling, desolate rim of the crater in which the colony stood. It was when the view shifted to the endless plateau beyond that they both tensed. The sole outstanding object in that whole wilderness, the unmistakable carapace of a lone Dalek gliding inexorably towards them.

It was making fast headway. The Doctor switched the monitor back to Kerrigan, then back to the Dalek, gauging the progress of each of them. Jasmine felt like rats were gnawing at her insides.

"He's not going to make it, is he?"

The Doctor switched the screen back and forth once more, watching with narrowed eyes.

"No."

In magnification, the Dalek now seemed to be almost upon them. Suddenly it dawned on Jasmine that it was not one of the regular Daleks. It had silver studs in its armour, not black.

"Ceros!"

The Doctor turned.

"What?"

"It's Ceros. The Dalek commander."

"Oh." He shrugged. "Well, Dalek officers do their own dirty work."

Jasmine was thinking fast.

"Listen, Kerrigan's almost here now. If I could just distract the Dalek for a few moments..."

His attention had been drifting back to the screen, but at this he looked round sharply.

"Whatever you're thinking, forget it. You're not going back out. It would kill you."

"I don't think he will. You don't understand. I told him I'd help when he was being tortured back in the cave and I think he feels something because of that. Why else would he have taken me out of the queue for that machine at the base?"

"Did it know you were with me?"

"Of course not. How could he?"

"Well, it'll have had some ulterior motive." The Doctor closed his eyes for a moment, then leaned forward, palms on the console, and spoke steadily. "Look, I know you're desperate for some way to help. I understand. But Daleks are evil. You can't appeal to their better nature because they haven't got one. If you go out there, it will certainly kill you."

"But..." Half remembered lessons in life from a softly spoken old man returned to her. "But you told me no one's really evil through and through! You told me where there's intelligence there's the chance of compassion."

"I never for one moment thought you'd ever have to meet a Dalek!" His voice rose painfully. "They're not natural creatures. They were genetically engineered to be incapable of compassion or any other emotion except hatred. You could say it's not their fault. They didn't ask to have their DNA turned inside out by a megalomaniac and they live a wretched, meaningless existence because of it. The fact remains, they cannot be reasoned with and, let me say this one more time, if you go out there it will kill you."

Jasmine looked up at the screen, the zoom focus now showing a closeup of Kerrigan's drained, exhausted face. She looked down defeatedly, and the Doctor relaxed.

She pushed the lever and bolted out through the opening doors, pursued by the Doctor's hysterical, panic-stricken cry:

"Jasmine, NO!"

[Soldeed]

Holding up her hand to protect her eyes from the monotonous, dust-filled wind blowing across the plain, Jasmine skidded to a halt at the very edge of the great three mile crater and looked around hastily to get her bearings. Kerrigan must have glimpsed the roof of the Tardis, because he had accelerated and was gasping his way up the final yards of the slope at top speed. A few more seconds were all he needed. But the Dalek commander was ready and waiting on the scene. Jasmine turned to face it, feeling as if every bone in her body had turned to water, and looked directly into its cold, glass eye.

"Ceros?" She used the name by which she had heard the naked, defenceless, seemingly gentle creature addressed when she first encountered it back in the cave. "Ceros, it's me. Jasmine. You remember, don't you?"

The thing didn't so much as pause, the twitch of its gun was the only warning she got, and as she leaped aside, over the lip of the crater, a stream of lethal energy coursed through the spot where she had been standing an instant before. Jasmine tumbled over in the dust, her legs giving way and her feet twisting beneath her, and crashed painfully to a halt lying awkwardly on her side, facing down the slope.

She was aware of Kerrigan running up to her... Straight past, ducking frantically as he sprinted towards the Tardis. She turned her head in time to see the young captain's body dissolving in a storm of blue fire from the Dalek's gun, the charred remains of his bones collapsing to the ground to mingle with the dust. Then the Dalek itself came gliding into view at the crater's edge, its gun and eyestalk both focussed on her.

So this was it. The thought flashed across her mind that she had killed herself through her own idiocy.

There was a sharp clatter as the Doctor's full weight hurtled into the back of the Dalek. It barely shifted under the impact, but when he wrapped his hands over its single mechanical eye it lurched backwards, its voice blaring out in high pitched agitation:

"Under attack! Vision impaired! Assistance required! Repeat, assistance required!"

Teeth clenched, the Doctor clung on like a limpet as the creature span and circled, trying to shake him off.

"Jasmine!" he shouted. "Get back inside!"

Clambering up to her feet, she hesitated, every instinct roaring at her to run instead to his aid, and he spat out his next command like venom.

"Do as I say!"

She ran, into the Tardis and to safety. An instant later the Dalek paused, calculated, then wheeled and reversed with bone-jarring force into the Tardis itself. Winded, the Doctor slumped helplessly to the ground, while the Dalek turned and backed off, levelling its gun.

"You are the Doctor. You will be exterminated."

But the Doctor was checking his watch, and looked up with a relieved grin.

"Not this time."

He flung up his arm to cover his eyes as the entire scene was bathed in a white light so intense that it blotted out everything else. Protected by a complex system of computerised filters, the Dalek's eyestalk swivelled to stare at the sight of the entire colony being consumed in a detonation of pure energy from the overloading power plant. Instantly it switched back to the Doctor, and found itself looking at an empty space. The Tardis door clunked shut.

Frenzied, the Dalek commander fired blast after blast, blue flame spattering harmlessly against the time machine's indestructible side, then blazing aimlessly away across the wilderness as the police box groaned and wheezed its way out of existence. A second later, in a surging black duststorm with a roar like a thousand rumbles of thunder, the shockwave struck, and scorched the landscape clean of Daleks and every other living thing.

* * * * *

The Doctor watched the steady rise and fall of the control column and leaned forward over the console, releasing a long, slow exhalation of pent up tension. He shook his head with a rueful smile.

"You know, I have a feeling most of my previous incarnations were braver than this."

No response, and he turned to look at Jasmine, sitting huddled on the floor. Her white, strained face pointed fixedly at her feet.

"I'm sorry," she croaked. "I'm so sorry. I should have listened to you. I almost got you killed."

He seemed about to make some light response, then frowned, walked over, and squatted down in front of her. He lifted her chin on the curled knuckle of his right hand so that she found herself looking into his eyes.

"I love you for trying, Jasmine."

The Doctor stood, and walked from the room.

END

[armadillozenith]

Another excellent tale. I wasn't sure which of Jasmine or Kerrigan would survive to be the Doctor's companion. The Daleks were chilling.

Graham