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THE HISTORY OF THE DALEKS
The following is from "The Official Doctor Who and the Daleks Book"
by John Peel and Terry Nation (the original creator of the Daleks)
and is an attempt to put all the Dalek stories of the "Doctor Who"
show into some kind of logical continuity.
All Dalek stories are covered here with the exception of the last
one, "Remembrance of the Daleks", which had not been aired at the
time this book was written.
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The home world of the Daleks is the planet Skaro, the twelfth planet of the
solar system not too far from our own. This small world has a single
continental body, which covers just over a third of its surface. Small islands
and chains of islands dot the rest of the planet, allowing some strange forms
of life to proliferate in isolation. Its humanoid race evolved on the main
continent, and after the normal rise of civilization, the race split into two
separate groups.
Across the rough center of the single continent is a large range of
mountains, the Drammankin Range -- no real barrier to a technologically
sophisticated people, but to the Stone Age tribes of Skaro, virtually
impassable. For whatever reasons -- long lost in those legendary days -- the
humaniods of Skaro split, and one faction undertook the long and dangerous trek
across the mountains to be on their own on the farther end of the continent.
The two groups then grew over the next thousand years in isolation, each
knowing of the other but having no contact whatsoever.
The tribes to the west became known as the Thals. Those to the east were
initially known as the Dals. After the move, they decided to change their
tribal name so that it was dissimilar to that of the Thals. They named
themselves after the first letter of their joint alphabet; Kaled. Naturally,
the Thals resisted calling them this for as long as possible, since they
realized that the Dals were trying to less-than-subtly assert their primacy.
Each group moved on through farming and agriculture until they had built
their first cities; they then began the rise to advanced technology. Thal
histories went back almost a half a million years between the prehistory of the
race and the war that almost destroyed the planet. Contacts between the two
races were not frequent, and the Kaleds disliked even these few occasions.
Their legends told that their ancestors had crossed the mountains to escape
persecution, and they resented the Thals having done this to them. The Thals'
legends, on the other hand, said that the Kaleds had disagreed with the tribal
policies and when they were outnumbered and outvoted, had left to form their
own community where they could do as they pleased. They were therefore quite
ready to accept the Kaleds back to union -- though, naturally, only when the
Kaleds admitted that the Thals were in the right.
The two sides grew apart emotionally and intellectually even as they grew
closer geographicvally and technologically. Neither side could allow the other
to have superiority, afraid that in such a case they would be overrun. As each
side developed atomic power, missiles, and poison gas, the other seemed to gain
the same knowledge at roughly the same time. Espionage was rife, since it was
impossible to tell Thals from Kaleds in any but ideological ways. As the
technological advances continued, mutual suspicions grew, and the state of poor
political harmony between the two peoples broke down even further, until an
all-out war seemed inevitable.
It was at this point that a Kaled scientist came to prominence. His name
was Davros, and he was considered perhaps the foremost intellect of the
millenium. His grip of cybernetics, microsurgery and genetic engineering
seemed unequalled. His work on grafting mechanical and biological units
together was certainly the work of genius. His dedication to research was
unparalleled, but he was rumored to be rather too intense and obsessed.
Nonetheless, the Kaled leadership could not afford to ignore his brilliance,
since his new methods promised ways of gaining superiority over the Thals.
Accordingly, he had to be kept isolated from spying activities, and allowed to
work at his own pace in the company of similar-minded scientists.
The Kaled government decided to build a bunker, hidden from their own
people -- and, hopefully, safe from the Thals. The Kaled capital lay on the
plains below the mountain range, in the center of a large forest, but the
bunker was built further north, closer to the sea. Here the mountains were
lower, but the bedrock was solid. The government decided that the bunker could
double as a point of safety for itself, should the city be a target of a Thal
attack. The lower levels, running like warrens through the solid rock, became
the province of the scientific corps, while the upper levels were to be the
home of the new government.
The bunker was actually a well-kept secret despite the Thal spies who
attempted to ferret out what was transpiring there. The Thal government,
worried that the Kaleds might be making advances undreamed of, redoubled their
efforts to penetrate the bunker. In the meantime, they began construction of a
similar one of their own, an equally well-kept secret. They had a rough idea
of where the Kaled emplacement was, and their own bunker, rather ironically,
was just a few miles away over a small range of mountains.
One Thal operative finally managed to get into the Kaled bunker. Once
inside, he realized just how effective the Kaled war effort was proceeding, and
he saw that the frontiers of science and technology were being pushed back at a
terrific rate by Davros. The bitter, obsessed scientist was working hard,
pushing hard, and firing up his staff with both resentment of his moods and
respect for his incredible intellect. Davros had originated genetic research
aimed at taking some of Skaro's seas' plentiful aquatic creatures and adapting
them to carry explosives to Thal targets. He had augmented their intelligence,
given them new sense, and heightened their endurance. They would be
formindable weapons should a war occur. Davros had pioneered work in
cybernetics, replacing defective or destroyed body parts with mechanical and
electronic equivalents -- most of which were superior to their natural
counterparts. He had even begun work on laser technology, using ruby crystals
to generate beams of terrifying potential.
The spy knew that should Davros continue, the Thals would be swiftly
outclassed in the impending combat. He therefore sabotaged one of Davros's
experiments, which exploded when the scientist was operating on it. The head
of Security apprehended the agent, and, using sophisticated mind-ripping
techniques, soon obtained a filmed confession of guilt, including the fact that
the man was an agent of the Thal government. This was the final spark that
flamed the war. The Kaleds were furious over the infiltration and assasination
attempt; the Thals were embarassed by the discovery and destruction of their
agent. They were also desperately afraid because of the spy's final messages,
which indicated that the Kaleds were ahead in weaponry and research. Both
sides attacked almost simultaneously using their latest weapons -- neutron
bombs.
The capital cities were instantly rendered lifeless. The blasts' terrific
heat melted buildings in the centers of the cities, yet left the outer suburbs
standing. The forest near the Kaled sapital perished and petrified. All
living creatures were slain for almost a hundred miles. As the clouds cleared,
destruction and death were all about both cities. Neither side had won the
first engagement, and both had utilized their only neutron bombs in the effort.
The governments had retreated to their respective bunkers, where they could
be safe for the time being. Both possessed a small number of atomic weapons,
but had also evolved the defense against such weapons -- a type of shie;ding
that could be raised above the bunkers. Two domes were formed into which
numerous refugees fled. Shanty-town dwellings sprang up and the unwinnable war
continued. Eventually even the atomic weapons were used up, and the fighting
went on with tanks, machine guns, poison gas and anything else that could be
found. Such was the pace of the war that neither side had the time to excavate
for fresh materials. As the spare parts or ammunition for a weapon wore out or
ran out, it was discarded and fresh, less sophisticated arms were employed.
Neither side considered surrender.
The assasination attmept on Davros had not succeeded. He had been left
almost dead: one arm, both legs, part of his chest, his eyes, and a part of his
skull had been crushed in the explosion. However, his team had instantly
placed him on one of his own life-support systems, hooking him directly into
the machinery. Davros was alive, and his condition stabalized. To save him
the surgeons cut away the lower portion of his body, and the crippled arm. He
was grafted onto a mobility unit he had helped to design that could be
controlled mentally; this connected to his brain. In the chair portion were
placed two separate life-support systems. One was controlled by his own will
and the second was a backup system in case he should ever be rendered
insensate. The secondary unit could not keep him mobile, but it could maintain
the basic bodily functions until Davros could be revived.
To offset the loss of his normal senses, various mechanical devices were
fitted into the chair and Davros himself as implants. A small phto-electric
eye was placed in the center of his forhead, replacing his two damaged eyes.
Though his vision was not as fine as beforem since it was no longer
stereoscopic, it was augmented. Davros could see into infrared and
ultraviolet, making his sight more acute in darkness and bright light. His
detroyed larynx was replaced with an electronic analogue; though his voice was
mechanical he could still speak. His sense of touch could not be directly
replaced, but small units in his chair "bumps" served as radar sensors to
enable him to avoid objects and move about freely. His own skin had been
damaged by the corrosive chemicals and was not mostly discolored and patchy.
Davros was alive, but he was not as he had been. There was some worry that
the accident -- or even the solution -- might have had vast emotional impact on
his butter but brilliant mind. If this was so, Davros made no mention of it.
Instead, he reiterated his desire to return to the work of winning the war for
the Kaleds, and promised breakthroughs compared to which all previous
scientific advances would be nothing. With the war dragging on, the Kaled
government agreed, and assigned him a special guard. Over the years, a number
of such security commanders kept him safe, though none as fanatically as the
final one, Nyder.
Davros had changed in ways deeper and worse that anyone could have
suspected. As he had hovered between life and death his mind had tumbled from
sanity. He was convinced that he had been almost killed because of the Kaled
government's failure to adequately protect him; sometimes he even wondered if
they were so afraid of him and his brilliance that they had engineered the
attempt themselves. At any rate, he felt that he now owed them no allegiance
whatsoever. At best they were incompetant fools; at worse, conniving would-be
assasins. Davros had, while injured, seen what he must do: the Kaleds must be
reborn. Only he could accomplish this.
In his studies, Davros had noticed that not all forms of life that had been
irradiated by the fallout had died. Some had mutated. What he had been
attempting in his laboratory in a small way, nature was performing out on the
blasted surface of Skaro on a larger scale. Most of the resulting mutations
were so hideously deformed that they died out -- but some of them not only
survived, they thrived. Davros had a number of these transferred to his own
study center deep in the warrens of the bunker. He traced the genetic drift
and the changes, but what he wanted most of all was to see the effects upon
Kaleds and Thals.
Random scanning of the old capital city showed Davros that it was no longer
entirely dead. The metal walkways and buildings now housed some of the mutant
creatures. Some were mutated animals but many were mutated men crawling back
to life as best they could in an environment that they remembered from better
days. These Kaled mutations were of a variety of forms, and they were exactly
what Davros required. The city was no longer any more dangerous than the rest
of the surface, and he and Nyder managed to travel there without being
observed. Davros found that his old laboratory was still relatively intact
and, after he had restored it, he captured some of the mutant Kaleds with
Nyder's willing help. These he experimented upon and dissected, leaving them
either dead or to fend for themselves however they could.
He soon learned that the forces of mutation working on the Kaleds were not
entirely random. Radiation was changing the genetic pattern, and it would tend
to produce a stable end result within a couple of centuries at the most. The
end form would be small and wizened, totally unlike the Kaled form, and it
would have claws instead of hands. But it would be stable, and it might be
able to survive in the radiation-scarred world it would inherit. Davros was
fascinated, and began to design a mobility unit for one of these mutations.
Since they were clearly no longer Kaleds, he termed them "Daleks". This was a
clear choice for him, since that was the final letter of the alphabet. "Kaled"
had been a claim of primacy on the part of the Dal peoples; "Dalek" was a claim
of completion from Davros for his creations. To him, they were the ultimate
life-form, and the choice of their name seemed obvious.
Using whatever resources he could in the old capital, he built his
prototype design. It was based on his own mobility chair, with life-support
systems built in. It could be controlled by the creature within the casing,
and its senses were, like his own, augmented. The same sensor discs that his
chair used served as prototypes for those of the Dalek machines. A specialized
iris and lens system provided them with vision. A sucker-stick type of arm
would give them the ability to hold and use materials. For armament, they used
a variation of his own ruby laser-beam projections.
The end result of this work pleased Davros immensely. The Daleks he had
created resembled -- in a twisted way -- the children he could never have.
They were his creation, the fruits of his genuis, and the inheritors of his
vision of the future. These primitave casings were simply the beginning as far
as he was concerned. Since the city was almost dead, it had very little power
available. Davros had been forced to use simple static electricity to power
these casings, with the Daleks moving on a single large roller that acted as
pickup for the power with which he electrified the floors. It was primitave
but it served for the moment, and that was all that mattered. Once he was back
in the bunker, he aimed to refine the design, adding an small internal power
pack and external solar-powered cells to make the machines independant.
This had all been conducted in utmost secrecy, because Davros was not
insane enough to think that the Kaleds would approve of his experimentation.
Now that the preliminary work had been done, he abandoned the city and returned
to the dome and bunker to work in earnest on the creation of his Daleks. With
the added resources of the bunker, he could make far more sophisticated
fighting machines, and also work on creating his Dalek beings from embryos
instead of waiting for natural causes, which would take decades. He was able
to begin this work, convincing the Kaled rulers that he was breeding them the
ultimate fighting machines that would enable them to win the war. In fact, he
was working toward his own ends, subtly changing the genetic makeup of the
embryos he had fertilized, eliminating what he considered to be weaknesses in
the Daleks -- emotions such as pity, compassion, love and mercy. His ultimate
race would inherit the universe, and needed to think of no others. He bred
into them a fierce loyalty to their own species and taught them contempt of all
others -- including the Kaled race from which they had sprung.
Davros neither knew nor cared what would happend to those early Daleks he
had created and then left in the old capital city. His mind was on other
matters, and he simply left the shells and his hasty notes within the depths of
his old laboratory, unaware of what the future would hold for them...
Once he was back in the bunker, Davros began work on his travel machines.
These would be far more sophisticated versions of the Dalek casings he had
created in the old city. The new casings (termed the Mark 3 -- his own being
Mark 1, and his initial Dalek designs Mark 2) worked with several different
power sources, allowing them greater mobility and not restricting them to the
static electrical power their prototypes used. A ring of solar cells was
constructed about the midsection of the casing. In cases of need, there would
be a battery pack inside the casing. An optional addition -- useful for
overcast areas -- was a small dish that could be attached to the back of the
Dalek to collect broadcast power.
Davros used chemical agents to change Kaled embryos into Daleks. Though a
number of scientific elite disagreed with what he was doing, they could not
openly attack his policies. Notable among them was one of the chief
researchers, Ronson, who believed that Davros was creating monsters utterly
devoid on conscience.
But Davros was not alone in his vision. The Time Lords of Gallifrey had
also seen the potential within the Daleks. With their own methods of scanning
time and space, they saw the danger that the embryonic Daleks could wreak.
They felt that this was too great a threat to intelligent life, and elected to
use their rather reluctant agent the Doctor to stop the creatures' development.
"We forsee a time," their spokesman informed the Doctor, "when [the Daleks]
will have destroyed all other life-forms and become the dominant creature in
the universe... we'd like you to return to Skaro at a point in time before the
Daleks evolved... [to avert their creation] or affect their genetic development
so that the evolve into less-aggressive creatures." This was a challenge that
the Doctor could not ignore. Despite the fact that this was a point at which
the Daleks were being created, he had met and battled them many times previous
to this in his own tortuous existence in the time stream.
This was the critical stage in the Thousand Year War. In fact, the war
itself had only lasted a quarter of that length of time, but the politicians
liked the ring of "Thousand Years". It enabled them to glorify their struggle
into epic proportions -- as if a mere 250 years of warfare had not done enough
damage! Both sides were ludicrously short of soldiers and materials by now,
fielding armies that consisted of young men, hardly more than boys for the most
part. The armies were both very badly underequipped and overworked. The four
miles that separated the Kaled and Thal strongholds were wormed through with
trenches. Poison gas floated through the polluted air and silences were broken
by occasional barrages of shells. If war is hell, then Skaro had become an
outlying region of the netherworld.
Despised and slain by both sides were the Mutos. There were creatures once
human, now badly mutated by the decades of chemical and radioactive pollution
that had impregnanted the planet. Some looked almost normal; others were
undergoing bizarre and repulsive changes. Nyder stated the official line when
he claimed that killing them was right: "We must keep the Kaled race pure."
This was, of course, ridiculous, since Nyder was assisting Davros to mutate the
Kaled into its final form anyway! Still, politics and logic are not often too
compatible, and no one really worried about the matter. They simply killed the
Mutos when they could. The Mutos favored neither side and simply avoided all
fighting whenever possible. They spent most of their time scavenging for
anything they could to eat or to make their wretched lot slightly more
comfortable.
The Kaled government knew that matters were bad, but they were limited in
what they could do. The Kaled people would never accept peace before the Thals
were destroyed. Mogran, the leader of the government, was forced to support
Davros and the scientific elite, believing them to be his people's only chance
of winning the war. If matters were a trifle irregular, they could be
overlooked. Mogran was fighting a war in which his chief general -- Ravon --
was in his early twenties...
Then Ronson managed to sneak a message from the bunker to Mogran, thanks to
the Doctor. It detailed accusations against Davros that claimed that the chief
scientific genius on the planet was not actually working to end the war, but to
create mutated forms of the Kaled race. Mogran called a meeting of those in
the council who were less than worshippers of Davros. Together they agreed to
an investigation of what was actually transpiring below their feet, and issued
an order to Davros to cease his work until this investigation could clear or
condemn him. Davros, though furious inside, kept his temper and agreed to
these insufferable terms, in order to buy himself the time that he needed.
His initial trials with the Daleks were perfect. They were totally under
his control, and a force of twenty was being produced. To Davros's delight,
the Dalek creature had identified the Doctor as an alien, and its response had
been the desire to slay the non-Dalek. The Daleks were everything Davros had
worked for, and now those fools in his government aimed to stop him and to
close down the production of his offspring. Davros had absolutely no intention
of cooperating with Mogran and his weak-spined followers. If they were to
learn the truth about what he was doing, Davros was certain they would
terminate the Dalek project. He knew that even some of his scientific elite --
many of whom he had trained and helped -- did not approve.
It was time for the drastic steps that he had long anticipated. It was
time for the Kaled race to die so that the Daleks might live.
The Kaleds had designed rockets using distrionic explosives; Davros had
developed a coating for the Kaled dome that would withstand the distrionic
attack. The Kaled spies reported that there was a final effort by the Thals to
build one last distrionic missile to attack the Kaled city. The Kaled
government knew that nothing could come of this attack, and was not worried.
It did, however, give Davros the leverage that he needed. With the aid of only
the obsequious Nyder -- the one person Davros trusted -- Davros approached the
Thals with a staggering offer: a method to nullify the protection of the Kaled
dome so that the Thals could destroy Davros's own people. "My only concern is
for peace," he lied. "An end to thge carnage that has virtually destroyed both
of our races." Wanting to believe this, the Thals accepted his offer. "By
dawn tomorrow, our world could be at peace." The peace, naturally, would be
that of a total Thal victory.
At dawn, the guns of the Thal forces fired the chemical that dissolved the
protection of the Kaled dome. Then, they launched their rocket. Unhindered,
the distrionic explosives detonated and wiped out virtually the entire Kaled
race in a single blow. All that survived were those in the depths of the
bunker -- the scientific elite.
To these shocked and shattered men, Davros offered a hope for revenge and a
vision for the future: "We will avenge the annihilation of our people with a
retaliation so massive, so merciless it will live in history!" Everyone was
affected, and no one seemed to realize that Kaled history was about at an end.
While the mood was high, Davros exposed his greatest threat -- Ronson -- as a
spy, and had his Dalek kill the unfortunate man. "Today the Kaled race is
ended," Davros cried, "consumed in the fires of war. But from its ashes will
rise a new race -- the supreme creature, the ultimate conqueror of the universe
-- the Dalek!"
Knowing nothing of this, the Thals naively celebrated their supposed
victory. They cheered Davros as a hero even as he gave orders for more
alterations on the Dalek embryos. Even Gharman, who so far had stood with
Davros in everything, was appalled at the changes he demanded. Gharman could
not believe Davros's claim that eliminating the conscience and sense of
morality in the Daleks was an improvement. Davros now ordered his strike force
of twenty prepared Daleks into the Thal city to wipe out the fools there.
Unprepared for further fighting, and never expecting an enemy within their own
walls, the Thals fell in thousands to the Dalek onslaught.
Some survived, escaping into the bleak wilderness. One Thal leader, a
woman called Bettan, began to round up as many soldiers as she could.
Overcoming her distaste of Mutos, she persuaded them to join in to fight this
new menace. The source of the Daelks was clearly the Kaled bunker. Urged on
by the Doctor, Bettan planned to seal the Daleks into the bunker, thereby
gaining the Thal survivors time -- preferably centuries -- to regain some level
of civilization.
At the bunker, Gharman and other men, such as Kowell, were worried about
the instructions Davros was issuing. Gharman realized that the Kaleds were
doomed and that the Daleks had inevitably to take their place. He wanted the
embryos to have a sense of morality, a sense of pity -- to retain what was most
valuable in the Kaled race. Unknown to them, Davros was aware of their
planning. Rather than spend his time rooting out each and every traitor to his
grand desgin, Davros aimed to let them show themselves, and then eliminate them
all at once.
At this point Davros and Nyder managed to capture the Doctor and his young
companions. Davros was no fool, and realizing the Doctor was what he cliamed
to be -- a traveller in time and space -- he demanded from him information
about the future of his creation. The Doctor reluctantly gave this, and begged
Davros to turn the Daleks into a force for peace. Davros had no use for such a
silly thought; he believed his Daleks could only be powerful through strength,
and could only be strong through total repression of other life-forms. The
Doctor claimed that the Daleks were evil, but Davros -- like all truly evil
creatures -- could not believe the charge. "They are conditioned simply to
survive," he explained. "They survive only by becoming the dominant species.
When all other life-forms are suppressed, when the Daleks are the supreme
life-form in the universe -- then... we will have peace. They are not the
power of evil but of good." Needless to say, this somewhat partisan position
was not one that the Doctor could assent to.
Davros's vision of the universe as the home of only one race -- the Daleks
-- was exactly what the Time Lord was afraid of. The thought was abhorrant to
the Doctor, who tried without success to force Davros to stop the Dalek
production. Davros recalled the twenty units from the Thal city, in order to
strengthen his hand in the bunker. Gherman and Kowell had begun their
rebellion, determined to force Davros to make the Daleks moral. Davros had no
desire to see his valuable men killed in the fighting, so he and Nyder
surrendered, asking to be given a chance to convince the elite of his position.
Gharman, still foolishly wishing to believe Davros, agreed. Despite all
Davros's plotting, Gharman -- like the other Kaleds -- had been raised to think
of Davros as their savior. It was difficult for Gharman to realize that he was
a deadly danger.
Gharman's beliefs were pure idiocy to Davros. "They talk of democracy," hw
sneered to Nyder. "Freedom! Fairness! These are the creeds of cowards!
Achievement comes through absolute power, and power through strength."
Meanwhile, the Doctor had been freed, and determined that his mission was
almost a total failure. His only remaining option was the destruction of the
Dalek embryo room in the hope that this would eliminate the Daleks. Once
there, however, he realized that what he was hoping to do was not ethical. "Of
I kill," he explained to Sarah and Harry, "if I wipe out a whole intelligent
life-form, then I become like them. I'll be no better than the Daleks."
In fact, his crisis of conscience was not as important as it seemed.
Davros had already established an automated process for the construction of the
Dalek travel machine and the production of embryos. The worst that the Doctor
could manage was to delay this for a short while. There was now no way to
prevent the birth of the Daleks. As it happened, Gharman stopped the Doctor,
believing that the rebels had beaten Davros. The Doctor was freed from his
decision. Above the ground, the Daleks began to enter the bunker, ready to
help Davros. They were followed by Bettan and her troops, who prepared to seal
all the surface exits and entomb the Daleks, hopefully forever.
Davros had called the survivors to a meeting. He presented his case to the
assembly, and lost. The majority favored the reprogramming of the embryos to
make them capable of full moral choices. Davros forced them all to choose
between his position and that of Gharman. Once the two sides were drawn, the
waiting Daleks emerged and slew the faction that opposed Davros and his plans.
In the meantime, the Doctor, Sarah and Harry had escaped the carnage. The
embryo rooms were destroyed, but not permanently. The trio made its way to the
surface just seconds before the Thals, under Bettan, sealed the passageways.
On a monitor, they began to watch the final events transpiring below in the
bunker.
What Davros had not anticipated was that the Daleks themselves might not
approve of what he had planned for them. They had begun their own production
lines, before he was ready. When he ordered them to turn it off, they ignored
his commands. When Nyder attempted to implement Davros's order, the Dalkes
turned on him and killed him. Davros's world was crumbling about him, and he
hysterically demanded that the Daleks obey him. Their leader refused: "Our
programming does not permit us to acknowledge that any creature is superior to
the Daleks." Davros shoud have known this, since it was his own instruction;
he had simply never imagined that his Daleks would apply it against him and his
scientific conspirators.
Now that they were secure, the Daleks did not need the scientists, and slew
them, despite Davros's pleas that they could help. "Pity?" the Dalek grated in
reply to his creator's imploring. "I have no understanding of the word."
Davros had learned too late what the true end result of his own cold,
remorseless genius would be. He was the final victim of the Dalek fire, which
was meant to kill him. Yet, even as he had underestimated the power of his
creations, they in their own turn had underestimated his powers. His primary
life support was destroyed, but his backup system still worked, maintaining his
life and beginning the repairs to his body that might take centuries to finish.
The Daleks simply shunted his "corpse" and that of the other Kaleds into a
side toom and sealed the room -- forever, they believed.
Bettan and her Thals had entombed the Daleks, but this was a temporary
measure at best. The small party's last sight of the Daleks showed the leader
encouraging his fellow Daleks: "We are entombed, but we live on. This is only
the beginning. We will prepare. We will grow stronger. When the time is
right, we will emerge and take our rightful place as the supreme power of the
universe!" With this dreadful promise ringing in their ears, the small group
of Thals and Mutos headed into the wilderness to try and start a fresh life for
themselves.
For the next few hundred years, life was far from easy. Bettan's small
band moved away from the war-ravaged zones only to discover that almost the
entire surface of Skaro was polluted. They finally found a tiny strip near the
coast where, with much hard work, crops could be raised. Bettan managed to
organize her followers into a community where all refugees were accepted,
without regard to their background. Life was hard, but the group began to make
it.
The mutations that had begun continued, but in a different direction than
the Kaled mutations. Instead of remaining decaying caricatures of their former
selves or evolving toward the hideous Daleks, the Thals evolved toward physical
perfection. Bettan's folk became tall, strong and handsome people, and the
Thals were a reborn race. They were, however, pitifully small in numbers, and
their fertile land was meager.
The band remained very conscious of its history. Bettan had learned from
her experiences that warfare was suicide, and had taught that only through
nonviolence and peace could the Thals become strong. The children of Bettan's
band carried her message down through the centuries, and the Thals became a
totally pacifistic society. These gentle people were vegetarians and lived
simply, for the planet supported nothing more than the most meager of
life-styles. As the years passed, they prospered and grew in number. They
kept full records of the history as it was known, but their knowledge of the
Daleks was blurred. The name of the Kaleds was lost because of the horror that
the original colonists had felt for the Dalek machines. Over the centuries the
Daleks came to be thought of as the enemies the Thals had fought -- though none
living knew what a Dalek looked like.
The Thals thrived, and this caused the next problem. The land was still
badly polluted from warfare. As the population grew, food became harder to
find. Finally one leader, Temmosus, realized that the only way for his people
to survive was to seek out new lands and new food sources. Temmosus was a
direct descendant of Bettan, and he had inherited her courage and vision.
Along with a younger relative, Alydon, he assembled a small group of pioneers
who would venture back into the war zones to attempt to find cultivatable lands
and new food sources for the Thals.
Meanwhile, the old Kaled capital had been resettled. As Davros had
predicted, the Kaleds caught on the periphery of the original neutron bomb
explosion had mutated into the form that he had termed a Dalek. Seeking refuge
and help, these pitiful creatures -- as they completed the chain of mutation
that would leave them dying and crippled -- migrated back to the city their
ancestors had fled. Once there, they discovered the remnants of Davros's
experiments.
His original travel machines -- powered by the city's energy sources --
stood empty. The old capital had been drawing power from the nearby lake, and
it still generated the peculiar form of static electricity that Davros had
required for those travel machines. When the mutants crawled into them, they
were powered up and ready to move. To the mutations, these machines were
clearly designed by their ancestors for their own use. They had evolved their
own myths about the war, since they had long been out of touch with other
intelligent beings. They knew, however, that they had once been something
other than the crippled beings they had become.
Some of Davros's notes were intact, so these creatures discovered that they
were Daleks. They learned of the war with the Thals, obviously their
hereditory enemies. They explored the city and brought it back to life. The
last surviving wild mutations they condemned to the lake behind the city, the
Lake of Mutations. The city was theirs again, and it grew as their power grew.
It blossomed in the wildreness as further sections were opened and repowered.
Still, the city was vast and underfilled. Huge areas remained empty.
The Daleks needed their travel machines to stay alive and to protect
themselves from the radiation, they thought. This last they garnered from
Davros's notes, not realizing that they were in fact products of that
radiation, and thus immune to its otherwise lethal dosages. They planned some
day to free themselves from the machines and reclaim their world. Besides the
travel machines, the Daleks needed food, so they experimented with several
concepts. Some notes led them to try hydroponic growing, which proved
successful. Little nutritious food could grow in the irradiated soil of Skaro.
What could grow were lethal monstrosities, such as the Varga plants. These,
the Daleks soon discovered, thrived on Skaro's soil -- and could move about and
infect other creatures, converting them into replicas of the Varga. Naturally,
they could not penetrate the Dalek casings.
The Daleks were actually developing into fine scientists over the century
or so that it took them to reclaim and remake the city of the Kaleds. Their
minds, honed by bitterness and the desire to rebuild, evolved into terrible
tools. They could never be certain that any of the Thals had survived the war
-- but if any had, they would be ready...
The Thals had built their home in an area where there was very little
rainfall. This had saved the soil there from the pollution suffered by
virtually all the rest of the planet. The problem was that the ground was
consequently very dependant on the huge storms that occurred about every four
years. The storms were never very predictable, and at this point, they failed
to materialize at all. The ground became more arid, the crops fewer and fewer.
Opinion was divided on what should be done. Temossus maintained that
simply waiting and hoping for rains was foolishly optimistic. Their only
chance was to find a better food supply elsewhere. In answer to this, his
opponents (in their gentle Thal way) pointed out that he would have trouble
finding any food sources that were not polluted or lethal. Temmosus's
opinions, however, won the day when starvation became a serious threat. The
Thals had developed a drug that could help them survive in the irradiated areas
of the planet. It was an extract of one of the radiation-resistant plants.
They stocked up enough to last them for several years, trusting that they would
find food on the way.
The Thals set out through the wastelands of their once-beautiful world.
They carried their historical and scientific records, and what items of the old
technology they had salvaged over the years from the dead cities of the past.
They were not a large group even now -- barely two hundred, all told -- but
they were strong, they were brave and they were determined. They travelled for
almost four years, managing to live scantily off the land as they sought out
better food supplies. These were nowhere to be found, nor were there traces of
other survivors. Perhaps the Thals had been expecting none, but all the same
it was a terrible blow to learn that they shared their world with just the few
animals and plants that were about -- and countless mutated creatures that none
could name.
They worked their way toward the old Kaled capital, and finally the advance
guard moved out to scout the area. Alydon, the natural next in line for
leadership, took a small party of the younger men into the petrified jungle
that lay close to the city. Ganotus -- a cheery, reckless type -- and his
brooding brother, Antodus, took four Thals and headed for what the old maps
showed to be the lakes. There they encountered a terrible view of the changes
that had overcome their world. The once fresh lake was now rank, and it
abounded with mutated creatures that preyed on any living thing. Of the group,
only the two brothers survived.
Meanwhile, in the forest, Alydon had made a very strange discovery. There
were other beings alive there -- four in all -- but they did not seem to be
Thals, nor did they match his people's legends of the Daleks. Curious, he
followed the four and tried to speak with the young girl in the group. She
panicked and ran from him. He followed the visitors back to the tall blue box
that they were apparantly camping in, though it looked very small to contain
them. Waiting to make amends, he left a gift to show his good will: a box of
the anti-radiation drugs. When the strangers saw them, he conjectured, they
would see that the Thals were sophisticated and civilized.
The four travellers were the first Doctor, his granddaughter Susan, and the
teachers Ian and Barbara. Not realizing what the box was for, they simply left
it inside the Tardis and set off to explore the city that lay beyond the
forest. Unknown to all of them, the Daleks had been monitoring the activity in
the forest, through their rangerscopes and vibration detectors.
When the intruders arrived at the Dalek city, they split up to search. The
Dalek council was pleased, for this gave them the opportunity to examine one of
the people. Were they Thals? They certainly didn't look like Daleks, so what
else could they be? Had the radiation induced this mutation in them? They
selected Barbara as their first captive, because she was alone and apparantly
unarmed. By using their monitors and closing off doors behind her, they
trapped her in an elevator and brought her below the city to the inhabited
levels. There she was captured and briefly examined.
The intruders seemed weak, and the final three were also taken without
incident. The intruders seemed sick, and undoubtedly needed their
anti-radiation drugs to survive. The council was interested in the drugs
because they were well aware of the ties that limited them to the city. They
wanted to get out and reclaim their world, but they could not live for more
than a few moments outside of their travel machines. If they could get the
Thal drug and use it, they could escape their confines. Accrodingly, they
interrogated the oldest of the captives, the evident leader of the group. To
him they explained their belief that he was not a Thal:
"Over five hundred years ago, there were two races on this planet: we, the
Daleks, and the Thals. After the neutronic war, our Dalek fore-fathers retured
into the city protected by our machines. Most of [the Thals] perished in the
war, but we know that there are survivors. They must be disgustingly mutated,
but the fact that they survived tells us thay they must have a drug which
preserves their life force."
The solution was obvious once the Doctor realized that the container
outside the Tardis was a sample of the drugs: the Daleks insisted that Susan
fetch them. She was the only one well enough to travel alone into the forest.
The Dalek council, however, had absolutely no intention of letting the
prisoners use the drugs -- which they wanted for their own experiments. The
prisoners would be simply allowed to die once their usefulness had ceased.
In the forest, Susan collected the drugs from the Tardis and then met
Alydon. Though scared at first she calmed down, and accepted him as a friend.
Alydon was surprised to hear that the Daleks were still alive, but it gave him
hope: presumably they would have food, perhaps enough to share. He explained
to Susan the Thals' need for food, and she promised to try to help. When she
admitted that she did not trust the Daleks, he gave her a second set of the
anti-radiation drugs in case the Daleks kept the first. He then gave her his
cloak for protection. Susan returned to the city and informed the Daleks of
what had happened. Since there were two sets of the drugs, the Daleks allowed
Susan and her companions to have the duplicate set to cure themselves.
Clearly, these prisoners might yet be have their use.
The council was elated to realize that the Thals now in the petrified
jungle were the last of their race. If they could be wiped out, the Daleks
would have their world to themselves. The means was obvious: food. The Thals
wanted it, and the human captives wanted to help the Thals. The Daleks could
offer food as bait to draw in the Thals, and then exterminate them all. They
had been monitoring the captives and announced to them that they would help the
Thals, "which is what you want us to do." Susan was easily duped into writing
the note for the Thals -- then she realized that the Daleks were intending it
to be a trap.
In the forest, the next party of Thals caught up with Alydon and Ganatus.
Temmosus heard with pleasure the news that the Daleks still lived; he hoped
peace could be made between the Thals and their old enemies. Ganatus was less
confident. Alydon admitted that he trusted Susan and believed she meant them
only good. His opinion of her influenced his opinion of the Dalek's message,
and the Thals decided that they would accept the invitation from their old foes
to share their food surplus.
In the city, the four prisoners managed to break the cell monitor so that
they could talk without being overheard. The Daleks were not too worried about
this, believing their captives to be helpless. This foolish confidence in
their own superiority would cost the Daleks dearly. The guard assigned to feed
the prisoners was overcome and killed when the Doctor realized that the Daleks
depended on their strange form of static electricity to survive. Disguised as
the Dalek, Ian managed to get the four safely into an elevator. The Daleks
soon detected the escape, however. To stop Ian, the council had simply to
magnetize the floor, rooting his Dalek to the spot. Other Daleks then burned
down the door to the elevator shaft, but not before the prisoners had made good
their escape.
Other matters now pressed on the council, for the Thals were approaching
the city, walking into their trap. Temmosus insisted on being the first to
enter, and made an impassioned plea for peace and cooperation to rebuild their
dead world. Ian had doubled back and saw that the Daleks were paying no
attention to the speech. He cried out a warning and the Thals retreated.
Several of them were left behind when the Daleks opened fire. Temmosus was the
first to die. The rest of the Thals returned to safety in the forest, gathered
about the incongruous shape of the Tardis. Alydon was promptly declared the
new leader, and all of the wondered why the Daleks had tried to kill them.
Ian had the answer: "A dislike for the unlike." The Daleks were totally
xenophobic, and would not rest until all other races were subjugated or dead.
The Thals simply could not grasp such monstrous horror, and resigned themselves
to simply giving up and moving on. Ian tried to make them understand that
sooner or later the Daleks would find a way to leave the city and come after
them. As long as the Thals lived, the Daleks would never rest. He believed
that they simply had to fight, moral scruples or not. Alydon was not so sure.
"Look at our planet," he explained, "This was once a great world, full of ideas
and art and invention. In one day it was destroyed. And you will never find
one good reason why we should begin destroying everything again."
In fact, Alydon was wrong on two counts. The destruction of their world
was the work of more than a single day; the destruction of the city and the
forest was perhaps what he meant, since they had been the first casualties of
the war. Also, Ian had found a very good reason for the Thals to fight --
survival. By threatening to take Alydon's bride-to-be, Dyoni, to the Daleks as
a sacrifice, he provoked Alydoin to punch him. Alydon knew that Ian was doing
this, yet he was filled with fury when his Dyoni was threatened. All night
long he considered the problem of whether or not to fight to help Ian and the
others and to save their own people. Finally, with the dawn, he decided: the
Daleks had left them no option but to do battle.
They had no way of knowing it, but the fight had become critical. The
Daleks had tested the Thal anti-radiation drugs and discovered they were lethal
to the Daleks. The Daleks were not only used to radiation; they now needed it
to survive. The exterior radiation counts were dropiing, a condition that
would mean the end of the Daleks. The council decided on the obvious: "We do
not have to adapt to the environment; we will change the environment to suit
us." Since it would take too long to build and detonate a second neutron bomb,
the Daleks decided instead to vent the waste from their nuclear-power
generators into the atmosphere. This would raise the radiation level to a
point at which even the drugs could not help the Thals to survive.
Ganatus was quite readly for Alydon's decision to fight. Showing keen
tactical sense, he proposed an expedition try to approach the city from the
rear, by way of the Lake of Mutations. This horror-filled swamp had cost the
life of several of his friends and had terrified his brother, Antodus.
However, the Daleks were using this as a barrier to guard the rear of the city,
and would never expect an attack from that side. A small party might be able
to make it through the mountains and gain entry covertly. Alydon agreed to
this, giving them three days to make the journey. Along with the two brothers,
Ian, Barbara, Elydon and Kristas would make this dangerous journey.
The swamp was a nightmare, and Elydon was dragged under and devoured by
some half-seen creature. The rest of the party made it through to the
mountains, where they saw the pipes for the Dalek city vanishing into the
mountains. The Daleks clearly had a way through the range -- perhaps a tunnel.
The searchers finally found a way through, though Antodus was still terrified.
Their way was eventually blocked by a chasm, which had to be jumped. Ian acted
as an anchorman for the others. Antodus was the last to jump, and panicked,
falling into the chasm. His weight dragged Ian down, despite all that Ganatus
could do. Seeing this, Antodus bravely severed the rope tethering him to Ian.
Ian was saved, but Antodus plunged into the chasm to his death.
In the meantime, the Doctor and Alydon had not been idle. Using mirrors
they had managed to confuse the Dalek monitoring devices -- and believed that
they could safely approach the city to sabotage the enite system. The Daleks,
however, had vibration detectors planted under the streets and could track the
Doctor, Susan and Alydon when they entered. Alydon returned to the forest to
alert his people to the attack, and the Doctor began his sabotage.
Unfortunately, he enjoyed his moment of triumph too long, allowing the Daleks
to capture him and Susan. Here the Daleks explained that they were ready to
deflect the radiation from the reactors to kill the Thals: "Tomorrow we will
be the masters of the planet Skaro."
In the cavern, the small party despaired -- until they found the entrance
to the city. Now they could begin their work to help the attack. In the
forest, Alydon roused his people for the assault on the city, little knowing
just how critical matters were. The Daleks were almost ready to begin the
venting process when the twin Thal assaults struck. The Doctor had been
attempting to bargain with the Daleks, offering them the secrets of his time
machine if they would spare the Thals. The Daleks refused to bargain, aiming
to take the machine and use it anyway once the Thals were dead. The movement
of the Thals was detected, and the Daleks began sealing off the city corridors.
A small party of Thals managed to get through to the central control
complex. Here a brief but victorious fight began, and ended only when the
Thals had destroyed the power controls. All electrical power in the city died,
sealing the doom of the Daleks. "Stop our power from wating," the council
leader begged the Doctor. "Or it will be... end of the Daleks." The Doctor
had no idea how to restore the power, and the Daleks all died. Alydon grimly
surveyed the scene. "The final war," he muttered, "If only there had been some
other way."
In fact, he was being overly optimistic. This was far from the final war;
the Dalek machine had hardly even begun to stir.
With the city now in Thal hands, Alydon discovered that they could use a
great deal of the Dalek technology for their own purposes. Especially useful
were the hydroponic gardens, enabling his people to feed themselves. The
Doctor and his friends continued their strange journeys, leaving the Thals to
peacefully take over the Dalek city and adapt its technology to their own uses.
The Thals prospered. Alydon married Dyoni. The race began to grow again. For
five hundred years, there was peace on Skaro. The surface radiation died down
in almost all areas, and it began to be possible to considr replanting the
surface. It looked as though the Thals had finally regained a fine world.
In the city they made great strides, studying the technology of the Daleks.
They built and flew their first spacecraft, and were actively looking into the
possibility of inhabiting other worlds. Their histories told them of the
Doctor and his friends, so they knew there was life elsewhere, waiting to be
found. Unfortunately, there was also other life on Skaro, and it did not
intend to wait any longer. Five hundred years of peace was over.
The Thals had begun to plant in the soil of Skaro. Various exploratory
parties had mapped out the planet but all had avoided the two old bunkers from
the Thousand Year War. No one had wished to approach them too closely, once
they had been identified as the reminders of that long-finished madness.
Under the Kaled rubble, however, the Daleks were ready.
They had been planning their return. They had perfected underground mining
systems, which automatically delved for the metals that their automated
production lines needed. Left alone with the vast embryo banks, the Daleks
had built up their numbers. They had honed their warfare techniques, studying
the computer records that had been entombed with them. They were now prepared
to take on whatever might remain on the surface of their world.
The original leader of these Daleks had set up a chain of command. He was
the Dalek Prime, his casing painted in gold to distinguish him. Under him came
the Dalek Supreme, also known as the Black Dalek from the paint on his casing.
The Black Dalek was the warlord of the race; and below him were dozens of minor
ranks. Red Daleks were section leaders. Red-and-grey Daleks were
transportation, and the rank and file were simple grey and blue. The life
supports built into the Dalek casings meant that no Dalek would be forced to
die a natural death for several thousand years. The later Dalek embryos,
however, had been implanted with obedience to the original Daleks, and would
gladly die to further the Daleks' purposes. Die they would over the centuries,
but they would kill even as they died. All were still fired with that
implacable hatred for all other forms of life -- especially any humaniod
life-forms that reminded them of what they themselves had once been.
Into the peaceful Thal world, the Dalek invasion force erupted. A huge
swath of death was sliced again across the face of Skaro, much of it before the
bewildered Thals even knew they were under attack. The Black Dalek led his
forces into action, annihilating all who opposed him -- and any who simply
tried to escape. In a matter of hours, most of Skaro was a burning cinder.
Once again, however, the Thals survived. With the initial attack, the Thal
starships still close to the world returned. They collected what survivors
they could find, and whatever could be salvaged before the Daleks destroyed
their society. They then fled, leaving the Daleks as the masters of Skaro.
The owrld was uninhabitable again, after all the Thals' efforts. The
overcrowded evacuation fleet staggered across space to one of the colony worlds
that the Thals had been experimenting with. Now they had no option but to
trust this planet for their survival as a race. With the arrival of the ragged
fleet, the Thals vowed that never again would the Daleks take them by surprise.
Pacifism was no longer foremost in the Thal mind; instead, they determined that
they would somehow, someday, utterly destroy the Daleks.
The Daleks themselves knew nothing of this, nor would they have cared.
They had cleansed their world of the Thals, believing that it was forever and
that the small remnant that had escaped would soon die out. Should the Thals
survive, they would be found and destroyed. Skaro finally belonged to the
Daleks alone; now it was time for the rest of the universe to follow.
For a hundred years or more, the Daleks prospered. They rebuilt their
capital, eliminating from it all evidence of the Thals. The city grew as they
raided the old bunker for equipment, computer systems, and metals. Finally,
the remnants were buried, as the Daleks sought to conveniently forget the fact
that they had been forced to spend five hundred yeats lurking below ground
while their enemies had prospered. Their capital expanded and they had access
to the accumulated knowledge of the Thals in the computers they discovered.
The Dalek Prime thus found out about starflight. Since the Thals had no
warning of the attack, all of their plans and propulsion methods were laid out
in detail in their records. The Daleks had been experimenting with
antigravity, building discs that could contain a single Dalek and support it in
the air, controlled mentally by the creature within the casing. Utilizing
these principles and the Thal knowledge, the Daleks pieced together a hybrid
starship. This was tested, proven successful, and then used as a basis for a
fleet.
Despite the fact that Dalek embryos were produced through cloning, the
Dalek numbers still remained fairly small. Skaro was almost exhausted, worn
out from the wars, and it contained too little metal for the Daleks' purposes.
What they needed was another world that they could mine. It had to have plenty
of metallic ores, and preferably abundant radioactive elements that could be
taken fairly simply. It had to be a world in which they could move about. If
it had a native species, so much the better -- they could be used and then
destroyed.
The Thal deep-space telescopes were still in orbit above the planet. The
Daleks used them and finally discovered exactly the place they were looking
for: Earth.
It was A.D. 2164 on Earth. Finally, Earth was more or less united under a
central government. The exploration of the solar system was well under way.
Lunar bases dotted the crater surface of the Moon, and a Transmat system linked
the world and its natural sattelite. This was in itself not such a good thing,
for the use of conventional rockets and spacecrafts was dying out. Why spend
days in a tin can when you could walk through a booth and appear on one of the
lunar bases?
Earth was experiencing a time of prosperity. Many cities had installed
moving pavements, curtailing private transportation and freeing towns from
congestion. Cheap fission power provided convenient energy augmented by huge
orbital satellites that gathered the energy of sunlight and broadcast it to a
waiting Earth. Weather control was beginning, and it looked like a new age of
peace and expansion was under way.
Then came the meteorite bombardments. Scientists theorized that Earth was
passing through cometary debris -- though it was puzzling that it hadn't been
detected before this. The falling showers caused minor damage, but on the
whole it was more spectacular than dangerous -- until the plagues began. For
millenia, superstitious souls had believed that portents in the sky had marked
the outset of plagues. Mankind had grown beyond such foolishness -- except in
this case, that was exactly what had happened. The meteorites had been seeded
with a virulent plague developed by Dalek research. The Daleks did not have
the numbers to attack and defeat the combined military might of Earth, so they
had approached the problem obliquely.
Over those terrible months there were billions of deaths. Scientists and
doctors worked on the killer plague and finally managed to effect a cure -- but
it was far, far too late. The world had split asunder again, into small
communities. Plague victims had been cremated wherever possible, or simply
dumped into the nearest river (which was forbidden, but done anyway). Normal
services had ground to a halt, economies collapsed, and the whole structure of
human society died. Those poor souls isolated on lunar stations starved
slowly; the Transmat terminals on Earth were inoperable, and the lunar
operatives could not return home.
Animals were not affected by the plague. In the initial months of the
infestations, a great number of animals escaped from zoos or were released by
sympathetic humans. Many thrived in their new situation. Alligators lived in
the old sewers. Lions prowled New York streets. Packs of once-pet dogs
combined to hunt outside the cities. Humans had to struggle against nature to
survive. Cities began to decay mere weeks after the plagues began.
Then the Daleks came. They simply razed some cities, which they never
could have held, and occupied those that could prove useful. The human
communities were too small to fight back individually, and too far apart to
band together and counterattack. Resistance groups sprang up, but with very
little success. The Dalek casings were impervious to normal fire power, but
the Dalek guns were extremely effective against humans. There seemed little
the humans could do other than evade Dalek patrols and try to stay alive. That
wasn't easy to do.
The Dalek forces were spread very thin. There had only been a dozen of
their saucers in the first place, and the total invasion force numbered no more
than five hundred. They were commanded by the brilliant Black Dalek, whose
grasp of strategy made even the strongest human counterattacks quite futile.
Captures humans were experimented upon and the Daleks began to augment their
forces with humans. The Daleks knew about the electromagnetic fields around
each living brain, and had discovered a method of manipulating these
temporarily, creating a condition of obedience in the victim. They could then
be completely dominated by electronic pulses channeled through a radio receiver
in a headset. The Daleks called these human automatons "robomen" -- half
robot, half men. The only drawback was that the continual interference with
the natural brain functions invariably led to mental breakdown, madness, and
death. This was an inconvenience, since they then had to be replaced.
These robomen aided the Daleks in controlling strategic areas of the world.
The Daleks had no real interest in the human race beyond a malicious glee in
humiliating them. The humans reminded the Daleks of their own lost heritage,
and the invaders enjoyed working their captives to death in menial, foolish
chores, or converting them to robomen. Robo patrols kept the resistence
fighters out of the way for the most part, and they also rounded up fresh
workers. The plan was for the invasion force to turn Earth into a gigantic
starship and pilot it back to their own solar system, where it could be
exploited for the much-needed metals and radioactive elements.
Accordingly, the Daleks probed the surface of the planet. They discovered
that a huge fault lay just a few miles below the Bedfordshire countryside in
England. It could be reached by a mine shaft and then split apart by a small
nuclear charge. This would enable the combined Dalek saucers to extract
Earth's precious molten core. In its place they could install huge generators
to pilot the planet. The core could be cooled and exploited, since it was
almost pure iron and radioactive elements. The only problem in this was that
the molten core also produced large magnetic effects, which the Daleks could
not get too close to without damaging their internal computers and other
life-support systems. The bulk of the work would have to be accomplished using
robomen and slaves.
Since this was taking place in the English countryside, the Daleks
concentrated many of their forces there. London, the obvious place to occupy,
became their central receiving station. The old Chelsea heliport was made into
a saucer landing site. The fleet of ships was used to transfer prisoners from
all over the world here for robotization or transport to the mines in
Bedfordshire. The small English resistence groups knew all of this, but could
do little. The robomen patrols and the Dalek forces hunted them down,
attempting to annihilate them.
Not all the humans resisted the Daleks, of course. Some actively
collaborated with them, trading information and other humans for food. Others,
convinced that the Daleks would be defeated eventually, looted cities or they
traded food for valuables from the prisoners in the camps. As in all such
situations, some of the most undesirable people managed to flourish for a
while.
Into this situation the Tardis arrived, bearing the first Doctor, his
graddaughter Susan and the teachers Ian and Barbara. Unaware of what they were
getting into, the four were soon plunged into the thick of the war. Susan and
Barbara were found first, by the resistance, and taken to their cramped
headquarters below the Elephant and Castle subway station. The resistance
fighters were led by the crippled genuis, Dortmun. He dreamed of fighting back
and had spent years perfecting a bomb that he believed would penetrate the
Dalek casings. The action leader was a tough, cold man named Carl Tyler. A
younger man, David Campbell, still retained much of his humor and enthusiasm,
but it was leaching out fast. Jenny, the only female of authority, was a total
cynic. With them were about twenty fighting men -- not much with which to take
on a Dalek invasion force.
The Daleks viewed the resistance groups as more of a nuisance than a
danger, but even minor irritations had to be dealt with. The Black Dalek made
regular broadcasts orffering amnesty and work to any rebels who surrendered.
"Resistance is useless," he explained, "We are the masters of Earth." To
encourage defection to their side, the Daleks warned that otherwise "you will
all die: the males, the females, the descendants." Daleks, naturally, could
view children as nothing else, since they had nothing themselves in the way of
family life. The broadcasts had no effect on the resistance members other than
to annoy them. "Obey motorized dustbins?" Dortmun sneered, voicing their
common opinion. They would never have accepted the Daleks as their masters.
Dortmun knew that what the fighters needed was a victory that the Daleks could
not ignore, and he spoke out in favor of an attack on the London saucer, using
the new bombs. Tyler was more cautious but was stung into action by Dortmun's
snide comment: "You've been down here so long you're beginning to *think* like
worms."
The Doctor and Ian were not so fortunate. They were both captured by the
robomen patrols and taken to the Dalek saucer. Both were amazed to see the
Daleks again, and the Doctor attempted to rationalize their reappearance after
their apparant destruction. "What happened on Skaro was a million years ahead
of us in the future," he guessed. "What we're seeing now is the middle history
of the Daleks." The Doctor was simply guessing, and he was guessing
incorrectly. Even Ian could see that these Daleks were far more sophisticated
than the ones they had previously faced. On the other hand, Ian had by now
learned not to contradict the Doctor!
The Daleks needed a continual supply of robomen, so they tested each batch
of prisoners, selecting those of higher IQ for robotization. The process
snapped the minds of the victims, so the higher the starting intellect, the
better the resulting roboman. The Doctor managed to find a way out of the
cell, ending up back in Dalek hands and slated for robotizing. Before this
could be completed, the rebels launched an attack on the saucer with Dortmun's
bombs.
The bombs failed to work properly, but they did create a certain amount of
confusion for a while. Some of the rebels managed to get into the saucer and
free the slaves. Then the Dalek's counterattacked, driving the resistance
fighters out and annihilating them. The raid was a costly failure, leaving the
resistance broken and many of its members dead. The Daleks were furious, for
even this failed attack was the worst setback they had received. All of their
captives had been freed, even if many were killed attempting to escape. It set
a bad precedent, and the obvious answer was to ensure that nothing like it ever
happened again.
The Dalek Supreme decided that the best thing to do was to destroy London.
A large number of fire bombs was placed about the city, and the Daleks pulled
back their patrols and all robomen. There was a final skirmish with the
resistance members as these humans tried to leave the city. Some made it, but
others -- including their leader, Dortmun -- were slain. Once the Dalek
patrols were aboard the saucer, the ship took off and the fire bombs were
triggered. Some failed to detonate, but large areas of the city were enveloped
swiftly in the conflagration. The saucer moved to the Bedfordshire mining
area, where its mission was coming to a close.
Shortly after the saucer landed, the Black Dalek took control of the
operations. The saucer moved out to destroy a truck that the rebels were using
to escape from the burning city, then it began to gather in all of the patrols
from the country. The Dalek shaft had now reached the level of the natural
fault in the planet, and the penetration explosive was prepared. The Dalek
Supreme contacted all of the other saucers scattered across the Earth. They
were to move to the mine area and prepare for the delicate task of freeing
Earth's molten core. The explosion would be timed to go off shortly after they
were all in place.
Across the globe, the Daleks began pulling out. Freedom fighters in the
other countries were puzzled by this move, little realizing that the final act
in the Dalek plan was being played out deep in the English countryside. The
Daleks had no interest in conquering the humans, and even less in enslaving
them. They were simply an inconvenience that had to be controlled while the
real work was being done.
What the Daleks did not know was that once again the Doctor and his friends
were preparing to deal a fatal blow to their plans. Ian had managed to reach
the mine. The Black Dalek had released a Slyther to patrol the grounds at
night. This horrible creature, one of the mutations from Skaro, had two
complete digestive systems and two voice boxes. It was huge, shapeless, and
virtually indestructible -- and ate anything it could. No prisoners dared to
try escaping at night, because the Slyther hunted by scent and never gave up on
a meal. Ian almost became a victim but was saved by leaping into a huge crane
bucket. The Slyther tried to follow, but fell to its death down the shaft.
The Daleks had now readied the penetration device. Ian had accidentally
chosen the bomb as a place to hide, and he delayed matters for a while by
sabotaging it. This was no more than a minor setback that was soon repaired.
Ian realized the Daleks were about to drop a bomb down the shaft they had cut,
so he blocked the tunnel. When the bomb was released, instead of falling to
the Earth's core it was trapped a bare five hundred feet below the surface.
Unaware of this, the Daleks prepared to abandon the mine, leaving behind all of
the robomen and the human prisoners. Barbara and Jenny had attempted to
penetrate the control room and turn the robomen against the Daleks, but they
failed. They were imprisoned there, and left to die with the rest of the
humans.
The Doctor, Susan, Tyler and David arrived at this crucial point. Some
Daleks still remained at the mines to prevent last-minute attacks, so the
Doctor had Susan and David destroy the ground power bases that fed these
Daleks, killing them. He then freed Barbara and Jenny, and together they
turned the robomen against the remaining Dalek forces. Ian joined them, and
they all abandoned the area before the final explosion.
The Black Dalek did not really care. Once the core was freed there would
be nowhere for the fugitives to escape to -- most of England would be destroyed
in the cataclysm. His ship was recording the images from the control room
below, including those of the Doctor and his companions. The other saucers
were closer to the site, ready to magnetically grapple the core when it was
released.
Then the penetration device exploded. Instead of venting its force against
the Earth's core as planned, the main shock wave rose upward, shattering the
Dalek mine complex and annihilating the hovering saucer fleet. The only
survivor -- badly crippled -- was the Black Dalek's ship. Impotently, the
Dalek Supreme watched the molten end of his invasion as full volcanic fury was
unleashed below him. There was nothing that he could do but order the return
to Skaro -- slowly -- and report failure to the Dalek Prime. With him, though,
he took footage of the Doctor and his companions.
Earth was left in the hands of the humans again, but their was with the
Daleks was not yet over. The last survivors began to repair their broken world
and to regain their technology. Forced to improvise, they managed to rebuild
their cities. Within fifty years, they were strong again.
On Skaro, the Dalek Prime was furious but recognized that there was little
that could be immediately done. It was time to take a different and less
costly approach to gaining the materials needed. Accordingly, the Daleks began
a massive attack on their own solar system. Piece by piece, they started
slicing into the nearby moons and planets. They drained them of materials,
destroying them as worlds, and used these materials to begin the construction
of the greatest army the Galaxy had ever seen.
The Dalek wars were about to begin.
It took the Daleks several hundred years to build up an army of assault.
They had spread to neighboring solar systems, mining the planets for materials.
In so doing, they committed a grave tactical error, underestimating the Thal
resolve: they neglected the defenses of Skaro. Since their world was worn down
they had no particular attachment to the place, and assumed this would be true
of others. The Thals, however, were grimly determined to regain their home
world, and they managed to launch an assault from their colony planets back at
Skaro.
Because of the Dalek laxity, the Thals managed to seize their planet back
again, destroying for the moment all Daleks based there. This effort severely
crippled the Thal war efforts, for they were still basically a peaceful people.
They knew, though, that they would never know peace until the Daleks were
destroyed. They felt a deep guilt that part of the blame for the creation of
the Daleks rested upon them, and they vowed to sweep the Galaxy free of their
enemies. Accordingly, they began to develop deep-spaceships of their own,
ready to strike and cripple the Dalek forces whenever they could. In the
captured computer files, they discovered details of the Dalek communications
system, which they modified so they could monitor their foes. Then they
discovered that the Daleks were maintaining a secret base on the planet
Spirodon.
The Thals had no deep-spaceships that had been tested, so a volunteer crew
for a suicide mission was selected to fly to Spirodon, uncover the Dalek plans,
and stop them. This expedition would consist of seven, commanded by Mira.
Second in command was Taron, the ship's doctor. The ship made the flight but
crashed on reaching Spirodon. Mira and three others were killed. Taron, Vaber
and Codal, the expedition's science officer, all survived, only to find
themselves on a nightmare world.
Spirodon's vegetation was terrifically aggressive, often virulently
poisonous. It had forced the intelligent race of the planet to evolve its own
defense -- invisibility. It was this secret that the Daleks were seeking.
They had bombarded the planet with bacterial agents (as they had in their
invasion of Earth), killing most of the population. Few survived, and most of
those were used for experimentation by the Daleks, or as slave labor. Some of
the natives, including one called Wester, tried to fight back, rather
ineffectually. The Thals were forced to skulk around, trying to work out the
best way to use their few remaining explosives to halt the Dalek plans. Vaber
hated this approach, preferring to attack frontally -- a suicidal concept to
Taron's way of thinking.
What the group did not know was that the situation was even worse than it
looked. The invisibility approach was one thing, but ten thousand Daleks were
ready to be mounted as an army from this planet. Ice existed in a bizarre
allotrope here -- a sort of slushy liquid that was intensely cold. The planet
produced this somehow in a natural way -- probably due to some enzymic
reaction with the plant life millenia ago. Vast rivers of this ice water
flowed below the surface, giving the planet a chill surface except in direct
sunlight. The Spirodons had tapped into these vents to cool their cities. The
Daleks used the vents to power huge refrigeration chambers into which ten
thousand Daleks were placed. They were thus kept cryogenically alive, waiting
to strike unsuspected at the heart of the Galaxy.
The Thals on Skaro managed to intercept a call from the Dalek Supreme
Council -- the advisors to the Dalek Prime -- mentioning their army.
Worriedly, they dispatched a second ship to Spirodon to warn the first
expedition. This ship crashed, die to the pilots' inexperienced handling of
the controls. Rebec (Taron's girlfriend), Marat and Latep were the only
survivors, linking with the earlier expedition. At about this time, the third
Doctor and his companion Jo Grant arrived.
The Daleks had been planning their strategy for the deployment of the army.
The humans on Earth had risen to a position of some power since the defeated
Dalek invasion. They had managed in the five centuries since then to build up
a small but powerful empire. Close to them stretched another empire, that of
the Draconians. Allied, they could weaken or perhaps even defeat the Dalek
forces. Accordingly, it was important for the Daleks that the two empires
fight. At this opportune moment, the Master had volunteered his servies. Like
the Doctor, the Master had fled Gallifrey, home world of the Time Lords.
Unlike the Doctor, he served his own aims, which generally involved gaining
personal power. He had seen a perfect chance in helping the Daleks.
With the aid of the Ogrons and a hallucinogenic device, the Master had
struck at human and Draconian ships. He had convinced each crew that the other
race was attacking, and matters escalated to the satisfying point of war. This
was when the Doctor and Jo had arrived and managed to get the two sides to see
the truth. The threat of war between Earth and Draconia was prevented, but the
Doctor still wished to deal with the Dalek army. He followed the Daleks to
Spirodon, and then teamed up with the Thals there. Together, they planned to
stop the Dalek experiments.
Unknown to them, the Daleks had another project under way -- the creation
of a virus that would kill all forms of life. The Dalek section leader in
charge of the project and his chief scientist manufactured the virus and an
antiviral agent. They were both immunized, byt before they could immunize the
rest of their forces and the Spirodon slaves, Wester managed to break the vial
in the secure room. He perished instantly, but his sacrifice was not in vain.
The two Daleks were safe from the virus, but if they attempted to leave the
room, it would kill every other Dalek on the planet, including their army.
They were forced to remain where they were, forever.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Codal had been captured by patrols and taken to
the city for interrogation. They managed to escape and were joined by several
of the Thals who were trying to break them out. Marat was slain in the attempt
and the others were trapped in the refrigeration unit. They all escaped up the
waste heat ducts to the surface. Having discovered from this expedition the
layout and plans of the Daleks, the Doctor and the Thals planned an attack.
The Doctor believed that breaching the walls of the refigeration unit would
cause the ice to flood in, forever sealing in the Dalek army.
The Dalek Supreme then arrived to take command of the operation, since the
Supreme Council was worried about the delays. The invisibility experiments
were completed and the Daleks had now gained a method to become invisible for
short periods of time. The Dalek Supreme ordered the awakening of the army,
preparatory to invading the Galaxy. The Doctor managed to plant a bomb, and
flooded the army chambers with the ice. This rose swiftly, spreading
throughout the city. Only the Dalek Supreme and two others escaped the rising
frozen tide. They then discovered that the Thals had stolen their ship,
stranding them on the planet for the time being. "We have been delayed -- not
defeated," the Dalek Supreme observed. He ordered a relief ship and planned on
freeing the trapped army below him as soon as possible.
The footage of the Doctor and his companions taken on Earth proved to be
very curious. The person referred to as "the Doctor" was clearly the same
person whose arrival had been filmed in the old Kaled capital five hundred
years earlier. The Dalek Prime replayed the section of the records where the
old humanoid claimed to be able to travel through time and space in a device he
had used to arrive on Skaro. It was unthinkable that any one person could live
five hundred years, and get from Skaro to Earth without the Daleks knowing of
it; the only possible answer seemed to be that the Doctor was telling the
truth.
If time travel was possible, then the Dalek Prime wanted to use it. He
ordered research into the subject to begin at once. This Doctor was clearly a
problem for the Daleks, and it would be more expedient to dispose of him and
his companions. The only possible way to do this was, obviously, to build a
time machine and track him down. In the meantime, there was much to do.
The first matter for the Daleks was the removal of the Thals from Skaro.
Although they had no sentimental attachment to their home world, they could not
afford to have the Thals established there, forming a second front to attack
them. To the Dalek Prime, the simplest solution seemed to be the mass bombing
of the world, rendering it lethal.
As before, the Thals learned of this plan by monitoring Dalek
communications. They knew they had no chance at all of stopping the Dalek
attack, so they resolved to abandon Skaro again. To prevent the Daleks from
realizing that their foes had fled, a small number of Thal troops remained
behind to stage a fairly convincing defense of Skaro. It was quite literally a
suicide mission, buying time for the Thal race to retreat and consolidate, to
fight another day. The small band of volunteers fought long and hard, but the
massed Dalek firepower won through. The Daleks dropped several neutron bombs
on the Thal settlements, not realizing that the settlements were already
abandoned. All that mattered to them was that Skaro was once again free of
Thals.
The time-travel program instigated by the Dalek Prime finally achieved
results. At tremendous effort and cost, the Dalek scientists built a single
working machine. They found that when the laws controlled operations in time
and space were applied, they created stressed space within the device. The
interior of the ship was in a different dimension than the exterior, allowing
it to be larger than it appeared. The time machine was equipped to track
disturbances in the space-time continuum, then to lock in and follow the trace.
The Black Dalek immediately ordered an assasination group to be prepared.
The Tardis was detected leaving the planet Xeros, and its path locked into
their own detectors. It was heading for the planet Aridius, and the Dalek
squad was dispatched to intercept the Doctor and his companions and kill them.
Aridius was on old world in a very troubled state. Originally, the natives
had been amphibians, for the world had once been covered by a large, deep
ocean. They had built cities in the sea beds, and developed an advanced
culture. Then something had interfered with their planet's orbit, sending it
fractionally closer to its twin suns. The overall planetary temperature rose
slightly, and the oceans began to evaporate. Over hundreds of years, the
oceans literally evaporated into space. Slowly, the native life-forms
perished, until only two species remained. The world turned to sand and dust
under the relentless glare of those terrible suns. The Aridians survived by
staying within their cities, conserving amd recycling all of their water. The
air locks that had originally been constructed to keep waters out of the city
now served to keep the precious liquids within.
The other survivors were the mire beasts. These creatures were large,
carniverous octopods, with sufficient intelligence to track down their sole
remaining prey -- the Aridians. The mire beasts were tough and almost
indestructible. Nothing that the Aridians could do seemed to affect the
beasts, so they were forced to simply seal off any sections of the city into
which the mire beasts penetrated. It was a losing battle, and the Aridians
were slowly dying out.
Unaware of this, the first Doctor arrived in the Tardis, along with Ian,
Barbara and Vicki. Ian and Vicki stumbled into the city, and the Doctor and
Barbara discovered the existence of the Dalek hunters. The Dalek time machine
had arrived on the world, and the executioners began their search for the
Tardis. The search was interrupted by a terrible sandstorm that covered the
entire desert in howling winds and changed the face of everything. The Daleks
were not badly affected, since they could simply wait out the storm, then
burrow out of the sand using their antigravity discs. They then located the
Tardis.
It had been buried in the storm. Contemptuous of the native race, the
Daleks insisted on their help to dig out the Tardis. Once this had been done,
the helpers were exterminated. Clearly, if the Doctor and his companions
lived, they were being sheletered by the Aridians. The Daleks therefore
demanded that the time travelers be handed over to them, else the Daleks would
destroy the Aridian city. As this would doom the race, the Aridians had little
option but to accede to the demand. Before they could, however, the mire
beasts invaded their city, and in the confusion the time travelers escaped.
One Dalek had been guarding the Tardis, but he was lured away by Ian and the
Doctor. The travelers then made good their escape.
The squad leader recalled the rest of the Daleks, and they set off in
pursuit of the Doctor, tracking the Tardis and staying on its path. Their time
machine was a trifle more efficient than the battered Tardis, and they were
bound to catch up with it eventually. The next landing was on Earth in the
1960's. By the time the Daleks arrived, the Tardis had left and the only being
about was an American tourist named Morton Dill. The Daleks had landed atop
the Empire State Building in New York City. Dill found the Daleks highly
amusing and hardly realized how lucky he was not to be killed out of hand.
Unwilling to spend the time to kill such a fool, the Daleks continued after the
enemy time machine, gaining slightly.
The next landing was only a period of time away, still on Earth. The
Daleks emerged onto a wooden, seagoing vessel. The humans aboard it were
clearly too stupid to know what was happening, and jumped into the sea to
escape from the Daleks. The Doctor and his friends had already left, so the
Daleks followed -- leaving the Mary Celeste to its lonely journey into history.
The next landing was again only a matter of time away -- 1996, in Ghana. Here
the execution squad discovered that they were up against foes that were
unkillable. They were unfamiliar with human literature, so could not recognize
Frankenstein's monster or Count Dracula for what they were. Mistaking them for
humans, the Daleks attempted to execute them. The effort failed, for both were
actually robotic creations who responded by attacking the Daleks.
The Doctor, Ian and Barbara seized the chance to regain the safety of the
Tardis, but the Daleks prevented Vicki from following. When the monsters
attacked the Daleks, though, Vicki managed to slip into the Dalek time machine
undetected. The Daleks were unable to kill foes that had never truly lived and
were forced to retreat -- their quarry had already escaped anyway.
They were still very close on the Doctor's trail and the flight of the
Tardis indicated that their next landing would be on the planet Mechanus. The
Doctor had proven to be more capable than the Daleks expected, so they
determined to utilize subterfuge. They had managed to scan the Doctor many
times over the years, and they now applied this information to a fabrication
machine. This then produced an exact robotic copy of the Doctor -- but one
that would obey the Dalek's orders implicitly. Once the two time ships arrived
on Mechanus, the Daleks released this deadly android to kill the party from
within. Unknown to them, however, Vicki had witnessed its creation, and she
warned her companions. When the robot appeared, the real Doctor was able to
combat and defeat it.
The planet Mechanus was one of a number of worlds that had been intended in
this period for colonization by Earth. It was only marginally habitable, so
Earth had employed its then-current tactics of sending in a shipload of
Mechanoids to prepare the world for the colonists. The Mechons (as they were
also known) were large, rounded robots that could virtually think for
themselves, possessing self-awareness to a remarkable degree. Their rounded
bodies could extrude tools required for many tasks, and their computer brains
could analyze situations and take appropriate action. Earth had sent out a
large number of Mechon ships to various marginal planets to prepare them for
colonization.
The colonists, however, never did arrive. It was at this point that Earth
entered into one of its periodic clashes with other races, and a war in space
ensued. When it was over, many billions were dead, and the pressing need for
expansion was felt no more. The Mechanoid worlds were abandoned, though the
Mechons knew nothing of this and continued to await the arrival of their
masters.
On Mechanus itself, vast jungles covered the surface of the planet. A
mobile form of plant, the Fungoids, attacked any kind of animal life,
enveloping and eating it. Knowing this would create a problem for colonists,
the Mechanoids created a great city on legs that rose over a thousand feet
above the jungle. Here, humans could dwell in perfect safety. The city was
constructed and prepared, and the Mechons settled back to maintain the place
and wait for the human masters they were certain would one day arrive.
After fifty years, one did -- an astronaut whose ship crashed there.
Steven Taylor knew nothing of the Mechanoids, and had no idea of what their
control codings were. Accordingly, he was kept imprisoned by them, fed and
allowed exercise. They would watch him from time to time, but he was not
allowed free. They served him even as they kept him prisoner. Then after
another few years, the Doctor and his party arrived, pursued by the Daleks.
The Mechanoids observed this, at first without interest. Then they realized
that the party the Daleks were chasing was composed of humans. Accordingly,
they helped the Doctor's group escape -- and then imprisoned them with Steven.
The Mechons were programmed to protect humans, and they could not allow the
Daleks to harm them.
The Daleks were annoyed at this interference. It was clear that the only
way they could destroy the Doctor and his friends was by first annihilating the
Mechonoids. The rest of the assasination squad was called in, and the defenses
of the city broached. The attacking Daleks demanded the release of their prey,
and the Mechons responded with violence. In a short while, the two groups were
fighting bitterly. The Doctor seized his chance to flee the city, and the
Dalek and Mechonoid clash eventually destroyed the main supports. In a
tremendous crash, the city collapsed to the jungle floor a thousand feet below,
destroying Daleks and Mechonoids alike.
Ian and Barbara took the Dalek machine to return to their own time, where
they then destroyed the time machine. On Skaro, the destruction of the machine
was noted. Little could be done for the moment, for the materials used to
construct it were very rare, and it would be decades before a second device
could be created -- providing something more interesting could not be created
in the meantime. The time-travel project was open to alternatives.
This clash with the Mechanoids proved to be merely the first skirmish.
There were a number of other worlds where the Mechons waited for humans. The
Daleks knew that there would be serious problems should the Mechanoids be
allowed to grow in strength. Accordingly, they began to systematically search
out and destroy all of the Mechon worlds. The resulting wars were long and
bitter, but eventually the Daleks prevailed.
One casualty of the Mechanoid attacks was a small party of Daleks in an
experimental capsule that had been testing time warping on their foes. The
Mechons had destroyed the ship -- or so they had thought. In fact, the forces
at play on it had sent the capsule hurtling through time and space. Badly
damaged, the capsule crashed on the world of Vulcan, completely drained of
power. There it sat for decades, the Daleks inside, not dead but deactivated
and surviving on small amounts of power in their life-support systems.
Eventually, the world was settled by natives of Earth. A sleeper starship
had set there in the opening years of the twenty-first century, and had arrived
on Vulcan. The crew opted to begin their dating system from the time they had
entered into deep sleep; thus for them this was still A.D. 2010, even though
several centuries had passed, and Earth had now more sophisticated and faster
ships at its disposal. Unfortunately there were members of the colony who had
their own ideas of how things should be run, and they desired nothing more than
the overthrow of their Earth-appointed leader, the ineffectual Hensell. The
chief plotter was Bragen, the colony's head of security. Quinn, the deputy
leader, suspected Bragen's ambitions and requested an examiner from Earth.
At this point, the colony's chief scientist, Lesterson, discovered the
Dalek capsule in the planet's mercury swamps. He had taken it to his
laboratory and proceeded to open it. Since the colonists had been in flight
during the Dalek invasion of Earth, Lesterson had never heard of the Daleks,
and was not disturbed by the three robotic-looking machines he found in there.
Testing them, he discovered that they were drained of power. Aided by Janley
and Renso, he began to power up the machine, to see if he could get it working
again.
Once again, fate brought the Doctor into play. The Tardis had just helped
him to regenerate into his second self, and had slipped across the space and
time boundaries during this operation. The ship had landed on Vulcan, where
the Doctor and his companions, Ben and Polly, were taken for the examiner and
his party. The Doctor played along, stalling for time, and was appalled to
discover his oldest foes on the planet. Despite his fervent pleas, no one
would listen to him and have the Daleks dismantled. On the contrary, Lesterson
insisted on powering one of them up. On awakeining, it recognized the first
thing it was as a human, and naturally exterminated him. Renso was thus the
first victim on Vulcan. Lesterson cut the power and the Dalek fell back into
immobility.
Lesterson, desperately wanting to be proven right about the Daleks' being
useful, took away its gun, convinced that the killing of Resno was an accident.
Janley was affected also, but in a very different way. She was one of the
rebels and saw the killing machine as a chance to gain power rapidly. The
Doctor tried to have the Daleks destroyed, but his warnings were undercut by
the Dalek: "I am your servant," it rasped. Preferring to believe their dreams,
the colonists kept the Daleks powered up, and it offered to help the colony by
establishing an anti-meteorite shield about the place. Foolishly Lesterson
believed it, and gave the Dalek all the materials it requested. The Dalek
naturally had no plans to help the humans, and set about diverting power from
the colony into the capsule.
Secretly, the Dalek worked and repowered its two companions. Together they
used the materials the humans were so naively supplying them with to build a
small construction line of Daleks. Stored specimens of embryos were unfrozen
and set to growing. Janley, knowing nothing of this, approached the Dalek
with an offer of help: the rebels would supply further materials if the Daleks
would back their seizure of power. Naturally the Daleks agreed -- with no
intentions of keeping the agreement once they were strong enough. Everything
was working fine, as the Daleks had anticipated.
Lesterson, however, had grown worried, and soon discovered that the Daleks
were breeding in the capsule -- and that they were armed. Before he could do
anything, the Daleks were ready for action. Bragen made his bid for power,
having Hensell killed. Before he could take command, though, the Daleks poured
out of their capsule, aiming to kill the humans and take over the colony. As
the Daleks began their process of murder, the Doctor and Lesterson slipped back
to the capsule. The Daleks were still working on power drained from the colony
and transmitted through the capsule. The Doctor and Lesterson set about
reversing the energy flow. The Daleks discovered this and attempted to stop
them. Lesterson was killed, but the Daleks were too late. The power drain
began, and soon rendered them all lifeless. With the Daleks out of the way,
Bragen tried to regain control but was killed by one of his own men,
disillusioned with the power bid. Quinn took over the colony leadership, while
the Doctor and his companions slipped away.
By the conclusion of the Mechon Wars, the Daleks had developed the Time
Vortex Magnetron. This device tapped into the space-time vortex that underlay
the observable universe, and allowed the passage of objects using a small hand
unit rather than the bulkier time machines. The inherant power of the
Magnetron gave rise to several interesting possibilities, one of which the
Dalek Prime immediately sanctioned: the reinvasion of Earth through time.
When the Daleks studied the history of Earth, they discovered a curious
paradox: the historical flow that had led to their first invasion attempt had
somehow shifted. Earth in the twenty-second century -- a hundred years after
the first invasion attempt -- was somehow a postnuclear wasteland. The
survivors of the human population were living in small groups, trying to
survive. It was a situation that the Dalek Prime found perfect for
exploitation, and he ordered an immediate invasion of the planet. The reason
this had occured was not important -- only the fact that it had, and that it
presented the Daleks with a perfect second chance.
This time, though, there would be no attempts to move Earth. With the
remnants of the human race to tap for slave labor, they could simply process
the minerals needed for Skaro to continue its expansion. To keep the human
slave forces in line, the Daleks would raise some of them as overseers, called
Controllers. As a police force the Daleks knew the humans would be
untrustworthy. There were few enough Daleks to control the planet, so the
Daleks imported the Ogrons as helpers.
The Ogrons were natives of a distant world, and were only a step up from
brute savages -- they could communicate. They had absolutely no initiative of
their own, obeying any orders given them implicitly and to the death. This
made them perfect for situations where Daleks could not be spared to do the
job. There was simply no chance for a human to subvert an Ogron or to appeal
for mercy, since Ogrons had no desires, and no emotions that they were not
commanded to have.
The reinvasion of the Earth was a simple matter, and the Daleks established
factories and mines for the needed materials. They also set up plants to make
food pills for the natives, though higher-up humans were allowed more natural
foods as an incentive to obey the Daleks. No humans were ever allowed to have
too much power, however. Some humans -- as humans always did -- rebelled
against the Daleks. Guerilla resistance movements tried to fight back, hoping
against the obvious facts to reclaim their world. The Daleks knew that this
was impossible, but they still worked at eradicating the resistance.
Very soon the resistance workers also came to realize that the Daleks were
bound to win. Instead of giving up, as the Daleks had expected, the guerillas
simply changed their plans. Since the Daleks had time machines, the guerillas'
secret members in Dalek factories stole the plans and parts to contruct their
own machine. The guerillas intended to strike back through time and to the
point at which the Dalek invasion had become possible.
This alternate future became possible because of a single incident. By the
late twentieth century, the international situation had become extremely tense.
Nations prepared to mobilize for war, and sporadic fighting broke out in Africa
and South America. Russian forces poised on the Chinese border, and it looked
as though World War III was inevitable. At this juncture, an English diplomat
named Sir Reginald Styles intervened. His long years of service had gained him
sympathetic hearing from many nations, and he convened a peace conference at
his home, Auderly House. Delegates from all the potentially warring nations
attended, hoping to end the tension. Instead a huge explosion rocked the
house, killing all present.
It was believed that Styles was some form of fanatic and had intended to
provoke the very war he claimed to be combatting. With the house destroyed,
war was inevitable. The world simply tore itself apart. There was continual
warfare for a hundred years; almost 85 percent of the world's population
perished. The few survivors were at the mercy of the Daleks when they invaded.
Having this foreknowledge, the guerillas aimed to strike before the event
-- and kill Styles before he could detonate his bomb. Project Intercept was
established, headed by Anat, a strong-minded woman. Under her were Shura, Boaz
and a third member.
This last member tried first, but failed to reach his target due to the
erratic nature of the rebel time devices. A Controller fixed his location and
sent Ogron troopers after him. The guerilla was wounded, but escaped. In the
twentieth century, UNIT troops had been called in to help Sir Reginald Styles.
They were aided by the third Doctor, who was then working as UNIT's unpaid
scientific adviser, and his companion, Jo Grant. He deduced that the would-be
killer was from the future, and managed to contact Anat's party when she came
into the past to kill Styles. When the guerillas were traced, they were forced
to return to their own time; the Doctor went with them, hoping to find Jo, who
had been transported by accident into the future.
The Daleks were amazed to discover that their greatest foe had somehow
managed to turn up again, and they insisted on his capture, interrogation and
death. The capture was simple, since he tried to break into one of their
factory complexes. The interrogation was more difficult, despite the
mind-analysis machine. The Doctor's resistance to the mind-ripping techniques
was formidable, and it was all that the machine could do to extract the
information that he was indeed the same person who had already met and
frequently defeated the Daleks. His death was not achieved. The Controller
wished to use the Doctor to dispose of the human guerilla groups, and the Gold
Dalek in charge foolishly agreed to this. (The Dalek Prime had given orders
that if the Doctor were ever encountered, he was to be immediately interrogated
and then exterminated.)
Before the Daleks could use the Doctor, the humans invaded the control
complex and rescued him. When Ogron patrols were assigned to capture the
group, the Controller himself helped the Doctor to escape back to his own time.
Furious, the Gold Dalek executed the rebellious human and then personally led a
raid back to the twentieth century. The Doctor had realized that the explosion
at Styles's house had not been set by him but by the freedom fighters. Their
own attempt to interfere with history had caused this. Paradozically, they had
made the Dalek invasion possible: Shura was still in Styles's house, with a
bomb. The Doctor determined to prevent the explosion; the Daleks could not
allow this, as it would ruin their own invasion.
The Daleks and the Ogron patrol encountered resistance from UNIT troops,
who abruptly evacuated the area. The Daleks forced their way into the house,
only to discover that the peace conference had been moved. Shura had been
alerted by the Doctor, and once the Daleks were all in the house, Shura
detonated his bomb, destroying them. The future returned to the pattern it had
originally held. Styles's talks were a success, and the international
situation calmed down once again. The Dalek invasion attempt never took place.
On Skaro, the Dalek Prime noted the shift in the pattern of the past. There
had to be another way to foil the human expansion into the Galaxy.
Before the Daleks could begin considering this, they suddenly found
themselves in a terrible position. They had been concentrating all of their
forces and energies toward the growing power of Earth and its allied worlds,
and now they suddenly discovered that there was a foe from a fresh front. From
deeper toward the galactic center came the Movellans -- tall, beautiful and
humanoid in appearance. They were in fact a robotic race, ruled by calm,
strict logicx. Millenia before, they had been created by some long-extinct
race to serve them. The Movellans had soon discovered their perfection; they
were more logical and much better suited to rule. They had overthrown their
old masters, then established control of all near-space.
Movellan power spread, reaching out into freshly explored territory. They
inevitably took all non-mechanical races as subject populations, and used them
to construct further robotic creations. It was inevitable that in their
expansion they should finally encounter the Daleks. The Movellans initially
saw the Daleks as merely a cyborg race to be swiftly subdued. They did not
realize that they had evolved far beyond being simply organic life-forms within
travel machines.
Over the centuries, the Daleks had installed ever more sophisticated
computers to be used as adjuncts to their own memories and reasoning. This
interfacing between creature and machine had given the Daleks insights and
abilities they had never known in the past -- but it had also given them a
serious flaw. They had become the slaves of their inbuilt computers, unable to
operate in any fashion their computer logics did not sanction. While far from
robotic, they had become enmeshed in the rigorous network of logic.
The Movellans, being pure machine intelligences, were equally the slaves of
logic. The two armies faced off and began analyzing the weaknesses of the
other. Both armies, governed by their implacable war computers, vied for the
superior position. When one moved, the other countered, and the situation,
constantly changing, never altered in essence: the two armies stalemated one
another.
The Dalek Prime realized that a situation like this called for more than
mere logic. For decades, the two armies effectively neutralized one another,
and neither could expand. Both knew that this uneasy peace was giving their
enemies time to prepare, but neither dared do anything to disrupt the impasse
without a certainty of victory. The Dalek Prime began scanning all of the
possibilities recorded within Dalek history, going as far back as his records
stretched -- even to those initial days of the creation of the Daleks by
Davros.
It was then that he discovered that certain records about Davros were
classified. Working carefully, he broke through the programming and learned
that Davros was not -- as had long been accepted -- dead. There was the
secondary life-support system that could keep his body in stasis virtually
eternally. All it would take to revive Davros was a large influx of energy.
The Dalek Prime was about to discard this as useless when he realized that this
might be the lever needed to upset the balance of power. Davros had had the
insight to create the Daleks -- the supreme force in the universe. Might he
not know the way to defeat the Movellans?
It was worth risking, providing certain safeguards were taken. The Dalek
Prime knew that Davros considered himself to be superior to the Daleks and
would inevitably try to gain control of them again. He must seem to have that
opportunity. The Dalek Prime ordered the special construction of a small group
of Daleks that would take orders from Davros but be fitted with explosive
devices that the Dalek Prime could detonate in case of need. Davros would be
given an extremely small army to order about, but the Dalek Prime would retain
ultimate control.
The computer records on Skaro were incomplete, but this did not matter.
The location of Davros was known, and there were sufficient humanoid captives
in that area of space to help the Dalek task force dig him out. The ship
containing these Daleks and a small number of captives was dispatched for
Skaro. Their task was to find and restore Davros, and to convince him that he
had full control of the Daleks. Unfortunately, the Movellans had broken the
Dalek transmission codes and and learned of the mission to ASkaro -- though not
of its purpose. Movellan Central sent a ship after the Dalek task force,
commanded by Skarrel. He was ordered to prevent the Daleks achieving their
objective by any means possible. If it could be managed, he was also to secure
their prize, and use it to tip the balance of power in the Movellan favor.
The Dalek force arrived on Skaro and began operations. Some radiation
remained from the final war with the Thals, but little enough that the captives
could endure it. They began the clearing of the old Kaled bunker where they
knew Davros rested. As soon as they could, they repowered the city. According
to the computer records, Davros's primary life-support systems needed actinic
light from the general illumination to repower. By the time the Daleks reached
the level at which Davros had been abandoned, they hoped he would be waiting
for them.
Unfortunately, at this juncture the Tardis's erratic wanderings brought the
fourth Doctor to Skaro, with his fellow Time Lord, Romanadrevatrelundar (Romana
for short). The Doctor and Romana became separated during the blasting the
Daleks were conducting to free the way down to the old levels. At this moment,
the Movellan search craft arrived. Sharrel and his assistants Agella and Lan
managed to discover the Doctor, and began picking his brains about what the
Daleks were up to. They soon discovered that the Doctor had been an opponent
of the Daleks for a considerable time, and cleverly followed his lead. Romana
had fallen captive of the Daleks, and had been put to work on their digging
parties. The Doctor and the Movellans were joined by an escaped worker,
Tyssan, and they ventured into the Dalek control in the old bunker to work out
their objective.
The Doctor realized that the Dalek maps of the levels were incomplete.
From his point of view, the thousands of years that had passed between the
destruction of the Kaled city and the present represented but a short period of
time. He could remember the path that he and Harry had taken without problems,
and knew that there was a faster way down to the level the Daleks were
interested in. Accordingly, he and his Movellan allies of the moment reached
Davros first.
By this time Davros had awakened from his sleep of the millennia. His
tissues had regenerated and he was expecting to lead his Daleks to universal
conquest. As the Doctor observed, the millenia had not improved his
megalomania. The Daleks broke through also, and began their search for their
creator. Buying time, the Doctor threatened to kill Davros, and his companions
escaped. The Daleks responded by killing several of their captives -- none of
whom was now needed since the digging was completed. The Doctor, instead of
surrendering, countered by threatening to kill Davros unless the Daleks freed
the prisoners. Davros forced them to agree, knowing that the Doctor would do
it. The Doctor then made his escape.
The Movellans had learned from Romana that the Doctor was an expert in
cybernetics. They knew that he might give them the edge he needed to win the
war, provided that the Daleks did not escape with Davros. Accordingly, they
readied a nova bomb. This would ignite the atmosphere of Skaro and destroy the
planet -- along with the Daleks, Davros and any others that were left behind.
Sacrifices were necessary, and Lan agreed to remain to trigger the device.
However, Tyssan organized the freed prisoners, and while the Movellans
attempted to get the Doctor to help them, Tyssan's force struck. They were
able to remove the power packs of the Movellans and to reprogram them to obey
Tyssan's orders. Striking at the Movellan ship, they managed to capture it.
They now had a transport off Skaro.
Davros had not been idle. He realized that the Movellans might escape with
the Doctor, who could bring them victory in the impending showdown. The Time
Lord was certain to realize that the way to win the stalemate was to make some
illogical move and strike while the enemy tactical computers were attempting to
analyze it. Accordingly, Davros equipped most of the surviving Daleks with
bombs he could detonate, and then sent them off to destroy the Movellan craft.
Once again he had underestimated the Doctor, who used this opportunity to slip
in and confront Davros. One remaining Dalek had been left to guard Davros
until a deep-space cruiser could arrive; this Dalek was no match for the
Doctor, who blinded and then destroyed it. Davros fought against the Doctor
but the Daleks exploded early, leaaving the Movellan ship unharmed.
Romana had prevented Sharrel from detonating the nova device, and defused
it. The freed prisoners could now return to Earth space. The Doctor helped
them to rig up a cryogenic util to take Davros with them in suspended
animation. That way he could neither signal for help nor try any tricks. Once
on Earth, he could be tried for crimes against all sentient species.
The trial was something of a formality and Davros was condemned to
suspension -- to be frozen forever in a block of ice on a prison ship in space.
He would be alive and aware, yet unable to move or act. Ostensibly a mercy,
it was in fact a living hell. His term of sentence, however, laster only
ninety years, not for eternity.
The Daleks finally lost their war with the Movellans when the robotic race
played on the fact that their opponents were still organic beings.
Experimenting on captured Daleks, they developed a virus that would kill
specifically Daleks (they intended to subjugate the humanoid races for their
own use, naturally, and had no intentions of harming them). The virus spread
fast, utterly decimating the Dalek population. The last few survivors crawled
back to whatever retreats they could and reformulated their plans. The Dalek
Prime and his Supreme Council retreated to Skaro once again, to their oldest
city. Many things remained to be done, and this latest setback had to be
rectified.
The Dalek Prime authorized a number of possible avenues to regain their
status. The number of time-travel experiments were increased and would soon
provide them with heady fruit. The Dalek Prime himself began genetic
experimentation to further develop the Dalek form -- perhaps to some
undreamed-of goal. Daring trust this advancement to no other Dalek, he was
forced to use himself as an experiment. The Dalek Supreme was left to pursue a
means of combating the virus. His suggestion was the recovery of Davros, using
humanoid assistance. A group of troopers under the command of a mercenary of
Lytton offered to accomplish this, and it was agreed. With Davros, perhaps
there was hope. Lytton knew his location, and an armed ship was sent to
intercept and invade the station.
The attack was a success, since the station had been allowed to degenerate
somewhat. Earth and its allies were embroiled in a bitter war with the
Movellans. With the Daleks out of their path, the Movellans had moved into the
humanoid sectors of space. This was not as simple a matter as they had hoped,
and the fight turned against them. Slowly the allied forces of Earth and
Draconia pushed back the Movellans, annihilating them as they went. This
voctory was not achieved without many losses on the human side, and the
Draconians were also very much weakened. With the Movellans totally destroyed
the humans returned to their own areas of space, hoping to begin a new alliance
that could not stand against the inevitable return of the Daleks.
Lytton's attack on the prison ship succeeded, and Davros was rescued from
his icy tomb. He had been aware throughout those ninety years, and had thought
long and hard. He knew that the Daleks had freed him only because he was of
use to them -- and that they would kill him once he had achieved their purpose.
Accordingly, he had no intentions of helping them or placing himself in their
power. Rather than leave the station, he insisted on working on it. Using a
mind probe, he established control of first the humans assigned to help him,
and then two of the Daleks themselves. Davros was forming a loyal core, about
which he would create an army that would obey only him.
The Daleks, meanwhile, had hidden their samples of the Movellan virus in
the past -- the 1980's, in fact, in London. This way, if the containers ever
broke they could not affect any Daleks. They allowed the containers to be
discovered, then captured the army troops sent in to dispose of them. The
Dalek had developed a method of cloning that could duplicate a being, then scan
the original's mind, transferring his or her mental patterns to the duplicate.
The clone would be loyal to the Daleks and the original would be destroyed.
The army troops under Colonel Archer awere all treated and left to guard the
virus.
Once again, the Doctor and his friends intervened. This time it was the
fifth Doctor, along with Turlough and Tegan. The Tardis had accidentally
impinged on the Dalek time corridor, and the Doctor could not resist
investigating this. The Daleks soon detected his presence and arranged for him
to be captured. One of their duplicates, Stien, managed the task by winning
the Doctor's confidence and then capturing him when they reached the Dalek
ship. The Doctor was then prepared for duplication. Knowing that the Time
Lords were bound to intervene again in their destiny, the Daleks planned to
send a duplicate Doctor to assasinate the High Council of the Time Lords --
paving the way for the Daleks to capture all of time. However, the Doctor
escaped this fate; the duplication process worked too well and the Doctor was
able to access enough of Stien's old self to break the Dalek mind control for a
while. Together, they planned to stop the Daleks and kill Davros.
The Daleks had become aware of Davros's treachery, and realized that he
would never do as they wished. They had not fooled him any more than he had
fooled them. Davros was too dangerous, and the Dalek Supreme ordered him
killed. They also planned on exterminating Lytton and his men, who were
becoming unreliable allies. The whole plan was crumbling. Davros released the
killer virus to stop the Daleks, intending to escape and create a new race for
himself -- beings programmed with total obedience to his will. The Daleks
would obey him in the future, or perish. The Doctor, meanwhile, having again
failed to kill Davros, escaped into the past and there released the Movellan
virus to destroy the Daleks loyal to Davros.
In both eras the Daleks perished. To his astonishment and fury, Davros
discovered that he had enough in common with the Daleks for the virus to affect
him also. Meanwhile, Stien had managed to hold together his mental control
long enough to destroy the prisom station and the accompanying Dalek ship.
On Skaro, the Black Dalek regarded this setback with fury. At least, it
seemed, all possible menace from Davros was eliminated. The Dalek scientists
evolved a cure for the virus, and the remnants of the Dalek army began to
reassemble itself. The way forward was still open.
An excellent opportunity arose when a plague began spreading through the
Galaxy. Thanks to their new viral technology, the Daleks were immune to the
disease. They soon discovered that most of the humanoid races were not,
relying on an elixir to immunize themselves. One essential ingredient for this
drug was the mineral Parrinium. This was conveniently located on only one
world -- the lost planet of Exxilon. No ships that had ever ventured there had
ever returned, but that would not stop the humans and it would not stop the
Daleks. Whatever faced themm there, they were certain they could overcome it.
The plan was for them to obtain whatever mineral supplies they could and return
to Skaro with them. As soon as they left Exxilon, they were to drop a plague
bomb on the planet to prevent further expeditions landing there. With the only
supply of Parrinium, the Daleks could then negotiate the surrender of worlds
for the antidote.
The plan floundered from the start. As the Dalek ship approached Exxilon,
a sudden power loss forced it to the ground, where it stayed. Until the source
of the drain could be located, they were stranded on the planet. Worse was to
come, for the ship was not the only energy source affected by the drain.
Emerging from the ship, the Daleks discovered that a human party had beat them
to the planet. They instantly attempted to exterminate, but their guns would
not operate; the concentrated power sources used were also now drained.
Luckily their lower-powered life-support systems were still working, as they
were wired into the Daleks' own mental patterns. It was obvious that the
energy drain only worked above a certain minimum level -- biological energy was
immune and so were low-level explosives.
The Daleks were forced to think the unthinkable: an alliance with the
humans until the energy drain could be located and destroyed. Naturally, the
Daleks had no intention at all of keeping faith with mere humans. Three Daleks
remained hidden in the ship and began developing projectile weapons for
armament. Meanwhile, the other Daleks discovered that they must also ally
themselves with one of their worst enemies: the third Doctor, and his
companion, Sarah Jane. Together, the mixed group headed for the Exxilons but
were captured. The primitave armaments of the natives proved effective enough
against the humans.
The Exxilons were the descendants of a once great society. They had built
a magnificent city, one that would keep itself going forever. It could drain
energy from any source to power itself, and it had tendrils that searched
through the ground for metals and necessary elements to keep the city in
pristine shape. The computer that ran the city rebelled against its creators,
throwing them out as impure and unnecessary. Disillusioned and disheartened,
the Exxilons for the most part swore off all civilization and descended into
barbarism. Few of them retained any semblance of manners or intellect.
Instead, the dying race worshipped the city that their forefathers had created
centuries earlier.
When the pellet-firing Daleks arrived and began annihilating the Exxilon
natives, the Doctor and Sarah escaped into the tunnels beneath the city.
Unable to stand against the Daleks, the Exxilons and the humans were forced to
surrender. This was exactly what the Daleks needed: a slave work force. All
survivors were set to digging Parrinium and storing it in sacks. Meanwhile the
Daleks had realized that the city was the source of the energy drain. They
opted for a two-pronged attack. Two Daleks were dispatched to enter the city
through the tunnels and attempt to destroy the computer. Meanwhile, two of the
humans -- Galloway and Hamilton -- were sent up the side of the city with
bombs. On the top of the city was the antenna that received the drained power.
They were to destroy this.
Thus far, their planning was impeccable. However, matters began to
unravel. Hamilton used his bomb to destroy the beacon on the city, stopping
the power drain -- and Galloway hid his. He managed to sneak aboard the Dalek
ship and hide as the Daleks prepared to leave. Within the city, the Doctor and
an Exxilon native, Bellal, teamed to get through the traps that the computer
had set. The two Daleks in pursuit managed to solve the problems of the deadly
maze. They arrived at the computer center just as it created two zombie
figures to fight the Doctor. Recognizing that the Daleks were the greater
menace, the computer turned the zombies onto them. The Doctor finished his
reprogramming of the computer, ordering it to self-destruct, and he and Bellal
were able to escape.
The Daleks were ready to leave, and had the sacks of Parrinium loaded on
their ship. They didn't bother to ikill the humans, knowing that the plague
bomb would effect the job for them. As they lifted off, however, Galloway
triggered his bomb, destroying the saucer and the remainder of the task force.
Sarah and the human female, Jill, had actually substituted sand in the sacks
loaded onto the Dalek ship; the Parrinium was now on the human ship, powering
up for launch. The humans could cure the plague. and the Dalek plot had been
thwarted. The Doctor and Sarah watched the Exxilon city melt into nothing,
eliminating the energy-drainage problem forever.
Davros was not dead. The virus had only partially affected him, and he had
managed to reach an escape pod from the Dalek ship before the explosion.
Jetting away from the site, he began to plan his next moves. In this, he
proved to be very lucky, for the escape craft came down on Nekros -- the world
of the living dead.
The whole economy of Nekros was based around the huge forests of Tranquil
Repose. Here the freshly dead were cryogenically preserved and stored to await
reawakening in the future, when some cure for what had killed them might be
found. Their consciousnesses were kept alive and they were kept informed of
what was happenening in the Galaxy at large. They were even given a disc
jockey to play music for them and alleviate boredom. The problem was that the
government did not really wish to bring back the dead. The only ones who could
afford Tranquil Repose were those who were politically active, and the
politicians knew that reawakening them would result in grave competition for
their jobs.
At this juncture, Davros offered a suggestion that was eagerly seized upon.
The dead would stay dead, but no one would know. Davros would be established
in a laboratory to pretend to cure the fatal illnesses that had killed the
sleepers. In fact, he would be making sure they never awoke. In the meantime,
the dead could benefit the living in another way: there was a famine in the
area and the bodies could be processed to form a protein concentrate to feed
the hungry. The government of Nekros agreed to this plan and Davros took over,
calling himself the Great Healer. What he had not bothered to tell the greedy
political forces on Nekros was that he had his own plans for parts of the
undead bodies.
The protein processing worked well, under the control of the ruthless and
greedy Kara. She resented paying Davros the money he wanted for his
researches, however, and hired Orcini, a Knight of the Grand Order of Oberon,
to kill him. Orcini -- a somewhat despondant idealist -- liked the concept of
a quest to kill Davros and undertook the task with his squire, Bostock. Kara
was taking no chances, and gave Orcini a bomb that would kill him and Davros
the second it was triggered -- though she told him it was merely a signal box.
Orcini penetrated the catacombs of Tranquil Repose, where he discovered Davros
waiting. Sensing a trap, Orcini killed him -- so he though. But the fake head
was only a decoy, and Davros and his Daleks were ready. They slew Bostock.
Davros had been working in secret. Since the Daleks had refused his rule,
he had begun to create new Daleks from the bodies in the vaults. The heads
were taken and treated so that they were transformed genetically into Daleks.
Davros programmed these Daleks to be completely obedient to him. As soon as he
had sufficient funds, he aimed to convert all of the sleeping millions into
Daleks, and with his new army wipe out the old Daleks and begin the conquest of
the universe. The arrival of Orcini to kill him prompted a slight change of
plans, however. The Daleks fetched Kara and confronted her with the evidence
of her treachery. Realizing that he had been lied to and tricked, Orcini
knifed the greedy woman.
At this point, Davros's final plan matured. He had lured the Doctor to
Nekros, determined to finally extract his revenge. This was the sixth Doctor,
along with his companion, Peri. There was no way the Doctor could resist such
a challenge, and the two old foes were soon face to face again. Davros
believed he had all the aces now, but he was wrong. He had neglected the staff
of Tranquil Repose, who were annoyed at what he had done to their mausoleums
and wanted peace restored. Takis had informed the Dalek Supreme of Davros's
hiding place. At Davros's moment of triumph the real Daleks arrived,
annihilating Davros's models and capturing their creator.
The Dalek Supreme wanted Davros back on Skaro, for public execution.
Cursing and screaming, he was taken off. Takis had hoped that the old order
would be restored on Nekros, but the Black Dalek had no intention of that. He
would use Tranquil Repose's facilities to continue the Dalek production line --
creating Daleks loyal to the Dalek regime, not to Davros. This plan was
thwarted by Orcini, who still possessed the bomb that Kara had given him.
Triggering the bomb, he destroyed the vaults and the Dalek assembly line, along
with himself. He died as he had wished -- fulfulling a quest to eradicate
evil. The Doctor and Peri suggested to Takis that they use the local plant
life to make protein, and thus supply the hungry worlds nearby with food.
The ship carrying Davros had narrowly escaped destruction, having launched
into space with moments to spare before Orcini had triggered his bomb. It
returned to Skaro with Davros strictly watched at all times. On the Dalek home
world, he was brought before the Supreme Council and the Black Dalek for trial.
As he had expected, this was mostly a farce played out before the Daleks who
watched the events on film. Davros was given the opportunity to speak, the
Black Dalek knowing that their crazed creator would never be able to resist.
Davros launched into an impassioned plea to the watching Daleks to swear
allegiance to him, and to allow him to lead them to greater victories once
again. He promised to redesign their casings, making them stronger, swifter
and more enduring. He promised to oversee their destiny as supreme beings in
the universe. Finally, the Black Dalek cut him off, and spoke in its turn.
Davros had never renounced his claim to be the supreme ruler of the Daleks; to
him, they were nothing more than an extension of his own purposes. Instead,
the Black Dalek insisted, they could do what was needed without Davros -- who
would undoubtedly seize his first opportunity to reprogram them to obey him
again. Davros could not be trusted; he must be exterminated so that the Dalek
race could achieve its own destiny.
Davros called them fools if the rejected him, promising that without him
they were doomed. The Daleks refused to listen further, and he was sentenced
to death. He managed one last attempt to regain power, for there were some
within the Dalek ranks -- even within the Supreme Council -- who felt that he
was possibly telling the truth. At any rate, there were some Daleks who felt
that Davros could be used and then discarded once his mind had been drained and
utilized. A rescue attempt was staged but the Black Dalek had been
anticipating this. Since the disastrous losses of the Movellan War, he had
known that there was talk of overthrowing the Council and reforming the Dalek
power scheme. The only reason Davros had been brought to Skaro was to force
the rebel elements into the open.
The Black Dalek and his forces struck against the traitors. They succeeded
in slaying the dissidents, and this time there was no escape for Davros. The
Black Dalek ensured that he was condemned, and he was placed within a matter
transmitter. It was set on a broad beam, and his component molecules were
scattered about their sun. There would, it seemed, be no way back for Davros
this time, despite his rantings and boasts. The war for the final control of
the Daleks was over.
For the time being.
Lacking the army they desired, the Daleks alone could not complete their
plans for the conquest of the Galaxy. They needed pawns for this task. The
Dalek scientists managed to evolve another variation on time travel -- the Time
Destructor. This device could locally reverse or accelerate the flow of time.
Placed on an enemy world, it could either age the inhabitants to death, or
regress the planet millions of years, killing all intelligent froms of life.
The Daleks simply had to smuggle one of these devices to each of their enemies'
worlds and trigger them.
The problem was that they were powered by a taranium core, and taranium was
perhaps the rarest mineral in the Galaxy. A few grams could buy a smallish
planet, and a kilo could buy a solar system -- if there was a solar system
anywhere to be had. The Daleks needed all they could get, and they needed
dupes to help them obtain it. Accordingly they plotted a Dalek alliance,
offering various alien races the chance to strike at the riches of Earth and
the federated space about it. The Daleks were well aware of humanoid greed and
stupidity, and -- despite the Dalek record -- several races joined up with
alacrity. Each helped in some aspect of the design and construction of the
Time Destructor, though all were unaware of its true aims and powers. The
final member of the consortium was perhaps the moxt unexpected of all -- Mavic
Chen.
The solar system at this point was at peace. Earth had secured the
boundaries of its empire, and, with the good relationship it enjoyed with the
Draconians, was safe within its boundaries. The destruction of the Movellans
had left both empires in a secure position. The Daleks were obviously going to
be trouble again, so Earth had formed the SSS - Space Special Security -- to
check into threats against peace. The SSS was headed by a man named Karlton,
under direct command of the Guardian of the Solar System. The Guardian was the
elected ruler of Earth and near space -- Mavic Chen. Chen, however, had
overwhelming ambitions to rule over the entire Terran Empire. Accordingly, he
threw in his lot with the Daleks, who promised him (with no intention of paying
off) the power he lusted after. Chen in his turn suborned Karlton.
Despite this, Karlton had to follow procedures, and when there were several
reports of a Dalek buildup on the planet Kembel, he was forced to dispatch a
team of agents to investigate. He simply ensured that the Daleks knew of its
arrival, so the mission was bound to fail. Agent Marc Cory discovered that the
reports had been correct, and that the Daleks were beginningh some plan to
invade Earth's empire from Kembel. He also discovered that the Varga plants of
Skaro were at large here, and they accounted for his crew. The Varga plants
had spines that were doubly poisoned -- they induced dementia in humans, then
transformed the victims' bodies into Varga plants. Cory discovered much of the
plot and recorded the information, but was caught and killed by the Daleks
before he could do anything.
Karlton was forced by procedures to send in a second team, this time Bret
Vyon and Kert Gantry. Gantry was killed fairly quickly, but Vyon managed the
impossible -- he penetrated the Dalek defenses and evaded them long enough to
team up with the Doctor, who had once again fortuitiously arrived where the
Daleks were gathered. This was the first Doctor, and he had with him his
companion Steven, and the young girl Katarina, fresh from the battlefields of
the Trojan War. The four discovered the details of the Dalek plot, and the
Doctor managed to steal the taranium core for the Time Destructor by disguising
himself as the cloaked Zephon, the grandly titled Master of the Fifth Galaxy.
In the meantime, Vyon, Steven and Katarina managed to power up Mavic Chen's
ship, which they used for their escape.
Furious at this setback, the Daleks exterminated Zephon for his stupidity
and then used their instruments to cause the ship to crash on the prison world
Desperus. Though the Doctor managed to break the ship free of Dalek control,
Katarina had to sacrifice her life to kepp her friends at liberty. Chen,
expecting the fugitives to alert Earth, returned there himself and told Karlton
what to expect. The two men laid their plans, convincing the SSS that Vyon had
betrayed Earth and was to be killed on sight. From an experimental plant run
by Daxter, they received an alert that Vyon had landed there. Karlton
dispatched his best agent, Sara Kingdom, to kill Vyon and recover the stolen
core. The fact that Sara was Vyon's sister did not prevent her from following
what she believed to be her only course of action -- killing him. She then
went after the Doctor and Steven, but the three of them accidentally stepped
into a prototype matter transmitter and recovered on the planet Mira.
Chen was furious at the technicians' mistake, until he realized that Mira
was close to Kimbal. He alerted the Daleks, pretending this was his planned
course of action all along. Sara finally listened to the Doctor and Steven,
and realized how she had been tricked. She now threw herself wholeheartedly
into helping them. Unfortunately, the planet was the home of the invisible,
monstrous Visians, who began hunting the three refugees. Ironically, it was
the Daleks who saved them by intruding. The Visians promptly attacked the
Dalek party, enabling the Doctor's group to slip away and steal the Dalek ship.
The Daleks on Kembel overrode the controls, forcing the ship to land again. On
the journey, though, the Doctor had created a duplicate of the time core. The
Daleks didn't dare try to kill the humans, for fear of damaging the precious
core. The Doctor knew that the impasse wouldn't last, and agreed to hand it
over to them only at the Tardis.
Chen forced the Daleks to agree to this, and as the exchange took place the
Doctor, Steven and Sara managed to reach the safety of the time machine with
the real core. The Daleks tested the core and detected the fact that they had
been fooled. Once again furious at the delay, they prepared their second time
machine and sent it into the Vortex after the Tardis. It was another chase
through time and space, and the Doctor was again forced to outrun or outwit his
greatest foes. After a short stopover at the Lords cricket ground, the two
ships materialized on the volcanic world of Tigus. Here the Doctor wished to
make his stand but was prevented by the unexpected reappearance of another old
foe, the Monk.
The Monk was a Time Lord, like the Doctor. Unlike the Master, he was not
evil, but he was certainly irresponsible and derived a great deal of joy from
his efforts at altering the course of history. In an attempt to change the
outcome of the Battle Of Hastings in A.D. 1066, he had run into the Doctor, who
stole his dematerialization circuit, stranding him in 1066. Having finally
made a replacement, the irritated Time Lord was after revenge, in his usual
half-brilliant, half-bungling way. He rigged the Tardis doors with a special
lock to keep the Doctor out -- then made the mistake of bragging about it to
him. The Doctor broke the lock and entered the Tardis, then, unwilling to take
on two foes at a time, he set the Tardis in motion. This time, both the Daleks
and the Monk were on his trail.
The three time machines all appeared within a short time and distance of
one another in ancient Egypt. Kephran and his men were engaged in building the
pyramid of Chepos and did not take kindly to the interference. Chen and the
Daleks managed to capture Steven, Sara and the Monk, and would release them
only when given the core. The Doctor had no option but to hand it over. Then
the Egyptian army arrived before the Daleks could exterminate their prisoners.
The Doctor managed to confuse matters somewhat, as the Egyptians and the Daleks
enganged in a pitched battle. He took the directional circuit from the Monk's
Tardis -- a more advanced model than his own -- and used it to steer his own
Tardis to Kembel. The Monk was again stranded by the Doctor, but the Daleks
and Chen made their escape back to Kembel.
With the taranium core once again in their possession the Daleks had what
they really needed, and their alliance was dissolved. They locked all their
erstwhile allies together, leaving them to ponder their foolishness, while the
Time Destructor was prepared. Chen could not accept this final betrayal, and
he went crazy. Steven and Sara freed the by-now wiser delegates and allowed
them to return to their home worlds and unite those planets with Earth to face
the future Dalek onslaught. Chen, however, in his madness, became convinced
that the Daleks had misunderstood him. He captured Sara and Steven and took
them to the Daleks, demanding to be placed in command. The Daleks promptly
exterminated the maniac.
The Doctor used this diversion to make his way to the Time Destructor,
which he set on low power. Instantly, everything began to age slowly, and he
ordered his companions to make for the Tardis, whose internal forces would keep
them safe. Steven did as he was told, but Sara stayed to aid the Doctor. As a
result, she was caught within the advancing field of the Destructor and in
moments she aged, withered, and finally decayed and turned to dust. The
Doctor, being nonhuman, was not was affected, but even he began to feel the
effects as he ran for the Tardis. Steven helped him the final few feet. In
doing so, though, he dropped the Time Destructor, which suddenly went into fast
reverse. The Doctor and Steven watched from the control room as everything
regressed through time. The Dalek casings eroded away as they passed back
before the time of Dalekanium. The creatures themselves died without the
protection of the travel machines. Finally all life on Kembal died, and the
world was left as arid, shifting sands. The Time Destructor itself ceased to
exist.
This threat was gone, but the Daleks were committed to their invasion of
the Galaxy. With their allies now turned against them, they found themsleves
badly outnumbered. The Dalek Wars lingered over the next couple of centuries,
but the Daleks were gradually pushed back toward Skaro. It was becoming
increasingly obvious that somehow the Daleks were no match for the humanoids
they so despised. In fact, for the Daleks even to survive, they needed to
adapt themselves.
The experiments by the Dalek Prime on himself were beginning to show fruit.
In his attempt to expand his mental capacity, he had grown far larger. He
ordered the construction of a specialized life-support system, since he soon
lost all mobility. He was becoming pure mentality, and he saw that the future
of the Daleks lay in his hands. What he needed was to know why -- despite
their destiny, despite their power -- the Daleks constantly lost their battle
to become dominant. He needed answers, and solutions.
He needed the Doctor.
From the very origin of the Daleks down to the end of the Dalek Wars, the
ever-changing time traveler had cropped up. At crucial points in their
history, the Doctor and his companions had appeared and helped to defeat the
Daleks. If anyone knew what it was that made the Daleks vunerable, it was the
Doctor. If anyone could help to make the Daleks undefeatable, it had to be the
Doctor. The problem was finding a method to ensure his cooperation. From past
knowledge, there was no inducement that could win him over -- unless it was the
possibility of defeating the Daleks forever.
The Emperor Dalek now evolved a plan that was double-edged and devious
enough to fool the Doctor. If the Doctor could be induced to work for thr
Daleks on the suppostition that he was actually planning their defeat, then the
plan would succeed. First, though, the Emperor needed a bait on the hook. The
obvious place to look was Earth, for the errant Time Lord seemed to love that
planet for some odd reason.
Sanning across time, the Daleks discovered that in 1866 two scientists
were working on penetrating the time barrier. The Daleks' own ability to
travel though time had been dealt a crushing blow with the affair of the Time
Destructor, but their surviving equipment was more than sufficient to link up
with the feeble efforts of Maxtible and Waterfield on Earth and to form a
space-time tunnel from the hills above the Dalek city on Skaro to the country
house near Canterbury. The Dalek Supreme passed though, and instantly took
control in the past. Both men had daughters, and one -- Victoria Waterfield --
was taken as a hostage by the Daleks. The Dalek Supreme realized very early on
that Maxtible was a greedy man; the Daleks convinced him that they had the
power to transmute metals into gold, offering it to him if he would assist
them. His alacrity to accept the offer was disgusting to behold, but for the
time being he was useful.
The Daleks then took over the house, confining Victoria to one wing. In
this wing, they set up recording devices and posted a human to guard the girl.
The first phase of their plan was complete. The second was to locate and
ensanre the Doctor. Waterfield's time machine was used to penetrate time,
until the Doctor or the time field from the Tardis was located. They finally
discovered a contact in 1966, London. With Victoria a hostage, Waterfield had
to play along with the Daleks. Traveling though time, he opened a small
antique shop -- selling items from his own day! He used the money to hire men
to steal the Tardis from Heathrow Airport, where the second Doctor had been
involved with his companion Jamir, in an affair with alien invaders.
Waterfield laid a careful trail back to the store, ensuring that the Doctor
would follow it to recover his Tardis. The Tardis was taken back thorugh time,
then transferred to the relay station above the Dalek city on Skaro. As
anticipated, the Doctor had little trouble discovering what had happened to his
time and space craft, and when he arrived at Waterfield's shop he was trapped
with a gas bomb and transported to Maxtible's house, along with Jamie. When
they awoke, Waterfield and Maxtible filled them in on what was happening. The
Doctor was forced to confront the Daleks.
The Daleks struck a bargain with the Doctor that they knew he couldn't
refuse. They informed him that they were seeking the reason they had
constantly been defeated in the past, and believed that humans had something in
them that Daleks lacked -- the human factor. If they could analyze this and
duplicate it, then they could instill the human factor into the Daleks and make
them invincible. They carefully did not tell the Doctor that there was a
logical flaw in this reasoning, knowing that he would see it and believe that
they had overlooked it. If the Daleks were given human attributes, they would
know compassion, kindness, pity and affection -- which would blunt their power
for evil and perhaps turn them into a force for good. This was bound to appeal
to the Doctor -- and it did. He beleived their story, and agreed to aid their
research. The chance of turning the destiny of the Daleks around was too great
an opportunity to miss.
To get the required readings on the human factor, the Daleks had made the
passage to Victoria very difficult. They wanted Jamie to run the gauntlet of
their traps so that they could record his honesty, courage, hope, mercy and
other human emotions they did not share. Jamie faced the tests well, giving
them exactly what they required. But the Daleks were amking rather a different
use of the data than the Doctor beleived. Eventually the Doctor had isolated
what he identified as the human factor and instilled it into the
computer-augments for the minds of three Daleks. As he had expected, these
Daleks became humanized -- they started to play with him and Jamie. The Doctor
gave them names -- Alpha, Beta and Gamma -- which was unheard of for the
Daleks. These Daleks responded by giving the Doctor a name: Friend.
The Emperor Dalek was pleased with the work done. He dismissed the three
Daleks with human factors as of no importance. That had not been the real
reason for the project. He issued an order recalling all Daleks to Skaro, and
the ones from the house took Victoria with them back to the Dalek city before
placing a bomb to destroy that end of the space-time tunnel. The friendly
Daleks also returned and the Doctor realized that he must follow, for both
Victoria and the Tardis were on Skaro. The Emperor had planned all of this,
wanting his greatest foe to be on hand at the moment of Dalek triumph.
Maxtible plunged though the tunnel, still demanding the secret of transmutation
in return for his betrayal of the human race. The Doctor managed to get
Maxtible's daughter, Ruth, to evacuate the house; then he, Jamie and Waterfield
followed though the tunnel seconds before the bomb detonated.
The humans were captured as soon as they arrived on Skaro, and the Doctor
and the Emperor Dalek finally met face-to-face. The Doctor, predictably, was
defiant even when defeated. He bravely told the Emperor that the human factor
would defeat the Daleks -- that the infection would spread. This was sheer
bravado, since the Doctor had no idea of the real intentions of the Daleks.
The search for the human factor had been simply a smoke screen to keep the
Doctor placated. What the Daleks had been after was the Dalek factor -- those
parts of the Dalek mentality that made them what they were, in contrast to the
human factor. The Emperor had no intention of making Daleks more human. On
the contrary, with the Dalek factor isolated the plan was to make humans into
Daleks.
The Doctor finally realized that he had been outwitted. The Daleks had used
him for a pawn and he had fallen for it, in the hope that he could estroy them.
In a fit of depression he witnessed the first application of the Dalek factor.
The conditioning unit was set up and Maxtible was put through it. He emerged
blindly loyal to the Daleks, and willing to do whatever he must. He was a
Dalek in all but shape. Peased with this, the Emperor ordered the Doctor to be
used for the next experiment -- a fatal mistake. The Dalek factor had been
isolated using humans as the base, and the system was set up to work only on
humans. The Doctor was far from human, and the conversion process failed to
work on him. He pretended, naturally, that it had worked.
Elsewhere in the Dalek city, a supervisor gave an order to a Dalek -- and
that Dalek questioned the order. This was unheard of, for no Daleks would ever
disobey a direct command from a superior. The Doctor knew what it was -- the
first of the humanized Daleks was exercising his individuality and his right to
freedom. This was the beginning of a plague that could destroy the rigid
structure of Dalek society, and the Emperor was informed immediately. This rot
in the heart of Dalek society would have to be eradicated. The problem was
that the disobedient Daleks looked exactly like any other Dalek, so how could
they be found? The Doctor came up with the obvious answer; the problem was the
Daleks with the human factor, so why not order all Daleks to pass through the
Dalek-factor conditioning machine? This way the normal Daleks would be
unaffected, and the humanized ones would be reversed. The Emperor approved
this, and authorized the action.
Since he was faking obedience, the Doctor simply seized his opportunity.
He rewired the machine to instill the human factor instead, so that when the
Daleks began passing through the machine they were transformed into humanized
Daleks. It was a while before this was discovered, and by that point it was
too late: Daleks all over the city were questioning orders and refusing to
obey. They wanted some say in what was being done, rather than being ordered
about by a ridiculous self-appointed Emperor.
The normal Daleks responded with extermination, and in a manner of minutes
civil war broke out. The Doctor used the moment to free his friends and flee
into the city, which was erupting into an inferno behind him. Waterfield was
killed in the escape, and Maxtible met his end in the hills. The Doctor, Jamie
and Victoria managed to return safely to the Tardis. From this vantage they
studied the Dalek city below.
Fighting had intensified, and the city was turning into a war zone. The
humanized Daleks broke into the EMperor's control room and proceeded to
exterminate the tyrant. With his destruction, the city began to explode. All
the Daleks -- normal and humanized -- perished in the blaze. The last Dalek
city collapsed about the ruins of the deadly race. Watching from the hills,
the Doctor murmered with satisfaction: "The final end."
The Daleks were no more.
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