Doctor Who Read Free Page B

back to the embedded mementoes in glass. He found himself being drawn to what looked like a tiny spaceship. Hepushed his face close to the transparent casing around its miniature hull.
    ‘Hmmm,’ he mused. ‘Anyone at home?’
    Crouching, he could see some lettering on the underside of the ship.
    ‘Made in Carthedia,’ he read aloud. ‘You’re a toy, aren’t you?’ The Doctor grinned his broad grin and ruffled his hair. He chuckled to himself. He knew the difference between a memory and the faint tingle he felt when something from his future was reaching back to him. He knew that sometimes the complexities of time travel meant he had to be patient.
    ‘Something for another day,’ he muttered to himself. ‘But I shall remember you, little spaceship. I shall remember you.’ And he pointed at it, chuckling again, moving closer and closer to the glass. So close now that the little ship started to blur and the microscopic flaws in the transparent ‘amber’ around it looked like the tracks of eternity, reaching out to tantalise the Doctor.
    He snapped back up to his full height, swaying, inelegant, looking up at the giant monument. One day, this would mean something to him, he felt. One day …
    But not today.
    As the Doctor turned and left the graveside, striding off back to the TARDIS, he was being observed.
    Deep within a vast, metallic complex, surging with the power of a terrifying, almost unimaginably superior technology, there seethed the hatred and determination of a single, powerful intellect. Contained within the bonded polycarbide armour of a Dalek, this creaturewas the result of generations of genetic manipulation. Manipulation with but one aim: to furnish the Dalek race with a controlling force that could see into the frenzied chaos of the Time Vortex and read its unfathomable patterns.
    This was the Dalek Time Controller.
    The upper grating sections of its casing, just below its dome, were diagonally circled by revolving rings, like the whirling debris fields around a gas giant, appearing solid from a distance, but close up … Close up, they burned with the energy of the Vortex that unfolded in the open gateway in front of this ultimate form of Dalek life.
    Its eyestalk twitched, agitatedly, as it followed the image superimposed in the centre of the Vortex. The Doctor was still moving towards his TARDIS on the planet Gethria.
    Inside its casing, the mutant body of the Dalek Time Controller quivered with something very like anticipation and delight. Behind it, not daring to approach the open gateway into eternity, a squad of high-ranking Daleks eased a little closer to their soothsayer. They too had spotted the Doctor.
    He was now entering the TARDIS. The door closed behind him. A few moments later, the TARDIS groaned the hoarse groan of its temporal engines and was gone.
    In a voice infused with an almost exultant, dark determination, more guttural and yet more delicate than any other Dalek’s voice, the Time Controller finally spoke.
    ‘It is beginning …’
    *
    At another, precise point in the infinity of space and time, a young girl was terrified – and it was becoming more and more difficult for her to remember a time when she had not been. She sat, hunched, hugging herself as tight as she could, shivering in spasms of cold and fear so relentless and all-consuming that it felt to her as if the cold and the fear were becoming the same thing.
    She squeezed her eyes tight shut again. But all she found in her mind were terrible memories she could almost not bear to think about. She remembered the shouting, running, an explosion … Sheer terror.
    There had been a man. He was kind, she had thought. He had rescued her … Her and her little brother.
    Her little brother!
    She remembered him calling out to her. ‘We’ll come back for you! We’ll come back for you! I promise!’
    The thoughts were too painful and she opened her eyes again. The memories faded into the grimy, grey-silver walls