‘You have an emotional connection to the Doctor.’

Rose swallowed and stepped back.

‘The Doctor will be weakened by your death,’ the Dalek continued.

‘It is a Dalek directive to weaken the Doctor.’ The gun swivelled in its 50

socket.

Rose closed her eyes.

Then she heard the distant roar of ancient alien engines.

She opened her eyes to see the side of the TARDIS standing right in front of her. She heard the Dalek fire. The bolt bounced off the battered wooden doors. Then the Doctor emerged. He looked wet and scruffy but he was smiling in an angry, dangerous way. He turned to face the Dalek.

‘I see you’ve got your gun back,’ he said quietly. ‘Easy to find you.

Not many people firing high-energy lasers around here today. Something in his voice was different, more emotional than usual. He raised his hands.

‘Come on, then, exterminate!’

51

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ROSE HURRIED TO THE Doctor’s side. He waved his hands in front of the Dalek. ‘Come on. Fire. Even you can’t miss at this range.’

He nodded to Kate. ‘Oh, and you’ve got a girlfriend now, have you?

About time. We were all starting to wonder.’

The Dalek lowered its gun.

‘It won’t kill you,’ said Rose. ‘So it wants something from you?’

‘Of course it does,’ said the Doctor. ‘It needs knowledge. That old data store it’s using is out of date. It wants to take the knowledge from my mind. Am I right?’

‘That knowledge is of value,’ said the Dalek.

‘We can discuss having my brain sucked out later, over a burger perhaps,’ said the Doctor, rubbing his hands together. ‘But first I want a few explanations.’ He strolled over to the Dalek casually.

‘Stay back!’ shouted the Dalek.

‘Yeah, not afraid at all,’ called Rose.

‘Come on, then. Let’s get the whole story. Because after I’ve destroyed you, Rose over there’s gonna be full of questions. You know, yatter-yatter in my ear, how did it come to life in the first place and all that. So you might as well tell her now.’

Rose could see that beneath his jokiness the Doctor was actually furious.

The Dalek faced the Doctor squarely. In an even louder voice than usual, it began. ‘My glorious Dalek ancestors –’

‘Oh, here we go,’ sighed the Doctor. ‘Couldn’t resist showing off, could you?’ He smiled at Rose. ‘I can play a Dalek like an old fiddle.’

‘My glorious Dalek ancestors,’ the Dalek repeated, ‘sent a time capsule back to Earth. It arrived here centuries ago. Its mission was to spread the Dalek factor to all humans and use their life force to create back-up from raw matter.’

53

‘How embarrassing for you,’ said the Doctor. ‘The mighty race of Daleks, so weakened they needed help from the humans they despise.

A last, desperate gamble. To alter the genetics of the human race. And judging from that scented candle shop over there, it didn’t work.’

The Dalek continued, ‘The capsule was blasted towards Earth in the final battle of the Time War. Its engines failed on the journey. My ancestor, the owner of this casing, ejected and fell to Earth.’

‘Where it let go a little bit of Dalek factor, just a whiff,’ said the.

Doctor, ‘before it died. It caught on to some humans. Not active, but always there in their genes, handed down from generation to generation. Probably only one in half a billion have got it-now, including Kate over there.’

‘The Dalek factor was triggered when this casing was disturbed by the humans digging,’ continued the Dalek. ‘Kate answered the call.

Her Dalek life force was used to bring to life a new Dalek from the data stored in the casing.’

‘Nifty,’ said the Doctor. He raised his voice. ‘But this is where it stops.’ He suddenly became more serious. ‘You have two options: destroy yourself or I will destroy you. Up to you.’

‘You cannot destroy me!’ shrieked the Dalek.

The Doctor leaned up close and whispered simply, ‘Wanna bet?’

‘There is another option, Doctor,’ it replied. ‘A choice for you to make.’

The Doctor blinked. Rose could tell he hadn’t been expecting this.

‘I offer you a deal,’ said the Dalek.

The Doctor laughed. ‘In the old days I knew a few people who did deals with Daleks. What happened to them? Let’s see if I remember.

Oh yeah, they all ended up being exterminated. In the back, usually.’

The Dalek ignored him. ‘I know of your emotional attachment to this planet. I can kill all the humans. But I am prepared to spare Earth and its people.’

The Doctor bit his lip. ‘For what?’

‘You must give me the power to escape. The means to travel in space and time. I wish to travel to another planet. I will give you the space-time coordinates for my journey.’

54

‘And what’ll you do there, settle down to a quiet retirement? Or, I dunno, build a new race of Daleks perhaps?’

‘The Daleks will be reborn,’ said the Dalek. ‘But I will spare Earth. I will spare the woman Rose and all the other humans.’

‘And some other planet, they all get killed,’ said Rose.

‘There is no choice. In a crisis, impure creatures care only for the ones they know. This is a weakness.’ The Dalek was speaking to the Doctor. ‘The Doctor will not allow me to destroy your planet. To kill your family.’

The Doctor turned pale. He looked over at Rose. ‘It’s right. It can play me like an old fiddle.’

‘You’re gonna give it what it wants?’

The Doctor nodded. ‘Nothing else I can do. I can’t let Earth be destroyed.’

‘But this other planet and all the others out there. . . ’

‘They will be exterminated!’ the Dalek exulted. ‘And the new race of Daleks will be born. Daleks of my creation!’

55

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE DOCTOR WALKED SLOWLY into the TARDIS. It was clear that he wasn’t happy. Rose followed, slamming the door quickly after her.

‘How convincing was I?’ she said. ‘I deserve an Oscar for that.’

The Doctor looked at her grimly. ‘I wasn’t bluffing.’

‘I know you. You’re gonna fix up some booby trap, send the Dalek flying off into the space-time vortex or something, kill it.’

The Doctor shook his head and said gently, ‘Rose, that Dalek is a genius. An expert in space-time engineering. If I try any kind of trick, it’ll see it a mile off.’

Rose watched as he strode over to a shadowy corner of the TARDIS

and pulled out a huge, old-fashioned trunk. ‘But you can’t actually do it!’

‘I can save Earth,’ said the Doctor. He swung open the lid of the trunk. ‘For a Dalek, that’s a good deal.’

‘People who do deals with Daleks. . . ’ Rose reminded him.

‘Even if I was the sort of person who liked pulling triggers, do you know anything that could stop that Dalek? It’s fully formed now. I can’t just throw a brick at it again. It’s got a tough, radiation-proof casing. It’s immune to every infection. It’d just blink at a nuclear explosion. If it could blink.’ He rooted through the trunk, which contained a weird collection of jumble.

Rose came up close to him. ‘We destroyed them before,’ she said seriously. ‘I destroyed them.’ She remembered becoming the bad wolf, looking into the time vortex, wiping away a million Daleks with the wave of one hand.

‘Try that again and you could take the whole universe down with you,’ said the Doctor. ‘This is the only way. Here.’ He’d found what he was looking for in the trunk and held it up for her to see. It was a thick metal bangle decorated with a strange seal. ‘It’s old, but I reckon 57

I can get it going.’ He buzzed the sonic screwdriver over the seal and it glowed gently. ‘Time Ring, it’s like a personal TARDIS. Could take you anywhere.’

Rose stared at him. ‘So we’re really selling out? Letting it go?’

The Doctor looked down sadly. Then he gently stroked her cheek.

‘Either option is a nightmare. But the Dalek was right.’ He gazed over her shoulder, looking into the past. ‘We go back a long, long time.