“The Time Lords were indeed intelligent,” said a Dalek as it studied the control panels of the TARDIS.

“Yes,” another added, “But this technology will take a substantial amount of time to transfer to our fleet.”

“The Emperor’s will must be done,” a third interjected. “We must salvage the technology for our own. There is no question.”

Out of the six Daleks currently in the TARDIS’s control room, this third one was the ringleader. It had a haughty and arrogant air about it, which was some accomplishment for a giant pepper-pot, and it thus had the honour of being the one the Doctor hated the most.

The Doctor himself was currently being flanked by two of the six Daleks, both of which were keeping a good eye on him, whilst the other four were busy studying the myriad of switches, levers and screens at the chamber’s centre. The clouds of a storm were brewing in the pits of his eyes as he watched this quartet at work, for he wanted nothing more than to get them all out of his precious sanctuary.

“Begin replication of TARDIS technology,” the lead Dalek now ordered.

The leading Dalek’s three other lackeys took up their positions around the control panels and plugged themselves in. Their sharp minds then began to absorb what information they could from the time machine whilst the Doctor could do nothing but stand there and watch, powerless to do anything.

He inhaled a deep breath and tried to remain calm. He knew better than to act brashly, however much he wanted to; it was sheer fortune (or rather misfortune) that was keeping him alive right now, the plain fact that the Daleks grudgingly needed him until they had mastered his machine and its technology. He was still hoping that he would be able to turn this dire situation to his advantage, as well, something which he could only accomplish by keeping his cool. He knew that there was still a slight possibility that he might be able to prevent the Daleks from getting away with the knowledge of time travel, and he prayed that he could turn this possibility into a certainty.

He looked over once more at the quartet of Daleks surrounding the central column of the TARDIS and pondered on things. The Dalek Emperor was still revelling in his great triumph of having acquired a Time Lord’s TARDIS, and he was eager to put its abilities to use, but there were already obstacles lining his path.

For one, he was presently relying on the Doctor in order to be able to use the time machine at all; this was a dilemma that certainly had to be rectified for the Time Lords were their mortal enemies and had to be eliminated. It was an insult to think they had to depend on one of them to do greater things.

Another drawback was the fact that his fellow Daleks had to actually go inside the TARDIS to use its time travelling capabilities, which was hardly practical - the Emperor wanted to take his entire fleet back in time, not just a select few soldiers, and this was why the technology needed to be duplicated and reproduced in every single Dalek ship.

The Doctor felt a grim smile lurch up at the corners of his mouth. Time travel was a complex art, an art that his race had perfected and even been named after, but the Daleks were different - they were engineered to kill, not to journey through the many dimensions of time and space.

The Doctor’s last journey through time, where he had returned Rose and Jack to the twenty-first century, had in fact proved their lack of suitability for such travel to a certain extent. The Doctor had been escorted on his journey to and from the year 2006, the Daleks acting as an armed escort to make sure the Doctor kept his word, but upon their return, some of the Daleks had been disorientated, whilst others has been slow to react to stimuli, as if the very nature of time travel had had an adverse effect on them. It was clear that they were not as flexible a species as the Time Lords, not even as flexible as humanity, if they were affected so.

In retrospect, the Doctor wondered if perhaps all would not be lost even if the Daleks did gather his time-travelling technology. They were not built to evolve and adapt to such things, after all - they were a genetically manufactured order, a race made to be the same forever, nothing but an army of killing machines; evolution did not suit them. The Doctor only had to remember that lone soldier, imprisoned deep beneath the Utah desert, who had succumbed to Rose’s DNA and thus begun mutating, to realise this.

“It took my people centuries to perfect the technology of time travel,” he consequently opted to say to his audience, looking particularly at the ringleader. “Don’t think you’ll master it in a day. You can copy it, but I’ll wager you won’t understand it. Or be able to cope with it.”

The leader seemed to give him something of a long, hard stare. “We are geniuses,” he rejoined, as if it were obvious. “We were engineered to be the greatest. Do not think the workings of the Time Lords are beyond us. We will soon understand what the primitive minds of your ancestors concocted.”

The Doctor glared at him. “Maybe. But were you bred to travel in time?”

The Dalek said nothing.

The Doctor flashed him another grim grin. “It doesn’t suit all races, you know.”

“There is nothing my race cannot achieve,” the Dalek replied.

The Doctor gave him another fierce look, but said no more. The Dalek was probably right, after all, but he had to hope that they would encounter serious problems when it came to transporting themselves through time, and that this would either stop them altogether, or at least slow down their progress. After all, the Utah-Dalek he and Rose had encountered had hardly been in the best of shape after its tumble through time…

He cast these bleak thoughts aside for a brief moment and looked up into the rafters of the TARDIS, his blessed machine and friend. ‘Come on, old girl,’ he urged her, ‘You got us into this mess. You’ve got to get us out.’

Telepathic though she was, the TARDIS didn’t seem to respond.

The Doctor only continued to stare at the column central to the chamber, as if he were staring his machine in the eyes, and willed her to do something. He knew that she couldn’t give up, not on him, or herself; she was alive, and she had to remind the Daleks of that, too.

The living energy of the TARDIS was one thing the Doctor knew the Daleks might never be able to get their heads round, something they might even abhor, and it would be fitting for that element to thus be their downfall.

‘Even if we both have to die,’ the Doctor continued to tell her, ‘Then at least the world will be safe. Don’t let them do this.’

“Last of the Time Lords,” the lead Dalek suddenly proclaimed as he turned his eyestalk onto the Doctor. “Ironic that he who is the last of his race should now give us the key to the destruction of all inferior life.”

The Doctor’s gaze tightened another time on this malicious creature, but he didn’t open his mouth.

Then suddenly a screen on the TARDIS’ control panel came to life and words blinked across the screen. The Doctor felt his brow furrow - what was this? Had the TARDIS heard him? Was she going to help…?

“What is this?” one of Daleks said as it unplugged itself from the console and turned its eye down to look at the screen.

“The machine seems to have identified another,” the leader said as it rolled up behind its comrade and read the readout in turn.

“Impossible,” one of the others said as it too parted from its terminal. “They all died in the war, slaughtering our brethren. All of them but one.”

The Doctor looked between the throng of conferring Daleks before he then became the subject of their gazes as they all turned their sights onto him in the same instant.

“The Time Lords are dead,” one of them said to him.

“I know,” the Doctor growled. “Do you think you need to remind me?”

“They were wiped out.”

“Yes, they were! Happy?”

The lead Dalek had an air of suspicion about him now, something which made the whole chamber feel cold and unsettling. “Then explain this. Another has been detected through time.”

The Doctor was overcome with a strange sense of confusion, followed by a tiny inkling of hope. “Another?” he whispered.

“The Time Lords are our enemies,” one of the other Daleks crowed. “They must all be destroyed!”

“But they died, I know they did!” the Doctor blustered.

“We will soon have their technology,” the leader calmly went on. “They will not escape us for long. Time will soon be no object.”

“This one must still be destroyed!” another protested. “They both must die, the Doctor and the newcomer. We cannot coexist with any Time Lords.”

The leader turned his eyestalk on this Dalek. “We must discuss this with the Emperor. All decisions must be made by the Almighty.”

The Doctor wasn’t listening to them any more - he was just staring into the middle distance and wondering what the TARDIS was playing at. Surely there were no more Time Lords? He knew there weren’t; he had been the last for far too long to be able to doubt his race’s extinction in the Time War. But then, what was the TARDIS on about? What signal had she detected? What had she really found?

“What are you doing, old girl?” he murmured aloud until, catching him by surprise, one of the Daleks suddenly began screeching!

The Doctor looked up to see white bolts of electricity surging up the arm of this shrieking Dalek, emitting from where it was still plugged into the TARDIS’s consoles. “Help me!” it screamed, whilst its comrades came to attention and rushed to its side.

But it was too late. With a final bang, the Dalek’s head exploded and a column of smoke rose into the air.

The Doctor couldn’t help but smile at this - the TARDIS was suddenly pulling out all the stops!

The Daleks looked at one another, caught unawares, and pondered on what to do next. That was until, leaping up through the trellised floor, another bolt of electricity caught a second Dalek by surprise!

In the ensuing confusion, the Doctor tore away from his pair of Dalek jailers and looked around himself - ‘Assets, assets!’ he thought, but he could see nothing… except Jack’s big gun, the one which the Captain had picked up on the Games Station. His eyes lingered on it and he tried to push the memories it brought to light out of his head…

‘No’ said his conscience. ‘Never a gun.’ But what else was there?

“The Doctor is attempting hostile action! Exterminate him!”

He turned to see the remaining few unscathed Daleks, roused and angry, gliding over the metal floor toward him.

‘Think!’ he kept urging himself. ‘Think, damn you!’

And then it came to him as the image of Rose, telling him not to kill the Dalek back in Utah, loitered before his mind’s eye. A chain of thought flickered through his brain, filing down from Rose until it hit a conclusion, and he laughed. “Of course!” he shouted, drawing his sonic screwdriver from out of his pocket and aiming it at the control panel.

There was a flicker of light and a holographic image of the Doctor appeared on the floor, in-between the two Daleks that had been his guard. They turned to look at it, stunned, whilst it began to say “This is emergency program one…”

“Exterminate!” was the initial reaction of the two as they glared at the ghost-Doctor, and they shot at the image without thinking. Their death rays consequently passed through the hologram and hit one another. They both screamed and erupted into flames.

There now remained only two of the original six Daleks, the leader and one of its associates; the Doctor could just make out the silhouettes of the pair through the smoke that now fogged the entire chamber, rising up from the metal shells of the deceased Daleks.

The leader stared back through the smog impassively. “It is a trap,” he plainly stated.

“But we have not yet downloaded all that we need!” the other objected.

“We have enough,” the leader countered. “Take evasive action.”

The Doctor was surprised at this Dalek for making such a decision, and he watched it as it shepherded its comrade out of the TARDIS and back into the safety of their own flagship. Perhaps he had at last met one of the wisest of the Daleks…

As soon as the pair had trundled away, though, the Doctor didn’t leave it another second before he threw himself at the controls of the TARDIS and yanked down a lever. The machine groaned and vibrated and was soon sailing once again through the eddies of time and space.

“You could have done all that sooner,” the Doctor then grumbled at the TARDIS as he shut off his holographic twin, who was talking to an absent Rose, and gave the ship a pat on the console. “I swear you sometimes have ulterior motives… What was the point, eh? Leaving me dancing on the edge of a knife like that…”

The TARDIS, naturally, didn’t respond, but she somehow managed to have a smug air about her.

It took the Doctor a while to collect himself after all this excitement, and it was then that he realised, with a heavy heart, that he might just have left the earth and everyone back on the Games Station to die; but there were now, unbelievably, more pressing issues at hand...

He pushed the smouldering shells of the four dead Daleks out of his way as he walked round the control room and again looked up at the TARDIS’s column. “How much did they get away with?” he asked her with dread, flicking a few switches and turning several knobs.

Words flickered across one of the screens and the Doctor heaved a deep sigh, hanging his head. “Too much…” he murmured. “They are geniuses - it won’t take them forever to establish the basic laws and means of time travel.”

He mulled on this for a while longer before he then asked, “And what of this ‘Time Lord’ you told them about? What are you playing at?”

He turned another couple of knobs before more readings came onto the screen.

“It wasn’t a ruse?” he gasped, rubbing his chin and staring at the report. “Are you sure?”

Another few taps on the keyboard and the TARDIS gave him an affirmative - it was no lie.

The Doctor shook his head. He could feel it deep inside, that something was amiss and very wrong; there was an anomaly in time and space which hadn’t been there before, and it reeked of Dalek.

“So what now?” he pondered aloud, “The Daleks know of me and this other ‘Time Lord’ and will soon be on our tails. And history will change wherever they decide to intercede, there’s no doubt. We must stop them. Going back to 200,100 is hardly going to help anymore… All creation is again at stake.”

He flicked a few more switches and examined the great universal time line, searching for a glitch somewhere, a reading that indicated when and where the Daleks would soon decide to appear in time and space. It didn’t take long for the TARDIS to discover this.

“Back to earth?” the Doctor said. “That figures… Can’t seem to shake that planet. It’s not Cardiff, is it…?”

He read down the lines of text the TARDIS was throwing up. “Right. So, they take ‘X’ amount of time to imitate your technology, fine, then what do they get up to…?” He tapped his lips with his fingers. “Of course, they’ll be searching for this other Time Lord - and they’ll also be searching for me. They want us dead. And yet…” He paused again before he continued. “It feels like they want more from us. I can’t explain that. A gut reaction… or maybe just something I ate.”

He studied the reports for a little longer before he rushed round the control room and flicked several more switches. “Right, ol’ girl, we’ve got a Time Lord and a world to save. And then we’ve gotta find Rose and Jack. Let’s prevent that glitch from appearing in time, and make sure we’re home in time for tea.”

What the Doctor failed to notice, as the TARDIS hurtled on through time and space, was that the screen on the console said, “Bad Wolf.”