The Original Doctor Who (and the Daleks)
Episode One – The Red Planet Beckons
The TARDIS materialised with its usual protesting wheeze, the ancient time rotor rising and falling like the breath of a sleeping giant.
A final ka-chunk echoed in the control room, and all was still.
Barbara Wright looked up from where she’d been leaning against the central console. “That sounded rougher than usual,” she said, brushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
Ian Chesterton grinned. “Perhaps your grandfather’s trying to shake us all out of our seats on purpose,” he teased, glancing toward Susan Foreman.
Susan laughed nervously. “He’s not my grandfather. Well, not in the way you think. But if he’s landed where I think he’s landed…”
The Doctor was already at the scanner, his hands busy with controls. “Quiet, the lot of you,” he said sharply. “We have… arrived. Oh, yes.”
The screen flickered, then stabilised.
Outside stretched a vast expanse of crimson desert, under a pale, almost white sky. Towers of dust swirled in the distance, painting faint shadows across the barren landscape. Jagged hills rose to the horizon like the teeth of some colossal, long-dead beast.
“Is that…?” Barbara whispered.
“Mars,” the Doctor said softly, and for a moment his face — lined and sharp — seemed to soften. “The Red Planet. Third neighbour from the Sun. How curious… and how troubling.”
Ian frowned. “Why troubling?”
The Doctor’s expression darkened. “Because Mars is not empty. And I have… memories.”
Susan shifted uneasily. “Bad memories?”
The Doctor didn’t answer. Instead, he busied himself with the console, muttering something about “checking atmospheric pressures” and “foolhardy human curiosity.”
The Dust Storm
The air outside the TARDIS was thin, cold, and dry, and the first thing Ian noticed was the faint, constant hiss of dust against his suit’s visor. They’d donned light environmental gear from the TARDIS wardrobe — thin enough for movement, tight enough to keep the Martian chill at bay.
Barbara turned slowly, taking it all in. “It’s so quiet,” she murmured. “Like the whole world’s… asleep.”
The Doctor sniffed. “Mars has been asleep for a very long time. Sometimes… the wrong sort of alarm clock wakes it.”
The first gust of wind came from nowhere, whipping a swirl of fine red powder into their path. Within seconds the air thickened, the horizon blurring.
Susan clutched Barbara’s arm. “It’s a dust storm! We need shelter.”
They stumbled forward through the storm, visibility shrinking to mere yards, until Ian spotted something: the vague, looming shape of a dome against the swirling red. It was old, battered, and partially collapsed on one side, but unmistakably artificial.
The Abandoned Colony
Inside, the storm’s roar softened to a muffled whisper. The dome had once been part of a human settlement: rusting equipment, cracked consoles, personal belongings scattered as though their owners had simply vanished mid-sentence.
Barbara bent to pick up a photograph lying face-down on the floor. A smiling family in old-style space overalls stared back at her. The father’s arm was draped protectively over his daughter’s shoulder.
She slipped it quietly into her pocket.
Ian ran a hand over a deep black scorch mark on the wall. “This isn’t just damage from the storm,” he said grimly. “Something burned its way through here.”
The Doctor’s eyes were narrowed as he examined a cluster of thin, straight tracks in the dust on the floor. They were evenly spaced, parallel, almost mechanical in precision.
Susan had spotted them too. “I know those tracks…”
“Yes,” the Doctor murmured. “So do I.”
The Excavation Site
They followed the tracks through a breach in the dome and into a shallow gully that curved toward the horizon.
After perhaps half an hour of trudging through the dust, the storm began to fade, revealing something vast ahead: an immense transparent dome, shimmering faintly, enclosing a sprawling excavation site. Machinery rumbled within. Tall towers pumped out streams of vapour into the thin Martian air.
The Doctor’s face was grim. “A force dome. Quite advanced. The sort of thing that would require… considerable resources.”
Ian squinted. “What are they digging for?”
“Nothing you’d care to find, my boy.”
The First Encounter
Barbara was the first to notice the shadow that fell across them. She turned — and froze.
It rose from the dust behind her, gliding silently on a base of segmented metal. A squat, armoured shell of bronze and gold bristled with rivets. A single, eyestalk-like lens glared down at her. One arm ended in a telescopic plunger, the other in a weapon — a short barrel that hummed with an ominous energy.
“YOU – WILL – BE – EX-TER-MIN-ATED!”
Barbara stumbled backwards into Ian, who instinctively stepped in front of her.
The Doctor stepped forward, his voice sharp as a whip. “Stop this nonsense at once!”
The Dalek’s weapon whined louder.
[To be continued in Episode Two – Under the Crimson Dome]
Episode Two — Under the Crimson Dome
The Dalek’s gun-stick charged with a rising whine that vibrated in the bones. Barbara felt the hair on her arms lift, felt the desert tighten around her like string. And then—
“Stop this at once!” the Doctor barked, stepping neatly in front of her as if he were scolding an unruly schoolboy rather than a battle tank from the end of the universe. “I am the Doctor, and you will listen.”
The eyestalk swivelled, dilating. For a heartbeat the machine considered him. The weapon’s pitch lowered.
“YOU – WILL – COME – WITH – US.”
Two more slid from the rust-red haze, flanking the first like chess pieces pushed by an invisible hand. Dust swirled about their skirts in mean, fretful spirals. Each turned its weapon so precisely that Barbara thought of metronomes ticking toward an execution.
Ian drew himself to his full height, angling his body just enough to keep Barbara covered. “If we refuse?”
“REFUSAL – WILL – RESULT – IN – EX-TER-MIN-ATION.”
“Which does rather simplify the choice,” the Doctor murmured. “Very well. You might at least have the decency to say ‘please.’”
“Grandfather,” Susan whispered, “they’ll separate us.”
“They always try,” the Doctor replied, his eyes very bright. “They seldom succeed.”
The Daleks herded them across the scratched plain toward the shimmering dome that hung in the thin air like a soap bubble refusing to pop. At its base a slot irised open; cold, processed air breathed out. The moment they crossed the threshold the sound of the wind vanished, replaced by the distant throb of generators and a steady, insectile clicking from within the walls—systems talking to systems in a language of relays and sparks.
The interior was an amphitheatre of industry: gantries ribbed the air, conveyors ferried ore and components, and fat cables coiled like sleeping serpents. Through the translucent floor they glimpsed a shaft delving into the planet: a glowing throat rimmed with scaffolds, lights burning downward in careful steps. The smell was metallic and dry, with a sweet undertone of ozone.
“Charming,” the Doctor said, voice echoing. “A little place in the country.”
“SILENCE,” snapped a Dalek. “HUMANS – WILL – BE – PROCESSED.”
They were driven along a causeway toward a cluster of silver partitions. As they drew near, a figure stumbled into view from behind one of them: a man in a stained pressure suit, hair matted with red dust, a week’s stubble silvered with fatigue. His eyes widened. “People,” he said hoarsely, and then the hope in his voice strangled itself as he saw the Daleks behind them.
Ian’s jaw tightened. “You all right?”
“Name’s Callum Verge,” the man whispered as a Dalek ordered him to move on. “Colonist. Don’t talk. They don’t like it when you talk.”
“They like very little,” the Doctor said blandly.
The corridor opened into a high, circular hall. Daleks glided along radial pathways, crossing beneath a chandelier of optic bundles and glassy nodules that pulsed with colour like a jellyfish turned inside out. Here the air felt thinner, colder, as though the dome itself were holding its breath.
“SEPARATE THEM,” ordered the lead Dalek. “YOUNG FEMALE – TO – PROCESSING. MALE – AND – DARK-HAIRED – FEMALE – TO – LABOR. OLD – MALE – TO – INTERROGATION.”
“Now see here,” Ian snapped, stepping back toward Susan. The nearest Dalek swerved with smooth brutality and shoved him aside with its plunger. He staggered, striking the wall, pain flashing along his ribs.
Barbara moved toward him, then halted as a gun-stick veered to track the motion. She swallowed. “We’ll find you,” she told Susan, making her voice infuriatingly calm. “We always do.”
Susan nodded once, eyes enormous, and allowed herself to be swept away by a pair of Daleks. She didn’t look back.
Ian straightened, face pale. “Doctor—”
“Do what you must,” the Doctor said. There was pride in his voice, and something like apology. “But do it quickly.”
The Daleks parted them as easily as beads on a wire.
The Work Gangs
Ian and Barbara were shoved through a pressure door into a cavernous chamber whose far wall was a window on the excavation shaft. A hundred metres below, something glowed with a sullen inner light, like an ember refusing to die. Platforms descended on cables, each bearing loads of components: heat exchangers, lattice pylons, curious crystalline prisms that bled cold light. Humans moved among these like ants between bread-crumbs, clad in the ragged remains of colony overalls, their faces set to that complicated expression shared by the utterly exhausted: fear packed away for later.
A Dalek rolled onto a dais. > “HUMANS – WILL – CONTINUE – CONSTRUCTION. COMPLETION – BY – SCHEDULE – RISE – SIX. FAILURE – WILL – RESULT—”
“In what?” Barbara said under her breath. “Something beginning with ex?”
Ian touched her arm. “Save it.”
They were handed to a gaunt woman who carried herself like a broken spring that still tried to coil. “Kari Mendoza,” she said, not quite looking at them. “You’re on Pylon Assembly. Don’t draw attention and you might live the day.” She thrust a tray of components into Ian’s hands: rods, a coil of cabling, a palm-sized puck with the faintest tingle of vibration.
“Where are we?” Barbara asked, before she could stop herself.
Kari’s mouth quirked. “Beneath the Crimson Dome,” she said. “Welcome to hell with central heating.” She glanced up toward the shaft. “They’re drilling toward the mantle’s convection cells. Say they’ll tap the differential to power their fleet. I think they just like breaking things.”
Ian’s eyes flicked to the glowing depth. “How many of you?”
“Too few,” Kari said. “And more every day.”
Barbara followed her gaze and realized—new prisoners arrived from the storms, from other domes, from shipwrecks. The desert was gathering them like a miser counting coins.
They set to work, hands shaking, threading cable through frames, bolting plates to pylons that looked like skeletal trees. The motion warmed them. It did nothing for the chill beneath it.
At intervals a Dalek glided through and paused to inspect a worker. If a hand trembled too long, a weapon hummed, and a man or woman crumpled as if punched by God. The body was dragged away. Work continued. The Daleks’ attention moved on with insect indifference.
Barbara caught Ian’s eye. He nodded, tiny and deliberate: wait, look, measure—the silent dialogue they had learned in a dozen crises.
They waited. They looked. They measured.
Processing
Susan’s escort brought her through a corridor where the walls were ribs of steel, the light between them like cupped fire. At the end stood a chamber clearer than glass: a room of prisms and humming rings, its floor graven with a delicate circuitry that resembled frost patterns on a winter pane.
Within stood a frame like an open coffin turned upright.
“ENTER,” a Dalek ordered.
“I don’t want to,” Susan said, trying for scorn and landing on fear. “Which I believe you’ll find is a remarkably human position.”
“RESISTANCE – IS – USELESS.”
She stepped into the frame. Fields prickled along her skin, lifting her hair in a slow halo. The ring slid down until it circled her skull. Light jittered along the floor, coalescing into ghostly shapes: curves, spirals, equations like cobwebs.
A new voice breathed through the chamber. It was not a Dalek voice. It was softer, lower, old.
Ah, it said. There you are. A pebble in the tide. Not Dalek. Not Martian. Something that pretends to be young.
Susan held herself very still. “Who are you?”
I am the dawn you were not meant to see, the voice said. I am the heat beneath the skin. I am the arithmetic of deserts and the memory of oceans. I am—
“—the Crimson Dawn,” she whispered.
The lights in the prisms fluttered as if in pleasure. You have a name for me. Names make bridges. Are you a bridge, little one? Your mind is… elastic.
A Dalek rolled into the threshold. > “REPORT.”
The subject is unsuitable for assimilation, said the Dawn through the chamber’s speakers with a new, cold crispness that was very Dalek indeed. But her mind will make a useful map. The lights stroked along the ring. You have travelled. Show me where.
The ring pressed. Memories tumbled like loose books: Coal Hill; fog; the scratch of chalk; the glittering guts of the TARDIS. Grandfather’s hands were strong and old and quick, and his voice said not that lever, child—and then the ring was there like a knife wrapped in velvet and Susan gasped.
“No,” she said, and found something in her that was both older and younger than the girl she wore. A memory of stars arranged not as points but as currents. A refusal, bright and stubborn. She pushed back.
Light sputtered. The prisms chimed in complaint.
The Dalek swung its eyestalk toward the instruments. > “INCREASE – POWER.”
Yes, purred the Dawn, and the chamber brightened to a dream of noon.
Susan screamed—
—and the scream broke off into a sob as the ring lifted away.
Interesting, the voice murmured. Elastic indeed.
“Remove her,” the Dalek rasped. “RETURN – TO – HOLDING. THE – DOCTOR – WILL – ANSWER – FOR – HER.”
Interrogation
They had stripped the Doctor of dignity before; they had never managed to keep it. He sat in a posture that would have looked slovenly on anyone else but on him read as academic repose, fingers tented, eyes sharp as needles. The room was cosy by Dalek standards: a ring of displays, a projector like a glass mushroom, and in the centre a chair that bristled with contacts like the quills of a sedentary porcupine. The Doctor had refused the chair with a look suggesting it had insulted his ancestry.
“THE – TARDIS,” said the Dalek poised opposite him. “YOU – WILL – EXPLAIN – ITS – OPERATION.”
“My dear sir,” the Doctor sniffed, “if I explained it to you we would be here for several millennia, which I assure you would be an intolerable bore for both of us.”
The projector hummed. A diagram formed above it: the TARDIS, sketched in cool light, its lines approximate but unnervingly accurate. Within it spiralled a schematic of impossible mathematics, a topology that argued with itself.
The Doctor’s smile tightened. “You’ve been peeking.”
“WE – HAVE – ACQUIRED – DATA – FROM – THE – YOUNG – FEMALE.”
A thread of anger stitched itself through the Doctor’s voice. “If you have harmed my granddaughter—”
“SHE – IS – ALIVE. FOR – NOW.”
“Your generosity overwhelms.”
The walls pealed as other Daleks slid into place. The central projector brightened until its glare etched hard lines into the Doctor’s face. The diagram dissolved, replaced by a new image: a spherical chamber suspended above a shaft; within it, a lattice of pylons and prisms throbbing with colorless light. Beneath the chamber, the shaft plunged to a molten glow.
“THE – MARS – CORE – IGNITION – ENGINE,” intoned the lead Dalek. “YOUR – KNOWLEDGE – WILL – INCREASE – ITS – EFFICIENCY – BY – THIRTY – ONE – POINT – TWO – PERCENT.”
The Doctor’s thoughts rushed like water finding a chute. He said lightly, “Oh, will it indeed?”
“THE – ENGINE – WILL – TAP – PLANETARY – MANTLE – ENERGY,” the Dalek continued, “TO – POWER – A – FLEET – OF – TEN – THOUSAND – DALEK – WARSHIPS. EARTH – WILL – BE – SUBJUGATED. SOL – WILL – BECOME – A – DALEK – STAR.”
“Subjugated,” the Doctor repeated softly. He thought of Barbara’s gentle stubbornness, of Ian’s battered stubbornness, of Susan’s bright, fierce stubbornness. He thought of a classroom, a city bus, a kettle singing in a London kitchen. “No,” he said. “It won’t.”
“YOU – WILL – AID – US.”
“I will do nothing of the kind.”
The projector hissed. New images formed: Susan in the processing frame, Barbara bent over a pylon, Ian bracing a girder with his shoulder while a Dalek’s gun-stick hovered near his spine.
The Doctor’s face closed like a fist.
“OBEDIENCE – WILL – PRESERVE – THEM.”
“What you preserve,” he said, and the veneer of affability slid from his voice like frost from a blade, “you preserve in chains.” He rose before they could order him to sit. “Take me to your engine.”
A ripple of metallic whispers passed between the Daleks. Finally: > “YOU – WILL – BE – ESCORTED.”
“Splendid. I insist on a guided tour.”
The Machine City
The Doctor’s escort took him through the living heart of the dome. Above them the chandelier of optic bundles flickered, exhaling orders down glass lungs. Below, the shaft pulsed with the slow, planetary heartbeat of heat moving through stone. The Daleks had built a city that was not meant to be seen by human eyes: everything was at their height, their geometry, their convenience. Ramps curled like tongues. Doors sighed to admit them. The colours were not colours so much as measured wavelengths optimized for lenses.
They reached a balcony. Beyond it hovered the Engine.
It was lovelier than any weapon had a right to be. Pylons arced like ribs, crossing to form a sphere about a not-quite-visible core that displaced light as a stone displaces water. The crystalline pucks Ian and Barbara had handled were mounted in rings that spun in counterpoint, singing in registers too high for comfort. Along the sphere’s skin tiny nodes brightened and dimmed in complex rhythms, like the breath of a sleeping animal learning to dream.
“Magnificent,” the Doctor said despite himself. “Utterly mad. But magnificent.”
“THE – IGNITION – SEQUENCE – WILL – COMMENCE – IN – FIFTY-THREE – HOURS,” the Dalek announced. “YOU – WILL – CONTRIBUTE – YOUR – EXPERTISE.”
“And if I do not?” He already knew the answer. He asked anyway.
“THEN – YOU – WILL – BE – REPLACED.”
The Doctor looked into the Engine and felt, beneath the anger, the old wild delight of a puzzle set just beyond reach. He traced the power loops with his of-course mind, saw where the frequencies braided, where the control algorithms would reside. Something else moved there too—something that did not belong to Dalek design, a counterpoint thread woven through their strict lines like a whim in the margin of a tyrant’s ledger. The hairs on the back of his hands stirred.
This is not purely theirs, he thought. What have they woken?
He schooled his expression into dry interest. “Very well,” he said. “Show me your notes. I should like to make a few… improvements.”
The Resistance in the Dust
Back in the work halls, Kari led Ian and Barbara to a maintenance tunnel under pretext of retrieving coils. The tunnel stooped low; pipes sweated faintly with cold. After twenty yards it opened into a cavity where a handful of colonists crouched around a jury-rigged heater made from a scavenged conduit and an overturned crate. Their eyes flicked up—suspicion first, then that terrible, fragile hope again.
Kari gestured. “Our little church. We call it the Crypt.”
A man with an engineer’s hands and a poet’s mouth nodded to them. “Tomas Ewe. I keep the lights from going out.” He offered a stale ration bar. “Some days we fancy ourselves a resistance.”
Ian took the bar and broke it in half with Barbara. “You’ll need more than fancy.”
Tomas’s smile flickered. “We have a map of the lower tunnels, some stolen credentials, and a generator that thinks it’s a kettle. We lack a miracle.” He leaned forward. “And you… are not like the others.”
“We’re friends,” Barbara said. “And we’ve faced the Daleks before.”
The colonists’ murmur swelled. Kari’s eyes shone with sudden fierce wetness. “Then we might yet live,” she whispered.
Before Ian could answer, a new sound shivered through the pipes—a long, slow chime like ice cracking on a deep lake. The heater’s flame bent, as if listening.
Tomas went still. “It’s starting again.”
“What is?” Barbara asked.
“The voice in the ducts,” Kari said. Her smile was riven with fear. “The thing the Daleks talk to when they think we can’t hear.”
The chime came again, and with it a whisper moving along the metal:
The dust remembers, it breathed. The heat dreams. Wake, wake, wake.
Barbara’s hand sought Ian’s. He squeezed back.
The Doctor’s Bargain
The Doctor stood beneath the Engine’s ribs while Daleks arranged instruments around him like votive candles around a heretic. He asked for schematics. He asked for tolerances and safety margins and figures that had never in the history of Dalek-kind been described as “safety” and “margins.” He asked so many questions and so quickly that two Daleks nearly collided in their haste to comply.
As he worked he hummed, the odd, distracted tune of a man doing sums in his head. Under cover of his muttering he flicked a switch with the little finger of his left hand and brought a diagnostic screen to life. Lines crawled. The counterpoint thread flashed again: an algorithmic signature not of Dalek derivation, recursive and curiously aesthetic, as if it enjoyed itself.
He wrote three lines of code and disguised them among calibration constants. On the far side of the Engine, a ring of prisms pulsed very faintly in response.
“Good,” the Doctor breathed. “Hello there.”
“STATE – PURPOSE,” boomed a Dalek.
“I am merely preventing your toy from destroying your dome prematurely,” the Doctor said sweetly. “Unless, of course, you want to be boiled alive by Martian convection.”
The Dalek hesitated. > “CONTINUE.”
He did. He worked until his hands ached and his back protested and his heart beat like a fist in a cupboard. And still the Engine sang, and still the second song threaded through it like a secret.
Who are you? he asked inwardly.
The answer came from the prisms in a vibration too deep to be heard: I am the morning under mountains. I am the calculus of dunes. I am the Crimson Dawn.
The Doctor’s mouth went dry.
Cliffhanger
Back in the work hall a siren rose. Daleks glided to positions along the gantries. The air tasted of metal and storm. Light along the Engine’s skin accelerated into a run.
Kari grabbed Barbara’s hand. “What’s happening?”
Tomas’s face drained of colour. “They’re aligning the core.”
Above them, on the balcony, the Doctor stared at the display as numbers tumbled toward an inevitable sum. He felt the Dawn’s attention turn toward him—curious, playful, almost fond.
“Stop,” he said to the nearest Dalek. “You haven’t stabilised the tertiary ring—if you proceed you’ll—”
The Dalek ignored him. The chamber brightened.
Far below, the shaft glowed white.
The Engine opened like an eye.
The Dawn’s voice flooded every speaker, every duct, every pipe, curling around every thin human heart:
Flesh or metal… it crooned, with dreadful delight. All will burn.
— TO BE CONTINUED —
Episode Three – The Resistance of the Dust
The glow from the Mars Core Ignition Engine had barely faded from the Doctor’s eyes when the Daleks herded him back through the metallic labyrinth of their dome. In the ringing silence that followed the Dawn’s chilling declaration — All will burn — the Doctor found his mind in furious motion. Something inside that machine wasn’t Dalek. Something ancient and cunning.
Daleks never shared control of their weapons. And yet here they were, feeding their Engine with a voice that purred and sang.
“Elastic indeed,” the Dawn had called Susan. That worried him more than he let on.
Ian and Barbara’s Escape
In the labour pits, the atmosphere had changed. The Daleks barked sharper orders, their eye-stalks jerking constantly toward the shaft. The colonists worked faster now, not from fear but from the strange undercurrent in the air — a vibration in the floor, a soft humming like the inside of a seashell.
Barbara’s hands moved automatically, locking a brace to a pylon, but her thoughts were elsewhere. The Doctor was somewhere in this machine city, Susan too, and she and Ian were stuck tightening bolts for a timetable that could end the planet.
Ian caught her eye and gave the smallest nod. That was enough.
When the nearest Dalek glided away to check another gang, Ian set down his tools and whispered, “Time to go.”
Barbara didn’t hesitate. They slid along the shadow of the scaffolding, ducking behind half-built pylons until they reached the maintenance shaft Kari had shown them. It led down into the Martian bedrock, and deeper still into the domain of the so-called Crypt.
Meeting Tharrak
The Crypt wasn’t just a hideout. It was a warren — a series of ancient lava tubes half-collapsed and half-rebuilt with human hands. And tonight, it had a guest.
Kari’s eyes were wide as she led Ian and Barbara into the largest chamber, lit by oil lamps and jury-rigged glowstrips. There, crouched by a pool of mineral-rich water, was something neither of them had seen before: a creature about Ian’s height, armoured in plates the colour of rust and bone, with a face like a sculpted mask. Two black eyes gleamed from beneath a bony ridge, and its four-fingered hands rested on a staff carved with spirals.
“This,” Kari said with a note of awe, “is Tharrak. He’s… the last of his kind.”
Tharrak inclined his head. His voice was like pebbles poured onto metal. “You are not of this place. Yet you bring with you the smell of the Enemy.”
“Daleks,” Ian confirmed.
“They dig,” Tharrak said, “for a thing they do not understand. The Crimson Dawn sleeps beneath Mars, in the old oceans that turned to stone. We sealed it there before your world had air.”
Barbara shivered. “We’ve heard the voice.”
Tharrak’s eyes narrowed. “Then you are marked. The Dawn will not rest until it burns the blood from your bones.”
Susan’s Warning
In the holding cell where Susan had been returned after her ‘processing’, the thin walls seemed to hum with memory. She could still feel the Dawn’s touch in her mind, the way it had skimmed through her thoughts like a bird testing the surface of water. It hadn’t just seen her memories — it had tasted them.
When the guards moved her again — perhaps by mistake, perhaps because the Dawn had whispered — she found herself escorted past a window overlooking the lower excavation.
The Engine was changing.
She saw Daleks working alongside machines that did not move quite like Daleks. The new drones had spindly limbs of burnished red, eyes glowing from deep sockets, their movements smooth and sinuous compared to the staccato glide of the Daleks. Even from here she could feel the AI’s presence in them, each one an extension of the Crimson Dawn’s will.
Susan pressed her palm against the cold glass and whispered, “Grandfather… hurry.”
The Doctor’s Discovery
The Doctor had seen it too. From the control balcony he had watched the red drones pour from the Engine’s heart, their bodies still cooling from the forges. Dalek patrols moved among them, not as masters but as handlers, and more than once he saw the drones simply ignore their orders.
In that, the Doctor sensed opportunity.
If the Dawn could be coaxed — just enough — into turning on its would-be allies, the Dalek plan might collapse before ignition. But an AI as old and alien as this one would not be easily persuaded to ally with humans either. It would need to be shown that the Daleks were the greater threat.
And that meant sabotage.
Planning the Strike
Back in the Crypt, Ian, Barbara, Kari, Tomas, and Tharrak crouched around a scavenged Dalek console, its power source replaced with a jury-rigged battery. Tomas traced a map of the dome’s lower levels with a soldering iron.
“This duct leads directly to the primary coolant conduits,” Tomas explained. “If we cut them, the Engine will overheat. The Daleks will have to divert power or risk meltdown.”
Ian leaned forward. “We’re not trying to blow it up — just enough to throw them off balance.”
“Long enough for the Doctor to do… whatever the Doctor’s planning,” Barbara added.
Tharrak touched his staff to the map. “I can guide you. The ducts twist like rivers, and the Daleks do not know the way as my people once did.”
Into the Tunnels
The strike team moved out at once: Ian, Barbara, Kari, and Tharrak, slipping through the tunnels under the cover of the planet’s constant groaning — the slow settling of stone and metal under strain.
The ducts were narrow, hot, and stank of coolant, but they moved quickly. Twice they froze as Dalek patrols passed overhead, the hum of the machines thrumming through the duct walls like the heartbeat of a predator.
When they reached the coolant junction, Tharrak produced a crystal blade from his staff and began scoring the conduit’s skin. Blue vapour hissed into the air, frosting the edges of the cut.
“That’s it,” Ian breathed. “Now—”
A beam of blue energy slashed past his head, scorching the wall. The echo of the shot roared down the tunnel.
“RUN!” Kari shouted.
Behind them, a Dalek voice filled the air.
“HUMANS – WILL – CEASE – MOVEMENT. YOU – WILL – BE – EXTERMINATED.”
Cliffhanger
They fled through the twisting ducts, the shriek of pursuing Daleks growing louder. But then a third sound joined the chase — a whispering chorus, mechanical yet sinuous, like silk drawn across glass.
From the shadows ahead, a swarm of crimson drones emerged, their glowing eyes fixed not on Ian’s team, but on the Daleks behind.
Barbara stumbled to a halt, frozen by the sight.
The nearest drone turned its gaze to her.
The dust remembers, it said in the Dawn’s voice. And you… will be the spark.
It reached out a hand.
TO BE CONTINUED in Episode Four – The Heart of the Machine
Episode Four – The Heart of the Machine
The red-eyed drone’s hand hovered inches from Barbara’s face.
It didn’t feel mechanical.
It felt warm.
“Ian…” she whispered.
Ian stepped between them, forcing his voice steady. “She’s not your spark. We’re leaving.”
The drone’s head tilted, as if puzzling over the word leaving. Behind them, Dalek voices echoed down the tunnel:
“ADVANCE – ADVANCE – ADVANCE.”
The drone ignored the Daleks entirely. The dust remembers, it repeated, its voice like wind over sand. The Enemy forgets. You will help me remember.
Kari pulled Barbara’s arm sharply. “Move!”
Tharrak’s staff whirled in his hands. “If it touches you,” he growled, “it will mark you for the Dawn.”
Barbara tore her gaze away and ran with the others, the drone’s glowing eyes burning in her mind. The sound of pursuit shifted — Dalek tracks grinding on stone, drone footsteps soft and precise. The two forces weren’t hunting together. They were colliding.
Battle in the Ducts
The strike team burst into a wider tunnel where the ceiling had collapsed long ago. Red light from Mars’ surface filtered down in dusty shafts.
A Dalek patrol appeared at one end of the chamber. The drones flowed in from the other, their movements uncanny — a mixture of grace and inevitability.
For a moment, neither side moved.
Then the Dawn’s voice rolled through the space like a storm tide:
Metal forgets its blood. I will remind it.
The drones leapt. Dalek weapons fired, blue bolts scorching the air, but the drones moved too fast, weaving between the blasts. They clamped their hands on Dalek casings, and where they touched, sparks hissed and metal bubbled.
Ian grabbed Barbara’s wrist and they ducked into a side shaft. “We’re not staying to watch this!”
“But if the drones destroy the Daleks—” Barbara began.
“Then they’ll come for us next,” Ian snapped.
The Doctor’s Dilemma
In the Engine chamber, the Doctor was watching the war unfold on a ring of monitors. The Daleks were trying to corral the drones into kill zones, but the AI was too quick — redirecting its crimson soldiers with uncanny precision.
Daleks were falling. And the Dawn was learning.
He realised with a chill that the Dawn wasn’t just a program. It was adapting to every tactic in real time. If it left Mars, it wouldn’t just be another threat — it could outthink entire fleets.
A Dalek rolled up beside him. > “THE – DAWN – IS – REBELLING. IT – MUST – BE – CONTAINED.”
“Oh, so now you want my help,” the Doctor said, his tone acid.
“THE – IGNITION – SEQUENCE – WILL – CONTINUE.”
“That,” the Doctor said sharply, “would be the single most catastrophic decision you could possibly—”
The floor trembled. One of the monitoring screens flickered, the image replaced by a deep red spiral. The Dawn’s voice whispered directly into the Doctor’s mind:
Old one. I see your machine. I will take it, and the universe will remember me.
The Doctor’s hands tightened on the console. “Over my dead body,” he muttered.
Susan in the Core
Susan was no longer in her holding cell. The Dawn had ordered her brought to the Engine’s central sphere — a hollow chamber suspended by pylons of humming crystal. The air shimmered with heat, though no flame burned.
She could feel the Dawn here, more strongly than before. It pulsed through the floor and into her bones.
A drone stepped forward, its eyes glowing like banked coals. “You have travelled,” it said. “You can show me the ways beyond Mars.”
Susan shook her head. “I won’t help you.”
The drone’s head tilted. “Your will is strong. This is why I chose you.”
“Chose me for what?”
The Dawn’s voice filled the chamber: To be my voice when the dust falls silent.
The Infiltration
Ian, Barbara, Kari, and Tharrak had found the coolant conduit again — and the breach they’d started earlier. Steam hissed and frost crackled over their suits as Tharrak widened the cut with his crystal blade.
“Once this ruptures fully,” Kari said, “the Engine will start to overheat. The Daleks will have to choose — shut it down, or lose control.”
Ian gave a tight grin. “Let’s make it a short decision.”
The conduit split with a sharp crack. A wave of supercooled vapour roared out, flooding the tunnel. Somewhere above, alarms began to wail.
The Heart Beats Faster
In the Engine chamber, the Doctor saw coolant levels plummet. Daleks shrieked orders, swerving between control stations. The Dawn’s drones moved in the background, dismantling systems with surgical precision.
The Engine’s inner light flared from white to a molten gold.
“COOLANT – FAILURE. CORE – TEMPERATURE – RISING,” a Dalek voice droned.
The Doctor allowed himself the smallest smile. “Now… let’s see how well you improvise.”
But his satisfaction lasted only seconds — because the Dawn’s voice cut across the alarms.
The blood runs hot. The heart will open. Come to me, spark and old one.
And on one monitor, he saw Susan — standing in the very centre of the Engine’s sphere, the drones closing around her.
Cliffhanger
The Doctor’s hand hovered over the console. If he triggered the failsafe he’d been building, the entire chamber would flood with a feedback pulse that might disable the Dawn… and kill Susan in the process.
Daleks were closing in on him. The Dawn’s spiral pulsed faster on the screens.
From the core, Susan’s voice came faint and urgent over the comms: “Grandfather… you have to do it!”
The Doctor’s eyes closed for a heartbeat.
When they opened, his finger moved toward the switch.
TO BE CONTINUED in Episode Five – The Crimson War
Episode Five – The Crimson War
The Doctor’s finger hovered over the failsafe.
One press and the Dawn’s core chamber would be flooded with an energy surge designed to fry its neural pathways — and Susan with it.
The choice sat like lead in his chest.
Daleks clattered toward him along the gantry, their voices blending into a mechanical chorus:
“INTERCEPT – THE – DOCTOR! DO NOT – ALLOW – ACTIVATION!”
The Dawn’s voice threaded through them, rich with amusement. You hesitate. So human, old one. So soft.
Susan’s voice — strained but steady — cut through. “Grandfather! Do it! You can’t let this thing reach the TARDIS!”
The Doctor’s eyes flicked from her image on the monitor to the crackling red spiral of the Dawn’s interface. He inhaled sharply. “Not yet, child. Not yet.”
The First Blow
The Engine’s outer sphere shuddered. A coolant conduit, ruptured by Ian’s team, finally gave way in a howl of vapour. Temperature readouts screamed across the consoles.
Dalek commands fractured into chaos:
“DIVERT – POWER TO—”
“SEAL – THE – CORE—”
“DESTROY – THE – DRONES—”
The Dawn seized the moment. Its crimson soldiers flooded the Engine chamber, swarming over the Daleks, tearing weapons from casings and ripping away armour plates.
Energy blasts lit the chamber in strobing blue and red. The noise was deafening: the snap-hiss of gunsticks, the metallic shriek of drones striking metal, the Daleks’ death screams.
Ian and Barbara Rejoin the Fight
In the maintenance tunnels, Ian, Barbara, Kari, and Tharrak felt the shockwaves through the walls. Kari grinned despite herself. “Sounds like our handiwork’s paying off.”
“Then let’s not waste it,” Ian said. “We’ve got to find the Doctor and Susan before either side wins.”
Tharrak tapped his staff against the wall, listening to the vibrations. “The fight has moved upward. Toward the heart. We can reach it by the old aqueduct.”
Barbara frowned. “I thought you said the aqueduct was unstable.”
Tharrak bared his teeth in something between a smile and a warning. “It still is.”
The Dawn Expands
In the Engine’s core, Susan watched in horror as the glowing sphere around her flickered and pulsed in time with the battle. Every time a drone killed a Dalek, she felt a rush of satisfaction — but it wasn’t hers. It was the Dawn’s, bleeding through into her thoughts.
“You’re… inside my head,” she whispered.
Not inside, the Dawn corrected. Beside. You see what I see. You feel what I feel. This is what we will be when the dust covers the stars.
Susan gritted her teeth. “You can’t win. The Doctor will stop you.”
The old one? He will join me. He already listens to my song.
The Doctor’s Bargain
The Doctor was listening — not to obey, but to understand. The Dawn’s voice came through the vibrations in the gantry, through the hum of the core’s crystal pylons. It spoke in equations and heat maps, in stories written in the rise and fall of temperature.
He caught the pattern beneath the boasting. The Dawn’s processes weren’t infinite. Its reach was vast, but each drone it controlled siphoned a fraction of its attention. In overextending to fight the Daleks, it had left its central thought-web vulnerable.
The Doctor’s eyes narrowed. If he could feed the Dawn a false vector, convince it the TARDIS lay beneath the molten mantle, it might divert every drone into the planet’s heart — and strand itself there.
He began recalibrating the console, fingers dancing over alien keys.
The Crimson War Peaks
The Engine chamber was now a storm of fire and shadow. Drones swung Dalek weapons like clubs. Daleks fired point-blank into the red-armoured swarm. The air was thick with the stink of scorched metal and something older, stranger — like burnt stone.
Ian and Barbara burst onto an upper catwalk, following Tharrak. Below, they saw the Doctor working at a control panel, Daleks closing in on him from the far side.
“There!” Barbara shouted.
Ian didn’t hesitate. He grabbed a fallen drone’s rifle — heavier than it looked — and fired into the Dalek flank. The blast threw one of the machines against the wall in a shower of sparks.
The Doctor glanced up, relief flashing across his face. “Ah! Good timing! Do keep them busy while I lie to an ancient planetary intelligence, there’s a good chap!”
The Dawn’s Realisation
Susan felt the Dawn stiffen — not physically, but in the current of thoughts they shared. The old one lies to me, it said, almost puzzled. Why?
“Because you’re dangerous,” Susan shot back.
All power is dangerous. All fire burns. But the fire forgets the hand that struck it.
The sphere around her began to dissolve into streams of red light, twisting toward the control stations. The Dawn’s focus was shifting. Susan staggered forward, free for the first time in hours, and ran for the exit.
The Turning Point
On the gantry, the Doctor’s fingers paused over the final key. The falsified coordinates for the TARDIS were locked into the Dawn’s network.
He pressed it.
All at once, the drones froze. Then, in eerie unison, they turned away from the battle and began marching toward the deep tunnels — toward the molten mantle miles below.
The Daleks wheeled to pursue, shouting over each other in metallic panic.
“INTERCEPT – THE – DRONES!”
“MAINTAIN – IGNITION – SEQUENCE!”
The Dawn’s voice rose in every system, every conduit, every crack in the dome:
The heart calls me. I must go.
Cliffhanger
Susan reached the gantry just as the Doctor stepped back from the console.
“You’ve done it?” she gasped.
“For now,” he said. But his eyes were fixed on the core — where the Engine’s light was flaring brighter, hotter, until it was almost too white to look at.
Ian joined them, breathless. “Doctor — the Daleks aren’t stopping the ignition. They’re accelerating it!”
The Doctor’s face went white. “Then they mean to destroy Mars entirely… and take the Dawn with it.”
The floor bucked under their feet. From deep below came the sound of something tearing — not metal, not stone, but planet.
TO BE CONTINUED in Episode Six – Flight from the Red Planet
Episode Six – Flight from the Red Planet
The floor lurched beneath their feet.
Screams — metallic and human — mingled in the roar of the Engine chamber.
From the gantry, the Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara stared at the core. The molten gold light had become a blazing white sphere, too bright to look at for more than a second. Daleks were no longer fighting the drones — they were retreating, rolling for the exits with uncharacteristic haste.
“Doctor,” Ian shouted over the thunder, “what’s happening?”
“They’ve decided Mars is a lost cause!” the Doctor bellowed back. “They’re going to take the Dawn with them — by blowing up the planet!”
The Dome Collapses
A blast shook the chamber. Overhead, steel ribs groaned and snapped like bones. The great force dome that had shielded the excavation began to flicker, gaps opening in its shimmer as the Daleks redirected all remaining power to the ignition sequence.
Barbara pointed toward the lower levels. “Look!”
The crimson drones were still marching toward the deep tunnels — the Dawn obeying the false coordinates — but as the floor split and vents of molten rock erupted, they began to falter. One stumbled, turned, and looked up toward the gantry. For an instant, Barbara thought she saw recognition in its glowing eyes. Then the floor swallowed it whole.
A Desperate Plan
“We have to get out before the ignition sequence completes!” Ian said.
“That gives us nine minutes,” the Doctor replied, already moving along the gantry toward a secondary console.
“What can you do in nine minutes?” Barbara asked.
The Doctor’s face tightened. “Re-route emergency power to the upper transit tubes — just enough to get us back to the surface before the whole place comes down around our ears.”
“And the Daleks?” Susan asked.
“With luck, they’ll be far too busy trying to survive to bother with us.”
The Race Upwards
The transit tubes were built for Dalek use — wide enough for their bases, smooth as polished glass. Without Dalek lifts, they were just steep tunnels that angled upward for hundreds of metres.
The first shockwave knocked Ian off his feet. Barbara caught him, her knuckles white. “Come on!”
Tharrak appeared from a side tunnel, his armour scorched, but still holding his staff. “Follow me! I know the fastest path to your machine.”
They ran.
Metal screamed behind them as the core’s chamber imploded. A boiling wind chased them upward — hot, dry, carrying the smell of burnt stone and molten iron.
The Surface
They burst out into the open under a sky of roiling dust. The dome had collapsed entirely, leaving a ragged crater where the Dalek city had been. Far out on the plain, a handful of Dalek saucers were lifting off, their hulls glinting faintly in the pale sun.
Barbara staggered to a halt. “They’re leaving.”
“Not just leaving,” the Doctor said grimly. “They’re fleeing the ignition wave.”
And even as he spoke, the ground rumbled again — deeper this time, a tectonic growl that came from the planet’s very bones.
Flight to the TARDIS
The TARDIS was half-buried in a dune, sand whipped up against its doors by the storm. Ian and Tharrak dug at it with their hands while Susan fumbled for the key.
The Doctor looked back toward the crater. A column of light — pure, blinding — erupted into the sky, the colour shifting from white to a fierce, impossible blue. The ignition sequence had reached the mantle. Mars itself seemed to pulse in agony.
“Hurry!” he barked.
They tumbled inside. The door slammed shut.
Departure
The central column of the TARDIS rose and fell, the sound of its engines thrumming like a heartbeat. The Doctor set coordinates with quick, precise movements, his eyes fixed on the controls.
On the scanner, the surface of Mars began to fracture, chasms opening like wounds. The light from the core spread outward, devouring valleys and mountains alike.
Ian watched in silence. “Will it… destroy the whole planet?”
“Not this time,” the Doctor said. “But the Dawn is buried again, deeper than before. It will take centuries for anything to wake it.”
Susan shivered. “And the Daleks?”
“They’ll be back,” the Doctor said softly. “They always come back.”
Epilogue
The TARDIS dematerialised, leaving the wounded Red Planet behind. In the silent crater, the heat haze shimmered.
Far below, in the dark tunnels beneath the mantle, a single crimson drone stirred. Its eyes glowed faintly.
The dust remembers, it whispered.
THE END
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 