Free Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks by Ben Aaronovitch, Nicholas Briggs, Terry Molloy Page B

forearms and then her shoulders silently bore the impact, and then she felt herself falling. The sharp crackle of breaking glass somewhere behind her shattered the silence, and then she bounced off the corridor wall.
    The Dalek continued to scream and glass rained onto the floor as Ace scrambled to her feet. Bat still in hand she ran for the stairway, ignoring a sharp pain from her left ankle.
    There was another Dalek at the top of the stairs.
    Woman and Dalek saw each other at the same time.
    Ace screamed as she charged forward.
    The Dalek hesitated.
    Ace gave it a vicious backhanded swing as she went past, and fragments of polycarbide exploded off the Dalek’s casing. She took the staircase in two leaps, screaming again as she came down on her injured ankle.
    She saw the dead soldier as she skidded into the entrance hall. Beside his sprawled body lay his gun and a rifle grenade. Ace grabbed the weapons and limped for the exit.
    The commander of the Dalek attack squad had no name, yet it knew what it was. That was enough – it would always he enough. It puzzled over the reports from scouts one and two.
    Scout one had sighted a small human female on level three. The commander had expected extermination details to follow, but scout one had instead registered severe damage. The female was using a weapon of advanced design and had disabled the scout. This was outside the parameters established for the operation.
    Eight seconds after the attack on scout one, scout two sighted the female. It reported behaviour inconsistent with human response predictions.
    The commander immediately tagged the female as an intruder human – one either not from this planet or from this temporal zone – or both. It recalled two undamaged warriors and assigned them intercept positions. Only one intruder was allowed for in the operational parameters –
    the Time Lord known as the Doctor. The commander issued a capture directive specified under the human section of Dalek battle tactics. The female was to be intimidated into surrender.
     
    The commander entered the school entrance hall; it immediately sighted the female. The female now exhibited the expected reactions of fear and flight, accelerating away in the inefficient controlled fall of bipedal locomotion. The commander notified the two warriors to close in while it pursued the female.
    As Ace entered the playground, the commander sprang its trap: it and the other warriors closed in on her. Again, the commander considered, the human deviated from normal human behavioural patterns, even as the intimidation took place.
    ‘Exterminate!’
    The voices rebounded off the walls and crowded Ace’s mind; they made it difficult to think, harder to act.
    ‘Exterminate!’
    Three Daleks. There was a sickness in her stomach as she realized that blind aggression was not going to save her now. But why had they not killed her?
    ‘Exterminate!’
    The rifle was clumsy in her fingers; the grenade kept slipping off. She was determined to take one of them with her.
    ‘Exterminate!’
    They were on every side – an alien wall of white and gold. She knew she was going to die.
    The Doctor is going to be really angry this time, she thought.
    The commander monitored the female carefully, wary of more unpredictable behaviour. It contacted the mothership through the communications relay in the transmat below and demanded reinforcements.
    It had just finished when communications were drowned in static. Co-ordination systems suddenly malfunctioned; motor circuits failed to respond. With dimming vision the commander saw the female scuttle away. It tried to fire but its weapon failed. Wild power fluctuations disrupted the incubator, and it felt a sudden intense physical pain. There was a fleeting sensation of enemies, humans near itself. Spiridon, it screamed silently, the Doctor.
    Sudden heat and oblivion.
    Ace fell down a few metres away from the Daleks. They were thrashing about, their gunsticks waving erratically.