Miranda took in the scene before her with growing dismay. "You have got to be kidding me."
"Where my scarf? I give you jelly baby!" one of the newborn aliens said repeatedly as it wandered in a little circle around the group.
"Oh, wish for more colour in this, I do! No personality at all!" a second alien sighed, shaking its head despondently at its armour.
"But these shoes, they fit perfect!" a third exclaimed happily.
A fourth was staring intently at its reflection in the breastplate of a fifth. "Regeneration is trouble. Never know what you get," it grunted soberly.
Miranda groaned in realization. The essence! Goran programmed these things, all right; he inadvertently programmed them after the different forms of the Doctor! As she watched them chatter aimlessly with their borrowed personalities, Miranda found herself speaking her mind: "I almost wish it was Daleks."
"Daleks?!" the lead alien repeated, turning to glare at her (which had been looking at its reflection in the shiny corridor wall and commenting about its ears). "You know nothing about Daleks!" it snapped.
Miranda recoiled at the viciousness in its voice. "S-sorry. I didn't mean--What do you know about Daleks?" she asked suddenly, recovering her nerve. This lead alien seemed to be channelling her Doctor more than the others. If it really had absorbed some of his personality and his memories, then Miranda sensed an opportunity to have some questions laid to rest.
"Daleks kill. Killed everyone," the alien answered, clearly upset. "Killed my family, my home. All gone. Daleks!" it snarled.
The other aliens stopped to pay attention. "...Yes," one of the others nodded slowly, "I remember. Glowing ember in space."
"But the Daleks were gone, too," another chimed in. "It worked, remember?"
"But, home!" the second alien cried. "Home was gone!"
"Stop, stop! I know home was gone!" the lead alien shouted, silencing all of them. "I try to fix, and now see! See how I am! My own skin is failure for all to see!" With an anguished wail, the alien turned away from all the others and curled up on the floor, shuddering.
"...F-fail?" one of the others repeated weakly. It gazed at its tentacle hands and started to weep. "Fail!" it cried, pulling into a ball on the floor.
"Oh, no," Miranda groaned, as one by one, the aliens began to panic and collapse to the floor in self-loathing. The sight was as deeply disturbing as the revelation the lead alien had just described, and she found herself struggling to keep herself from being swept away in it. No wonder the Doctor never talked about home, and no wonder he'd reacted how he had when those Dalek casings first appeared. Miranda suddenly felt horribly guilty for not having recognized it sooner. She'd sensed there was something damaged about him for a long time, but she'd never have suspected it was anything like this. And now, all that trauma and all those repressed feelings were imprinted, naked and undeserved, onto these poor creatures. Some army!
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The Valeyard stepped toward the Doctor, eyes wide and glittering in the kaleidoscope light of his tiny universe. He reached out and just brushed the Doctor's arm. The Doctor jerked back violently, as if the Valeyard had grazed him with a hot poker. The Valeyard's presence screamed with wrongness; the Doctor had become so used to the mental dampening of this place that it was like an electric shock. He had no doubt anymore.
"You're completely insane," he said.
"Of course I am!" the Valeyard suddenly shouted, "I was born to it! I'm an impossibility inside a singularity wrapped up in the most destructive temporal paradox the universe has, had, and will ever know, Doctor!" With a wail of anguish, the Valeyard whirled away from the Doctor, thrashing at his miniature galaxies. "My mother was Gallifrey, and my birth killed her! Only here, caught between being and not being, in this...boil on the wound of time, could I end the destruction and create the means with which to restore that which was taken," he continued, falling to his knees, and lifting his arms above his head. "'A peace above all earthly dignities, A still and quiet conscience,'" he quoted softly.
The swirl of stars and galaxies suddenly zoomed in towards his hands, coalescing into two large, glowing spheres. "Nothing corrodes the soul with quite the same efficacy as failure does," he said, as the large globes above his hands took on color and detail. "Something the poor denizens of these two worlds never really understood."
The Doctor recognized the two planets: Gallifrey on the left, and the original homeworld of the Daleks--Skaro--on the right. Two worlds both long gone, at his hands. He swallowed with difficulty. He had exactly zero patience for his un-self's mad ravings. "Yes, very nice picture show. That must be a top-of-the-line holo projector you've got there." A pair of noticeably loud thumps echoed through the chamber, originating behind the Doctor. He'd almost forgotten about them. "Now what say you call off your little Dalek army and send us all back home?"
The Valeyard stood slowly, the two large planets flanking him, hovering above his outstretched arms. He was staring up at them worshipfully. "That's exactly what I shall do, Doctor. It will all be made right." He looked at the Doctor again, his eyes clearing. "Shall I tell you why you failed, Doctor? I remember, of course. The dark time in that lonely void when all of it was gone. You tried to fix it. Attempt after attempt, always ending at the same mortal wound."
The Doctor crossed his arms. He didn't want to hear this. "Crazy or not, you do have a gift for gab, I'll grant you that." There were more thumps from the corridor behind him.
"Maybe it is because I am outside of your time, that I could see what you couldn't. Perhaps the council had a purpose in bringing me forth after all, albeit not the one they expected. 'Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.' You see...those beings out there aren't Daleks. They are made of the universe's oldest sentience, yet utterly new, and they shall be the saviour of all we have lost and so very much more," the Valeyard said, nodding towards the sealed hatch. His eyes gleamed mischeviously.
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"No, please, guys, pull yourselves together, huh?" Miranda tried to reassure the panicking creatures, both for their well-being, and for speed. She clutched the Nitro-Nine cannister tightly. She needed to find the Doctor now. But the things were lost in their anguish, huddling together and wailing piteously. "Please, I know it's hard, but that's all in the past. You gotta help me now. I need to find the real Doctor. I need your help to fix all this," she pleaded.
One of the creatures raised its head. "Fix? Can't fix, Miranda! That is problem!"
"No! Listen to me, I understand that what happened to you and your people was horrible, but I need your help to fix things here and now. You've got to..." To what? She was flying by the seat of her pants, here. "To get yourselves, and all the rest of you that are in this facility, to...uh, help us get out. Me, all those other friends of yours that Goran hid away in the TARDISes, we need your help, see?"
The creature eyed her thoughtfully. "Goran," it said.
Miranda smiled, encouraged. "Yeah, remember him? He hid--"
The creature suddenly leapt to its feet, drawing the attention of the others. "Goran's fault!" it proclaimed angrily. "Yes, Miranda! Goran did it! We help! We get Goran for this!"
The other creatures began to rapidly recover from their breakdowns and join the ringleader in angry solidarity. "Goran!" they all began to chorus, transforming the name into a threatening invective. They were riled, and if their building fury at Goran was as potent as their terror had been...
Miranda felt her control of the situation dissolve with frightening speed. "Whoa, now, wait a second! What are you--?"
"Goran abused us! Made us age, made you die! We more powerful than him!" the lead creature growled.
"We superior!" the others began to chant. "We get Goran! We get all of us and we terminate Goran! Terminate! Terminate!"
Suddenly Miranda faced a mob. Her pleas for mercy and patience were drowned out, and she could hear the chilling word spreading back into the incubation chamber. There were a lot more of them in there than she had suspected. "Terminate Goran!" the lead creature screamed, and the group began to surge past her, back towards the laboratory.
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The Valeyard slowly brought his hands together, guiding the two planets closer and closer until they merged into one over his head. "It is so simple, can't you see? Mutually assured survival. I scoured the timelines, Doctor, and in every one of them I saw the Time Lords and the Daleks, locked in mortal combat. They only way one can survive is if the other also survives. They must be one, Doctor! One world, and one race! Dalek and Time Lord, Gallifrey and Skaro, both and neither! That is the noble end that this entire endeavor has been striving towards!" The Valeyard spoke faster, fueled with the excitement of a purpose nearly fulfilled.
"I had the Dalek components, this place was theirs, a retreat from the devastation of the Time War. But for the other half...I am tainted, neither living, nor dead, nor entirely existant, for that matter, as you have perceived. I found you, so many of our fragments, ripe for distillation. Thanks to you, we can restore the universe, Doctor. But to do it, we must make such a change, so drastic that you never would have considered it. We cannot change the Time War, but we can prevent it. We must. For it is not just our lives and our people who suffered. How many worlds and peoples were lost, Doctor? We can restore them, but first we must evolve, Doctor! The Daleks and the Time Lords--two races blind to their own ancient stagnation. Two stars, dying in the universe. I have brought them together. And when I send them out in your TARDISes, they will flow back in time to when their mother races were but infants, and supplant them entirely with a hybrid creature that will never make such war upon the stars. They won't only close the scars of time, they will make it so they never happened. Only then will your pain--and this nebulous purgatory of mine--at last have a chance to subside."
The thumps behind the Doctor grew more insistent, accompanied by the squeal of strained metal. He glanced from the hatch, to the Valeyard, then back again. All he could think about was the brief contact in that corridor when he realized Goran had used his essence. "Those things...you made--?" He couldn't even say it, the idea was so hideous.
"A hybrid organism, Dalek and Time Lord, and the only way to repair the damage to the universe," the Valeyard reiterated gravely.
"You idiot!" the Doctor cried, applying it to himself, Goran and the Valeyard in varying measures. "Goran used regenerative essence on those things." The Valeyard looked at him with equal parts astonishment and confusion."They're not just hybrids, they're in biological meta-crisis, they're unstable. And they're half-Dalek!" the Doctor emphasized.
The Valeyard lowered his arms and stood, as understanding slowly crept across his face. "But they are half Time Lord also. You assume that they will fall to the violent nature of the Dalek. But the restraint and mental superiority of a Time Lord, surely--"
"A Time Lord which was me," the Doctor said pointedly. He indicated the door hatch, which was starting to shudder in its frame. "Does that sound restrained to you?"
The Valeyard's chest began to heave. "They simply desire guidance and instruction," he protested sharply. "In that way they do follow the Dalek. But they will listen to me, Doctor. I'll open the hatch, and you'll see your prejudice disproved." The Valeyard began to walk towards the hatch. The Doctor moved quickly to block him.
"Either way, I can't let you do this."
"You cannot stop me. This is the future of the universe, I've seen it. I've planned for it. I've made it happen!" the Valeyard insisted in ever-angrier tones. He tried to sidestep around the Doctor, but the Doctor countered, pulling the cannister of Nitro-Nine out of his pocket. The Valeyard paused, looking at the disguised aerosol can. "You would do it."
"Like you said, you don't exist, and for all I know, I don't have any regenerations left. So...yeah." The Doctor grinned, enjoying the unsettled expression that flitted across the Valeyard's features. But staring at his face meant that the Doctor didn't notice the Valeyard's right fist until it was plowed into his midsection.
Winded, the Doctor doubled over and staggered. He managed to keep hold of the Nitro-Nine, but the Valeyard slipped past him and made a beeline for the stressed hatch. The Doctor's vision flashed red for a second and he just happened to catch himself on a wall that had appeared as invisible as the floor. As his diaphragm relaxed and he started to straighten, the Doctor noticed another hatch a few meters from him, in the invisible wall. He heard a loud crash behind him. The Valeyard's sucker punch had stunned him for only a few seconds, it seemed, but it was long enough for the Valeyard to reach the first hatch and trigger the opening mechanism.
"Don't!" the Doctor gasped.
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Jostled roughly in the stampede, Miranda shrieked and pressed herself flat against the wall. The armored creatures flowed past her in a torrent of murderous intent. Panic welled. There were scores of them, just in this one incubation room. One of them clipped her shoulder and and she nearly fell headlong into the crowd. She lost her grip on the nitro can, heard it clatter briefly on the floor, but it was quickly lost.
"Terminate! Terminate! Terminate!" the cry was practically a shriek and she covered her ears. They sounded so much like Daleks!
Great gods, what had she done? Goran was helpless in that tube. If those things got it open, got hold of him in their present frenzy...certainly the little rat man had done some despicable things, but he didn't deserve this! Her stomach lurched. Finally, the mob passed her by, barrelling down the corridor like crazed gorillas. She tried to call after them, screaming for them to stop. But they rounded the corner and were gone in a chilling, echoing wail of bloodlust. It wasn't just Goran she feared for, what if they ran into Ace and the shrunken Doctor on their way? This was bad. Her can of nitro was nowhere to be seen, either, probably snatched up by one those things. Crazed gorillas with explosives. Very, very bad.
She stared after them, her legs itching to run after and try to stop them somehow. But they weren't listening to reason and they had nearly trampeled her. Plus she was alone, unarmed and injured (as her trembling limbs and aching insides constantly reminded her). Her breath catching in a sob, Miranda made her decision: "Sorry, Goran." She turned, trying to remember the way back to the TARDIS room.
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The roar of the creatures' shrieking and pounding was instantly deafening as the hatch began to retract. The Valeyard stood before the growing aperature, his arms outstretched. "Please, children of Gallifrey and of Skaro! Calm yourselves! There is much work to be done!" Several grotesque figures began to come through, their true form hidden by the darkness, shrieking unintelligibly, reaching towards the Valeyard.
"You are in pain! We can make it end," the Valeyard cried, grasping the hand of the nearest creature. Swift as a fleeting shadow, the creatures set upon him. He was mobbed in a writhing mass of screaming darkness, limbs reaching, tearing, thrashing.
The Doctor triggered the fuse and threw the Nitro-Nine at the hatch. It exploded with a loud POP of dense, white smoke. Turning to the second hatch he'd just seen, the Doctor whipped out his sonic screwdriver and triggered the hatch's opening mechanism. The corridor beyond was dim, but deserted. The Doctor wasted no time in legging it through the aperature as more creatures filled the smoky room behind him, all making a horrifying sound the Doctor had only ever heard once before--the first time he'd watched his people die. As the hatch closed behind him though, he heard one scream that stood out from the others: the Valeyard's.