Prisoner of the Daleks

Trevor Baxendale

2010

This book is set during the same time period as Paul Cornell's Seventh Doctor New Adventure story, 'Love and War' - the Earth - Dalek wars of the 23rd and 24th centuries.

The Doctor is travelling alone when the TARDIS brings him to an abandoned outpost. As he searches out any signs of life, the Doctor finds himself caught in a complete...almost completely empty room. But a skeleton isn't a great conversationalist when all's said and done. So the Doctor finds himself caught in a trap waiting on the people who had set it...

Those that free the Doctor, however, are not those who set it. A small free trader had put into the port for emergency refueling and investigating the source of a strange sound, they found a desperate Doctor locked away.

These free traders, though don't deal in cargo as their trade but in the extermination of daleks as Earth Central, in its increasing desperation to beat back the daleks, turned to freebooters, mercenaries, and outright pirates. All you needed to be paid was a collection of dalek eye stalks...

All-too-soon, however, these mercenaries were facing a veritable flood of daleks as they raced back to their starship. In a dead heat, they make it back to their ship but a dalek had managed to join them as well. Before it could be disabled, a member of the crew was dead and the Doctor looked upon by the rest of the crew as a potential traitor as he argues against torturing their involuntary guest, deep frozen and almost dead. However, the ship's captain is a forceful person in his own right and overrules the doctor. Even though this was a dalek, and purely fictional, the scenes of the dalek being tortured are quite graphic (one of the purposes behind the books are to be somewhat more graphic than the TV series). 

Just before the dalek finally expires, it passes on a clue that lets the Doctor make the connection - the Arkheon Threshold, a flaw in the Space/Time contiuum that would let the daleks invade the Vortex.

Only one problem - the planet Arkheon had been hit by a planet killer missile early in the war and was presumed destroyed.

Whne the mercenaries investigate, though, they find that reports of the planet's destruction were exagerated. Just not by very much...

However, the daleks weren't looking for the planet. They were already there in force!

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