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Ten Little Aliens
(Stephen Cole)
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 Name: Schirr
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Unconfirmed, but definitely far
future.
Appearances: "Ten
Little Aliens".
Doctors:
First
Doctor.
Companions:
Ben
Jackson and
Polly.
History: The
Schirr were some of The Doctor's most powerful and ferocious foes.
The specific Schirr he faced were the Ten-Strong, ten Schirr lead
by a Schirr called DeCaster and Pallemar, his second-in-command,
attacking Earth's empire with rituals they'd learnt from their former
allies, the Morphieans, after the annexation of their homeworld;
the Morphieans had withdrawn to their quadrant centuries before Earth
reached the Schirr planet, but now appeared angered at the humans’ inability
to contain the Ten-Strong. Only the best warriors get into Earth's
Anti-Terror Elite after exhaustive training, and on every training
mission they wear neural net websets to record their experiences
and impressions for later review. Right now, a team of ten soldiers,
consisting of Marshal Nadina Haunt, her second in command, Shel,
Adam Shade, an Earthborn with pieces of a mine in his face following
an explosion, his ex Gisel Denni, Joiks, an annoying obnoxious flirt,
Mel 'Frog' Nerda, who'd had her throat torn out in a shuttlecrash
and could only talk via an artificial microphone, Tovel, a pilot,
his old friend Roba, Creben, the brains of it all, and Lindey, a
soldier attempting to blackmail Shade, were going on a training mission
on an abandoned asteroid to destroy two new Kill-Droids. However,
once arriving there, Denni went missing, and the TARDIS materialised
in a control room where the bodies of DeCaster and his eight followers
were standing, apparently dead, behind a force field of some kind
while Pallemar was slumped dead in a chair, mysterious stone cherubs
being located in various parts of the caverns.
After
one section of the asteroid took off from the rest, leaving
the soldiers and the TARDIS crew trapped with the corpses, it was discovered
that Denni
had gone missing that one of the corpses had vanished, and
that the TARDIS doors couldn't be opened for reasons unknown. Worried about
the disappearance,
the fact that they were heading into Morphiean space, and
by The Doctor's statement that the entire thing seemed very likely to be
a trap, Haunt
had everyone split off into teams to track down Denni, but
Lindey went missing as well, and when they got back, another corpse had
vanished. Despite
Haunt's claims that the corpses were probably only destroyed
by either vibrations from the take-off or the Kill-Droid's disintegrator
guns, The
Doctor was sceptical about it all - as he had every right
to be, since when Ben,
Tovel, and Roba managed to take out one Droid and the other was disabled
after it attacked The Doctor, Shel and Polly,
checks by Creben revealed that the disintegrators hadn't been fired. Also,
a check of Shel's
injuries revealed that he wasn't even human - he was an
android, apparently sent by Earth Central, and presumably responsible for
the disappearances.
Even more disturbing, shortly after Shel’s departure the bodies of
DeCaster and Pallemar vanished, and the stone cherubs were
starting to move on their own and attack the group.
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| William Hartnell |
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Things
were made even more disturbing when Frog and Shade’s old injuries
began to heal; the plastic chunks in Shade's face literally
started to push their way out of his skin, and Frog's damaged vocal chords
and scarred
face were regenerating themselves. However, Frog’s healing was accompanied
by her body transforming into a Schirr simultaneously, and
Tovel and Roba weren't too far behind either. Finding some pairs of web
sets in a room
full of crystals - the ship's engines - Shade and Frog learned
that the newly-discovered websets were Lindey and Shel’s, but Joiks
was killed by the stone cherubs, who The Doctor realised were Morphiean
constructions.
The Doctor also realised that the Schirr bodies were not
really dead - they had simply been frozen in Time, and when they had gotten
out, they
had been moving so fast that nobody could see them as they
transferred back into ‘reality’.
Examining
the websets, they came to the conclusion that Denni was behind everything
that had happened, and, to allow the team to maintain contact with each
other, The Doctor hardwired the websets so that they transmitted everyone's
thoughts to the other websets, in a neural network. While Frog remained
in the room with the corpses, the rest of the team went wandering around
the asteroid. Polly managed to track down the lost navigation crystals,
needed to turn the asteroid away from its course into Morphiean space,
and Roba, tapping into the Schirr memories due to his mutation, discovered
that Pallemar had become scared by DeCaster's ambition and contacted Earth
Central, causing them to send Shel to spy on the asteroid team. Wandering
off from his group, The Doctor arrived in the main chamber again, and discovered
DeCaster and the other Schirr waiting for him. Confronting DeCaster in
the main control room, The Doctor learnt that the Ten-Strong had been working
with rouge Morphieans - the true Morphiean consciousness in reality having
no interest in Earth’s affairs, having ascended to a state of pure
thought long ago -, the Schirr working their rituals to give the Morphieans
true bodies and the necessary strength to subvert the main Morphiean consciousness
while energising the weakened Schirr with the bodies of the team. Even
more shocking, the traitor in the team was Haunt herself, having been driven
mad by the terrorism and the death of innocents and seeking to give the
Morphieans bodies so that Earth's empire could wage a proper war against
them. The cherub forms were there mainly for symbolism; to carry the soldiers
to their rest.
As
the rest of the team struggled to get the navigation crystals to turn them
around, The Doctor faced off against the majority of the Ten-Strong, DeCaster
included, in the main engine room. However, they realised that The Doctor
had tricked them, and knocked him out, killed Haunt, and proceeded to cast
their ritual. However, as The Doctor began to be pulled into the ritual,
he sensed Shel's presence in the network; as an android, he had interfaced
with the websets far more fully, and there was still some of him in the
sets even though his body was destroyed. With The Doctor's encouragement,
Shel joined him in standing against the Schirr, and his presence in the
ritual destabilised things long enough for Roba to kill himself, thus breaking
the link. This broke the strain of the ritual long enough for Shade to
kill DeCaster, and let the survivors recover. The Doctor, Ben, and Polly
departed, leaving Tovel, Creben, Frog and Shade to get picked up, all of
them changed by the experience, and, The Doctor hoped, now prepared to
treat the Schirr with kindness and compassion rather than hatred. |
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