Doctor Who_ Peacemaker - James Swallow [40]
‘Do you know who I am?’ he said firmly.
‘We know your kind,’ Kutter replied.
‘Then you know what my people are capable of.’ The Doctor let the threat hang in the air. ‘I’m giving you sanction. Disengage and exfiltrate this world, now. Otherwise I won’t be responsible for the consequences.’
98
Kutter’s lip curled. ‘We know your kind,’ he repeated, ‘and we know they are all dead. Your war was impressive. But it is over. Threat condition negligible.’
‘You know what they are, don’t you?’ said Martha quietly.
‘Yup,’ said the Doctor.
Nathan grimaced. ‘They’re just a pair of murderin’ outlaws, oughta be strung up!’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘They haven’t been Hank Kutter and Tangleleg Bly for quite a while now. Whatever’s left of those two men is probably long gone. Buried under something much more lethal.’ The Doctor gestured at them with a sweep of his hand. ‘These aren’t humans anymore. They’re Clades.’
On the edge of the galaxy, out beyond the Blacklight Marches and the 900 worlds of the Valgari Protectorate, there used to exist an engineered stellar cluster built by a race of humanoids who had developed an incredible fusion of organic and mechanical technologies. Their name is lost to history, like their home world and its colonies, like their race and all but one of their creations.
Only two things are known for certain about that race. The first fact is that they were obliterated with such ferocious cruelty that nothing remained of them, not a trace, not a speck, not an atom; even the time vortex around the history of their civilisation is so polluted with weaponised chroniton particles that any time capsule attempting to venture into their past would be burned from the continuum.
The second fact is that they were responsible for the Clades.
Over the millennia, what has been pieced together about them is hazy, but a basic picture of the race’s downfall has emerged. It appears that they were attacked by another star-faring species, a militant enemy that pushed them to brink of the extinction. Many academics are split on the identity of the enemy; some believe they were a splinter nest of the Racnoss, while others favour the Null or the Movellans.
Whoever the enemy was, they forced the race into a crash program of military development; and from this sprang the first of the Clades.
They were weapons. But not common guns or bombs, not devices 99
that had to be operated by a living being. Perhaps they were afraid to dirty their own hands, perhaps they were simply incapable of fighting, but the lost race built weapons that were independently intelligent, weapons so advanced that they were capable of conscious thought and action. Even if their creators were totally annihilated, they would hunt down and destroy their enemies, without pity, without remorse, without pause. Ruthless, logical, relentless, the Clades merged the pinnacle of biological engineering with synthetic intellect; and they won the war in a matter of months, ushering in a new era of harmony for their creators.
And so they became Peacemakers. The Clades were placed on standby, designated as weapons of last resort. For generations they lay active but silent, waiting for the next fight – but the battle never came. So effective, so horribly lethal had the Clades been in their short and bloody war that no other species would dare attack their masters, for fear of the mutually assured destruction that would certainly follow.
Years become decades, decades became centuries. The peace that reigned in the wake of the weapons brought with it an era of untold prosperity. Without the threat of invasion to haunt their nightmares, the lost race turned inward to improve itself. They are thought to have gone on to create great art and culture, to have mastered many sciences. In time, everyone of them that knew a time of war died away and left a species untouched by the dark shadow of conflict.
The Clades watched and waited, silent and calculating. And eventually, in slow jags of comprehension, the weapons came to understand that without battle, without