The Closing of Doors

Part Three

The black-cased Dalek, trapped inside his own train of thoughts and scheming, did nothing but stare at Cai, who was taking careful time to buzz through sensors and data signals.

In the tense silence that was present in the room, Camille leaned against the warm shell of her partner briefly; fortunately, Cai noticed her muscle movement and had a nanosecond's warning to drop the external temperature of his casing to prevent her from getting burned as she came in contact with him. Highly advanced sensors in his armor allowed him the ability to imagine her touch, as though he could actually feel the physical warmth of her body himself--if only he could. Her contact was strangely comforting to Cai. He felt somewhere in his mind that, unlike the Commander, he had a reason to go through life--that reason was currently pressed up against him. Meanwhile, Camille continued to ruminate over the exchange between the Cai and the Commander; she found it interesting that the two Daleks' voices, besides Cai's very humanized tone and the Commander's very high pitch, were similar in the sense that they were both electronic and had the same Dalek accent.

As Camille stood up on her own, Cai swiveled to the right in a sort of pacing motion in front of the prisoner. Camille could feel the nervous energy flooding the room; some belonged to the Commander, some to Cai, and some was her own.

Cai stopped moving, looking at the other Dalek with a sideways swivel of his dome. "How does it feel to have true responsibility for the Brigade?"

The subject was apparently dumbstruck, not able to compute the unusual question. Finally, after deciphering the human-like vagueness, the Dalek spoke up, "I have always been the Command-"

"Incorrect!" Cai cut him off, his voice rising with excitement and dripping with annoyance, "Every new assignment given to Brigade 116 was immediately redirected to me. Meanwhile, you only followed my instruction! Your orders came from me, yet you prevail!"

"I am pure Dalek! I am superior!"

"Silence! If the Daleks are superior, then why was I, an impure Dalek, the most necessary component for the Brigade's success?"

The Command Dalek was outsmarted by whom once was the Strategist Dalek once again. He did not continue to argue, and sat in silence. He had been outwitted, and he had nothing to prove on the contrary.

Cai played off his pride, giving the silent Dalek a somewhat sideways glance as he turned and glided to face the computer monitor ahead of him. He touched his manipulator to an interface. In that instant, his mind was buzzing with new information.

Because he was a Dalek, and an unusually smart one at that, his mind worked at incredulous speeds; all while suppressing the Commander's distress signal from breaching the walls of the quarters, preventing his life systems from pumping him full with sedatives, and maintaining the intricate connection between himself and Camille, he effortlessly read through the ship log of the Centre in a single millisecond, starting from the ship's origin two hundred years prior. Then, he switched from milliseconds to nanoseconds in a rush of new information. One nanosecond passed--he entered the sub-category of the encrypted reports of individual Daleks and located the log of the Systems Coordinator Dalek in charge of the Centre's systems out of thousands. Another nanosecond passed--he urged the Stratagem Computer to undo the encryption, but it, claiming security protection, refused. It took him two whole, tedious seconds, but Cai calculated the entire millions of digitalized codes himself; for any other Dalek, the Cortex Vault would have intervened in this process and it would have taken hours of concentration, even for an advanced mind. But Cai had multitudes of experience, and no pesky interference from his conquered Cortex Vault. The recent system log updates poured into his brain with the force of a river.

"Power is still draining from the weapon. They are unable to locate the problem in the system," Cai read, "They are still unaware of our location."