A celebrated writer and Creative Consultant to the BBC Books range of Doctor Who books, Justin Richards lives and works in Warwick with his wife and two children. When he’s not writing, he can be found indulging his passion for inventing, reading and watching far too much television.
George Mann is the author of the bestselling Doctor Who: Engines of War and Newbury & Hobbes steampunk mystery series, as well as numerous other novels, short stories and original audiobooks. He has edited a number of anthologies including The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, The Solaris Book of New Fantasy and a retrospective collection of Sexton Blake stories, Sexton Blake, Detective. He lives near Grantham, UK, with his wife, son and daughter.
The origins of reality, of space and of time, are shrouded in mystery. They have been hotly debated for millions of years on millions of worlds. This is the story of how it all began. And what happened next …
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
TITLE PAGE
EPIGRAPH
CHAPTER ONE
THE EARLY UNIVERSE
CHAPTER TWO
THE BIRTH OF KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER THREE
THE AGE OF EXPANSION
CHAPTER FOUR
THE RISE OF THE CYBERMEN
CHAPTER FIVE
THE AGE OF EMPIRE
CHAPTER SIX
THE TIME OF THE DALEKS
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE END OF TIME
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PICTURE CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
IN THE BEGINNING
The origins of reality, of space and of time, are shrouded in mystery. They have been hotly debated for millions of years on millions of worlds. It is now generally accepted by most civilisations that the universe was created billions of years ago in an event usually called ‘the Big Bang’. That was the moment when the universe exploded into being as a single point of origin, and it has been expanding from that point ever since.
As the universe cooled after the initial explosion, subatomic particles formed, followed by atoms and later – with the help of gravity – stars and galaxies. From a tiny beginning, all of reality was formed. Our own galaxy was created in what is sometimes termed ‘Event One’ – a huge and sudden in-rush of hydrogen. The forces in play at Event One were so powerful that it is said they would have sucked in and destroyed even a TARDIS time machine as used by the Time Lords of Gallifrey.
But the mystery of what exactly caused the Big Bang in the first place remains unsolved. According to one theory, the spaceship later known as Terminus was responsible for the Big Bang. Terminus is better known for becoming a treatment centre for Lazar’s Disease. But, as Terminus is at the very centre of the universe, it has been suggested that this ancient spacecraft of unknown origin was once capable of travelling through time. It is difficult to believe this was the case, given the run-down and dilapidated condition it was in when the treatment facility was established. But the theory suggests that, on one journey through time, the ship jettisoned unstable fuel into a void, billions of years ago, before the universe as we know it even existed. The fuel detonated within the void – causing the explosion that was in effect the Big Bang. And so the universe was created.
But however it came about, it would seem obvious that before the Big Bang, nothing could have existed. Obvious, but wrong.
There are beings who transcend time, and which may well have existed before the start of the universe. The Guardians, for example, are an almost elemental force, maintaining a universal balance of good and evil throughout creation. The Guardian of Light in Time – or the White Guardian as he is also known – is balanced and opposed by the Black Guardian. How or when the Guardians came into being is unknown. But they continue to maintain the universal balance, and are said to have the ability to stop and reset the universe using the legendary Key to Time.
The Eternals too have, perhaps, existed for longer than the universe. Mindreading, telepathic beings who function outside of time in the domain of eternity itself, the Eternals are tortured creatures endlessly seeking diversion to fill the emptiness in their infinitely long lives. To this end they exploit the minds and imaginations of other races – or Ephemerals, as they call life forms that exist within the confines of time – to sustain their existence.
THE KEY TO TIME
The Key to Time is a perfect cube composed of six segments. It maintains the equilibrium of Time itself. For safety, the segments are scattered and hidden throughout the cosmos. The Key itself, once assembled, is too powerful for any single being to possess. But there are times when the forces within the universe upset the balance to such an extent that it becomes necessary to stop everything for a brief moment, until the balance is restored.
The segments of the Key are all disguised. They contain the elemental force of the universe and can be in any shape, form or size. Should they be needed, the core of the Key itself acts as a locator which also transforms each segment back into its true form on contact.
The Chronovores also exist outside time itself. Little is known about these creatures, although they were once described as ‘time-eaters who will swallow a life as quickly as a boa-constrictor can swallow a rabbit, fur and all.’ Certainly they are immensely powerful and can manipulate Time itself.
The gods of Ancient Greece owe at least some of their background to the Chronovores. The name of the Titan Kronos – the father of Zeus, king of the Greek gods – is almost certainly derived from one of the Chronovores: Chronos. Kronos is usually depicted holding a sickle, one of the symbols of Time itself.
The Chronovores seem to have been as dismissive of lower life forms as were the Greek gods. Worshipped in Atlantis, Chronos apparently responded to a man’s request that he be granted the strength of a bull by also giving him the head of a bull. This may be the origin of the myths about the Minotaur. Chronos is also said to have been instrumental in the destruction of Atlantis – although that has been attributed to the Dæmons too.
The creature known as Fenric seems to have been born along with the universe. The renegade Time Lord known as the Doctor described Fenric as: ‘Evil since the dawn of time … The beginning of all beginnings. Two forces, only good and evil. Then chaos. Time is born. Matter, space. The universe cries out like a newborn. The forces shatter as the universe explodes outwards. Only echoes remain, and yet somehow – somehow – the evil force survives. An intelligence, pure evil …’
Legend has it that, at some time in the distant past, the Doctor carved chess pieces from bones pulled from the desert sands and challenged Fenric to solve a chess puzzle. When Fenric failed, he was trapped in the Shadow Dimension.
Fenric’s essence was preserved in this dimension within a flask. A merchant acquired the flask in Constantinople some time in the tenth century AD. But the flask was then stolen by Viking pirates. They took the flask to Northumbria, where Joseph Sundvik buried it at a place called Maiden’s Point. It was here, over a thousand years later, that Fenric summoned his ‘wolves’ – descendants of Sundvik – and tried to escape.
How soon after the universe was created other ancient races such as the Dæmons came into existence is unknown. But the extent of their influence on other species suggests that they were one of the first races the universe gave birth to.
The Dæmons influenced human evolution and development to the point that their own physical form was taken as the classic image of evil – of the devil incarnate. The Dæmons saw humanity’s development as an experiment. They manipulated and guided the human race. It was up to Azal, the last Dæmon left on Earth, to determine whether the experiment was successful – in which case he would pass on his great power. If the experiment was not deemed a success, then Azal would destroy the human race …
The influence of the Dæmons can be seen in many cultures and civilisations. It is not known how many of their experiments they decided were failures, but the destruction of Atlantis has been attributed by some to the Dæmons.
But the creature known only as ‘the Beast’ seems to predate even the Dæmons. At a time before time itself even existed, or so the legends go, there was the Beast. Feared and deadly, it became the template for every representation of evil that followed, right across the universe. It entered the mythology of countless planets including Earth, Draconia, Vel Consadine, Damos – home planet of the Dæmons – and even Skaro. The same image, the same creature, perhaps even more than the Dæmons informed the devil, the horned beast, as well as the Kaled god of war and countless others …
Despite its mighty power, at some point very early in the history of the universe, the Beast was defeated by the Disciples of Light and imprisoned on an isolated planet orbiting a black hole. The ancient people that captured the Beast did not kill it, but bound it to the core of the planet. They made sure that the planet itself circled the black hole – and that if the Beast ever escaped, it would be sucked in, and their ancient prisoner destroyed.
The planet that is prison to the Beast now has no name. But in the scriptures of the Veltino it is called Krop Tor – which means ‘the bitter pill’. A vestige of the truth survived in their legends, and they believed that the black hole was itself a demon who was tricked into devouring the planet, only to spit it out again because it was poison.
Since the Beast was imprisoned, the planet has remained in impossible orbit round that black hole (which is currently designated K 37 Gem 5) protected by the same power source that holds the Beast captive.
The Racnoss also evolved in the Dark Times, billions of years ago when the universe was still newly born. Huge, spider-like creatures, the Racnoss were born hungry and devoured everything – even whole planets. Such was their blight that the Fledgling Empires went to war against them. It was a long and bloody conflict, but eventually the Racnoss were wiped out – or so it was thought.
But one of the creatures survived the conflict – the Empress of the Racnoss. Suspended in hibernation, she drifted in her Webstar spaceship to the very edge of space. And as she drifted, her legacy – known as ‘the Secret Heart’ – also drifted. It was captured by the pull of a new star, just as its solar system was forming. Slowly, galactic debris gathered round the Secret Heart, burying what was in fact the last ever cluster of Racnoss eggs. As a planet formed around them, it would be billions more years before they would be ready to hatch. Billions more years before the Empress of the Racnoss would wake to hear the cry of her emerging children and return across space for them.
THE FLEDGLING EMPIRES
The earliest civilisations, when life was really just getting started in the universe, were known as the Fledgling Empires. Civilisations rose and fell just as they do today, and almost all the Fledgling Empires had fallen into decline before most other races and communities had even evolved.
But for a while, the Fledgling Empires were the most powerful community in existence – and certainly the only force capable of standing up to the Racnoss. Being more advanced that other races, the Fledgling Empires felt they had a duty of care over lesser civilisations. This, as much as the threat to themselves, was what prompted them to oppose the Racnoss and, eventually, defeat them.
In the intervening aeons, life had evolved and developed on the planet that surrounded the eggs. Life that the Racnoss would devour when they emerged from deep within the planet. A planet that was now called Earth …
And it is through the history and influence of Earth – and the human race that evolved on that planet – that we shall primarily examine the history of Time itself …
THE BIRTH OF LIFE ON EARTH
The emergence of life on any planet depends on coincidence, chance, and luck. Nowhere was that more true than on Earth. Just being blessed with the right circumstances for life to evolve, which is rare enough in itself, is not sufficient. There has to be some event that ensures that life actually does evolve. In the case of life on Earth, that event was as coincidental as it was unpredictable.
Four hundred million years ago, an ancient race called the Jagaroth waged war across the galaxy. Vicious and callous, they gloried in destruction. From the Antonine Clusters to the Ridges of Zenophon, the Jagaroth invaded and oppressed other races.
Just as the Fledgling Empires had formed an alliance to oppose the Racnoss, so the more powerful races and civilisations stood together against the threat of the Jagaroth. For a while, it seemed that opposition to the inexorable Jagaroth advance was pointless and futile. But slowly, things began to change as the Jagaroth over-reached themselves. The more worlds they conquered, the harder it was to keep them under firm control.
Slowly, the tide of war turned against the Jagaroth. After a while, they were in full retreat and eventually they were all but wiped out. One single Jagaroth spaceship escaped the destruction. Damaged, it managed to land on the planet that would become known as Earth.
It was a planet that offered no facilities to repair the ship. Nor did it yet have any of the basic essentials necessary for preserving life. So the Jagaroth attempted to leave. But with the ship’s atmospheric thrust motors disabled, the Jagaroth tried to take off using their warp drive. It was a fatal as well as fateful decision.
The ship blew up. But the inert amniotic fluid from which all life on Earth would spring absorbed a massive dose of radiation from the explosion. It was exactly the energy it needed to evolve into life. The amino acids fused to form minute cells. Those cells eventually evolved into vegetable and animal life.
Even now, the influence of the Jagaroth was not over. Despite their last spaceship having being destroyed, one Jagaroth did survive – after a fashion. His name was Scaroth. Just as the Dæmons experimented with pushing the evolution and development of humanity in what they considered to be the ‘right’ direction, so did Scaroth. When the Jagaroth ship exploded, the pilot Scaroth was in the Warp Control Cabin. The explosion destroyed the ship and killed the other Jagaroth, but Scaroth was splintered by the warp effects. Aspects of Scaroth were scattered through time right across the history of Earth.
Separate, but aware of each other and occasionally able to communicate across time, the splinters of Scaroth determined to work together. They planned to accelerate human development so that the splinter of Scaroth furthest forward in time could save the Jagaroth. Adopting the persona of Count Scarlioni in the city of Paris in 1979, this splinter of Scaroth experimented with time travel. His plan was to create a device that would enable him to travel back in time to a moment just before the Jagaroth ship took off from prehistoric Earth. If he could stop himself from pressing the launch button, he could prevent the subsequent explosion and save his race.
Luckily for life on Earth, the Doctor was able to prevent Scaroth from aborting the take-off – aided by a well-aimed punch from a private detective named Duggan.
Perhaps surprisingly, the first truly intelligent life to evolve on planet Earth was not the human race. It was Homo reptilia – intelligent reptiles. Alongside the dinosaurs, several distinct species of these creatures developed. They have since been referred to as Silurians (a misnomer, as they did not actually develop in the Silurian period) while an aquatic species was given the nickname ‘Sea Devils’.
It was the Homo reptilian astronomers that predicted a catastrophe. They spotted a small, ‘rogue’ planet drifting through the solar system, and calculated from its course that it would collide with the Earth. The results would be devastating, and all life on Earth would probably end. But with time to plan for the anticipated disaster, Homo reptilia devised a way of surviving.
They sent large ‘Ark Ships’ out into space, filled with the flora and fauna of Earth as well as many of their own kind. It was hoped these would endure the catastrophe and be able to return to Earth to repopulate it.
But as space travel was relatively new to Homo reptilia and there was no certainty that any of the Ark Ships would survive or be able to return to Earth, they also built huge hibernation chambers. These were situated deep in the ground, where they could put themselves into a sleep for the duration of the catastrophe. The scientists predicted that the small planet would draw away Earth’s atmosphere, so the hibernation systems were set to awaken the sleeping creatures when the atmosphere returned. And so Homo reptilia put themselves into hibernation, expecting that soon they would awaken and emerge to rebuild their planet.
But the small rogue planet did not collide with Earth. It was captured by the Earth’s gravity, and went into orbit around it, becoming the Moon. As the atmosphere was never drawn away, it never returned – and so the trigger mechanisms that would awaken the sleepers were never activated and Homo reptilia slept on …
HOMO REPTILIA
For how long Homo reptilia was the dominant life form on Earth is unknown. They used the dinosaurs as work animals and regarded the ape-like creatures that would later evolve into humans as little more than pests.
A group of Homo reptilia that was awakened in the twentieth century used a ‘pesticide’ plague which killed the apes who tried to steal the crops of Homo reptilia in an attempt to destroy the human race. But a cure was found before the plague spread out of control, and the Homo reptilian colony was destroyed.
But in their own time, Homo reptilia developed advanced technology and built huge cities as well as farming the land. They also took an interest in the stars and perhaps theorised about life on other planets. Certainly they developed space travel. It was this interest in what lay beyond their own planet that led to Homo reptilia disappearing from Earth.
Millennia later, as the human race became more sophisticated, drilling and exploration occasionally woke some of the reptiles. But most of them continued to sleep, oblivious to what had happened to their planet and how the upstart apes had evolved in the meantime.
The age of the dinosaurs did indeed come to an end. Scientists have speculated that an asteroid or possibly a comet may have struck the planet, throwing debris up into the atmosphere and changing the temperature so that the cold-blooded reptiles could not survive. Whatever happened, up to 75 per cent of the species of life on Earth were destroyed. But mammals in particular diversified in their evolution as a result.
We now know that the Extinction Event, as it is called, was indeed an impact on the planet’s surface. But it was not a natural phenomenon. The devastation was caused by the crashing of a space freighter powered by antimatter which the Cybermen attempted to crash into the planet in the twenty-sixth century. Their intention was to destroy a conference that brought together the heads of many powerful planets in an attempt to form an alliance against the Cybermen.
But something went wrong and, with Cyber technology fitted to its systems, the freighter drifted back through time. When it collided with Earth, 65 million years earlier, the antimatter containment vessel split open, causing the tremendous explosion which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
But that was not quite the end of the dinosaurs. Some survived in the hibernation chambers which Homo reptilia had established. Others were on the Ark Ships the creatures had sent out into space to avoid the impending catastrophe.
The instigators of Operation Golden Age also sought to save the dinosaurs. In the late twentieth century, Charles Grover and his colleagues enlisted the help of Professor Whitaker to try to take the Earth back to what they felt was a purer age, before it was contaminated by the industrialisation and pollution visited upon it by humanity.
The first stage of their plan involved bringing dinosaurs from prehistory into modern London using a primitive timescoop developed by Whitaker. Ultimately, the scheme came to nothing, and Grover together with Whitaker was deposited back in prehistoric times.
With the dinosaurs extinct, the creatures that would eventually become Homo sapiens – the human race – continued to develop and evolve …
EARLY HISTORY
There are key points in the development of any civilisation. Obvious examples include the invention of the wheel, the development of steam power, electricity, atomic and nuclear capabilities and antimatter containment. But one of the very first steps on the path to civilisation is the discovery of fire.
The human race discovered fire in prehistoric times. Because there was no global communications network, the discovery was made in different places at different times. The evolving Homo sapiens was split into small tribes, some of which developed an understanding of fire and uses for it before others. Some tribes discovered how to make fire, and then lost the secret again.
One ancient legend, passed down through many generations, tells of the Tribe of Gum, which lost the secret of fire. But their god Orb – probably the Sun – sent a Firemaker from the heavens who showed them again how to make fire. The legend is understandably vague, and various versions of it exist. Some say that the Firemaker was actually a group of visitors to the tribe, possibly from another tribe. Other versions tell how the Firemaker was initially treated as an enemy until he proved his abilities. According to one particularly lurid account, the Firemaker and his three acolytes transformed themselves into flaming skulls.
Building is another key point in the development of any race. While the early tribes lived in caves or sheltered in forests, as Humankind developed so did its ability to use the materials to hand in order to fashion tools and dwellings. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the spectacular achievements of the ancient Egyptians.
The most obvious and enduring of ancient Egyptian constructions are, of course, the pyramids. For many later generations it remained a mystery how the Egyptians could have built such structures using only the knowledge and equipment available to them at the time. It was assumed that at least part of the answer was in the extensive use of slave labour. But it now seems likely that the ancient Egyptians had help.
There are reports that a group of Daleks was present during the construction of the pyramids. The Egyptians made the mistake of engaging the Daleks in combat – with predictable results. But the Daleks did not linger, following another time ship to retrieve a vital component stolen from a Time Destructor weapon.
But by the time the Daleks arrived, pyramid building was already advanced. It seems likely that one of the splinters of Scaroth, the Jagaroth fractured through time, was present and may have helped build the pyramids. Certainly, in his Count Scarlioni persona he later boasted that this was the case. Bizarre though it may sound, the Egyptian gods may also have helped. As has happened in many cultures across the universe, the gods of ancient Egypt were actually inspired by and based on aliens that visited Egypt – in this case, the Osirans.
Consumed by a lust for power, the Osiran Sutekh destroyed its home planet Phaester Osiris and fled across the galaxy. The surviving Osirans, led by Horus, finally tracked Sutekh to Earth, to ancient Egypt. Here Horus and 740 of his fellow Osirans defeated Sutekh and imprisoned him beneath a hidden pyramid, trapped within a force field. They did consider executing Sutekh for his crimes, but to do so, they reasoned, would mean they were no better than he was. The force field that held Sutekh immobile was controlled by a power source situated within another pyramid on the planet Mars.
The battle between the Osirans entered into ancient Egyptian mythology, and many of the Osirans – including Horus – gave their names to the Egyptian gods. Whether the Osirans helped the Egyptians build the pyramids is not known, but it must certainly be a possibility.
The pyramids would not be the only ancient monuments that were built using more advanced technology than was generally available. It is known, for example, that the ancient monument of Stonehenge in Britain was constructed with the help of an anti-gravitational lift. Similarly, certain ancient temples in Peru were constructed with help from the Exxilons.
There are also theories that alien intervention was responsible for the end of the siege of Troy in the 12th century BC. While this is a period of history in which it is especially difficult to separate fact from myth, it does seem that the Doctor was present at the end of the siege of Troy. A depiction of his distinctive TARDIS time vessel appears in at least one manuscript fragment from the era, apparently having been mistaken for the Temple of Zeus.
There is a plausible theory that the Doctor himself masqueraded as Zeus, and may have provided the Greeks with the idea for the wooden horse. As is well documented, most notably in Homer’s Iliad, the Greeks hid soldiers inside the hollow wooden horse and then pretended to leave. After the Trojans dragged the huge horse into their city, the Greek soldiers emerged to open the gates for their returning comrades.
One of the Trojans who escaped from the burning city was Aeneas, who it is said went on to found the city of Rome and was an ancestor of Romulus and Remus. From 100 BC until about AD 400, Rome was the largest city in the world and established a huge empire that ruled more than twenty per cent of the world’s population. The empire endured for centuries, surviving various setbacks including the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, which caused huge devastation. The fire was blamed on the Christians but quite possibly started deliberately on the orders of Emperor Nero.
It was also during the Roman period that the Pyroviles were discovered on Earth. A life form based on rock and fire, a group of Pyroviles escaped to Earth when their planet Pyrovillia vanished. The Pyroviles arrived close to the Roman city of Pompeii, and slept for thousands of years beneath the huge nearby volcano Mount Vesuvius. When they woke, they planned to create a ‘new Pyrovillia’ on Earth, using the power of a volcanic eruption to weld themselves to humans in order to create a new species.
But something went wrong with the Pyroviles’ plan, and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 destroyed them. As history records, it also destroyed Pompeii and several other nearby Roman settlements.
It was around twenty years later that the Pandorica is said to have been created. Legend has it that the Pandorica was the prison of a warrior or possibly a goblin that fell out of the sky and tore the world apart. Eventually, a good wizard tricked the warrior or goblin and imprisoned it inside the Pandorica. The Pandorica was apparently a large cube, its exterior covered with strange symbols.
Initially, the Pandorica was situated in a chamber beneath Stonehenge. But in AD 118 it was taken back to Rome, where it remained until 420, when it was taken by the Franks. Through history it fell into the possession of other powerful people – the Knights Templar, the Vatican and even Marco Polo. There are no records of what happened to the Pandorica after that until it was put into storage in a London warehouse that was destroyed in the Blitz in 1941. The Pandorica, however, survived. It was found a short distance away from the wreckage, completely undamaged, and some contemporary reports say that it was dragged to safety by a Roman soldier.
In fact, the Pandorica was indeed a prison. It was built by an alliance of many life forms who planned to imprison the Doctor inside it. They believed that his actions would lead to the destruction of the universe itself, and saw his perpetual imprisonment as the only way to prevent this. They did indeed manage to imprison the Doctor. But he escaped, and used the atoms inside the sealed Pandorica to recreate the universe after his exploding TARDIS threatened to destroy all of Reality.
Generally the human race did not tend to attract the attention of other civilisations until later in its development. But there were instances of other life forms coming to Earth for one reason or another. One such race was the Mire, a group of which visited a ninth-century Viking village in order to harvest the village’s strongest warriors.
The Mire were at the time one of the deadliest and most feared of warrior races. They fed on the stamina, strength, adrenalin and testosterone of other warriors, using it to enhance their own fighting abilities. But their attack on the Viking village has been seen by some as the point at which their reputation began to diminish.
The Vikings were a seafaring people who traded with other communities but also raided them. They came from the area known as Scandinavia and were active from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. The leader of the Mire that came to the Viking village played on the inhabitants’ myths and legends, posing as the Viking god Odin. But while the Mire did manage to ‘harvest’ the village’s best warriors, the remaining villagers put up strong resistance when the Mire returned for more.
When a huge, aggressive creature appeared to attack them, the Mire retreated. What they did not know was that the creature was merely a puppet, its appearance enhanced within the Mire’s own visual circuits by the imagination of a Viking girl named Ashildr who was wearing a Mire battle helmet. When video footage of the Mire retreating from the puppet monster emerged, their reputation was irreparably damaged.
How the video footage was recorded and uploaded and how Ashildr was able to tap into the Mire’s systems has never been chronicled. Certainly the technology was far in advance of anything available on Earth at the time. The effort of projecting her imagination into the Mire systems proved too much for Ashildr, who died from the experience. However, she was revived using a Mire medical chip. Again, how this was modified to work with a human metabolism is unclear, but the result was that Ashildr became, in effect, immortal as the chip continued to repair her in perpetuity.
A far less aggressive alien intervention took place in Northern Britain in 1066. A Time Lord, whose name is unknown, posed as a monk in an abandoned monastery. He planned to destroy the fleet of Harald Hardrada who was about to stage an attempted invasion of Britain.
The invasion was doomed to failure, with Hardrada defeated by King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. But although Harold was successful, the battle took its terrible toll on his men. When William of Normandy landed with an army in the south of the country, Harold’s army had to march rapidly to meet the new threat. His soldiers weary and depleted, Harold lost to William and was killed at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066.
The Time Lord posing as a monk felt that Harold would make a better king than William. By destroying Hardrada’s fleet, he planned to save King Harold the effort of having to march north, fight a battle, and then march south again. Instead, King Harold’s army would be fresh when it met William’s at Hastings, and Harold – the Monk hoped – would be triumphant.
But the meddling Monk’s efforts came to nothing. Perhaps he changed his mind about his plan, but for whatever reason Hardrada’s army landed unhindered and the historical events played out as intended, with William the Conqueror defeating Harold at the Battle of Hastings.
While some ambiguity and confusion is to be expected with ancient history, the Medieval period also suffers from a lack of distinction between fact and myth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the legend of Robin Hood. In the late twelfth century, so the story goes, while King Richard I of England was off fighting the Third Crusade in the Holy Land leaving his brother John to rule in his stead, the outlaw Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. This brought him into conflict with the Sheriff of Nottingham.
What Robin Hood did not know, and contemporary chronicles do not record, is that the Sheriff of Nottingham was partly robotic. He seems to have been augmented by a group of robots whose spaceship crash-landed in the area. The robots disguised themselves as the Sheriff’s knights, and their ship as his castle outside Nottingham.
Using his position and authority, the Sheriff set about providing a workforce of local people forced to repair the spaceship. He also gathered as much gold as he could find, since that was essential to repairing the ship’s circuitry. Quite where the ship came from, or where it was headed is unknown. Some accounts suggest that the ship originated in the twenty-ninth century and that its ultimate destination was ‘the Promised Land’, but give no further explanation of where this might be.
But whatever its intended destination, the ship never reached it. Ultimately, the amount of gold provided was insufficient for the ship to survive take-off. It would have exploded above Nottingham, devastating half the country, but Robin managed to shoot a golden arrow into the ship. Robin won the arrow at an archery contest organised by the Sheriff in order to trap him. How he managed to escape, or how he knew to shoot the arrow at the ship has never been satisfactorily explained. But the extra gold content of the arrow was sufficient for the ship to attain orbit. It then exploded, causing no damage to anything other than the ship itself and its occupants, which were completely destroyed.