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Storm of the Horofax
(Andrew Smith) |
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 Name: The Horofax
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Confronted The Doctor on Earth in the 1970s, but this group came from the far future and had a history that was apparently spread out across Time.
Appearances: "Storm of the Horofax"
Doctors: Third
Doctor
Companions: Jo Grant
History: While some of their history may be coloured by prejudice on both sides, the history of the Horofax is in some way more tragic than anything. It is a known fact that most of their number are merely brainwashed victims, and even their leaders may have been driven to their current state due to prosecution from their places of origin, even if their response is excessive.
According to The Doctor, the Horofax were originally brought together by their Provosts, who were a collection of time-sensitive individuals from across all of time and space. The Provosts were essentially prophets in their own places of origin, as their sensitivity to Time allowed them to perceive the past and future. Unfortunately, these abilities led to them receiving harsh treatment from their peers, ranging from being dismissed as lunatics to actually being prosecuted in the belief that they caused the disasters they foresaw. Eventually the Provosts came together as their own army to assault the universe that had prosecuted them for so long, apparently reaching out across past and future to come together in some manner.
At their peak, the Horofax Empire was vast, gathering a range of advanced technology to support their campaigns against the universe that had dismissed them. The potential danger they posed was so great that the Time Lords have been known to take action against the Horofax Empire on occasion, even if they would do nothing to stop the Horofax from coming together in the first place. A particularly dangerous tool in the Horofax arsenal was their ability to brainwash their former enemies into serving them, the Provosts using their awareness of time to manipulate their captives' memories to change former enemies into loyal followers (although apparently a few volunteered on their own accord). These followers wore armour to protect them when travelling in time, with the armour also including a pulse weapon on their gauntlets. However, aside from the protection it offered against time travel, this armour wasn't particularly elaborate; one soldier was killed by a shotgun blast from a standard weapon during a visit to the 1970s. A Provost claimed that this brainwashing involved actually manipulating the person's timeline, but when a Provost tried to change Jo Grant's history, the Third Doctor and new ally Adam Rigg still remembered Jo's true self even after she had been 'converted'. Since The Doctor showed no awareness that history 'should' have been altered and Adam had no past experience with time travel to justify any immunity to such changes, this suggests that the Provosts only manipulated their followers' perception of the past rather than changing the past directly.
Despite their powers, the Horofax Empire of the future were defeated when it turned out that humans were relatively immune to their brainwashing technique; human victims of the Horofax would succumb to their influence, but they would also regain their original memories and identity within a relatively short time. As a result, the humans of the Horofax army were able to make contact with each other and gather their strength until there was a sufficient amount of them to strike back against their alleged masters, devastating the Horofax army and leaving them with only a few fragmentary resources. Attempting to stop humanity from rising up against them, Arianda, an Altarian (a humanoid species with blue skin and higher-than-human foreheads), apparently one of the last Provosts of the Horofax, was able to travel back through time to visit various earlier periods of Earth's history, eventually arriving in the 1970s. The destroyer HMS Nemesis accidentally struck Arianda's initial capsule when it appeared in the sea, but the ship was subsequently taken on board the Nemesis and Arianda emerged.
The Third Doctor and Jo were sent to investigate Arianda's situation on behalf of UNIT, where Arianda presented herself as a historian who had come to Earth to study its history. However, The Doctor was soon concerned as Arianda's ship was revealed to be far too elaborate for a simple historical research mission, becoming even more concerned when the captain of the Nemesis heard reports from the rest of the fleet that suggested Arianda had been following other ships for a while. A temporal pulse from the ship's damaged engines subsequently seemingly erased a dozen marines and UNIT Major Paul Hardy from existence when Arianda tried to leave despite The Doctor warning her that the ship was damaged, prompting The Doctor to take Arianda away on a helicopter. As the three departed, the Nemesis vanished, but The Doctor was forced to prioritise dealing with Arianda over finding out what had happened to the Nemesis.
Taking Arianda to a UNIT bunker in the Kent Downs, The Doctor intended to spend a couple of days questioning Arianda to learn her real story, but she showed her true colours when the Horofax ship arrived. Arianda took Jo captive and set up a temporary base in the bunker, but The Doctor was able to escape with the aid of forest ranger Adam Rigg, who had met Jo before the ship arrived. Reading Jo's mind, Arianda was able to not only determine humanity's weapons capabilities at the time, but also remove all of Jo's memories of her family and The Doctor, convincing Jo that she was a loyal follower of the Horofax. Fortunately, The Doctor and Adam were able to kill one of the Horofax soldiers and dress Adam in his armour, allowing The Doctor to enter the bunker and rescue the brainwashed Jo, taking her to a nearby cabin so that he could de-program her. The effort proved successful, with Jo revealing that she had managed to read Arianda's mind while she was being brainwashed and learn that the Horofax had come back because humanity had destroyed their empire in the future.
Jo suggested that she return to the Horofax ship as a mole to get a better idea of what they were planning, but just as Jo returned to the ship and UNIT reinforcements arrived, the Horofax activated a time-freeze, immobilising basically all life on Earth apart from the Horofax crew, The Doctor, and Adam, although Adam's immunity was only a brief effect caused by him still wearing the stolen Horofax armour as the suit wasn't sealed properly. Stuck for options, The Doctor transmitted a message to UNIT as he took the helicopter to try and find help, hoping that the message would be recorded despite the time-freeze and thus serve as proof of the Horofax's plan if he couldn't stop their planned attack. At the same time, he realised that the Horofax's signal for reinforcements to the future had also drawn in the Nemesis from the recent past, as Arianda's time capsule had responded to the signal on automatic and dragged the ship along with it, explaining the ship's disappearance and giving The Doctor a potential ally.
With the Nemesis not frozen in time as the freeze had been triggered before it arrived in the 'present', once The Doctor reached the ship and explained the situation (although puzzled at the reappearance of Major Hardy), the captain was able to track the Horofax ship to London as it was the only thing presently moving through the sky. As the Nemesis approached, Arianda revealed that her plan was to detonate a super-powerful bomb in the heart of London, escalating the Cold War into an open conflict, also mockingly revealing that she had realised that Jo had broken her conditioning and leaving her beside the bomb to die. Fortunately, the Nemesis arrived in time to take the Horofax forces by surprise, holding off the soldiers while The Doctor disabled the bomb. After the Nemesis destroyed the Horofax ship's spatial engines, Arianda tried to take off on the temporal engines, but the ship exploded due to the accumulated damage. The previously erased marines and Major Hardy were revealed to have been casualties of the battle in frozen time, The Doctor regretfully explaining to Jo that their deaths outside of Time would have erased them from history completely, Jo forgetting her own memories of Major Paul Hardy even as The Doctor contemplated to himself that he would remember UNIT's lost officer. |
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