Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [137]
Just for a moment, the dust clouds parted. Magdelana could see all the way across the ring of wagons, past the muddy grey tents that the Remote were just starting to tear down. She could see one of the wagons, with its door hanging open. She could see two figures hurrying into it, the Doctor helping his girlfriend up the step. The blind man was behind them, glancing over his shoulder, and for a moment Magdelana completely forgot that he didn’t have any eyes.
There was a gunshot. She saw the blind man’s head jerk back. The Remote soldier lowered his weapon.
A clean shot, straight to the head. The Doctor and his woman had vanished into the wagon by now, so Magdelana wasn’t sure whether they’d seen it happen. She waited for the blind man to fall, for his body to sink down into the dust.
It didn’t happen. Instead, the man just turned away from the Remote soldier, and followed the Doctor into the wagon. The soldier stood rooted to the spot, staring at his would‐be victim, not sure whether he should try to get off another shot before the target vanished for good.
Magdelana’s hand found the butt of her shotgun, lying on the desert floor nearby. She rolled over once she had the weapon in her grip, and started to crawl forward, heading for the cover of one of the other wagons before the Remote noticed her.
Not that the shotgun was going to do her much good. Everyone around here seemed to be bulletproof.
* * *
Meanwhile, in the Eleven‐Day Empire:
The Eleven‐Day Empire was the heartland of Faction Paradox, and to understand exactly where it was located, a brief history lesson may be necessary. So…
On 14 September, 1752, the country known as England – arguably the most important nation‐state on Earth at that point in time – adopted the Gregorian calendar, the system of measuring time that had been championed by Pope Gregory nearly two centuries earlier. According to the Gregorian calendar, it was actually eleven days later than the people of England liked to think. Thus, in order to bring England in line with the rest of the world, eleven days had to be removed from the nation’s calendars. Quite simply, the population went to sleep as usual on the night of 2 September, and when they woke up the next morning they found it was 14 September.
And the missing eleven days were occupied solely by the elders of Faction Paradox.
Naturally, a cynic would have said that this was pure nonsense. A scientific mind would have pointed out that no time was really ‘lost’ in the change at all, that only people’s perceptions of time changed, not time itself. All of which would have been perfectly true, if It hadn’t been for one thing: the Faction’s agents specialised in temporal impossibilities. What would have been a metaphor to anybody else was solid reality to them. The fact remained that, even if the missing eleven days had only ever existed as a concept, any Time Lord who set the controls of his TARDIS for England in early September 1752 would have found himself lost in the darkness of the Eleven‐Day Empire.
But of course no Time Lord would do anything so irresponsible. Only the Faction would have thought of it. Besides, it’s questionable whether any self‐respecting TARDIS unit would accept those sorts of co‐ordinates in the first place.
The Eleven‐Day Empire was a version of England tailored to the Faction’s own needs, and there were no people there in the usual sense of the word ‘people’. Apart from the Faction’s own representatives, the only living things in the Empire were the ravens that had been let loose from the Tower of London, which were exempt from the usual rules of time for reasons that only the elders of the Faction really understood. London was the capital of the heartland, a cityscape where there were never any lights, and at the core of it all lay the Faction’s central seat of power. The Houses of Parliament themselves.
In ‘real time’, the Parliament buildings wouldn’t even be built until the nineteenth century, but their impact on Earth’s timeline was so