Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [70]
‘Relative 101 by 4E,’ gargled the newscaster.
The telephone rang. Llewis screamed again. This time, he wasn’t quite quick enough to stop himself putting his fist through the TV screen.
* * *
‘So.
‘Faction Paradox is a Time Lord voodoo cult, and it’s just like any other voodoo cult in the universe. It all came together in the middle of a big cultural crisis, just like on Earth. The leaders of the cult got rooted out and hunted down, just like on Earth. And, just like on Earth, the cult started using symbols it knew damn well were going to upset the powers that be. The Time Lords were hung up on immortality, so the Faction started dressing itself up in skulls and dried blood. The Time Lords thought time was sacred, so the Faction did everything it could to mess up the continuum. Setting up paradoxes, punching holes in causality without giving a toss about the consequences. They played with the time‐travel equations the way they wanted to play with them. Are you with me so far?
‘Yeah, I know. You must be thinking there’s no end to all these ancient‐and‐terrible‐secrets‐of‐the‐Time‐Lords, am I right? But it’s all window dressing. The Faction’s a political group, that’s all. It messes around with the timelines for its own reasons. Political terrorism, the cultists call it. This is what you’ve got to remember. We’re not talking about some mythical terror from the dawn of time here. They’re terrorists, and they’re fanatics, but they’re not monsters.
‘Never mind that now, though. I’m getting off the point.
‘A couple of thousand years ago – in my timeline, anyway – Faction Paradox had a planet all to itself. The Faction had been around for a while, so it had started to get corrupt, the way these groups usually do. It’d got itself involved in some pretty sordid criminal operations around the universe: arms deals, slave deals, that kind of thing. The Faction’s people must have thought they were safe. They must have thought the Time Lords were too scared of their blood rites to go after them.
‘Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The High Council didn’t think much of the way Faction Paradox was peddling time technology to the other species, so it decided to take… what’s that phrase? “Extreme measures”. By wiping out most of the planet.
‘The Faction was almost killed off. The survivors got off the home world just in time, and started setting up new colonies all over space‐time, making sure they didn’t draw too much attention to themselves this time. They still gave illegal time tech to the natives, but they were more careful about the way they did it. They set up cults, secret societies, that kind of thing. Told their recruits all the nastiest secrets of the Time Lords. Ever heard of the Order of the Rectangle? The Cult of the Black Sun? The Luminus? They were all down to Faction Paradox. I mean, being the Faction, there was always a kind of mystical feel to what they did. They didn’t do anything as simple as handing over the blueprints for a TARDIS, God no. They dressed up the procedures a bit, slapped a few rituals on top. They let their followers build time engines that ran on pain, or on blood, or on fear, or…
‘Oh yeah. I forgot. You’ve seen their “technology” first‐hand, haven’t you? All right, I’ll move on.
‘Now, one of the planets the Faction found was an Earth colony on the edge of human space. Sometime in the twenty‐sixth century, I think. The colony was a long way out from Earth central, so it’d degenerated a bit since it had been set up. The people there had an information‐dependent culture, based around some seriously primitive hardware.
‘They watched TV a lot, basically. Well, not just TV. The planet was wired into one big medianet, and the colony’s political system had already been pretty much absorbed by it. And of course where there are mass media, there are celebrities. If there was