Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [100]
The masks were based on the old Remote shadow masks, and they’d changed very little over the years, apart from the fact that they now covered the whole head instead of just the face. The Faction had programmed the Remote to adapt, but not to innovate. In the yellow-grey light of the sunset, the masks made the Remote troops look like little black pharaohs, with their faces hidden under death masks. The only features you could make out were the tiny points of light from the eyeslits, where the systems inside the eyepieces blinked in time to the soldiers’ biorhythms. The armour the men wore was hard, sharp and bulky, plates of pure shadow that had been frozen in place around their bodies, but the dust clung to it just like it clung to everything else around here.
They were still more or less human, once you stripped the armour away. Not like me, thought the oldest. So old, so frayed at the edges, that the armour was just about the only thing keeping him together. His flesh had started growing into the cracks of the plating, and so many implants had been slotted into his joints that his cells had long since given up trying to reject them. His body accepted anything you put into it these days. Even his receiver, which a thousand years ago had just been a tiny little radio component at his neck, had worked its way down into his body and wrapped its wiring all the way around his spinal column. You could probably suck my whole skeleton out through one of the oxygen valves, he mused, and I’d stay upright anyway. The mask’s sensory systems had been linked to his neurosystem for so long that he had started to think of ‘temporal displacement’ as just another colour.
It didn’t bother him, most of the time. The horror stayed in the darkness down at the bottom of his spine, sleeping through most of his life, but every now and then there’d be a signal from the ship’s media systems that’d wake it up and get it agitated. Then the fake muscles in his armour would go into overdrive, thrashing and punching at anything that got in his way until he’d worked the adrenaline out of his body. There were certain specific signals that could trigger the horror, certain ideas the oldest of the Remote couldn’t tolerate, and most of them involved the Time Lords.
He could sense the Time Lords here now, somewhere on the surface of Dust. The taste of loose tachyons on the air, the scent of sweat laced with Artron energy. The four-dimensional fallout of an impending Gallifreyan death, or possibly just a regeneration, working its way backward in time and finding its way into the senses of the mask. The oldest could already feel his muscles tensing up, and the plastic-lined veins pulsing away in his neck.
He was remembering again. Memories that were almost two thousand years old, that had been moved from one part of his mind to another over and over again, finding a new place in his head whenever some of his brain cells died and were replaced by implants. The memories were flat and full of static, but he could still see himself in the days when he was young and sarcastic and covered in stubble, before his life back on Earth had been taken away from him. He still remembered his first meeting with the Doctor. His first trip on board the TARDIS. His first meeting with Faction Paradox, on the streets of San Francisco in the early twenty-first century.
But more than anything else, he remembered Anathema. The first city that had been called Anathema,