Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [106]
The warship could have eradicated the entire town in a second, if it had wanted to. But that wasn’t the crew’s mission here. So instead of opening its mouth and breathing light over the world, the ship simply jettisoned a single metal capsule from its underbelly, and tracked the object as it ripped its way through the upper atmosphere.
In the command section, the crew members settled back in their seats to watch what happened next.
* * *
8
Army of Me
(the Magnificent Thirteen, or the Dirty Baker’s Dozen)
Unbelievably, things were getting worse.
The Doctor strode back towards I.M. Foreman’s wagon, feeling the eyes and gun sights of the Remote troops digging little holes in his back. Their leader, who for some reason insisted on being called ‘Father’, had given him a message to pass on to I.M. Foreman himself. An ultimatum. The Doctor had pleaded with the man to call off this ridiculous siege, but the Father hadn’t listened.
Well, of course he hadn’t. The Doctor remembered the vision of his future self he’d seen on board the TARDIS, just before the ship had started bleeding. Yes, that was where things had started to go wrong. Where the timelines had begun to cross. Since then, he’d been forced to suffer not only the usual threats and rhetoric from his opponents, but a kind of brutality he simply wasn’t used to. He felt as if he’d been dropped in the middle of this situation several regenerations before he was ready to deal with it. As if this old dog of a body was far too worn out to learn any new tricks.
He felt as tired as everything else on Dust.
When the Father had ignored his pleas for sanity, the Doctor had tried explaining how dangerous the travelling show could be, and how it had attracted so many things to Dust. Like the Remote themselves, or like the aliens Magdelana had told him about, the two big grey humanoids who’d been crucified out in the desert. The Father had found that funny, though.
‘Ogron Lords,’ he’d explained. ‘Nothing we couldn’t cope with.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ the Doctor had said.
‘Ogron Lords. Can’t you work it out for yourself? Ogrons who’ve had time-travel codes wired into their bodies.’
The Doctor couldn’t possibly imagine why anybody would want to do such a thing, and he’d said so.
‘Ogrons are like a blank slate,’ the Father had said, wearily. ‘That’s what makes them the last word in security hardware. That’s why everyone uses them. You can customise them any way you like. The Remote used to give them media receivers, but we’ve moved on since then. A lot of the Time Lord factions have been fitting Ogrons with time-travel biodata. “Ogron Lords”. The name’s supposed to be a joke.’
‘Ogrons,’ the Doctor had repeated, speaking slowly just in case the words exploded in his mouth. ‘Working for Time Lords.’
‘Far as we can tell. We still don’t know who sent the ones we killed. Probably the High Council. We think they just got drawn here by accident. We would’ve taken their ship, if it hadn’t had a recall system built into it. We didn’t feel like ending up on Gallifrey.’
And that was the thing that had shaken the Doctor most of all. The idea of the High Council, or any other Time Lord body, using… no, it couldn’t be true… using Ogrons as slaves. A ludicrous, insane strategy. But, unless the Father had been lying just to upset him, then the Doctor had obviously wandered into a part of the universe he’d never even dreamed of before, where the Time Lords were as militant and political as any other power bloc in this galaxy. A corner of reality where the great and the good of Gallifrey were ready to inject their secrets into…
Well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
Sarah jumped when he climbed back into the wagon, although I.M. Foreman seemed as calm as ever. The man hadn’t left the armchair, but now he was sitting in the cross-legged pose that humans often used when meditating, and that Gallifreyans used when entering telepathic rapport with their nearest