Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [127]
The gift of the Faction was in the blood, as Mother Mathara knew full well: the first thing the Faction did when you joined the family was rewire your body. In theory, the virus would turn anyone it infected into an agent of Paradox. In theory. However, the engineers had managed to give the virus only a tiny life span, and the infection was nowhere near powerful enough to break through the defences of a Time Lord’s immune system. Otherwise, the Faction could have just let the virus loose on the High Council of Gallifrey and sat back to watch. As things stood, the virus could worm its way into a Gallifreyan’s biodata only under certain extreme circumstances, if the victim’s body was in a state of great vulnerability.
During a regeneration, for example.
The Faction had first come across I.M. Foreman’s travelling show centuries earlier, when the show had stopped off on New Mars and some of the family’s agents among the Ice Lords had realised that time technology had to be involved somewhere. It hadn’t taken the rulers of the Eleven-Day Empire long to work out exactly what I.M. Foreman was, or where he’d come from. They’d analysed his biodata, as well as they could without revealing themselves to him, and they’d been perceptive enough to see the slow mutation he was going through. They’d worked out I.M. Foreman’s destiny long before I.M. Foreman himself had. It hadn’t been hard, figuring out that one day a single body wouldn’t be enough for him. The Faction hadn’t been able to guess the exact circumstances, but they’d known that one day he’d evolve into an entire ecosystem. He wouldn’t have settled for anything less.
The Faction had abandoned the Remote a long time ago, in the early years of the Time Lord war, when it had become clear to the Mothers and Fathers that the Remote were far too conspicuous to use as agents in the modern universe. But the Faction’s programs remained on board the Remote ships they’d sent out into space, recording everything, sending any important data back to the Eleven-Day Empire. The programs had been instructed to keep watch for I.M. Foreman, to let the Mothers and Fathers know if the Remote ever stumbled across the place where the travelling show was bound to meet its final fate. Where Number Thirteen would eventually become Foreman’s World.
That was why the virus had been unleashed on Dust. The way the Eleven-Day Empire saw it, if the virus could integrate with I.M. Foreman just as his thirteenth self joined with the biosphere of the planet…
Well, then the whole world would be infected. It’d be a planet of Paradox. A complete ecosystem, with the principles and biodata codes of the Faction wired into the very heart of its biosphere. Faction Paradox had tried to set up homeworlds for itself before, but so far every one of them had been destroyed, either by the High Council or by the other groups that liked to involve themselves in Time Lord politics. These days, the Eleven-Day Empire was the only hiding place the Mothers and Fathers had left. But a planet that was Paradox itself? That could grow and learn and protect itself, the way any life form would? That was too good an opportunity to miss.
That had been the plan, anyway. It had started to go wrong, though, as soon as the virus capsule had been sent down to the surface of Dust. Like all of the Faction’s greatest creations, the virus was semi-intelligent, programmed to seek out Gallifreyan matter and detonate inside the body of its victim. What the Faction hadn’t realised, at least not until