Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [128]
Typically, it was the Doctor that the virus had found first.
Mother Mathara watched the pathetic spectacle on the monitor wall, as the Doctor’s companion dragged his body through the streets of the Dust town, with her eyes all soggy and her clothes covered in dirt. The Doctor was still in midtransformation, wrapped up in a cocoon of hormones, glowing with the force of his biofield. The girl had no idea what was happening, Mathara told herself. As far as the Doctor’s companion was concerned, this was all an adventure that had gone terribly wrong. Like Cousin Llewis, she hadn’t seen the bigger picture. The plans. The politics. The possibilities.
In the long run, thought Mathara, the Faction’s interference is the only interference that matters.
‘The Doctor wasn’t scheduled to die here,’ she announced, loudly enough for all the crew in the command section to hear her. ‘We’ve got this part of his existence on record. Evidently, we’ve altered his timeline. For the better, naturally.’
Llewis made a little grunting noise. ‘So? We’ve still messed up the job.’
‘Only to an extent. The Doctor’s infected with our virus. Our biodata’s going to take root inside him. We haven’t secured the planet, but the Doctor’s always been a major player in our plans. The Eleven-Day Empire won’t be entirely displeased.’
Llewis took a step towards the monitor wall, to squint at the image of the dying/born-again Time Lord. You couldn’t make out any of the Doctor’s new features, not yet. Away from the influence of the TARDIS, the regeneration was slow and clumsy. ‘So the Doctor’s going to turn into one of us, is that it?’
‘Not yet. It’ll take time for the virus to get all the way into his biodata. Time Lord bodies are designed to hold off this kind of attack. But every time he regenerates, the Paradox biodata will tighten its grip on him a little. Eventually, he’ll come round to our way of seeing things.’
‘“Eventually”?’ Llewis queried.
‘Give him four or five more regenerations. The more contact he has with the Faction, the quicker the process will be. One day, the virus will tip him over the edge and rebuild him according to our principles. There’ll be a few side effects before then, I should think. He’ll probably lose his shadow first. That’s usually the way it happens.’
‘Be a bit obvious,’ Llewis mumbled.
‘We can give him a new shadow. A false one. He shouldn’t notice the difference. Not until it’s too late.’
Llewis blew out his cheeks. ‘He’s not looking good. No chance of him snuffing it, is there?’
‘No. He’ll regenerate into the same form he was scheduled to regenerate into. I expect his companion will get him back to his home base on Earth. History will carry on much as before, apart from this one alteration. The fourth Doctor will be exactly as the records describe him. And the fifth. And the sixth. And probably the seventh. But the eighth…’
She didn’t bother finishing the sentence. It was pure melodrama, she knew, but melodrama had always been the most powerful weapon in the Faction’s arsenal.
Llewis didn’t take his eyes off the figures on the screen. The Doctor’s features were starting to stabilise at last, now he was just a street or two from the comfort of the TARDIS. The girl kept dragging him through the dust, and the townspeople kept staring at him from the shadows.
‘Poor bugger,’ grumbled Llewis. ‘He must have felt like he’d walked into someone else’s adventure.’
‘He had,’ said Mother Mathara. ‘Ours.’
* * *
A week after the blue box left the planet that had been called Dust, Magdelana Bishop stepped out into the town square, where the creepers were reaching into the cracks of the buildings and the townspeople were starting to lose themselves in the wild grass. The plants were stretching up out of the ground, and taking the walls of the town apart piece by piece, sweeping away the old settlements just like they’d swept away the deserts. The locals were starting to leak out through