Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [93]
‘So what did happen to you?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s why I came here. To talk to you about Dust. About the last time we met the Remote. I’m sure there’s something I’m missing.’
‘All right,’ said I.M. Foreman. ‘Then let’s get back to Dust. Where were we?’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘No, wait. There’s still something you’ve got to tell me.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘The goose,’ said the Doctor. ‘How do you set the goose free without breaking the bottle?’
‘Later,’ said I.M. Foreman.
* * *
WHAT HAPPENED ON DUST
(PART TWO)
Different game, different rules, but a lot of the pieces are the same. (Can you imagine that? Knights and pawns and bishops turning up in the middle of a Cluedo board. Still, it’s no stranger than seeing the Third Doctor trying to cope with life on Dust.) This is the Dead Frontier, we’ve already established that. The place where human culture finally rolled over and died, and had its carcass picked apart by the vultures. The dead end at the edge of the galaxy.
The Remote are here on Dust, although they seem to have degenerated a little since we saw them in the twentieth century. We get the impression that the oldest of the Remote is barely human at all, but we haven’t met him face to face yet, so it’s hard to be sure. When we left this story in stasis, the soldiers of the Remote were just about to descend on the town where Magdelana lives, planting their boarding tubes in the middle of I.M. Foreman’s travelling show. Remember?
Oh yes. I.M. Foreman. We still don’t know who he is – and he is a he, at least here on Dust – or why he’s running a show like this one. But it’s probably safe to assume that the Doctor and Sarah are about to find out, seeing that they’ve just taken refuge inside one of the thirteen covered wagons outside the town wall. One of the Remote shot I.M. Foreman in the head a few moments ago, although he doesn’t seem to be suffering any ill effects so far. And let’s not forget: Faction Paradox itself has noticed what’s happening on Dust, so a Faction warship is already on its way from the Eleven-Day Empire.
There are all sorts of questions we could ask ourselves, if we wanted to build up the suspense. How are the Remote connected to the Remote we saw on Earth? Why is I.M. Foreman a different gender from the individual the Eighth Doctor met on Foreman’s World? And who (or what) lives in the thirteenth wagon of the travelling show?
But suspense is cheap. The fact is, things are about to come together, at last.
Let’s start with that Faction warship…
* * *
6
How I Was Made
(prototypes and consequences)
The warship arrived in ‘real time’ about four and a half light years from Dust, in orbit around a planet that had been claimed by the Earth Empire nearly a thousand years earlier, but which had never been fully colonised for economic reasons too dull for history to remember. The human outpost there had soon been infiltrated by agents of the Faction – it was a perfect away base, being as obscure and as far from Gallifrey as it was – but it had been abandoned when Earth had fallen, leaving nothing but the ruins of the marble cloisters and ivory towers that the Faction had carved out for itself there. The crew of the Faction’s warship had been instructed to stop at the planet en route to Dust, to tie up some loose ends while the vessel was in the vicinity.
The Mothers and Fathers of the Eleven-Day Empire felt that the abandoned colony was now something of a liability. The Time Lords were bound to investigate events on Dust, and there was a very real risk of Gallifrey’s agents noticing what the Faction had been up to in the systems nearby, even if those systems had already been evacuated.
Typical of the Faction, the skeleton of the warship was quite literally a skeleton. A great horned skull at the prow, with the central corridor running through the spine, kilometres of electrical wiring threaded through the spaces where the nerve