Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [3]
Now, though, as he stood on the edge of the very highest terrace, he could hear the loudspeakers telling people to stay in their homes. Worse, he could hear that those proclamations were being drowned out by cheering crowds.
Laughter and insolence. Music was being played. Mondova hated music, and had banned it as his first act as monocrat, over two hundred years before.
Slogans were being chanted. He could hear what sounded very like a vast statue being toppled. On this planet, there were only statues of one person.
Was it the one in Victory Square, Mondova wondered, where he was holding a spear aloft in one hand, a peasant’s head in the other? That was his very favourite.
‘Crallan!’ he yelled. ‘Crallan, what in the name of the Seven Systems is happening?’
His chancellor ran into the room, already cowering, almost tripping over his dark grey robes.
‘My Lord Mondova.’
‘Where are my bodyguards?’
‘They’ve fled, my lord.’
‘Scum! I knew they would be unreliable. That’s why I had my Kyborgs built.
Deploy them in the streets. Wipe out this resistance.’
‘The Kyborg legion changed allegiance to the rebels, my lord. That’s why the bodyguards fled.’
Mondova hesitated.
‘Then I have no choice. Call in the space fleet. Order them to atomise the city.’
‘The space fleet has gone, my lord.’
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‘Gone? Gone where?’
Crallan shrugged. ‘We haven’t managed to figure that one out yet.’
‘It is the most powerful space navy in the galaxy. It has snuffed out stars, Crallan. Civilisations spanning whole sectors of space have surrendered at the mere thought I would launch my fleet against them. It has campaigned, unbeaten, for over two centuries.’
‘No longer, sir. It’s. . . gone.’
The cybernetic regulators of Mondova’s stomach skipped a track.
He
lurched at Crallan, grabbed him with one armoured hand, lifted him into the air.
‘We have to regroup. Gather those still loyal to me, bring them here to the sanctum! I’m not defeated, you hear me?’
He dropped Crallan, who picked himself up and dusted himself off. ‘Of course, my lord.’
‘Find my daughter,’ the monocrat growled, concerned with little else now.
‘I’m here, Father.’
She was so beautiful. The slits, folds and colours of her exquisitely tailored outfit contrived to make her long legs longer, the curve of her back more graceful, the blue of her skin more delicate, the white of her hair more vivacious.
Her eyes burned with gold fire, just as her mother’s had done.
‘I have been persuaded of the error of my ways, Father. For twenty decades you have bullied your subjects, killed them on a whim, sent them across the universe to die in your name.’
It was impossible to see Mondova’s face behind the burnished-steel mask, so he didn’t seem to react as Crallan pushed his way past his daughter to flee the room.
The monocrat’s voice sounded calm, when it came. ‘Persuaded by whom, may I ask?’
She smiled. ‘He only arrived here this morning, but. . . he opened my eyes, Father. He showed me what was really going on in the city. He’s given the people down there hope.’
Mondova watched her carefully. There was defiance in those opened eyes.
A joyfulness he’d never seen before.
He had lost her.
He toyed with the idea of reaching over and snapping her neck. ‘Who?’ he asked instead.
‘The Doctor,’ she said simply.
‘Doctor?’ Mondova roared. ‘Doctor who?’
A man stepped into the room. He was not an old man, but neither was he really a young man. His long face was oval, with an aristocratic nose and a full mouth. He had a high forehead, framed with long, dark-brown hair. His 10
skin was milky-pale. He wore a long, dark velvet coat that flapped behind him.
‘I think that’s my cue,’ he said, a little shamefaced. ‘There