Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [41]
87
Interlude
The Last of Gallifrey
The invaders were from beyond the future.
The Doctor and Fitz had known for some time that a war was coming. For months, as they’d gone about their travels, they had stumbled across hints and echoes of a battle fought in the future between the Time Lords and an unknown enemy. The Time Lords were losing. This was a war fought in five dimensions, across the whole of time and space. The Doctor was forbidden to see his own destiny, but the future had sought him out. He had learnt he would die, he had learnt that Gallifrey and everything it now stood for would be destroyed.
Those that attacked Gallifrey today had travelled back from a time towards the end of the war. They were not the enemy, but they were members of one of the factions opposed to the elite that ran Time Lord society. In the Doctor’s time Faction Paradox was a nuisance, a secret society of renegades obsessed with symbols and ritual, with breaking the rules.
In the future, they had become an army, and one that was used to fighting Time Lords. And because they were from the future, they already knew how they’d won this battle. Today, they’d already dissected every planetary defence system. Their war fleet circled Gallifrey. Above the dome of the Capitol, the seat of Time Lord power, hovered the Edifice, a structure the size of the dome itself that looked for all the world like a rare orchid. Now, Faction Paradox troops had launched a massive ground assault.
The front-line Faction infantry wore costumes made from the bones of impossible creatures. Thick ribs protected their chests, plates of bone covered their shins and forearms. They wore masks that looked like the skulls of enormous bats. No two sets of armour were identical, although most had fierce spikes and stegosaur plates. The gaps between the bones were filled with a viscous, oily-black substance. What they wore resembled costumes worn for a voodoo ceremony as much as suits of armour.
These skulltroopers advanced quickly through the Capitol, each squad covering its comrades, always pressing forward. There was something inhu-man about the precision of each move. Where they encountered defences, they took them apart efficiently. They carried bulky guns that fired beams 89
of shadow that never seemed to miss. It was impossible to surprise them, and they always managed to dodge hostile fire. Behind them were the officers in their flowing black robes and more streamlined skull-masks. They were searching the Capitol, catching the strategic areas of the Time Lord’s fortress as they fell. Meanwhile, the Faction’s leather-clad assassins, the Uncles, hunted down unarmed old men and stabbed them through both hearts.
More than one race had tried to use brute force to conquer Gallifrey, assembling vast armadas that had been hopelessly dashed against its defences.
This attack was almost small scale by comparison, yet when the Time Lord tacticians ran what was happening through the Matrix simulators it was succeeding as well as the Faction’s best-case scenario. The Faction were making no mistakes, yet perfectly exploiting their opponents’ hesitations and weaknesses. The rumour among the city Watchmen was that data about the fight was being relayed to the invaders from the future. If one of the skulltroopers was about to miss, he was told how to adjust his aim. The officers were told where they would find what they were looking for, saving them the search.
Entry codes and passwords were learnt and transmitted to the past, allowing unhindered access to the Capitol. History was being retouched and redrafted.
Forewarned was forearmed.
The Gallifreyans guarding the Capitol had a few tricks of their own. They each had centuries’ worth of familiarity with the battlefield, and knew all the ancient passages and secret paths. This place had once been a fortress, and now it was a fortress again. The defenders were well drilled, with near-telepathic communications. If the guards managed to cut off a group of attackers, then hit them so hard and fast