Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [42]
Fitz was with the president of the Time Lords, an – apparently – young woman named Romana, who had herself travelled with the Doctor before returning alone to their home planet. They had been joined by Mali, a member of the Time Lord military. Romana was petite, with black hair and a snub nose. Mali was tall and solid, with close-cropped hair. Fitz wouldn’t say no to either or both of them. The two ladies, however, were more concerned with the alien hordes swarming across the capital city of their home planet.
Fitz himself had just been distracted by a hallucination, a vision of the walls running with blood, hundreds of screaming corpses trapped behind them.
90
This had dampened his ardour.
‘The Matrix has restabilised. The Faction influence has been woven into its databanks,’ Romana said quietly as Fitz’s vision faded.
The Matrix was the Time Lord’s central computer; it contained every scrap of their knowledge and all the secrets of their power. Fitz thought someone had said something about how the memory of every Time Lord was loaded into its databanks when they died, but he might have been confusing this with something else. There were often a lot of things to keep track of on an alien planet.
‘You were right, you stupid, ignorant primitive,’ Romana was crying, ‘you were right.’
‘I was?’ Fitz had guessed what the invaders were planning a little while ago, and no one had believed him. The satisfaction of knowing he’d worked out something that an entire race of immortal supergeniuses, every one of them more brilliant than the Doctor, had missed was tempered by the fact that Faction Paradox now had complete control of the entire universe of space and time.
‘There are nine Gallifreys!’ Fitz reminded Romana and Mali.
It was true. The Time Lords had copied their own homeworld and secreted the copies around time and space as back-up against just such an attack as this.
‘No,’ said Mali. ‘There isn’t even one.’
The Faction had found all the back-ups, then written them out of existence.
Without anyone to stop them, their version of history was being imposed on the universe. Fitz could feel time itself being corrupted, but couldn’t describe the feeling.
Something shadowy and unknowable was grabbing at him. At first, he thought it was just the sense that everything had gone wrong. Then he realised he was being removed from the action. The skulltroopers were closing in on Romana and Mali, guns raised. The two Time Ladies were trying to make a break for it, but the world was melting around them.
As the world faded away around Fitz he heard Romana sobbing. ‘We can’t have lost. Everything I ever did was to stop this from happening. I can’t have failed. I can’t let this happen to my people!’
Then he heard two shots.
High above the Capitol was the Edifice. Inside the Edifice was a control chamber, and inside the control chamber was the Doctor. He was face to face with the leader of Faction Paradox.
The Doctor hadn’t been able to sleep the night he’d first heard his name.
91
He’d been a very small child. He couldn’t remember how old he was, but he remembered his mother’s long red hair and her cut-glass voice. She was sitting at the side of his bed, reading from a storybook.
It was a tale about an adventurous youth who had gone back into his own past, to before his mummy and daddy were born. He knew, as everyone knew, that this was strictly forbidden. Travelling into the past was allowed, but not into your own past. That part of your story had already been written, and there was no room for any