Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [31]
The Doctor nodded. ‘Oh, no. Gallifrey honours its dead, as you will see. When we reach the Panopticon you will see the Flowers of Remembrance of the Lost Dead. There –’ he pointed across the city to an unassuming geodesic structure
– ‘is the Tomb of the Uncertain Soldier.’
‘You value a lack of decisiveness in your military? This man died because he hesitated?’
‘No, no, no. This was a Gallifreyan body recovered from an alternate reality. We couldn’t identify him because that soldier, and many like him who fought in the Time Wars, didn’t hesitate at the critical moment, they chose to cancel out their own timelines for the greater good of Gallifrey.’
‘An impressive sacrifice. It would please me to hope that my own men would destroy the universe rather than let it fall into enemy hands.’
The Doctor smiled forgivingly, and didn’t correct the old General. ‘Later, I will show you some of the surviving buildings that never existed or ever will, and we’ll tour the Omega Memorial. Our entire civilisation was built from his sacrifice. It is thanks to Omega that we became Time Lords.
Many Gallifreyans still worship him, including the current President, who has written a number of volumes on the subject.’
‘I would like to learn of how your race acquired time travel.’
I bet you would, you old fox, the Doctor thought.
‘No doubt we’ll have that opportunity,’ he said.
The Past
Eldest Sun
They had turned their backs on one hundred billion stars.
The Gallifreyan fleet had left its home galaxy and was deep in intergalactic space. Now the ships slowed down as they approached their destination, dropping out of vworp drive and proceeding at near-light speed towards the target co-ordinates. Omega had no need to look back. The galaxy behind him was a vast spiral, a hundred thousand light years from one side to the other. It was too far away now to make out any but the crudest of features. Within that mass was Gallifrey’s sun, along with every star that could be seen in the night’s sky of his homeworld.
There were two generations of stars. The spiral arms were filled with the youngest suns, which scientists designated Population I. Gallifrey’s sun was a typical example, hot, rich in elements heavier than helium and hydrogen, surrounded by a planetary system. Towards the galactic core were clusters of older, larger, redder stars, those of Population II.
They had formed before the heavy elements, indeed they were the nuclear factories in which the heavy elements had been forged. As Population II stars died they exploded, seeding the galaxy with heavier elements, the process that had brought the Population I stars into being many billions of years ago.
But even the Population II stars contained traces of metals and other complex molecules that could only have been created in the hearts of stars. Long ago, long before even the first galaxy had formed, there must have been another type of star. These Population III stars were supermassive, far brighter and hotter than their modem equivalents. Gallifrey’s sun had been shining for around three billion years, and-even without the assistance of a solar engineer – would do so for twice as long again. The processes within a Population III star were so intense that they would have burned out three or four hundred times faster. The typical Population III star lived for ten million years before going supernova. In the early days of the universe these short-lived, vast stars had been the fuel for the newborn galaxies, filling them with riches. All the Population III stars were long dead, either vanished altogether or become vast black holes.
All but one.
Qqaba was the last in the universe, of that Omega was certain. It had barely survived this long, sustained by a drip feed of interstellar matter from the intergalactic nebula that partially obscured it. Even so, it had been teetering on the brink of death for aeons when Omega had found it. He had