Doctor Who: Engines of War (13 page)

The Cardinal with the beard gave an exasperated shrug. ‘We should send out a flotilla to deal with it, then.’

The Doctor slammed his fists upon the table, leaning forward to tower over the man. He stuck out his chin, pushing his face close to that of the other man. ‘We’ve tried that already, Grayvas,’ he said. ‘We’ve left it too late. There are too many of them and we’re spread thinly enough as it is. I watched as Preda’s entire fleet burned up, the Battle TARDISes blooming under the fire of a hundred or more Dalek stealth ships. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. They’ve been incumbent on a dozen planets for years now, shaping their plans, building their fleets.’

‘We’ve seen this before,’ said the Castellan, his tone dismissive. ‘The Daleks are building armies everywhere we look. It’s just the same. They seed their infernal progenitors throughout history and harvest biological matter from the local populace to create new mutants. This is nothing new, Doctor. The War grinds on.’

‘Oh, but it is,
Castellan
.’ The Doctor used the honorific like a curse. ‘They are mining the temporal radiation that seeps from the Tantalus Eye, using it to create dematerialisation guns such as this.’ He pointed to the weapon on the table. ‘This is taken from one of their new paradigms. I’ve seen what it does, watched as it rewrote time and totally eradicated four human beings from history.’

Rassilon leaned forward, peering at the weapon. The Castellan reached out his gloved hand as if to touch it, and then withdrew, changing his mind. His expression was gaunt.

‘That’s right,’ said the Doctor. ‘You remember what a demat gun can do to a Time Lord. No chance of regeneration – just simple oblivion. We locked ours away, burying them in a vault because of the horrors they were capable of inflicting upon others.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Now the Daleks have them, and they’re putting their new paradigms into production as we speak.’

Grayvas cleared his throat. ‘This Temporal Weapon Dalek, Doctor – you’ve seen it more than once?’ he said.

The Doctor nodded. ‘It’s viable. I destroyed one of their hatcheries on Moldox, but there’ll be hundreds more, thousands even. The Tantalus Spiral has become a breeding ground. If we don’t stop them soon they’ll begin seeding them through time, to all of the different epochs in which we’re fighting, and others in which we are not. The genie will be out of the bottle, and we’ll never be able to put it back in.’

Rassilon sat back, looking thoughtful. He rapped his gauntleted fingers upon the table,
rat-ta-tat-tat, rat-ta-tat-tat
. ‘Tell them the rest of it, Doctor. Tell them of the real threat.’

‘This is only the beginning,’ said the Doctor. ‘I gained access to their computer systems while I was onboard one of their saucers. They’re building a planet killer. They’re using the same technology to turn the Tantalus Eye into a massive energy weapon. A temporal weapon.’ He paused for breath. ‘They’re planning to erase Gallifrey from history, from every single permutation of reality. The Time Lords will cease to exist, history will be rewritten as if they
never
existed, and the universe will fall to the Daleks.’ The Doctor stood back from the table, glowering at Rassilon. ‘We have to act
now
.’

Rassilon frowned. ‘If you’re wrong, Doctor, and we show our hand, we might leave ourselves utterly exposed to the Daleks. As you so ably put it, our forces are already spread too thin. If we commit to an offensive in the Tantalus Spiral we risk allowing the Daleks an opportunity to establish a beachhead elsewhere.’

‘I’m not wrong,’ said the Doctor. His tone was forceful. ‘Here’s the evidence, right before your eyes.’ He gave the Dalek cannon a shove, so that it slid across the table toward Rassilon. ‘Have the technicians examine it if you doubt me.’

Rassilon smirked. ‘Then what is to be done? Tell us, Doctor. What do you suggest?’

The Doctor sighed, his shoulders slumping. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They appear to have a command station at the heart of the Spiral, just above the Eye. I’d guess that would also be the location of the weapon. The problem is getting to it. There’s an armada of saucers stationed there, let alone countless stealth ships, hiding in the void. It would take everything we’ve got.’

‘Impossible,’ said the female Time Lord. ‘We simply don’t have the resources.’

‘There is a way,’ said the Castellan, his tone grave. ‘There’s a weapon in the Omega Arsenal.’

The other cardinal, who until this point had remained silent, turned to the Castellan. ‘You can’t seriously be referring to the Moment? Surely it’s not yet come to that?’

‘No,’ said the Castellan, firmly. ‘Not that. The Tear of Isha.’

The Doctor frowned. ‘But the Tear’s designed to collapse black holes,’ he said. ‘It’s a tool for stellar engineering. How would you… Oh.’ He stopped, his mind catching up with his mouth. ‘Yes, I see…’

‘I see you understand, Doctor,’ said the Castellan. ‘If we were to deploy the Tear into the heart of the anomaly, we could close the Eye. It would allow us to re-engineer the fold in space-time and neutralise the source of the Daleks’ temporal power for ever.’

‘You can’t do it,’ said the Doctor. ‘Billions of lives would be forfeit. There’re a dozen inhabited worlds in the Spiral, colonies that have been established there for centuries. The Tear would cause the Eye to implode, and the ensuing storm would ravage the planets, ageing them to dust. I can’t allow it.’

‘
You
can’t
allow
it?’ said Rassilon. ‘Really, Doctor, I think you have an inflated sense of your importance. Who are you to say what we can and cannot do?’

‘Rassilon, you’d be condoning genocide on a massive scale,’ countered the Doctor. ‘The stakes are far too high. There must be another way.’

‘Then tell us, Doctor. Enlighten us. What other way do you see?’ Rassilon rose to his feet, closing his gauntleted fist. ‘You come to us with word of impending doom, and yet you expect us to sit back and refuse to act because of your petty fondness for a handful of human beings?’

Cinder couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘A handful?’ she said, strutting forward. She’d had enough of listening to all this casual talk of genocide. ‘That’s my home you’re talking about.
Billions
of lives. There are more people on those worlds than the sum total on Gallifrey. They are not pawns in your game, to be sacrificed at will.’

Rassilon glared at the Doctor. ‘Kindly silence your assistant, Doctor. She has no voice in this room.’

Cinder felt Karlax’s grip on her shoulder once again, and this time he squeezed until it was painful.

The Doctor glanced at her, and she could see the frustration in the set of his jaw. Clearly he wanted to grab Rassilon by the shoulders and shake him until he listened.

‘Please, Lord President,’ he said, with an effort that must have been clear to everyone in the room. He was holding back a tirade. ‘If you give it time, give it proper consideration, there will be other ways. We just cannot see them yet.’

Rassilon waved his arm at the assembled Time Lords. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘All of you. This session is at an end. I will make my decision and you shall be informed.’ He looked up, fixing the Doctor with a menacing stare. ‘Doctor, you may wait in the observation lounge. I will speak with you shortly.’

‘Very well,’ said the Doctor. The other councillors stood and filed out of the room, each of them refusing to meet Cinder’s gaze. Whether this was down to their sheer arrogance, or their inability to face a human being after their complicity in what would amount to the genocide of her people, she did not know. Neither did she particularly care. She wanted them to squirm.

Karlax left her side to go and speak with the President, and she rushed over to the Doctor, who was leaning heavily on the table, his brow creased. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come and show me this observation lounge.’

The Doctor looked round and she smiled at him hopefully. She knew she needed to get him out of the room. There was still time. He would find a way. The look on his face now, however, suggested that if she left him here with Rassilon and Karlax, things were not going to end well. Besides, she didn’t think she could bear to look at them any longer, either.

The Doctor straightened up, collecting the Dalek cannon from the table. ‘This way,’ he said, storming abruptly from the room.

Chapter Eleven

From the observation panel in the antechamber they had a view right across the Capitol. Cinder stood before it, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Doctor, both of them lapsing into awed silence. She couldn’t help but marvel at the sea of bristling spires, the orb-like crystal domes, the oddly angular complexes of buildings and transport platforms. This was the urban sprawl of an ancient, god-like race; this was the pinnacle of Time Lord civilisation. It was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure, a far cry from the blighted wilderness of Moldox.

‘I haven’t looked out upon Gallifrey like this for too long,’ said the Doctor, after a while. ‘It reminds me what I love about the place, and what I hate about it, too.’

‘It reminds you what you’re fighting for?’ said Cinder.

The Doctor laughed. ‘Yes, I rather suppose it does.’

With the Time Lords, Cinder shared a common enemy in the Daleks, and peering out across the expanse of this, their premier city, she felt a sort of bitter empathy with them. This was what they were trying to protect: their home. It was only natural that, backed into a corner, they would lash out and do anything in their power to defend it.

Many of her people claimed the Time Lords were nothing but self-deluding fools, an ancient people who had taken it upon themselves to attempt to police the universe, to meddle in the evolution and development of other races. They argued that the Time Lords’ power had gone to their heads and corrupted them, and that they had started the war with the Daleks in the first instance, all those many centuries ago. Perhaps worse was the thought that it was their interference, or even the sheer fact of their very
existence
, that had driven the Daleks to evolve into the heartless killing machines they were today.

Cinder didn’t know if any of this was true. It didn’t alter the fact, however, that when faced with the same problem as the Time Lords – a marauding army of Daleks threatening to obliterate her people from history – she had behaved in exactly the same way. She had fought with every ounce of her being, deploying every available weapon in her arsenal. That, she could understand.

Nevertheless, she couldn’t forget the things she had seen during this long and dreadful conflict: the sheer arrogance of the Time Lords, their disregard for human life, and the horrifying inventiveness of their weapons. Empathy was one thing; trust was quite another.

Nor could she simply ignore the fact that, if the Time Lords had their way, her people might still face extinction, only this time at the hands on an entirely different enemy.

It was approaching dusk and, as Cinder watched, tiny lights began to wink in the sky around the habitation domes. At first there were only a handful, but as she watched they seemed to multiply, until there were scores of them, hundreds even, drifting slowly into the sky from the city below. They looked like fireflies, buzzing about chaotically on the breeze.

‘What are they?’ said Cinder. ‘Paper lanterns?’

The Doctor shook his head. ‘No, although the principle is the same. Those are memory lanterns.’

‘Memory lanterns?’ echoed Cinder.

The Doctor glanced at her. ‘They all think they’re going to die,’ he said. ‘All of those people down there think the Daleks are coming for them, and that they’re going to be exterminated.’ He sighed, and the weariness in his expression spoke volumes. Perhaps he thought they were right. ‘So they’re recording all of their thoughts and memories into those lanterns, and scattering them through time and space. It’s the last act of a desperate people. They’re terrified that they’re going to be forgotten, so they’re seeding themselves into all the distant corners of the universe to be remembered.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Cinder, softly. She stepped closer to the observation screen, watching as more of the tiny pinpricks of light drifted up into the sky, before winking out of existence, transmitted somewhere deep into the Vortex. She wondered where they’d all emerge, into the distant, long-forgotten past, or perhaps the battle-scarred future, long after the end of the War.

‘It’s vain,’ replied the Doctor, ‘and unseemly. A waste of time. Most of those lanterns won’t survive the journey through the Vortex. They’ll break up on the time winds, and all of those cherished memories will be dashed to the breeze.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Cinder. ‘To those people, the lanterns represent
hope
. Hope that some small part of who they are might survive all of this. Don’t take that from them.’ She suddenly felt cold, and folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself.

The Doctor smiled, for the most fleeting of moments. ‘You’re marvellously human, Cinder,’ he said, quietly. Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, before he looked away and the tired, haggard expression returned.

‘What do we do now?’ said Cinder.

The Doctor shrugged. ‘We await their answer,’ he said.

Half an hour passed, maybe more. Cinder paced the room impatiently, while the Doctor remained standing at the window, looking out upon the city that had once been his home.

She wondered how long he had been running. Rassilon had called him ‘Gallifrey’s wayward son’. That suggested a deeper, more interesting history than she had so far managed to glean. What had he done to earn a reputation such as that? It was clear he was non-conformist, of course – the simple matter of his appearance, the tarnished leather jacket, the red and white scarf, not to mention the strange external aspect of his TARDIS – all of these marked him out as different from the other Time Lords. Yet Cinder got the sense there was more to it than that.

She supposed it might simply be down to his antagonistic approach to authority and his blatant disregard for the Time Lords’ obsession with ceremony and ritual. He certainly hadn’t done himself any favours in the way he’d spoken to Rassilon. Although, seeing how Karlax fawned over the Lord President, it was probably a healthy attitude to adopt. Someone had to speak up. Cinder herself, of course, probably hadn’t helped matters with her outburst. Still, at least she’d been able to make her point.