Doctor Who - The 8th Doctor - 25 - Interference Book One by Lawrence Miles

Author:Lawrence Miles
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Space Opera, General, Science Fiction, Adventure, Doctor Who (Fictitious Character), Fiction, Occult & Supernatural, Time Travel
ISBN: 9780563555803
Publisher: BBC Worldwide Americas
Published: 1997-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

[Fade out.]

199

Travels with Fitz (VI)

Augustine City, 2596

The sky was in pieces. It was like a patchwork, like someone had torn fragments out of all kinds of skies – dark ones, stormy ones, angry ones, boiling ones – and sewn them together, letting them ripple and bubble, streaking the air with lightning as they fought for airspace. There was wind, too, a wind that burnt your face if you turned right into it. Across the planet, the masses were wailing and whining, threatening to lynch the weathermen, as if they were the ones responsible for the catastrophe. And why shouldn’t they be?

thought Fitz. That was the religion of the colony. Blame the icon. Kill the image.

All over the city, TV sets were pumping messages of reassurance out into the air; the screens inside the houses, the screens on the streets, the screens that floated over the public plazas were all repeating the same messages, the entire settlement chanting the same words. The city was saying, Do not panic.

But the city wasn’t listening to its own advice.

You could hear it even from here, even from the roof of the media tower at the dead centre of the planet’s mass mind. Three hundred storeys up, so you could see all the way to the horizon if you stood on the edge. The roof was flat and tarmac-black, carved up by fluorescent lines and ringed with infrared marker lights. A private spaceport site, thought Fitz. And now two hundred media employees were standing in a circle around the landing zone, staring up at the heavens, letting the rain burn red-hot patterns into their eyes. Children of the Faction, all two hundred of them, waiting for salvation to come down from the clouds. According to the family’s inner circle, the sky was burning because it knew, on some level, that the Time Lords were coming. It knew the planet was damned. The atmosphere could feel the ripples, the temporal fallout of an attack that hadn’t even started yet.

Even if the Doctor had been here, could he have stopped this? If the Time Lords wanted something to happen, wasn’t that the closest thing to ‘destiny’

you were likely to find in this universe?

Frankly, he wasn’t sure what his standing was with Mother Mathara’s people right now. He’d been initiated into the Faction, shown glimpses of how their techniques worked, but over the last eighteen months they’d told him next to nothing. He didn’t even remember the initiation properly. He remembered the transmissions coming in through the receiver that Mathara had put in his ear, 201

and he remembered thinking he was talking to somebody’s shadow, but after that it was all a bit of a blur, as if several hundred channels of information had been beamed into his head at once. He’d had to switch channels very, very quickly, and he wasn’t sure he’d taken it all in.

He remembered seeing a man with one arm, although he was pretty sure it had been a hallucination. Grandfather Paradox himself had only one arm, according to Faction lore.

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