The Dimension Riders (Daniel Blythe) by The Dimension Riders (by Daniel Blythe) (html)

Author:The Dimension Riders (by Daniel Blythe) (html)
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 14

Cracks

‘Du musst herrschen und gewinnen,

Oder dienen und verlieren,

Leiden oder triumphieren,

Amboss oder Hammer sein.’

(‘You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the hammer or the anvil.’)

J.W. von Goethe

The President of St Matthew’s College was playing chess against his TARDIS, and losing.

As the pieces flicked across the scanner, pushing his queen deeper into an unforeseen trap, he allowed his mind to wander. It was ironic, he thought, that he should have escaped the routine into which Gallifrey had fallen, only to acquire a taste for the sedentary academic life. It had been a dynamic world once, a powerful world, the home of the Time Lords. But the man who now called himself the President was far, almost immeasurably far, from the Ancient Time, from an era when even the exploits of famous renegades had become legend.

Among the Time Lords, he had been nothing. Known at the Academy by the code of Epsilon Delta, he had become a mere attendant to Gold Usher, with mundane duties and no real responsibility. That, despite a respectable double beta in cybernetics, was where he had ended up, a robed lackey wasting his brilliant mind. He had had another name, then – a longer one – a different face, and certainly no title; but his lowly position had given him unforeseen advantages. For one thing, no one expected Epsilon Delta to have any kind of scientific knowledge, and so it did not occur to anyone that he would have either the means or the inclination to adapt a spare TARDIS to his own palm and voice prints, under the guise of official inspection.

Nor did many other Time Lords have any idea of the progress in the cybernetics faculty of the new, advanced Academy. His creation, a totally new model, had been the result of a combination of factors. The first had been his own under‐estimated skill in electronics. Another was the enormous amount of time during which nobody really cared where he was and what he was doing, time which he often spent in the Panopticon archives, reading, preparing. Some files had restricted access but he broke into these, and became something of an expert in the much‐discouraged doctrine of weaponry systems.

Over that time, which by Earth standards could be measured in decades, his hatred and resentment grew. He watched the colourful displays in the Panopticon, nodded respectfully to the elders in their heliotrope robes, while inwardly he seethed, sought escape from this mindless life and yearned for his revenge.

One night, Epsilon Delta had left. The primed TARDIS was waiting, and creations were planted inside, ready to let him in. He picked up security transmissions from Gallifrey on a coded channel. It was the crowning irony for him that the disappearance of a Type 102 was noticed far more quickly than his own absence, and indeed was awarded a far higher level of importance by the High Council.

He read, in the data banks of his TARDIS, of those other, legendary

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