He glanced round at the guards. Like him, most were looking down at their own pieces of hardware with the same gloomy concern.
'Watch out Jerry,' Fitz muttered. 'Here we come.'
The Doctor stood in the centre of the Council Chamber, shadowy benches stretching back all around him into the gloom. Tarra, Kristeva, Mathara and Kreiner were all clustered around him, watching intently.
'Who do you serve?' Tarra demanded, scrutinising his wan face.
'The Grandfather is my god,' said the Doctor.
There were murmurs of assent from the shadowy figures lurking on the great benches.
Mathara took a step closer to the Doctor. 'What nourishes your soul?'
'Divine and perfect paradox.'
Kristeva moved in. 'You will spike on sharp sticks the heads of your past incarnations.'
The Doctor nodded. 'The past is nothing.'
'Your arm will be taken,' Kreiner chipped in, clearly with a great deal of satisfaction.
'I raise it now in the Faction's service.'
'Good,' muttered Tarra, caressing the wet velvet clinging to the Doctor's right arm as more murmurs of satisfaction filtered down from the onlooking Shadow Parliament. 'You are ours.' She turned away. 'It is time for you to finish carrying out your first instruction.'
'It is,' hissed the Grandfather's voice, as his onearmed form shivered into solidity once again. Tarra felt the power radiating from him. Just to have the Grandfather near ... That it should be she who stood at his right and only hand ...
'What must I do?' the Doctor asked, like a child anxious to please an angry parent. It was a question she had asked herself, so many times.
'The Edifice will be of incalculable value to us,' Grandfather Paradox observed. 'If we can access the multiple universes at its core, our resources and power will be near infinite. But first, it must be made stable.'
'I understand,' the Doctor said.
'You will travel to the Edifice. Its structure will have been weakened by the enemy blast.
Kristeva, you have brought the gravitic stabilisers?'
Kristeva held out his skeletal hand to show a number of the small, dull, metal cubes. 'I have.'
Mathara opened her seemingly empty palm. Then she gestured to what looked like tiny insects spiralling above their heads. 'Cameras, Grandfather. Our people approach in ships of every size. If it pleases you, we shall broadcast to the fleet, so that all the Faction may see the first spoils of our endless war.'
The Grandfather nodded acknowledgement. 'I shall retire until all is prepared. There are still ... adjustments to be made. Mother Tana will go with you, Doctor. So too will Father adjustments to be made. Mother Tana will go with you, Doctor. So too will Father Kreiner.'
Kreiner bowed. A chance to redeem himself, thought Tarra. We shall see.
Then the Grandfather flickered and was gone. Soon after, the skeletal figures crowding the benches drifted from sight too. Only the ghostly, breathless sound of flapping wings lingered in the chill air.
'How are we going to get to the Edifice?' Kreiner asked.
Tarra smiled and produced the ivory control box ffom her pocket.
Compassion had shut down her systems for their own protection. With so much power surging through the Edifice she had no intention of being timerammed again. Now the storm had passed, but she'd woken to find night had fallen over the now well and truly blasted heath. A starless sky as black as the thickest shadows. She took that as a fairly ominous symbol of the current physical state of the Edifice.
Just as she was about to plan her next move, Compassion bellowed in pain as what felt like hot knives cut through her insides. It felt like nerve endings were shredding, tendon wires snapping, a hot paralysis beginning to settle. It was the Faction, she could recognise the pain.
Even here they could reach her. Perhaps especially here in this sick, dying place.
Kicking and screaming, she struggled against the fishhook tugs that were dragging her back.
But with her engines shrieking louder than she was, Compassion felt herself reassembling at the Faction's bidding.
Where was she?
Back on Gallifrey, she could feel it. The Council Chamber, she imagined. Her higher sensors told her there were two or three levels of reality overlaid on the room, but the chamber was a big enough mess even in visual mode.
Recovering, she found herself opening to allow the Doctor to board her. Tarra and Fitz's alternative self followed him in. There was a slight buzzing sensation, and Compassion realised tiny camera eyes were darting about inside her, broadcasting the view.
'We're going back to the Edifice, Compassion,' the Doctor said, his voice dull and flat.
'Don't try to fight the Faction's control.' He paused. 'It doesn't work.'
Compassion felt uncomfortable as he input the coordinates. The last time he'd touched her inside he was wrestling for control, desperate for her to respond. Now his hands were like frozen meat, pushing stiffly at her switches. She could sense the resignation in every precise command.
Kreiner turned to Tarra as Compassion readied herself for takeoff.
'Give me two minutes alone with him.'
She looked at him, black sockets gaping like surprised mouths.
'Please.'
Tarra looked at the Doctor, standing motionless now by Compassion's controls. 'Still you persist. You wish to harm him again?'
'No. But there are things I need to say to him.'
'We set the past adrift, Kreiner, or we set it alight.' It was obviously a stock Faction phrase. It was also clear from his reaction that Kreiner wasn't impressed. 'Let go of your former life,'
Tarra continued. 'It is meaningless.'
Kreiner reached out a gauntleted hand to touch her cheek. 'What were you called before you were a fairytale Time Lord princess, Tarra?' he said, not hiding the smirk in his voice. 'What name can you still not bear to go by?'
Tarra's eye sockets seemed almost to warp, to narrow at him. She took his hand, and lowered it from her glistening cheek.
'All right. You have until we reach the Edifice,' she said. 'I shall activate the camera transmitters then.'
She walked over a small footbridge and out of the console room.
Kreiner turned now to the Doctor, who returned his look placidly, as if he too were wearing a mask. Reaching out with his good arm, Kreiner grasped hold of Compassion's internal monitor controls and twisted savagely hard. She screamed with the pain of it, but could hear no sound. It was as if she were leaving her own body, a disembodied intelligence, all perception gone. They would do this to her for good, in the end, make her mute, blind, senseless, a nameless power source bent only to their will. As her own heart pumped on without her, Compassion saw Kreiner stalk over to the Doctor, arm outstretched, before her world went dark.
'Alone at last,' she heard him whisper, then silence.
Chapter Fortyone.
Ever the mortal
Mathara had her hands to her head. 'I sense the seething life around us,' she whispered. "The pain and the death, but there is resolve and purpose too.' She turned to Kristeva. 'This room must be safeguarded.'
'Nothing can harm the Grandfather,' Kristeva said, gesturing to the empty benches, spectral in the cold gloom. 'His presence is immortal.'
'But are not his servants worthy to be saved?' Mathara whispered. She had lived for so long, endured so much. Now that the moment of triumph was here to be enjoyed she found she was terrified it would be taken from her.
'The Capitol is in ruins, the Time Lords are weak cattle roaming it aimlessly,' Kristeva asserted. 'Our warships are approaching Gallifrey now. Our people will settle soon enough.'
'In the meantime, I will arrange for our crew to transmat down,' Mathara decided. 'Until all opposition has bowed down before us.'
Kreiner stroked his gauntlet against the Doctor's cheek. His voice was a low growl: 'You're faking, Doctor. Aren't you?'
The Doctor blinked, but didn't speak.
'Aren't you?' Kreiner insisted.
The Doctor sighed. 'You can't kid a kidder,' he said.
Kreiner felt his head buzzing, but couldn't give the feeling a name. 'I knew it.'
'You know me.'
'You left me.'
'I was left with no choice.'
Kreiner paused. The Doctor was too good with words. That's why the inadequacy of his apology, Kreiner realised, had actually meant something to him, for all his desperation to believe it had not.
The buzzing feeling was still there.
'How did you fool the Grandfather?'
The Doctor looked away. 'Seems I've been fooling myself for a long time.'
'Well, I won't give you away,' Kreiner said. He paused for a moment. 'Not like you did me.'
The Doctor still couldn't look at him, and kept quiet.
Kreiner took a step closer. 'What are you planning?'
Still silence. Kreiner took a deep breath.
'I don't care what you do, Doctor. Only ...' The buzzing was getting worse. Then he remembered the name for it. It was a word that meant little to men as their lives stretched on and on soullessly before them.
Desperation.
'Only let me go home. Make me who I was.'
The Doctor closed his eyes and opened his mouth:'! can't, Fitz.'
'Don't call me that. I'm not Fitz. Not unless you make me, like you made like you made him Fitz.' He grabbed hold of the Doctor's coat, pulled him closer. 'Look at me. What I've become. Go back to Earth in 1963. Don't take me with you. Leave me behind, leave me be.
Let me stay a bum from Archway who's never going to amount to anything.' He felt a sob wrench its way out of him. 'We'll kill Tarra, Doctor, you can run and we'll -'
The Doctor shushed him, like he was shushing an infant. 'I can't help you like that,' he whispered. 'I'd just make one more paradox, a cheat's way of doing things.'
'It's all about knowing when to leave people, right, Doctor?' Kreiner said. 'And you left me for dead millennia ago.' He snorted. A cheat? You cheat all the time!' Kreiner grabbed hold of the Doctor's neck. 'You cheated me.'
'I made a terrible mistake,' the Doctor gasped. 'Don't you think I'd go back and change that if I could? But I'm not like the Faction. I won't keep the promise of impossibility. Not even now with their toxins trying to drown my body. Not even now.'
Kreiner almost choked on the thickness of his saliva as he released the Doctor's throat.
'Please.'
The Doctor fell back and massaged his throat. 'My first paradox,' he whispered hoarsely. 'All the others will seem easier after that -' The Doctor's swollen eyes were looking somewhere far away. 'Say I did take you back,' he said. 'Would it be the same world you remember?
Would it be the next day? Or the day after?' He shook his head. 'It won't be the universe anyone remembers once the Faction get to work. Nothing will ever be the same. Literally, nothing. And if I do as you ask, I'd be doing the Faction's work for them. Changing the past, transforming the future. I'm too close to being Faction already, can't you see?' The Doctor had become so impassioned that one of the cuts on his face had reopened, and a drop of blood fell on to his knuckles. He stared, transfixed.
'See? Blood on my hands.'
'On your hand,' Kreiner retorted, bitterly. 'If you don't save me you won't save yourself.
You'll become Grandfather Paradox.'
'So it would seem,' the Doctor whispered, a sad smile on his face. 'But I'm not running away from my mistakes this time, Fitz.' He paused, lips pursed as if a terrible secret were hanging from them that he was desperate to spit out. "The Edifice is my old TARDIS, Fitz.'
Kreiner stared at him, incredulous. 'What?'
'It is. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I have to face up to my responsibilities -'