Chapter Text
Doctor Who – Trial and Error
Long before the Time War, the Time Lords knew it was coming, like a storm on the wind. There were many prophecies and stories, legends before the fact…
The Doctor – Heaven Sent
Prologue
Gallifrey, the Golden Age
The second sun had only just risen over the southern mountains when a group of clerks set out from the Lord President’s office and spread out across the Citadel, each of them carrying a dispatch sealed with the official mark of the High Council. Red circular script on the cover declared the contents ‘Top Secret’. Some headed to the chambers of the High Council themselves. One descended into the labyrinth of rooms where the Matrix was monitored and maintained by the Keeper and his staff. Another made for an ornate doorway near the Panopticon, where the circular script above the lintel read, ‘Halls of Law’.
There, in a wide tiled foyer, secretaries and lawyers were busy setting up their desks, gossiping in small groups and readying themselves to start the day’s work. The clerk passed by them all, ignoring the curious glances she received. Her attention was focused on the broad staircase at the far end. At the top, an archway loomed over her like the mouth of a cave in a fairy story. The sign above it read, ‘Junior Judicial Chambers’. She paused only long enough to check the name on the cover of her file, then headed off down the long corridor beyond the arch. This seemed to stretch on into infinity thanks to its dimensional engineering, and hundreds of doors lined both sides, each with a brass name plate to indicate whose office the door belonged to.
This early in the day, most of these doors still had the quiet, sleepy feel of a place waiting for occupation as the clerk passed by. One, though, about halfway down, lay ajar. The last the clerk slowed her pace a little as she came to this door, and read the name on the plaque, checked it against her file. This was the right room. Inside, she could hear someone pacing about, footsteps making the floor creak, and someone spoke with a deep voice, every word clipped and precise.
‘It is my unpleasant duty,’ the voice said, ‘to prove to this inquiry that the accused is an incorrigible…’
The clerk pressed the call button on the door and the words stopped abruptly.
‘Pause dictation. Who is it?’
The clerk strode into the office. The edges of the room were hazy, again thanks to the architects tinkering with the internal dimensions. Bookcases appeared like islands on a misty sea. It was impossible to see the far wall. A bank of fog had gathered there. Before her, though, lay a large desk, its surface glowing with moving text, some of it hidden beneath more old-school solid paper and books. The clerk came to the desk and bowed curtly to the tall, dark-haired man who stood opposite her.
‘Forgive the intrusion, Lord Dolyn.’
She laid the file she’d carried on his desk. He glanced at it, and she saw the flash of comprehension in his green eyes.
He nodded and pressed his hand against the cover of the file. There was a bleep, as the reader built into it scanned and recognised his palm print, then sent the information back to the Matrix. The red symbols on the file turned blue, and whereas the clerk would not have been able to open the folder, even if she’d wanted to, it would now release its contents whenever Dolyn required them.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
The clerk gave another stiff bow, then hurried out.
***
Dolyn tapped the interface on his desk and closed the notes for the speech he’d been practising, then flung back his black and white robes of office and sat in his high-backed chair. He opened the dispatch folder and studied the contents, though it was merely the written confirmation of a dozen hushed and secretive conversations in offices around the Capitol over the last few months. He sighed and ran a hand through his short brown hair, then he reached for the glowing symbol on the desk that activated the communications software. He selected a contact and waited until an air display appeared above the desk. The blue-tinged image of an elderly Time Lady appeared. She frowned.
‘My lord? Is everything all right? I was just about to pack the little ones off to the Academy.’
‘Yes, I understand. I only wanted to say that it’s been confirmed. I shall be required to go off-world for a time for this case. I thought you ought to know.’
She nodded, but still looked unhappy. ‘Have they said for how long?’
‘Not yet. No real way to tell.’ Dolyn leaned back in his chair.
‘I suppose you still can’t say what it’s all about.’
‘Afraid not. But tell the boys I’ll be back soon, and I’ll send a message if I’m able. Comms may be censored once the court’s in session.’
‘Very good, sir. I’ll tell them.’
He switched off the comms channel, then stared for a while at a static image that formed part of the regular display on the desk’s surface. A pale, dark haired woman held two boys in her arms and smiled towards the camera lens. The children, so identical that even their parents sometimes had to give a slight telepathic nudge to each boy to tell who was who, stared, wide-eyed. They were bigger now, he thought, and pictured them how they would be right at that moment, in their novice’s robes. He didn’t allow himself to think about the woman, Alyssa. It had been years, but he still couldn’t say her name or look at her image for long without seeing the flash of a blaster in his mind’s eye, or hearing the clatter of Sontaran boots through a city - across a planet - that had thought itself impenetrable. . He sometimes wondered what she would think of him even considering a second marriage and then the guilt would strike him when he remembered all the recent times he’d actually forgotten her, for the briefest moment, in another’s company. Safer to stick to work, at least for now. He returned his attention to the dossier before him.
The doorbell rang again, and he glanced up to see his secretary on the threshold, looking even more harassed than was customary.
‘Sorry, Dolyn,’ he said in a low voice, ‘but the Castellan just called. Something about a meeting this morning…?’
Dolyn checked the time display on the desk and cursed under his breath. He swept up the dispatch along with a folder of his own notes and shoved past the secretary and out into the hall.
He passed through the bustle of the Citadel and crossed the Panopticon, where the great and good of Gallifrey had gathered for their morning’s gossip, though no one paid a mere lawyer any notice. Right behind the great Seal of Rassilon that dominated the plaza, he hurried down a narrow flight of stairs that he hadn’t even realised were there until all this business started. The stairs spilled out into a dimly-lit corridor, at the end of which, he made out a group of figures in the shadows beneath a vaulted archway, beside an ornate set of double doors. Amongt them, he spotted the bronze robes of the current Castellan, though he had only spoken to him through comms, never met him in person. The Castellan was flanked by two chancellery guards, but there was another, stouter man with him, in a stiff, square collar and gold robes.
‘Valeyard,’ the Castellan called out. ‘We thought perhaps you were lost.’
Dolyn struggled to hide his embarrassment and his annoyance. With a surreptitious glance at the time display on his wrist comms he saw it was only five minutes after the agreed time of their meeting.
‘My apologies, Castellan,’ he said, with a politic smile. ‘I only just received the relevant information from the High Council.’
He reached them at last, aware that the smaller man in gold was watching him with an air of hauteur and just a touch of suspicion.
‘You know the Keeper of the Matrix?’ the Castellan asked.
‘Only by reputation.’ Dolyn offered his hand to the man in gold.
‘Valeyard…?’ asked the Keeper.
‘Dolyn. Junior Judicial Chambers.’
‘Junior?’ The Keeper looked appalled. ‘I thought the High Council were taking this seriously?’
Dolyn struggled to maintain his smile.
‘A quirk of terminology, Keeper. Senior Chambers is the name given to the members of the High Council and other Time Lords appointed to head inquiries or special courts. The junior chamber consists of the likes of us. Those who actually studied the law.’
‘They’re lawyers, Keeper,’ said the Castellan. ‘You can’t expect them to actually say what they mean. Shall we get this over with?’
‘Excellent idea,’ said the Keeper dryly.
He turned from them and went to the double doors. A large, antique-style key hung on a hook on the chest panel of his robes. The Keeper unlatched it and inserted it into a recess in the door’s access panel. Locking mechanisms somewhere inside the wall clunked and whirred. Until that point, Dolyn hadn’t given much consideration to the location of this meeting. It had just been words in a confidential message, but now the doors were opening, he found his hearts quickening. He’d never been to the Cloisters before. He knew it somehow allowed access to the workings of the Matrix, that it was dark, and deadly enough that anyone who entered without proper training rarely came out again. He was one of those Time Lords who allowed the Matrix to run his daily life, keep the time accurate on his wrist comms, control the temperature in his quarters, provide lessons for his children, store his experiences and thoughts, without actually having a clue how any of it worked.
‘The wraiths are fairly quiet today,’ the Keeper muttered. ‘Shouldn’t present too much of a problem, but if they should appear, please leave them to me.’
The Castellan and Keeper headed in, while the guards stayed behind in the corridor, presumably to stop anyone following them. Dolyn passed through the doorway into what looked like a ruin, gothic arches and pillars rising from a low mist. Vines, ivy, and what looked like some kind of power or data cabling twisted around the stones and snaked off into the fog. The corridor outside had been quiet but here, the silence was like a solid thing that pressed in all around them. Thick shadows swirled on the fog, and debris littered the place as if the whole structure was crumbling around them. Dolyn glanced up and realised he’d fallen far behind the Keeper and the Castellan while he’d been looking around, and quickened his pace to catch up. Ahead, he saw them pass beneath an archway and disappear around a bend in the path. Dolyn followed, turned the corner, and came face to face with a stone angel.
He froze, fighting not to blink. The angel’s mouth gaped in a snarl, showing sharply pointed teeth, and its clawed hands were raised above its head as if to strike.
Something touched his shoulder. Dolyn let out a cry of fright and whirled around, then felt the grip of panic as he realised he’d turned his back on the creature. The Keeper, still with a hand on the stiff collar of Dolyn’s robes, sighed and shook his head.
‘Quite inert, Valeyard,’ he said, then wandered over to the angel. Now, as he caught his breath and tried to stop his hearts from bursting through his rib cage, Dolyn saw that the creature was tangled in a mass of cables.
‘The Matrix is more than capable of defending itself,’ the Keeper went on. ‘Over the centuries, some have tried to invade it. All have failed. Those who manage to infiltrate its inner workings are neutralised by the Wraiths, and in some cases even form part of the system, their biological energy feeding the Matrix’s processes.’ He patted the angel on the shoulder, then moved off.
It took a great mental feat for Dolyn to drag his gaze off the angel, but he forced himself to move and carried on after the Keeper and Castellan. As they continued through the Cloisters, he spotted other creatures, other monsters in amongst the rubble, some only shapes beneath the cables. The thought hit him like a blast of ice water that he might turn a corner and see the corpse of a Sontaran. He wasn’t sure he’d have the will to keep calm if that were the case.
‘I expect, however,’ the Keeper was saying up ahead, ‘that it is this particular invader that interests you, gentlemen.’
He was standing before a fractured piece of white wall with a recessed arch set into it. Inside the arch, suspended with arms outstretched, like a piece of laundry at a Drylands barn, was a Time Lord. Cables wound around his body, half obscuring his face, but not enough to hide the fact that he had apparently died screaming.
‘His name was Alzath,’ said the Keeper. ‘Junior diagnostician in my team. Until his body was discovered here, I would have said he was a promising young man.’
Dolyn stepped closer, peering upwards at the body. There was no obvious cause of death, no visible injuries, and nothing to explain why the unfortunate Alzath hadn’t been able to regenerate.
‘We’ve analysed the data logs,’ the Keeper continued, ‘now we knew what to look for. It would appear Alzath had been downloading files using an unmonitored interface in this section. Those files were transmitted off-world, we believe to one of the Third Zone planets in Andromeda, but they were using a relay point. My people are working to track down the exact location now.’
‘We know what he was doing,’ said the Castellan, dismissively. ‘The Celestial Intervention Agency submitted a full report on the Third Zone’s time travel experiments and it’s been dealt with. We knew their level of development wouldn’t have progress so far in so little time. Something had to have spurred their work along. Now we know what it was.’
‘I’m afraid it’s worse than that,’ said the Keeper. ‘Alzath had been accessing the files the High Council had asked me to quarantine. The prophecies.’
‘Ah,’ said Dolyn. He clutched the dispatch folder a little tighter to his chest.
The Castellan had lost his air of nonchalance and stood a little straighter.
‘Is there any possibility anyone saw what was in those files?’ he asked. ‘Besides the High Council, I mean.’
‘I can’t say for certain,’ replied the Keeper. ‘We introduced malware as soon as the breach was detected, but we have no way of telling whether we were in time or not.’
The three of them stood for a moment in silence, regarding the lifeless figure on the wall. Dolyn could see the Castellan’s mind working, figuring out the many consequences if that information had been leaked.
‘Why didn’t the Wraiths stop him?’ the Castellan asked. ‘Isn’t that what they’re for?’
‘The Wraiths don’t tend to come near this area,’ said the Keeper. ‘Alzath would’ve known that. He often came down here to troubleshoot the infrastructural servers for the Capitol systems.’
‘The Wraiths are dead, what do they have to worry about?’
‘Technically, dead,’ said the Keeper, ‘although it might be more accurate to think of them in terms of artificial intelligence. The Wraiths are simply data shadows of former Time Lords and they’re usually only capable of following simple programming but a few still have a tendril or two or their old emotions, their old thought processes, left over from their connection to the Matrix whilst they were alive.’
‘So what are they scared of?’ asked Dolyn.
The Keeper wandered to another archway nearby, where the shadows were too dense to see far beyond the threshold. He stood a few feet away and gestured towards the darkness.
‘We believe it’s because this is where we keep the Partition.’
The more Dolyn studied the shadows, the more he could see within them. There were shapes within the darkness, constantly moving, so that it was hard to focus on them before they shifted into some other pattern, some other form. He ventured nearer, trying to make out the details, but the Keeper caught his arm.
‘I wouldn’t recommend getting too close, Valeyard.’
‘What is it?’ asked the Castellan.
‘Every Time Lord past, present and future has a connection to the Matrix,’ said the Keeper. ‘Every memory and experience is stored within its systems, but the Matrix also controls the everyday running of Time Lord society. There are certain impulses, negative experiences for example, that can interfere with those functions, so we ensure they’re kept separate from the main archives.’
He threw a wary glance at the shadows. ‘Those impulses are stored in a Partition.’
‘The nightmares of all Gallifrey,’ said the Castellan with a slight sneer.
‘All Gallifrey?’ The Keeper gave a dry laugh. ‘Not at all. We lead a fairly tranquil life here, relatively speaking. No, this is a side effect of one particular person whose lifestyle is, shall we say, atypical of Time Lord society.’
The Castellan nodded. ‘The Doctor.’
The name made Dolyn’s shiver. He had never learned exactly what happened during the Vardan-Sontaran invasion, or how exactly Alyssa had died, but he knew the Doctor had been at the heart of it. The mention of that Time Lord had always made his stomach turn.
Despite the warning, Dolyn edged a little closer to the Partition. He wondered if, somewhere in the writhing mass of shadow, he might see some memory of those days. Perhaps he’d even see Alyssa, though he doubted if the Doctor would even have been aware of the individuals who died. Someone who swept around the universe like an avenging god probably didn’t have time to care about the little people.
Deep within the darkness, Dolyn saw faces phasing in and out of existence, changing from one image to another, and at the very edge of his hearing, he felt sure there were voices, other than that of the Castellan and Keeper.
‘You met him, didn’t you, Maxil?’ he heard the Keeper say.
‘Last regeneration. Not an experience I’d wish to recreate,’ said the Castellan.
‘Do you need to see anything else?’
The conversation seemed to grow more distant as Dolyn focused on the whispers in the darkness. Had it just spoken his name? Then a hand landed on his shoulder and the spell was broken. He turned and found the Keeper looking up at him.
‘Valeyard?’
Glancing back at the archway, Dolyn saw the shadows recede a little, but the ever-shifting patterns continued, as did the whispering. The other two Time Lords did not appear to hear it.
‘Are you all right?’ the Keeper asked.
Dolyn shook himself out of his stupor and smiled.
‘Oh, no, thank you. I just need to take some images, in case I need them for evidence at the inquiry.’
He watched the two of them start back towards the door, walking slowly and talking in low voices. Dolyn found the imager application on his comms unit and snapped off a few pictures for his files. He didn’t pay much attention to composition or quality. He would be glad to get out of that place too.
He stepped back from Alzath’s body and was about to follow the others, when he noticed the archway that had held the Partition.
The shadows were gone. All he could see now was a path wending off into the fog. He frowned. Was it supposed to do that? Fascinating though the thing was, he decided it was time to go. He finally turned.
And found the shadows in his path. The faces within the darkness screamed at him in unison.
***
‘Do you believe it?’ asked the Castellan. He studied the Keeper’s expression, though it was hard to see the other man’s face in the half light, and through the uncomfortable-looking collar he wore. ‘That there’ll actually be a war?’
‘I’ve seen the predictions,’ said the Keeper. ‘Whether they turn out to be correct or not, only time can tell. The Matrix has been wrong before. Any system reliant on biological input for its computational power will be prone to inaccuracy from time to time.’
‘But it’s never been so insistent before.’ Maxil shivered, despite his heavy robes. ‘And can’t you feel it? It’s like the first winds of a storm on the air. Something’s coming.’
A scream cut through the silence of the Cloisters. The Castellan drew his gun and ran. In the middle of the path ahead, he saw a figure crouched on his haunches. Maxil couldn’t be sure in this maze, but he thought the figure was beneath the archway where that thing, the Partition or whatever it was, had been, though there was no sign of it now. He held his staser in both hands to steady his aim and watched as the figure slowly rose, collecting up his scattered papers.
‘Valeyard?’
The lawyer turned and stared back at him, expression unreadable.
‘What happened?’ asked the Castellan.
For a long time the Valeyard seemed distracted and didn’t answer. He ran his hand over the back of his head and frowned, like a man in the throes of a regeneration sensing his new body for the first time. Then he blinked and straightened.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all. My apologies, Castellan. Just… jumping at shadows.’
***
The trees below the Capitol gave a shiver as a night breeze passed over the plains. A few silver leaves flittered down and landed amongst the flame-red grass. Most of the city slept, but even in the dead of night there were still lights burning in its towers.
The Lord President couldn’t fathom why the Castellan couldn’t have scheduled this meeting for a more civilised hour. Moving around the citadel this late, he could practically hear the rodents scurrying inside the walls, and he kept picturing the bottle of four hundred year-old Patraxe wine he had in his quarters that he’d planned to decimate that evening. Instead, here he found himself seated at the head of his conference table in the middle of the night, staring down at reports he’d read so many times, the circular script just seemed to twirl meaninglessly.
‘A junior diagnostician would not have had the credentials to access files marked priority Omega,’ said the Castellan. That man was always so intense, thought the Lord President. It was a surprise he hadn’t made himself spontaneously regenerate. ‘Someone had to have helped.’
‘And,’ the Lord President said, ‘I take it we are no closer to finding out who?’
‘We have a theory.’
The Castellan glanced across the table, where the Keeper of the Matrix sat fidgeting.
‘I took the liberty of running a statistical analysis of the Matrix’s predictions, Lord President,’ said the Keeper. ‘Many of the warnings are vague, as always, but there was one name that occurred in practically all of them. The Time Lord who will be instrumental in, and ultimately end, the Time War.’
‘We are not calling it the ‘Time War’,’ the Lord President chided. ‘It is not a war of any sort. It’s a bogeyman thrown up by the Matrix to remind us all we cannot be complacent. The idea’s ridiculous. No race has ever successfully invaded Gallifrey, or at least, none have ever managed to hold the planet. Our defences are more than adequate.’
‘Against the Daleks?’ asked the Castellan.
‘If necessary. The sky trenches are…’
‘With all due respect, Lord President,’ the Castellan had the audacity to interrupt, ‘whether the war itself is a feasible possibility or not is beside the point. The fact is that there are obviously those within our society who have heard about this prophecy and who believe it, enough to steal information from the Matrix and send it off-world to try and rally support.’
The Lord President bristled. Technically his Castellan was right but it was irksome to have to admit it.
‘Are we any closer to identifying the recipients of this information?’ he asked.
The Keeper of the Matrix consulted his notes. ‘The ultimate destination, we believe, was somewhere in Andromeda, probably the Third Zone. We are as yet no closer to pinpointing the exact location…’
‘Someone was sending the Third Zone information on time travel,’ said the Castellan.
‘I am aware of that,’ the Lord President replied. ‘The CIA…’
‘Have dealt with it, yes, for the moment. But someone wants to build an army. They think Gallifrey isn’t listening to the warnings and they are trying to equip others to fight the Daleks for us.’
‘If I may?’ the Keeper ventured, actually raising his hand like an Academy student. ‘We haven’t been able to track down the location in Andromeda where the information was received. However, we have identified the site of the data relays the thieves were using to pass the information to Andromeda.’
‘Where?’
The Keeper tapped a few commands into the display on the desk in front of him and a hologram of a planetary system appeared in the air above the centre of the table, eight planets and various satellites and asteroid belts, orbiting a small, yellow star.
‘Sol Three, Mutter’s Spiral. I believe it’s also known by the local designations, ‘Terra’, or ‘Earth’. The files taken from our archives were sent to a collection point there and then forwarded to their ultimate destination. I have no knowledge of law enforcement, gentlemen, but it occurred to me there might be something on that planet to identify the culprits.’
‘We know who the culprit is,’ insisted the Castellan. ‘The fact that it’s Earth only proves it.’
‘Circumstantial evidence only, I’m afraid,’ said the final guest at their table. This one the Lord President didn’t know by name, but the black and white robes were enough to identify his position at least. This had to be the Valeyard sent down by the Hall of Law to advise him, though so far this was the first time the sullen-looking fellow had broken his silence.
‘Well,’ the Lord President muttered. ‘Whoever’s responsible, I’ve had far too many messages already asking me to confirm or deny what the Matrix is predicting. And I for one should like to continue denying it.’
‘What harm could there be in letting people prepare?’ asked the Castellan. The Lord President could hear the strain in his voice, as if it was taking his every reserve of strength not to lose his temper. ‘At best, we can all breathe a sigh of relief when it turns out to be just another false alarm from the Matrix. At worse, we can be ready when the attack comes.’
‘According to the Matrix’s predictions,’ said the Valeyard, ‘it doesn’t matter how prepared we are. This war will end Gallifrey.’
‘Enough,’ the Lord President said. ‘For the time being, I do not want these rumours running around our cities. Gallifrey is still in a delicate political state after the Borusa affair and we do not need another scandal, nor indeed another panic. Besides, if you’re right, Maxil, and the Doctor is involved, then best to tread carefully. For some unfathomable reason, the ordinary people seem to like him.’
‘It has to be the Doctor,’ insisted the Castellan. ‘He served as Lord President. He would have the necessary codes to access the Matrix and could have passed them to this Alzath character. He’s fought the Daleks countless times. They’d probably never have crawled away from Skaro in the first place if it wasn’t for his interference, and he refused to destroy them when he was asked to by the High Council. His name is littered through the Matrix prophecies. By all accounts it will be his actions that will ultimately destroy this planet. You know how critical he’s been of our policies. Whoever sent that information to the Third Zone evidently thinks they have a better idea how to rule Gallifrey than the High Council. Tell me, who else would fit that description?’
‘The Doctor himself was sent to investigate the Kartz and Reimer experiments in the Third Zone,’ the Lord President began.
‘In an earlier regeneration. He’s had more than enough reasons since then to think ill of this government. Lord President, the Matrix is adamant that war is coming. There has never been so consistent a set of predictions since the days of Rassilon. And if the Doctor is allowed to roam free and continues to interfere, the Matrix is equally insistent that Gallifrey will fall. You may wish to contain the rumours, sir, that is your prerogative. I daresay, I’m a soldier, not a politician. But we must prepare for this.’
‘You’ll be asking to go to Andromeda yourself, next, Castellan,’ said the Lord President. ‘Raise a time army of your own.’
‘Whether the news of the prophecy is released or not,’ said the Valeyard, ‘the fact is that a serious data breach has been committed and we now have a definite lead on the perpetrators…’
‘Quite,’ said the Lord President, happy to have someone sound at least partially on his side. ‘This Earth planet will have to be isolated until we can be sure we’ve recovered our files. We can’t have anything else transmitted to Andromeda until we know what’s going on.’
‘Hard to isolate the planet,’ said the Castellan. ‘Thanks to the Doctor, there’s so much temporal damage, that repulsive lump of rock practically shines throughout the fabric of time like a supernova. The only way would be to…’
The Lord President saw a thoughtful expression cross the Castellan’s face like a shadow.
‘What?’ the President asked.
‘There may be a way,’ said the Castellan, with an air of reluctance. ‘But the technology is extremely unstable. It can only be used under an Order in High Council, and the damage to the ecosystem of the planet can be catastrophic.’
‘Well? Out with it, man.’ the Lord President prompted.
The Castellan sighed. ‘We could use the Magnetron. Remove Earth from its current spatial co-ordinates and relocate it in a part of space that’s easier to keep secure while we conduct a forensic sweep of the surface. But it would…’
‘Do it,’ said the Lord President.
‘But, sir…’
‘And as for the Doctor,’ the President interrupted. He had checked his time display and saw that night was rapidly heading towards morning. ‘The Valeyard is quite correct. We have nothing more than coincidence and rumour at the moment. Not enough to secure a conviction. The Doctor has wriggled his way out of our justice system on several past occasions, when there’s been far more of a case against him than this.’
‘There may be a more lateral solution,’ said the Valeyard. ‘As you say, Lord President, the Doctor has been tried on many occasions. There are no shortages of violations he’s committed. We might try the Al Capone approach.’
‘The what?’
The Valeyard looked wary for a brief moment, as if he’d spoken out of turn. When he carried on, his attention was back on his notes again. ‘My apologies, it was an Earth reference, My Lord. What I mean to say is, if we cannot find enough evidence to convict the Doctor of the data breach, we might secure his arrest and detention on some other charge, some other transgression of our laws. There should be no shortage of instances to choose from. And with the Doctor imprisoned or, if you should deem it necessary, eliminated entirely, then his involvement in the Matrix prophecies also becomes impossible.’
‘Rendering the prophecy itself in paradox,’ muttered the President. He made a mental note to find out this fellow’s name. He was beginning to like him. ‘Indeed. Where precisely is the Doctor, relevant to this time stream?’
‘A planet called Thoros Beta,’ said the Valeyard. He tapped his desktop interface and the image of Earth above the table was replaced by that of a man with blond curls and a frightful multicoloured coat, walking along the shoreline of a lurid pink ocean.
‘It would be safer not to bring him to Gallifrey,’ the Lord President said, thinking out loud.
‘There’s always Zenobia Station,’ said the Valeyard. ‘It is easily isolated, should there be any… trouble from the Doctor.’
‘It would need to be upgraded,’ said the Keeper. ‘Zenobia’s links to the Matrix are running on the old operating system. They won’t cope with the latest updates unless I can replace some of the hardware. I have been meaning to get round to it.’
The Lord President nodded. ‘Then do it.’
‘Lord President.’ The Keeper rose, bowed and left the room.
‘And you, Castellan, make whatever preparations are necessary for the Magnetron. I shall sign whichever forms are required. We cannot afford to delay.’
The Castellan did not look happy, but when did he ever? But in the end, he too left his seat and headed out.
‘And you, Valeyard…’ The Lord President waited for the man to give his name but the Valeyard just stared back at him. ‘I trust I can rely on you to ensure the case against the Doctor is entirely watertight?’
The Valeyard shifted slightly in his chair. ‘There is no such thing outside the world of fiction as a watertight case, Lord President, and the Doctor, while he may not have actually studied the law, has certainly broken it enough times that he may well find a way out. Unless…’
‘Unless?’
‘So far all our plans rely on the case against the Doctor being entirely… above board, shall we say?’
The Lord President watched as the Valeyard got up and wandered around the table, studying the image of the Doctor on the beach.
‘If, on the other hand, things were… I believe the vulgar expression is ‘rigged in our favour’, we might be more assured of a positive outcome.’
‘You mean set him up? Is that possible?’
‘I’m sure I could arrange something.’
The President heard the additional clause to that sentence in the silence that followed. ‘And what would you ask in return?’
The Valeyard gave a light shrug, reached out and touched the air display, turning the screen around in a seemingly idle gesture. ‘The Doctor is currently in his sixth regeneration, I believe. That would place him around halfway through his life cycle.’
‘Your point being?’
‘My point, Lord President, is that should he be eliminated now, his remaining store of regeneration energy, his remaining lives as it were, would be destroyed with him.’
The Lord President scratched his beard and nodded. He now saw where this was going.
‘You want the rest of his regenerations.’ The Valeyard, he reasoned, must be nearing the end of his own final lifetime. The Lord President felt some of the tension that had been twisting up his innards loosen its hold. He liked when things, and more so when people, made sense.
The Valeyard said nothing, but the understanding was already there between them.
‘You realise,’ said the Lord President, ‘that should anything go wrong, my involvement in this cannot be known.’
‘You can rely on my discretion,’ said the Valeyard. They smiled at one another, having reached their accord, then the Valeyard bowed and left the room.
The Lord President studied the image of the Doctor a while longer before switching off the display. Then he clapped his hands and hurried off to his quarters and his wine.
***
A storm flashed over the dark clouds in the distance beyond the trees and ruins. Moments later, thunder growled. The rain pattered against the dead leaves that covered what had once been a wide street in one of the planet’s largest cities. The Valeyard made his way slowly along the ancient route, towards a large building straight ahead that stood starkly white against the glowering skies, its dome like a broken eggshell.
This city, he thought, had once been home to millions of humans. Now it was barely visible. A few stones in a forest. The only life he could sense around him were the guards and forensic scientists on the expedition. Project ‘Ravalox’, as it had become known, had been in operation for two days, and so far no trace of the Andromedan agents had been found. Whatever equipment or technology they’d used to transfer their secrets back to their home galaxy, they had hidden it well.
Behind him, the guards barked commands and questions across the damp air, but he paid little attention to them. Instead, the Valeyard approached the building ahead. Beneath the dome, a set of wide stone steps led to what had once been a large entrance, but was now a mass of fallen pillars and broken stones. He wasn’t sure if the damage to the place was entirely down to the strain of the planet’s transfer to this new location, or if Earth had been in the last stages of its life even before the Time Lords came, but this city was certainly dead now. Even the ghosts probably left long ago.
As he climbed the steps, however, the Valeyard looked up at the dome and thought of Cybermen, of maniacs who used the dead as an army, of the dome itself opening up, and a dozen other monsters that had walked the streets of this city when it was still alive. All of them fought and all of them defeated and for what? Every small battle that was ever won only served to remove the feebler enemies, leaving the strongest behind. This Time War, he thought as he entered the main chamber and stepped carefully over the rubble, is the inevitable consequence of interference. When these aliens knew they had an adversary out there, someone who always defeated them, always triumphed, it gave them ambition. It forced those races who might otherwise have stayed on their miserable homeworlds, picking fights with one another until they annihilated themselves, to find better technology, better weapons, and to set their sights on the stars, to find and destroy that enemy.
Whatever happened in this war, the Valeyard thought, there is no question as to who was guilty.
He kicked the dust and dead weeds from a long piece of fallen stone and read the inscription. Resurgam , it said. I will rise again. He gave a slight sneer and was about to head off, knowing that the building had a crypt, and therefore somewhere underground where things might be hidden, when a flash of movement caught his eye. Something had dashed past one of the open side doors. The Valeyard hurried to the door and came out onto the side of a hill, into the mist and drizzle, and scanned the forest.
There was no sign of any of the guards, but a shape flitted down the line of the ancient street and disappeared into the trees. The Valeyard ran after it, listening for the sound of thrashing in the undergrowth above the tattoo of the rain against the leaves.
A few feet ahead, a figure in a dark cloak and cowl sprinted through the trees. He was sure it wasn’t one of their team. The Valeyard stood for a while, trying to work out what was going on. Perhaps it was one of the human survivors, but they should still be hiding in their underground settlements in this time period. He had never actually expected to find the Andromedans. Perhaps his memory was faulty. It was taking more time than he’d imagined to get used to this new form and now and then he felt a stray idea that evidently came from the Time Lord, Dolyn, invading his own ideas and purpose. He drew the staser weapon he’d taken as a precaution in case any local fauna had survived the Magnetron and carried on up the hill.
The figure veered off the line of the old street and headed north through the forest. The Valeyard climbed the hill after him, but by the time he reached the spot where the figure had disappeared, there was no sign of anyone.
‘Whoever you are,’ he called out, ‘there is no possibility of your escape. Your planet has been impounded by the High Council of Gallifrey. We know who you are. Surrender now and we may consider leniency.’
He waited, not actually expecting an answer, but the trick worked. Ahead, a twig snapped and gave him a direction to head in. He started off again, slowly this time, listening for movement. The trees clawed at him as if trying to hold him back but he pushed through, then came to a clearing and paused. The gilded statue of a woman, about nine feet tall, lay on its side. Her arms were outstretched on either side of her but one hand was embedded in the dirt beneath her. The other held a set of scales. She had once topped a building here, the Valeyard remembered, though there was no trace of it now. In front of the statue was the robed figure. It was impossible to make out any features beneath the cowl, but the Valeyard had the impression he was male, tall and slim, hands clasped calmly in front of him.
The Valeyard took aim. ‘Identify yourself.’
For a moment the figure did nothing. Then he raised one hand with ominous slowness and pointed to a spot on the ground between them. Without lowering his gun, the Valeyard edged a little closer and risked a look down at the place the figure indicated. A slab of Portland stone stuck out of the dirt like a bone poking through a wound, and on it was a small, bronze disk. The Valeyard took another step nearer to be sure he had seen the thing correctly. It was a Time Lord confession dial.
‘So, you’re one of Alzath’s comrades then,’ he said. The figure didn’t reply, but continued to point towards the confession dial.
‘I must say,’ the Valeyard continued, ‘your gall in coming here is somewhat impressive. But you understand, we know what you have been doing. We know why you have been doing it. And we are here to stop you.’
The figure moved its outstretched arm slightly as if to re-emphasise its point.
‘You think confessing now will save you?’ asked the Valeyard. The thought occurred to him, though, that if the Doctor was the ringleader of this operation, perhaps that’s what was in the confession. Still, if that dial was not intended for him specifically, it would send a jolt of energy through his body as soon as he touched it, painful and above all distracting, perhaps enough of a distraction to allow the figure to escape. Yes, the Valeyard thought, that was more likely to be the figure’s plan.
‘You must think me very stupid,’ he said. ‘A confession dial can only be opened by the intended recipient and you had no idea I was coming here.’
The figure remained as immobile as the statue of Justice behind him.
So long as he didn’t touch it directly, the Valeyard thought, it couldn’t harm him. He grabbed a handful of his outer robe and wound it around his hand, before he crouched on his haunches, never taking his eyes or his gun off the figure.
‘No matter what you do,’ he said, ‘you will fail. This war of yours will never happen. It will never be allowed to happen. Even if I stand alone, I will make sure of that.’
The Valeyard scooped up the dial, keeping the swathes of fabric between him and its surface. Despite his precautions he felt a jolt but not a painful one. It was more like something tugging on his robes at his back.
The Valeyard kept his gun aimed at his target but risked a look over his shoulder. A burst of light blinded him, as if a doorway had opened and allowed the unfiltered heat of a sun to blaze through. He stumbled, lost his balance for a moment and struggled to stay on his feet. He expected the figure to have fled but when he looked up, the man in the robes was still there, watching him. The force pulling him towards the light gathered strength. The Valeyard felt his feet slip on the dead leaves as he was drawn towards the it. There was nothing to grab hold of, nothing to stop him falling into that blaze.
‘Goodbye, Valeyard,’ said the figure. ‘Though I’m sure we’ll meet again.’
The Valeyard knew that voice. It was…but before he could think clearly about it, he was falling. The forest vanished and he was hurtling towards an ocean. Before he hit the water and passed out, he caught a glimpse of a castle, and was sure that parts of it were moving.