Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [101]
‘The name was coined after your time,’ the Doctor said.
‘Tegan means your time capsule.’
‘Not mine: my husband’s. It is near here.’ She rubbed her temple, as if she could hear it calling to her.
‘We need to initiate temporal fusion,’ the Doctor told Patience. He explained the procedure to her, rattling off a string of long words that Tegan didn’t even try to understand Patience listened, nodding every so often.
‘I can’t return home,’ Patience told him.
‘I know.’ The Doctor placed his hand on Patience’s thigh, so casually that it took a moment for Tegan to be surprised by the intimacy. It wasn’t the sort of thing the Doctor did. ‘We can remove the Time Control Unit from your husband’s TARDIS and operate it remotely. It will return to Gallifrey, and you can remain here, with me. All traces of your journey will be erased.’
Patience smiled, placing her hand over his. ‘Doctor –
look!’ Tegan called out. Outside, the cloud pulsed and rippled.
‘What’s that?’ the Doctor asked. The sky reminded Tegan of the surface of a duckpond just after a stone had been thrown into it. When she told the Doctor as much, he grabbed her arm.
‘Run, Tegan! Find Nyssa!’
* * *
There was a dot of light at the epicentre of the hole in the clouds. It was growing, glinting in the light.
In the distance, all around, there was a faint rumbling.
It was growing louder, second by second, but there was no way of saying where it was coming from.
The wind was picking up, soon reaching gale force.
The shape in the sky was large enough to see, now. It was a globe, pale blue. Impossible to judge the scale of anything that far up - like trying to work out how large a cloud is by relating it to things on the ground.
The size of a marble now, sonic booms reverberating all around as it punches through the stratosphere. Clouds parting like the Red Sea, thick beams of sunlight forming leaning columns of light from the heavens to the ground a spotlight on the falling object.
The size of a tennis ball. It’s pale blue, with markings all over the surface. Flames dance on the lower hemisphere as the friction burns the metal hull.
The size of a melon, but still impossibly high. It’s artificial, not a meteor. But it isn’t a conventional spacecraft: they skip across the levels of the atmosphere, like a flat stone on the sea. Spacecraft descend in gentle parabolas, they glide in, slowing down as they go by deploying parachutes, retro rockets or antigravs.
The size of a football, and still among the clouds, so it’s bigger than the largest aircraft or hot-air balloon. There’s a burning line scored in the sky. In the wake of the object the sky has caught fire.
Beachball. It’s dropped beneath the clouds and now it fills the sky. The wind is screaming as the air is sliced in half. Doubling in size every second, it’s now possible to judge that it is the size of ten cathedrals.
Antigravs fire at the last possible second, the underside of the Battle Platform barely clears the roof of the Nightingale Facility. It dwarfs the hospital, eclipsing the sun.
For a moment it hangs there.
Night had fallen, along with the sky.
The floor was carpeted with shards of glass. They crunched and tinkled as Tegan ran over them. Chris and Nyssa were ahead of her, at a double door at the end of the corridor. The glowbes that lined the ceilings were automatically adjusting their lighting levels.
There were screams: men and women, above and below.
Tegan found herself sharing their fear and incomprehension. She refused to succumb to it, concentrating on catching up with Nyssa and her friend.
He was trying to trip an electronic lock with some device or other. Both had got dressed while she and the Doctor had been away: Cwej was in a tuxedo, Nyssa in a green silk dress that left little to the imagination.
‘Who’s screaming?’ she asked.
‘The inmates here,’ Chris said. ‘This place is a