Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [86]
The screen lit up again, showing the Doctor in the middle of an animated conversation. The camera panned across, and showed Adric replying. These were pictures from earlier from the transmat room. They were taken from Forrester’s point of view, from the camera mounted in the helmet of her stolen armour. Without letting Forrester see what she was doing, Whitfield dialled up the Adjudicator database and searched for information on the stolen freighter.
‘The Doctor has regenerated,’ she told Forrester while she worked. ‘Where is he now?’
‘He looks even goofier with the sound turned down doesn’t he?’
‘You’ve just changed the subject.’
‘I need to get back to the Machine.’
‘That’s out of the question.’
‘I was meant to activate it again after fifteen minutes.’
‘You’ve missed that deadline already.’
‘I know, but... has that freighter turned up on the register of stolen ships yet?’
The ship’s registration details had just appeared, along with a message that no officers were to approach it. ‘My people are searching the plateau. The Doctor will not be able to hide from them.’
Forrester was straining to look over her shoulder at the computer display. ‘That ship’s come from somewhere outside this system. Where?’ Before Forrester had finished, the computer had supplied the answer: the freighter was assigned to the Third Fleet, so it ought to be on border patrol in the Seventh Galactic System. The Fleet was under the command of an Admiral Dattani.
Ten years ago at the All Worlds Science Fair on Dellah, Whitfield had been Senior Protector and had led her planet’s delegation. Medford had been there handling the security arrangements, a mutually beneficial arrangement, and the longest period that the two of them had been together for many years. One of his most loyal subordinates had been a Pakislovak called Dattani, a member of the Unitatus like ‘Lian. Medford had told her many years later that Dattani had gone on to do well in the Space Fleet.
Whitfield felt a sense of betrayal. She isolated it at once, analysing the feeling in her stomach and right at the back of her head.
There was a commotion at the door.
Adric, the mathematician who had accompanied the Doctor, was there, being led in by a couple of her men, including the Prorector.
‘We found him climbing down from the plateau, Chief Scientist.’
‘He was alone?’
‘Yes, ma’am. We took a couple of jetpacks up there.
There’s no sign of anyone else, but we found a second suit of Adjudicator armour.’
‘Don’t worry about that, it was only this lad’s disguise,’
Whitfield assured the Protector. ‘Where is the Doctor?’ she asked Adric. The boy was exchanging worried glances with Forrester.
‘We need to tell her, Roz.’
Forrester nodded. ‘The Machine was only activated once,’ she explained. ‘So now the Doctor is trapped in another universe. We need your help to get him out.
The Doctor was trying to explain the consequences of time travel to Tegan as Adam lead them down through the bowels of the snowship. At first the Doctor had talked about tachyon tides and negative reality inversions. That might have been science, but it was gobbledegook to Tegan. So he’d resorted to an extended analogy: ‘The Universe is like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly by a good enough doctor.
Paradoxes are just the scar tissue.’ He paused. ‘But if that damaged TARDIS was allowed to enter the Vortex it would be... a massive heart attack. Emergency treatment would be needed, followed by intensive care. The Universe would never fully recover, and there would always be the risk of a relapse.’
Tegan had always prided herself on having a cosmopolitan outlook. At school, her friends’ ambitions had reached no further than the local factories and shops.
Her classmates had always laughed at her when she said she wanted to see the world. She’d struggled to pass her HSC, they said, and so she would end up stacking shelves until she found the right man and married him, just like everyone else. But Tegan wanted to travel. She