Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [6]
She sat at Bonderev’s console and could only come up with one other question. ‘The English weather. Is it still hot?’
There was a cheer from below as Operations got the Gobi Desert back.
Surveillance Statellite NAVSAT 61 in geo-stationary orbit at a height of 59.82 miles above North-west Europe, accessed its memory and scanned for a comparative event.
It had identified a Grade 6 burst of neutrino activity in section A9 lasting 0.26 seconds. With no apparent trace source for the emission, NAVSAT 61 sent a routine Talk-to-Me option to NAVSAT 71 stationed over the North Atlantic.
NAVSAT 71 had no record of the emission. It ran a memory check. Suggestion: Comparable event. Possible relation to localized sunspot activity.
NAVSAT 61 withdrew the option of an Italic Alert on the information. Instead it sent a Retainer order to signpost the event for the UNIT Space Surveillance computers at Herstmonceux Control.
The computers recorded the messsage and inserted the relevant Retainer. The unidentified event was sift-selected and the data passed to Geneva HQ, where its print-out was folded neatly into oblivion halfway down a stack of continuous computer paper.
An unbidden alien presence had slipped through the surveillance net, as it had been accustomed to do for longer than the scribes could recall.
The sword Excalibur recognized the neutrino burst at Night Watch plus 1242.192 solar cycles. It also recognized a flare of tachyons and other superlucid particles which NAVSAT 61 could not even begin to notice.
The sword had recorded this activity pattern before.
The spells that bound its blade went to pre-alert mode.
This phase had been conjured nearly a thousand times, but unless direct contact was made with its secondary alert key, the sword’s spell status would return to basic observation mode after 600 seconds.
The new intruder slowly swept a broad scanning probe across the geomass, formulating and assessing the features and contours of the Avallion countryside as it went. It missed the sword’s receptors by 159 miles.
300 seconds.
The probe swept back and missed again, recording only the shoreline of the lake.
The sword waited. 500 seconds.
On the third sweep. the probe met Excalibur’s open key head on.
Contact. The incantation was complete. The sword’s recloaking spell was a closed option. The fire in the pommel amethyst flared.
Magic and logic in conjunction.
Excalibur remembered the like mind of the TARDIS
and blasted out a greeting worthy of the 1242.192 years it had waited.
The battered blue police box hovered three miles above the Bristol Channel, a tiny silhouette against the first light of the dawn sky. The Gallifreyan Time and Space ship, an outmoded but still vigorous TARDIS, swayed in its position, compensating for the 15-knot air current at this altitude.
Its systems retrieved major topographical features from previous information and overlaid them on the newly scanned data from its probe. Moments later it was producing an updated map of Britain in the late 1990s.
More industrial development and more water. Several major changes to the structure of the coastline. Two lowlying areas had disappeared below sea level and there were a number of new islands.
At the pilot’s request, the TARDIS double-checked that it had marked in a suburban development known locally as Perivale.
The ship’s task was almost complete when Excalibur’s greeting invocation slammed into its sensory systems. The spell bypassed the initial receiver grid and hit direct into the TARDIS’s artron centre like a barrage.
All over the northern hemisphere, radio listeners and TV viewers dashed to turn off their receivers. CB breakers and radio hams tore off their headphones in agony.
Telephone users flung down their handsets. Computer systems crashed. The complete NAVSAT surveillance net went dead.
The TARDIS dropped three hundred metres in five seconds and kept dropping. In shock, the ship had channelled all its power into cutting back the barrage.
Automatic systems began to shut