Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [7]
Amid loud protests from the crew, the lights went out, the ventilation faltered and the sensors died.
The falling TARDIS struggled to regain its senses and failed. Its reflexes were traumatized and its instincts swamped. It was deaf, dumb, blind and its artron mainframe was devoid of a single coherent thought impulse.
The ship pitched gracefully sideways as the barrage greeting drowned out the crew’s yells and even the sound of the air that screamed past outside.
The earth was rising eagerly to meet the dead TARDIS
when a sudden surge of energy pulsed through the ship’s systems. The assault on its senses began to be countered and contained.
Its first sluggish new thought was a remembrance that it had a pilot who was capable of taking over manual control.
At least when he could get the sequences correct.
Override signals and stabilizer inputs flickered urgently into the TARDIS’s neural systems. The police box’s free fall gradually slowed in response to the pilot’s guidance and finally steadied back into hover mode at just two hundred metres above the surface.
With the pilot in control, the ship’s artron centre began to think clearly again. But the invocation still pulsed. As other systems were restored, the ship was free to analyze its personal greeting.
‘I am here,’ said the message in Gallifreyan.
‘Identity?’ sent the TARDIS.
‘Myselfe,’ came the response in Early English.
There followed a sequence of runes which the TARDIS
language bank did not recognize, but the source clearly assumed that they would be familiar.
The message was transmitting on a wide spread of spectral and extra-spectral frequencies to the exclusion of everything else.
None of the data connected or made sense. But that was routine. The TARDIS was not defeated in its task. It had one further resource to employ. It resumed standard procedure and relayed the message up to its control interface. From there the pilot might deal with it.
Alone in his darkened control room, the Doctor watched an auxiliary screen stop rolling and juddering. While its readout settled slowly back to a safe level, he flicked up three more filter switches in the hope that they might stabilize the energy distribution.
By instinct or symbiosis with his timeship, the Doctor sensed the crisis easing. The TARDIS’s convulsion had given him a nasty turn, but although its power still fluxed, he felt the stresses relax like claws letting go of his nerve endings. He cored in two more stabilizers just to be certain.
The crisis had lasted less than two minutes, but the Doctor felt suddenly exhausted. A great weight pressed on his mind, like the whole of the unimaginable future toppling backwards, and he was the only support it had.
He thought to push forward, but feared that the reversed potential might start a Donimo Surge. He saw an uncontrolled ripple of collapsing time, growing infinitely, smashing against every alternative at every second of every future, until the tidal wave plunged the whole of Creation into an empty abyss of Chaos.
He dared not move for fear of what he might start. He was trapped by a hypothetical possibility. But that was the tightrope he walked, balancing precariously across time and space, between one alternative and another, over a pit of a billion more.
He gripped the edge of the control console and took a deep breath. His eardrums still fizzed with the aftereffects of the barrage. He wanted his hat. He would feel better with his panama hat and his paisley scarf.
His grip on the control console tightened. What was he thinking of? Somewhere at the back of his mind, he had the feeling that someone was trying to tell him something, but he could not decide exactly who.
Across the chaos of the dimly lit console room, he saw movement from a tangled heap of furniture by the outer doors. As the ship systems slowly filtered back, it occurred to him that he had a companion.
‘Mmph,’ said the heap.
A brass church lectern shaped like an eagle lay across the top of the pile. The Doctor tapped it cautiously with his knuckles. There was no response,