Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [8]
Ace was trapped at the bottom of the pile, pinned under the overturned chair she had been sitting in when the first lurch of the assault hit home. ‘I can’t hear you,’ she complained loudly before the Doctor had even said a word.
‘It’s only temporary... like most things,’ he muttered as he helped her up. But it also struck him that the familiar hum of his ship’s power systems was unusually quiet — or deliberately restrained. Everything sounded at least two rooms away.
‘What? I can’t hear you, Professor. I think I’ve gone deaf.’
She shook out her tangled hair and stuck her fingers in her.ars. The blast of sound that had hit her reminded her of the wickedest rock concert she had ever been to. On that occasion she had been deaf for two days — this felt five times worse.
She wondered if Time Lords were required to take a driving test before being let loose on the byways of the universe with an unsupervised time machine. The Doctor always seemed preoccupied with the irrelevant minutiae of his ship, rather than the general business of getting them from A to B in one piece.
He was about to key in a set of tabs, when a loud repetitive pulsing signal emerged from one of the speakers.
Instantly, the normal sounds of the TARDIS came back into aural focus.
Ace shook her head again. ‘Now what?’ she moaned.
‘What’s going on?’
The Doctor shot the control console an accusing glance.
A diagram flickered up on to a monitor. Vector lines diverged like a web in all directions from a central core.
Angular runes marked each line, shifting both colour and shape across the wide range of transmission frequencies from the fluting signal.
Ace peered over the Doctor’s shoulder at the screen.
‘What is that noise?’
‘A cry in the dark.’
Already well versed in the Doctor’s infuriating habit of keeping everything to himself, she began to draw her own conclusions. ‘Distress call?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Intergalactic Mayday?’
‘Possibly. Perhaps a summons. Or a warning. Of course it might be a greeting.’
‘It gives me the creeps, whatever it is.’
Just as she began to get some hang of the screen, the Doctor tapped instructions into a keyboard and the whole layout shifted in its perspective.
‘Extraordinary,’ he said.
The web lengthened out into a wire-frame tunnel down which they travelled. From every section of the frame, new webs of transmission vectors branched out.
‘It’s covering everywhere at once,’ he said. ‘And I do mean every conceivable where. Surging out through the cosmos. Forwards in time, backwards in time... and sideways.’
‘Sideways!’
‘Yes. Across the boundaries that divide one universe from another.’
Ace tried to appreciate that this flowery simplification was for her benefit. She preferred to translate it into something more clearly and scientifically defined.
‘So what you’re saying is that instead of the usual rectilinear propagation within the normative space/time continuum, this signal’s wavefront is omnidirectional along every axis of the temporal continuum.’
‘Yes.’
‘I still think it’s creepy. Who’s it for?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Well, where’s it coming from?’
He had already begun to key in a triangulation order, but before he had finished, a small coordinate readout appeared at the foot of the screen. The Doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s odd. It seems to be coming from Earth.’
‘Really? Whereabouts?’
‘Not just where... when? What point in time?’ He waited as more data began to print out across the screen and then announced, ‘Late twentieth-century Earth.’
‘It’s not coming from Perivale, is it?’
‘No,’ he said rather too quickly.
‘Phew!’
He was slightly surprised as the map he had just been compiling overlaid on the monitor. ‘West of London. Now who could be operating a transmitter of such stupendous power in Cornwall?’ He began to tap the rhythm of the signal out with his finger against the console.
‘Why don’t you decode the message?’ said Ace.
‘I’m positive that the technology isn’t right for this time...