Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [61]
From up here, Sam could get some idea of the scale of the place. The fighter was too far away for her to be able to make out any individual buildings, but she could see the patterns in the city, the ripples of architecture around the points where the transmitters had been planted. She could make out the edges of the settlement, as well; the whole of Anathema had to be about forty kilometres from side to side, the same kind of size as London. And around it… blackness. The smooth black surface of whatever it was the city had been built on. No other cities, no suburbs. The city ended, and beyond that, zilch.
So what was it the city had been built on? As the fighter got further away, Sam began to get some idea. She kept staring out of the cockpit, watching the settlement shrink, until it was just a tiny spot of grey against the blackness.
And the blackness was a rectangle. Sam didn’t know what to make of that. An enormous oblong, with Anathema at its dead centre. If the city was forty klicks from side to side, then the rectangle had to be… oh, say, six or seven thousand kilometres long, and about a thousand wide. The rectangle was just hanging there in space. No planets or satellites around it. Just hanging there.
‘It’s the ship,’ Compassion said, helpfully
‘You said that before,’ Sam muttered. ‘It still doesn’t tell me anything. Anathema’s part of a ship, is that it?’
Compassion snorted. ‘No. It’s built on the side of a ship. The ship was around for billions of years before the Faction got to it. It’s supposed to have a force field covering the whole surface, but the Faction found a couple of flaws in the structure. Age, I suppose. They sniffed out a gap in the force field, set up Anathema on the hull there. They had to put an atmosphere bubble around it, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ agreed Sam. ‘I still don’t get it. Why build the city on the side of a ship?’
Compassion sighed. ‘Wait a minute. I’ll show you.’
She did something else to the controls. The fighter stopped moving away from the ship – stopped moving ‘up’, away from the city – and started to move forward. Sam kept her eyes on the rectangle, and saw it begin to change shape, to widen, to…
Oh God.
It wasn’t a rectangle. The thing had been so black, she hadn’t been able to get a grip on the perspective, but now she could see it. It was a disc. The rectangle was the side of a disc, and, as the fighter changed position, the upper side of the shape slowly became visible. A disc, six or seven thousand kilometres across, with a surface area of… well, why bother with the maths? With a surface area of millions and millions and millions of square kilometres. And it was just a few million kilometres from Earth, right inside the solar system. Bloody hell. There had to be planets in the system smaller than this thing. A great black coin that seemed to have gone completely unnoticed by every astronomer on Sam’s homeworld.
By the light of the stars, she tried to make out the details of the disc. She saw stars shining through its mass, and for a moment she thought it was hollow, maybe a hoop, maybe like one of those ‘space wheels’ the Americans were talking about setting up, a big spoked bicycle wheel in the sky. But no, it was more complex than that. The disc was engraved with a pattern, a glyph that must have been etched with tools the size of Australia. Several vast sections of the disc’s body had been cut away to complete the pattern, letting the starlight shine through from the other side.
The pattern was a lot like the symbol Sam’s maths teacher had told her meant ‘infinity’. A figure eight, inside a circle. There was a smaller figure eight inside the larger one, though, and there were other embellishments around the edge of the disc, most of them barely visible with the naked eye. If the fighter got any closer to the thing, thought Sam, would she be able to see even smaller details? Whole continents of symbols, stretching across the face of the ship? How many generations had been spent designing the disc, carving out the markings?
But the basic shape was unmistakable.