Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [75]
The Cold was in the dead centre of the sphere, in defiance of the local gravity, a pure-black globe inside a pure-black globe. He didn’t even try to estimate how big it was, how many hundreds of metres in diameter, how much mass it must have. He found his eyes sinking into its body, hypnotised by the things that pulsed and wriggled across its surface. As he watched, a face the size of a Drashig pushed against the sphere from the inside, its huge teeth trying to bite through the membrane. Two enormous clawed hands thrashed around under the skin, doing their best to break the surface tension. Gigantic black wings flexed in skeletal sockets.
Then the apparition was gone, lost in the mass of features, its body disintegrating into clusters of snapping mouths. And yet, somehow, the sphere remained a sphere. There were thick black tendrils sprouting from its surface, great sticky arms that bored through the inner surface of the chamber, but other than that the globe kept its shape, an unbroken ball of biomass and transdimensional engineering. Guest had no idea where the tendrils went to. He doubted he’d ever find out.
‘Oh,’ said the girl. He didn’t know how long she’d been standing next to him. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know how long he’d been here, staring at the Cold.
‘My,’ the girl went on.
‘God,’ she concluded, after a pause.
Guest looked over his shoulder. The Doctor stood next to the girl, his one good hand on her shoulder. The others were huddling in the TARDIS doorway behind him, peering out at the closest thing to God they’d ever see.
‘Spack,’ hissed Kode. Succinctly.
‘What is this place?’ asked the Doctor.
Guest swept his arm across the vast expanse of the sphere, taking in the massive arc of the wall. ‘The barrier Rassilon built, when he locked all the greater loa out of the universe. Look at it. The Cold’s straining against some kind of field, you can tell.’
The Doctor didn’t look convinced, though. ‘And this is all in some other dimension?’
Guest ignored him. Why was he asking such unimportant questions at a time like this?
‘Slightly odd,’ the Doctor muttered.
‘How slightly odd?’ the girl Sam muttered back.
‘Extremely slightly odd.’
‘So, how are you going to free it?’ asked Compassion.
A good question. A very good question. Guest looked around, searching the walls – wall – for some kind of control mechanism. He couldn’t see anything, and of course, there was nobody he could ask –
Wait.
The Faction’s rituals. The Cold was one of the creatures of Paradox, true? One of the loa. The Faction hadn’t told Guest anything about communicating with it directly, but surely, it couldn’t be hard.
Guest spread his arms wide, and concentrated on the faces of the Cold. He didn’t know whether the loa would understand the gesture, but he had to try.
‘Can you hear me?’ he asked.
And suddenly there were signals flooding through his receiver, a whole cavalcade of transmissions, on every frequency he could imagine. The voice of the Cold, flooding his synapses. Talking on all possible wavelengths at once.
Yes, said the Cold.
Guest heard voices behind him. The sound of a struggle. He wondered whether Kode and Compassion were hearing it, too, whether the Doctor was taking the opportunity to disarm them. It didn’t matter. It was too late.
‘I want you,’ said Guest.
Something else swept through the receiver. Another message. Silent, but deafening.
Look up, said the Cold.
So Guest looked up.
There was a tentacle. Stretching out from the body of the Cold. Filling up all of Guest’s senses, so he couldn’t see anything else, not the rest of the loa’s body, not the wall of the prison,