Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [80]
(There was a world, being sucked through a gap in time, the souls of its people devoured in the jaws of immortal monsters.)
There was something else, Guest realised. Alien images that seeped through the Cold and hovered on the edges of his consciousness. The pressure increased, and teeth made of nuclear fusion punctured tiny holes in the skin of the Cold.
(Immortal monsters. Alien monsters. Many things, not one thing. Universes full of horror. Endless agony, endless slavery, endless entropy.)
All around the ship, the pressure was getting worse. The people of Anathema were falling to their knees, barely able to breathe, the tension crushing the delicate machinery of the receivers, filling their heads with nightmares of the future.
(And the people. The people on those worlds. Screaming. Black light in the sky. Six billion human minds, bent out of shape, wrenched out of existence.)
The limbs of the Cold convulsed, contracted. All across the ship, the hull began to buckle, the black nonmetal crumpling as the Cold took a deep breath and prepared to scream into the vacuum.
(The Time Lords were building weapons.)
The ground under Anathema cracked, and
(There was a planet about to die.)
the surface began to collapse, the people
(All the people, all the animals, all the babies, all the beagles, all the kittens, eaten alive by the Cold.)
running for cover, trying to work out which way to run,
(One girl screaming, her family being sucked into the sky, their faces blank and empty.)
but the buildings were shaking, bending, not just the ground but space-time itself starting to collapse in on itself,
(Billions of souls, billions of bodies, eaten by the Cold.)
the effect of the same technology that millions of years ago had been used by the Time Lords to open up the universe next door, now let loose on Anathema,
(But there was no Cold.)
on Earth,
(There was no Cold, not really.)
on humanity,
(Do you understand, Guest?)
on the entire future of this galaxy,
(There-is‐no-Cold.)
on the future of every galaxy,
(THERE-IS‐NO-COLD!)
because of a stupid war that nobody understood anyway, and –
– and Anathema was bending, and –
– the pressure –
– the ship cracking open –
– and the weapons system, seconds away from detonation, less than seconds –
– and –
‘There is no Cold!’ screamed Guest.
– and the ship paused.
Anathema stopped shaking.
I’m sorry? said the ship. Was that an instruction?
Guest let himself relax. Let his mind reach out across the decks of the ship, through the power systems, into the bowels of the engines.
‘Go,’ he said.
So the ship went.
* * *
The Media:
Scene 63. Space
[We pan across the skies, and it isn’t difficult to work out that we’re in Earth’s solar system. We see the sun, then Mercury, then Venus, then Earth itself. Soon we focus on another object, just a few million kilometres from the third planet. It’s the Time Lord warship, a vast disc drifting through the vacuum, heading for its age-old destination.
[Then there’s sound. It’s a wheezing, groaning sound, but so loud, so fundamental, that it’s audible even here, even where there’s no air and noise is supposed to be impossible. Like the grinding of a hundred thousand TARDIS engines.
[Slowly, the warship fades away, until there’s nothing in front of us but empty space.]
* * *
Sam:
Sam watched the warship dematerialise. She didn’t know how she could see it, how there could possibly be a camera out in space to take the pictures. But then this wasn’t real, was it? It was just the media.
She glimpsed images of scared people, crawling from the ruins, staring into huge gashes in the ground. She saw the atmosphere above Anathema, the red sky boiling and crackling as the ship moved through the vortex. And she saw the thing at the heart of the world, the big black mass