Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [13]
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28
Six hours of searching and Marnal’s voice had an edge of panic, now. He’d built his cold-fusion reactor from things he’d found under the sink, and connected it up. He’d not found Gallifrey, but he’d found that some of the stars and planets nearby had disturbed orbits. This was a sign that something catas-trophic had happened.
‘It’s been attacked. It’s the only explanation. The scrolls said that. . . no.
What’s done is done. It can’t be undone. It’s written. We have to find out who did this terrible thing.’
Rachel frowned. ‘It can’t have gone. It’s a planet. Don’t you think you should recheck your results again?’
Marnal turned on her. ‘A terrible injustice has been done. The planet of the Time Lords, a civilisation twenty thousand centuries old, the one you loved to read about as a child, a place of such beauty and power that it makes your heaven seem profane, has gone, and gone forever. Someone destroyed it.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know, not yet. But now I have my memories back, I know of many who might have wanted to do it. There are so few with the necessary power.
It could have been the Klade, the Tractites, the Ongoing. It could have been Centro, but. . . no. In the end, none of them operate on such a scale. None of them would dare do such a thing.’
‘But you can find out who did it?’
‘Yes. I know ways I can track down the culprits.’
‘And then what?’
Marnal paused to put his blue blazer back on, then: ‘I told you. We’ll hunt them down and destroy them in turn.’
‘You said that. But if they can blow up whole planets, how can we stop them?’
‘I’m not sure I can. Not this time. But I have to try.’
Marnal was stalking around his dining table, talking to himself but expecting Rachel to listen to what he was saying.
‘Whatever destroyed Gallifrey would have to be time active, and very powerful. It – or they – could be anywhere in time and space. I need to put some thought into how I can find them.’
A flash of inspiration hit Rachel. ‘Couldn’t you just tune in to history and look at the destruction of Gallifrey itself? See it happen, then follow whoever did it?’
‘No. The destruction of the planet unleashed a vast ripple in the space-time continuum, one that makes it impossible to navigate or even see the area of devastation. Gallifrey cannot be observed, at any point in its history. Not any more.’
‘Oh. Shame.’
29
Marnal was pacing around the room.
‘What’s all this about the fourth and fifth dimension?’ Rachel asked.
She’d brought a couple of his novels with her to the dining room. If they really contained the secrets of the universe they might be worth struggling through. She’d started on The Beautiful People. So far, though, it was just The Da Vinci Code all over again.
‘Time and space,’ Marnal said. ‘Relative dimensions, you see.’
‘Oh,’ Rachel said again.
Marnal slapped his head. ‘Wait! That’s it! There will be a trail in the fifth dimension.’
He started adjusting the mixing-desk controls again.
The bottle grew dark again, the stars came out.
Marnal peered in. ‘It’s a question of seeing things in five dimensions. Yes. I think. . . ’
He stepped back.
There was a swirling psychedelic pattern in the bottle now, instead of the galaxies. A column of grey light that broke up into lines, then a colourful mass of concentric squares, a howling tube of blue light and what looked like stars, then a lurid purple galaxy. It struck Rachel that it would make a great screen saver.
All the time, Marnal was adjusting the settings, twisting dials on the mixing desk and then checking the bottle, as if he was tuning a television set.
‘We’re going to see who destroyed Gallifrey,’ he announced.
Images started smearing across the screen. Ghostly half-pictures, pictures of nothingness, of insectile things and abstract mechanisms. Something that looked like an orchid briefly flickered and faded.
‘Nearly there,’ Marnal