Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [14]
The picture was resolving.
‘It’s a. . . What is that?’ Rachel wondered. It looked like a phone box, floating in space.
A fresh solar wind breathed over the battered police box. Harsh starlight dap-pled it, picked out the blue paint. It sat in a hard vacuum, with temperatures little above absolute zero, and in a belt of radiation that would instantly kill anyone who stepped from it. Nevertheless, it sat there nonchalantly as though it was a perfectly normal place for it to be.
Inside, the Doctor pulled up the handbrake, locking the TARDIS in position, then activated the scanner. They’d left Rome eight hours ago now. They’d moved on, and had a new problem to solve. Don’t dwell on the past, that was his motto.
30
The Doctor wasn’t sure why the TARDIS had materialised here. He wasn’t sure where ‘here’ was yet. It was well within a solar system, several hundred million miles away from the star. He had a quick look round using the scanner.
The sun here was dimmer than Earth’s – the Doctor guessed the absolute magnitude would be about 13.5 – but the night sky was much as it appeared from Earth, with all the familiar constellations, give or take a few. So they weren’t very far from Earth, relatively speaking. He couldn’t see any gas giants. The star flared slightly.
‘Ross 128,’ the Doctor concluded.
It was a little under eleven light years from Earth, in the constellation of Virgo. The Doctor checked the instruments, and – belatedly – they were coming to the same conclusion. He’d never been to Ross 128 before, as far as he remembered, but had heard only nice things about it.
Setting the coordinates of the TARDIS was like sticking a pin in a map. Not every landing was in a place of great interest or historical importance. The TARDIS usually ended up on a habitable planet, but not always. He checked the instruments. The TARDIS had picked up a signal of some kind.
The Doctor turned his head.
A man in a blue blazer and a blonde woman in jeans were watching him.
The woman was saying some wordless something. She looked agitated. The man was more calm. He replied, silently, then leant in, blocking the woman’s view – and the Doctor’s view of the woman. The two men stared at each other for a moment, across time and space. The Doctor recognised him. . . not by name, not even his face, but he knew him from somewhere.
Something terrifying crossed the Doctor’s mind, for the merest moment.
The scratching at the back of the TARDIS seemed to be inside his brain. Fu-elled by raw panic, he hurried to the console and flicked the rows of switches that activated as many of the TARDIS defence systems as he could think of, one after the other.
He moved around the console, his hands reaching for and tugging at controls on instinct. He slammed down on the emergency dematerialisation button. The central column started rising and falling, and its rhythm had a sooth-ing, lullaby effect on the Doctor’s hearts’ rate.
The link was broken and Fitz had his hand on the Doctor’s shoulder.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Fitz asked him. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost’s ghost.’
‘Did you see them?’ the Doctor asked, aware there was a tremble in his voice.
Fitz shook his head. ‘There’s no one here. Pull yourself together.’
The Doctor stepped away from the console, and used his new vantage point to look around the control room.
31
‘There was someone here?’ asked Fitz, clearly concerned.
‘Not physically. Not. . . not in three dimensions. They were just watching us.’
‘Looking inside the TARDIS? Is that possible?’
The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. ‘Evidently it is.’
‘Thank Christ they were looking in here, not my room. Could have been a bit embarrassing otherwise,’ Fitz noted.
‘What?’ The Doctor scowled.
‘Nothing,’ Fitz said quickly. ‘Why are you so freaked out?’
‘This is serious,’ the Doctor snapped.
‘Yeah, all right. So what do we do?’
‘You go back to your room.’
Rachel stepped back as the bottle went empty again. There had been something about the face of the man they’d seen.
Marnal was still peering into the