Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [61]
He slammed the palm of his hand down on a button.
It began raining in the TARDIS.
Primitive sprinkler technology, but as effective as any more exotic method of putting out a fire. The water doused the last of the flames and, most importantly, it cooled the room. The Doctor looked around to find the it gutted.
The whole room was stripped empty, the walls smudged with great streaks of soot. The bare floor was a maze of fine cracks. The console was the only thing that was still there. Water was running off it, on to the floor and down the plugholes that had just opened up.
The Doctor bolted the door then wiped some of the damp ash from the panels, trying to get a sense of the damage from the ruined displays. The TARDIS was able to repair its own structure, given some time, but wouldn’t be able to replace the contents he and his companions had amassed during their travels.
He slipped the book bag off, and tucked it under the console to keep it dry.
Checking what monitors he could, the Doctor was almost absurdly grateful to discover that two of the TARDIS’s three great libraries had survived unscathed. The walls of the TARDIS were strong, and the old girl had a strong defensive instinct. Emergency barriers had come down, keeping the blast away from the engines and other critical areas, channelling the energy towards. . .
The Doctor started running.
He followed the route the firestorm would have taken, licks of soot on the wall pointing the way like road signs. He left the console room and entered the main corridor to the depths of the ship. The walls were still warm, but there was little here for the fire to take. Where the hatches hadn’t been bat-tened down, it would be a different story. He passed an open door and had enough time, even running past, to see that Fitz’s room was a mass of charred wood and twisted remains.
127
This wasn’t his most pressing concern.
The Doctor instinctively knew some of the principles that controlled the TARDIS, and he’d picked up more on his travels. At the heart of the TARDIS
was the immense source of the energy that travelling through time and space required. When the TARDIS had been built, it had drawn its power from a link with his home planet: Gallifrey. The Doctor himself had also had some connection to the place. He’d suffered physical side effects for a long time, until that business in Henrietta Street in fact, because the link with home had been broken. The TARDIS, though, had survived. The only inference was that it had, at some point long before the destruction of Gallifrey, been fitted with an independent source of energy.
He arrived in the large stone crypt that housed that power source. The blast had rushed into it, wiping away the decoration and leaving only the structure.
The iron sphere in the centre was immense. It wasn’t really iron, any more than the TARDIS was really a police box, but that was how it appeared: a pockmarked globe of dark metal, around thirty feet in diameter, set into the floor. It had always reminded the Doctor a little of a closed eye.
The procedure, when there was an explosion or other energy release on board the TARDIS, was to channel the energy here, and send it down the link to the distant power source. An atomic bomb could go off on the surface of the sun without anyone noticing; the power needed to move one time machine, let alone a fleet of them, was many orders more than a mere star could muster.
The forces at the other end of the link must be beyond comprehension. So the fusion explosion would be sucked safely down the link, a drop in the ocean of what was at the other end.
But this only worked if there was a link, and the TARDIS no longer had any such link.
The emergency procedures hadn’t ever been changed. The energy had been channelled down here, right to the power source, but there was nowhere for it to go from there.
The iron sphere had cracked open.
An immense black eye was staring straight at him and through him, the message clear:
I know you.
The Doctor did not