Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [62]
He knew he had to get closer. As he moved towards the great eye he could see the room flickering. He held his hand up in front of him and saw a double, then a triple image. Radiation sickness? It made people nauseous, but that wasn’t it – there wouldn’t be any radiation. Time and space were being made 128
to move in ways that weren’t possible outside this room.
The Doctor walked around, inspected the damage carefully. The sphere wasn’t fully open, he was surprised to see. Even after taking the full blast of an atomic explosion, there were only pinholes in it. But this wasn’t a question of degree. Either the immense forces were sealed from the rest of the universe or they weren’t. It was right that they were. Even pinhole views of what was inside the sphere filled the room.
He stepped away from the sphere and went over to the small control panel on the back wall. He reached for the lever that would seal the breaches.
The Doctor hesitated.
I can show you what you need to know.
The Doctor shook his head. It sounded like a man’s voice. He looked back over his shoulder to the sphere, watched time twisting around the breaches like swirls of smoke. It was beautiful, a little hypnotic, like staring into a fire.
He turned to get a better look, reached out his hand.
I know, should I tell?
This time there was no hesitation.
‘Yes.’
Come closer, then.
The Doctor walked over to the sphere. He felt so small next to it. He placed his eye over one of the pinholes, stared right into the heart of the TARDIS.
Time shifted.
129
Interlude
Intervention
The Shoal.
The charts describe it simply as an asteroid plain clinging to 1 per cent of the galactic rim, but this gives no sense of its scale. It is about two thousand light years long, three hundred deep, thirty high. Or, to put it another way, it has about eighteen million times the volume of a typical solar system.
The asteroid density varies enormously from place to place, with some areas almost void, some a swirling mass of boulders and icebergs. The size of individual asteroids ranges from chips to worlds larger than Earth with their own rings and moons. There are nebulae, but they are gossamer, not the great stellar nurseries to be found in the galaxy itself. There are no suns here, but the Shoal is close enough to the galaxy for there to be light. A crisp night’s sky on one side, a black void on the other.
Scientists rarely studied the Shoal, and hadn’t given much thought to its origins – either it was a remnant of the galaxy’s formation, like the shells of comets found around most solar systems, or it was bits of cosmic debris pulled here from intergalactic space by the galaxy’s gravity. There were more pressing matters to investigate than determining which was the oase.
The long-held assumption is that there is no life in the Shoal, and no reason for life to come here. The long-held assumption has recently been disproved.
Three craft emerge soundless from the Vortex.
They have arrived in one of the Concentrations, sunless parodies of solar systems. A particularly large body would attract clouds and belts of rock and ice into orbit around it, and the larger asteroids would coalesce to become moons and attract their own satellites in turn. These were inert places, with nothing like the energy or elements needed to ignite a new star. The orbits were weak, prone to disturbance. Rogue planets would drift in or out of the systems with little incentive to stay. There were many hundreds of thousands of such places in the Shoal, all unchartable, let alone uncharted.
The ships’ chameleon circuits start kicking in, adopting battle configuration.
As they speed towards the second planet of the system they sprout long fins and weapons modules. The exact design is left to each ship, with one coming 131
to resemble a snowflake, another a simple pyramid, the third