Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [63]
Their detector beams are already sweeping the system. One catches an outpost, a small colony in the outlying asteroid cloud. The squadron pitches up and round towards it, bringing its weapons to bear.
The asteroid bears distinctive marks – needle-like towers of dirt, giving off a strong thermal signal. The squadron quickens its pace, taking advantage of some of the more obscure, unrepealed by-laws of physics, until it is travelling a little faster than lightspeed.
There is no way, then, that the asteroid could know what hits it. As they pass the three ships release pulses of white light, which shatter the spires, find fault lines in the rock, continue to pound away. A third of the asteroid breaks off under the bombardment, blown clear by the pulverising explosions. As one, the squadron swoops around and performs a second attack run, passing through the light left behind by their first approach, reducing what remains of the asteroid to rubble.
The pilot of the flagship stands at his console, surrounded by two overlaid realities: amplified representations of the space around the ship, and the control deck itself.
‘Target destroyed, my lord,’ one of the other ships is reporting.
‘Reset detector beams, lock on to the next energy sign.’
The spoken command is a mere formality. The ships and their crews are already working together as one, doing just that. Command, communication and control all so fast that the ships outpacing their own photons seem almost too sluggish to respond.
‘Aye.’
The squadron dives towards the next target, the outer planet.
There are small lakes of methane ice, and a rift valley system that probably marks out where a number of rocks jammed together to form the planet. The detectors are finding spires again, and there are even a few pinpricks of light.
Below the surface the planetoid is squirming with mindless life.
The squadron breaks formation just above the surface, each ship independently seeking targets. Each one rains energy bolts down, felling the towers, 132
obliterating each source of light, darting to avoid the devastation before regrouping to cause some more. Then they pull away as one, forming up again.
Behind them, the planetoid explodes, the brightest light this area of space has ever seen, the shock wave racing through the system and perturbing the delicate status quo.
The ships are already far away, locked on course for the central mass, the
‘sun’ of this Concentration, the axis around which everything turned. The main nest of the monsters. All three ships are scanning the planet, compiling data. There is nothing alive on the surface, but there are countless life forms under it. More than even they could count.
He had seen a dead cobblemouse once, turned it over to find it wasn’t a mouse any longer, but a mass of maggots packing out the animal’s pelt. That was what this planet was, a husk containing mindless, aggressive life forms who would make every planet in the galaxy like this if they weren’t stopped.
There is an enormous energy trace coming from the planet.
‘What is it?’ he hears over the communications system. He has no idea.
Amplified, it looks like many hundreds of beams, coming from the surface and moving like searchlights through five dimensions.
‘They’re looking for us,’ he concludes.
‘Their technology is more advanced than we thought.’
‘Should we take evasive action, my lord?’
‘They can’t harm us, even if they do see us.’
His ship is shuddering even as he finishes the sentence.
The lights in the control room flicker.
What is going on?
‘Focus detector beam at the following point.’
A stream of numbers runs