Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [110]
‘The Sontaran delegation want to talk to you, sir, they say that their leader has been kidnapped.’
They walked over the drawbridge, into Omega’s fortress. The moat was dry, covered in grass.
Inside was a long corridor, lit by burning torches. The ceiling was low, the floor was bare flagstones. There were no doorways leading off, just a set of double doors a hundred yards or so in front of them.
‘Fascinating décor,’ the Doctor noted, his words not even echoing from the masonry.
‘Omega maintains only what he needs here.’
The Doctor jabbed his thumb back over his shoulder. ‘That garden is hardly functional.’
‘That is his gift to me, he grants me the power to tend it.’
The double doors at the end of the corridor swung open as they reached them. They stepped into the throne room together. The room was triangular, with a simple vaulted ceiling. The door they had just come through was at one point of the triangle. The throne itself was on a raised dais opposite. It was a vast upholstered thing, with a high back and vast arms, but it reminded the Doctor of an armchair more than anything else.
There were darkened archways leading off in all directions. A full-length mirror sat by the throne. The only other feature was a vast fireplace, with a roaring fire.
The Doctor watched the flames dancing in the hearth, as fascinated as a moth might have been. He wanted to reach out, let the fire lick his hand.
‘The source of his power,’ she told him.
‘A fire?’
She shook her head, smiling. ‘That’s how he chooses to represent the singularity. It gives him control over the physical laws in this universe.’
They stepped over to it, and the Doctor looked into the flame. When a certain type of black hole formed, all the matter and energy it contained collapsed in on itself, the immense gravitation condensing and condensing the material until it reached infinite density. That condition repealed some of the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics, breaking down the ordinary distinctions between matter and energy, space and time. Instead of ‘normality’, there was just quantum… well, at the point a singularity formed, words couldn’t to hope to explain what was going on. Theoretically it allowed anything to emerge, anything to happen. A state of singularity was how the universe had been created, and this is how it would end. Usually, the fact that all such singularities were locked away safely behind event horizons kept them from affecting the universe. Trapped behind the event horizon himself, Omega had found a way to bring the theory into practice, a way of harnessing the power of the singularity. He had shaped it to his will.
‘I imagine that it will also let him channel anti-matter through the Effect to give him an practically inexhaustible supply of energy in our universe.’
‘That’s more your field than mine,’ she replied.
‘It’s evil,’ the Doctor told her. ‘Can’t you hear it whispering?
A sound like a lullaby?’
‘DOCTOR.’
The voice seemed to come from all around, as if it was being relay by a loudspeaker system. Despite that, the Doctor could sense that the source of the voice was to his right, emerging from one of the archways nearest the throne.
Anyone who had been to the Panopticon would have recognised the man who stepped out, although most would have been surprised by his sheer size. He was over seven feet tall, and broad with it. His hug muscular shoulders and a beard that curled down his chest only emphasised that this was an ogre of a man.
He wore a purple cloak that reached to the floor, hissing as it was dragged over the flagstones. Was there a hint of a limp there? The Doctor couldn’t be sure, it might just be the weight of the golden armour. He wore a helmet, one that was almost fitted to his skull, encasing the back of his head, covering his hair. Great ram’s horns sprang from the temples, curled behind his ears, sweeping back around until their tips faced forwards and upwards. The Doctor wasn’t sure whether the horns were part of the helmet or not.
He dragged