Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [125]
‘Larna,’ he said, ‘Larna, Larna.’
She rested her head on his shoulder, unsure who was supporting who. ‘I thought you’d gone,’ she said.
The Doctor shrugged her off his shoulder and began looking around for an exit. ‘We have to hurry, the anti-matter/matter annihilations are increasing.’ As if to emphasis the point, the ground shook once more. ‘The breach in spacetime is growing wider.’
He had seen the TARDIS and started to stride towards it.
Larna caught his arm.
‘Slow down. Doctor, look, you’ll have to explain what’s going on.’ She indicated a pile of books, hoping that he’d sit down for a moment.
‘Sorry. Yes,’ he began, but carried on towards the time machine. ‘I’ll explain on the way.’
He reached the door, ran his hand across it.
Larna opened it with the key, and they stepped over the threshold.
The console room was warm and dry compared with the surface of the Needle People. The Doctor was stepping over to the console. Larna trailed after him, having to rub her wounded leg as she moved. ‘We have to wait for the Magistrate.’
The Doctor didn’t react, instead he started flicking switches and pulling levers, seemingly at random.
‘There’s no time. We must get back to Gallifrey.’
‘No!’ Larna shouted, but it was too late: the Doctor had thrown the dematerialisation switch. The central column began rising and falling rhythmically, and Larna could feel the power surging into the vast time engines beneath them.
The Doctor was hunched over the instruments, checking and rechecking the course he’d laid in. ‘We’ll travel directly down the timegate,’ he explained. ‘It’s a long journey, a couple of hours at least.’
He turned to her, looked at her properly for the first time since she’d rescued him. He smiled, a little awkwardly.
‘Your leg is in quite a state,’ he said. He began rummaging through his pockets. ‘I’ve got some iodine here, I think.’
‘Tell me what’s happening,’ she asked as he came over.
‘Why have we abandoned the Magistrate? What about Omega?’
He knelt down, peeled away the part of her Suit around her leg wound. He had found a small bottle and soaked his handkerchief with the contents. Now he pressed it to the wound, made her wince.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘What happened?’ she said, softly. ‘Savar said there was great power down there, but that –’
The Doctor placed a finger to her lip. She caught his wrist.
‘Tell me!’ she insisted.
‘I crossed the threshold,’ he said. ‘I passed into another universe. Anti-matter, regulated by a naked singularity.’
She let go of his wrist. Instead of returning it to his side, he stroked her cheekbone with his fingers and traced a course around her ear, before bringing it back.
‘The boundary between the universes of matter and anti-matter is a source of infinite, self-sustaining power. A sentient being can harness that power by using the singularity, and bring theories into fact, It literally allows you to do anything you can imagine – uncouple matter and energy, resolve paradoxes, redraft the laws of mathematics and physics.’
‘Including finding a solutions for the Agathon Equations?
Allowing whoever controls it to control the past?’
‘Yes. Just like Savar said. Omniscience ad omnipotence.’
She gasped a laugh. ‘Why come back?’
‘All that power comes from harnessing the singularity, and that’s behind the event horizon of the black hole, shut off from the rest of universe, like nature intended. It can only exist in the universe of matter.’
‘It –’ Larna began. The Doctor stared into her eyes. ‘Might it be possible to –’
His lip curled into a smile. ‘– to have a naked singularity in this universe?’ he finished for her.
‘It ought to be possible,’ she said. ‘We’d need to find a way evaporate a black hole to expose the quantum foam at the core. We’d then have to find a way to control the energies that were released First of all, we’d have to harness a black hole.’
The Doctor smiled. ‘Or to go somewhere where there’s already a captured black hole waiting for us.’
Larna hesitated.