Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [127]
All the time, the dark Savar inside him strains, writhes, trying to get out. It wants to reach the Eye at all costs, too.
That scares him a little, the thought that he might be collaborating with that, or even that they might share common purpose.
He understands the paradox, he knows the lunacy of the thought, but he must reach the Eye before the other Savar, he must get there first.
Savar continues his descent.
Lightning flashed over the magic garden, the distant thunder waking the Doctor.
The night air was cool against his skin, but not too cool.
The ankle-deep grass was as soft as any mattress. She was fast asleep besides him, at the base of a great apple tree, the smell of her hair mixing with that of the blossom. He could feel her swelling with every breath, and the throb of her single heart. There wasn’t a moon in the sky, but there was auroral light, as if it were nearly dawn. But there would be no morning here, not until he willed it.
The Doctor got up, gently so as not to disturb her, and stood over her for a moment. She was at peace, only a little curled up, her head resting serenely in the palm of her hand.
Her long, curved body was a pale grey in the no-Moonlight, her blonde hair looked white. He looked at her and knew that he couldn’t imagine life without her.
They had been here, together, since the universe had begun.
He knew that this was a prison. He knew that he had been placed here by a being called Omega. The Doctor knew that he wasn’t meant to have that knowledge, that Omega hadn’t wanted him to know. What the Doctor didn’t understand was why Omega had kept that information from him. Why would Omega have thought that he would ever want to escape?
Restless, Larna had made her way back to the control room.
The decor of the Magistrate’s TARDIS was sepulchral throughout; narrow corridors with coal-black walls leading to dark, crypt-like bedchambers or cavernous libraries and laboratories. The control room was no exception: a gloomy, intimate space, panelled with ebony, bereft of furniture apart from a single, severe, high-backed chair. The only things by way of decoration were gleaming mechanisms mounted to the walls that may have been vital machinery or mere sculpture. Here the familiar humming of the TARDIS took on a brooding, sinister note.
Larna took a place at the console itself. The central column was rising and falling like a piston. Far beneath her feet, she could hear the lullaby grinding of the time engines.
The lights and displays on the console winked and flashed in their arcane sequences. The time path plotter pulsed, but still wasn’t giving any indication of their arrival time. The journey was out of the hands of the TARDIS or its pilot. They were essentially falling through the hole in time rather than flying.
There was no indication that their course had varied even slightly from the mathematically perfect, pre-set, preordained course calculated by the Matrix. There wasn’t a hint that any of the innumerable safety features that the TARDIS bristled with were failing to operate. Despite that, Larna could sense the unease of the TARDIS, and she shared it.
The return trip to Gallifrey had been straightforward; a far more pleasant experience than the outward trip, with its visions and hallucinations. Despite her long day, despite her aching muscles and headache, Larna had been unable to sleep. Part of it was excitement her not wanting to miss a moment of this adventure. But mostly it was fear of having another nightmare and of feeling herself die again. The last few nights it had been so real. Drowned in an icy lake, stabbed through the heart by the man that she loved… she had woken each time, desperately surprised and grateful to be alive.
There was a whirring and clicking from the console. She moved round in time to see a display slapping into place. It would only be another ten minutes before they arrived. Arrival point