Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [16]
Peltroc’s knees buckled and he blacked out again.
Three floors below the Infinity Chamber level, the Great Panopticon Bell had begun to chime Nine. It could be heard through the floor of the Main Temporal Monitoring room.
The Cardinal sent to fetch the Doctor was barely away from the President’s side when there was a commotion at one end of the chamber. The crowd of Time Lords was parting, with considerable reluctance and grumbling. At the centre of the disturbance was the Doctor, his skullcap in one hand, the other waving in front of him, trying to clear the way.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he told anyone that would listen. He bustled past Larna’s group and reached the President’s side.
‘Have I missed much?’ he said breathlessly, grinning as he pulled the skullcap onto his head, adjusting it until it was right.
This was the man who had invited the aliens to Gallifrey, and Larna’s ex-tutor. Now he stood less than ten feet from her, at the President’s side. While everyone else’s attention returned to the vast display in the centre of the room, Larna kept her eye on the Doctor. He was alongside a handful of his High Council colleagues, men who were his friends, like Hedin and the Magistrate. He was perfectly at home in his scarlet robes, wearing them as though they were day clothes.
But despite the gleam in his eyes and the smile, Larna sensed a sadness there. It was not difficult to guess why.
Unlike almost everyone else, everyone apart from poor Savar, the Doctor had travelled. This was a man who had looked up at other skies, left footprints in alien soil. To have such freedom, only to be denied it… surely that must be infinitely worse than never tasting it at all.
Condemned to watch the universe on monitor screens, rather than to walk in it.
‘The fleets are in the Vortex,’ Hedin informed the Doctor.
‘They are about to arrive,’ the President corrected him.
The Bell struck for the ninth time.
‘There you go,’ the Doctor smiled. ‘I’m not late at all, I’m bang on time.’
Space and time unfolded gracefully and the two space fleets faded into view in their allotted positions, one over each pole of Pazithi Gallifreya.
Just from the most superficial observation it was clear that the fleets had been built by races which had evolved along fundamentally different lines, on opposite sides of the galaxy.
One was composed of huge, brutal structures in dark metal. For a number of practical reasons, such as ease of production and battlefield repair, everything that poured from the robot production lines and space docks was modular, prefabricated, standardised, and every ship looked much the same. The only difference was the scale: the smallest fighters were barely three metres across, the flagship was over three miles in diameter. They had all the defensive screens, shields and fields that you’d expect of a fighting vessel, but as well as that they had thick armour, compartmentalisation, back-ups and redundancies that would appear ludicrously cautious in any other context. Some warrior races took pride in ornamentation – decoration on sword hilts, or space armour. There was no evidence of that here. Everything was starkly functional, and while the ships were beautiful in the way that piston engines or suspension bridges can be beautiful, there was no art there, just mass-production. The fleet hung over the north pole of Pazithi Gallifreya: solid, immovable.
The other fleet was more pleasing to the eye. Each ship was perfectly symmetrical, and radiant. They looked like snowflakes and were lit from within, sparkling against the night sky like captured stars. And like snowflakes, each one was different. But this had nothing to do with aesthetics. Their technology was based on crystalline structures, optic information passing and spreading and diffracting through complex prismatic forms. The ship’s builders