Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [32]
Now they had returned to Qqaba to destroy it.
A dying star.
No doubt there were writers capable of capturing the waning majesty of such a thing, or its sheer scale. A poet might be able to sum up a man’s feelings as he saw such a spectacle, find words for the new emotions that welled up in its presence. Perhaps he would fall back on physical description of the mundane surroundings of the observation bay, and note that everything was transformed by the evening starlight, becoming either harsh crimson light or sharp black shadows. There might be room for philosophical or moral instruction in that imagery, Omega thought. He didn’t know. He was an engineer, not a poet, and he was here to do a job.
He ran his gloved hand over each casket in turn. Their clasps and buckles rattled with expectation and impatience.
He could feel them in there, radiant. They were so beautiful, so intricate. They were children in a womb, twins, with many possible futures. Omega had brought them into existence, built boxes that were larger on the inside than the outside, filled them with basic programming and operational parameters and opportunities, let them feed on energy and data. Unobserved, the Hands had slipped the bonds of technology. Even Omega didn’t know what they were any longer, he couldn’t know without collapsing their potential.
Whatever was in the boxes might be infinite, it could be anything.
Their thoughts touched his, the link of parents, children and lovers through the ages. They had always felt cold, they told him in unison, they had always known their destiny.
‘Today was a day to live in history,’ Omega thought.
‘What about tomorrow?’ they asked. ‘This wasn’t an ending, this was a beginning.’
‘Who knows where it will all end?’ Omega asked out loud, the words echoing around the room.
They knew. Should they tell?
‘It is time.’
His mind linked with the captains of the other ships in the fleet. They were on the control decks of their own starbreakers, they would follow him in. There was no room for hesitation or hubris. There was no doubt. There was only the Plan, and that began with a single word.
‘Open,’ he said.
The caskets cracked open, the merest chinks of light filling the room.
‘Go.’
And they were gone, spiralling round each other, singing like dolphins.
Others could track them, others could monitor their progress. Omega was content to watch through the dark windows and the shaded visor of his helmet. Two points of light, brilliant even against the surface of a star. Then they were gone, plunging into the photosphere, the convection zone, the vast radiation zone, onwards to the core.
There was a burst of static in his earpiece. ‘The computer indicates that the star has reached the point of collapse.’
‘Activate the stasis halo,’ Omega responded automatically.
He could feel the halo activating, the protective field granting the ship temporal grace, swathing it from the rest of time and space.
When new, Qqaba had been twenty times more massive than Gallifrey’s sun. The huge weight of the star had pressed down on the centre, and it should have collapsed – except that the sheer pressure squeezed energy from the hydrogen in the core, energy that pushed outwards, holding the star up.
In its heyday, this star shone fifty thousand times brighter than Gallifrey’s sun. But it burned so fiercely that within ten million years it had converted all the hydrogen fuel into helium. It cooled, lost energy, and the inner parts began to shrink. This only intensified the pressures once more, helium burned, the star swelled and darkened. Helium burning took place for a million years, and once the helium at the core had gone, the star ran through increasingly desperate alternatives. Converting its carbon into neon, magnesium and oxygen sustained it for ten thousand years, and then burning the neon had kept the star alive for a dozen years. The oxygen lasted for four.