Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [34]
It had about ten seconds. The other ships had a quarter of a minute more.
Every piece of matter in the star was becoming compressed and energetic. Very heavy elements rapidly formed from this neutron soup. The core was now a neutron star, barely twenty kilometres across.
There was a great deal of material in the shock front.
Two-with‐twenty-eight‐noughts tonnes. It took energy to force that amount of matter outwards and even the death-throes of the heart of a star can’t generate enough.
The shock wave slowed, almost to a halt. It was still a hundred kilometres from Omega’s ship. There must have been members of his crew that thought they had been saved, that there had been a miracle.
There was a tear in Omega’s eye.
Remember the neutrinos? Remember how they travel at the speed of light? Remember how they can travel through all but the densest matter?
As the shockwave slowed, the layers of stellar material started piling into one another, jamming, solidifying. The outer layers of the star formed a shell, compressed to a density of three hundred trillion neutrons in every cubic centimetre.
Thick enough to stop just a few of the neutrinos.
Remember the neutrinos? Remember how they travel at the speed of light?
They hit the outer layers with literally infinite force. The dense material absorbed the energy, ablated it, spread it out.
But it was too much.
The neutrino impacts blasted the shock front outwards again, away from the core, faster than ever. The shock front was now travelling at two percent light speed.
Omega’s crew saw it coming.
Hard radiation evaporated the outer skin of the hull. The ship popped, burst and blistered like a fruit on a fire. Below him, Omega heard the screams of his crew, but he couldn’t see them through the thick black smoke and the red pall of the emergency lighting. Emergency lighting here, when the light outside was melting the hull! He could smell his own flesh, he stared at the shock front as it swamped his ship, annihilating it.
The shock front passed through him.
If the Fragment was a forgery, then why was he still alive?
‘This is my destiny,’ Omega objected over the terrible noise of the deckplates and bulkheads obliterating. He had fulfilled that destiny. ‘Feel the Energy around us!’
Gravitational forces, raw matter, the stuff that universes are made of. Space and time and matter are linked. ‘These are the reins, seize them! ‘Why wasn’t he dead? He could hear the other two in his mind, talking to each other, but not to him. Their voices were fading.
‘We can power the stasis haloes with our minds. The ships will be saved.’
‘Not Omega’s, the machinery has gone.’
‘We can’t save his ship or his crew.’
‘We can save him.’
Their minds had gone, his ship had gone, but Omega was still there, truly immortal in his stasis halo. Gravity had taken a hold, he plunged towards the dawning neutron star at the heart of the destruction at a third the speed of light. Time began to slow around him. This wasn’t just his imagination: the intense gravity had dilated space and time, rendered them plastic. He could feel Time washing through him, altering him, even through his protective shield.
The surviving starbreakers would be bathed in the Time Energy within the next few seconds. They would collect a fraction of that power, siphon it, store it in vast batteries. That was the Plan – that would be the fuel for the timeships. But what Rassilon hadn’t foreseen was that the crews themselves would be exposed, they would be anointed in the energies. Omega saw it all now, he saw Time laid out in front of him as plain as the stars in the night’s sky. He could feel the harmonies there.
He saw the future, he felt the time winds at his back.
There was one last process taking place at the heart of the star.
If any object is squeezed small enough – the exact size depends on the mass of the object, but is easy to calculate –
then space closes up around it. The object drops out of spacetime. All that remained was a perfect matte black sphere, a hole in the universe. But the