Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [53]
‘Or the Doctor? Is that why he isn’t here?’ Castellan Voran wondered hopefully.
The Magistrate finally had their attention. ‘I have no reason to believe that it has anything to do with the aliens. The Doctor is currently chairing the Conference, and there is no need to interrupt his important work there. If I may make my report.’
He stepped through the door that led to Temporal Monitoring. A dozen Technicians and Junior Grade Time Lords sat in their high-backed chairs, monitoring energy levels, scanning the Time Vortex. The Magistrate crossed the roundelled floor, keeping to the left of the room to allow the rest of the Councillors to see the infinity chamber, like a vast arena sunk into the floor. A holographic image of the universe. Everyone here would recognise the familiar fractal shape, rotating imperceptibly slowly.
He folded his hands behind his back, and began to speak before everyone had quite finished getting into their places.
‘During routine work yesterday, Technician First Class Waymivrudimqwe observed anomalous behaviour within the Infinity Chamber.’
He nodded to the Duty Technician. None of the staff here knew about Waym’s death yet, there was no need for them to be distracted by the knowledge. The young lad who had found the body had been sent back to his dorm for the day.
The picture zoomed in on Pazithi Gallifreya, it showed them the fleet and the distortion of the image.
It zoomed in again, and the flaw became more obvious.
A zoom to the molecular level, and the disturbance looked catastrophic.
Everyone in the room understood the importance of it, no one had ever seen anything like it before. They huddled around their nearest control panels.
The President stood in the middle of the room, resting his hands on his walking stick. ‘It’s a breach in spacetime.’
The image zoomed out again, to show the whole of Gallifrey’s galactic sector. The time reference at the bottom of the picture showed that these were live pictures. There was a line of distortion, moving slowly bluewards, away from the direction of universal expansion. It was a filament crack that bisected spacetime, moving through it like a cheesewire. It had at least eleven dimensions, meaning that it was travelling through time as well as space, not to mention in a number of directions that didn’t have common names.
‘It appears to be spreading. How fast?’
The Keeper of the Matrix looked up from his display. ‘It would be able to cross the universe within a matter of weeks.’
Not as fast as a TARDIS, then, the Magistrate thought, but an incomprehensible velocity by any other standard, so many more times faster than the speed of light that the calculation was meaningless.
‘Can we see the ends of the phenomenon?’ one of the Councillors asked.
The scale increased to galactic level, the line still started above the top of the picture and ended below it. Another zoom out revealed that the line bisected the entire Local Group of galaxies. It took another twelve zooms before they had established that the effect was longer than the universe was wide.
The Time Lords watched the image, but couldn’t believe it.
To a man, they had broken away from their own screens to stare at the main display, ignoring the protocols of where they should be standing.
‘It is the largest phenomenon ever observed,’ the Keeper of the Matrix told them, after consultation.
The assembled Time Lords began babbling amongst themselves. The Magistrate scowled. There needed to be some order here, clarity of purpose, not the usual bickering.
He looked over to the President, whose job it was to impose such order, but he was staring up at the screen, deep in thought. The President was the master of a dozen disciplines, including astronomy, temporal physics and history, but decisive leadership was not one of them.
The Magistrate was about to say something when the President spoke.
‘Is there curvature?’ he asked.
The other Time Lords fell silent and turned to the screen.
At this scale, the curve in the effect was noticeable.
‘Any curve when viewed from