Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [62]
It was time. Sontar had finished feeding, and was standing up. The other Sontarans were entering their dormancy phase
– a dreamless sleep during which their bodies repaired themselves.
The Doctor patched the TARDIS console into the Citadel’s architectural configuration. Holographic plans of the xenodochia level appeared in the air in front of him. A couple of minor adjustments and his work was done.
He pulled the big slide control on the Regulator. The hum of power started to build up all around him. He slipped a blue control pad from his coat pocket. There were two buttons, one red, one green.
The Doctor had just built a primitive Time Scoop, taking a few short cuts by feeding it through the TARDIS computer.
He turned away from the console. Two ebony pyramids rotated into three-dimensional space by the back wall of the control room, and continued to hang there, spinning slowly.
The Doctor pressed the green button twice.
The pyramids faded away as they stopped swirling, and in their place were General Sontar and the Rutan. The Rutan was readjusting to its oxygen-breathing form, water dripping from it. Sontar was disorientated.
‘What is this?’ Sontar snarled.
‘Good evening, gentlemen. Welcome to my TARDIS. I’ve brought you here –’
‘This was not part of the agreement,’ the Rutan squeaked.
‘We are alone here, wherever this is, this was not part of the agreement.’
‘Where are my men?’ Sontar roared.
The Doctor turned away for a moment, pulled the last few levers. The central column began rising and falling rhythmically. ‘They are safe in your chambers. I have –’
Sontar pounced, leaping a good ten feet, pinning the Doctor to the console. His powerful bifurcated claw was grasping at the Doctor’s throat, his finger and thumb were around his neck, the middle finger was crushing against his lips, chin and mouth.
‘How dare you?’ Sontar roared, filling the air with his oily breath.
‘Sontaran!’ the Rutan shrieked. ‘That is a Time Lord! Do not kill the Time Lord!’
The Doctor was unable to open his mouth. He was pinned under Sontar, who must have weighed several tonnes even in Gallifreyan gravity.
‘I am the leader of the most powerful race in the universe!’
Sontar roared, trembling with rage. ‘You will not treat me like some podling. I am not a pet for you to take out of its cage when you please.’
The Doctor tried to speak, but couldn’t even draw breath.
Sontar’s eyes were burning a furious red. They narrowed to tiny slits. ‘You will pay for your insolence.’
The Sontaran snapped the Doctor’s neck and then threw his broken body across the control room.
The Station was one of the Time Lords’ secrets.
It sat right on the edge of Gallifrey’s Constellation, in a perfect orbit around a red supergiant. There were a few barely inhabited worlds in this sector of space, but they were far from the normal trade routes and of little commercial interest. The area was notorious for shipwrecks and vanishments, and the charts would tell anyone consulting them that this was because of the particularly high concentration of asteroids, dust clouds and freak energy fields. The remains of once-powerful star cruisers passed silently by, powerless. Each of the ships was surrounded by a halo of metal fragments. Once a century or so, these dead ships would drift past older, less easily explained ruins. This part of the galaxy was a place that space pilots told stories about, not the sort of place they would ever visit, whatever payment you offered. Those that travelled out here had a habit of never coming back.
So no one ever saw the Station from the outside, had ever seen the dark cathedral-like shape, with a vast pyramidal tower emerging from the centre. No one had ever noticed that it, alone of all the ships of this graveyard in space, had escaped collision with asteroids and the other cosmic debris of the region. The pristine hull was dotted with spires and masts, fins and gutters. Some of the features might have been weapons emplacements, huge hangar bays or landing strips. Equally