Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [69]
‘Activate the timegate.’
The President pressed the control. The image of the Magistrate snapped out of existence and the energy column at the centre of the room brightened still further. The President turned his attention to the display screen. It showed the Station making its way steadily up the time spiral.
He smiled. There was something beautiful, elegant, about the Station’s progress.
The Magistrate screamed.
All around him, the crew were on their knees, screaming.
The TARDISes were screaming from their cradles. The Station itself was screaming. Bulkheads designed to sit safely at the heart of a supernova began buckling and distorting. He could hear the engines stepping up a level, then another level, automatically compensating for the stresses.
The Magistrate managed to pull himself to his feet by sheer force of will. It was like struggling against a hurricane force wind. It was Time, he realised, passing over them and through them at an incredible rate. Without the stasis haloes they would have been obliterated.
He hauled himself over to one of the seats, slumped into it.
Ten feet from where he had been standing, but he felt like he’d run a marathon. He caught his breath.
There was something watching him. He could feel red eyes bearing down on him, staring at him, fixing him in place.
All around and beyond the station were… shapes. The Magistrate tried looking into them, but couldn’t interpret them.
The image of the Station, reflected and distorted? He didn’t know. Outside, reality was superimposing itself on whatever it was that existed here: ghost-like shapes rutted past the window. There were vast insects, bizarre mechanisms, even purely abstract shapes. Some were more human: angular-faced women in golden cloaks; a blue-skinned figure in an immaculate business suit; a man with a single bionic eye. The Magistrate saw himself with six faces wearing a black tunic, head back, mouth in a cruel rictus. He heard mocking laughter. The universe had fallen to the darkness.
The Station continued to fall.
Dok-Tor had not said a word since they had left futurity.
The Time Lord was sitting in his chair, hands steepled, staring at the console. If he hadn’t known better, Sontar might have thought that the steady rising and falling of the column at the centre of the console had lulled him into a hypnotic stupor. But Dok-Tor’s silence and lack of movement weighed on Sontar’s mind.
Sontar was tired. Sapped of his energy by the accursed Rutan, he knew that he was lucky to be alive. Perhaps it was only the same magic that had saved the Dok-Tor’s life that sustained him now.
The Rutan sat in the opposite corner of the TARDIS
control room, poised on its hind tentacles, apparently ready to pounce. After a war lasting millions of years, it was difficult for Sontar to feel anything but loathing for the Rutan and its kind. It had been many years since Sontar had come into physical contact with a Rutan. Neither side took prisoners any longer, and both sides had used diplomatic missions as lover for sabotage or assassination attempts. Hatred was like a trusty sword: he knew its weight and balance. It seemed the natural emotional reaction to have, hardwired into his nerves and sinews.
And had it all been for nothing? The universe was destined to end, Sontar knew that, but his scientists had told him that it would not be for untold trillions of years. Ten thousand years was nothing… a clawful of lifetimes compared with those that he had already endured.
Sontar shut off his eyes, and remembered the grey universe. Nothing but mist. Dok-Tor had stood over the console of his time machine, tried to interpret what its instruments told him, but there was nothing to interpret.
Nothing.
The Doctor had babbled about the lack of even the fundamental particles and forces, he had run tests and made observations designed to demonstrate that this was not a local problem. But after an hour of experiments, he had not changed his conclusion that the universe was gone, utterly.
How could that have happened? At first Sontar had