Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [71]
‘What are you doing?’ Savar asked her. He was on the opposite side of the console. She could see his face through the transparent central column. He was blind, how could he fly a TARDIS without seeing the controls? As Larna listened, she could hear the console whispering, she could see Savar carefully guiding his hands around the switches. The telepathic circuits had been adjusted, she realised. They were telling him everything he needed to know. TARDISes were symbiotically linked to their owners. Was this TARDIS
as mad as Savar?
‘I am trying to access information from the minutes of the High Council meetings,’ she told him. ‘There would have to be consent for such a diversion of power.’
‘The power is being drained!’ Savar insisted.
‘No,’ Larna corrected him firmly, ‘it is being used by the High Council to power some device. Can’t you see?’
‘Is that meant to be a joke?’ he snarled.
‘No. No. Sorry.’
Savar was bent over his instruments. ‘Show me.’
Larna pulled a few levers, and the display on the scanner changed. The pitch of the console’s whispering changed, too.
She assumed that he was being kept informed of the readings.
‘This is the Citadel energy grid normally,’ she adjusted the setting, ‘and this is it now. Power has been channelled away to –’ Larna check another readout – ‘a control room in the lower area of the Citadel not far from the Council Chambers.’
‘What are they powering?’
‘An artificial wormhole, a tunnel that leads into the far future.’ She reached down without looking, located the switches she needed flicked them.
‘How far?’ he asked, looking straight at her.
Larna shrugged. ‘Off the scale. I could check, but I just don’t know where they could be heading. It’s beyond the expansionary phase of the universe.’
Savar moved around the console, until he was at her side.
Hurriedly, she pulled her hand away from the bank of switches.
‘I know…’ he said calmly. ‘I know what they will find.’
The Doctor was busy preparing for landing.
No one on Gallifrey seemed to have noticed his absence.
He patched himself into the Citadel’s traffic control system with one hand, adjusted the TARDIS s course slightly with the other. Gallifrey was surrounded by force fields and transduction barriers, but there were plenty of chinks in the armour. It was easy enough to slip a TARDIS through if you knew the right tricks.
The console gave a bleep, and a ticker tape printer began reeling out a couple of inches of tape.
The Doctor watched it, fascinated. Until that moment, he hadn’t even known that there was a printer there.
He tore off the slip and read it. It was from Larna.
‘Ah… there’s going to be a slight detour,’ he announced to the Rutan and Sontar. ‘I just need to nip out for a moment.’
He recalculated the landing position, dialling the new co-ordinates in. He smiled at them, trying to reassure them.
The TARDIS landed, gently.
The Doctor kept the power circuits on, but locked off all the controls.
‘Right,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Won’t be long.’
He pulled the lever that opened the door and was outside before the aliens could react. Then he closed the door, locking it, slipping the key into his jacket pocket. The TARDIS
had landed in a peculiar little room almost a cupboard. This was deep within the Citadel, he could feel the hum of the power conduits. This wasn’t far from the Council chambers.
There was ancient equipment down here, some of the oldest time machines.
He had landed his TARDIS alongside another one. On their field trips to other planets, the Time Lords had quickly learnt to disguise their technology from prying eyes. Each time capsule had an array of defences, and this included the ability to transform its outer appearance into a native object.
The systems had never been entirely reliable. The Doctor’s own TARDIS was stuck in one form. This other one resembled a battered old wardrobe. It was unmistakably a TARDIS, though: place your hand on the side and you could sense that it was alive, or at the very least that there