Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [82]
‘I agree,’ said Savar thoughtfully. ‘It is not too late to prevent this.’
Larna was angry again, just seeing the face, hearing the voice. ‘Why do I have to listen to this madman?’
‘I’ve seen the grey universe,’ the Doctor explained urgently. ‘There’s nothing capable of that except the Effect.’
There was a glimmer of terror in his eyes. If he couldn’t persuade her, how could he hope to persuade the Council?
‘But the Station is in the future now,’ Larna said, pointing at the display screen. ‘That’s what will happen to the universe: it will run its course. The future you saw doesn’t happen.’
‘Have you understood nothing, child?’ Savar asked her.
‘While that Effect is active, nothing is fixed. The future with the Needle is one future, but not necessarily the one that we will enjoy. The Effect has the power to control every aspect of time and space, from the smallest particle to the Absolute.
We have to warn the Council of this. We have to tell them of the omnipotent power of that place.’
‘That is exactly what we mustn’t do.’ the Doctor warned. ‘If we even mention the sheer power of this thing, we’ll do nothing but encourage them to investigate it.’
‘We are going to lie to the Council?’ Larna said.
‘To save the universe, yes. Come on.’
Norval’s TARDIS hovered, its scanners beginning to capture beautiful images. The pictures and associated data were relayed to the Station, where the Time Lords and their computers analysed what they saw and prepared their reports.
Norval crossed his arms, studying the image on the scanner, letting his TARDIS fly itself. Except for its size the Needle seemed fairly straightforward. The Needle was a tube, like an immense length of drainpipe or a drinking straw.
Gallifrey could have fit neatly down hole in the centre. At one end, the Needle was stuck in the black hole, and this twisted its straight lines a little, and bathed it in hard radiation and gravitational distortion. All around that end of the Needle were waves of spacetime distortion: the Effect that they had detected from Gallifrey. These radiated out from the black hole like spray from fountain.
The Needle was bone-white, smooth and immaculate.
There were no craters, no irregularities. There had been impacts, inevitable encounters with asteroids, maybe even larger objects, but the Needle itself hadn’t been damaged.
Instead, rocks and ice had dashed themselves against the surface, forming dirty smudges that were barely visible from this distance.
The spectroscope had just come up with something interesting, Norval noticed it just before he heard the Magistrate’s voice.
‘Norval, fly a little closer,’ The Magistrate read out a series of co-ordinates.
The TARDIS was already making the necessary course correction, its scanners homing in on the designated area.
Norval stared.
Impossibly – but not, by far, the most impossible thing about this artefact – a swathe of the surface at the end furthest from the black hole had once sustained a biosphere.
It represented only a hundredth or so of the tube’s surface, from this distance it was a speck. But even so, it was a huge area: a million times more habitable land than even a Dyson Sphere could provide. Enough room, perhaps, for the entire Population of a galaxy. There must have been artificial suns here at some point, providing all the heat and light the population needed.
Like everything else in the universe, it was long dead now.
The entire great stretch of the tube’s surface was deep with thick snow and ice. This wasn’t simply frozen water –
although there was enough of that to have filled a hundred thousand oceans on Gallifrey – but also frozen oxygen and nitrogen. As the last energy of the universe had dissipated, the air had cooled and solidified, the sky had fallen, encasing the cities that had dotted this part of the surface. The tallest buildings were around ten miles high, and poked out from the snow.
Over the next few minutes, Norval identified at least a hundred settlements, one of which had been