Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [91]
Larna smiled. Then she twisted her torso around to the left. The force blade sliced through her spinal column, found her right heart. She pulled herself to her full height, despite the damage to her spine, bringing the blade up through the heart. The action was enough to kill her.
Horrified, the Doctor tried to establish a telepathic link. He needed to trigger her regeneration. But all he found was Larna blocking his way again.
‘I want to save you,’ he said, bending over her.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can’t have everything that you want.’
She kissed him, then fell back. The Doctor tried to steady her, and ended up lowering her to the floor.
He stood over Larna’s body, watched the dark stain spread over her crisp white shirt. Her face and fingers were already becoming grey. But her hair was just as vivid a blonde as before, her eyes were just as blue. The Doctor didn’t know what to do. He was clutching the knife that had killed her. He didn’t know what to do.
The door was buckling. It would only be another few moments before the guards were through. There was blood all over his hands, all over the Sash.
Larna was right, he’d already made his choice.
He stood, the knife still in his hand.
He leapt forwards, into the energy column.
Part Three
The Opposite of Matter
Chapter Nine
Thresholds
The Doctor fell.
It was like plunging into a lake, that same sense of not knowing which way he was, and having something alarming wash over his skin, filling his ears and forcing him to screw his eyes shut for a moment. There was the same sense of inexorable movement as he was dragged down. He plunged further and further, and the water was much colder and deeper than he was expecting. His mind was giving him advice that would have saved his life if he had been underwater. Every instinct screamed at him to hurl himself upwards, break the surface, fill his lungs, pull off the Sash, take off his coat. Their weight is making you sink. But it was only the arcane power of the Sash that was preventing him from being torn apart by the time energies. It was his lifejacket, not a millstone.
By the time the Doctor had opened his eyes, he realised, he had already travelled beyond any future known to the Time Lords. All around him, the swirling walls of the Time Vortex were an almost comforting pattern, even if they did seem to form the sides of a bottomless well. But waves of colour and sound were streaking up past him, with no pattern to them, at least no pattern he could decipher.
He let himself fall further. Not that he could stop it now, of course. He started to see things. Were they there, or were they simply tricks of the mind? One of the most fundamental philosophical questions, one that not even the Matrix had solved: what is reality?
Memories of years long gone, thoughts of family and childhood. He remembered his father and mother. He remembered a trek in the mountains, and what he found while sheltering from a storm in an ancient cave.
He saw himself falling. There was someone with him… a woman… professional-looking with a generous mouth, wearing a tailored suit and baggy coat… heavily pregnant, with long legs, high cheekbones and ruffled black hair Be… a teenager, blonde streaks in her ginger hair and Rupert bear trousers… a wiry young woman with blue eyes and blonde hair.
He saw Larna, lying drowned in a black tam her skin like moonlight on the water. No, not drowned. There was a knife wound, washed clean. She looked so peaceful floating there, and so young. Her slender body was almost androgynous and it seemed symbolic, a representation of everything that he had lost over the years.
He let go of the knife, which crumbled to dust.
Larna faded away, and time continued to wash over him.
He turned his mind outwards, tried to imagine the universe beyond that of his own head. All the stars from his own time would have reddened and died, new stars would have sprung up in their place. But just as city streets retain their shape over the centuries, the galaxies would survive in something like their current