Doctor Who_ Wooden Heart - Martin Day [1]
‘We’ll see Thorn again,’ said Petr firmly. ‘Somehow… Somehow all the children will come back to us.’
Kristine pulled away, a different dread in her eyes now. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s what frightens me.’
ONE
For a few moments, as Martha stepped towards the main console, she thought she was alone.
The walls that pulsed with light, the huge support struts that seemed hewn from living coral, the mundane latticework beneath her feet – everything around her hummed with secrets and potential, with the hint of amazing things as yet unseen, and with terrifying things that were all too clear. It was like stepping into some old church where every footstep feels like an intrusion – or finding yourself alone in a mad scientist’s lab and wondering which bubbling experiment or complex bit of machinery you’ll fiddle with first.
She liked these moments without the Doctor – these momentary pauses for breath, when she had time to take it all in, to dwell on the things she had seen, the adventures she had already had. Paths already taken. Normal life never seemed so dull and one-dimensional as in these brief moments of reflection.
Then again, she didn’t like having too much time to think – sometimes it was scary. These events that played out before her threatened, on occasion, to wash her away entirely. Sometimes she just wanted to watch a beautiful sunset on an alien world, or meet someone famous from history, without battalions of blood-sucking monsters and megalomaniacal villains hoving into view.
It was probably just as well, then, that at that moment she noticed the familiar and reassuring form of the Doctor, leaning against one of the walls, his face partly hidden by shadows, staring intently at the small scanner screen some feet away. He was chewing absentmindedly on one of the arms of his glasses, seemingly lost in thought himself.
Martha circled around towards him and he looked up. ‘It’s just drifting through space,’ he said, indicating the screen with his spectacles. ‘It’s easy to think that the cosmos is full of planets and stars and stuff, when actually… So much of it is empty. Bit of stray gas maybe, echoes of dark matter and plasma, but otherwise… Nothing.’
Martha came round and looked at the screen. It showed, as the Doctor said, a remarkably dark area of deep space. The velvety blackness was smudged by only a handful of distant stars. Against this there drifted the silent form of a slowly spinning craft. Orientated vertically, it resembled a great smooth tube of silver that thickened into some sort of blackened propulsion system at its base. At the top the tubular shape sprouted various spokes and protrusions.
‘Every atom’s full of space, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Even solid things… They’re not really solid. Not if you look at them close enough.’
‘The gap between electron and nucleus, the chasm between one atom and the next…’
‘What’s the ship?’ asked Martha, looking back at the screen again.
‘It’s… interesting,’ said the Doctor, as if that explained everything. ‘A Century-class research vessel. The Castor, if the faint mayday signals it’s giving off are to be believed. Not built for speed, as you can see – once it reached its destination it would hang around in orbit like a space station. Jack-of‐all-trades sort of vessel.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘Dunno,’ said the Doctor. ‘No life signs, but no signs of collision or other damage either. I can’t tell at the moment how long it’s been here. Days, years, decades…’ Suddenly his hands moved over the TARDIS controls in a blur. He spoke more quickly, a growing excitement evident in his voice. ‘There’s an atmosphere, though, and gravity – now that’s odd in itself. And there’s a few other little things as well…’
‘Enough to pique your interest?’
‘Oh yes!’ he exclaimed, grinning. ‘My interest is well and truly piqued. It’s reached a critical level of piqued-ness. If it were any more piqued,