Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles Part 4

'I understood some of that!' Fitz announced happily. 'Watch out, Doctor, he's got a bomb!'

'Don't do it Thorgan.'

'Too late. . . Doc-tor!' The mule-man squeezed the control box.

'Run,' the Doctor suggested to Fitz and Trix, already practising what he preached.

There was a huge, sharp explosion behind them, and they were showered with a combination of mosaic tiles, plaster and a smattering of minced mule.

'You usually give a bit more warning than that,' Trix complained, brus.h.i.+ng debris from her shoulder and turning back to look at the crater.

'Sorry,' the Doctor said sheepishly. 'I managed to plant '

' the grenade on Thorgan when ' Fitz interrupted, ' you shook his hoof,' Trix finished.

The Doctor looked a little crestfallen. 'Oh.'

'As long as he didn't see it coming,' Trix said. 'That's all that matters.'

'We should get back to the TARDIS,' the Doctor said.

'Don't you want to check the villa, to make sure everyone's OK?' Trix asked.

Fitz brightened. 'Yeah, perhaps we could go to the org the villa, after all?'

'Fitz. . . ' Trix warned gently.

'Don't worry. We'd only observe, not interfere,' he a.s.sured her.

The Doctor ushered them away. 'No, they'll all be fine. . . Besides, there's a young lady called Fulvia waiting for me back there, and I've already given her quite enough of my attention for one night.'

28.Six hours of searching and Marnal's voice had an edge of panic, now. He'd built his cold-fusion reactor from things he'd found under the sink, and connected it up. He'd not found Gallifrey, but he'd found that some of the stars and planets nearby had disturbed orbits. This was a sign that something catas-trophic had happened.

'It's been attacked. It's the only explanation. The scrolls said that. . . no.

What's done is done. It can't be undone. It's written. We have to find out who did this terrible thing.'

Rachel frowned. 'It can't have gone. It's a planet. Don't you think you should recheck your results again?'

Marnal turned on her. 'A terrible injustice has been done. The planet of the Time Lords, a civilisation twenty thousand centuries old, the one you loved to read about as a child, a place of such beauty and power that it makes your heaven seem profane, has gone, and gone forever. Someone destroyed it.'

'Who?'

'I don't know, not yet. But now I have my memories back, I know of many who might have wanted to do it. There are so few with the necessary power.

It could have been the Klade, the Tract.i.tes, the Ongoing. It could have been Centro, but. . . no. In the end, none of them operate on such a scale. None of them would dare do such a thing.'

'But you can find out who did it?'

'Yes. I know ways I can track down the culprits.'

'And then what?'

Marnal paused to put his blue blazer back on, then: 'I told you. We'll hunt them down and destroy them in turn.'

'You said that. But if they can blow up whole planets, how can we stop them?'

'I'm not sure I can. Not this time. But I have to try.'

Marnal was stalking around his dining table, talking to himself but expecting Rachel to listen to what he was saying.

'Whatever destroyed Gallifrey would have to be time active, and very powerful. It or they could be anywhere in time and s.p.a.ce. I need to put some thought into how I can find them.'

A flash of inspiration hit Rachel. 'Couldn't you just tune in to history and look at the destruction of Gallifrey itself? See it happen, then follow whoever did it?'

'No. The destruction of the planet unleashed a vast ripple in the s.p.a.ce-time continuum, one that makes it impossible to navigate or even see the area of devastation. Gallifrey cannot be observed, at any point in its history. Not any more.'

'Oh. Shame.'

29.Marnal was pacing around the room.

'What's all this about the fourth and fifth dimension?' Rachel asked.

She'd brought a couple of his novels with her to the dining room. If they really contained the secrets of the universe they might be worth struggling through. She'd started on The Beautiful People The Beautiful People. So far, though, it was just The The Da Vinci Code Da Vinci Code all over again. all over again.

'Time and s.p.a.ce,' Marnal said. 'Relative dimensions, you see.'

'Oh,' Rachel said again.

Marnal slapped his head. 'Wait! That's it! There will be a trail in the fifth dimension.'

He started adjusting the mixing-desk controls again.

The bottle grew dark again, the stars came out.

Marnal peered in. 'It's a question of seeing things in five dimensions. Yes. I think. . . '

He stepped back.

There was a swirling psychedelic pattern in the bottle now, instead of the galaxies. A column of grey light that broke up into lines, then a colourful ma.s.s of concentric squares, a howling tube of blue light and what looked like stars, then a lurid purple galaxy. It struck Rachel that it would make a great screen saver.

All the time, Marnal was adjusting the settings, twisting dials on the mixing desk and then checking the bottle, as if he was tuning a television set.

'We're going to see who destroyed Gallifrey,' he announced.

Images started smearing across the screen. Ghostly half-pictures, pictures of nothingness, of insectile things and abstract mechanisms. Something that looked like an orchid briefly flickered and faded.

'Nearly there,' Marnal called out.

The picture was resolving.

'It's a. . . What is that?' Rachel wondered. It looked like a phone box, floating in s.p.a.ce.

A fresh solar wind breathed over the battered police box. Harsh starlight dap-pled it, picked out the blue paint. It sat in a hard vacuum, with temperatures little above absolute zero, and in a belt of radiation that would instantly kill anyone who stepped from it. Nevertheless, it sat there nonchalantly as though it was a perfectly normal place for it to be.

Inside, the Doctor pulled up the handbrake, locking the TARDIS in position, then activated the scanner. They'd left Rome eight hours ago now. They'd moved on, and had a new problem to solve. Don't dwell on the past, that was his motto.

30.The Doctor wasn't sure why the TARDIS had materialised here. He wasn't sure where 'here' was yet. It was well within a solar system, several hundred million miles away from the star. He had a quick look round using the scanner.

The sun here was dimmer than Earth's the Doctor guessed the absolute magnitude would be about 13.5 but the night sky was much as it appeared from Earth, with all the familiar constellations, give or take a few. So they weren't very far from Earth, relatively speaking. He couldn't see any gas giants. The star flared slightly.

'Ross 128,' the Doctor concluded.

It was a little under eleven light years from Earth, in the constellation of Virgo. The Doctor checked the instruments, and belatedly they were coming to the same conclusion. He'd never been to Ross 128 before, as far as he remembered, but had heard only nice things about it.

Setting the coordinates of the TARDIS was like sticking a pin in a map. Not every landing was in a place of great interest or historical importance. The TARDIS usually ended up on a habitable planet, but not always. He checked the instruments. The TARDIS had picked up a signal of some kind.

The Doctor turned his head.

A man in a blue blazer and a blonde woman in jeans were watching him.

The woman was saying some wordless something. She looked agitated. The man was more calm. He replied, silently, then leant in, blocking the woman's view and the Doctor's view of the woman. The two men stared at each other for a moment, across time and s.p.a.ce. The Doctor recognised him. . . not by name, not even his face, but he knew him from somewhere.

Something terrifying crossed the Doctor's mind, for the merest moment.

The scratching at the back of the TARDIS seemed to be inside his brain. Fu-elled by raw panic, he hurried to the console and flicked the rows of switches that activated as many of the TARDIS defence systems as he could think of, one after the other.

He moved around the console, his hands reaching for and tugging at controls on instinct. He slammed down on the emergency dematerialisation b.u.t.ton. The central column started rising and falling, and its rhythm had a sooth-ing, lullaby effect on the Doctor's hearts' rate.

The link was broken and Fitz had his hand on the Doctor's shoulder.

'What the h.e.l.l's the matter with you?' Fitz asked him. 'You look like you've seen a ghost's ghost.'

'Did you see them?' the Doctor asked, aware there was a tremble in his voice.

Fitz shook his head. 'There's no one here. Pull yourself together.'

The Doctor stepped away from the console, and used his new vantage point to look around the control room.

31.'There was someone here?' asked Fitz, clearly concerned.

'Not physically. Not. . . not in three dimensions. They were just watching us.'

'Looking inside the TARDIS? Is that possible?'

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. 'Evidently it is.'

'Thank Christ they were looking in here, not my room. Could have been a bit embarra.s.sing otherwise,' Fitz noted.

'What?' The Doctor scowled.

'Nothing,' Fitz said quickly. 'Why are you so freaked out?'

'This is serious,' the Doctor snapped.

'Yeah, all right. So what do we do?'

'You go back to your room.'

Rachel stepped back as the bottle went empty again. There had been something about the face of the man they'd seen.

Marnal was still peering into the bottle as though he could somehow re-a.s.semble the picture. He reached over to the controls, and started to adjust the levers. 'I can't lock on again,' he said to himself.

'The reactor's gone flat,' she told him.

'No, it's still working at full power. He saw us and boosted the force fields protecting him.'

'But you know where he is?'

'He will have moved, and he'll have obscured his trail,' Marnal scolded himself. 'He was 3.35 pa.r.s.ecs away. That's practically next door.'

Rachel glanced out of the window at the side of the neighbouring house, the Winfields'. Marnal was shaking his head. Something was troubling him.

Something was troubling Rachel too, but it was ridiculous. She decided to ask Marnal what he was worried about instead.

'Do you know who it was?' she asked.

'I never thought it. . . I never. . . '

Rachel gave him a moment.

'The background,' he asked, 'did you see it?'

'It was like a flight deck. There was a control panel on a podium with a big column rising up out of the middle of it.'

'Yes. It was the control room of a TARDIS.'

'TARDIS? You said that word before. That was the name of your time machine.'

'Yes.'

'So the man who destroyed Gallifrey was a Time Lord?'

'No. . . How could it be?'

'So he must have stolen a TARDIS?'