Doctor Who_ Battlefield Part 2

All over the northern hemisphere, radio listeners and TV viewers dashed to turn off their receivers. CB breakers and radio hams tore off their headphones in agony.

Telephone users flung down their handsets. Computer systems crashed. The complete NAVSAT surveillance net went dead.

The TARDIS dropped three hundred metres in five seconds and kept dropping. In shock, the ship had channelled all its power into cutting back the barrage.

Automatic systems began to shut down.

Amid loud protests from the crew, the lights went out, the ventilation faltered and the sensors died.

The falling TARDIS struggled to regain its senses and failed. Its reflexes were traumatized and its instincts swamped. It was deaf, dumb, blind and its artron mainframe was devoid of a single coherent thought impulse.

The ship pitched gracefully sideways as the barrage greeting drowned out the crew's yells and even the sound of the air that screamed past outside.

The earth was rising eagerly to meet the dead TARDIS when a sudden surge of energy pulsed through the ship's systems. The a.s.sault on its senses began to be countered and contained.

Its first sluggish new thought was a remembrance that it had a pilot who was capable of taking over manual control.

At least when he could get the sequences correct.

Override signals and stabilizer inputs flickered urgently into the TARDIS's neural systems. The police box's free fall gradually slowed in response to the pilot's guidance and finally steadied back into hover mode at just two hundred metres above the surface.

With the pilot in control, the ship's artron centre began to think clearly again. But the invocation still pulsed. As other systems were restored, the ship was free to a.n.a.lyze its personal greeting.

'I am here,' said the message in Gallifreyan.

'Ident.i.ty?' sent the TARDIS.

'Myselfe,' came the response in Early English.

There followed a sequence of runes which the TARDIS language bank did not recognize, but the source clearly a.s.sumed that they would be familiar.

The message was transmitting on a wide spread of spectral and extra-spectral frequencies to the exclusion of everything else.

None of the data connected or made sense. But that was routine. The TARDIS was not defeated in its task. It had one further resource to employ. It resumed standard procedure and relayed the message up to its control interface. From there the pilot might deal with it.

Alone in his darkened control room, the Doctor watched an auxiliary screen stop rolling and juddering. While its readout settled slowly back to a safe level, he flicked up three more filter switches in the hope that they might stabilize the energy distribution.

By instinct or symbiosis with his timeship, the Doctor sensed the crisis easing. The TARDIS's convulsion had given him a nasty turn, but although its power still fluxed, he felt the stresses relax like claws letting go of his nerve endings. He cored in two more stabilizers just to be certain.

The crisis had lasted less than two minutes, but the Doctor felt suddenly exhausted. A great weight pressed on his mind, like the whole of the unimaginable future toppling backwards, and he was the only support it had.

He thought to push forward, but feared that the reversed potential might start a Donimo Surge. He saw an uncontrolled ripple of collapsing time, growing infinitely, smashing against every alternative at every second of every future, until the tidal wave plunged the whole of Creation into an empty abyss of Chaos.

He dared not move for fear of what he might start. He was trapped by a hypothetical possibility. But that was the tightrope he walked, balancing precariously across time and s.p.a.ce, between one alternative and another, over a pit of a billion more.

He gripped the edge of the control console and took a deep breath. His eardrums still fizzed with the aftereffects of the barrage. He wanted his hat. He would feel better with his panama hat and his paisley scarf.

His grip on the control console tightened. What was he thinking of? Somewhere at the back of his mind, he had the feeling that someone was trying to tell him something, but he could not decide exactly who.

Across the chaos of the dimly lit console room, he saw movement from a tangled heap of furniture by the outer doors. As the ship systems slowly filtered back, it occurred to him that he had a companion.

'Mmph,' said the heap.

A bra.s.s church lectern shaped like an eagle lay across the top of the pile. The Doctor tapped it cautiously with his knuckles. There was no response, so he began to prise the heap apart piece by piece - a technique he employed endlessly on the universe at large.

Ace was trapped at the bottom of the pile, pinned under the overturned chair she had been sitting in when the first lurch of the a.s.sault hit home. 'I can't hear you,' she complained loudly before the Doctor had even said a word.

'It's only temporary... like most things,' he muttered as he helped her up. But it also struck him that the familiar hum of his ship's power systems was unusually quiet - or deliberately restrained. Everything sounded at least two rooms away.

'What? I can't hear you, Professor. I think I've gone deaf.'

She shook out her tangled hair and stuck her fingers in her.ars. The blast of sound that had hit her reminded her of the wickedest rock concert she had ever been to. On that occasion she had been deaf for two days - this felt five times worse.

She wondered if Time Lords were required to take a driving test before being let loose on the byways of the universe with an unsupervised time machine. The Doctor always seemed preoccupied with the irrelevant minutiae of his ship, rather than the general business of getting them from A to B in one piece.

He was about to key in a set of tabs, when a loud repet.i.tive pulsing signal emerged from one of the speakers.

Instantly, the normal sounds of the TARDIS came back into aural focus.

Ace shook her head again. 'Now what?' she moaned.

'What's going on?'

The Doctor shot the control console an accusing glance.

A diagram flickered up on to a monitor. Vector lines diverged like a web in all directions from a central core.

Angular runes marked each line, shifting both colour and shape across the wide range of transmission frequencies from the fluting signal.

Ace peered over the Doctor's shoulder at the screen.

'What is that noise?'

'A cry in the dark.'

Already well versed in the Doctor's infuriating habit of keeping everything to himself, she began to draw her own conclusions. 'Distress call?'

'Hmm.'

'Intergalactic Mayday?'

'Possibly. Perhaps a summons. Or a warning. Of course it might be a greeting.'

'It gives me the creeps, whatever it is.'

Just as she began to get some hang of the screen, the Doctor tapped instructions into a keyboard and the whole layout shifted in its perspective.

'Extraordinary,' he said.

The web lengthened out into a wire-frame tunnel down which they travelled. From every section of the frame, new webs of transmission vectors branched out.

'It's covering everywhere at once,' he said. 'And I do mean every conceivable where. Surging out through the cosmos. Forwards in time, backwards in time... and sideways.'

'Sideways!'

'Yes. Across the boundaries that divide one universe from another.'

Ace tried to appreciate that this flowery simplification was for her benefit. She preferred to translate it into something more clearly and scientifically defined.

'So what you're saying is that instead of the usual rectilinear propagation within the normative s.p.a.ce/time continuum, this signal's wavefront is omnidirectional along every axis of the temporal continuum.'

'Yes.'

'I still think it's creepy. Who's it for?'

'I don't know!'

'Well, where's it coming from?'

He had already begun to key in a triangulation order, but before he had finished, a small coordinate readout appeared at the foot of the screen. The Doctor raised an eyebrow. 'That's odd. It seems to be coming from Earth.'

'Really? Whereabouts?'

'Not just where... when? What point in time?' He waited as more data began to print out across the screen and then announced, 'Late twentieth-century Earth.'

'It's not coming from Perivale, is it?'

'No,' he said rather too quickly.

'Phew!'

He was slightly surprised as the map he had just been compiling overlaid on the monitor. 'West of London. Now who could be operating a transmitter of such stupendous power in Cornwall?' He began to tap the rhythm of the signal out with his finger against the console.

'Why don't you decode the message?' said Ace.

'I'm positive that the technology isn't right for this time... What was that?'

'Why don't you decode the message or something? Then you'll know who it's from.'

He looked at her, startled by the simplicity of her solution. 'That's brilliant, Ace!' He wondered why he had never thought of it.

Ace made a mental note to state the obvious more often.

The Doctor began to adjust the settings on the console.

'We'll just change the modulation, like so,' he said, suddenly grateful that the TARDIS was filtering out so much of the superfluous transmission.

The signal began to trans.m.u.te, compressing and then enhancing, echoing around the darkened console room as it fed through the TARDIS computer systems.

'Just twist the envelope a little and play.' He gave the console a final theatrical flourish and the sound vanished altogether.

On the monitor, the wire-frame image went berserk, swerving and spiralling as the tunnel sped faster and faster.

The harsh light from the screen grew fiercer, catching the Doctor in its glare and throwing his giant shadow up the wall. Finally the rushing image broke up completely. The message's harsh trill vanished and the screen went dead.

'Merlin!' hissed a sibilant spider-voice from the speakers.

Instinctively, Ace looked across at the Doctor and found him returning her confused stare.

Thunder rumbled in the clear air outside.

Dark thought from another time and place pierced the skies and looked into Avallion's morning. Its eyes sought those who heard the message of the sword.

'At last, he is revealed to us!'

High in the suddenly storm-rich air, the TARDIS sensed the danger. Its systems shuddered.

The first drops of rain began to fall.

Chapter 2.

The weathermen were embarra.s.sed.

The violent storm that was wreaking havoc over the south of England had come from nowhere. Worse than the great storms of 1987 and 1995, this time there was not even an inadequate explanation.

At 06.33 hours, exactly the time that the diabolic eruption of deafening sound and static had woken most of Northern Europe, the barometer had dropped like a stone.

Several groups of morbidly eager evangelists took the blasts to be the Last Trump and revelled as all meteorological h.e.l.l broke loose immediately afterwards.

As the British Met Office computers went down and the lights failed, one hapless systems operator swore that while he fiddled to light a candle, he saw his precious pine cone (which he kept as a reliable fail-safe) opening and closing its segments like an overenthusiastic sea anemone.