Doctor Who by Lance Parkin

Author:Lance Parkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446416051
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Interlude

Intervention

The Shoal.

The charts describe it simply as an asteroid plain clinging to 1 per cent of the galactic rim, but this gives no sense of its scale. It is about two thousand light years long, three hundred deep, thirty high. Or, to put it another way, it has about eighteen million times the volume of a typical solar system.

The asteroid density varies enormously from place to place, with some areas almost void, some a swirling mass of boulders and icebergs. The size of individual asteroids ranges from chips to worlds larger than Earth with their own rings and moons. There are nebulae, but they are gossamer, not the great stellar nurseries to be found in the galaxy itself. There are no suns here, but the Shoal is close enough to the galaxy for there to be light. A crisp night’s sky on one side, a black void on the other.

Scientists rarely studied the Shoal, and hadn’t given much thought to its origins – either it was a remnant of the galaxy’s formation, like the shells of comets found around most solar systems, or it was bits of cosmic debris pulled here from intergalactic space by the galaxy’s gravity. There were more pressing matters to investigate than determining which was the case.

The long-held assumption is that there is no life in the Shoal, and no reason for life to come here. The long-held assumption has recently been disproved.

* * *

Three craft emerge soundless from the Vortex.

They have arrived in one of the Concentrations, sunless parodies of solar systems. A particularly large body would attract clouds and belts of rock and ice into orbit around it, and the larger asteroids would coalesce to become moons and attract their own satellites in turn. These were inert places, with nothing like the energy or elements needed to ignite a new star. The orbits were weak, prone to disturbance. Rogue planets would drift in or out of the systems with little incentive to stay. There were many hundreds of thousands of such places in the Shoal, all unchartable, let alone uncharted.

The ships’ chameleon circuits start kicking in, adopting battle configuration. As they speed towards the second planet of the system they sprout long fins and weapons modules. The exact design is left to each ship, with one coming to resemble a snowflake, another a simple pyramid, the third a more chimerical, organic form. All are bone-white, perfectly smooth, with no portholes or vents. They adopt a loose formation, the flagship at the front, and start growing vworp drives and picking up speed. Navigation here is easy enough, although it occasionally requires suddenly changing course at a right angle, or barrelling evasive manoeuvres. The squadron passes through the Concentration as effortlessly as fish negotiating a coral reef.

Their detector beams are already sweeping the system. One catches an outpost, a small colony in the outlying asteroid cloud. The squadron pitches up and round towards it, bringing its weapons to bear.

The asteroid bears distinctive marks – needle-like towers of dirt, giving off a strong thermal signal.

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