Doctor Who: BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures [022] - Dominion by Nick Walters

Author:Nick Walters
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563555742
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 1999-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Shutdown

The Doctor looked narrowly at Professor Nagle. He had a bad feeling about this. ‘What do you mean, you can’t shut it down?’

‘What I said.’ Nagle sat down in front of the desk indicating for the Doctor to do the same. The theory is, you set where you want the Zeta Node to be using the locator program I devised. When you activate the generator, it sends a telecongruency beam between the nodes and you should be able to walk through Alpha and be transported instantly to Zeta. I initially set the Zeta Node on the moon, the idea being to send a robotic probe through first. But when I activated, the readings went off the scale. The Zeta Node couldn’t be located.’

‘Hmm,’ said the Doctor, sitting in the swivel chair next to Nagle, gazing thoughtfully at the silver prongs of the generator. The solution could be simple. ‘A glitch in your program?’

Nagle glared at him, obviously resenting his questioning of her expertise. ‘That was the first thing we checked. There were no errors in the program. The fault seems to be external – as though something grabbed the telecongruency beam and yanked it halfway across space.’

‘So, you don’t know where the Zeta Node is.’ Things were beginning to fall into place. The Zeta Node had obviously ended up on some distant alien world. That was where all the strange creatures were coming from. But how did that explain the abductions, and the violation of the TARDIS? The effect of a telecongruency warp was limited to the two nodes. Unless… ‘Oh, no.’

Nagle looked at him sharply, her green eyes wide behind her glasses. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I hope.’ He had to be sure. ‘Anyway, did you send your probe through?’

‘Yes we did,’ said Nagle. ‘And what it brought back, well, wow.’

‘Well, what?’

Nagle typed in a string of commands. One of the monitors flickered into life, showing an image of a rocky, crater-pocked surface, picked out in flickering blue. The image was grainy, and the picture flickered badly. The probe moved along the surface for a while, until something scuttled in front of the lens – and then the image cut out, to be replaced by swirling static.

The Doctor watched in silence as the thirty-second sequence repeated itself three times. ‘Turn it off.’

‘We sent through more probes, but they were all destroyed. And then something came through.’

‘What?’

Nagle switched off the monitor. ‘It was a savage, uncontrollable carnivore. Fortunately, it couldn’t get out of the generator chamber. After a while it died, apparently from natural causes. It’s down in the lab; you can have a look at it later.’

‘No need,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve had a close encounter with those things. Which leads me to ask, how did those things get to the farm? I have a nasty theory which I hope you’re going to refute.’

‘Well, after that creature came through, we had to close down. So I shut off the power to the generator and closed the nodes.’ Nagle took off her glasses, and began to clean them again.

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