Doctor Who: Harvest of Time by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Action & Adventure, Media Tie-In, General
ISBN: 9780385346818
Publisher: Broadway Books
Published: 2013-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

There was, of course, no sense in which the events of the Doctor and those of Captain Mike Yates could be said to be cotemporaneous, not now that the Doctor was hurtling through the Vortex, neither part of time nor entirely detached from it.

But in the moments before the TARDIS vanished from the reactor hall, Yates, from a distance of two miles, trained his glare-proof binoculars on a single red-finned and shark-grey Phantom. He watched the jet curl away to the north east, twin afterburners bright as miniature suns, its bunker buster package having been deployed successfully. Invisibly to Yates, for it was far too small to be seen at that distance, the jet was already in the process of being guided home via a laser-designator, shone onto the reactor building from a second Phantom loitering far beyond the Durlston Heath perimeter.

Yates lowered his binoculars. He reached for a pair of flash goggles and slipped them on. It was almost unnecessary. The bunker buster did not detonate until it had already penetrated both the outer and inner layers of Durlston A, so there were already two layers of well-protected building interposed between him and the initial flash. Through the goggles it registered as an instant of muted brightness, as if the reactor building were a giant opaque cube in the heart of which some illuminating light source had just been switched on and off. Yates felt the kiss of the heat pulse. And then an eruption of billowing bright light punched apart the hall in a kind of cone formation, dragging fire and gas and dirt in its wake, and an instant later there it was, the incipient mushroom cloud, hauling itself into the sky like a vast swollen cerebellum, propelled upwards on the piston of its own monstrous knotted spinal column. The brain seemed to churn and writhe, like a thing in transports of mental anguish. Under Yates’s boots, the road quivered.

Yates was not impressed. He had seen bigger bangs.

Then it came: the sound and the fury. A hot wind, a muffled but still appallingly loud thunder crack, echoing and echoing, until a second sound, a crunching endless roar, swallowed it. It sounded like the world being torn in two, over and over again.

Yates extracted the earplugs from his ears and lowered the flash goggles.

There was a squawk from his radio. He lifted it to his ears. ‘Greyhound Two.’

‘Status?’ the Brigadier queried.

‘Bang on target, sir. Couldn’t have asked for a cleaner strike.’

‘No,’ the Brigadier said, with a distinct absence of enthusiasm. ‘I don’t suppose we could have.’

‘And the Doctor, sir? Do you suppose …?’

‘We gave him as long as we could,’ the Brigadier said.

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