Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett [Abnett, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Anthologies, Anthologies & Short Stories, TV; Movie; Video Game Adaptations, Doctor Who, Time Travel
Amazon: B00BBA6FL6
Publisher: BBC Digital
Published: 2013-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

THE MAKER OF OUR EARTH

With the Doctor enthusiastically leading the way, they explored the deep chambers and tunnels of the massive terraformer plant.

The simple scale of it silenced Bel and Samewell, and took Amy back a bit too. The machined and engineered cavities inside the artificial mountain were bigger than any machine, factory or structure she’d ever seen on Earth. They also matched or exceeded the scale of structures she’d seen since leaving Earth and travelling aboard the TARDIS.

They followed winding tunnels lined in galvanised metal plates or slightly tarnished sheets of shipskin. They entered chambers that had been hollowed out of the hill so that the face of the rock was cut perfectly smooth and straight-edged, like set and polished concrete. Colossal machines that Amy thought of as turbines dominated these chambers, feeding whatever energies or processes they output into vast networks of gleaming metal pipes and condensers. Some of these pipes, large enough in cross-section to take two trains on parallel lines, exited into vent stacks, or swept down into stone floors, connected to other, deeper chambers and larger, stranger machines.

Sometimes, the Doctor and his companions came out of tunnels onto mesh walkways of welded shipskin that crossed, precipitously, the middle of vast subterranean spaces, delicate bridges suspended hundreds of metres above the chamber floors from which they could look up at dim ceilings thousands of metres above, or peer down into heat-exchange trenches or energy sinks or other abyssal clefts that pulsed with distant glimmers of energy, and dropped away into the planet’s crust for miles. Warm updrafts touched their faces and billowed their hair.

‘I’ve run out of words for big,’ said Amy.

‘None of them seem adequate, do they?’ the Doctor agreed.

Everywhere they went, they could hear the whirr and hum of the giant mechanisms. Occasionally, they could also hear the scratch and scurry of transrats emanating from blind tunnels or side vents.

They entered one chamber on the level of the rock floor and found it to be the largest they had seen yet. Its dizzying space was dominated by a massive column of silvery metal that was fed by a cobweb of tubes and ducts. It looked like a huge chrome oak tree. High up, the roof of the titanic chamber was hazed by clouds of vapour, so that the branches of the giant metal tree appeared to be swathed in ghostly foliage.

‘Are those clouds?’ Amy asked, looking up.

The Doctor nodded.

It was drizzling slightly, like a wet autumnal day. The chamber was so big, it had its own weather system.

‘That’s a secondary sequence prebiotic crucible,’ said the Doctor, with the appreciative tone of a twitcher who has just spotted a very rare species. ‘What a beauty.’

‘What does it do?’ asked Bel.

‘It makes the world a better place,’ said the Doctor. ‘In human terms, anyway. It makes life. It’s gently sculpting and shaping the ecosystem of Hereafter.’

‘You said secondary,’ said Amy.

‘What?’

‘You said it was a secondary sequence something or other.’

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, matter-of-factly. ‘There’ll be about a hundred of these, all supporting the main sequence crucibles.

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