Who Universe
Others could track them, others could monitor their progress. Omega was content to watch through the dark windows and the shaded visor of his helmet. Two points of light, brilliant even against the surface of a star. Then they were gone, plunging into the photosphere, the convection zone, the vast radiation zone, onwards to the core.
There was a burst of static in his earpiece. “The computer indicates that the star has reached the point of collapse.”
“Activate the stasis halo,” Omega responded automatically. He could feel the halo activating, the protective field granting the ship temporal grace, swathing it from the rest of time and space.
When new, Qqaba had been twenty times more massive than Gallifrey’s sun. The huge weight of the star had pressed down on the centre, and it should have collapsed – except that the sheer pressure squeezed energy from the hydrogen in the core, energy that pushed outwards, holding the star up. In its heyday, this star shone fifty thousand times brighter than Gallifrey’s sun.
But it burned so fiercely that within ten million years it had converted all the hydrogen fuel into helium. It cooled, lost energy, and the inner parts began to shrink. This only intensified the pressures once more, helium burned, the star swelled and darkened. Helium burning took place for a million years, and once the helium at the core had gone, the star ran through increasingly desperate alternatives. Converting its carbon into neon, magnesium and oxygen sustained it for ten thousand years, and then burning the neon had kept the star alive for a dozen years. The oxygen lasted for four. There was only one fuel source left – the traces of silicon. Qqaba had been creating energy using nuclear fusion of silicon for just a week when Omega had discovered it, and it had already run dry.
Since then, the nuclear processes were only kept going by Gallifreyan technology. By the Hands of Omega…
Omega had already sensed it. Was that intuition, or was it the Hands telling him? He could hear the spacedrive of his ship powering up. All was going to plan. For the whole of its life, the energy radiating outwards from the core had balanced out the gravitational force pulling inwards. There had been equilibrium, stability. Now there was nothing left in the core that the star could use as fuel. The only elements left were iron, cobalt, nickel – all too stable to break down with any ease. As the last molecules of silicon were converted into iron, the star died. Over a million years, the core had burned away most of its mass, and it was now a vestige of its former self, only around one and a half million kilometres across.
Three tenths of a second later, the core was ten kilometers in diameter. The energy involved in the compression was incomprehensible. Most of it was shed as heat and light, enough of it to disintegrate atomic nuclei. The chains locking protons, electrons and neutrons together as atoms and molecules were shattered. These fundamental building blocks of the universe began behaving differently in their strange new environment. Tiny electrons were pressed together to form neutrons by sheer force of gravity. Neutrons normally formed the nucleus of atoms. Here, as the core reached a new equilibrium, all that was left of the core was a sphere of densely packed neutrons, a hundred kilometers across but with twice the mass of the Sun.
The haloes are malfunctioning.
The news came from all around. He heard it via the telepathic link to the others, the shouts of his crew over the intercom, his instincts.
The pressures at the heart of the star were so intense that the neutron material was squeezed harder than it could bear. It sprang out, sending a shock wave out into the rest of the star.
He would not be denied this moment, he would watch. He would survive, he knew this from the Fragment. The others would find a way to restore the shields.
With no energy radiating from the core, there was nothing supporting the outer layers of the star. Although Qqaba was a mere shadow of its former self, there was still enough material there to build a dozen Gallifreyan suns. All of that matter, weighing down on the core. The outer shell began falling down the gravity well to the core, at a quarter of the speed of light.
“Neutrino flood detected,” the helmsman called.
It was half a minute since the star had died. The haloes had not been restored.
Omega knew that he would die. That glorious dying star was suddenly a maw that he was staring into. He knew his destiny.
He heard the first sparks and muffled explosions as radiation began to blast apart his ship. A shock wave had formed in the core. Even now it surged outwards. It was immensely powerful, easily enough to reverse the infall of the outer layers. Suddenly there were fifteen solar masses heading outwards, an expanding spherical shock front. The instruments were registering the neutrinos now because neutrinos have no mass, and they were so small that they were passing through all but the densest matter at the speed of light. They were created after the shock front, but they outran it. The shock front was already on its way, it had already happened.
“But the Fragment…”
He heard one of their voices, then the other.
“No!”
“The Fragment’s a forgery. Rassilon’s work.”
“No!”
“You deny it even now?”
“I thought you had forged it.”
Omega wasn’t listening to their squabbling any longer. He stood, hands behind his back, facing the shock front. Around him his crew betrayed their animal instincts, they flinched, they cowered, they tried to run or shield themselves. The Gallifreyan fleet was right in the path of the destruction, facing towards it, unprotected. Omega’s ship was the closest.
It had about ten seconds. The other ships had a quarter of a minute more. Every piece of matter in the star was becoming compressed and energetic. Very heavy elements rapidly formed from this neutron soup. The core was now a neutron star, barely twenty kilometres across. There was a great deal of material in the shock front. Two-with-twenty-eight-noughts tonnes. It took energy to force that amount of matter outwards and even the death-throes of the heart of a star can’t generate enough. The shock wave slowed, almost to a halt. It was still a hundred kilometres from Omega’s ship.
There must have been members of his crew that thought they had been saved, that there had been a miracle. There was a tear in Omega’s eye.
Remember the neutrinos? Remember how they travel at the speed of light? Remember how they can travel through all but the densest matter?
As the shockwave slowed, the layers of stellar material started piling into one another, jamming, solidifying. The outer layers of the star formed a shell, compressed to a density of three hundred trillion neutrons in every cubic centimetre. Thick enough to stop just a few of the neutrinos.
Remember the neutrinos? Remember how they travel at the speed of light?
They hit the outer layers with literally infinite force. The dense material absorbed the energy, ablated it, spread it out. But it was too much.
The neutrino impacts blasted the shock front outwards again, away from the core, faster than ever. The shock front was now travelling at two percent light speed. Omega’s crew saw it coming.
Hard radiation evaporated the outer skin of the hull. The ship popped, burst and blistered like a fruit on a fire.
Below him, Omega heard the screams of his crew, but he couldn’t see them through the thick black smoke and the red pall of the emergency lighting. Emergency lighting here, when the light outside was melting the hull! He could smell his own flesh, he stared at the shock front as it swamped his ship, annihilating it. The shock front passed through him. If the Fragment was a forgery, then why was he still alive?
‘This is my destiny,’ Omega objected over the terrible noise of the deckplates and bulkheads obliterating. He had fulfilled that destiny. ‘Feel the Energy around us!’ Gravitational forces, raw matter, the stuff that universes are made of. Space and time and matter are linked. ‘These are the reins, seize them! ‘Why wasn’t he dead? He could hear the other two in his mind, talking to each other, but not to him. Their voices were fading.
“We can power the stasis haloes with our minds. The ships will be saved.”
“Not Omega’s, the machinery has gone.”
“We can’t save his ship or his crew.”
“We can save him.”
Their minds had gone, his ship had gone, but Omega was still there, truly immortal in his stasis halo. Gravity had taken a hold, he plunged towards the dawning neutron star at the heart of the destruction at a third the speed of light. Time began to slow around him. This wasn’t just his imagination: the intense gravity had dilated space and time, rendered them plastic. He could feel Time washing through him, altering him, even through his protective shield. The surviving starbreakers would be bathed in the Time Energy within the next few seconds. They would collect a fraction of that power, siphon it, store it in vast batteries.
That was the Plan – that would be the fuel for the timeships. But what Rassilon hadn’t foreseen was that the crews themselves would be exposed, they would be anointed in the energies. Omega saw it all now, he saw Time laid out in front of him as plain as the stars in the night’s sky. He could feel the harmonies there. He saw the future, he felt the time winds at his back.
There was one last process taking place at the heart of the star. If any object is squeezed small enough – the exact size depends on the mass of the object, but is easy to calculate – then space closes up around it. The object drops out of spacetime. All that remained was a perfect matte black sphere, a hole in the universe. But the object would have a gravitational pull, it could still draw matter and energy towards it. The very centre of the hole would have infinite density in an infinitely small radius. None of the laws of physics would apply there, space and time would be uncoupled.
Anything might exist there, a man might be a god. Omega smiled, opened his arms, ready to embrace the singularity. He could hear their voices again, infinitesimally faint, over the roar of the dying star.
They could see the effect the singularity was having on space and time. It was like a hammer smashing against thick glass, or a block of ice. Cracks developing, growing together into a network of lines. The universe was a block of stone before, now it was being chipped away to reveal the sculpture that had always lain within it. Spacetime is shattering, the laws of physics have been repealed.
Rassilon was panicking. Rassilon would not let it happen. Omega could feel Rassilon’s mind once again. He lifted his head, strained to hear the voice far above him. But the mind wasn’t speaking to him, it was speaking to the black hole, encompassing it, manipulating it. By sheer force of will, Rassilon passed a new law of physics. He struck up equilibrium, established beautifully elaborate equations. A surface appeared upon the darkness, a surface from which the escape velocity was exactly the speed of light. The naked singularity was covered, the hole in the universe was sealed over, and outside the storm was subsiding. The universe was safe. Nothing can ever be allowed to escape from the darkness. The crewmen of the surviving ships were the Lords of Time.
Omega stared up. He couldn’t see anything, but he heard the event horizon slamming shut far above him. There was no force in the universe that could reach him now; no form of contact. There was only him, immortal in his stasis halo, protected from his infernal surroundings. He fell, an impossible, anomalous streak of light against the darkness. Omega fell forever.
***
The room was small, but it didn’t need to be any larger. It was an alcove, deep within the Citadel, a place few people ever visited. On the surface it resembled a hundred similar rooms dotted around the Capitol: three enameled consoles, full of blinking lights and enigmatic displays, set at points facing the centre of the room, a couple of uncomfortable chairs, and a large view screen on the back wall. The lighting levels and gloomy decor would hardly encourage anyone to stay here longer that they had to. This room was situated by one of the great power conduits that ran through the lower half of the Citadel. This deep down, the floor and walls throbbed with power from the Eye.
Rassilon had captured the black hole, brought it to Gallifrey, imprisoned it beneath the Panopticon using unyielding equations and the strongest mathematics. For some reason, Rassilon had insisted that the black hole be called the Eye of Harmony. There was a brick-lined column, like a vast chimney stack, capped by the vast iron globe set in the centre of the floor of the Panopticon, a hundred storeys above, down to the Eye of Harmony, a thousand miles below. Secondary conduits and runnels branched off at irregular intervals. A plan of the energy grid looked like a vast tree, the end of each twig representing an individual power point. Some branches were thick: those that powered the Time ships, the Infinity Chambers, the Matrix and the other time travel equipment.
The smaller branches powered the food machines, the hypocaust, lighting and the other items of domestic equipment. An infinite amount of raw power blasted from the Eye, up the shaft, and was channelled along the conduits. The spare energy… well, actually, no one knew what happened to the spare energy. Perhaps it was just returned to the Eye of Harmony, perhaps it served some other purpose.
Rassilon was a great architect. The Citadel was that some of the most awe-inspiring buildings in the known universe became everyday experiences, places you had to walk through to get to or from lectures. Few Time Lords stopped to consider the thought that had gone into the design of the Panopticon. The statues that stood in each corner were a clever trick of perspective. When you entered the Panopticon, passing under an impossibly high archway, you were immediately faced with the statue of one of the legendary Founders of Gallifrey, the six individuals credited with the creation of modem civilisation Rassilon, Omega, The Other, Pandak, Apeiron, and Eutenoyar.
Enter the hall from the north, for example, and you’d see a statue of Omega in the southern corner, a big bearded man, resplendent in a somewhat romanticised version of the hydraulic space suit he’d worn at Qqaba, his helmet under his arm. Your mind would sketch in an idea of scale, and guess that the statue was perhaps three times actual size. You’d walk towards the raised area at the centre of the room. The statue wouldn’t move. Only as you walked out underneath the canopy of the Panopticon Dome would you realise how big this place was, that it would take an hour to cross. And only when you turned around to see how far you’d come did you realise that the arch you had originally come through was formed by the legs of another statue, and that Omega must be the size of a tower block. If you’d come in from the north, you’d have walked between the Legs of Rassilon, between sculpted feet the size of houses.
***
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