Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Also in the Series
Title Page
The Changing Face of Doctor Who
Prologue
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part 3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 4
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Copyright
David Whitaker
David Whitaker
Gerry Davis
Terrance Dicks
Terrance Dicks
Malcolm Hulke
Gerry Davis
Brian Hayles
Terrance Dicks
Ian Marter
Terrance Dicks
Bill Strutton
Terrance Dicks
Malcolm Hulke
Terrance Dicks
Eric Saward
Philip Martin
Marc Platt
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473530379
Version 1.0
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BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
BBC Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Novelisation copyright © Marc Platt 1991
Original script © Ben Aaronovitch 1989
The Changing Face of Doctor Who and About the Authors © Justin Richards 2015
Marc Platt has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
BBC, DOCTOR WHO and TARDIS (word marks, logos and devices) are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.
First published by BBC Books in 2016
First published in 1991 by Universal-Tandem Publishing Co. Ltd.
www.eburypublishing.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781785940415
Editorial Director: Albert DePetrillo
Editorial Manager: Grace Paul
Series Consultant: Justin Richards
Cover design: Lee Binding © Woodlands Books Ltd, 2016
Cover illustration: Chris Achilleos
Production: Alex Goddard
This Doctor Who novel features the seventh incarnation of the Doctor. In this incarnation, the Doctor’s persona is one of contradictions. At first, he seems to be a bumbler who misinterprets and miscalculates at almost every opportunity. Yet, he is also a master-planner.
But the Doctor’s quips and misquotes mask a deeper, darker side. He cultivates an image of mystery – with a question mark for an umbrella, and a multitude of them on his jumper. But rather than simply keep his secrets, he constantly alludes to them – as if to provoke an enigmatic aura.
Perhaps the Seventh Doctor is a flip-side to the Second. Whereas the Second Doctor so often made his success look like luck or happenstance, so it may be that the Seventh Doctor has a knack of making his good fortune and sometimes callous impulsiveness seem like complex planning.
Ace is working as a waitress in the café on Iceworld when the Seventh Doctor first meets her, having been transported there by a timestorm from 1980s Perivale. Ace is young, naïve and impulsive. In many ways, she is a typical, rebellious teenager. She lies about her age, her room is a tip, she hates her job and she believes her parents cannot be her real mum and dad as they gave her such a naff name – Dorothy.
Back in her home of Perivale, it is unlikely Ace would stand out much from the crowd, except that she does everything with such a determination born of enthusiasm. It is difficult to see why the Doctor agrees to take her in the TARDIS anywhere other than straight home. But perhaps he realises right from the start that Ace is somehow bound up in his own future … Or perhaps he simply feels an affinity and a sympathy for a teenage girl who it turns out does not understand the currency of Britain in 1963.
Three sisters bore him down to the boat. Swan-haired and regal, each was crowned with a circlet of silver and robed in weeds of darkest green. Sisters, yet each also a queen from one of the Thirteen Planets. Summoned, even in the final throes of war, to another Universe as the prophecy decreed. Two queens to carry the High King. One queen to tend his wounds.
The aged king was armoured in black with the crest of the Pendragon on his breastplate. Lying still on the pallet, he gazed up into the endless blue of the sky over Avallion. He searched for the corridor gate that led back to the home dimension, but he could no longer focus on the invisible as Merlin had once shown him.
With the bulk of his army scattered, this final battle had become a rout. He had been trying to rally his forces, any forces at all, when out of the smoke came three of Morgaine’s rabble. Three grey knights from her personal entourage, fiercely trained and with the arrogance of near victory in their gait.
They had circled round him, just out of reach, neither attacking nor parrying, but they laughed mockingly at their lucky catch.
He knew they were confining him in a cage until Mordred might arrive to take the glory as the High King’s executioner. Where was the honour in that? But what did Mordred have to do with honour? There was no honour even in Mordred’s conceiving.
‘Excalibur,’ he had warned the grey knights, lifting the fabled blade for them to recognize. Together, he and the weapon were one; sword and swordsman understood one another and were terrible in the havoc they could wreak. But the knights only backed off a little.
Instead he had made to run, but only to draw the knights back in on him.
Three against one. Excalibur leapt eagerly out and slew the first two with one swing that nearly carried the king’s arm from its socket.
The third knight ducked and brought his sword in low. The blow caught the king on the right knee, slicing into the hydraulic muscle of his armour’s joint. The old warrior pitched forward in the mud, but his jewelled sword swung itself back and took off the knight’s arm.
As the king lay alone and cold, trying to gather his fleeting senses, he had heard the knight weeping in pain. Then there was quiet. No birds sang near the battle. The yells and screams of the fighting had grown more distant.
Close at hand, a sudden voice whispered, ‘My lord king.’
He opened his eyes and saw Bedivere bending over him. The young black-armoured knight was helmless. He was pale and there was a crimson gash across his forehead.
‘Water,’ said the king. He tried to raise himself, but his armour was lifeless and he could not manage the effort alone. He felt Bedivere lift him easily in his arms and start to carry him. He swooned.
He was weary of fighting. Full weary of the hatred that beset the world like a plague. And weary of Morgaine’s endless plans to assert her dark order on them all. A weary and old king.
She worked ceaselessly to overthrow him with her black arts. Everything around him was crumbling. Everything he knew and loved was either smashed or stolen. Most of all, he was weary of having to make decisions alone where Merlin once would advise him. But he would never cease to resist her monstrous duplicity.
He had smelt the lake before he saw it. The lake on whose banks the Pendragon had once defeated Vortigern the Usurper. On the Isle of Apples, away from the world, the willows were burgeoning into new leaf. Avallion in springtime. Yellow flags grew among the rushes at the waterside. He saw them fluttering like battle standards as the three women settled him on to a pallet constructed from linen and spear shafts. The prophecy was familiar, but the outcome either eluded him or he refused to remember.
Bedivere stood watching nearby, his handsome head bowed to hide his tears. Beyond him, along the bank, a group of local peasants stared, uncomprehending, by their rough huts of wattle.
Now the women were loading the king into the boat. His chest was tight and wet inside the dead armour and he began to cough, feeling a trickle run down through his beard. He moved his hand against his side and shuddered.
‘My sword! Excalibur!’ Surely it could not have left him now? ‘Excalibur!’ Why did they not listen? Merlin would have listened.
Queen Selysette of Lyonce leaned in over him to wipe away the blood.
‘My sword! I must have it! And the scabbard!’
She nodded gravely to Bedivere who had drawn closer on the bank. The king heard his faithful young knight pounding away into the distance.
‘It will come,’ said the queen.
Mist drifted across the sky overhead. Or was it smoke from the battle? A full minute passed before the king realized that the boat was moving away from the shore. But the queen had given her word. The sword would come.
The gentle rhythmic swish of the boat’s fins as it paddled over the lake eased his mind. The mist closed in and the king scarcely noticed as a shimmering dome rose like a bubble around the boat’s occupants. It sank slowly beneath the surface of the lake and the light around it deepened into a water-dappled green.
It seemed to the king that he was sinking down a great well. And then the well became a tall tower with walls of water lifting high above him. They glittered and streamed with rising columns of tiny bubbles. He began to be afraid. He dared not move or breathe for fear that one tiny disturbance would bring the walls cascading down upon him in a torrential flood of retribution.
This was a trap. Some hateful witchery of Morgaine’s devising, like that with which she, in the guise of Nimue, had thought to entomb Merlin in the ice forest beneath Breceliande. Yet while the king lived, all those days of chivalry were not dead. He could rebuild his world again. He had fought alone against worse odds than this and battled worse monsters. And everything that Merlin had taught him as a boy, everything the aged wizard and counsellor complained that he had forgotten, was coming back to him. Clear and fresh as the air after a storm. The son of the Pendragon would return. It had been foretold. He could fight alone again.
The high walls of water above him teetered in and blocked the light. Plunged into darkness he cried out again for his sword.
A new but dim light appeared from the side. The king managed to raise himself, but the pallet on which he lay lurched as the queens lifted it from the dry-docked boat. He watched the light approach as they neared its source, until they finally emerged into a wide and familiar hall. The dark glossy walls rose high into the gloom. He could make out arrays of heraldic devices along the consoles that lined the wide floor. The solemn tranquillity of the place was almost tangible. It had been genetically designed to be so. It should have been like coming home.
A single shaft of light fell from the roof and illuminated a black slab of obsidian like an altar at the centre of the hall. There was a figure standing in front of the slab, silhouetted against the light. As the king’s cortege crossed the floor, their footsteps echoing back at them, the figure stretched out its arms in greeting and stepped backwards into the pool of light.
The king caught his breath in disbelief. ‘Merlin! Against all hope …’
The wizard smiled impishly at his aged royal pupil. ‘I see you’ve been killing people again, Arthur. Another fine pickle you’ve got yourself into!’
The armour ran faster than Bedivere’s legs could carry him.
His own muscles ached to tearing point as he almost fell down the bank towards the willows and skidded to a halt at the water’s edge. The boat was gone.
Staring out across the lake, he thought he glimpsed the featureless shape of the boat disappearing into the mist. He clutched his king’s sacred sword and its scabbard in his fists.
What could he do now? How could he return Excalibur? At all costs the sword must be kept from the enemy. But there were no allies to turn to. No prisoners were being taken. All captives were being put to the sword by the victors on Mordred’s orders.
Avallion was a prison. His helm had been shattered in the battle and he could not leap through infinity to his own dimension without it. He was trapped in a cold and barbaric reality, a universe away from home and love. But he must forget his honour and hide himself, living on his wits until his mission was fulfilled. That was nothing. Galahad had endured far worse for the Grail.
He looked out over the lake again. The mist had suddenly cleared to reveal the far bank, but there was no sign of the boat.
He heard the clank of armour and saw a group of grey knights running along the bank towards him. There were more coming from the other direction. He had nowhere to run to, but they would not have Excalibur.
Flinging aside the scabbard, he began to wade out into the water. The knights began to splash in after him, swords raised.
Powering up the tension of the hydraulic muscle in his right side armour, he lifted Excalibur high behind him. With a yell, he pitched the sword as far out over the water as the armour would throw it. He felt a fierce stab of pain as his arm fractured, and then he was dragged back by force and found a sword at his throat.
Excalibur gleamed in the sunlight as it began to fall over the centre of the lake. Before it struck the surface, there was a flash of white and the sword vanished as if it had been snatched away by a burning fist of fire.
The arm around Bedivere’s throat wrenched back in anger. The other knights were forming a circle around him in the water.
‘Where’s Arthur?’ yelled the voice at his ear. Bedivere knew the voice only too well and loathed it with all his heart.
‘Safe away from you, Mordred Fitzroy! King’s bastard!’
There were no more questions to ask. And nothing that Bedivere would answer. Staring up at the sky towards home, he hardly felt the sword that cut into his throat.
‘A once and future king?’ complained Merlin. ‘Dear oh dear, I thought we’d given up all that nonsense.’ He shook his head of unruly red hair in irritation. ‘Isn’t enough ever enough?’
Arthur raised himself painfully from the side of the chair where they had sat him. He slammed his gloved fist against the carved arm. ‘You gave your word!’
‘I most certainly did not! You’ve been listening to those minstrels again. They always exaggerate.’
‘Teeth of Heaven!’ A series of coughs tore up from Arthur’s aching lungs. He pushed away the queen who moved in to tend him and wiped the fresh blood from his mouth himself. ‘You are never here when I have need of you, Merlin.’
The wizard shrugged and smiled weakly, revealing the laughter lines on his avuncular face. ‘I can’t be everywhere at once.’
But there was still mischief behind his eyes. And he still looked younger every time he returned.
Arthur rested his head back on the side of the chair. He looked around the dark ribs of the King’s Hall ship that Merlin had cultured for him long, long ago in the vat-cellars of the High Tagel. The consoles bleeped quietly as they awaited his instructions. Always ready to jump the stars or outfly the swiftest ornithopter.
‘Ten years of war have we suffered. My wife and friend are lost to me. The alliance of the Round Table is broken. My kingdom is slipping away. The land dies.’
‘Morgaine has grown in power.’
‘She will destroy us all with her black arts.’
‘I doubt that, Arthur. But it may be a long struggle.’
‘I thought I had lost my tutor too. And then you return against all odds, but only to snatch away my remaining hope.’
‘Oh, don’t be so gloomy. And never trust people who make prophesies.’
Arthur lifted his eyes in disbelief. ‘But you do naught else!’
‘It’s one of my more annoying habits.’
The High King of the Thirteen Worlds gripped the arms of the chair and struggled to rise. He cursed as his knees buckled under him. The dead armour was cumbersome and he was too weak to move against it. He sat back temporarily defeated. But he would find a way.
He missed Lancelot. And he longed to see Guenever again and ask for her forgiveness.
Merlin took a salve-sponge from one of the queens and began gently to wipe the mud and blood from the aged king’s face.
‘My dear Arthur, I think it’s time I came clean with you.’
‘Excalibur,’ he muttered. ‘Where is it?’
‘You see it’s all very well calling me tutor, but I can’t even begin your education until I find out how all this ends.’
To Merlin’s surprise, the king appeared to rally from his misery. ‘So it is true then,’ he said eagerly.
‘True? Why? What else have the minstrels been saying?’
‘That you live your life backwards.’
‘No, no, no!’
From his tatty embroidered Afghan coat, Merlin tugged a floppy hat of brown felt. He flailed it into shape as he tried to contain his annoyance. Around its brim, the saffron Katmandu bandana was creased and tangled. A pair of finger cymbals tinkled to the floor. ‘My life may be rather haphazard – in a temporal sort of way. But I cannot predict the future …’
‘You deny it yet again!’
‘Of course I do! And you know that.’
‘So you cannot say the hour of my death.’
The wizard smiled inwardly that the old king could still beat his tutor into a corner. He looked forward to beginning the young king’s education. But there seemed no way to convince his old friend that time was passing. All things had their time and that included the time to let go of what you loved.
‘I shall rise again,’ continued Arthur. ‘There is no question. I decree it. And I shall see Morgaine defeated. And you, Merlin, I rely on to see me win through!’
Merlin’s twin hearts sank. ‘I’ll see what I can do, my lord,’ he said quietly. ‘It may already be in hand.’
The king grunted. Satisfied at last, he leaned back into his chair. ‘And find my sword too.’
There was a movement in the shadows at the back of the hall. One of the queens, Bellangere of Orlamande, lifted Excalibur from the cavity into which it had been peristalted by the ship. She carried the ancient sword with reverence to Merlin.
‘But there is no scabbard,’ she said.
‘I’m sure it’ll turn up again some time.’ Merlin held the sword for a moment, recognizing the filigree ganglia systems worked out in the hilt and the blade.
‘I am hight Escalibore,
Unto a king fair tresore.’
‘Thank you, your majesties,’ he said gravely. ‘Your part in this will be remembered.’
The three attendant queens bowed low to him. Then he turned to present the sword to its true master.
The king was already sleeping. A new serenity drained the aching weariness from his face. His breathing steadied.
The queens watched Merlin carry the sword, symbol of the High Kingship, to the central control console. He found the key input socket that he had grafted into the obsidian unit, because he remembered that long ago he had found it there in the future. He slowly, ceremonially, lowered the blade into its place.
‘So my once and future friend, the Night Watch begins.’
The huge amethyst in the hilt glittered momentarily with fire. The gentle hum of the ship pitched up a degree.
High King Arthur shifted in his sleep. ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ he muttered through his dreams.
Scenario: Dull Swords
‘Alle be ware
Of they that stare.
Theyre watchful minde
Behind theyre eyes
Already blinde
From stareful glare.’
‘The Watchers Songe’
Anonymous 29th Century Bardic Ballad
They pulled Bambera out of the Zambezi valley days from Koroi. An army surplus Hind-24 gunship picked her up and flew her back to Harare. The controls were still labelled in Cyrillic lettering and the Chinese-trained pilot cursed in Shona all the way to the airport.
A first class seat on the Swissair flight to Geneva. Her weapons as hand luggage in a diplomatic bag above her head. German businessmen furtively studied her over folded copies of Der Spiegel and the Wall Street Journal. She accepted the compliments of the airline, picked at the poule à la reine with a plastic fork, and drank herself stupid.
She woke up in the Geneva BOQ, tangled in crisp and damp cotton. She was still holding the whisky bottle; its label was Japanese. Stumbling into the bathroom, she dropped it into the rubbish bin. There were echoes of a nightmare in her head, but the details were gone.
She stared into the mirror over the sculpted plastic basin, daring herself to throw up.
A shower helped. She looked down at her feet and saw the water stained mud brown as it swirled away. Fifteen days in the Zambezi valley washing down the drain. She wrapped herself in the soft laundered towels and sat looking at the trouser press and the kettle. She would have to force down some coffee. One cup made with two individual sachets. No milk.
UNIT passports are never stamped by customs. No questions asked, no nationality given. The pages stay pristine, only the magnetic strip on the back changes. Bambera’s military career reduced to ghost lines in iron oxide, to muddy sheets in nameless rooms, ribbons in storage.
A dress uniform hung on the wardrobe door, a tiny store of cocoa butter on the dresser. Next to it, by the coffee sachets, a white plastic afro comb in a sterile wrapping.
Bambera sat with her back to the mirror and combed her hair.
Orders were waiting in gold and silicon, wrapped in matt black plastic. Bambera slapped the EPROM cartridge into her portable file, keyed in her security code and dumped it into memory. She read the information as it scrolled up on the small LCD screen.
Dull Sword, she thought, a non-significant incident involving a nuclear weapon.
Salamander Six-Zero, a ground-launched cruise missile system, in breach of the Berlin Convention.
Not many left now, but their disposal had to be discreet. One at a time. Bambera’s turn had come round again.
She could feel a dull pain building up above her left eye. The soft burr of the air-conditioning nagged at her head, far worse than the stridulant insect life of the Zambezi. There had been a time when she never got a hangover. There had been a time when she never had time to drink properly at all.
Why do they always give these jobs to me?
UNIT HQ was an old finishing school perched over the lake six klicks from Geneva. In her imagination, the girls were always white and insubstantial as wraiths. Clustering in the polished hallways, heads dipped towards each other as they exchanged confidences. Learning how to dance and curtsey in the large, high ceilinged rooms, before running like so many Isadora Duncans out on to the lawns to vanish in the sunlight.
The BOQ was a wooden annexe built in chalet style to the north of the main building. Bambera walked across the damp lawn. To her left a hydrofoil was cutting a white wake across the steel grey lake. The mountains beyond were shadows in the overcast sky.
She flipped her card at one of the Swiss guards in her glass box by the side entrance. The guard unsealed the door and she stepped inside. Both passenger lifts were out of order, so Bambera went down in the service elevator with half a tonne of electronics and a new coffee machine.
Two hundred metres down, the doors opened on to a long corridor with puff concrete walls. Black electrical cables spewed out of the ceiling and snaked across the floor. The air smelt of damp cement.
A young private snapped to attention as Bambera stepped from the lift. The private was young with wide Slavic features and small, close-set eyes; one of the new intake recruited directly by the United Nations. For a horrible moment, Bambera thought from the look of recognition that the girl was going to ask for her autograph. But she saluted instead. Bambera returned the salute with more crispness than usual; she’d been young once.
She found Bonderev chain-smoking in Operations. One of the consoles was open, its contents spilling out, a German contractor up to his elbows in fibre optics. He and Bonderev traded insults in French, their only common language. On the ten-metre main wall screen, red lines crawled over a relief map of the Gobi Desert. An inset repeater screen showed a close up NAVSAT image of the area.
Bambera leaned on the balcony rail and watched as Bonderev stubbed out his evil-smelling black cigarette. Around him personnel stepped over cables, junction boxes and crates that littered the floor. With its unnatural light and regulated air, the workers called this room the ‘armpit’.
‘Bonderev,’ called Bambera.
The Russian looked up and gave her a sour look.
‘Shall I come down?’
Bonderev shook his head and walked up the stairway. There was a loud Teutonic curse behind him as the Gobi Desert vanished from view in a blaze of visual static.
A squat man in his fifties, Bonderev was out of breath by the time he joined Bambera on the balcony.
‘Teething troubles with NAVSAT,’ he said, nodding below.
‘Who’s in the Gobi?’ asked Bambera.
‘The Ethiopians.’ He lit up another cigarette.
‘I thought we weren’t supposed to use national designations,’ said Bambera. ‘I read a memo or something.’
Bonderev shrugged. ‘It’s a tight ground sweep. Meteorite impact.’
‘Oh, a rock hunt. Big, was it?’
‘Came in out of the eliptic,’ he said. ‘NAVSAT 81 spotted it. Gagarin Station tracked it down. You know the cosmonauts, very excitable people.’ He crossed to his console, ready for her inevitable briefing.
‘Who have we got in England?’ she said.
He scrolled the answer up. ‘Third Light Recce just back from Libya, laid up at Aylesbury.’
‘Tell them to have a couple of squads on standby, light weapons. I’ve got a Dull Sword in south-west England.’
Cyrillic letters rolled up on Bonderev’s screen. The big bulk translators in the house above would translate from Russian to English before sending orders to Aylesbury.
Aylesbury, thought Bambera, why is that familiar?
The answer eluded her, but she doubted it was important.
She sat at Bonderev’s console and could only come up with one other question. ‘The English weather. Is it still hot?’
There was a cheer from below as Operations got the Gobi Desert back.
Surveillance Statellite NAVSAT 61 in geo-stationary orbit at a height of 59.82 miles above north-west Europe, accessed its memory and scanned for a comparative event.
It had identified a Grade 6 burst of neutrino activity in section A9 lasting 0.26 seconds. With no apparent trace source for the emission, NAVSAT 61 sent a routine Talk-to-Me option to NAVSAT 71 stationed over the North Atlantic.
NAVSAT 71 had no record of the emission. It ran a memory check. Suggestion: Comparable event. Possible relation to localized sunspot activity.
NAVSAT 61 withdrew the option of an Italic Alert on the information. Instead it sent a Retainer order to signpost the event for the UNIT Space Surveillance computers at Herstmonceux Control.
The computers recorded the messsage and inserted the relevant Retainer. The unidentified event was sift-selected and the data passed to Geneva HQ, where its print-out was folded neatly into oblivion halfway down a stack of continuous computer paper.
An unbidden alien presence had slipped through the surveillance net, as it had been accustomed to do for longer than the scribes could recall.
The sword Excalibur recognized the neutrino burst at Night Watch plus 1242.192 solar cycles. It also recognized a flare of tachyons and other superlucid particles which NAVSAT 61 could not even begin to notice.
The sword had recorded this activity pattern before. The spells that bound its blade went to pre-alert mode. This phase had been conjured nearly a thousand times, but unless direct contact was made with its secondary alert key, the sword’s spell status would return to basic observation mode after 600 seconds.
The new intruder slowly swept a broad scanning probe across the geomass, formulating and assessing the features and contours of the Avallion countryside as it went. It missed the sword’s receptors by 159 miles.
300 seconds.
The probe swept back and missed again, recording only the shoreline of the lake.
The sword waited. 500 seconds.
On the third sweep, the probe met Excalibur’s open key head on.
Contact. The incantation was complete. The sword’s recloaking spell was a closed option. The fire in the pommel amethyst flared.
Magic and logic in conjunction.
Excalibur remembered the like mind of the TARDIS and blasted out a greeting worthy of the 1242.192 years it had waited.
The battered blue police box hovered three miles above the Bristol Channel, a tiny silhouette against the first light of the dawn sky. The Gallifreyan Time and Space ship, an outmoded but still vigorous TARDIS, swayed in its position, compensating for the 15-knot air current at this altitude.
Its systems retrieved major topographical features from previous information and overlaid them on the newly scanned data from its probe. Moments later it was producing an updated map of Britain in the late 1990s.