Doctor Who (24 page)

The energy wave from the Cradle of the Gods was surging upwards into the sky; a broiling mass of impossible colours getting brighter, ever brighter. The Doctor shielded his eyes and looked down at Sabel and Ollus, both of them speaking softly but with great determination into Jenibeth’s ears. But Jenibeth was still and silent, her eyes staring up, unblinking into the apocalyptic chaos.

‘It’s too late. I’m sorry,’ the Doctor called to them. ‘Come on, we have to take shelter in the TARDIS or the Cradle’s energy will destroy us.’

But Sabel and Ollus gave no sign of having heard him.

The Doctor stumbled forwards, starting to feel as though his body was being crushed by a merciless increase in gravity.

‘Run! Run back to the TARDIS,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll carry Jenibeth, but you must—’

His words were cut off as great, corkscrewing shafts of burning energy suddenly slammed into the desert, seeming to rock the very foundations of Gethria. Like gigantic, writhing, gnarled tree roots impossibly fashioned from the fiery matter of stars, they seemed to surge ceaselessly both upwards and downwards at the same time. Each titanic impact created its own shockwave with a force like ten thousand hurricanes.

Squinting desperately through all this, the Doctor tried to blink the burning sand from his raw eyes, searching for Sabel, Ollus and Jenibeth. His mind was whirling with the effects of concussion as he realised he had been propelled a hundred metres or more by a shockwave. Picking himself up, every fibre of him fighting against the energy that was combusting in the air all around him now, he started to make his way back to the siblings.

They were now barely visible to him as he tried to struggle onwards. But although he was exerting all the energy of a full-powered sprint, he gradually became aware that he was barely moving at all. He called as
loudly as he could, but he found his voice made no sound.

Gathering himself and applying every ounce of energy he could muster, the Doctor was suddenly hit by another shockwave.

Consciousness drained from his mind. All he could feel was the sensation of flying, tumbling … A dull, hard impact.

Then he was awake again.

Almost blind now, he reached out and felt the familiar, wooden shell of the TARDIS. Instinctively, he reached up, finding the key to the door was already in his hand. He unlocked the door, pushed it open, then attempted to look back.

Gethria was now an unrelenting mass of burning energy. But he would try again to find those Blakelys.

He could not leave them. He
would
not leave them.

Then another blast hit him, pushing him through the now open TARDIS doors.

He crashed to the floor of the TARDIS control room, barely aware that the doors had slammed shut behind him.

Of course they closed, he suddenly found himself thinking. You clever thing, you.

He patted the floor in an utterly exhausted gesture of affection, as the ship juddered violently. Explosions and smoke were everywhere, and the Doctor wondered for a moment if the TARDIS had finally met its match. Whether the Gethrian monument, sending its energy wave out to engulf Gethria and the Sunlight Worlds, had the ancient power to rip his old space-time machine apart …

In a way, the Doctor felt, it was perhaps no more than he deserved.

He tried to reassure himself that he had done his best. But in the final analysis, he had left Ollus and Sabel with their dying sister, Jenibeth.

The Doctor who kept meddling in the affairs of others, who lit the blue touch paper then ran for the hills. He had done it again.

Never again, he thought. Things were going to change. And soon.

He breathed a sigh of relief as the juddering ebbed away and the TARDIS steadied. He rubbed the sand painfully from his red eyes.

When he ventured outside, he feared the worst …

The sky was dazzling. The power the Cradle had released was apparently still present everywhere. The desert was awash with sizzling energy, sending clouds of dust into the sky. Through it all, the Doctor could make out the monument, still towering but no longer alight with its ancient, elemental forces.

Gripped by a grim determination to discover what had happened, the Doctor ran at full pelt towards the monument. His feet pounded through the sand. Energy crackled and burnt, splattering sparks and sand in his face; but he kept running. Running to the exact spot where he knew he had left Ollus, Sabel and Jenibeth.

He finally reached it.

The dust and flashes of dissolving power slowly cleared. He peered down, fearing … expecting the worst.

What he saw filled him with an overwhelming joy and wonder. Such was the force of it that it sent him
crashing to his knees. He wiped tears from his eyes. ‘Well, hello there,’ he said.

He found himself looking at Ollus, Sabel and Jenibeth … But they were children, as he had known them when he had first met them.

‘Well, this is …’ he paused. ‘Unexpected.’

He had told the old Ollus and Sabel to tell Jenibeth about the Sunlight Worlds. To describe them in every detail, to convince her how peaceful and worthwhile they were. The idea was to change the matter-creating wave of energy from the Cradle into a force that would either recreate or preserve the Sunlight Worlds as they were.

But somehow, Ollus and Sabel had gone further. Perhaps they had idealised their story of the Sunlight Worlds too much. They must have created a vision of their happiest times together …

When they were children.

The matter conversion wave had done the rest, taking as its template the thoughts from the mind it was locked into. The thoughts of Jenibeth Blakely.

Just as the Doctor was pondering what to do or say next, and whether or not these newly atomically reconstructed children would even know who he was, there was an enormous crashing sound.

Another spaceship had landed. An oddly familiar spaceship. It was, he realised, the craft that Alyst and Terrin Blakely had chartered to bring their family here, to Gethria.

The children turned to look at the spaceship, and the Doctor found himself slowly backing away. He could
see that two people were exiting the craft.

As he backed away faster and faster, he stopped and lingered just long enough to see if what he suspected was true.

Yes, the two people were Alyst and Terrin Blakely, recreated from the mind of their daughter.

The Doctor turned and ran back to the TARDIS as fast as he could go. He closed the door behind him and rushed to the console, panting hoarsely. He switched on the scanner and adjusted it to view local space.

There, he could see the Sunlight Worlds, still intact. He made some adjustments and turned up the volume on the speaker. Slowly, he began to make out the sounds of life from these worlds. A cacophony of transmissions. He even fancied for a moment that he could make out the voice of Lillian Belle.

Satisfied, he set the TARDIS in motion. The old engines heaving back into life.

He shook his head, still in a daze of disbelief. He felt like he had just participated in some crazy dream. A dream that had been made real by the ancient powers of an unfathomably mysterious technology. A technology the Daleks had set out to harness and turn into a force for destruction. A technology which, the Doctor noted with a broad, beaming smile, had ended up doing exactly the opposite.

‘Ha!’ he found himself saying aloud. ‘One in the eye for you, Daleks!’

But it had been a close run thing. Things could so easily have gone the other way. Billions could have died.

Feeling cold inside, he thought of all those he had
lost during his long life and resolved to learn his lesson once and for all.

‘No more meddling,’ he said. ‘No more.’

As Ollus, Sabel and Jenibeth embraced their delighted but baffled parents, Sabel turned and looked across the desert, away from the huge monument before them.

‘Did you see that man, Mummy?’ she asked.

‘What man?’ asked Alyst Blakely.

‘I didn’t see a man,’ said Ollus, pulling his tiny spaceship from his pocket.

‘Neither did I,’ said Jenibeth, tucking into another packet of jelly blobs.

‘I think you must have imagined him,’ said Terrin Blakely.

Sabel looked out across the desert. For a moment, she thought she had heard a strange, groaning noise. But no, there was nothing now.

‘They like the shadows.’

‘What like the shadows?’

‘You know them as Plague Warriors …’

When the Doctor arrives in the 19th-century village of Klimtenburg, he discovers the residents suffering from some kind of plague – a ‘wasting disease’. The victims face a horrible death – but what’s worse, the dead seem to be leaving their graves. The Plague Warriors have returned …

The Doctor is confident he knows what’s really happening; he understands where the dead go, and he’s sure the Plague Warriors are just a myth.

But as some of the Doctor’s oldest and most terrible enemies start to awaken, he realises that maybe – just maybe – he’s misjudged the situation.

A thrilling, all-new adventure featuring the Doctor as played by Matt Smith in the spectacular hit series from BBC Television
.

U.S. $9.99 (Canada: $11.99) ISBN: 978-0-385-34676-4

23 November 1963

It is the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination – and the faces of the dead are everywhere. PC Reg Cranfield sees his recently deceased father in the mists along Totter’s Lane. Reporter Mae Callon sees her late grandmother in a coffee stain on her desk. FBI Special Agent Warren Skeet finds his long-dead partner staring back at him from raindrops on a window pane.

Then the faces begin to talk, and scream … and push through into our world.

As the alien Shroud begins to feast on the grief of a world in mourning, can the Doctor dig deep enough into his own sorrow to save mankind?

A thrilling, all-new adventure featuring the Doctor and Clara, as played by Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman in the spectacular hit series from BBC Television
.

U.S. $9.99 (Canada: $11.99) ISBN: 978-0-385-34678-8