Doctor Who Read online

  Trevor Baxendale, Steve Cole,

  Jenny T. Colgan, Jo Cotterill,

  Paul Magrs and Mike Tucker

  Contents

  Chasing the Dawn by Jenny T. Colgan

  That’s All Right, Mama by Paul Magrs

  Einstein and the Doctor by Jo Cotterill

  Who-Dini? by Steve Cole

  The Pythagoras Problem by Trevor Baxendale

  Mission of the KaaDok by Mike Tucker

  About the Authors

  Steve Cole is an editor and children’s author whose sales exceed three million copies. His hugely successful Astrosaurs young fiction series has been a UK top-ten children’s bestseller. His several original Doctor Who novels have also been bestsellers.

  Paul Magrs was born in 1969 in the North East of England. He has written numerous novels and short stories for adults, teens, children and Doctor Who fans. He teaches Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

  Jenny T. Colgan has written numerous bestselling novels as Jenny Colgan, which have sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide, been translated into 25 languages, and won both the Melissa Nathan Award and Romantic Novel of the Year 2013. Aged 11, she won a national fan competition to meet the Doctor and was mistaken for a boy by Peter Davison.

  Jo Cotterill’s first story at the age of five was a festive one entitled ‘Chismas’. After writing a lot of stories about unicorns, she decided at the age of thirteen to become an actress. Her professional acting career was enjoyable but frustrating, so she became a teacher instead, writing stories on the side. Her first book was published in 2004, and she gave up teaching in 2009. Jo now lives in Oxfordshire and fits writing around her young family. She enjoys music and card-making, and is an avid fan of Strictly Come Dancing.

  Trevor Baxendale has been a writer since 1998, when his first Doctor Who novel The Janus Conjunction was published by BBC Books. Since then he has written many novels, short stories, comic strips and audio dramas for both BBC Books and Big Finish Productions, plus various adaptations for schools in Pearson’s Bugclub range. His Doctor Who novels include the The Deadstone Memorial, which was voted best novel of 2004 by the readers of Doctor Who Magazine, as well as Eater of Wasps, Prisoner of the Daleks and Deep Time. His acclaimed Fear of the Dark was reprinted in 2013 as part of Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary celebrations. His first Torchwood novel, Something in the Water, was published in March 2008 and was a national bestseller. He was regular contributor to BBC Magazines’ hugely popular Doctor Who Adventures between 2007 and 2012, scripting the further exploits of the Doctor in comic strip form. He has written scripts for Big Finish’s Doctor Who, Robin Hood and Highlander ranges, and most recently full cast audio dramas for Blake’s 7.

  You can follow him on Twitter @trevorbaxendale

  Mike Tucker is a visual effects designer and author who has written several original Doctor Who novels as well as fiction for other shared universes. He has also co-written numerous factual books relating to film and television, including Impossible Worlds and the TARDIS Instruction Manual.

  Chasing the Dawn

  Jenny T. Colgan

  Yaz walked quickly to the door leading from the console room. Time was of the essence. ‘Doctor?’ she yelled.

  ‘Why do you need her?’ said Graham, looking up from the console. ‘Can’t we help?’

  ‘No reason,’ said Yaz quickly, as Ryan glanced across at her. There was an awkward pause, then she walked away.

  ‘Doctor?’ Yaz found her fiddling with wires that were spilling out of a panel on a distant wall, wearing her goggles. ‘Um, are you busy?’ she said.

  The Doctor pulled up her goggles. ‘For you, Yaz, never.’

  The wires sparked and one briefly caught fire. Yaz looked at it pointedly as the Doctor shot her hand quickly behind her back and pinched it out without looking.

  ‘So …?’

  ‘I need …’ Yaz frowned. She’d thought several times about what would be a good way to approach this, and hadn’t come up with anything so far. ’It’s … well. It’s my time of the month, and …’

  The Doctor grinned. ‘I have just the thing. Four things in fact.’

  Yaz squinted. ‘Just … the usual will probably be fine …’

  ‘Noooo’ said the Doctor. ‘Come with me.’

  Yaz followed, smiling.

  ‘I’ve travelled with a lot of human females,’ said the Doctor intriguingly.

  ‘Have you?’ said Yaz, interested.

  ‘Follow me …’ The Doctor screwed up her face. ‘Ah yes. Hungarian bathroom …’

  They set off rapidly down the endless corridors, Yaz looking around worriedly. Getting lost in here haunted her dreams, even if the determined person walking quickly beside her would never let her get lost. She knew that.

  The Doctor hardly ever mentioned people she’d travelled with in the past. Yaz wondered; had there been many? Hundreds? What had happened to them all?

  The Hungarian bathroom had been quite something, its rococo detailing something to be dwelt on and admired. Yaz wondered who cleaned the whirlpool bath, with its gleaming golden chains.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, emerging.

  ‘OK! Next!’ said the Doctor, who was outside the door, staring at a fish tank on the opposite wall she’d completely forgotten was there. The fish, though, appeared to be thriving. She opened a random cupboard door, took out a hot water bottle and handed it to Yaz.

  It was, Yaz was both surprised and unsurprised to note, already hot.

  Then followed a very long walk down a seemingly endless spiral staircase, that brought them to a pair of very tall gates. Yaz stared at them, astonished, as the Doctor opened them.

  ‘What’s behind there?’ she asked, as the Doctor slipped between them.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the Doctor airily, closing the high gate behind her. ‘Nobody ever goes out and nobody ever comes in.’ She returned with a vast bar of the most delicious, creamy-tasting chocolate Yaz had ever known.

  ‘OK,’ conceded Yaz. ‘So you do know a lot of human females.’

  The Doctor frowned slightly. ‘It’s easier looking like this.’

  ‘Blonde?’

  ‘Like a girl.’

  ‘Oh. OH. Don’t you always?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Is that weird?’

  ‘I have,’ said the Doctor grandly, ‘quite a lot of bandwidth for weird.’

  Yaz bit her lip. ‘OK. Does it matter what you look like?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said the Doctor. ‘You didn’t ask me what the fourth thing was.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Yaz.

  They had gotten themselves comfortably ensconced on a nearby chaise longue. The Doctor pulled her knees up to her chest.

  ‘A story!’ she announced. ‘Would you like one?’

  Yaz settled back into the deep purple cushions of the incredibly comfortable squishy sofa, put the hot water bottle on her tummy and opened the chocolate. ‘Oh! So much …’

  The engine was making a peculiar juddering noise, and there was wind whistling through various gaps in the fuselage, but Amelia Jane Earhart was used to that. Anything lower than a high-pitched squeal in the engines was always fixable. Sometimes just with a good knock with a wrench. That was flying machines for you.

  ‘Noonan?’

  Her navigator was taking a snooze in the back of the tiny fuselage, surrounded by spare fuel and supplies. Even though the engine noise was deafening, he was snoring peacefully. Amelia grinned. Typical sprocket. They had all learned to grab forty winks when they could.

  She moved forwards and looked out of the tiny front window of the Electra. The view was of pale blue sky and pale blue
water, both of them indistinguishable apart from the slim line of white curving round the horizon.

  Despite the enduring noise of the plane and the clicking of the joystick, Amelia felt as she always did: completely at peace; soaring above the grubby world below, with its endless fundraising and jockeying for sponsors and publicity, and flashbulb cameras in her faces, and newspapermen shouting – men, everywhere, telling her off and doubting her credentials. Here, with a light hand on the joystick, her short hair tucked neatly behind her ears, the only man within a thousand miles fast asleep, and her plane responding perfectly in her hands; here, soaring above the world, only a tiny splash in the water six hundred feet below – a whale? A shark? – the sole evidence that she wasn’t completely alone in the universe. Here and here alone, Earhart’s spirit calmed and she felt, simultaneously, both at home and utterly free. She smiled to herself, and checked the instruments. She was approaching the International Date Line: longitude 180 degrees exactly, where she would run two days twice. She’d have to remember that in the log. But for now they were steady as she—

  Two things happened very quickly.

  First, she thought she saw something, a long way off, almost certainly a trick of the light, but it looked like something hanging in the air – not a bird, not a cloud. She screwed her eyes up, just as, suddenly, they appeared to be flying through a thin purple line, hanging in the sky, as if a rope had been thrown down from a cloud. Except the line hummed. There was … something. Above the noise of the engines, came a great buzz, as if a sudden plague of insects or locusts was passing through the entire cabin, as well as an extraordinary rushing sound.

  And then it was gone.

  She looked all around, but could see nothing where the line had been. She frowned and reached for the logbook.

  She heard a strange gurgling sound right behind her.

  ‘Noonan? Fred?’

  The gurgle turned into a strained yelping noise.

  Amelia clicked on the brand new Sperry autopilot and scrambled out to the back.

  Amelia Jane Earhart was not a cowardly person. On the contrary, she was one of the bravest people in the world.

  But what she saw in the back of the plane made her shrink back in terror and start to shake.

  The Doctor was swinging gently from his hammock, hanging from the TARDIS on the very cusp of the International Date Line. A tall man in a tweed jacket and black trousers, he looked like a young man assembled by old men from memory.

  The Panama hat he was wearing was slightly too small for him, which was irritating, but his book was good, which made him happy, after he had been to all the trouble of hanging the hammock. Especially after the swing debacle.

  It also tickled him to be in a place where there was nothing definite to do, just the pale blue of the sea below him and the light turquoise of the sky above him and …

  The tiny biplane seemed to appear out of absolutely nowhere, blundering through the sky, bouncing, rearing up, then tearing between him and the TARDIS above, smoke puffing out of its tail, putt-putting ahead.

  ‘Golly,’ said the Doctor. His hat fell off his head onto his book, and he stared at the plane crossly as it spun around, doing loop the loops. ‘Showing off,’ he added. ‘I like showing off.’

  He quickly shinned up the hammock sides and scrambled back inside the TARDIS to see what was up.

  Amelia was still staring in horror at the prone figure of Noonan on the bottom of the aircraft. What could possibly have caused this?

  The plane started to buck without her at the controls, and she braced herself against its metal framework to try and work out what to do next.

  Noonan’s face was pulled back in a hideous rictus grin. His teeth were exposed, his gums a ghastly green colour, as were his eye sockets – wide, red rimmed, already rotting. He looked like a corpse that had been there for a long time. But even as she looked at him he twitched; twitched again. Not like a person, but as if something was moving him from the inside. Crawling beneath his skin, a livid green trail up and down his pale empty flesh. Getting closer.

  Amelia was not the screaming type.

  The Electra was though, and now she was starting to make a very uncomfortable set of noises.

  ‘A race, huh?’ said the Doctor, watching the little plane bounce along the warm air currents. ‘Always!’ And he jammed the TARDIS into gear, meaning it immediately toppled sideways, which at least sorted out the hat problem.

  He felt wistful for a moment. He was on his own. Nothing fun was quite as much fun on your own.

  Then he did a speedy handbrake turn and shot off into the bright blue horizon in pursuit of the tumbling plane.

  Amelia clicked off the automatic pilot, whereupon the plane immediately rolled. Her heart was pounding. What had happened to Noonan?

  She couldn’t think about that now; she had a plane to right. Oh God, why was everything so blue? As the plane tumbled, it was impossible to tell which way was up; what was water and what was sky. She screwed up her eyes and could just about … Was that a spit of gold ahead, a tiny blip in the ocean? Was it an optical illusion, or could it be land?

  She was suddenly distracted to her left as something came pummelling out of the air towards her: a strange, square box, on its side, a blue light at the front of it leading on. It was quite spectacularly non-aerodynamic.

  She blinked. It must be an airship. Surely not the newspapermen again? And how on earth was it moving so fast? As she stared at it, a door flopped open from top to bottom, and a large-faced man poked his head out and waved cheerily.

  She frowned back at him. What was this? A newspaper stunt? A rival? And why were there always men trying to prove her wrong? She grimaced back at him, then turned back to the matter on hand: could she land on the tiny spit? Or should she carry on, try and get Noonan to Howland Island, where there would be medical facilities on the ships.

  Then the noise came: a rustling, shaking, dreadful noise. It was liquid, a thick sound, like something moving beneath skin. Amelia couldn’t believe it, after what she’d seen. Was Noonan still alive?

  ‘Fred?’ she said plaintively. But those eyes, that rotting, churning flesh. Even the smell had started to seep through over the normally overpowering scent of gasoline.

  The cracking noise came again, as well as a horrible thud.

  Something, which had once been Fred, was on the move.

  ‘Oh come on!’ said the Doctor, still trying to get the woman’s attention. ‘I just want to race.’

  He gracefully clambered back inside, and wound the TARDIS around and up and over the little plane again. See, he said to himself, mutinously. You couldn’t do this when other people were there. They kept falling over and complaining about not wanting to fall over, and elbows and things. He could do whatever he liked, by himself. So there.

  He sat on the wall – now the floor – of the TARDIS and let her glide along, making beckoning noises to the other plane. As he looked up, he saw the other plane suddenly making a swift dive.

  He immediately followed.

  It was the shape of Fred. It looked like Fred. But it wasn’t. The body rippled and pulsed in strange ways; the eyes were pallid. Bits of flesh were erupting from what looked like the outside in. Even over the incredibly strong smell of fuel, the stink was absolutely ungodly.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Amelia. The figure lurched towards her. Whatever it was, whatever was happening, she knew somehow, with every fibre of her being, that she couldn’t let it touch her. ‘Get back!’

  The thing that used to be Fred howled weirdly, a creaking, guttering noise that sounded like something running over his voice box.

  ‘Stay away!’

  It lurched forwards with the plane, reaching out a green clammy hand to her shoulder.

  She leapt back and glanced around. Could she make it to open the aircraft door? It was a two-handed twist which would take about five seconds. And they were dropping out of the sky at a rate of knots. She looked down at her hands and wil
led them to stop shaking. She had been in worse situations than this. Well, maybe not worse.

  She pulled out her zippo lighter from her pocket, then put it away again. The figure might be scared of fire, but the entire plane must be covered in gasoline. They’d both go up.

  Instead, Amelia lifted her large boot and kicked out at the creature, sending it hurling back towards the very back of the aircraft, buying herself crucial seconds.

  She pulled up the nose, looked at the instruments and down into the blue. The spit of yellow sand was clearer now. She could … if she set the angle just right … if she could run and open the door and throw that thing, which even now she could hear getting up, groaning, creaking, the ligaments twisting around themselves … if she could throw it out … and land the plane …

  She glanced to her left. That absolute idiot was still leaning out of the blue airship, waving wildly and mouthing ‘HALLLOOOOOO!!!!’ but she didn’t have time to think about that just now.

  She very carefully propped the joystick up, just a tad, and engaged the autopilot once more. She could hear the thing now – it wasn’t breathing, but making rasping noises as it moved, as if something was moving its throat.

  She whisked around. The creature was worse now, if anything: more and more holes appearing as its skin integrity broke down. The whole thing was pulsing with motion, with whatever was inside, but it was slow-moving.

  Amelia ducked under its arm and dived to the doorway, pulling at the handle and turning it round until it fell open. The air outside was warm at the lowering altitude, the noise formidable, roaring past her ears. The pale turquoise sea looked uncomfortably close.

  She turned. She fastened her gloves more tightly. She didn’t want it touching her flesh. Looking round, she grabbed the largest thing she could find – the axe, for cutting chocks. She hoisted it, keeping her balance in the stuttering plane as they headed ever downwards.