Doctor Who BBCN15 - Wooden Heart

  A vast starship, seemingly deserted, is spinning slowly in the void of deep space. Martha and the Doctor explore this drifting tomb and discover that they may not be alone after all.

  Who survived the disaster that overcame the rest of the crew? What continues to power the vessel? And why has a stretch of wooded countryside suddenly appeared in the middle of the craft?

  As the Doctor and Martha journey through the forest, they find a mysterious, fog-bound village – a village traumatised by missing children and prophecies of its own destruction. . .

  Featuring the Doctor and Martha as played by David Tennant and Freema Agyeman in the hit series from BBC Television.

  Wooden Heart

  BY MARTIN DAY

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Published in 2007 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing. Ebury Publishing is a division of the Random House Group Ltd.

  © Martin Day, 2007

  Martin Day has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  Doctor Who is a BBC Wales production for BBC One Executive Producers: Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner Producer: Phil Collinson

  Original series broadcast on BBC Television. Format © BBC 1963. ‘Doctor Who’, ‘TARDIS’ and the Doctor Who logo are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.co.uk.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 84607 226 0

  The Random House Group Ltd makes every effort to ensure that the papers used in our books are made from trees that have been legally sourced from well-managed credibly certified forests. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.randomhouse.co.uk.

  Creative Director: Justin Richards

  Project Editor: Steve Tribe

  Production Controller: Alenka Oblak

  Typeset in Albertina and Deviant Strain

  Cover design by Henry Steadman © BBC 2007

  Printed and bound in Germany by GGP Media GmbH

  Dedicated to the memory of Craig Hinton

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  One

  3

  Two

  9

  Three

  21

  Four

  29

  Five

  39

  Six

  51

  Seven

  61

  Eight

  73

  Nine

  87

  Ten

  99

  Eleven

  109

  Twelve

  125

  Thirteen

  137

  Fourteen

  147

  Fifteen

  159

  Acknowledgements

  169

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Petr in a choked whisper. ‘Just like the others. . . ’

  Kristine pushed past her husband and into the room. She wanted to see for herself.

  She stared at the crumpled sheets on the bed, the pale pillow that still bore an impression of her son’s head. It looked for all the world as if Thorn had simply got up to get a glass of water – as if he was in the next room and would soon return, rubbing his eyes and yawning.

  Kristine rested a hand on the bed. It was warm.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No, this can’t be happening. Not to us. . . ’

  ‘Why should we be immune?’ asked Petro, He tried to place a consoling arm around Kristine’s waist, but she twisted free.

  ‘The bars you put across the windows, the lock on the door. . . ’

  There was anger in Kristine’s voice now, an anger that her silent tears could not soften.

  ‘We knew it might not make any difference,’ said Petro ‘The children just disappear. There’s no way of protecting them.’

  Kristine shook her head. ‘How can you be so accepting of it all?’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Petr, an awkward tone to his voice as he struggled with his emotions. ‘But it’s like I said. Just because Thorn is the son of the elected leader, it does not make him any less vulnerable.’

  ‘I don’t care about the leadership,’ said Kristine. ‘I don’t care about the village. I just want my son back!’

  ‘I know,’ said Petro.

  This time Kristine accepted his embrace; he wrapped his arms around her, muffling the tears. Her entire body shook like a slender tree caught in the wind.

  Petr shook his head sadly. ‘If only this nightmare would end. . . ’

  ‘How many more children are going to disappear?’ asked Kristine.

  ‘How many more families are going to suffer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Petro. ‘No one does.’

  1

  ‘We should ask for help.’

  ‘But that is not our way,’ said Petr, grateful that his wife was too weak to argue the point. ‘This. . . evil. . . will either resolve itself or. . . ’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or we must hope for outside intervention. Some external factor, some miracle we have not considered – but you know we cannot make any approach ourselves.’

  ‘So we do nothing?’

  Petr didn’t know what to say. In fact, he had tried every means at his disposal to protect the village from the gathering threat. But it was only now, after the evil had snatched away his own son, that he realised how pathetic their actions had been.

  Just for a moment he thought he heard a footfall behind him – the creak of a floorboard, followed by the soft murmur of Thorn’s voice.

  But he knew his mind was playing tricks on him, and he wondered if Kristine was undergoing similar agonies.

  ‘We’re never going to see Thorn again,’ said Kristine in a voice so flat and hopeless it almost broke Petr’s heart.

  Petr thought of his son – such a proud, energetic child, forever tousle-haired and impish. Would he always be like that in Petr’s mind, trapped in his youth and unable to grow older? Petr thought of Thorn’s strong hands, his clear eyes – his sheer force of will. And the arguments they’d had!

  Petr would give anything in the world to have one last row with his son, just so that they could eventually come together to mumble their embarrassed apologies to each other. Just for one last chance to say how much he loved him.

  ‘We’ll see Thorn again,’ said Petr firmly. ‘Somehow. . . Somehow all the children will come back to us.’

  Kristine pulled away, a different dread in her eyes now. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s what frightens me.’

  2

  For a few moments, as Martha stepped towards the main console, she thought she was alone.

  The walls that pulsed with light, the huge support struts that seemed hewn from living coral, the mundane latticework beneath her feet – everything around her hummed with secrets and potential, with the hint of amazing things as yet unseen, and with terrifying things that were all too clear. It was like stepping into some old church where every footstep feels like an intrusion – or finding yourself alone in a mad scientist’s lab and wondering which bubbling experiment or complex bit of machinery you’ll fiddle with first.

  She liked these moments without the Doctor – these momentary pauses for breath
, when she had time to take it all in, to dwell on the things she had seen, the adventures she had already had. Paths already taken. Normal life never seemed so dull and one-dimensional as in these brief moments of reflection.

  Then again, she didn’t like having too much time to think – sometimes it was scary. These events that played out before her threatened, on occasion, to wash her away entirely. Sometimes she just wanted to watch a beautiful sunset on an alien world, or meet someone famous from history, without battalions of blood-sucking monsters and 3

  megalomaniacal villains hoving into view.

  It was probably just as well, then, that at that moment she noticed the familiar and reassuring form of the Doctor, leaning against one of the walls, his face partly hidden by shadows, staring intently at the small scanner screen some feet away. He was chewing absent-mindedly on one of the arms of his glasses, seemingly lost in thought himself.

  Martha circled around towards him and he looked up. ‘It’s just drifting through space,’ he said, indicating the screen with his spectacles.

  ‘It’s easy to think that the cosmos is full of planets and stars and stuff, when actually. . . So much of it is empty. Bit of stray gas maybe, echoes of dark matter and plasma, but otherwise. . . Nothing.’

  Martha came round and looked at the screen. It showed, as the Doctor said, a remarkably dark area of deep space. The velvety blackness was smudged by only a handful of distant stars. Against this there drifted the silent form of a slowly spinning craft. Orientated vertically, it resembled a great smooth tube of silver that thickened into some sort of blackened propulsion system at its base. At the top the tubular shape sprouted various spokes and protrusions.

  ‘Every atom’s full of space, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Even solid things. . .

  They’re not really solid. Not if you look at them close enough.’

  ‘The gap between electron and nucleus, the chasm between one atom and the next. . . ’

  ‘What’s the ship?’ asked Martha, looking back at the screen again.

  ‘It’s. . . interesting,’ said the Doctor, as if that explained everything.

  ‘A Century-class research vessel. The Castor, if the faint mayday signals it’s giving off are to be believed. Not built for speed, as you can see

  – once it reached its destination it would hang around in orbit like a space station. Jack-of-all-trades sort of vessel.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said the Doctor. ‘No life signs, but no signs of collision or other damage either. I can’t tell at the moment how long it’s been here. Days, years, decades. . . ’ Suddenly his hands moved over the TARDIS controls in a blur. He spoke more quickly, a growing excitement evident in his voice. ‘There’s an atmosphere, though, and grav-4

  ity – now that’s odd in itself. And there’s a few other little things as well. . . ’

  ‘Enough to pique your interest?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ he exclaimed, grinning. ‘My interest is well and truly piqued. It’s reached a critical level of piqued-ness. If it were any more piqued, I’d. . . ’ He slammed a few more controls home and very nearly pirouetted on the spot. ‘I think I’d run out of pique and need a little lie-down!’

  The great engines at the heart of the TARDIS began to wheeze and shudder.

  . Are we going to take a look?’ asked Martha, wondering if the Doctor could pick up the uncertainty in her voice. Exploring a rusting old space station stuffed with dead bodies – or worse – didn’t exactly sound like a barrel of laughs. ‘What am I saying?’ she realised, seeing the Doctor’s expression. ‘Of course we’re going to take a look.’

  ‘So, why the Castor?’ asked Martha some moments later as they stepped through the TARDIS doors and into darkness.

  ‘Good question,’ said the Doctor. He busied himself at a small panel on the wall, illuminated only by the piercing blue glow of his sonic screwdriver, then stepped backed triumphantly as the lights flickered on.

  ‘ Fiat lux! ’ he said triumphantly. ‘From the Latin for My small Italian car is on fire. . . ’

  ‘They’re not very bright,’ said Martha. The lights that had come on were glowing dully, leaving pockets of shadow at regular intervals.

  ‘Night cycle,’ said the Doctor. He looked down the long, gently arcing corridor they found themselves in. ‘I imagine whoever named this craft had a love of the classics.’

  ‘Castor, as in Castor and Pollux – the sons of Led a,’ said Martha, trying to elevate the conversation somewhat – and, if truth be told, wondering if she could impress the Doctor with her learning.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the Doctor, peering at another panel recessed into the wall. ‘Probably why on the colony world of Aractus they still say Never turn your back on a swan.’

  5

  Martha sighed. That was the problem with the Doctor – you had no way of working out if he was telling the truth, or deliberately escalating the conversation into the realms of the absurd. ‘I’ll remember that next time I’m on Aractus,’ she said.

  ‘Castor was said to be a skilled horse tamer,’ said the Doctor,

  ‘whereas Pollux was a pugnacious pugilist. I wonder if that has a bearing on this ship. People rarely just a pluck a name from the air –it always means something. Take Martha, for example. . . ’

  ‘Martha means “mistress of the house”. I remember looking it up in the library when I was a kid.’ Martha smiled. ‘Mum just said she liked the sound of it.’

  ‘There could be other reasons, I suppose,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s a place near Peterborough called Castor. Just off the A47. . . ’

  ‘So you’re wondering if the owner of this spaceship was born near Peterborough. . . ? Nothing against Peterborough, but I prefer your first suggestion.’

  ‘You do?’ said the Doctor absent-mindedly as he pulled the mesh covering the panel clean off the wall. ‘You should have heard my third idea. . . ’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Whoever owned this ship was a fan of the Popeye cartoons.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Poor Popeye – hopelessly addicted to spinach and skinny women. . .

  Anyway, Olive Oyl’s brother was called Castor.’

  ‘You’re a fount of useless information,’ said Martha.

  ‘Don’t you mean “useful”?’

  ‘I mean what I said.’ She tried to see what the Doctor was doing.

  ‘How come the lights are working?’ she asked.

  ‘Solar power,’ said the Doctor, as if that explained everything.

  ‘I’ve seen pictures of the space station,’ said Martha. ‘The one the Americans and the Soviets are building. They’ve got huge solar panels, but I didn’t see anything like that on this ship.’

  ‘It’s integrated into the very fabric of the craft,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Almost every external component and hull panel plays its part.’

  6

  ‘But you were just telling me how empty bits of space are. This thing might not have been anywhere near a sun for ages.’

  The Doctor slipped on his glasses while peering at the panel’s small read-out screen. ‘It’s obviously had just enough sunlight to keep it ticking over. To be fair, it hasn’t had to expend much energy recently –a smidge on life support, a soupcon on a few other essential systems. . .

  The engines haven’t been used in years, so it’s just kind of drifted.’

  ‘Is that what drew you here?’ asked Martha. The mystery of it all –a Mary Celeste that drifts in the spaces between the stars. . . ’

  The Doctor took a step back, suddenly serious. ‘It reminds me of another ship, a craft with a link to a person from the history of your planet. . . ’ He trailed away, his eyes intense, as if he could stare through the metal hull of the craft and see the stars and nebulae beyond.

  ‘The Pollux?’ suggested Martha hopefully.

  ‘Never mind the Pollux,’ said the Doctor abruptly, replacing what was left of the panel’s ou
ter covering. ‘It’s this vessel that fascinates me now. What happened here?’

  He began to stride down the corridor; big, confident steps. Steps that wanted to march into the future, to turn corners, to find out what happened next – and to revel in it.

  Martha chided herself for downplaying this particular trip in the TARDIS – she’d forgotten that, with the Doctor at your side, words like ‘mundane’ and ‘everyday’ just didn’t seem to count.

  ‘Probably just a systems malfunction,’ offered Martha helpfully.

  ‘There’s no sign of any great systems failure in the central computer system,’ said the Doctor. ‘But perhaps it just healed itself. Stranger things have happened.’

  Martha drew a long breath. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the Doctor. ‘This looks interesting.’

  The corridor terminated at a circular door about three metres in diameter. It looked like a resolutely closed metal iris, and horizontal bars extended from the walls on either side and through large metal loops to give an even greater impression of solidity.

  7

  ‘To keep something out, or to lock something in?’ wondered Martha out loud.

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ said the Doctor. A quick wave of the sonic screwdriver and the bars retracted into the walls, leaving behind a faint smell of ozone and grease. Then the main door blossomed open.

  ‘Hello!’ the Doctor called as he stepped through. ‘Anyone home?’

  ‘You sure there’s no one on board?’ said Martha. ‘Little bit of courtesy goes a long way, you know.’

  ‘The TARDIS didn’t pick up any life signs,’ said the Doctor. ‘As long as the life forms in question aren’t hidden behind some sort of elec-tromagnetic shield. . . Or out of phase. . . ’

  His voice dwindled to nothing as they found themselves on a high gantry, a circular walkway that had fifty or more doors leading away from it. Three metres above them was another walkway, and another; Martha risked a glimpse over the edge of the handrail, and the tubular structure they found themselves in seemed to disappear in both directions almost out of sight.

  Martha took a step back from the edge. ‘This place is huge.’