The Dead Star (audio story)

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The Dead Star was the fourth release in The Audio Novels. It was written by Kate Orman and featured the Second Doctor, Ben Jackson and Polly Wright.

Publisher's summary

It's 1968, and the Earth has one month to live.

The Doctor, Ben, and Polly race to escape a frightening lifeless London. But as the city folds in on itself, it is a warning of a far greater danger. Someone has misused terrifyingly advanced technology to make Earth the target of a primordial black hole - a tiny, invisible world-killer. Struggling to avert the catastrophe, the Doctor must send his companions on dangerous undercover missions.

Can the Doctor and his friends prevent the planet Earth from being erased from space and time?

Plot

Part one

The TARDIS is caught in a time corridor and lands on Carnaby Street in 1968 instead of Ben and Polly's home time of 1966. The newly-regenerated Doctor and his companions find that the city is deserted and the world is at a 90 degree angle, allowing them to walk on the walls of the empty shops. At the end of the row of shops, they are able to step onto the ground and see that various other laws of physics have broken down, leading the Doctor to the conclusion that they are in a singularity created by the TARDIS entering the corridor and that they will not be able to leave safely until they know the Vortex constants.

Ben and Polly notice that there is no Sun despite there being light and that the city resembles a child's playset or a dream landscape, with office buildings sliced down the middle and Big Ben on its side and the size of a mountain. They also feel like they are being watched by something in the sky. The trio take shelter when Big Ben moves towards them and then find themselves in another world which the Doctor explains is another bubble which has taken the place of the previous bubble. He suggests that they split up to find the pathological bubble in which nothing makes sense and which will allow him to determine the singularity's structure constants.

The second bubble pops like the first and the TARDIS, sitting in Fitzroy Square where Ben and Polly first entered it, is apparently lost, but the Doctor believes that it was a copy and leads his companions into the London Underground where they find the pathological bubble. The trio hear a roar and experience a suspension of the laws of physics. The Doctor manages to get Ben and Polly out after getting the measurements he needs by bouncing a rubber ball and they go to find the real TARDIS, the Doctor now knowing how to leave and calculating the stability of the bubbles using an abacus. The bubble begins to fall apart as they reach Carnaby Street, but they manage to get into the ship and dematerialise.

Reasoning that the time corridor was likely created by scientists out of their depth and that the Earth could be in danger, the Doctor pilots the TARDIS down the corridor to confront them and they arrive at the London College of Natural Sciences in August 1968. There, the Doctor gets Polly a job as lecturer Dr Anne Fields' secretary and Ben a job at the Chicxulub Club, a club which Fields, aspires to join. Polly learns from Fields that she believes there to be a tenth planet in the solar system which is heading towards Earth, but Professor Christoffel of the Chicxulub Club does not accept her findings. The Doctor eavesdrops on Polly and Fields at lunch before introducing himself and asking to have a look at Fields' calculations.

The Doctor deduces that the approaching planet is actually a black hole and he and Polly are attacked by a shape-changing robot after leaving the university. They are saved by Ben, who is driving a limousine for Professor Gerro Scapinelli and smashes into the robot before picking them both up. He drops Scapinelli off at the university and she gives Polly a glass tube filled with a blue liquid, the taste of which the Doctor recognises but cannot identify, to use in an emergency. The trio are surprised by Scapinelli's lack of a reaction to the robot and decide to go to the ecology department's offices whilst its members are all at a Chicxulub Club meeting.

After finding a letter in Christoffel's office mandating that Fields be denied access to technology which help her prove the existence of the black hole, Polly is caught by Fields and hands it to her. They are interrupted in their discussion of Christoffel's existing knowledge of the nature of the black hole when a robot climbs onto the window and smashes in in the form of an eight-legged disc. Polly screams.

Part two

The robot knocks Polly over as it attacks Fields, causing Scapinelli's tube to smash and the liquid to spill onto Polly's skin. Polly gains increased strength and destroys the robot by hitting it with a typewriter and tearing out its insides before throwing it out the window, surprising the Doctor and Ben. The Doctor identifies the liquid as a 21st century pneumatic gel which gives its user the ability to fight by affecting their brain and leaves with Ben, asking Fields to ensure that Polly gets to her flat safely to rest. On the way, Polly convinces Fields to make her findings public so that she will no longer be a target, but Fields disappears in the crowd at a café and Polly assumes she has been kidnapped.

Ben drives Scapinelli back to Oldenwhite House, the club's headquarters, and gets the feeling from a conversation about physics and the club's iridium rings that she is from outer space. Meanwhile, the Doctor uses a holographic orrery from the TARDIS to discover that the time corridor originates from the Kuiper Belt and that the black hole, which is following its path, will arrive in a month's time. He gets some of Fields' students to help him build a muonic activator to find the exact location of the corridor's exit and activates it in Polly's flat; the remains of the robot form a face which which identifies itself as Trin, an astronautic assistant built by the Outer System Company in 2064.

Trin is destroyed again when the muonic activator malfunctions and the Doctor, leaving Polly to sleep, gets a lift from Ben to a party at Oldenwhite House. Ben is told by Mrs Berry to serve drinks at the party and searches the house using a lockpick given to him by the Doctor, finding a laboratory and photographing it with a camera from the future. As he does so, he is caught by bodyguards Mr Sage and Mr Tanning, who are joined by a wolf-shaped robot before they fetch Scapinelli. Scapinelli summons the rest of the club and discreetly gives Ben a tea cake which gives him the knowledge to write out a complex formula on a blackboard, giving her the pretext to claim that he is not a spy but an enthusiastic fan.

to be completed

Part three

to be added

Part four

to be added

Part five

to be added

Part six

to be added

Characters

to be completed

Crew

Worldbuilding

Notes

Original cover.
  • The cover originally featured the 2018 logo, which had been used on Big Finish releases since July 2018. It was updated to feature the 2022 logo before its release.
  • The story ends without an explanation for exactly what Ra-atouie is. In narration, the Doctor does think up several hypotheses though. These include:

Continuity

External links

v • e
The Audio Novels
Second Doctor
Third Doctor
Fourth Doctor
Fifth Doctor
Twelfth Doctor
Multi-Doctor
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