Prelude Transit (short story)
Prelude Transit was, as the name suggested, a prelude to Transit by Ben Aaronovitch. It did not appear in the published novel.
Summary[[edit] | edit source]
An old man is forcibly retired, given a country home and assigned a nurse. He uses a wheelchair, wears an electronic bracelet that monitors his life signs, and suffers from nightmares. A young man (who the old man considers a boy) wearing a UN uniform begins watching over him but the old man, suffering clearly from dementia, no longer recognises who this is.
Eventually, the 'boy' helps the old man mount a horse which had also been put out to pasture, and during the ride both the man and the horse die from the exertion. The old man is buried with full military honours. General Bambera drinks at the wake to try and sleep, only to be woken to hear of an explosion in America.
Characters[[edit] | edit source]
- Old man (implicitly Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart)
- Boy (implicitly Lethbridge-Stewart's grandson)
- General Bambera (implicitly Winifred Bambera)
- Bambera's husband (implicitly Ancelyn)
Worldbuilding[[edit] | edit source]
- The location is implied to be Geneva, as it is in the mountains and is near a lake.
- The old man's nurse used to work for the KGB.
Notes[[edit] | edit source]
- If the old man is in fact the Brigadier, then this story proposes yet another contradictory account of his death, since a different fate for him was later revealed in the novels Happy Endings and The King of Terror (in which he is de-aged in 2010 and dies in 2050) and also the show, which in TV: The Wedding of River Song has him dying in a British nursing home in the early 2010s. Ben Aaronovitch had himself intended to kill the elderly Brigadier in TV: Battlefield before changing his mind.
- If the boy is in fact the Brigadier's grandson, it's Mariama's son as he calls the old man Baba, an African word for an older, reverend, male relative. (Mariama was introduced in the Transit novel) Other grandsons would be introduced after this story was published: Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (HOMEVID: Downtime), Nick Wilson and Conall Lethbridge-Stewart. (PROSE: The Enfolded Time)
Continuity[[edit] | edit source]
- Bambera is informed that a mountain in America had just exploded, implied to be the events of the end of PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Warhead. As fits the events of that story, there's heavy pollution in the world and they can't always safely wheel the old man outside.
- There is a military command around "the school", implicitly making this dacha near UNIT Central Command as the then-recent Battlefield novelisation put it underneath an old Swiss school.
External links[[edit] | edit source]
- The entire text of the piece at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
