Doctor Who Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Collection

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: In the Bleak Midwinter

  Chapter 2: Let Nothing You Dismay

  Chapter 3: If Thou Knowst Thy Telling

  Chapter 4: Though the Frost Was Cruel

  Chapter 5: The Hopes and Fears of All the Years

  Chapter 6: Deep and Crisp and Even

  Chapter 7: The Stars in the Night Sky

  Chapter 8: Certain Poor Shepherds in Fields as They Lay

  Chapter 9: The Night Is Darker Now

  Chapter 10: Underneath the Mountain

  Chapter 11: The Maker of Our Earth

  Chapter 12: Brighter Visions Beam Afar

  Chapter 13: Brightly Shone the Moon that Night

  Chapter 14: Born to Raise the Sons of Earth, Born to Give Them Second Birth

  Chapter 15: Now in Flesh Appearing

  Chapter 16: Guide Us to Thy Perfect Light

  Chapter 17: Close by Me Forever

  Chapter 18: Above Thy Deep and Dreamless Sleep

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The winter festival is approaching for the hardy colony of Morphans, but no one is in the mood to celebrate. They’re trying to build a new life on a cold new world, but each year gets harder and harder. It’s almost as if some dark force is working against them. Then three mysterious travelers arrive out of the midwinter night, one of them claiming to be a doctor. Are they bringing the gift of salvation or doom? And what else might be lurking out there, about to wake up?

  About the Author

  Dan Abnett is a novelist and award-winning comic book writer. He has written over thirty-five novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His latest Horus Heresy novel Prospero Burns was a New York Times bestseller, and topped the SF charts in the UK and the US. His combat SF novel Embedded was published in 2011. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

  The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Collection

  Ten Little Aliens

  Stephen Cole

  Dreams of Empire

  Justin Richards

  Last of the Gaderene

  Mark Gatiss

  Festival of Death

  Jonathan Morris

  Fear of the Dark

  Trevor Baxendale

  Players

  Terrance Dicks

  Remembrance of the Daleks

  Ben Aaronovitch

  EarthWorld

  Jacqueline Rayner

  Only Human

  Gareth Roberts

  Beautiful Chaos

  Gary Russell

  The Silent Stars Go By

  Dan Abnett

  For George Mann

  O little town of Bethlehem

  How still we see thee lie

  Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

  The silent stars go by

  Yet in thy dark streets shineth

  The everlasting Light

  The hopes and fears of all the years

  Are met in thee tonight

  ~ ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’,

  a song of Earth before

  INTRODUCTION

  We all travel in time thanks to Doctor Who. The fifty years of the programme’s existence represents a continuum for us all, from the oldest veteran to the newest and youngest fan. We measure our personal journeys against the space-time curve of the programme’s history. Certain moments along that curve vividly evoke special things for each of us, and whisk us back to a particular time and a particular place, like a Proustian TARDIS.

  Yes, I know. I can’t believe I just wrote ‘Proustian TARDIS’ either, but we’ll move past it and remain friends.

  Let me explain. One of the singular things for me is Jon Pertwee’s Doctor. I think of the Third Doctor as ‘my’ Doctor, in that it was during his incarnation that I properly became a regular viewer and fan. I carried on watching after that, of course, and have an enduring love for each subsequent doctor, but Jon Pertwee’s era is the moment I connected, and glimpsing him in character, or watching one of his episodes, or even seeing a Target book cover to one of his stories, or an annual from that time, bundles me into my Proustian TARDIS and vworps me all the way back to my childhood. It is my most magical memory of the show, because it was the time when I simply engaged with it as a child, with a child’s unalloyed, gleeful imagination.

  Another of ‘my’ time travel moments is the Seventh Doctor’s tenure. By the time Sylvester and Sophie were having their adventures, I was grown up, and working as a writer and an editor. I was lucky enough to be commissioned to write regular comic strips for Doctor Who Magazine and, because the magazine’s strip always featured the current cast, it was Sylvester and Sophie I wrote about. Memories of them whisk me to an entirely different place, a place where I engaged with Doctor Who as an enthusiastic professional, seeking to understand the show so I could write the characters as well and as authentically as possible.

  Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor represents yet another time travel response. I remain an avid watcher of the programme, but modern-era Doctor Who engrosses me as a professional who relishes the chances I get to write series-related projects, and also now as a parent too. It’s no less of a thrill than the thrill I got from watching Jon Pertwee, it’s just a different kind of thrill. I have travelled in time with the series, and my responses have evolved along with it.

  When I was approached to write the book that eventually became The Silent Stars Go By, I immersed myself in the spirit, mood and characters of the Eleventh Doctor era, in order to do the best possible job of capturing the feel of the TV show as it currently stands. But part of me wanted to add a little of the giddy thrill of the earlier incarnations as a nostalgic nod to the child inside me.

  I wanted to use a classic monster. Spoiler warning… unless you’ve, you know, seen the cover, but I was allowed to use the Ice Warriors. This was a great privilege, and it immediately threw me back into the Proustian TARDIS again, and whisked me off to… well, a time before time began for me.

  It was the strangest thing. I realised I had a strong and evocative response to the earliest eras of Doctor Who too, to the Hartnell and Troughton incarnations, even though I had not seen them at the time. I have, of course, seen all the episodes extant from those early days as an adult, but my gut response to the early days is as a place of immense, and cosmic mystery. I had seen, as a child, glimpses of the Hartnell and Troughton periods, in books and stills and clips and magazines. It was a mysterious and alarming place, coldly immortalised in black and white, somehow more eccentric and frosty, strange and unearthly than anything that came after. The Hartnell and Troughton eras, to me, were far more invested with a chilling grace, a haunted silence, the bleak sterility of deep space.

  There was a simple reason for this. I had never been initiated into that part of the continuum. I had only ever seen little flashes or hints. It seemed particularly daunting and mysterious, because it was literally unknown to me. The Ice Warriors, the quintessential opponents of the Second Doctor, were the very embodiment of that cold, implacable mystery. It was, I decided, an extra flavour I very much wanted to add to the book.

  So that’s what I tried to achieve. I tried to write an Eleventh Doctor adventure, filled with the style and character appropriate to that era, with strong proactive roles for Rory and Amy and plenty of bantering chat… and invest it with just a dash of the timeless, chilling threat that, as a child, I had always felt trailed the series like a comet’s icy tail.

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nbsp; The Ice Warriors are, in my opinion, one of the most interesting of all Doctor Who adversaries. They are regularly counted by almost all fans in the very upper ranks of all-time popular monsters, yet this reputation far outweighs their very few and very early appearances. They are also not strictly baddies. They are a complex alien race who are not always in the wrong and not always hostile. They have their own agenda, and they have their own morals. They cannot simply be dreaded and opposed as irredeemable threats.

  I hope you’ve come to this novel for a classic Eleventh Doctor adventure, but I also hope that, whether you’re a veteran fan or a newcomer, and no matter what the moments that your personal Proustian TARDIS likes to whisk you away to, this will be a timeless Doctor Who story too. I hope that when the TARDIS door opens for the first time, any of the Doctors could step out, and you would not be surprised or disappointed.

  We all travel in time thanks to Doctor Who. I hope we all travel for at least another fifty years.

  Dan Abnett

  August 2012

  Vesta got up early that morning, before Guide’s Bell rang to mark the start of labour, before the sun had come up and brought heat and full light. She got dressed in the dark, in woollens, and skirts both under and over, and a cap, and two shawls. She had gloves that Bel had sewn for her. It was very cold. She could feel the red in her cheeks and nose, and the water in her eyes, and she could see the white smoke of her breath in the gloom.

  It was a biting cold, a bad cold. It was a cold that had a threat to it, not a promise, no matter what Bill Groan and the others said. Winter was supposed to go away, not come worse. Eighteen years Vesta had been alive, and she had never seen a white winter until the last three, each one whiter than the one before.

  When she took her coat off the peg, her hands were numb despite her gloves. The twilight of dawn, a grey light made brighter by the snow, was creeping into the back hallway. By it, she found her boots, and the little pot and tie of heathouse flowers she had laid out the night before. She found the pole too, a pruning hook, strong and almost two metres long. It wasn’t the season for pruning, but she’d left it ready too because Bel had said it was good to know how deep snow was before you walked on it. Snow changed the landscape, and filled holes up. You could fall, or vanish, or turn an ankle and lie out of help’s way so long you’d freeze.

  They had all been told not to go out alone, especially early or late, but that was just worry. There had always been stories of things lurking up in the woods. They were stories made up to frighten children. Vesta had things to do. Some old dog bothering the herds wouldn’t bother her.

  She saw her name on the label above her peg. Harvesta Flurrish. Next to it, Bel’s name. Next to that, an empty peg. Bel was not one for sentiment: she was older and she was clever. However, Vesta Flurrish could not let the day go unmarked.

  Chaunce Plowrite had make them all metal cleats for their boots. Bill Groan, the Elect, gave Chaunce permission to make them out of leftover shipskin, and there wasn’t much of that remaining. Vesta had hoped, when she woke, she wouldn’t need to use them.

  But she did.

  Snow had come again in the night, overlaying the snow from the days before. Everything had a soft curved edge to it.

  In the yard, the sky was night blue, the colour of Bel’s eyes. First light, and clear all the way to the stars. The rooftops and chimneys of Beside, bearded with snow, were black against the blue, and so were the bare trees beyond, and the great rising plateaus of the Firmers. The plumes of steam coming from the vents on the tops of the Firmers were luminous white against the cobalt blue. They were catching the earliest rays of sunlight because they were so much higher up than anything else.

  Vesta turned on her solamp, and hung it from her pole. Then she started to walk, her metal cleats crunching, her pruning pole probing the snow cover, one hand holding up the hem of her overskirts. A dog barked in the yard. In the byre behind the Flurrish house, the cattle were lowing.

  She followed the North Lane out of Beside, past the well and up towards Would Be, which lay in the shadow of Firmer Number Two.

  It was slow going. It was hard work striding over ground that sank under you. Vesta’s legs began to ache. She stopped to rest for a minute and looked down at the streams that fed the autumn mills. They were frozen like glass in that stilled place between night and morning.

  By the time she reached Would Be, she knew she would not manage to get back to Beside before Guide’s Bell rang and called them to work. She resolved to work on after nightchime to make up. Vesta also knew that the people of the plantnation community would excuse her. They would allow her an hour or so, once a year.

  Would Be was quiet. The trees were like silent figures with snowy caps. Autumn had taken their leaves, but winter was bowing their black branches and trunks. Vesta’s solamp was beginning to flutter, its charge worn out, but it was getting lighter by the minute. The blue sky and the white snow were both tinged with pink from the sun-to-be.

  As she walked along, in the quiet, she felt for one moment that someone was following her. But it was just the stillness, and her imagination.

  The memory yard was in the centre of Would Be, a place chosen years ago as a quiet bit of earth. Patience was said to be the greatest virtue of all Morphans, and those who lay here were the most patient of all. Simple stones marked each burial spot, each one marked with a name, as clear as the labels above the pegs in the back hall of the Flurrish house.

  There were Flurrishes here. Years of them, laid out and remembered, mixed up with all the other Morphan families. Vesta’s mum had gone away long ago, before Vesta was really old enough to know her. She lay here, and Vesta always said a friendly hello to her stone.

  But Vesta had come for her dad, Tyler Flurrish, gone four years, taken by a fever. He’d seen the colder seasons coming, and fretted about it with his kin, but he hadn’t lived to see the actual snow and ice. Vesta wondered if he felt it there in the ground, across his grave like a numbing blanket. He would have worried too much, about his daughters Vesta and Bel, and about the future that awaited them.

  Vesta crouched by the grave and brushed the snow off the stone so she could read the name there. She took out the flowers she had brought, and set them in the jar on his plot. It would have been his birthday, so she wished him a happy one, and then talked to him a little about the work and how things were.

  Far away, down in Beside, Guide’s Bell chimed.

  Vesta bowed her head and said a few words to Guide, and asked Guide to look after her dad. Then she got up to make her way back.

  The stars were still out. Over in the west, behind the bare silhouettes of the trees, one seemed to be moving.

  Vesta stopped to watch. There had been talk of stars moving. Even Bel said she had seen one do it. Many said it was a bad omen, signifying the coming danger of the cold, but it was a mystery too. Stars weren’t supposed to slide silently past in the darkness of a winter dawn.

  Moving slowly, making no sound, it disappeared behind a stand of trees. Vesta hurried along to see if she could catch another glimpse of it.

  That’s when she saw the tracks.

  She almost walked across them. They were so deep in the snow, they held shadow and looked as black as pitch. They cut straight through the heart of Would Be from the north, running away towards Firmer Number Three.

  They were the biggest footprints she’d ever seen, bigger than even Jack Duggat would make, with his work boots and his metal cleats on and everything. And it wasn’t just the size of the prints – the stride length was also huge.

  Vesta stared for a moment. She thought hard, trying to explain what she could see. She wondered if they were footprints that had begun to melt, thus exaggerating their size.

  But they were fresh. The snow was only a few hours old, and there had not yet been enough day to start to thaw it. No one was out except her, not this far north of the town. The tracks were clean cut. She could see where the heel and the toe pads had cut.
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  A giant had walked through the silent woods, and not long ago. If she had left her dad’s grave just a few minutes earlier, she would have met it. It would have come right across her path.

  Vesta Flurrish was really scared. Her hands were trembling, and it wasn’t from the cold. Beside seemed a long way away: too far to reach quickly, too far to run to, too far to call to. She didn’t even want to cross the tracks to run for home. That felt like the wrong thing to do, as if the giant might feel her path crossing his, and turn back for her.

  She turned and began to run back towards the memory yard. At that moment, with the sun still not even risen, by her father’s side seemed the safest place to be.

  But there was something waiting for her in the trees, something with a deep, gurgling growl like a dog being throttled, something with red eyes that caught the gleam of the early light.

  Something bred to kill.

  CHAPTER 1

  IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER

  ‘That,’ said Amy, unable to disguise a slight note of surprise, ‘was a perfect landing.’

  ‘I thank you for noticing,’ replied the Doctor. He beamed, and flipped a row of console switches to their ‘off’ positions with the flourish of a maestro organist shutting down his Wurlitzer after a career-defining performance.

  ‘Then why are we leaning?’ asked Rory.

  ‘Leaning?’ asked the Doctor, polishing the glass in the console dials with a handkerchief.

  ‘Over,’ said Rory. ‘To one side.’

  ‘We’re not,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Stand up straight,’ said Amy.

  They all did. They all looked at themselves in relation to the guard rail uprights.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘That is lean-y,’ he conceded.

  ‘Perhaps not as perfect as I first imagined,’ he added.

  ‘“Lean-y”?’ asked Amy.

  ‘Well, lean-ish at the very least,’ replied the Doctor, sliding down the handrail of the stairs to reach the TARDIS main deck.