11 - Dreamstone Moon

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DOCTOR WHO

Dreamstone Moon

An Eighth Doctor Ebook

By Paul Leonard

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Ackwhowledgments

First and foremost I would like to thank my friends: Barb Drummond, for reading through the book and making

many valuable suggestions; the BFW crowd - Mark Leyland, Chris Lake, Nick Walters and Simon Lake - for

their consistent help and support during what has been a difficult time for my writing - in particular Nick, for

doing far more than his fair share of our joint writing project and thus leaving me free to concentrate on

worrying myself to death over this one.

Thanks also to my mother for telephone support and occasional free meals, and Nadia Lamarra for talking

about other things (most of the time). Then there's (inevitably) Jim Mortimore - thanks for the pep-talks, Jim.

Also many thanks to Kate Orman, Jon Blum and Lawrence Miles for writing good books to aim at, and

Andrew Vogel (DW page at http://www.erols.com/vogell/), Dominique Boies (DW page at

http://www.geocities.com/~boies00), Paul Beardsley, Jeremy Bement and others for email support! Jeremy's

book of author interviews, The Collective Consciousness, is now available, contact him at:

who1@darkmatter.planitia.net.

Lastly I must thank Steve Cole and Lesley Levene at the BBC for their patience and understanding, as well

as their many helpful suggestions concerning the plot, the text and continuity matters. Not to mention the

free lunches...

For John Bunting

(I know you prefer Stetsons to spacesuits, but never mind... maybe next time!)

Prologue

Hello

My name is Anton La Serre

This thing isn't working

Look there are supposed to be full stops where are the full stops what do you mean I

. .

So how do I?

Oh. I see.

Where did you get this thing anyway?

Where?

Where's that?

Look are you serious? You expect me to pay real money for this antique? I've got an Olivetti typewriter at

home. Genuine 1960s portable. Real polymer plastic. Swiss-French keyboard. Wouldn't like to swap it for

that would you?

No! I was joking! Look. I don't want it to take dictation. I want it to read my mind. Can't you understand

English?

Oh. I see. Sorry. I didn't know you were using a translator. But I'm still not buying it.

I'm not surprised there's no call for them. I suppose there's no call for bells either?

Hang on. How do you

Yes. BELs. Not bells. BELs. Bio-electric connections. Dream machines. Nobody wants them any more.

Nobody wants me any more. Boo-hoo. I'm very sad. Hey. How do you get this thing to do commas?

Three thousand is a bit steep.Will you take a part exchange? I can give you a Carnival 380.

OK. Two thousand and the Carnival. It's a deal. But show me how to do the commas. Oh. I see. Right.

Come on, then, Dictacom 400. We're going home.

***

Ali! I picked up this weird machine this morning, records what you say and spits it out as words.

Yeah. It's doing it now. Writing words in the air as I speak. Some sort of laser effect. Hollows, did they call

them? Must be about a century old.

What does it look like? You mean the casing? Well, it's sort of greenish - you know, old organoplastic colour.

Looks like it's been in the wars.

You reckon? Yeah, there's all kinds of ex-military trash around on Earth I suppose. Wonder how it got here?

Look, I need a favour. I still haven't got that fund transfer from Ybrik from the Artificial Fish series, and I could

do with -

OK. Yeah. I suppose I'll just have to give Ybrik a call. You don't know where he is?

OK.

***

Once upon a time, there was a dreamer called Anton. He liked his dreams. He liked them a lot. He liked

them so much that he thought other people might like them too. He recorded them on computers and played

them back into other people's heads.

And the other people liked his dreams and paid him lots of money. Well, OK, a bit of money. Well, in fact his

girlfriend loaned him most of it, but then such is the life of an artist.

Then along came the big greedy dreamstone dragon, and ate up all the dreams. That is, he ate up all the

market for dreams, because Dreamstone Dreams are Better Dreams.

Big, glittery, dreamstones. God how I hate them. But I suppose I'm going to have to learn to use them or I'll

never pay Jono back that loan.

***

Dialogue setting, there's got to be a dialogue setting

'Yup, this is it,' said Anton.

'Look, stop messing with that machine,' said Jono. 'We have to talk about this in a serious way. I can't

continue funding you when you're not making anything.'

'I'm not asking you to fund me, just tide me over until the Artificial Fish series pays -'

'Anton, it isn't going to pay anything. Nobody wants BELs any more. All that hardware in your head. You can

put a dreamstone on your pillow. And dreamstone dreams are -'

'"- better dreams". Yeah. I know. Hey! Look! It picked up the quotes!'

'Stop messing with that machine !'

'Sorry,' said Anton.'Look. I'll get a dreamstone. I'll try it once. It won't work - I know it won't work. But I'll try it.

OK?'

'OK,' said Jono. 'But not tonight. We do other things tonight.'

Anton laughed. 'OK. Not tonight.'

[non-verbal sounds]

'Hmm. Hang on - off. Oh. Umm, that is

Well, looks like I've finally found a use for this thing.

OK, Dictacom 400. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sit there all night waiting for me to

wake up, and then write down my first impressions of making dreams with dreamstone. Just in case the

dreamstone doesn't work properly, which I'm sure it won't anyway. Got that OK?

Right, I'm going to sleep now - no I'm not, where's the -

OK. I think this stuff's in the right place.You know, it's quite pretty. All sort of glittery and yellow, with little

bits of blue in it. And it shines in the dark, and the glittery blue bits move. I suppose it is like a dragon - ah,

well, idle speculation. But I can feel something. There is something- there, in the stone. They say that.

More in the morning. G'night.

[non-verbal sounds]

No. No! Oh God no help please. I've

[non-verbal sounds]

Please don't - Please! No. No!

I-

[non-verbal sounds]

[file closed]

Chapter 1

By her sixth 'morning' on the Kusk ship, Sam could barely unglue herself from the floor. She gritted her teeth,

concentrated on it. On each movement.

Roll on to your front. Push up with your arms. Get a grip with your feet. Now push - push -

She fell back again, gasping, felt the mozzarella-like floor reattach itself to her clothes and her skin. She

closed her eyes, decided to give herself a count of ten before trying again.

I'm going to come to a sticky end.

At first that had seemed like a good joke. A cool line for a dangerous situation. She'd looked at the thick,

fetid air of the Kusk ship, the moisture crawling down the walls, the welded-in, immovable controls, the heavy

gravity gluing her feet to the organic slime of the floor, and she'd giggled and thought: a sticky end.Yes. If she

sat down she would certainly get a sticky end.What do you get if you cross a Kusk ship with a paintbrush?

What do you get if you cross a Kusk ship with a pitcher plant?

But gradually the jokes had begun to wear thin, especially since there was no one to tell them to.

What had Anstaar been thinking of, leaving her alone on this thing? She'd said there was food and water, but

all Sam had managed to find was eggllke things that looked as if they belonged in a horror movie and smelled

as if they belonged in a drain. When she'd finally got one open - by dropping it repeatedly, kicking it,

punching it, screaming at it - it turned out to contain a mushy green substance with a passing resemblance

to pea soup, most of which had soaked into the floor. She'd scooped some up into her hands and forced

herself to eat a little. It had tasted like vomit, and she'd promptly been sick.

Eventually she'd got hungry enough to try again, and had managed to keep it down. But she wasn't thriving on

the diet.

There were no mirrors anywhere on the ship, but Sam could feel the bones pressing through the skin of her

face. The skin of her hands was white, with lots of small red blotches. An allergy? An infection? To think that

all she'd had to worry about once was her new fringe.

- perhaps if I comb it back the blotches will go away will stop crawling on my skin perhaps I should find the

medical kit but I don't know down this corridor somewhere the Doctor will know the Doctor the Doctor -

Sam opened her eyes, looked at her blotchy hands, realised with a shock that a lot more than ten seconds

had passed. Had she fallen asleep again?

She had no idea how long she'd been on the ship. She'd slept six times, so it was probably only a few days,

but it felt like weeks. There was no sense of movement. When she'd tried to use the controls they'd clung to

her, oozing against her skin, searching presumably for the familiar pheromonal connections present in the

skins of their Kusk masters.Whatever it was they were finding in Sam's skin, they didn't like it.

She struggled to get up again, forcing her body away from the floor, then forcing herself to walk the short

distance through the gloomy air to the room where the food eggs were kept. It was like climbing out of a

swamp loaded with a fifty-kilo backpack.

There were only four of the food eggs left. Opening even one seemed like too much effort. It would be so

much easier to lie down and -

- cold, cold, with scratches along his cheeks and he wasn't breathing wasn't breathing pinching his nose

watching for his chest to rise blowing desperate blowing wake up lips pressed hard against his -

'Please,' she told the ship, tears running down her cheeks.

'Please, I'd just like to go home.'

But if there was any sentience on this ship it either didn't understand her, or wasn't working, or simply wasn't

switched on.

This is stupid , thought Sam. I can't die like this, stuck in an alien spaceship, just because I don't understand

the control system.

She looked at the eggs again, decided that opening one really would be a waste of effort. She wasn't hungry.

She had some energy. She would have another go at the control room, right now. Before it was too late.

With an effort, she lifted her left foot off the sticky floor, and lurched out of the food room towards the room

where she slept. She had no idea whether it was really a control room, but it contained something that she

thought was a viewscreen. It looked like a jellyfish strung up on wires, with little bits of metal in it, but it

glowed slightly and showed her a grid and an image of a starfield. For all she knew it might be the Kusk idea

of interior decoration - but the stars did move, if slowly, and occasionally a bright star appeared, bright

enough to make her believe that she wasn't drifting in interstellar space, doomed to die.

The bright star was there again now, drifting across the screen - presumably the ship was rotating. And there

was another star -

Sam felt her heart jump. That hadn't been there before. She must be drifting towards something - a planet, a

moon, a piece of space junk. She struggled with the floor, adrenalin giving her a renewed burst of energy. The

second 'star' seemed to be moving relative to the first, and changing in brightness. So she couldn't be far

away from it. If only she could get something to switch on -radar, scanners, even a telescopic sight - then

she might be able to find out what it was.

The star emitted a little tail of light, and began moving very quickly.

A spaceship .

Sam had an absurd impulse to shout, wave, jump up and down. But the other ship was already gone from the

viewscreen.

'I'm here!' bawled Sam.'I'm alive!'

She knew that there was no way they could hear her, but there was always the chance that they might be

telepathic. Vocalisation might help them pick up her thoughts.

Or, failing that, at least it made her feel better.

'Help me!' she yelled.'I don't want to die!'

Silence. There wasn't even an echo from the metal walls.

Then a voice spoke.

'Athshsish doshdoshdosh gurghdosh dshdsh gosh!' it said urgently.

The TARDIS translation system must be too far away, thought Sam. I should've realised this was going to

happen.

'Athshsish doshdoshdosh gurghdosh dshdsh gosh!' repeated the voice, with a good deal more emphasis.

She found herself giggling.

I should've stopped to pick up a translator when I'd finished trying to revive the Doctor and crying and being

concussed and hysterical -

Yeah, right. And a toothbrush and a change of knickers would have been useful too. Life doesn't work like

that, Samantha Jones. Not any more. It probably never did.

Clunk.

Sam's heart jumped.

That had felt a lot like -

Clunk.

'Athshsish doshdoshdosh gurghdosh dshdsh gosh! Gurghgurgh pishtoshf'

'Let me guess,' said Sam.'Someone's going to board the -'

BANG!

Air began whistling past Sam's ears. A high-pitched whine, like a swarm of angry wasps, almost deafened

her. A Kusk alarm system? A weapons system?

Sam became aware that the air was getting rather thin.

Very thin.

Her ears popped.

'Hey!' she yelled.'I'm alive! I need air! I haven't got a spacesuit!'

She gasped, could barely suck in enough air to refill her lungs. Her ears popped again.

'Help!' she bawled. She could hardly hear the alarm now. The air was getting too thin to carry the sound.

There was a flash of light, and a hole appeared in one of the dark walls.

Sam could see stars through it.

- which means there's no air and I'm not going to live much longer -

Her ears were hurting, and something was bubbling in her throat. Mucus? Blood? She tried to jump towards

the hole, towards the outside where there was at least a chance that someone might see her and pick her up

before she died of oxygen starvation, but she was too weak to break away from the floor. Or it had hardened

in the vacuum. Or something. Anyway she couldn't move and this wasn't fair and she should never have left

the Doctor -

Something cold tingled on her face and hands, something cold and wet and she could breathe , she was

sucking in vast gulps of air and they were hurting her throat and her lungs and she was coughing something

up, yellowish gobbets floating in the air -

- mucus, great, at least I haven't burst a blood vessel -

And the cold wet thing was there again, another breath, and Sam could see the airline now, running back

towards a big cylindrical object standing on heavy-duty legs. Some kind of robot?

No. It had an eye. A single big eye and rubbery skin and a big, beaklike mouth. And the 'airline' wasn't an

airline at all: it was one of several long, rubbery tentacles.

The rest of the tentacles were wrapping themselves around Sam's body.

I don't believe this. I thought I was being rescued and now I'm going to be eaten alive.

'No!'she yelped, struggling frantically.'Put me down!'

But the tentacles were pulling her towards the mouth, which opened wide to reveal several rings of long, sharp

teeth. A blast of air that smelled like a particularly bad case of illegal pollution blew across her face, making

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DOCTORWHODreamstoneMoonAnEighthDoctorEbookByPaulLeonardContentsPrologueChapter1Chapter2Chapter3Chapter4Chapter5Chapter6Chapter7Chapter8Chapter9Chapter10Chapter11Chapter12Chapter13Chapter14Chapter15Chapter16Chapter17Chapter18Chapter19Chapter20Chapter21Chapter22AckwhowledgmentsFirstandforemostIwouldli...

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