'Ten Days of Christmas' by Steve Cole

Festive tales with the Tenth Doctor

For the Tenth Doctor, the festive season always brought adventure.

In fact, he's saved Christmas across space and time more times than we ever knew . . .

Join the Doctor (and Donna and Martha and Rose, and other friends old and new) for incredible tales of daring and danger.

From Daleks plotting to save humanity to Sycorax working to exploit it . . . from star-narwhals massing on the Moon to a toy factory in space.

Because even in the jolliest of seasons there's a world or two to save.

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'Under Control' (Part 1)

Something compels the TARDIS to bring the Doctor to a cave system, where he encounters several alien species and humans, all caught in self-perpetuating traps, their perceptions altered to make them think they are in constant danger. The Doctor frees them, but their state of hypervigilance causes them to still fear for their lives. The Doctor discovers that the prisoners are aboard a huge stone spaceship, their pain used as energy to power the ship’s engines…

'Into Control' (Part 2)



The Doctor confronts the ship’s owners: the Sycorax. Their Queen wields the sword of the Sycorax leader the Doctor once slew, and she attempts to use traces of the Time Lord’s blood to bring him under her control and take over as pilot of her ship. But although he looks the same as his Tenth incarnation, this is a different version of the Doctor, and he easily resists the Queen’s influence. After a short battle the Sycorax Queen and her crew teleport away, leaving the ship on self-destruct. But the combined minds of the freed prisoners override the ship’s controls, allowing them to take charge of the vessel. Leaving the aliens to retrace the ship’s flight path and return them all home, the Doctor departs in the TARDIS.

Notes:
*Featuring the Fourteenth Doctor

*Time-placing: This takes place between 'Liberation of the Daleks' and 'The Star Beast'

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'Saviour'

A spaceship full of vampires lands on an Earth outpost at Christmas Eve, and the crew start feeding on select colonists. A young boy, Alessandro, meets a stranger called the Doctor, who vows to help stop the alien threat. These vampires are of a type that forge a bond of love with a specific victim - and their leader infects the Doctor. However, the Doctor uses his Time Lord regenerative energy to free himself of the bond, and to change the leader’s biology to feed off anyone and anything without commitment. The Doctor helps the vampire to realise that she can pass on this gift to her comrades, by letting them feast on her blood. The Doctor and the vampires depart in their respective ships, leaving the colonists to live out their lives in safety.

Notes:
*Featuring the Tenth Doctor

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'Not a Creature Was Stirring'

The TARDIS arrives in present day Christmas at Chalstone Manor. Donna encounters a ghost that transports her back to Elizabethan times, where she is tried as a witch, while the Doctor is mistaken for a pest controller by the events coordinator, Celia Jeffries. After discovering that the National Trust site’s preparations for the holiday tourists have been spoilt by an infestation of a large alien squirrel, the Doctor encounters the ghost as well. Learning of Donna’s time travelling from an historical display detailing the ‘Chalstone witch’, the Doctor jury-rigs a device to activate the osmic field projector he suspects is moving things in time. But he is transported instead to 1340, where he meets an injured alien called Surveyor, who was thrown back in time after an electrical storm caused his ship to crash in Twenty-First Century England. Surveyor is cut off from his bond animal, Jorcon, which is impacting their shared vitality, so the Doctor wastes no time in fixing the time projector’ after stopping off to rescue Donna from a witch’s ducking, they then return to the present. Surveyor happily reunites with Jorcon, and together they summon their space-time ship. After the aliens depart, the Doctor and Donna make a swift exit, just as Celia and a security guard arrive on the scene…

Notes:
*Featuring the Tenth Doctor and Donna

*Time-placing: This story takes place early on in Donna’s travels with the Doctor

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'Life in Oils'

The Doctor and Rose arrive on a hydrocarbon-mining rig on an alien world, where the human maintenance crew are under attack by sludge monsters. The Doctor reverses the intake of the pipe where the creatures broke in, allowing the crew, led by Director Hellen Folkow, to dispose of the remaining creatures using dispersant foam. Rose succumbs to the fumes of the alien ‘Goobers’, and becomes empathic to their feelings. The Doctor learns that the humans injected a solvent to increase yield into the sludge around the rig, which has driven the Goobers wild. When a huge mass of creatures threatens to crush the rig, the Doctor works frantically at a solution to neutralise the solvent’s effects. Meanwhile, Rose fights against the overwhelming influence of the aliens by concentrating on thoughts of Christmas. To buy more time, the Doctor introduces a sedative into the sludge to slow down the monsters; Folkow seizes the opportunity to destroy the Goobers, but Rose intervenes. The sedative takes effect, and as the Goobers fall asleep, Rose comes to her senses. With the crew of the rig making amends by working on a ‘Goober-fertiliser’, and Folkow now taking credit for discovering a new species, the Doctor and Rose depart in the TARDIS.

Notes:
*Featuring the Tenth Doctor and Rose

*Time-placing: I'm choosing to place this prior to 'School Reunion'

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'The Christmas Blessing'

The Doctor arrives in a UNIT Moonbase in 2183, as its commander, Colonel Peshawar, prepares for an incoming attack from a blessing of narwhal-like creatures, nicknamed Herkalocks. The Doctor and Professor Eliz Amir, an expert on space junk, join a UNIT team aboard the scout craft Benton to make first contact. They discover that the creatures are encased in an atmosphere bubble, and that they communicate via infrasound; however, one creature’s attempt to broadcast a message sends the Benton spinning, and structurally damages the Moonbase. When the team return to the UNIT base, the Doctor and Eliz try to convince Colonel Peshawar that the aliens are harmless; but they are too late: the aliens’ Moonfall has led to a pre-emptive missile strike. To everyone’s dismay, the Herkalocks swallow the missiles harmlessly; they then head to Earth, where they cause global disasters with their further attempts to communicate. The Doctor connects his sonic screwdriver to the TARDIS telepathic circuits and decodes the Herkalocks’ message: “We were here first”. Landing the TARDIS on the back of one of the space- narwhals, the Doctor manages to communication with it; he and Eliz are surprised to learn that not only did the Herkalocks think the missiles were refreshments, but they see themselves as rightful salvagers of all the debris floating in Earth orbit. Learning of the inadvertent harm caused by their messages, the Herkalocks make amends by clearing away all the hazardous junk threatening Earth for recycling. Eliz is overjoyed, and agrees to be the human-Herkalock liaison for Earth.

Notes:
*Featuring the Tenth Doctor

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'The Eternal Present'

James Pryce is a man trapped in an eternal death. Found by the Doctor and Rose, he tells them how they already met… In 1937, James was sent into the Brazilian jungle by the British Secret Service to investigate a spate of expeditions from opposing world powers. Thirteen days in, James’ expedition was slaughtered by an alien monster, and he only just escaped its attack with the help of Rose. The duo escaped in a nearby seaplane, only to be flown by its crew to a hidden city in the jungle. Having used the TARDIS to join them, the Doctor and his friends meet Ernest Hobley, a professor thought lost on the Black Orchid expedition of 1925. Professor Hobley is using technology from a crashed alien ship to enslave the crew of bear-like creatures and the missing expedition members, and to freeze in time localised pockets of space; with these devices and James’ governmental contacts, the insane Hobley plans to take over the world. The Doctor disables the telepathic control device, causing the crew to run on Hobley; with the creatures in pursuit, the Doctor and James grab the time-vector generator and race to the seaplane. Here they meet Rose, who has freed the other missing expedition members from a second, damaged, time-sphere; but as the two devices meet, James is caught in the resulting sympathetic resonance, and trapped in time… Until James finally awakes, and finds himself with the Doctor and Rose in 2045; they explain how their friends, Jo and Cliff Jones, found his frozen body, which led to their encounter in 1937. After the time blast subdued everyone around James, the Doctor and Rose dropped off the aliens at an asylum planet, then waited for the energy in the time-sphere to drain away and release him. To James’ delight, the Doctor and Rose promise to drop him off in his own time, so he can be with his family for Christmas.

Notes:
*Featuring the Tenth Doctor and Rose

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'Gifts From Afar'

While visiting a planet of flying dinosaurs, the Doctor and Martha meet an alien named Trinkin, whose spaceship was hit by an asteroid field during a delivery run. After crashing on the planet, Trinkin’s ship was carried away by flying Aviakks, and left atop a high Mesa. Trinkin is concerned for her safety, fearing that the asteroids will soon destroy the planet. While the Doctor goes to find the alien’s ship, Martha takes Trinkin to the TARDIS; but the Aviakks carry away first the ship, then Martha and Trinkin, and take them to the mesa. Investigating a meteorite landing nearby, the Doctor finds a large seed, which swiftly opens and sends roots throughout the surrounding area; before he can learn more, the Doctor is also carried off by an Aviakk. Dumped in an Aviakk nest on the mesa, Trinkin confesses to Martha that she was stealing her cargo: precious gold, frankincense, and myrrh for a Christmas Nativity play among the humans on Jaslo Three; Trinkin and her people have been used as cheap labour, and she wants to get even and raise awareness of their plight. Just then Trinkin’s spaceship arrives, piloted by the Doctor; he explains that the Aviakks have just been trying to help, and have repaired the ship with a sealant compound created from the cargo. After explaining about Life-Fall - how the incoming space seeds help the planet’s ecology every ten years - the Doctor tells Trinkin that her stolen ‘gold’ is only pyrite: fool’s gold. Realising that one seed could help replenish her planet and provide her people with an alternate food source, Trinkin returns home in triumph. With seed pods raining down and the Aviakks singing ‘carols’ the Doctor and Martha leave the TARDIS.

Notes:
*Featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha

*Time-placing: Martha appears to have been travelling with the Doctor for a while, so I'm placing this in the midle of her adventures with him

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'The Big Store'

The Doctor visits Space Station Ex-Mas 1, a giant factory in space dedicated to building festive toys. After meeting the owner, Niklaus Midwinter, and his prototype Gal Galaxy figure, the Doctor is intrigued to learn that the station is experiencing shifts in orbit, has unauthorised software on its computer, and a guest party of buyers has arrived in the wrong place. Nosing around, the Doctor is surprised to find the toy production line is an illusion, and the boxes of Gal Galaxy figures filled with killer androids: the station is a replica created by the Kraals to trick Midwinter and gain his unwitting help in the aliens’ invasion of his customers’ planets. With the aid of a deluxe version of Gal Galaxy, the Doctor holds off the Kraals long enough for Midwinter’s assistant, Stevens, to hack the Kraals’ computer and install Gal’s software into all the killer androids and android guests. Realising he has been duped, Midwinter holds the Kraals at gunpoint while the police arrive at the fake station. Having saved Christmas, the Doctor cheerfully departs.

Notes:
*Featuring the Tenth Doctor

*Time-placing: This story takes place straight after ‘Voyage of the Damned’

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'Dark Waters'

Jackson Lake sends a letter from New Zealand to his old friend, Rosita, recounting a second adventure with the Doctor, fifty years after they last met. The Doctor was looking for Daleks in a base hidden under the Waimangu Geyser, where the creatures were using the geothermal energy to prepare the atmosphere for when they will steal the planet. Realising the Daleks had miscalculated, the Doctor fixed their device, then set the controls to ensure the base was destroyed in the resulting explosion. Their mission completed, the Doctor spent an early Christmas dinner with Jackson, before slipping away…

Notes:
*Featuring the Tenth Doctor and Jackson Lake

*Time-placing: For the Doctor, this story takes place a few months after ‘The Next Doctor’

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Publication Date:
12th October 2023

Notes:
*A BBC Children's Book