'Short Trips' edited by Stephen Cole

From Neolithic Earth to the furthest reaches of the universe in the far future, Short Trips brings together established Doctor Who authors and first-time writers in a collection of stories exploring the ever-changing worlds of the Doctor and his friends.
Witness the last days of the siege of Masada with the First Doctor and meet the Fourth Doctor's extraordinary 'old flame'. An evil enemy makes life difficult for the Seventh and Third Doctors, and while the Fifth Doctor is under attack on a sinister ship shrouded in fog, the Second may soon be guilty of a grave error of judgement... The Sixth Doctor's hopes of a holiday are dashed when he discovers a pleasure planet is hiding a shocking secret, and the Eighth Doctor is caught up in a deadly drama played out during the construction of Stonehenge.
And of course, that just the beginning...



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'Model Train Set' by Jonathan Blum

The Doctor is no longer happy with his model train set, which was built by his previous incarnation as a model of clockwork timing, but which now fails to engage him. He re-engineers the set to function independently, and, after leaving it alone for a while, is delighted by the complex patterns that result. However, after leaving it alone for a long time, he returns to find that a group of impatient clockwork passengers have started series of events that have resulted in the total destruction of the train set. A few of the toy engineers have survived, and are starting to reconstruct the train set; the Doctor helps them to get started, hoping that this time, things will work out differently.

Notes:
*Featuring the Eighth Doctor

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'Old Flames' by Paul Magrs

The TARDIS arrives near an 18th-century manor, where the Doctor and Sarah investigate some giant cat footprints, and see a 20th-century double-decker bus driving through the woods. They befriend a local, Reverend Adams, who invites them to accompany him to Lady Huntingdon's ball, where the Doctor meets an 'old friend', Iris Wildthyme. Iris is a renegade Time Lady, and has brought her human companion, Turner, to the ball hoping that he will marry Lady Huntingdon's granddaughter Bella, enabling Iris to inherit the estate. Adams' body is found, mauled by a giant animal, and the Doctor discovers that Lady Huntingdon and her daughter are shape-shifting cat aliens, and that Lady Huntingdon is fully aware of Iris' plans, and instead plans to steal her TARDIS, which is disguised as a bus. When Bella refuses to help her grandmother, claiming that Earth now her home, Lady Huntingdon turns into a giant cat and runs off to the woods to find Iris' TARDIS. The Doctor arrives before her, and traps her in a pocket dimension by using a Time Lord dimensional message capsule. The Doctor, Sarah and Iris leave, leaving Turner behind with Bella.

Notes:
*Featuring the Fourth Doctor and Sarah

*First appearance of Iris Wildthyme

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'War Crimes' by Simon Bucher-Jones

After the events of 'The War Games', the Time Lords return the kidnapped humans to their correct time and place. However, not all the humans were de-programmed by them beforehand, and one such warrior, Ossu-male, of the Aelcluk clan, is returned to his home planet with an implant which seizes control of his body and sends him on a quest for his clan, in order to turn them into an army to serve the War Lords. They head for the sea which is poisonous to males - nature's way of ensuring the females can breed in safety without fear of the warrior males eating their young - when Ossu-male manages to override the implant long enough to throw himself into the water, and is swept out to sea. Fleeing from the Time Lords, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe, arrive in the TARDIS; they rescue Ossu-male, and deactivate the implant.

Notes:
*Featuring the Second Doctor and Jamie

*Time-placing: This occurs during part Ten of 'The War Games'

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'The Last Days' by Even Pritchard

Whilst in Roman times, the Doctor and his friends are separated into two parties, each on opposite sides of the city walls of Masada. The Doctor and Susan enter the Roman camp and pass themselves off as influential Roman citizens and military advisors, whilst Barbara and Ian meet a party of Jewish rebels, led by Eleazar. The besieged rebels realise that they will never triumph over the attacking Romans, and choose instead to commit suicide. Ian is appalled, but Barbara tells him that this is historical fact, and cannot be changed. As the women and children kill themselves, Ian fakes Barbara's death, but he is then made to take part in a drawing of straws in order to decide which of the men will kill the others, before taking his own life. Eleazar fixes the draw so that Ian wins, as the rebel leader knows Barbara is not dead. After the men have all fallen on his sword the Romans finally enter Masada. Amongst them is the Doctor, who is able to convince a furious Flavius Silva that Ian and Barbara are his spies and must therefore be spared.

Notes:
*Featuring the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan

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'Stop the Pigeon' by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

The Doctor and Ace are investigating a missing tree in a housing development in Croydon, Earth. When Joe Dakin, a man who has been inexplicably transported through time twice attacks Ace, a talking pigeon arrives and abducts them both. The pigeon is really part of a Virgoan probe, built by a race of biomechanical shape-shifters that rectify temporal irregularities in the galaxy, one such being Joe Dakin. A Krynoid has infected the probe while it was on the planet Melandra IV, and this is causing plants to come to life throughout Croydon. When she and Joe arrive in his correct time zone, eighty years in the future, Ace discovers that he has been hypnotised and sent back in time by the Master. The renegade Time Lord has been claiming that he can restore people's youth, but has actually been draining his elderly patients of nutrients in order to reverse the Cheetah mutation that he is suffering from. He has been sending people back in time to kidnap the old people when they were babies in order to convince the public that his process works. The Doctor arrives with the pigeon, but when he attempts to use the Master's equipment to separate the Virgoan probe and the Krynoid pod, his plans go awry, and plant life throughout the "retirement home" comes to life, destroying the Master's operation. Almost completely becoming a Cheetah person, the Master kills his elderly prisoners and stabilises his condition. The Virgoans transform themselves into vegetable matter and absorb the Krynoid, but the Master escapes, leaving the Doctor to clear things up.

Notes:
*Featuring the Seventh Doctor and Ace

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'Freedom' by Steve Lyons

The Master is imprisoned at Stangmoor Prison. His army of hypnotised salespeople attack the prison in an attempt to free him, but the attempt is foiled, and the Master is taken to another secure holding facility. The Doctor discovers that the salespeople worked for the Freedom Corporation, which recently announced a breakthrough in time-travel technology; he is suspicious, but when he breaks into the Corporation building with Jo, the pair of them are trapped in an extra-universe prison. In order to release them, the Brigadier is forced to make a deal with the Master, but the rogue double-crosses him, and uses the time-travel machinery to turn time back. The Master's Time Lord power enables him to resist the reverse time flow, and he escapes in his TARDIS. The Time Lords send the Doctor's TARDIS to the prison, and restore his knowledge of time travel. The Doctor is tempted to just leave in the TARDIS and let the Time Lords sort out the problem, but he cannot bring himself to let Jo down. Even though it means giving up his freedom, he returns to Earth, defeats the Master and restores normality.

Notes:
*Featuring the Third Doctor and Jo

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'Glass' by Tara Samms

The Doctor and Romana investigate a woman in Cambridge, who is haunted by the vision of an evil little boy's face, which appears in every pane of glass she sees. The face is actually the manifestation of an alien mind that escaped from Skagra's mind-draining sphere, and which is using the woman's mind to bring itself into this world. The Doctor and Romana trap the entity in the woman's greenhouse by making her look at it while they smash the windows; the Doctor takes the remains of the creature away with him, so that he can safely deal with it.

Notes:
*Featuring the Fourth Doctor and the Second Romana

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'Mondas Passing' by Paul Grice

Ben and Polly, who have since gone their separate ways and married other people, meet in a hotel room on New Year's Eve 1986. They reminisce about old times, and wait for Mondas to pass by, as they have already lived through it once before. Afterwards, they leave, ready to let go of their pasts and continue on with their lives.

Notes:
*Featuring Ben and Polly

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'There Are Fairies At the Bottom of My Garden' by Sam Lester

The TARDIS takes the Doctor and Dodo to what appears to be a diseased world full of decay. She follows a strange headless creature to a glade of beautiful crystals, where faery-like creatures hatch out of one of them. Dodo is horrified when the Doctor arrives and deliberately smashes the crystal at the heart of the glade, killing the dancing faeries. She is furious with him, until the Doctor takes the TARDIS out into space to show her that they had materialised on the petal of a gigantic, continent-wide flower, which had been infected by a parasitic crystal plague. Things aren't always what they seem...

Notes:
*Featuring the First Doctor and Dodo

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'Mother's Little Helper' by Matthew Jones

Nanci Cruz, an American teenager, is upset when she finds her boyfriend in a clinch with her best friend, but when she meets a young boy, his touch momentarily takes the pain away. The Doctor and an older woman are chasing the boy, and they enlist Nanci's aid in tracking him. They corner the boy at an abandoned pier, where the woman puts a restraining collar onto him, and forces him to take on her own emotional pain. When the Doctor frees the boy, protesting that he will not be able to handle her pain, and that the woman must learn to live with her own problems, she uses collars Nanci and uses her as a hostage, demanding the boy back. The boy takes on Nanci's pain, and then releases everything back into the woman, causing her to burst into flame and explode. The Doctor takes the boy to safety, and Nanci learns to deal with her own problems for herself.

Notes:
*Featuring the Second Doctor

*Time-placing: The Second Doctor is travelling alone, so this may occur in the period of time after 'The War Games', when he is working for the Time Lords

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'The Parliament of Rats' by Daniel O'Mahony

The TARDIS crash lands on a temporally-disjointed planet, and the Doctor and Nyssa meet Constantine, a strange woman who navigates a ship named The Lung of Heaven through the planet's timestorm seas. The ship collides with a legendary lost ship, the Parliament of Rats, which is a fortuitous occurrence for Brunner, a priest on a mission to destroy false gods, which he believes are aboard The Parliament of Rats in the form of 'The White God'. Brunner and Nyssa are captured by the lost ships' mutated crew, and taken to the White God, a mirror that grows out of its frame and attempts to envelop them. Brunner's holy silver staff proves ineffective against the mirror, but the Doctor is able to communicate with the staff, which is actually a sample of validium from his home planet of Gallifrey. The Doctor orders it to transform itself and all of its creations to water, and as The Parliament disintegrates and the planet returns to normal, Constantine vanishes, as she was the one that created everything using the validium she had found, simply for amusement.

Notes:
*Featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa

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'Rights' by Paul Grice

The natives of the planet Farrash are now doomed to extinction, as their sun changed over a century ago. The Doctor and Sarah arrive, and learn that the Earth Delegate to the Farrashian Future Ratificaion Assessment Committee has decided to go on holiday instead, as nobody is interested in a dying planet. He and Sarah steal the delegate's his paperwork and attend instead, but Sarah is separated from the Doctor during a protest rally against baby killing. The Doctor discovers that the Leader has been sanctioning abortion, so that the foetuses can be used in scientific experiments, whilst Sarah's captor's are carrying out similar experiments on animals. The Committee meets the next day, when a scientist demonstrates a mechanical body he has created, into which the Farrashians can downloaded. But the robot body goes rogue, and kills its creator and the Leader, before falling out of the window to the ground several storeys below. The Doctor attempts to convince the surviving members to work together to find a solution instead of dividing their efforts, but he is insure sure whether he has succeeded or not.

Notes:
*Featuring the Fourth Doctor and Sarah

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'Wish You Were Here' by Guy Clapperton

The Doctor visits a leisure complex on the planet Nestra, where holidaymakers are disappearing. The owners of the complex, the Thetrans, are a species whose economy is based entirely on service industries; however, after five thousand years, they have finally realised that they hate their jobs, and have instead put the complex under the control of Lakkis, a service drone. The Doctor and Janis Carma, a Thetran security agent sent to investigate the disappearances, are arrested as troublemakers by security drones. The Doctor discovers that Lakksis's programming has led it to view holidaymakers' requests for something that may cause them pain - such as insulin injections, or even the option to leave the pleasure complex and return to the perils of the outside world - as a psychosis. To this end, the drone has been restraining or killing people for their own good. The Doctor convinces Lakkis of its error, but the machine is destroyed by Janis, who then orders for the building of a replacement drone. As the Doctor leaves, Janis complains of a mild headache, and Lakksis-2 prepares to use the Doctor's arguments in order cut Janis' head open to ease the pain, for her own good.

Notes:
*Featuring the Sixth Doctor

*This story is also presented in 'Out of the Darkness' BBC Audio release

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'Ace of Hearts' by Tara Samms

In the guise of an entertainer, the Doctor visits Kathleen Dudman's daughter at the WRN's 30th Reunion, in order to apologise to her baby daughter for his treatment of her in the future - when she will become his travelling companion, Ace.

Notes:
*Featuring the Seventh Doctor

*Time-placing: The Doctor is apologising for pain done to Ace and pain "yet to come", so it probably occurs before the New Adventures novels, possibly during season 27

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'The People's Temple' by Paul Leonard

The Doctor takes Sam to see Stonehenge, but the TARDIS arrives too early, at a time when the monument is still under construction. Coyn, the king of the Bear Men, has conquered several tribes, and is using their slave labour to build the biggest temple in existence, to make him a god in the afterlife. His advisor Shalin is frightened of his king's obsession and cruelty. Sam rescues Dorlan, a young leader of a conquered tribe, from execution at Coyn's wrath, and takes him back to the TARDIS. She gives him aerosol paint cans, telling him to use them to spray his tribe's markings on the stones and convince Coyn's tribe that their gods have turned against them. As the Doctor shows Coyn the error of his ways, Sam is appalled when Dorlan instead sprays the paint directly into his enemies' eyes, and then starts a slave rebellion. Several slaves and Bear Men are killed before the Doctor takes Coyn into the TARDIS and lands it into the middle of the fighting, surprising everybody enough to make them stop. Coyn officially releases the slaves.

Notes:
*Featuring the Eighth Doctor and Sam

*Time-placing: This story is featured on the 'Earth and Beyond' BBC Audio release

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'Degrees of Truth' by David A. McIntee

The Brigadier is contacted by Major Carver, the father of a young private who was vaporised by the animated gargoyle Bok during recent events with the alien Daemon, Azal. Distressed that his son's body was never recovered, Carver holds the Brigadier and the Doctor hostage with primed grenades sewn into his jacket, and demands to know the truth. The Brigadier is prevented from telling him by the Official Secrets Act, but when the Doctor hints that Private Carver's death was related to the capture of a notorious criminal named Mr Magister, the Brigadier reveals that the body was unable to be recovered after Magister's experimental weapons blew up the church at Devil's End. Carver reveals that the grenades are fake, and the Brigadier allows him to leave without pressing charges - even though Carver has been told as much of the truth as can be allowed, he will always be haunted by visions of his son's death.

Notes:
*Featuring the Third Doctor and the Brigadier


Publication Date:
March 1998

Notes:

*A BBC Books publication