Transit

Ben Aaronovitch

1997

There may be a being that can get in to trouble faster than the Doctor, but we have yet to meet them. In this story, even the Doctor must have been surprised by the speed with which he and Benny are involved this time.

Practically as soon as they left the TARDIS the Doctor and Benny are made aware that something is going on. Something smashed its way through the tunnel behind them, only just missing them, but not the TARDIS. All that could be seen when they had recovered from the near miss was its outline where it had been driven deep into the walls of the cavern.

This is Benny's first adventure as a traveller with the Doctor; actually travelling in time to the historical actions she had been involved in digging up.

We are in Sol System in the centuries after the Terrans had occupied most of the Solar System; a generation after the Martian War. The system is tied together by the most ambitious transport system ever developed. An extension of the venerable Transmat system enabled even the poorest communities in the Outer Worlds to be united with the rich Inner Worlds as Transmat capsules pass from station-to-station through the system.

Even as the Doctor and Benny arrived the most prestigious link in the system was being opened; the Alpha Centauri Stunnel. But there were so many links in the chain that even the system's AI was finding it difficult to cope. As the new link was finally activated, things went off with a bang that left the System President and his cabinet a cloud of rapidly expanding atoms. Along with the explosion, an organism was blasted into the system that infected the Transit System, something that changed those caught up in the rapidly expanding wave front of change into something else indeed.

As the Doctor makes his way back to Earth, Benny is lost in the White Trash slums out Pluto way. But she's not herself and it becomes a race between the Doctor and Benny to bring the transmogrifying system back to their idea of stability.

On his travels through Sol System's multiple societies, the Doctor comes into the orbit of a great granddaughter of his friend Lethbridge-Stewart, who had been created to be the perfect Soldier, and the repair crew who had been ordered to correct the damage by people who remained unaware of the damage that had been done.

In the end, the Doctor has to confront the malevolent entity at the heart of the changes on its home ground. But who would win such a confrontation?

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