Dust Devil (audio story)

 was the first story in the audio anthology Genesis, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by John Dorney and featured Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown and introduced Colin Baker as The Warrior, Seán Carlsen as Narvin, Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, Sadie Miller as Sarah Jane Smith and Christopher Naylor as Harry Sullivan.

This was the first story in the Doctor Who Unbound series for 14 years and the first in the Doctor of War sub series.

Publisher's summary
The TARDIS crew are on the run, pursued by an unstoppable force. But who is hunting them? And why? Will they find the answers on Aridius? Or just more questions?

Plot
On the planet Skaro, during the events of the Creation of the Daleks, the Fourth Doctor has set up explosives to destroy the incubator chamber of the Daleks. All he has to do is touch two wires together and the Daleks are finished. But does he have the right? Sarah Jane Smith is certain he must do this, and complete his mission for the Time Lords. Thinking it over, the Doctor realises his life has led him to this moment, and that maybe this is his punishment for his constant interfering in the universe. Now certain that Sarah is right and that he must do this, he sends Sarah and Harry Sullivan to the laboratory to retrieve the Time Ring and the tapes of the Doctor's interrogation. He waits until the two leave, before touching the wires together. The incubation chamber is destroyed, and time reels from what has just happened.

In the lab, Harry finds the Time Ring, but Sarah feels off, realising her memories are warping and distorting. A prototype Dalek arrives, and so does the Doctor, having realised the trio need to leave now, with the temporal shockwave being greater than he expected. The Dalek immediately exterminates both Sarah and Harry, before turning its gun on the Doctor. The Doctor tells the Dalek it has lost. With the incubation chamber destroyed and the Dalek being only a prototype, the Daleks have no future anymore. With his friends dead, the Doctor accepts his death at the hands of the Dalek, who shoots him.

The Doctor finds himself in an infirmary on Gallifrey, talking to Narvin, who welcomes him home and offers him a drink. Narvin has extracted the Doctor from time, a second before he would've been exterminated by the Dalek. The Doctor remembers what happened and realises that Narvin knows what a Dalek is, despite what he had just done on Skaro. He is certain he destroyed the Daleks, but realises he had felt something wrong immediately afterward, like the cycle of cause and effect was tearing itself apart, opening up a gap in causality. Narvin reveals that what he felt was the Time War. The Time Lords sent the Doctor to avert the creation of the Daleks, but the Doctor's efforts failed. The Daleks still exist and the Time War is still going on. However, as the Doctor realises, the attempted change to history had terrible consequences, making the War even worse than it was before. As the Doctor puts it, it's like the universe decided to punish the Doctor for his crime as soon as he committed it.

Knowing he has to do something to fix things, the Doctor gets up, only to realise he's in pain. The Time Lords extracted him a bit too late. The Doctor is alive, but is slowly dying from his wounds from the Dalek. Narvin offers the Doctor an alternative. He tells the Doctor of the Sisterhood of Karn and their Elixir of Life. While the Sisterhood was wiped out when the Daleks devastated Karn, the Time Lords were able to retrieve one Elixir. If the Doctor uses it, he will regenerate, but it would not be a conventional one, as it would potentially change the Doctor's very nature.

Full of guilt over the deaths of his friends, the Doctor is determined to not let it all be in vain, and asks Narvin to use the Elixir on him to make him a warrior. Except, Narvin has already done it. The drink he offered the Doctor earlier was the Elixir, and it is now taking effect. The regeneration triggers, restoring the Doctor fully to life with a new body. Once the process finishes, Narvin asks the Doctor how he feels. The Doctor goes over to a mirror and examines his new face, proclaiming himself to be a warrior at last.

The Doctor lands on Aridius in a spaceship, during a storm to meet two Aridians. They commend him on landing the ship during a storm. The Doctor asks to find shelter to give them their payment for a bargain they agreed on. They arrive, and the Doctor gives the thirsty Aridians the precious water they agreed to trade. They explain that the orbit of Aridius is decaying and drifting further towards its suns, causing temperatures to rise and creating starvation and wars over resources. The Doctor says he would usually save them had he the time, but one Aridian, Chooban says they are resigned to their fate. He upholds his end of the bargain and gives the Doctor the map of the Great Plain, to help him find a tomb he is searching for. To help, Chooban summons the Diviner.

The Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown step out of the TARDIS. Peri expresses delight at a more interesting place to go for a vacation. The Doctor agrees that Gallia is a delightful planet and decides to take Peri to a nearby juice bar run by his friend Nordo. Peri remarks that the palm trees are orange and brown, and the Doctor realises the trees seem wrong, and there shouldn't be wind. He mutters about time and collapses, shouting "it's coming!" and seeing visions of his own death. He hears voices seeking to kill him.

Back on Aridius, the Doctor gets lost in his mind remembering the past. The Diviner, Talarn, arrives. Their crew of six people begin traverse the desert, searching for the tomb.

Back in the TARDIS, Sixth Doctor tells Peri they were nearly temporally displaced, and since he experienced it differently than here, something must be pursuing him through time. The Doctor tries to find a temporal trail but the TARDIS console begins emanating a shrieking noise. The TARDIS takes off on its own, with no clear destination— Peri suggests it is running away from something. Temporal waves begin washing over Peri, so the Doctor attempts to short-circuit the TARDIS.

Hiking on Aridius, the Doctor notes the world is more mountainous and begins to lose his patience. He can't remember a sense of time of their trip. He notices a figure following them in the distance. The Aridians dispute the possibility of this. One Aridian, Draylan, is sent back to inspect the figure. After a while, Talarn finds a tomb, and she discovers a body. Somehow, it is the body of Draylan, long dead and with two bullet wounds. Just then, a particularly large Mire Beast senses the body, but it takes only the corpse and does not feed on the travellers.

The Sixth Doctor and Peri land on a forest world, when the TARDIS makes an unusual noise. It disappears, and the Doctor and Peri appear in a new location: London. The voices return and declare they have found the Doctor.

The Doctor and the travelling crew arrive at the ruins of an Aridian city. The Doctor is unsure if it was the one he saw on his prior visit. They still do not know about the mysterious figure they spotted. Talarn determines the tomb the Doctor seeks is buried beneath them. She finds it strange their search should have been taken days, but is certain it only took hours despite the Doctor's sense otherwise. Talarn asks whose tomb it is the Doctor seeks. He answers that it is his own.

London is being destroyed, but someone arrives with a vortex manipulator and temporal shield to save the Doctor and Peri. She is Thayla from the Celestial Intervention Agency, though the Doctor doesn't recognize her uniform. The voices the Doctor heard are now audible to everyone, demanding to be let in. They appear as bullets to Peri, and Thayla dubs them "temporal bullets".

Talarn asks the Doctor who he is. He says he doesn't know, his own past and present seem unclear. The digging machinery begins operating, though Talarn finds this strange as there hasn't been ample time for it to been set up. The Doctor thinks they have been there for hours, but she says she is certain it is otherwise. Suddenly, Talarn is shot. The Doctor and Chooban hide behind the machinery. Chooban sees the shooting is coming from a tower, and the Doctor suspects it is the figure they saw earlier. They believe they can't be reached, and grenades begin being launched. The Doctor realises this isn't to hit them, but to draw the attention of the Mire Beast. The Doctor tells Chooban to aim a hoversled at the tower, in order to draw the Mire Beast over to it. The Warrior runs to divert the gunfire, and the tower collapses, with both making it out alive. They witness the Mire Beast entirely destroy the city, but the Doctor realises this eliminates the need for digging. Chooban decides to come with him into the depths.

Thayla explains the temporal bullets have latched on to the Doctor and will follow him anywhere through time and space. They were causing ruptures in time, including what happened on Gallia. Peri correctly guesses the weapons were created on Gallifrey, and the agent tells them Gallifrey has changed. The bullets disappear, meaning there is not much time left, and Thayla tells the Doctor the only way to evade them is to find his own future corpse and trick them into targeting it. The Doctor asks why he is wanted dead, and why Gallifrey changed. The agent says it started on Skaro, and suddenly is struck by the bullets. The Doctor takes Thayla's vortex manipulator and notices Peri has disappeared. He dematerialises.

On Aridius, the Doctor and Chooban arrive at the tomb. He notes the vortex manipulator no longer works and he has resorted to only space travel, hoping the rumours of his tomb's location are true to avoid the temporal bullets. They find a hatchway which the Doctor finds familiar somehow. On the other end, they find the tomb is actually the ship the Doctor arrived in, having been there for at least a thousand years. The Doctor dejectedly determines his corpse is not there. He realises it still may be tomb, because it may be where he himself dies. Someone arrives and kills Chooban. She takes off her helmet and the Doctor recognizes Peri, but she does not know that name, identifying as Miss Brown. She says she met a different version of him with the same face, and that he interfered with the creation of the Daleks, ruining the chain of causality and spawning a new reality that became the "main" one. The Warrior of this reality sees the Doctor, who should not exist, as a threat. He gifted the temporal bullets to Miss Brown, who furthermore killed the Aridians for sport. Preparing to kill the Doctor, the Mire Beast senses the corpse of Chooban and lets the Doctor escape with Miss Brown in pursuit. The Doctor hopes the other version of him will work for the temporal bullets, and runs into a strange wall of glass, beyond which space can be seen. Miss Brown's weapon is out of power, and fires the temporal bullets, but they are sucked into the vortex to catch up with the Doctor later. The Mire Beast eats Miss Brown and the Doctor prepares for the same fate, before a Dalek saucer rescues him. The temporal bullets catch up with the Doctor again.

Narvin tells the Warrior the Doctor is dead, the last of the "aberrations". The Warrior is unfazed, saying he "wasn't him", and Narvin wants to leave to determine what the Dalek saucer was up to. Before they leave, the Warrior pulls up a view of Aridius, and wonders how the planet, once a water world, became arid and was named such in advance. Below Aridius, they spot another vague sphere. The Warrior claims Aridius is not just drifting towards its suns, but being taken out of the universe by more powerful beings, but there is nothing to be done. Then, the two depart.

Cast

 * The Doctor / The Warrior - Colin Baker
 * Peri / Miss Brown - Nicola Bryant
 * Chooban / Bullet 1 / Driver - David Holt
 * Talarn / Bullet 2 / Thayla - Sasha Behar
 * Fourth Doctor - Tom Baker
 * Harry Sullivan - Christopher Naylor
 * Sarah Jane Smith - Sadie Miller
 * Narvin - Seán Carlsen
 * The Daleks - Nicholas Briggs

Continuity

 * The Doctor has been to Aridius before, "in another life". (TV: The Chase)
 * The Sixth Doctor remembers having not averting the Daleks' creation on Skaro. This was changed in the timeline Thayla came from. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks)
 * The Warrior's assertion that the Doctor "wasn't him" echoes the Sixth Doctor's own belief regarding the Valeyard in AUDIO: The Brink of Death.