The Pyramid of Sutekh (audio story)

The Pyramid of Sutekh was the first story in The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield box set The Triumph of Sutekh.

Publisher's summary
Professor Bernice Summerfield, archaeologist and adventurer, has discovered a Pyramid on Mars. Inside she finds her old friend the Doctor is fighting a battle with the Osiran God Sutekh. One he is losing.

Plot
A war is being waged between the government and the Free Mars Party and the atmosphere engines on Mars have been blown up, resulting in hostile weather. Benny is investigating a pyramid which she learnt of from a carving in an ancient hieroglyph addressed to her and was only recently exposed by a bomb blast; she enters and finds the Doctor in a sarcophagus, but he says that he is a servant of Sutekh and kills Benny's guide with his touch. He is able to resist Sutekh's control enough to tell Benny to run.

Benny sends out a call for help and, deducing that Sutekh is not at full strength, returns to the Doctor and traps him in the sarcophagus chamber with a promise to return for him later. She finds some tools in the bag of a man killed by a booby trap and enters a room lined with the corpses of Osirans. She steps on a panel and a recorded voice gives her the riddle of the two guardian Servicers, one of whom speaks the truth whilst the other lies. Benny is aware of what question to ask the Servitors to determine which is which, but the situation is complicated when a blast from outside destroys one of them. The one that remains performs a psychic scan on her and speaks with the voice of Jason Kane.

Sutekh detects that one of his Servicers has something wrong with their programming, but is unable to bring up the schematics without going to the central control room. The Doctor hides away in an imaginary TARDIS in his own mind and is soon found by Sutekh, who uses his powers to move the rocks keeping him trapped.

The Guardian tells Benny that sending transmissions from within the pyramid is impossible and joins her in fleeing other Servicers, activating a booby trap on Benny's order to destroy them. She comes across what the Guardian identifies as a flesh loom and determines that the Doctor only destroyed Sutekh's physical form in the past and that Sutekh now needs the loom to be restored. She also wonders if the Doctor had messed with the Guardian's programming to get him to assist her. When the Guardian detects the Doctor approaching, Benny sets up a trap and captures him, but he burns through his bindings and she instead has the Guardian knock him out.

The Doctor awakens and Sutekh prepares to use the flesh loom. He wakes up the Osiran corpses to chase Benny, but she reminds them that they opposed Sutekh and they turn against him, allowing her and the Guardian to get to the central control room where they find a time-space tunnel. To get around the computer's identity lock, Benny injects herself with mummia she found with the graverobber's tools and finds her state of mind altered; she can hear the war outside and the voices of Sutekh and the Doctor.

Sutekh reminds the Osirans of their many defeats and forces them to kneel before him. He sends them into the pool of the flesh loom so that their deaths will give him life. The machine knits him a new body, Benny failing to stop the process from the central control room after the Guardian lied to her about what to do. She instead uses her Osiran powers to order the humans outside to fire their weapons at the pyramid. Sutekh enters the control room with the Doctor, redirects the missiles to wipe out the colonists and leaves the pyramid via the time-space tunnel to spread his gift of death across the universe.

Freed from Sutekh's control, the Doctor hurries the dying Benny to the flesh loom and cleanses her of the Osiran DNA to restore her. He has been greatly weakened by his experience and tells Benny that she will need the Eye of Horus before crumbling to dust. The Guardian leaves her and the TARDIS materialises; Ace steps out, looking for the Doctor.

Cast

 * Bernice Summerfield - Lisa Bowerman
 * The Doctor - Sylvester McCoy
 * Ace - Sophie Aldred
 * Sutekh - Gabriel Woolf

Uncredited

 * Guardian - Stephen Fewell (BFX: The Triumph of Sutekh)

Worldbuilding

 * Benny took a fortnight away from the Doctor to attend her son's wedding.
 * Benny finds a dead man. He left behind a bag containing tools, a crowbar, a hammer, a torch and mummia.
 * Benny mentions Alice in Wonderland.
 * The Guardian takes on the voice of Jason Kane when speaking to Bernice.
 * Sutekh saw a magician at a carnival on Kairos who was conjuring snakes from his mouth. Sutekh used his powers to make the magician swallow them.
 * Bernice says during the years she travelled with the Doctor, he could never be bothered to clear her cat Wolsey's litter tray out.
 * The Osirans tried to corner Sutekh at the Delphate Cluster millennia ago.
 * The Osirans thought that the planet Alpharis would be Sutekh's last stand.
 * Trigellia was a planet where the Osirans sprung a trap for Sutekh in its molten core.

Continuity

 * The Doctor previously defeated Sutekh, (TV: Pyramids of Mars) but he has transcended his physical form and taken residence in a new body created through the use of a flesh loom.
 * The Guardian asks Benny: "What would the Doctor do?" Yasmin Khan would later write WWTDD on her hand, an acronym for that same question. (TV: War of the Sontarans)