The Age of Endurance (audio story)

 was the first story of the third series of The Early Adventures, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Nick Wallace, narrated by Carole Ann Ford and William Russell and featured the First Doctor, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright and Susan Foreman.

Publisher's summary
The TARDIS materialises on board a still and eerie spaceship. When a squad of soldiers land, they realise they've found themselves in the middle of a war zone. With one of their crew trapped by the enemy, the Doctor and his friends find themselves locked in a desperate race for survival. Vast warships manoeuvre around each other as both sides try to out-think their opponents, flying into ever more dangerous areas of space.

The stakes could not be higher. But as ever in war, the lines between good and evil are hard to define. Will anyone survive to claim the moral high ground?

Ship of Death (1)
The TARDIS lands on a spaceship adrift in space. As they explore, the travellers find a corpse inside a room, several machines measuring the quality of the atmosphere and a nebula outside the ship, looking thick and dangerous. They hear a radio message for the ship they are in, the Vanguard, and try to come back and leave, but the doors through which they passed are now closed. They are reached by a group of men led by Toban, calling themselves the "Last Born", and Barbara and Susan are driven away to their other ship, the Endurance, while the Doctor and Ian stay with the group to help them in their exploration.

Aboard the ship, Susan and Barbara are examined by the medical officer, Olivan, and are identified as "organics", i.e. made of flesh and blood. From Benya, another member of the party, and Myla, their leader, they learn they have encountered a race of syntethic beings, exploited for labour for a hundred year by the "Shifts", a sort of genetic vampires. They are sent into "the Bridge", as they call the nebula, to search for energy; as they did so, they also charted it in search of a way to escape their jailers and finally stole two ships when they were sure. The same thing is told to the Doctor and Ian by Toben, as he also explains the people aboard the Vanguard carried the map through the Bridge; when they lost contact, Toben and the others came here to see what happened, and try to recover the map if possible.

Toben's party is ambushed and captured by the Shifts, reptiloid lifeforms capable of changing forms, and they are killed except for Toben, Ian and the Doctor. Their leader, Arran, explains they did attack the ship, but even after killing the other party they were not sure which parts of it were secure; they observed the arrival of the travellers and followed them in order to be sure. He questions the prisoner about the TARDIS, but none of them answers. As he is about to become violent, Benya arrive in their aid with other men (sent by Myla), Barbara and Susan; they manage to free the prisoners, but Arran captures Barbara and locks them out of the control room as he prepares to open the windows and depressurize the ship, killing them all. Ian wants to go back for Barbara, but he is persuaded by the Doctor to first try and save himself.

Hunters in the Breach (2)
The party manages to come back to the ship, but the Doctor is knocked on his head by one of the debris and must be taken to the infirmary. On Myla's order, Toben tries to shoot the Vanguard to stop it entering the Bridge, but Ian sabotages the shooting out of fear for Barbara's life. The Vanguard is thus able to enter the Bridge, bringing with it the navigational charts needed for crossing the nebula. Susan, however, reveals her grandfather could be able to build a device to detect radiations, which would allow the Endurance to follow the ship into the Bridge and take back what they need.

Myla has the Doctor revived so he could help them, but he refuses, pretending to have some explanations. She attempts at threatening him by having Susan removed to the engine room with Benya (which is actually the safest place on the ship), but the Doctor insists and Myla relents. She reveals to him that, when the nebula formed, it affected their people making them sterile, forcing her first to build synthetic bodies for their people to survive, and then to experiment on a reptilian species of adaptable lizard. She sped up their evolution in the hope of finding a way for her people to be once again flesh and blood, but only created a new, intelligent species (the Shifts) who are also sterile and hate them for what they did to them.

As the Doctor works on the device, Ian notices Olivan lacks the cybernetics implants and the marks of the syntethic body of the others, and realizes he is flesh and blood. Toben confirms it: Olivan is the first natural-born person in centuries for them, and the chamber Arran was so interested in was an artificial birthing chamber, devised by Myla. The Doctor finishes the work and collapses unconscious, but not without saying Ian to "stop the tide" to help these people. In the engine room, Susan and Benya find the body of a Shift Olivan left there as a joke. The Doctor's detector works, and allows the Endurance to track down the Vanguard in the Bridge, also thanks to Ian's understanding of the Doctor's instructions (an ancient manouevre used by sailors): the ship stops the engines and let the gas wind bring them up to speed. However, as they arrive, the Vanguard fires an electromagnetic impulse who cripples the Endurance, forcing Ian, to save everyone, to drive the ship into a nearby cloud of potentially deadly gas.

A Fight for Survival (3)
to be added

The End of Endurance (4)
to be added

Cast

 * Susan/Narrator - Carole Ann Ford
 * Ian/The Doctor - William Russell
 * Barbara - Jemma Powell
 * Myla - Rachel Atkins
 * Toban - John Voce
 * Olivan - Gethin Anthony
 * Benya - Andy Secombe
 * Arran/Shift - Tom Bell

Continuity

 * The Doctor refers to his encounter with the Pied Piper in Hamelin in 1284. (COMIC: Challenge of the Piper)
 * Barbara refers to Spartacus. During his second incarnation, the Doctor and his companions Ben Jackson, Polly Wright and Jamie McCrimmon would later encounter Spartacus during his slave revolt against Rome in 71 B.C.. (PROSE: The Slave War)
 * Undergoing a medical scan, Susan's binary vascular system is revealed to Barbara. (TV: Spearhead from Space et al.)