Genius Loci (novel)

Genius Loci was the eighth full length novel published as part of Big Finish Productions' Bernice Summerfield series. It was also the first novel to explore (and was set) during Bernice Summerfield's early life before she met the Seventh Doctor in the novel Love and War.

Publisher's summary
''One day she will bring down empires and decide the fate of the universe. One day she will be feared by the creatures of evil and revered wherever people have had just a little bit too much to drink.''

But all that is yet to come...

Right now Bernice Summerfield is 21 years old and living hand to mouth and drink to drink. Offered a job beyond her qualifications she is lured out to the backwater planet of Jaiwan where nothing has ever happened — ever.

There she joins a disparate team of archaeologists who have just discovered that the planet of Jaiwan may have been just a tad more interesting than people thought. This could be Benny's big break and her ticket to a proper career in archaeology.

That's if archaeology doesn't kill her first.

Plot
The twenty-one-year-old Benny gets a job on Jaiwan as an assistant field director using a false CV, on the run from Spacefleet and planning to hack into Mariela Ankola's database to gain archaeological knowledge. The Professor quickly realises that Benny's credentials are fraudulent and promises to help her get legitimate ones if she takes care of the dig's expedition, freeing the Professor up to get on with actual archaeology. Benny agrees and, having been shown such kindness, cannot bring herself to hack into her database and, when the Professor hands her PDA to her, she decides not to.

Benny meets the other archaeologists and learns from Chayana Lopeti of Pinky and Perky, terraforming machines which allegedly fell in love and began building cities for one another instead the railway and road that they were tasked with laying; they had a falling out and were shut down for the safety of the colonists. Benny forgets to cover up the Continuous Active Recording units during a storm, delaying work on a midden where bones have been found. On her way to find replacement units, Benny is contacted by county authorities who threaten to shut down the dig for spurious reasons unless they are given money. Archaeologist Heidi Maputo offers to resolve this using her family connections and Benny, unable to find replacements, improvises by purchasing potfish guns used to mark empty pots. She gives them to visiting schoolchildren to tag anything that they find.

An artefact resembling part of a jet engine, far more advanced than anything else that has been found on Jaiwan, is found. Benny realises that the bones found in the midden belong to a giant frog and that they might have been buried ritually. The Professor promises her a Master's degree for this discovery. Simone Agani finds artificial structures with the frozen remains of a potfish spider, indicating that Jaiwan had experienced dramatic climate change. Benny realises that Simone has used classified military data to make her finds and learns from the Professor that Simone, Hedi and Chay are military officers; when Benny tries to flee, she is caught by General Elsa Lafayette. Fortunately for her, Lafayette was a friend of her parents and promises not to report her.

Benny learns more about her colleagues from the Professor and talks with her about the Professor's goddess; she tells Benny to live louder, drunker, braver and more loving and dies in her sleep that night. Pilar Hidalgo tells Benny that the Professor had been grooming Benny as her successor and that the Professor had come across lethal toxins on a dig on Cray. Benny promises to make the Professor proud and hires the young Shawnee as her assistant. Shawnee finds hibernation tubes at one of the digs, one of which contains a mummified potfish spider which indicates the present-day potfish spiders are descended from sapient ones. Before making the public aware of this, Benny goes to see a potfish spider in a swamp, its natural habitat, and loses a foot to it.

Benny wears a prosthetic foot whilst a replacement is grown. The swamp is drained and evidence is found of a war on Jaiwan ten thousand years ago; reporter Lola visits the site and Benny is forced to tell her that the potfish spiders might be descended from an intelligent species, which would make the human colony on Jaiwan illegal per the laws insisted upon by the Silurians.

On her birthday, Benny receives her new foot and learns that her colleagues are being sent to the front lines, which General Lafayette has already told her will most likely result in their deaths. Before they leave, Chay tells her that, whilst the potfish spider in the hibernation tube was most likely sapient, those of the present day would appear to be descended from a genetically-engineered servitor class.

A report is found in the Jaiwan database which details how the colonists had found and built over a tunnel system dug by the natives. Benny and Shawnee investigate and find the remains of an underground bunker and theorise that the natives had been attacked before they could evacuate the planet in a rocket. The tunnels are flooded by an explosion at the reservoir; whilst Benny and Shawnee survive, the water awakens buttonmonsters which attack them until the soldier archaeologists return and kill them. The three soldiers are part of the First Regiment of Combat Archaeologists and have been tasked with resolving the situation on Jaiwan. They found Holgon, who supplied Benny and Shawnee with climbing equipment, with a bullet in his head outside of the tunnels.

Benny believes that the tunnel had been deliberately flooded in an attempt on her life and that the buttonmonsters are genetically-engineered organic weapons, dropped into the bunker during the attack on the natives. The colonists are worried that they will be forcibly repatriated as a result of the Hibernation Clause in the Protocols of Colonisation and Benny agrees to give Lola an interview which results in her being invited to speak to the President and his representative, Sunan Paramita. Later, a riot breaks out in Crystal Peak, the capital city and Benny, stuck in her hotel with Lola and her friends, drinks champagne for the first time.

Benny meets with the President and realises that conversation with Jaiwanese representatives would make things far less tense. Shawnee's folk tales make Benny decide to look beneath the sea, where she finds and breaks into an artificial structure designed to survive the extinction event. The architecture is unlike that of the Alpha Culture sites, suggesting that it was built by those that attacked the bunker. She and Lola are taken captive by soldier-caste spiders and taken to meet the elderly spider Woke Up One Morning Feeling Fine, who uses a frog like the one at Kondeeo as a translator.

First contact between Benny and Woke Up One Morning Feeling Fine goes well, but the latter asks for time to talk with his fellow spiders before negotiating with the colonists. Benny is concerned that General Lafayette might have an ulterior motive for wanting an alliance and that the spiders they are dealing with might be responsible for the extinction of the Alpha Culture, as well as the looting and destruction of Alpha Culture archaeological sites. Hoping to find evidence of artefacts being smuggled off-world, she visits the spaceport Jop and finds Pinky and Perky stored in a warehouse.

On the train, Benny spots two people with bad haircuts whom she had previously seen glowering at her and Shawnee in a café. She finds spider artefacts in unmarked crates and trips an alarm, prompting the couple to attack her; however, they are no match for her and she defeats them, handing them over to Paramita. On behalf of the new Bureau of Antiquities, Paramita confiscates the artefacts, but Benny notices a look shared between him and the couple and decides not to hand over the data storage device she had taken from a crate.

Benny finds that Woke Up One Morning Feeling Fine's spiders, the Omega spiders, diverted an asteroid to collide with the planet and sabotaged the Alpha spiders' bunker. The Omega spiders, Benny learns, call themselves the Laughing People and wanted rid of the other faction as they were a federation of co-operating cultures. She surmises that the couple with the bad haircuts tried to kill her in Rembrandt to stop her from finding evidence of a pre-colonial culture and that the government have an arrangement with the Laughing People to get rid of evidence of the Alphas.

The Bureau of Antiquities prevent Benny from continuing their archaeological work and she learns from Lola, after flirting with her and spending the night at her apartment, that a supposedly independent team have arrived on the planet. The team soon announces an arrangement with the Laughing People, saying that they have agreed to share the planet with the colonists as the humans only inhabit parts of the planet inhospitable to them. Benny visits the Laughing People and sees that a new generation of spider soldiers are being bred.

Believing that Alpha spiders might have survived by entering hibernation units like that found at the midden, Benny continues her excavation there and finds two which are intact before she is arrested by Paramita. Her friends emerge from hiding and fight the government troops and Laughing People, but Chay is killed by the detonation of a Laughing People nuke. The survivors go into hiding with the hibernation units and Benny goes to Jop with Shawnee and Lola, who draws a gun and demands her surrender. Benny crashes the car and flees with Shawnee to the warehouse, where she shoots and kills Lola and returns Pinky's intelligence into her machine body. Pinky agrees to help the archaeologists and keep Paramita busy whilst the Alpha spiders thaw out.

With the Alpha spiders awoken and able to present their case to the authorities, Pilar gives Benny a University of Jaiwan Master's certificate and takes on Shawnee as an apprentice. Benny decides to leave despite Shawnee's protestations and decides to continue the Professor's legacy, continuing her tradition by writing her own journal. She departs for Earth, promising to be "louder, drunker, braver and more loving".

Characters

 * Bernice Summerfield
 * Professor Mariela Ankola
 * Pilar Hidalgo
 * Simone Agani
 * Heidi Maputo
 * Chayana Lopeti
 * Shawnee Boonmee
 * Lola
 * Elsa Lafayette

Culture

 * Professor Mariela gives Bernice a copy of her personal database, which included a lot of files on 20th century Earth.

Individuals

 * Pinky and Perky were two artificial intelligences.

Foods and beverages

 * Krill is part CO2 scrubber, part additional protein source.
 * Vodka is Russia's greatest contribution to interstellar travel (in Bernice's opinion).
 * There is a Kwik-Kurry at General Layfeyette's army base.
 * Benny drinks champagne for the first time.

Literature

 * Archaeology for Primates was published by Martian University Press in 2534.

Organisations

 * Benny dropped out of Spacefleet and is now on the run from it.

Planets

 * In January 2562, Benny decides to head for Earth.
 * The Professor encountered lethal toxins while excavating an industrial site on the planet Cray.
 * The planet Heaven is becoming a popular planet to be buried on, but the Professor has a Last Ticket for burial on Earth in the Rift Valley, Tanzania.
 * Pilar Hidalgo is from the planet Shantak

Science

 * Benny calls her group of archaeologists "Combat Archaeologists".
 * Nuclear dampeners create a field inhibiting chain reactions.

Species

 * Martians are known as some of the best archaeologists in the galaxy.
 * Benny still calls Draconians "Dragons".
 * Earth Reptiles never forgave humans for usurping them and taking over their planet.
 * Heidi mentions xenomorphs in a saying, "when the xenomorphs hits the ventilation shafts".

Technology

 * Continuous Active Recording units are used at the archaeological digs.

Vehicles

 * Fulcrum is a VTOL capable troop carrier.

Continuity

 * Draconians (and the Draconian War) were first mentioned/appeared in TV: Frontier in Space.
 * Earth Reptiles first appeared in TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Sea Devils.