Vespertine (audio story)

Vespertine was the second audio story in the audio anthology Cass, the fifth series of The Eighth Doctor: Time War. It was written by Lou Morgan and featured Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor, Emma Campbell-Jones as Cass Fermazzi and Sonny McGann as Alex Campbell.

Publisher's summary
It's Cass's first trip in the TARDIS, and the Doctor is determined to make it one to remember. But when they arrive at a research base that shouldn't exist, built above a missing explorer's ship that should never have been found, it seems their visit's going to be memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Because deep beneath the ice, there's more than just a long-lost ship waiting for them...

Plot
The Doctor, Alex and Cass travel to Station Twilight, a research base built to study the wreck of explorer Hudson Sage's ship, the Vespertine, which history records was never found. Additionally, the Doctor has detected a timeline that does not make sense. Technician Rin Martolo, believing them to have come from company headquarters, explains that the ship is in a cavern below the base and that she believes the crew abandoned it.

Without informing Ebus of their presence, Martolo lets the Doctor, Alex and Cass descend into the cavern and examine the Vespertine, which the Doctor finds that he knows his way around. They meet Hudson on a time locked deck and he lends Cass and Alex his memory recorder; they discover that Hudson was smuggling weapons, that his crew mutinied against him and that the Doctor was on the ship with Bliss. The Doctor too learns of the smuggling after finding some paperwork and confronts Hudson, who tells him that he was on his ship with a companion and promised to look after his family.

The time lock breaks and the Doctor realises that the beacon that Rin gave to them is actually an activated temporal destabiliser. As the Vespertine decays, Hudson tells the Doctor, Alex and Cass to leave to save themselves and, on the way back to the surface, Cass determines that Rin must be a descendant of his second-in-command, Isaac Martolo. Rin denies knowing that Hudson was still alive and explains that she is his granddaughter; she took Isaac's surname and wanted to destroy the ship in order to escape his intimidating legacy, but now she has to live with having killed him.

Alex tells the Doctor that he saw him on the ship with Bliss, whom the Doctor believes must be in his future until Alex says that his instinct tells him otherwise; he believes that the person whose timeline is wrong was not Hudson but the Doctor himself, explaining why he could not remember visiting the Vespertine but somehow knew his way around. The Doctor disagrees, instead theorising that everybody's timeline but Hudson's had changed, and wonders what else he might not be remembering.

Cast

 * The Doctor - Paul McGann
 * Cass Fermazzi - Emma Campbell-Jones
 * Alex Campbell - Sonny McGann
 * Hudson Sage - Simon Shepherd
 * Rin Martolo - Indigo Griffiths
 * Ebus - Homer Todiwala

Worldbuilding

 * Hudson Sage discovered the Scarab Nebula.
 * Three elements on the periodic table were named after Hudson.
 * The Station Twilight crew are believed to have suffered from greenpox. In truth, Rin slipped them somnus extract.
 * Hudson's crew included Iverson, Singh, Fenwick, Gruber Sky and Isaac Martolo, his second-in-command. Isaac had a husband and child.
 * Hudson has a memory recorder.
 * The Doctor was travelling with Bliss when he met Hudson.

Continuity

 * Cass said that she got enough snow on Bissle III. (AUDIO: Meanwhile, Elsewhere)
 * Cass previously mentioned Hudson Sage. (AUDIO: Meanwhile, Elsewhere)