A/N: Sorry that it has been so long! Winter semester has been absolutely crazy. I'm hoping to get back on top of writing and come out with chapters pretty regularly during the summer. Enjoy!
"All right," the Doctor said, plastering a smile on his face as they stepped out unto the Sycorax ship. "What have we here?"
They had landed in the council chamber of the Sycorax ship, where the Doctor had known he could talk to the Sycorax. But the room was completely empty. The sides of the chamber rose and rose, but the rocky surfaces showed not a trace of motion.
"This," said the Doctor, turning slowly in the center of the room, "is not right."
Susan wandered away from the TARDIS. "I've never seen a ship so quiet," she said in hushed tones. "Not a light blinking, not a thing breathing. Doctor, what happened here?"
"I don't know," he said. "But we are going to find out."
They all began to slowly move around the room, climbing the stair and checking the aisles for something, anything.
"Do you think they abandoned ship?" Amy said, crouching to look under a desk.
"Not likely," the Doctor said. "It's too clean. People abandoning ship leave messes, rush around, there's a general state of panic. This... This is too perfect."
"Are they all dead then?" Rory tried to keep the worry out of his voice, but honestly, he never enjoyed being stuck on spaceships with mass murdering sociopathic aliens.
"The Sycorax never leave their council chambers completely deserted," said the Doctor, shaking his head. "It goes against their 'gods'. If they are all dead, where are their bodies?"
"I've got my money on a parasitic bacteria," Susan stated loudly from across the room. She had found a door, and was running her hands all over it to try and find the catch. "The type that clean up anything organic, y'know? Real nice and tidy."
"Oh great," Rory said. "That sounds better. If we die, we won't leave a mess for the aliens to clean up. Splendid."
Susan grinned at Rory and pushed her shoulder against the door, but found it was quite solid. "Grandfather, can I borrow your screwdriver?"
"I'll get it," the Doctor said. He may have been pretending she was Susan, but that didn't mean he needed to take unnecessary risks.
With a flick of his wrist, the door slid upward, showing them a dark hallway. The Doctor entered with screwdriver in hand.
"Susan," he said softly. "What do you know about the Sycorax?"
She bit her lip. This was a test, she knew it. She began following him down the hallway. "They're humanoid, but they wear a thick exoskeleton, instead of the internal one of most humanoids. They think their society is much older than it is," she said with a smirk. "When I was at the Academy-"
"What of their religion?" the Doctor cut her off, turning a corner quickly with his screwdriver in front of him. He had tried it on the lights, but something was resisting. No need to be alarmed. Yet.
"Religion?" Susan followed the Doctor, trying to talk as softly as possible. "Um... they believe in..." Her hand hit the wall, and she scraped it on the rough rock. "Stone!" she said, a little louder than desirable. The Doctor noticed how her exclamation echoed down the hallway, bouncing off the walls. The sound momentarily disrupted his screwdriver, and he thought he heard a low rumbling in the absence of the hum. Still nothing to be alarmed about, he told himself.
"I remember. They believe that in the old days, the Sycorax were born out of the stone itself, taking on the properties of it to survive. Their gods were all stone." As Susan became more engrossed, she began to talk louder.
It's just the hum of the engines the Doctor told himself. The noise hadn't gone away. In fact, it was getting louder. The Doctor could hear it vibrating his legs, and his screwdriver began to flicker. He turned another corner. It was now getting very hot. Nothing abnormal.
"And their temperament? How is that?" the Doctor said, trying to distract Susan from the noise.
"Oh, very grumpy," she said with a smile, oblivious to the low rumble. "I seem to remember they had quite a conquering fetish."
"Yes," the Doctor said, her comment sparking his mind. "They wanted to conquer everything." They had reached a new door, and there was no denying it was radiating heat. The rumbling rattled the corridor, and the screwdriver's light grew dimmer and dimmer. But the red light from under the door was enough to see by.
"But mostly," the Doctor said, adjusting his screwdriver. "They wanted to conquer stone." The door flew open to reveal a huge room, bristling with heat and full of red bucket full of hot magma. All around, Sycorax dashed back and forth, pour this stuff into that bucket, or hurriidly taking buckets out of the room.
"They don't look productive," Susan said. "They look scared."
The Doctor could tell she was right. The Sycorax didn't even look up from their grueling work to notice the two aliens standing in the open door. The Doctor was reaching out to touch one on the shoulder, when he heard a scream from the hall behind him.
He whirled to look at Susan, but she had turned around at the sound of the scream as well.
"Amy!" The Doctor yelled, cursing under his breath. "This is the problem with you," he spat at Susan as he raced up the hall, her feet pounding in time with his. "You get too many companions, and someone important gets left behind."