Sole Survivor

Eleven

"I thought you said all the doors were unlocked now. So why is that one still orange?" Amy asked Jenny in a whisper, following her closely as they crept through the darkened corridors. Every now and then they heard a distant noise, or the torches flickered over another smear of blood along the walls.

"That's the captain's cabin," Jenny said, "It's on a separate system. If there's anyone here alive, they'll be in there. The whole thing is an escape pod."

"The captain's quarters? What, so the captain can escape and everyone else can die?"

"Essentially. But I disabled it. For morale. Didn't want people thinking I'd cut and run. Not that using the escape pod would do you any good getting out of the Fowl Pocket, might as well just stay attached. But nothing can get through the private airlock," Jenny was explaining, taking out her screwdriver again. The Doctor was hoping and praying that they didn't run into another of those things, whatever they were. Those post-human nightmares. Jenny was trying so hard to remain an emotional void, the Doctor hadn't a clue how much shooting that thing had affected her, if it had affected her. He wasn't going to argue and say she didn't need to do it, though. If it had once been a human, it was long gone, past the point of no return, and if Jenny hadn't have had that spike-gun, all three of them could be dead.

"That's the opposite of going down with the ship. Cowardly," the Doctor said.

"Hence why I disabled it," Jenny said, frosty, trying to unlock this door now as well.

"I didn't mean you!" he exclaimed, mortified at his implication, "You're not… you could never be…" The light on the door changed from orange to blue, leaving Jenny to touch the hologram-circle and open this one just like all the others. They stepped through into a tiny little room, the private airlock she had mentioned, and had to wait there for a minute or so while the air was pulled out and then pumped back in again. For a few seconds, those miniature O2 filters of Oswin's actually came into play. They worked aptly, even though it was a very short field test. Like she would give them anything she hadn't checked a thousand times over, though. She was meticulous.

And there they were, the captain's quarters, faced with another view of the sea-coloured space outside, shadowy shipwrecks in the graveyard vacuum. It was a very opulent room, with rather a large, ornate dining table covered in bits and bobs. Guns, knives, oxygen canisters, a great deal of very valuable looking cutlery, huge quantities of food, an empty spacesuit slumped over in one of the chairs. Whoever was living there had been building up supplies, clearly, perhaps sneaking out and braving those monsters to gather rations.

"What have you gotten yourselves into…" Jenny whispered to herself, looking around. If it wasn't for the speakers in the helmets, Eleven and Amy wouldn't have been able to hear. He supposed she was just speaking in general terms about her formerly-living, now-dead crew. Ex-crew.

"How close to them were you, exactly?" Eleven asked, watching her.

She began to speak, but was interrupted by an unknown female voice coming from behind them, up on the second floor of the cabin, a set of stairs on the right leading up to a balcony. A balcony which a woman, after smarmily declaring, "Oh, I'd say she was very close to some of them," jumped down from lightly. Quite a high jump, too, over two metres. Miraculously, given the situation, this woman was smiling. And when Jenny pulled her blaster on her, she continued to smile, even though Jenny marched right up and put the gun against her head.

"What are you doing!?" Amy exclaimed.

"Nice to see you again," the mystery woman said, like she was amused. She wasn't in a suit.

"Is it really?" Jenny asked, angrily, pushing the gun against her skin. But the last time Eleven had seen Jenny threaten to shoot someone, her gun hadn't been loaded, it had been all been an act; scare tactics. The spike gun, he knew, was loaded, and definitely lethal, so why was she using the blaster? "Tell me why I shouldn't just shoot you for getting all these people killed."

"Maybe you should shoot me?" the woman enticed.

"Do something!" Amy hissed at Eleven, "She'll kill her!"

"I hope she will," the stranger said, "I don't think she has it in her. Go on, Raxis. Finish it." She grinned and then stepped away and lifted her head high enough to bite down on the muzzle of the blaster, the barrel pointing right into her mouth. She raised her eyebrows in challenge. Amy was frantic. Jenny pulled the trigger, and the gun just clicked uselessly. The woman laughed as Jenny lowered it, looking annoyed. "You've never been one to pull a loaded gun on anybody. Can't threaten people who know your tricks."

"Why didn't you do anything?" Amy demanded of the Doctor.

"I knew what she was doing," he answered. He hadn't known. He'd hoped he knew, hoped his trust in his daughter was well-placed. And look at that, it was.

"Yeah, well, don't test me, Iveanne, because I have the ammo on me and I could load it in seconds and blow your head off."

"You're all talk. You'd never do that." Jenny scowled. "Besides, you're using your left hand to shoot. Probably means something's happened to the other one."

"I'm ambidextrous."

"You go both ways, I know. Everyone knows. Doesn't mean you don't have a preference," the stranger, Iveanne, remarked, winking at Jenny. Jenny looked appalled. "Don't look like that – if you're so ashamed, maybe you shouldn't have done me in the first place." Jenny's shoulders slumped and she looked, uselessly, at the Doctor, who didn't know what he was supposed to think at that moment.

"…Sorry…" she mumbled, then added to Iveanne, "And my hand is fine."

"Prove it."

"Shut up. You're a murderer."

"I am not," Iveanne said, then shrugged, "Well, not in this case."

"Right," Amy said, tittering coldly, "Does somebody want to explain what the bloody hell is going on here? On this nightmare ship? And who this is?"

"She's, um… a sort of… ex. A bit," Jenny said, "Not a proper ex."

"What's a 'proper' ex?" Iveanne questioned.

"How about somebody I actually liked?"

"Liked me enough to-"

"If you say one more thing, I will break your jaw, because my father is right there and I don't think he wants to hear any of this," Jenny interrupted. Iveanne frowned.

"Your father? Not-"

"Yes."

"The one you've been trying to find for-"

"Yes, alright? Yes, that's him, right there, the Doctor," Jenny said, "Now do yourself a favour and shut up. This is Iveanne," she turned to Eleven and Amy, "She used to be the first mate on the Comet, and then she led the mutiny against me eight months so that she could chase after a made-up story. And left me to die."

"I never thought you'd really die," Iveanne said. She was coming across as very sociopathic. And his daughter had been… doing things? With her? And then Jack after that? At that moment he was pretty much glad she was dating Ravenwood now. At least Clara was a decent person. More than decent, in fact, wonderful – but that was neither here nor there. "That's why I sent out the distress signal. How did you get here, by the way? Did you risk getting stuck in the Fowl Pocket, all to come and rescue little old me?"

"Not a chance," Jenny snapped, "Wouldn't have come at all if I didn't have a way out."

"What do you mean made-up story? And why can't anybody leave this place?" Amy asked. She wasn't enjoying being kept in the dark. Then again, neither was the Doctor. All they had learnt so far was that Jenny used to be a pirate captain, until she had been kicked off, and the woman who had been her second-in-command was some sort of sex-starved lunatic with no basic human empathy.

"It's not made up," Iveanne said.

"Oh, not this again. It's a load of-"

"We found it. I found it. You were holding us back," Iveanne told her, and she frowned.

"Holding you back? That's rich."

"Found what?" Amy interrupted.

"The Anobine Cartax," Iveanne declared.

"What's an Anobine Cartax…?" Eleven asked.

"It doesn't exist," Jenny said.

"It does exist, and the thing about the curse? It's true. That's what you're seeing on here, a curse," Iveanne 'explained,' talking in an eerie way, like she was still enamoured with whatever this alleged relic the Doctor had never heard of was.

"You don't know what it is?" Amy asked him.

"No. I don't know everything, Amelia," he said, "Certainly not when it comes to dangerous folklore."

"He sounds just like you, calling it 'dangerous folklore,'" Iveanne said, doing inverted commas, smirking.

"Allegedly, the Anobine Cartax is the device that creates the gravity belt in the Fowl Pocket. The reason the Fowl Pocket even exists in the Myoki Galaxy," Jenny began to explain to Amy and the Doctor, "Nobody knows what it is, or who built it, or what it does, or what it looks like – they don't know anything. It's just something people made up because they haven't thought of a way to scientifically explain the gravity belt."

"What's the gravity belt, then?" Amy questioned.

"Uh… it's like Saturn, you know, and its rings, but imagine the rings are actually the invisible gravity belt and the planet is actually the whole Fowl Pocket. It sucks everything towards it, but then when the whatever-it-is gets halfway through, the magnetism reverses. So instead of pulling things towards it, it pushes things away, but the thrust of whatever asteroid or ship is coming in means instead of pushing it out again, it gets pushed in," Jenny said.

"Can't they just, you know, go to warp speed, or something?"

"No, because of Newton's laws," Eleven explained to her, "For every action is an equal and opposite reaction. No matter how fast something goes towards it, the polarity will respond with exactly the same force and push it back."

"Like throwing a bouncy ball at a wall. The harder you throw the ball-" Jenny began.

"-the further it travels on the rebound," Eleven finished. Amy glanced between he and Jenny with an expression on her face bordering on amusement. The Doctor cleared his throat. "Anyway. Doesn't affect the TARDIS, of course. TARDIS goes anywhere."

"So if you found the Anobine Cartax, what is it? What does it do? Is it the thing making the gravity belt?" Jenny asked Iveanne.

"Curses anyone who tries to remove it," she said.

"Did you have a plan on how to get out of the Fowl Pocket when you came in? It's suicide."

"Yes," Iveanne said, "And it worked."

"I don't see it working right now." Iveanne looked at her. "What?" Iveanne continued to stare, and then Jenny's eyes widened and her jaw dropped, "I was your plan? All along?" she scoffed, "You leave me to die, and then expect me to just come back and rescue you!?"

"You have come back to rescue us. Well, me. Everyone else is dead," she shrugged, "Me, and the Anobine Cartax."

"If this thing is cursed, why didn't the curse affect you?" Amy questioned.

"Yes, good question, Pond," Eleven agreed, "Why haven't you turned into one of those creatures?"

"Because I was in the cabin when they retrieved it," she answered, "I have an independent oxygen supply."

"There's your coward, father," Jenny said to the Doctor, nodding towards Iveanne. It took him a moment to realise she was talking about his earlier remark about it being cowardly to have the cabin be an escape pod, because he was briefly hung up on her calling him 'father.' She usually called him 'Doctor,' like everyone else, which didn't bother him until he heard her call Thirteen 'mum.' Now it bothered him. But 'father?' Perhaps it was a step in the right direction.

"Funny kind of curse that can't get through an airlock," Amy said, looking at Iveanne shiftily, like she was trying to decide if she was trustworthy, which she most definitely wasn't.

"Sounds more like a virus, some kind of infection," the Doctor said.

"That's what they thought in medical, too. I wouldn't know, I wasn't there."

"You locked yourself up right away, then?" Jenny asked coldly.

"I don't want to get cursed."

"You're pathetic."

"It doesn't affect anything that isn't human," Iveanne said, "Humans only. It's in the air."

"Humans only? How does that work?"

"The species who found it, I assume. We ran tests."

"Ridiculous," Jenny said.

"The air should be fine for you Time Lords to breathe. I haven't rerouted the O2 supply, or anything. Is she a Time Lord as well?" Iveanne indicated Amy.

"No. But I wish I was. The last thing I want is to be part of the same species as you. This is why humanity has a really bad name, because of people like you."

"Say what you like, I survived."

"Fine," Jenny said, "I'll go find this… thing you picked up, Iveanne. But I'm destroying it. So where is it now?"