Into the Void

Eleven

"Well. That really puts a bit of a dampener on things."

"And I think that sentence puts a bit of an understatement on things," the Doctor grumbled in response to Amy's comment.

The exterior deck of the Comet was gargantuan. Towering up on either side of them were huge, rib-like attachments which all worked together to generate an amber-coloured forcefield around the ship, keeping all of the atmosphere (and the Anobine Infection) sealed up within, pumping diseased air around and around with no escape. The Cartax, or whatever it was, was right in front of them, the thing a relatively large sphere with a thin, blue glow around it. Unfortunately, it was also around thirty feet above them, floating in what looked to the Doctor like a crow's nest.

"Is that a crow's nest?" he decided to ask his daughter about it, who stood with her gun slung over her back and her hands on her hips, squinting and looking up at it. The two of them still didn't have their helmets on, only Amy did. Nice to see the forcefield holding up well.

"Yeah," she answered.

"Why is there a crow's nest on a spaceship?"

"For the same reason there's a crow's nest on a normal ship, to see stuff. And it's a nice view from up there." He thought it was odd, and wondered if she had maybe installed it herself because of the 'nice view.'

"And how would one go about getting up there?" Amy questioned.

"There's a teleport relay," Jenny explained, "Except, everything's off on the ship except life support, to preserve power. If the lights are off, the teleports are off."

"Can't you switch it back on?"

"Usually, yeah."

"But why not now?"

"Because that's the teleport relay," Jenny said, pointing at something at the base of the crow's nest, a circular archway. Well, once it had been circular, it was now bashed to pieces, the control panel smashed apart. No sonic screwdriver would fix that. Nothing would fix it, the only thing that would do any good would be a full replacement.

"Okay, so, we can't get whatever it is? Can't you switch off the atmosphere and let it get sucked out?" Amy asked.

"No, haven't you been listening? It needs to be destroyed. Letting it fly out into space is just as bad as leaving it here," the Doctor said.

"This is obviously a test," Jenny said.

"A test?" he asked, "A test of what?"

"Character, probably… Obviously Iveanne stuck that stupid thing up there. There was a spacesuit in the cabin, didn't you see? And tons of rations. Meaning that for all her cowardly behaviour, after this plague broke out, she kept leaving to gather supplies. Meaning she probably broke the teleport relay, left it there, and started broadcasting that distress signal," she said. He had noticed most of those things, as well. Jenny sighed, and added, mostly to herself, "Why is it that all the women I meet turn out to be sociopaths… except Clara." He wondered if she meant this 'Viola,' the person she had mentioned earlier when talking about her hobby of alligator wrestling.

"So she got you to come here, why? Just to rescue her?"

"No… she knows me… she'd know I'd come to destroy it when I found out what it did…"

"So she put it where you can't get it," Amy said, talking as though she had solved a problem. Jenny said nothing, she was thinking. "Jenny?"

"Maybe," she told Amy absently. It was clear she didn't think Amy was quite right, but she herself didn't know what was right to correct her. Jenny looked the opposite direction from the Cartax and the crow's nest, at the enormous, rear thrusters of the Comet. They towered up, a huge block of metal, about the same height off the deck as the crow's nest itself.

"What are you thinking?" Eleven asked her.

"That there's a ladder on the side of the thruster shell so that people can climb in and do maintenance from above," she answered.

"But how will climbing up there get you up there?" he motioned at the crow's nest.

"Because all the power's off…" she said. She wasn't really talking to him, she was more talking to herself, and she walked over to the teleport relay at the base of the crow's nest and peered at the panel on the base. "If the power's off, that means all the cables in here I ran about a year and a half ago don't have any electricity going through them, so they're safe to touch, and they're sturdy." Then she turned to him, "Would you help me with this?"

"Of course," he said immediately, walking over.

"I can't really pull the cables out with my thumb the way it is," she told him, and he felt a pang of guilt. She said she couldn't pull the cables, but she could wrench the remainder of the panel off the side of it and throw it onto the floor. Then it was just electronics, and she picked a wire and pulled it, and he began to help, a few times having to tug quite hard and presumably breaking something deep within the Comet itself. Not that it really mattered. Even if they somehow shut off life support, Iveanne would be fine, and he and Jenny could just put their helmets back on.

There was a great amount of electrical cable buried inside the ship, and it just kept coming and coming and coming, piling up on the floor around them. Pulling it out was quite exhaustive work, too.

"Why is there so much of that stuff?" Amy asked.

"I had to run it through the walls all the way to the backup generator, because nobody wanted me using the main generators for a fancy, arguably pointless teleport. And the backup generator is quite far away," Jenny explained. Eleven gave one last tug and the cable flew out, nearly sending him falling backwards.

"What are you going to do with it?" Eleven asked, watching her pick it up and wrap it around her bad hand to make a neat coil.

"Improvise," she answered. When he told someone he was going to improvise, it usually meant he was going to do something potentially dangerous with an ambiguous outcome he hadn't entirely thought through, and he didn't want anybody to question how watertight his most likely very leaky plan really was. Maybe Jenny was more sensible than he was, though, and 'improvise' didn't mean quite the same thing.

With the power cable wrapped around her bad arm and pushed up to her shoulder and her gun across her back, she toddled away towards the enormous thrusters, the sort of things that could send a ship to warp speed in a few seconds flat.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Amy called up to her when she began her ascent of the ladder, the other two merely watching. When Jenny said nothing, Amy turned and asked him, "Do you think she knows what she's doing?"

"That depends," Eleven began, "If she's really as much like me as people keep saying… then she probably hasn't got a clue. Doesn't mean it won't go well, though." He smiled at Amy, when really he was just as nervous as she was, he was just trying to be a bit more optimistic about it. He didn't want Jenny to fall at that height and die – another thing that would be his fault. But again, he reminded himself, she'd survived quite well for two-hundred years, he had to have more faith in her abilities. Though he did wish she would say what she was doing.

Jenny was a tiny, blonde-haired blip when she perched herself on the edge of the thruster, sitting down with her legs over the edge, doing something with her gun and the cable. It was impossible to tell from where they were.

"Is she like me?" Eleven asked Amy, now that Jenny couldn't hear either of them, the close-range comms switched off ever since the Time Lords had removed their helmets.

"You are going out with the same girl," Amy pointed out, "Maybe the two of you should bond over that instead of thinking about how weird it is all the time. All it really means is you like her new flame, which is more than can be said for the last one. And running and hiding when things get emotional? Like she's been doing all week? That's you all over."

"That's not exactly a positive trait," the Doctor pointed out.

"Stubborn?" Amy suggested, "Headstrong? You both have blue eyes? I don't really know her all that well."

"Yes, well, I suppose-"

There was a loud noise from above and they both jumped and saw a length of electrical cable whooshing through the air from Jenny's direction, then a clanging noise as one of those huge spikes wedged itself into the edge of the crow's nest, all the way from the thrusters. Jenny still had hold of the other end, it looked like, and she shot another metal spike into the top of the thrusters' hull at her feet. Then she appeared to pull the rest of the electrical cable as taught as she could, and tied it around the spike in front of her, making a line from the crow's nest to the thrusters.

"Are you going to walk on that!?" Amy yelled up.

"What!?" Jenny shouted back.

"ARE YOU GOING TO WALK ON THAT!?" Amy shouted again. The Doctor just gawked. With her good hand, she gave Amy a thumbs up. "You have to stop her! That's dangerous!" Jenny, tentatively, took a step out onto the line, holding her arms out at either side. It wasn't her ability to balance that he was questioning – she had told him the other day that she had once been the star acrobat in a circus - it was the ability of those rusty spikes and that electrical cable to hold her up, and his own ability to catch her if they didn't. "What if she falls!?"

"She won't fall," Eleven told Amy, then he called up, "You won't fall, will you, Jenny?" and, though she was so far above them, he thought he saw her smile. And then the unthinkable happened. She wobbled, and toppled sideways. Both of his hearts stopped for the split second in which he was sure Jenny was going to plummet to another messy end, and then she stopped falling and just hung there, having caught herself on the cable with her good hand. He could have sworn he heard her laugh.

With her other hand she reached up and fumbled with the collar of the spacesuit for a moment, and then her voice crackled through the speakers clearly, "You two are funny."

"You almost gave me a heart attack! Two heart attacks, in fact, at the same time!" he protested after switching his own comms back on. Jenny laughed again.

"That was my whole gimmick," she told him, pulling herself back up, and then pushing herself up even more so that she was balancing upside-down on one hand on the wire. Amy was amazed. "The wire I used to use was like fishing line and over sixty feet high, and all the trapezes were made of glass. So I would fall, and everyone would think I was going to die, and then I'd grab the trapeze out of nowhere. All part of the thrill of the performance, but the wire used to cut into my feet a lot." She righted herself, landing back on her feet perfectly on the cable, and continued to walk easily towards the crow's nest. "I'd do a cartwheel up here if my thumb wasn't broken, or a somersault."

"Have you ever had a normal job?" Amy asked her, "One that wasn't being a soldier or a pirate captain or an acrobat?"

"Not really," Jenny said. Showing off had clearly put her in a better mood than usual – she was sharing things. Actually sharing things. The Doctor was quite excited. But she didn't say anything after that, and Amy just stared, marvelling at how easy she was finding it. Until she got to the very end, that was, and she wobbled again and froze.

"Don't jump again," Amy told her sharply, "It freaks me out."

"It's coming loose," Jenny answered, "At the other end."

"Get off it, then," the Doctor said quickly, "Jump to the crow's nest!" Jenny tried to tentatively take another step forwards on the cable, and then it gave way. The spike stuck into the thrusters pulled free, and Jenny was forced to jump for the crow's nest while the Doctor and Amy were trying to leap out of the way of a very sharp spike flying straight for them on the end of the cable. It went right between them like a bullet, swung up until it was nearly horizontal, then came back again. Jenny hung off the edge of the crow's nest by one hand, but doing that probably wasn't putting any strain on her at all. "Jenny! Are you okay!?" he shouted.

"I'm fine," she answered, hauling herself up and squeezing between the railings around the thing, right with the Anobine Cartax, which continued to float. "It's alright, it'll give me an easier way back down." The spike-on-a-string swung through the air, slowing. Neither he nor Amy wanted to risk trying to stop it – he didn't want his palm to be impaled by that thing. Oswin would hate him even more if he ruptured her spacesuit.

"What is it, then? That thing?" Amy asked.

"Yes, good question," the Doctor added, both of them unable to do anything other than watch. Jenny plucked the floating sphere out of the air and held it up in front of her eyes, looking at it.

"It's got a hole in it," she said, "I have no idea what it is. Catch." He could have done with a bit more warning when she dropped it over the edge, and as it happened he only just caught it. It was big and metal and it did have a hole in it, like someone had punched it, and had stopped glowing now that Jenny had taken it from where it had been.

"What's this Anobine Cartax supposed to be?" he inquired, examining it, "There must be stories."

"They're like Chinese whispers," Jenny explained. She crawled back through the crow's nest railings and grabbed hold of the cable where it now hung limply, the spike suspended in the air between the Doctor and Amy. Giving it a wide berth, Amy walked around to be back at the Doctor's side looking at the Cartax as well. Lucky these suits were of such a good quality; anything less and even the tiniest rupture could see Amy catching the infection and turning into one of those horrors hiding out below deck. "No one really knows, that's why I thought it didn't exist. Some people say it's the thing that creates the gravity belt, some people say it's all the secrets of a lost civilisation whose name is conveniently omitted from the myths. Some just think they'll get rich with it. The usual stuff. But there aren't any descriptions of what it looks like." While she talked, she was climbing down the cable, doing a very good job of it considering her thumb.

"Well I daresay that you're probably right, and this 'Anobine Cartax' doesn't exist," he said, "I hardly think that this is what the legends are talking about."

"Why?" she asked, dropping down lightly onto their level again, returned from her elevated journey, "What is it?"

"It's an advanced containment device," he told her.

"Containing what?" Amy asked.

"This plague. It's a very clever piece of engineering, actually, it doesn't kill the plague, it mimics a biological organism to trick the microbes. In a nutshell, it more or less sucks the diseases out of people, and they all get stored within. Haven't a clue where it comes from, or this infection, but whoever built it must have pulled the contagion out of the air. Maybe it didn't turn this species into monsters like it does humans and it was curable. Then, what better place to dump it than the Fowl Pocket? The part of space nothing can ever leave?"

"And someone broke it?" Amy said.

"Probably to see if there was something valuable inside. Wouldn't be surprised if it was Iveanne who ordered it cracked open," Jenny sighed.

"Well what do we do with it? We can't take it onto the TARDIS," Amy said.

Eleven was about to say something else – not anything useful, because he was wondering if perhaps throwing it into the Eye of Harmony might rid them of it, and that involved doing the very thing Amy said they couldn't do (which he agreed with.) He didn't get the chance to, though, because they were interrupted by someone emerging, in a blue, baggy spacesuit, from the open hatch in the floor that hid the staircase back down to the interior. The same spacesuit he'd seen slumped on an empty chair in the captain's cabin earlier.

"You still haven't quite figured it out," said Iveanne's smarmy, familiar voice. She was carrying weapons, too. Not the weapons he expected to see on a spaceship, though; two swords. Cutlasses, in fact. "For my love," she said, tossing one of the lethal swords right at Jenny, who hastened to catch it by its hilt. "Using your left hand again?"

"What do you want?" Jenny questioned her, glancing, confused, at the sword.

"You to die. I was lying. I don't have a clue if that plague affects Time Lords or not. And there you two are, no helmets on, breathing in the air," Iveanne said. Though he doubted that it would do much good anymore, the Doctor quickly fumbled with the collar of his suit, the glass segments of the helmet rising up around his head to seal him away from the outside world. Jenny did the same thing. Iveanne laughed. "Doesn't look like the Cartax is going to kill you anytime soon, though, so I suppose I'll have to do it myself."

"She really is crazy," Amy said.

"It's kill or be killed, Captain Raxis," Iveanne said to Jenny, holding out the sword. She must have pressed a button on it, because it immediately started to glow a bright red, the metal becoming almost molten and burning hot. As if a sword needed to be made doubly lethal like that.

"I don't want to fight you, or kill you," Jenny said to her. Iveanne merely shrugged. Yes, he thought, Amy was right, she was definitely crazy. Iveanne swung the cutlass, bright red and fiery, right at Jenny, who switched on her own sword just in time to block it.

"You do know how to sword fight, don't you!?" Amy asked, the Doctor dropping the Cartax on the floor and dragging Amy away from the swords.

"Of course I do!" Jenny shouted back, ducking a swing Iveanne aimed at her head. At that temperature, the blade would melt clean through the glass helmet and take split Jenny's head apart.

"Why don't you use your good hand, then?" Iveanne questioned, clearly knowing that she had an advantage over Jenny that day. The Doctor stood and watched, seeing blurs of orange light in the air as his daughter blocked every single one of Iveanne's attacks, listening the sounds of the metal clashing over and over.

"Why would you call me back here to kill me? How did you know I wasn't dead?" Jenny demanded, really having to try hard to block Iveanne's attacks with one hand.

"I'm not the sort of person to leave someone to die and not check the job got done," Iveanne said, trying to stab Jenny right in her gut, but Jenny side stepped out of her way and hit Iveanne's cutlass to the side, "Don't you remember Fehl and Kayn? Those two Tranchans that were saved from the shadows as well? They told me everything when I tracked them down, about blue boxes and space travel." Jenny slashed at Iveanne and Iveanne blocked, leaving them locked together, swords pressing against each other. "They thought if they gave you up I'd let them live."

"You killed them!?" Jenny exclaimed, her grip slipping, Iveanne pushing Jenny's cutlass away and taking a swipe for her ribcage, which Jenny managed to block.

"One way or another, Raxis, you're going to die today."

"You know," Jenny shouted in the Doctor's direction, he and Amy just watching, "She's right about my hand!? I can't actually keep this up forever!? Considering I can't rupture her suit at all or she'll get the plague and die, and I don't want to kill her, it would be nice if you two would do something to help out!?"

"Right! Yes! Sorry!" Eleven spluttered. But he didn't know what to do to help out. Iveanne laughed and kept swinging for Jenny, who blocked her at every turn, the pair of them duelling in a haze of red light and heat. "Keep her busy!"

"For the record, I did lose the last sword fight I was in!" Jenny shouted, "Fatally!"

"I'm working on it!" Eleven said, staring around at the things on the ship. At present the only idea he had was just lobbing the faux-Cartax right at Iveanne's head, but that would shatter her faceplate and turn her into another of those things. He couldn't think of any way to incapacitate her that wouldn't lead to her becoming one of them, a fate worse than death. That led him to believe that he was going to have to do something drastic, something that Jenny would not. "Just try not to die!"

"Oh, thanks for brilliant advice, dad! Because I wasn't doing that already!" she shouted back at him, but he hardly listened. Amy following him, he was running over to the nearest of those enormous rib-like attachments generating the artificial atmosphere and keeping the whole Comet pressurised.

"What are you doing?" Amy asked him, and he didn't answer. "Doctor!?"

"Something she won't," he said. With the sonic screwdriver he pulled off a large, metal panel from near the base of the forcefield generator, revealing a whole bunch of wiring.

"What?"

"I have to break the forcefield," he answered.

"What? You can't do that! We'll all get sucked out into space!" Amy protested.

"No, she will. We won't, we have magno-boots, for zero-gravity," he explained, "But those spacesuits in this century don't, they still use tethers for spacewalks right now."

"And what happens to her?"

"Best case scenario, Jenny manages to get the sword away from her in the zero gravity while she floats and we drag her back to the TARDIS. Worst case scenario, she gets pulled into space and suffocates."

"You're going to kill her!?"

"What else am I supposed to do!?" he demanded of her, "Have you got a better idea, Pond!? Jenny can't just block her forever, she has a broken thumb, she'll lose, and that would be my fault. I'm not letting my daughter die again. Every time that happens there's a risk she might not come back. So, yes, I'm going to kill the homicidal maniac over there who's trying to destroy the only semblance of a family I have left." Then he pointed the sonic screwdriver at the inner-workings of the generator definitively, Amy no longer trying to talk him out of it, one-handed Jenny beginning to struggle quite severely to keep up with two-handed Iveanne.

The soft, amber glow of the forcefields flickered. Taking out one generator took out all of them, and the entire system failed within seconds. He felt the force of pressure leaving the Comet try and pull him away, while bright lights around the soles of his boots lit up to indicate they were magnetised. It was like wind rushing around them, random bits of debris being picked up from around them and flung into space. Iveanne had quick reflexes, though. She dropped the cutlass but grabbed hold of Jenny's right arm as she was getting dragged away, clawing at her. Eleven heard Jenny make a noise of pain as Iveanne scrabbled at the hand with the broken thumb, trying to cling on for dear life. Then Jenny did something he didn't expect. She took her own burning hot cutlass and slashed Iveanne's O2 tube on her back, slicing the thing clean apart. With a sudden loss of air, Iveanne couldn't hold on, and found herself pulled right out into space, the three of them watching her silhouette disappear into the Fowl Pocket's green clouds.

AN: Pretty sure that this chapter is written terribly and proofreading it was like hitting my face against a wall, so, sorry about that.