Measure of Devotion

by Kernil Crash

It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

(Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863)

Chapter 1

John Crichton banged into yet another alien critter.  The startled creature let out a gargling growl, shoved him to one side, and continued its way along the crowded thoroughfare.  Crichton spent several seconds watching it skitter off through the crowd then turned and elbowed his way deeper into the throng.  From its lack of reaction, he figured there was a good possibility that the black-skinned, bug-like being had not understood the intent behind his mumbled “Pardon me”, and that conclusion was based on the assumption that it had the translator things in its head in the first place.

“Remember to ask the blue chick whether all the critters on this side of the universe have the microbe doodads,” he said into his recorder.  There was too much to remember and assimilate here.  His list of mental notes to himself had exceeded available cranial storage space in a matter of hours, and he had begun relying on the pocket recorder instead.  Another reminder was added to the fast-growing reel of tape.  “Arns.  It’s arns here, not hours.”

Twenty feet ahead of him there was a flash of khaki.  Crichton squirmed his way between a pair of eight-foot tall blue-furred creatures, swerved around something that looked repulsively akin to a gargantuan leech, took several long steps, and was within arm’s length of the IASA uniform.  He snared his wife around the waist from behind and hugged her.  Alex jumped and let out quick screech, drawing the attention of vendors and customers alike.

She turned halfway around inside his embrace, deliberately elbowing him in the ribs in the process.  “You jerk!  It’s too bizarre here to be doing that to me.  I thought one of those --”  She paused, searching for an appropriate word to describe the alien species swarming around them.

“Critters,” John prompted.  He pulled Alex close to his chest and leaned his chin on her shoulder.

“I thought one of those beings had grabbed me.  Can you believe this, John?  We are actually on another planet!”  They moved toward the next open air shop as one, waddling slightly as a result of John’s ongoing hug.  “Other life forms,” she said, awestruck by the variety of beings flooding around them.

“Sentient lifeforms.  Lots and lots of weird, freaky, technicolor lifeforms.  We’re on a shopping trip in a bizarre bazaar.”

“Funny.”  Alex slapped his hand lightly and pulled out of his embrace.  “John, do you realize how important it would be to bring something as simple as the translator microbes back to Earth?  Not just for the language translation portion.  What if we could bio-engineer new microbes for a variety of functions?  We could be looking at instantaneous learning.  Think of the impact on technical fields.  The possibilities are endless.  Imagine being able to download medical knowledge with a single injection.”

“That is exactly why you were on board, babe.  I don’t mean because we thought we’d ever wind up on the far side of the universe, but for your medical expertise.  I see Mighty Morphin’ Power Microbes and you see the possibilities for human advancement.”  John lingered at what he guessed was a food stall.  Everything on display looked universally unappetizing.  He sniffed cautiously at the least revolting of the selections, and then turned away, gagging at the stench, and spent some time wondering if they could exist for the rest of their lives on nothing but the tasteless foodcubes they had been given aboard the leviathan.  Alex continued to drift along the stalls, examining the wares with rapt interest.

“Don’t go too far,” he called after her.  There was a flickering, truncated movement that he recognized as Alex’s in-public shorthand for blowing him a kiss, and then she moved further into the crowd.

Crichton heard the grumble of the luxan and the higher pitched tones of the delvian coming toward him long before he could see them.  It was too early to tell if any of the leviathan’s small complement could be trusted, but one thing was certain:  his and Alex’s survival depended on their questionable charity.  They would not survive for long without a few allies who were willing to teach them how things worked in this universe.  Glancing one more time to make sure his wife had not moved too far along the market stalls, he turned and went to meet the aliens.

“Durgo and Pah-oo Zan.”  He repeated the awkward syllables several times, resisting the urge to bastardize the names into a more familiar form.  He had nearly given into the desire several arns earlier, only to receive a vigorous elbow in the ribs and a furious glare from Alex.  That had stopped him cold, as it always did.

“We must break orbit,” D’Argo said as soon as they were within range.  “There is a Peacekeeper Command Carrier arriving.”  Edict delivered, the luxan turned and left without another word.  Zhaan lingered.

“Command Carrier is big and bad, I take it?” John asked.  “The Imperial Starcruiser of this end of the universe?  Evil empire?”

“Peacekeepers,” Zhaan said, summarizing the bad news.  “They will not allow us to escape.  If Moya remains in orbit around this planet when they arrive, our deaths are assured.”

Crichton expended four seconds weighing his options.  They had a choice of taking refuge with a bunch of escaped prisoners, or seeking asylum within what he was quickly beginning to believe was an autocratic military regime.  He made his decision.  “Alex went that way, I have to find her.  We’ll catch up.”

“All right, Crichton, but you’ll have to hurry.  We can’t wait for you.  If you aren’t at the transport pod in two hundred microts, we’ll be forced to leave without you.”  She ducked her head in silent apology.

“We’ll be there!  She’s right over there.”  He pointed toward where he had last seen his wife, and started in that direction before he finished talking.

“Be quick.  We will not wait.”  Pulling her wrap more securely around her head, Zhaan disappeared into the crowd.

Just when he needed to move fastest, the crowd thickened, closing in around him and slowing his progress to a nightmarish struggle.  Crichton abandoned finesse and manners.  Shoving bodies aside without regard for shape, size, or number of limbs, he forced his way through the mob.  There was no sign of his wife, no glimpse of the khaki uniform.  “Alex!” he yelled.  Half his allotted time was gone and he had not found her yet.  He pushed harder, rudely elbowing several critters aside.  “ALEX!!”

There was no answering shout.

Two seconds later, John Crichton’s life took the sort of turn for the worse that, if applied to a more normal event on Earth, transformed otherwise mundane moments into Stephen-King-quality tales of horror.  In his current surroundings, already struggling to cope with what had happened to him over the preceding several hours, it turned a waking nightmare into the sort of disaster that no film director would ever dare to put on the screen.  Disbelief, shock, anger, and half a dozen other emotions entwined into a sick-making lump in his stomach.

The downhill slide to disaster started with a familiar whining roar:  the only sound on this planet other than Alex’s voice that he had a prayer of recognizing.  It rushed overhead, the source of the noise obscured in the dark, and faded out within a matter of seconds.  To Crichton it meant that the transport pod had left right when the blue chick had said it would.  The fugitives had left without them.  He and Alex were stranded on this alien world, and the module, their only hope of ever getting back to Earth, was on board the huge space ship, which would undoubtedly be headed for parts even more unknown within a matter of seconds.

“Shit!”  The syllable did not begin to describe his frustration, and it was far too short to vent any of his growing anger.  “Damn it all to hell!”

After that, everything went from bad to worse in a rush.  The solid mass of bodies that had closed in around him a few moments earlier now began to move in the opposite direction he wanted to travel.  Crichton elbowed and shoved his way through the tide of bodies without regard for the injuries he might be inflicting.  Someone or something took a swing at him in response to his aggressive tactics.  He grabbed an arm that had more than one elbow joint, and flung the creature into the crowd ahead of him in an attempt to clear a path.  He surged forward no more than four feet.

“Get out of my way, you freaky bastards!  ALEX!!  Where the hell are you?” he yelled.

“JOHN!”  Her call tightened the muscles in his shoulders with an emotion he could not label.  It felt as though all the worst moments of his life had been combined into a single, reason-robbing ache that if left untended long enough held the promise of suicidal depression.  He shook himself, trying to flick away the peculiar sensation, and surged forward another two feet.  Alex’s cry had not been a shout to let him know where she was, and it had not been a scream of fear; it had been a mournful cry dominated by loss.  If he were lying on the ground dying from a fatal injury, he would expect her last words to him to be filled with that sort of regret.  But he was unharmed and he was not in danger, which left a single, horrid possibility.  With no clue other than that single yelled syllable from Alex, he was certain that something catastrophic was about to happen to her.

“ALEX!!”

Crichton rammed into the bodies in front of him like a linebacker, refusing to let their combined mass stop his forward momentum.  Several of the bodies gave way before his attack, opening up a small gap.  He wedged a shoulder into the opening and drove hard, lifting one alien clean off its feet with the force of the impact.  There was an unpleasant twang in the back of his thigh, testimony of a torn muscle.  He ignored it and continued to fight his way forward, profanity and Alex’s name pouring out of him in time with his efforts.

He was three feet and three seconds too late.

Alex screamed.  It was cut off mid-breath by an unfamiliar booming crack.  Crichton bellowed out her name, praying for some sort of reply from Alex, even if only an agonized whimper, and elbowed his way through the last of the crowd.  The bodies gave way and he tumbled face-first into an open area.

All the fears of the last few seconds were confirmed.  Alex was face down on the ground, her hand grasped around her personal recorder, thumb still depressing the record button.  Crichton scrambled forward on all fours, hoping, praying for a miracle of survival.  Drawing closer, he had to stop, on the verge of puking.  Where Alexandra’s back had been, there was now a smoking hole, charred bone, bits of blasted tissue and spine showing, pieces of her uniform still smoldering.  There wasn’t a chance in the universe that she was still alive.

“NO!!  No, no, no, no!!! Oh, God!  No!”  It was the only word he seemed able to find as he knelt beside her body.  John’s hands hovered just short of her hair, her cheek, the hand holding the recorder, momentarily incapable of crossing the short distance to touch the still warm flesh one last time.  The recorder continued to whirr in the sudden silence, faithfully recording the sounds of the worst moment of his life.  After two false starts, Crichton placed his hand over Alex’s still warm but motionless one, and pressed the ‘Stop’ button.  He turned her hand over and looked at the wedding ring on her finger.  It glowed eerily in the half-light of the planet’s dwarf sun, as though the spirit of its owner now resided in the gold band.  Then someone behind him moved, blocking out the light, and the phantom energy faded away, leaving him crouched over Alex’s dead body staring at nothing more than a metal band around her finger.

“Oh, Alex.  No,” he cried quietly.

His disbelief and grief were cut short.

“John Crichton, you murdered my brother.”  Bialar Crais stepped from behind the line of Peacekeeper soldiers and sneered down at where Crichton hovered over the lifeless body of his wife.  “Now you know the loss I experienced when you attacked him in that white death pod of yours.  It will be the last emotion you feel.”  He motioned to the soldiers and they moved forward as a single unit, weapons at the ready.

Abruptly, Crichton knew this was wrong, all wrong.  It had not happened this way.

Alexandra had not been here.  Crais had not done this.  There had not been any shots fired in the marketplace that day.  He looked at the crowd surging around the clear space, examining the avoided looks and curious stares for some clue that would tell him what was going on.  Thought was short-circuited by anger before he could put together a theory.  Rage swirled from belly to chest like an uncoiling dragon, flowed into his brain, and removed every vestige of rational thought.  The only reality left to him was that Alex never would have been here if it had not been for him, and therefore it was his fault she was dead.  It had been his dream, his theory, his project, his experiment, his fault.  His self-control snapped.

“You fucking bastard!”

Crais was unreachable, safely positioned behind the shoulder-to-shoulder row of armor-clad troopers.  Crichton settled for launching himself at the nearest soldier, a dark-haired woman with impassive grayish-blue eyes who cradled her rifle as though it was part of her body.  Her gaze did not even flicker as he rushed her; she stood her ground without faltering.

Crais’ command came before Crichton managed to cross even half the distance to that intended target for his rage.  “FIRE!”

“NO!”  Crichton spun away from the searing burn that would come from being struck squarely by pulse weapon fire, ricocheted off something soft and yielding, and hit the floor with a breath-stopping impact.  In a panicked flurry of movement, he rolled over twice and scrambled to his knees.  Both hands scrabbled about his waist and thighs for Winona while he searched for the source of the threat to his life.  He came up with nothing more than a fistful of the loose shorts he wore for sleeping.

“John!”  The summons was quiet, spoken at no more than half-volume, but no less fierce for its soft delivery.  “John!”

Crichton sat back on his heels and devoted several microts to getting his breathing restarted.  Once that was accomplished, he raised his head and looked into the same dark eyes that had filled the last moments of his dream.  Aeryn was propped up on one elbow, staring down at him from her spot on the bed.  She started to sit up.  He wanted to stop her.  The best he could manage was a wheezed, “Stay.”  He waved her back and then held up an index finger, asking her to give him a few microts to recover.

It had been less than two solar days since he had rescued Aeryn from the Kalish-run outpost, carried her back to Moya, and laid her drugged and abused body on the bed in her own quarters.  She was healing rapidly, far quicker than any human would have recovered.  The four vicious puncture wounds were already closed -- thanks to what may have been the only non-toxic potion Noranti had ever concocted in her entire life -- and the last of the drugs had cleared her system.  Aeryn was clean, dressed in her own clothes, and looked no worse than if they had been through one of their average, typically disastrous days.  Despite her remarkable progress however, she spent her waking arns hovering on the verge of exhaustion, and all but the smallest movements summoned a quiet exhalation of pain.

His next attempt at speech was closer to normal.  “I’ll be okay in a microt.  Lie down.”

“Was it the clone again?”

Clambering to his feet, John shook his head.  “Nightmare.  Just a very weird-ass, run-of-the-mill nightmare.”  He paused at the side of the bed.  Aeryn was wearing her patented, hair-trigger ‘I hate not being able to take care of myself’ look.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“Waste alcove.”  She flipped the thermal sheet aside and accepted his help getting to her feet.

“Take it slow.  Let me --”

Aeryn’s fingers sank into his shoulder deeply enough that he was sure it would leave bruises, she let out another of the all too frequent airy, over-controlled breaths, and hauled herself up straight.  Her slow sigh of pain was drowned out by his breathy growl of exasperation.

“Damn it, Aeryn, you need to give those muscles time to heal.”

“Shut up.  What they need is to move.  I’m stiff, that’s all.”

“You were skewered like a hunk of beef in a George Foreman rotisserie oven.  Even the great and powerful Aeryn Sun needs more than a single day to heal after that sort of thing.”  Aside from the initial wild journey back to Moya and the first trip from her bed to the waste facilities, every one of his attempts to pick her up and carry her had been firmly rebuffed.  His most aggressive attempt to force her into letting him help had earned him a vigorous elbow in his ribs.  After that, he had given up -- settling for a lot of protective hovering instead, just in case Aeryn’s body decided it was more debilitated than she thought.

“I can do this myself,” Aeryn said through clenched teeth.  “You’re hovering worse than a pair of trelkez parents fussing over a new hatchling.  If you keep this up, you are going to drive me insane.”

Ignoring her protest, Crichton remained beside her, one hand resting lightly on the small of her back, for the duration of the short journey to the cell’s waste alcove.

Aeryn came to a stop at the entrance to the small, secluded area of the cell.  “You are not coming in.  I can handle the rest without your help.”

“I know you can.  I was hoping to get a look at you without your pants on.”

Aeryn turned to face him.  It was not her usual graceful twist of her body -- the one where she looked at him over her shoulder, flipping her hair to one side with a deceptively slow swing of her head.  This was a pivot on the balls of her feet that did not require any movement from the center of her body.  The stiff, abused muscles did not hinder her look of amused disgust though.  “You never give up,” she said after staring into his eyes for two microts.

“So I can come in after all.”

“No.”  She disappeared behind the partition.

“Just a little peek,” John said, wheedling.  He propped a shoulder against the edge of the doorway and did not attempt to look inside.

“Only if you want to get shot.”

“You’re not armed.  I checked,” he called over his shoulder.

“I’ll take care of it when I come out.”

It felt as though he had swallowed a liquid anesthetic that was working its way outward from the pit of his stomach.  Combined with the look of tolerance she had given him before moving into the alcove, the nonsensical banter created a warm, hollow feeling several denches below his breastbone that expanded outward with each additional exchange.  It was a fizzing, disconnected sensation that meandered up his spine, raised the hair along the back of his head, and relaxed tension in his shoulders that he had not been aware of until it was gone.

A low, exasperated whisper made its way out of the alcove.  “Frell.”

“Can you get up?”  John did not wait for the answer.  He was already inside the doorway by the time she replied.  The answer, when it came, sounded as though Aeryn had cornered the universal market on ‘disgusted’.

“No.  I can’t.”

“Comin’ in.  Don’t shoot.”  He rounded the end of the half-height wall.

“Just give me your hand.  That’s all I need,” she said, reaching out with one of hers.

He ignored both the terse command and the outstretched hand.  Before she could object, he sidled into the cramped space alongside her, pulled her upright, twitched her soft, loose-fitting sleep pants into place, and then picked her up in his arms.  For once, she did not try to push herself out of his grasp.  Aeryn looped her arms around his neck to hold herself in place, and rested her head on his shoulder.  John let out the lungful of air he had been holding ready in order to drown out Aeryn’s expected complaints about being carried, and carefully maneuvered out of the waste alcove.

She noticed the extended sigh.  “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.  Nothing at all.”

“What are you thinking?”

What he was thinking was that the scant two motras to the bed was much too short to enjoy having her in his arms, and that he would prefer to hang a left, go out the doors of the cell, and take an all day tour of Moya without ever putting her down.  Instead, he considered her unwillingness to give into her injuries, decided that Aeryn would not want to be reminded of her temporary inability to take care of herself, even if his remark was not serious, and settled for shaking his head.  “Not a whole heck of a lot going on inside my skull right now.”

John waited while she lay down, offering a hand when leverage was needed to compensate for malfunctioning muscles, and then hovered alongside the bed indecisively for several microts.  Aeryn turned on her side in stages, each movement carefully planned and executed before she made the next small adjustment.  Getting comfortable generally took her several dozen microts worth of such cautious adjustments.  Having him beside her only made things more difficult.  “Why don’t I finish the night in my own --”

“No!”

It was the first uncontrolled, purely emotional reaction he had seen since he had first laid Aeryn on her own bed almost two solar days ago, and she had asked “Is this real?”

John dropped to one knee beside the bed and gently brushed an errant strand of hair away from her face.  “Aeryn, you’re hurting even when you’re lying down.  You can try to hide it, but even these deficient blue eyes can see that.  You’ll sleep better and heal faster if you have more room.”

“No,” she repeated more quietly.  Aeryn fought an extended internal battle with herself before she continued.  “Sometimes … sometimes I wake up in the dark, and I’m not certain where I am.  It seems real, but I’m not sure I’m truly here aboard Moya.  Then I hear you breathing --”

“Snoring,” he said, finally admitting to something that he had continued to deny no matter how many times she accused him of it.

She took full advantage of his confession.  “Then I hear what sounds like a Command Carrier at emergency thrust beside me, and your elbow digs into my ribs and your legs are in the way, and I’m so annoyed at you that I know I must be aboard Moya after all.”  She finished with another of the quiet, barely audible sighs that normally meant she was in pain.  This time it seemed to be connected to the small, glistening tide that was quivering along her lower eyelids, threatening to spill down her cheeks.

There was no way to argue with that quiet, tremulously delivered admission of mid-night fears.  John leaned down with the intention of kissing her on the forehead, meaning to deliver assurance rather than passion.  The hand that caught him behind the neck and redirected his focus somewhere else put an end to anything that innocent.  The heady touch and smell of Aeryn Sun -- her soft lips against his, strong fingers rubbing gently against the base of his skull, her second hand arriving to brush along the line of his jaw, and her breath moving like a half-remembered dream along his cheek -- divorced him from the ability to deny her whatever she asked.

He broke away, forced to pull hard against her grip in order to end the kiss.  “You win,” he said.

“As if there was ever any question.”  She gave him the full-wattage Aeryn Sun smile:  the one that had the power to weaken his knees and upset the rhythm of his heart.

“Took advantage of my hormones.”  He slid in under the covers, moving slowly in order to give her time to adjust.  They shuffled about for a while in a careful migration, seeking mutually comfortable positions in a limited amount of space.  “Look,” John said after several futile attempts, “stop worrying about me.  Just do whatever is going to make you most comfortable.  I’ll let you know if I can’t sleep.  Scout’s honor.”

Aeryn pushed herself up on one elbow to look at him.  “You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

She stared at him for another three microts, using the time to come to a decision.  Then she snared one of the smaller cushions from the head of the bed and set about making herself comfortable.  Microts later, Aeryn was tucked in alongside and on top of him, her body enveloping his.  The soft hummock of the cushion was tucked between his hip and her stomach where she could curl aching, half-healed abdominal muscles around it, seeking and finding some relief from the strain of holding them still.  Once the adjustments and motion came to a stop, John peered down his nose at Aeryn.  She had her head on his shoulder, her arm looped behind his shoulder to hold them together, using him like a body pillow.  And for the first time in two solar days, she looked as though she no longer hurt inside.

“Is this all right?” she asked.

If Aeryn was using his body to compensate for torture-weakened muscles, then he was getting something nearly as critical out of the arrangement.  One of her knees was nudging at the inside of his thigh, her upper leg lying warm and unbothersome across his hip and groin, and the soft cushioning of her breasts pressing against his ribs was distracting him to the point that he could barely form an answer.  There was not the slightest inkling of arousal; Aeryn was too tired and damaged for that sort of reaction to take over.  But he was pinned to the bed by a comforting weight that he had yearned after for too long, and it would take an attack by an entire squadron of sheyang ships before he would consider asking her to move.  He was in heaven.

“You’re uncomfortable,” Aeryn said.

John realized he had never answered her question.  He had wandered off to a muzzy sort of half-waking floating place where there was little left in his universe other than the feel of Aeryn lying against and on top of him.  “No!  I’m perfect.  Abso-frelling-lutely perfect.”

Aeryn ran her hand across his chest, idly tracing aimless patterns on his skin for several microts.  When she spoke, it was the sort of quiet mumble that preceded sleep.  “What was your nightmare about?”

“Nothing particular.  Just a very weird version of how my first day here didn’t happen.”

“Scorpius?”

“No.  Crais.  But I dreamed I had a wife who had come with me.  Crais killed her out of revenge for his brother and then ordered his men to shoot me.”

“Mmmm,” Aeryn hummed into his chest.  “Caroline?”

Aeryn did not seem bothered that he had been dreaming about someone other than her.  John could not tell if that was because she was secure in the knowledge that he loved her, or because she was nine-tenths asleep.

“Alexandra.  I probably haven’t told you about her.”  There was no response from Aeryn.  He decided that the lack of reaction was due to sleep, not peace of mind.

Nearly twenty microts passed before she mumbled her next question.  “Was it her getting killed that made it a nightmare?  Losing your wife?”

John looked down at her.  Although drowsy, the grayish-blue eyes were watching him carefully in the muted light of nighttime aboard Moya.  John caught a lock of her hair in his fingers and brushed it lightly across his lips.  It was soft, smelled sweet and clean, and was warm from lying against his skin.  “Losing the woman I love was the most horrifying moment of my entire life, and it had absolutely nothing to do with Alex.”

She smiled at him and a moment later fell asleep.  The exhaustion she refused to acknowledge claimed her in a matter of microts.  One instant she was awake; then her eyelids closed in the first half of a blink and simply never reopened.

John carefully snared the thermal sheet and pulled it into place, then lay awake for over an arn, simply enjoying the warm pressure of her body against his and reflecting on what it had taken to arrive at this moment:  cycles of waiting, hoping, trying to break through Aeryn’s thick armor, followed by another cycle of first physical separation, then emotional, and then another agonizing parting.  There had been one fleeting moment when he had her back, so brief that they had not been able to steal more than a few brief microts to be together, and then he had almost lost her forever.  He did not need or want exclamations of desire or faithfulness from Aeryn.  He wanted the quiet moments like this when he was allowed to make her part of his heart and soul.  It was her gusting breath tickling his chest and the way the thick sheets of dark hair spread out across his arm and shoulder that relegated the past two miserable cycles to the status of ‘bad dream’.  She was here, her elbow was digging uncomfortably into his ribs, and even after he fell asleep, his subconscious would rest easy in the knowledge that Aeryn Sun was alive and back aboard Moya.

It was just as he was starting to doze off that she stirred, took a deeper breath, and the arm around his shoulder clutched at him more tightly.  “Sssshhh,” he breathed out, “you’re on Moya.  It’s real.”

She did not speak.  Aeryn turned her head so her forehead rested against his chest, and stayed that way for a while, her body transmitting tiny trembling quivers.  Even if he had been absolutely certain of the source of those vibrations, which he was not, he never would have told her that he suspected she was crying.  In time, the trembling stopped, her breathing slowed and eased, and she nestled her head against his shoulder where it had been earlier.  John continued to stroke her back until he felt her body slump more heavily against his chest, signaling that she had gone back to sleep.  Only then, when he was sure that Aeryn was resting peacefully, did he close his eyes and let himself slide away.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

CHAPTER 2

Mid-morning aboard Moya found Crichton in one of the maintenance bays rummaging through several bins and various cargo containers filled with both surplus and discarded circuitry.  Chiana was perched on the corner of a workbench, chin propped on one fist, watching the disorder expand outward in an inexorable flood.  Bits of metal, electronic components, wiring, excess conduit material, and dozens of other objects were tossed aside, skittering and ricocheting further across the maintenance bay with each flick of his wrist.

“What the frell are you looking for now?  Isn’t all that dren enough?”  Chiana waved her free hand toward the assortment of parts strewn across the workbench surface.

More intent on his quest than on holding a conversation, Crichton left her question hanging unanswered.  With a triumphant yelp, he lunged headfirst into the bin, nearly turning upside down in the process.  Emerging with a small circuit chip clutched securely in his fingers, he then knelt down to talk to a DRD.  “See this?  I need one just like this only with twice the number of sensor processing circuits.  And it’s got to work.  Not burned out like this one.”  He waved the bit of charred electronics back and forth in front of the drone several times, setting the eyestalks to waving, then placed it in the extended pincer claw.  “Go!  Find Timmy, Lassie.”

Somehow managing to create an aura of grave introspection with little more than a pair of flexible eyestalks and a single limb, the DRD considered the chip.  After several microts, it chirruped once, dropped the damaged circuit on the floor, spun in a circle twice, and then zipped out of the maintenance bay at maximum velocity.

“What do you need with a sensor processor?”  Chiana picked up a round globe that had been sitting on an otherwise abandoned corner of the workbench and began tossing it idly from hand to hand.

Crichton moved fast.  He crossed the space between them in three long strides, snared it out of mid-air, and held it under her nose.  “Radioactive material, chica.  If you drop the shiny ball on the floor, it will be very, very bad.  Johnny will die of radiation poisoning and then Aeryn will shoot Pip, and everyone will be very sad.  Weeping, wailing, crying.”  Reverting to a more normal tone of voice, and spacing out his words for emphasis, he finished with, “Do not juggle the plutonium, Chi.”

He placed the globe back in the holder he had made to keep it from rolling off the workbench, and then answered her question.  “Have you ever heard of a dead-man switch?”

“Sure.  That’s like swapping one corpse for another, right?”  She slid off the workbench and followed Crichton to the far side of the maintenance bay.

With his head and shoulders deep inside a mostly empty container of parts, his response to the skewed interpretation was transformed into a booming, macabre laugh.  He straightened up with another fragment of equipment in his hand, examined it, and tossed it to one side.  “Good try, Chi, but not quite.  This is going to be my safeguard when we go waltzing into --”

Pilot’s voice interrupted before he could finish his explanation.  “Commander Crichton.”

“Yeah, Pilot.  What’s up?”

“Please proceed to Command.  There is something there that requires your attention.”

“Like what?”  John strode back to the work bench where he carefully latched the globe containing the plutonium into its holder, ensuring that even the most violent contortions by Moya could not rock it loose.

“I believe it would be best if you simply proceed to Command.  Explaining would be far too complicated.”  With that, the comms channel went silent.

Sighing, Crichton surveyed the mess he had made, then waggled a finger in the direction of several DRDs loitering in a corner.  “Don’t clean this up.  If you do, I’ll have to start searching through all this dren all over again.  Understand?”  He received a random collection of blinks, chirrups, and squeaks from the squad of drones.  “I shouldn’t be gone long.  An arn or two at most maybe.”  He glanced at Chiana.  “Coming or staying?” he asked.

She bounded toward him through the field of scattered parts, aiming for clear areas of the floor and missing almost every one of the infrequent bare spots.  The scrunching impact of her boots had no visible influence on the route she chose or the care she took with her aim.  Metal, ceramic, glass, and biomechanoid materials screeched, snapped, clattered, and shattered beneath her feet.  Every DRD eyestalk in the maintenance bay followed her hopping, erratic progress in perfect unison.  The drones themselves refrained from any of their usual robotic commentary concerning the stomping devastation.

Chiana finished her journey with one last huge gangling leap, finally coming to rest beside Crichton.  “Neither.  I got better things to do than sit around in Command listening to Pilot and you exchange techno-babble, and there’s nothing going on here.  Maybe I’ll go see about plotting a course that would take me and a transport pod away from scarran space.”

“Techno-babble?” Crichton echoed.  “That is not techno-babble.  That is the sound of two highly learned scientists comparing factual information in the pursuit of greater knowledge.”  After receiving one of the nebari’s brief, wild laughs for an answer -- one that seemed to imply that she did not believe his explanation -- he switched subjects.  “You are not taking one of the pods.  We’ve offered to drop you off somewhere if you don’t want to come with us to Katratzi, but you are not taking any of the transport with you.  We may need every one of the ships before this is over.”

“I’ll take your wreck then,” she suggested.  “That’s not exactly a space craft.”

He ignored the insult.  “Over my dead body.  Stay away from the module or I’ll program the DRDs to shoot you.”  He jabbed an index finger at her for emphasis, stopping half a dench from the tip of her nose.  To the tune of another wild, bubbling laugh, Chiana snapped at it, threatening to bite him.  The finger was snatched away unscathed, and Crichton scowled at her.  “Don’t go getting crazy on me, Chiana.  There’s enough craziness all around us without you joining in.”

She turned her back on him and wandered a few steps to one side, subdued by his warning.  “Yeah.  Whatever.  Who’s the crazy one though, Crichton?  Me for wanting to get away, or you for walking straight into the hands of the scarrans?”

“That’s what the big kaboom in the small package is for, Pip.”  He followed her and pulled her into an awkward, one-armed hug with her head tucked under his chin.  “You’re going to be okay, Chiana.  They’re not interested in you.  They’ll be concentrating on me, and the rest of you will be able to move around and get things done.”

After giving her one more squeeze, he released her and jogged out of the maintenance bay, headed for Command and Pilot’s mysterious summons.

She watched him leave, no happier than before the reassurances.  “But it’s not me I’m freakin’ about, Crichton,” she said to the empty maintenance bay.  Chiana examined the mess spread across the floor one more time, grinned impishly at the trail of smashed parts that marked her earlier journey through the detritus, and then left the chamber as well, moving more slowly than Crichton but also headed for Command.

* * * * *

John reached Command five microts behind Aeryn.  She was about to step through the doorway when he made the turn at the junction of the corridors.  Pausing half way through the ovoid door opening, she waited for him, watching him approach with a half-smile in place.  He slowed to a lazy stroll, giving himself an extra few microts to look at her.  Aeryn showed no sign of what she had been through while in the custody of the scarrans.  Standing with one knee bent, a hand resting casually on the edge of the doorway, head tilted slightly to one side so that her hair fell thick and glossy over one shoulder, she looked healthy, energetic, and happy.

And most of it was a façade.

It was not so much an act as it was a thin veneer over the more truthful reality.  Even after a good night’s sleep, she was still hovering on the thin edge of physical exhaustion, and by refusing to give in to her body’s needs she was making things worse.  Their morning had been a repeat of what had occurred in the middle of the night.  Aeryn had insisted that she could take a shower and get dressed on her own, and had rebuffed every one of his demands that she allow him to help her.  As with her brief visit to the waste alcove arns earlier, she had made it through less than half of the shower before her body had given out and she had been forced to ask him for help.  When he stepped around the shower partition to join her, he had been greeted by the repressed Peacekeeper officer he had met on his first day aboard Moya.  Her answers to his occasional comments had been monosyllabic and terse, her movements jerky with poorly contained anger, and his attempts to joke her into a better mood had only managed to make her more volatile.  The bathing had been finished quickly and without any of the sudsy familiarity he had been hoping for when she had first called to him.

“I’m sorry,” she had whispered half an arn later, and had run her fingers through his damp hair.

He had been kneeling at her feet, fastening the lowest buckles on her boots while she took care of the more easily reached upper ones, and had looked up in surprise.  “Sorry for what?” he had asked.

Aeryn had waved a hand in the direction of the shower.  “That.  It’s just that I --”

“You hate not being able to take care of yourself,” he had finished for her.  “Aeryn, face it.  You’re a control freak, and being forced to depend on other people is driving you a little bit nuts.  It will stop as soon as you’re back to running on all cylinders.  And that,” he said while he secured the last buckle and got to his feet, “will happen sooner if you stop pushing yourself.”

“You always understand,” she had said softly.  “It’s part of what I love about you.  I usually don’t have a clue why you do things, but you always seem to know why I’m acting the way I am, sometimes before I figure it out.”

The quietly voiced comment had been more than sufficient compensation for putting up with her moodiness.  What she had said was not true; Aeryn’s motivation for doing certain things often baffled him beyond any hope of comprehension.  But he had accepted the statement for the apology that it was, and had finished getting dressed feeling more lighthearted than he could remember feeling over most of the preceding four cycles.

“Hey,” Aeryn greeted him as he slowed to a stop at the entrance to Command.

“Hey.  You look good enough to eat.”

She gave him her often-seen ‘humans are odd’ look.  “I hope that’s just another of your peculiar sayings and not something I should take literally.”

“Maybe.  Maybe not.”  He ran a hand down her back, combining a caress with a small nudge toward Command.  “Any idea what Pilot’s emergency is?”

“He didn’t comm me.  I overheard him talking to you, and came up to see what was going on.”

They walked into Command together, John trailing half a step behind Aeryn.  Several of the crew had already gathered there, and were standing in a small cluster by the strategy table.  Without exception, they were all motionless and were staring out the forward view portal without any of the usual bickering commentary.  D’Argo was frozen with one fist propped on his hip, the fingertips of the other hand resting on the top of the table as though to steady himself; Rygel’s throne sled was slowly drifting to the right, suggesting that its owner was not aware that he was in motion; and even Sikozu stood without speaking.

“What’s the big … Holy light show, Batman!” Crichton burst out.  “Pilot?  What the frell is that?”

“That question is precisely why Moya and I have requested that you come to Command,” Pilot’s voice answered over the comms.  “There is no record of such an occurrence in any of Moya’s datastores.  We hoped that you might recognize this anomaly.”

From side to side and top to bottom of the screen, the entire expanse of space visible through the forward portal was filled with a shimmering, rapidly fluctuating energy disturbance.  Light streamed outward from a central, poorly defined area that was constantly undulating and changing shape.  Every color in the spectrum shattered outward into space:  pulsing, merging, shifting in complex sheets and spikes for thousands of metras in every direction.

Crichton shielded his eyes with one hand and tried to spot the source of the disturbance.  Each time he thought he had located the center it slid away from his gaze as if by magic.  It did not move; it simply refused to be seen.  It was as though the coruscating light was coming from ‘somewhere else’ -- a place that human eyes were not designed to perceive.  The central area was not black, and it was not a void of matter and energy.  As far as he could make out with just his eyes, it simply was ‘not there’.

“What the frell?” he said in a distracted mumble.  He looked around at the more familiar environs of Command, blinked several times in response to the abrupt shift from the unknown to the pleasant reality of his space-faring home, and felt as though he had taken several steps back from the edge of a cliff.  The adjustment was abrupt, the impact physical.  He staggered two steps to one side.  “Whoa.  That was wild.”

“Do you recognize this disturbance?” Pilot asked.

“No, I don’t.  But if it suddenly grows eyes and a mouth and introduces itself as Nagilum, then I want you and Moya to turn tail and run like hell, Pilot.”

Chiana bounded into Command and skidded to a stop.  “What the frell is that?”

D’Argo straightened up and shook himself vigorously, as though he too had been entranced by the sight and had just found his way back, guided by Chiana’s high-pitched outburst.  The fast, wild flurry of tanktas and braids looked as much like a shaggy dog shaking water out of its fur as it did like a temporarily stunned luxan returning to life.  Turning to look behind him, he asked, “Was that one of your usual senseless jokes, John?”

Crichton did not bother to explain the source of his comment.  Aside from the fact that it was a waste of time -- since every one of his attempts to describe Star Trek and the show’s imaginary aliens had resulted in uproarious laughter -- he was already at one of the consoles, calling up the stream of data being collected by Moya’s sensors.  “Pilot, how far away is that … that” -- he struggled to find a word for the spatial disturbance -- “thing?  Do we need to back off?”

“We have already reversed course several thousand metras.  We are now at the extreme limit of Moya’s short-range sensors.  If we retreat any further, it will require that I switch to long-range sensors.  That will limit both the amount and quality of that data that can be collected.  And we need data if we are to proceed.”

“What is it, John?” D’Argo asked.

Crichton was hunched over the console, leaning on his forearms, staring at whatever information was provided there.  Every few microts he would look up at the forward view portal, apparently comparing the visual effects to the less awe-inspiring collection of sensor readings, and then he would return to staring at the displays in front of him.  His answer, when it came, sounded as though he was distracted to the point of not being able to talk.  “It’s a great big galaxy-sized light show.”

“Thank you so much for that profound insight,” D’Argo said.  His voice dropped to a rumbling bass laced with sarcasm.  He made a pinching motion with his thumb and forefinger, indicating a miniscule distance, and asked, “Could you be just a little more precise?”

“That’s … not a wormhole,” Aeryn said tentatively into the ensuing silence.

John agreed.  “Definitely not.  None of the energy signatures resemble a wormhole, although I’ll admit that the visual manifestation has some similarities.  But whatever that thing is, it’s putting out a massive energy signature.  I wonder …”  His voice trailed off into silence.

“Wonder what?” several voices said in synchronized curiosity.

“I was thinking for a microt that it might be the butt end of a black hole that has punched through from another dimension, but no one has ever proved that singularities dump their energy in that manner, or even come up with the math for it.  And in either case, this thing’s not big enough for that to be the answer.”

“Then what is it?” asked Chiana.

“Who the frell cares?” Rygel said.  “This is not a scientific mission.  Pilot, go around the … whatever it is.”

“Moya is not inclined to move forward until we are able to determine the source of the anomaly, and the risks involved in drawing closer to it,” Pilot said.  “She is very concerned that it might envelope her.  She has informed me that she will not risk going near any spatial phenomenon related to a wormhole ever again.”

“So swing out to one side and put a galaxy worth of space between us and it,” Crichton said.  “Tell Moya to give this sucker a wide berth and take a detour.”

For the first time since the discussion had begun, Pilot’s image appeared in the clamshell.  He looked dejected as he explained, “She refuses.  In the arns since her long-range sensors first detected the energy signature, it has disappeared completely and then reformed elsewhere several times.  In one instance, its position changed from a location well clear of Moya’s intended route of travel to directly in her path.  She refuses to move forward until the source and nature of the phenomenon is determined and its movements can be predicted.”

Aeryn moved closer to the forward view portal to where she could watch the coruscating colors without anyone standing between her and the scenery.  “That could take dozens of solar days worth of study, Pilot,” she said.  “We don’t have that sort of time to spare.  What do you suggest we do?”

“An assessment can be made more quickly if we have more data to examine.  Moya and I request that someone, preferably Commander Crichton, take one of the smaller ships and circuit the anomaly in order to obtain a variety of sensor readings that cannot be obtained from this distance and relative position to the object.”

“No!” several voices yelled at once.

“That’s asking for trouble,” D’Argo said.

Aeryn looked at the avid curiosity on Crichton’s face, watched the fast increase in interest and excitement, and skipped all the less drastic methods of coercion for the most direct one.  She threatened him.  Dropping her right hand to the butt of her pulse pistol for emphasis, and careful to keep any hint of humor out of her voice, she said, “I will shoot you in the leg before I let you go out there.”

Crichton’s enthusiasm diminished but did not vanish entirely.  Keeping the scenery in sight out of the corner of his eye, he made a noncommittal sideways movement with his head.  “All right, then come up with a Plan B.  You tell me how to figure out what that thing is so Moya will take a detour.”

Chiana said, “Turn back.  Scorpius isn’t worth it.  This is a sign that we shouldn’t go through with the plan.”

Sikozu opened her mouth to object.  Crichton cut in before she managed to get a single sound out.  “What about wormholes, Pip?  You ready to see the scarrans trompin’ through the galaxy with no way for anyone to stop them?”  When no one answered him, John turned toward Aeryn.  “I’m not going to fly into it.  I can run out there in the module, grab a few readings that Moya can’t come up with from this far away, and then scamper back on board before you have time to charge a pulse rifle to shoot me in the leg.”

“No,” she said firmly.  “And certainly not in that heap of junk of yours.”

“Junk?” John protested in a falsetto screech.  “Why does everyone keep calling my module a piece of dren?  The white guppy is not junk.  A jalopy maybe, but not junk.”

Rygel interrupted.  “I suggest you let him do it.”  The hynerian waited until all eyes were on him before continuing.  “Crichton goes out there, Crichton gets sucked into whatever that is,” he said, waving a dismissive, languid hand in the direction of the ongoing light show, “and wherever he winds up, it will probably be far enough away that the wormhole knowledge can’t be accessed by anyone.  No one gets their hands on wormholes, we don’t have to go to this Get-Trotsie place where Scorpius is being held, and we live happily ever after.  I vote in favor of letting Crichton go out there.”

“And what about Scorpius?” Sikozu said.  “If we don’t rescue him, he will die at the hands of the scarrans.  We must continue to Katratzi, and we cannot be delayed.”

Rygel’s smile made a subtle shift from a basic, self-serving grin to a far more avaricious leer.  “As I just said, we live happily ever after.  If there is any justice in this universe, his death at the hands of the scarrans will be slow and painful.”

From there the debate descended into a shouting, multilingual squabble, every person defending their own interests, frequently changing their preferred course of action depending on how the latest suggestion would affect the outcome.  Crichton stepped out of the uproar and went to stand next to Aeryn, leaving the remainder of the crew to their various battles.

“Gotta go out there,” he said quietly.  “Moya’s not going to move forward or back unless someone does, and I’m the logical choice.”

Aeryn shook her head.  “Any one of us can go.  You agreed that it is not a wormhole.  All we have to do is get some readings and bring them back so Pilot can analyze them.”

“I’m not letting you do it.  Who do you suggest we send?”

The pair watched their crewmates for several microts.  Aeryn did not say anything.  After several more microts without an answer from her, John said, “Whoever goes out there has to at least know what the data indicates so they know whether they’re picking up anything meaningful.”  He paused, giving her a chance to respond before adding, “We could send Sputnik.”

“She can’t be trusted.  If it was the only way to rescue Scorpius, she wouldn’t hesitate to alter the data.”  Aeryn sighed, turned her head to look at him, and admitted defeat.  “All right, but I go with you.”

“NO!”  The single word was out of his mouth before he could stop himself, and he knew it was a mistake even as he blurted it.

Aeryn pounced.  “Why not?  If it’s not dangerous for you, then why don’t you want me to come with you?”

“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” John chanted.  The slip of a single word had left him without a defense, and there was no doubt in his mind that if he ever managed to get off Moya to survey the energy disturbance, that Aeryn was going to be sitting alongside him.  It was his turn to sigh in resignation.  “Me and my big frelling mouth.”

“Which ship do we take?” Aeryn asked.

“The module.”

“Aside from the piece of dren argument, there aren’t enough sensors in that archaic hunk of --”  John’s glare stopped her from adding more abuse to the description.  “We can take the Prowler.”

“We take the module and we take a DRD with us.  It has all the circuitry Moya and Pilot need to record a full range of readings, and I can tell it what to scan for.”

“We take the Prowler,” she said, glaring at him.

“Absolutely not.  That thing,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the forward view portal, “is not a wormhole, but it is putting out a couple dozen types of energy that go right across the full range of possibilities, Aeryn.  And in the wrong energy fields, Prowlers turn living flesh into red goo.  We are not taking the hotrod.  I will sit here until we are both old and gray before I let you out there in the Prowler.  And before you say it, if you put a transport pod into the same sort of energy, they melt, so we’re not taking a pod either.”

“Lo’la,” she suggested.

“D’Argo put it into a diagnostic check to make sure the shields and the cloaking equipment are all at full capacity.  It’s not going to do anything but sit and hiccup for another six arns.”

Aeryn frowned and wandered several steps away from him.  She stopped with her back to him, her head turned to one side so she could watch the shimmering display floating tens of thousands of motras in front of the motionless leviathan.  John glanced toward the strategy table, using the intermission to see how the battle there was faring.  Instead of the expected verbal chaos, he discovered that he and Aeryn had picked up an audience.

D’Argo was standing with his arms folded, satisfaction clearly reflected in both his facial expression and his body language.  John could not decide whether this was a result of the luxan’s pleasure that someone else other than him would be making the short trip to survey the anomaly, or if it was because D’Argo enjoyed watching his two friends bicker.  Chiana was perched on a seat beside the warrior’s right hip, curled into what Crichton would have said was an anatomically impossible position had he not seen it for himself.  She had her head cocked to one side and looked as though she was hovering permanently on the verge of laughing.  Sikozu and Rygel were arranged to either side of their other two crewmates -- one standing, the other hovering -- each with their own distinctive raised-eyebrow look of self-interest firmly in place.  Noranti was there as well.  The traskan had joined the group in Command at some point, her arrival gone unnoticed in the midst of his sparring with Aeryn.  The old woman was sitting on the table, feet propped on one of the seats, watching the discussion with a bright-eyed smile of avid fascination that Crichton had last seen on the faces of the spectators at a demolition derby.

John turned away from that hopeful expectation of an imminent car wreck to see what was happening on his own personal battlefront.

Aeryn had finished her deliberations.  “I don’t like it,” she hissed in a whisper.

“Oh, do speak up.  No secrets among friends,” Noranti encouraged from the sidelines.

John turned his back on the gallery and took a step to one side so Aeryn was blocked from their view as well.  He lowered his voice to a barely audible rumble.  “Options?”

“None, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.  It seems like every time you go out in” -- she put in a pause for emphasis -- “your module, something unexpected happens.”

“Is there any chance of me getting off Moya without you coming along?”

“No,” she said flatly.  Her tone of voice left no room for argument.

“Then you’ll be there to keep me in line.  We go out, we grab some readings, and we come back.  That’s it.”  He spread his hands, inviting a rebuttal.

She turned her head from one side to the other several times in a slow-motion headshake before reaching a decision.  “Pilot?  Send a DRD equipped with a full range of sensor circuits to the hangar bay, please.  Crichton and I will take his ship out and check on that disturbance.”

John headed for the door.  “Hot damn!  Goin’ for a drive in my sports car with my girlfriend!”  Halfway across Command, he spun around and jogged backwards for several steps, pointing a finger in Aeryn’s direction.  “Dress warm!  That thing was made to skip through the atmosphere, which means it sheds heat instead of retaining it.  Bundle up.”

“This is supposed to be a short trip!” she yelled after him.  But John had turned around again, and had already disappeared from sight at a run.  “Frell.  He’s too excited over this.”

“Want me to go with him instead?” Chiana asked.  There was a bright-eyed look of mischief about her that said she did not have sensor readings, data inputs, or spatial anomalies on her mind.

Aeryn ignored the offer.  She turned toward D’Argo.  “Keep the comms open, and be ready for anything.  If things start to go to dren, and he’s fixated on the science, you may have to drag us back aboard by force with the docking web.”

“I’ll be ready,” he said, and raised a hand in an awkward half-wave, half-salute.  “I won’t leave Command until you’re safely back aboard Moya.”

* * * * *

In the time it took Aeryn to go to her quarters and then make the trek to the hangar bay, John had stopped by his own quarters to retrieve several additional layers of clothing, and had finished the preflight check of the Farscape module.  Taking advantage of his head start and faster progress through the tiers, he snared two spare fuel cells from the recharging rack and, after listening intently for several microts to make sure he could not hear Aeryn’s footstep coming toward the hangar bay, tucked them out of sight under the pilot’s seat.  He had not been lying when he assured her that it would be a short, trouble-free flight, but if Aeryn was coming with him, he was not going to take even the smallest chance of once again getting stranded in space at the controls of a powerless spacecraft.  He considered the reserves provided by a single biomechanoid fuel cell, did some hasty calculations, and added a third spare.

“I’m ready,” Aeryn said beside him.

Startled, he straightened up without thinking and bashed his head against the underside of the raised canopy.  Rubbing the sore spot on his scalp and mentally cursing himself for not hearing her approach, he hopped down from his perch.  “Damn.  Didn’t hear you coming.”  He glanced at his hand to make sure he was not bleeding then looked up at Aeryn.

The results had been worth the short wait.  She had changed into a tight-fitting, long-sleeved shirt, and had chosen the same collection of layers he had selected.  Both wore their usual vests, followed by a short-waisted jacket, topped off by their long overcoats.  Aeryn carried a pair of leather gloves in one hand, and had a pulse rifle tucked under her other elbow.  Despite the bulky layers, she still managed to look slender and impossibly shapely.  The feminine curves refused to be cloaked by anything so mundane as leather and fabric.  He found the subtle hints more arousing than the idea of the bold, naked reality that lay underneath, and his imagination shifted into high gear.  John fought a short battle to get his hormones under control, and finally managed to lift his stare as far as her face.

Aeryn had her head tilted a few degrees to one side, and was watching him with all the intensity that he had seen when the biology majors at MIT were watching their lab rats.  He scrambled to find something to say.  “Uhm … You don’t really need a pulse rifle, Aeryn.  This is a science mission, remember?”

“This is you and me going somewhere, remember?”  She stepped up onto the small cargo container he had been using to reach the cockpit, and stowed the rifle.  “Do you want me to get in first?”

John looked at the smooth, rounded fall of her overcoat where it curved over her buttocks, and allowed his earthier desires to take control from unimpassioned logic.  “I’ll get in first.  You sit up front with me.”

Still perched on the cargo container, she peered under her arm at him.  “There isn’t enough room for both of us, John.”

He started to grasp her around the waist to lift her down, and then remembered the puncture wounds.  Recoiling before he made contact, he put out a hand instead and merely gave her something to help with her balance while she made the short descent on her own.  “I’ll move the seat back and you can sit in my lap.  We fit like that once before.”

“That was just sitting in the hangar, not flying.”

“I’ll let you handle my controls,” he said, wheedling.

The invitation backfired.  Aeryn’s expression shifted from tolerance to the impassive Peacekeeper stare that the last cycle’s events had taught him to avoid at all costs.  “This is business, John.  We pay attention, we don’t go off on one of your wild goof chases, and if either D’Argo or Pilot tells us we need to return to Moya, we do not argue or delay.  We turn around and dock.”

Crichton decided that correcting her English would not be a good choice in light of the borderline anger in her voice.  “Out and back,” he said, trying to sound agreeable.  “But you know there isn’t enough room in the rumble seat.  You have to scrunch up your knees to fit in there.  It’ll hurt.”

Aeryn stepped up on the cargo container to examine her options.  Finally, she stepped awkwardly over the side of the module, and stood hunched over in the front of the cockpit, leaving plenty of space for John to slide into his seat behind her.  He scooped up the DRD that had been waiting patiently beside his feet, handed the little robot to Aeryn, and then made the transition into the module in one vaulting leap.  He hit the hard cushioning of the seat with a leather-against-leather ‘fwhump’, and then slid his feet more cautiously past Aeryn’s.  She checked behind her to make sure he was ready, and folded herself into his lap.

“Power up,” he ordered.

His hands were busy adjusting and securing the safety harness.  After one futile attempt to get it around both of their bodies, he shortened it and belted just himself in.  He paused for a moment before fastening the webbing straps into the central buckle, considering the possibility of a crash and what it would do to Aeryn if she was not restrained.  But the rear seat was a crudely fashioned affair that he had added the first time he needed to take another person for a ride in the module, and the harness was not fastened into anything substantial.  It was bolted to the seat itself, instead of being properly secured to the module’s frame.  John decided that if they were faced with the prospect of an uncontrolled landing, he would let Aeryn land the module while he focused all of his strength and attention on the sole task of hanging on to her.

Aeryn flicked the last of the toggle switches connected to the power supply.  “Power on,” she said, bringing his attention back to the here and now, instead of on an imagined disaster.

“Canopy closed and sealed.”

“Closed.”  It lowered into place and there was a hissing sigh as the powered latches clamped it securely into place.  “And sealed,” Aeryn said.

They ran the rest of the checklist in easy partnership, finished getting settled and as comfortable as possible in the cramped confines of the cockpit, and then John reached around her to take the controls and they were out the hangar door and flying free, headed for the unexplained phenomenon.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

CHAPTER 3

Once clear of Moya’s exterior inertial fields, the module accelerated smoothly to a velocity just short of Hetch One.  Under Crichton’s relaxed guidance, its course scribed a gradually widening arc that shifted the stubby nose away from the drifting leviathan and toward the rippling ocean of energy without any fast turns or abrupt changes in course.  It was not until he had the thrust stabilized and the forward windshield lined up on the center of the phenomenon that John gave Aeryn a small, full-bodied nudge, and asked, “Left to right, or right to left?” referring to which direction they should take to orbit the anomaly.

“You always pull harder to the left when you’re banking.  Go … Frell!”

“What frell?”  Crichton did not try to make a joke out her exclamation.  There had been no humor or teasing in Aeryn’s voice.  What he had detected was a mild degree of alarm and a far larger supply of aggravation.  In order to peer around her without straining his neck, he resorted to resting his chin on her shoulder.  Aeryn made one half-hearted irritable shrug and then allowed him to leave it there without any further show that it might be bothering her.  It seemed to be more of a reflex than any true desire to get him to give her more space, which was a good thing, John reflected, since there was little room to spare in the cockpit.  His arms were beneath hers in order to reach the controls, his elbows resting very comfortably either side of her body just beneath her ribs.

“What’s wrong?” he said, referring to her outburst.

She made a frustrated gesture toward the front of the module with both hands.  Although the problem was immediately apparent, she explained anyway.  “I was looking right at it, and it just disappeared!  It’s gone.”

“No way.  Maybe it just isn’t visible because we’ve changed angles, kind of like when we can’t see a wormhole even though it’s there.”  He leaned past her and rapped his knuckles against the DRD perched on the top of the instrument panel.  “Which way do we go, Vespucci?  Point at it.”  Accompanied by a robotic soundtrack consisting of nonstop squeals and chirps, the eyestalks waggled wildly for several microts, pointing in no specific direction at all.  The message, for all its lack of decipherable signals, was clear.

Aeryn turned to a different source for help.  “Pilot?  Is the energy disturbance still there?”

“No, Aeryn.  It has disappeared again.”

“Is Moya willing to continue toward Katratzi now?” she asked.

“She is not.  Although she will not explain her reasoning to me, Moya is convinced that if she moves forward the irregularity will reappear directly in her path.  I cannot persuade her to move either forward or back.”

“Gotta love a headstrong female,” John murmured.  He leaned against Aeryn’s back and kissed the side of her neck.

Aeryn raised her shoulder, forcing him to retreat.  “Keep that up and you will find yourself walking back to Moya.”

“You mean this?”  He pulled her hair to one side and shifted his attention to the back of her neck where it would be more difficult for her to push him away.  Careful of her midsection, he used his free hand to pull her further into his lap and then hugged her tightly.

“I’m referring to the dren about being headstrong.”  She spoke more loudly in the direction of the comms equipment.  “Pilot?  What is the longest interval you have recorded between the energy signature disappearing and reappearing?”

“Two and a half arns.  The shortest absence was eight hundred microts.”

John slid an arm under Aeryn, fumbling awkwardly for several microts before he managed to thread his hand under her second leg.  With a quiet grunt of effort, he lifted and turned her so she was sitting across his legs instead of between them.  “I think we should just drift out here for a little while and see what develops.  It might reappear.”

“Pilot?” Aeryn called.  “Did you hear that?”

“Yes, I did, Aeryn.  I would like to remind you, however, of what happened the last time Commander Crichton decided to let his craft drift outside Moya.  It very nearly cost him his life.  Moya and I would be very distressed if there were to be a repeat of that event.  We believe it might be wiser if you came back on board while we wait for the phenomenon to reappear.”

“D’Argo, Chiana, Sparky, Sputnik …” John began, talking quietly to Aeryn.

She picked up where he left off.  “Pilot will want to talk to us.  The DRDs watch everything.  Noise, confusion … and Cholak help us, Noranti.  John, is there no way to get her to take a bath?”

He ignored the complaint, focusing instead on their privacy.  “Out here, there’s only you, me, and Herby the Love Bug,” John concluded, pointing to the top of the instrument panel where the DRD was motoring carefully from one side to the other, inspecting its unfamiliar new environment.  “Pilot!  Snare the module in the docking web, but don’t pull us in.  We’re going to hang around out here for a while and see what develops.  If anything nasty starts to happen, yank us back inside the hangar and then tell Moya to beat feet.”

“Done, Commander,” came the response, followed by the faint metallic chirp that said the comms channel had been closed.

“Alone at last,” Crichton said.  He gazed up at Aeryn.  “I forgot to pack the Parcheesi board, and there’s not a whole lot of room in here for gymnastics.  What would you like to do instead?”

“From what some of your friends on Earth said, it did not sound like limited space in a vehicle ever stopped you in the past.  Your sister showed me a picture of an automobile that you used to own.  It did not look any larger than this.”  She smiled at him and bent her head down for a kiss.  “Can we just sit like this for a while?”

The first touch was fleeting, a brush of her lips across his, warm and soft, testing for his reaction.  John freed one hand long enough to release his safety harness.  He flipped the metal ends out of the way so they were not digging into his stomach, and then boosted Aeryn the rest of the way into his lap, hauling her in snugly against his body.  She peered around him in order to find a safe place to prop one of her feet, and then looped an arm around his shoulders and kissed him again.  This one went on for what felt like arns, questing deep, tongues sparring and exploring, the contact of their lips somehow effecting a more thorough merging of their bodies wherever they touched.  He broke away, took in a deep breath, and went back for seconds.

The module seemed to dissolve around him, leaving them suspended comfortably in space, only their two bodies remaining.  In a detached, semi-aware kind of way, he was conscious of the back of the seat rubbing hard against his spine, the weight of two bodies pressing him further into the padding than normal.  But from knees to hips to throat, the remainder of his body was fully fixated on the presence of Aeryn Sun, from the softer cushioning of her butt, to the knobby projection of one hip digging into his gut, to the drifting touch of her fingers along the side of his neck.  She smelled sweet and clean, like the pleasant rain-washed air of a cool autumn day, the sound of her breathing drowned out the few small noises of the module’s systems, and within two microts every one of his senses were filled to overflowing with the one person who made his life worth living no matter how bad things seemed to get whenever they were together.

“I hope you can keep this up for two and a half arns,” he whispered when she took a break.

“I thought we might spend some of the interval talking.  We haven’t had a lot of time for that lately.”

“Haven’t had time for that ever,” John said.  “Whenever we decide we want to talk, all hell breaks loose within a matter of microts.”

They turned as one to look out the windshield of the module.  The stars crept in a circle, the result of a small amount of drift by the module.  Nothing moved outside the viewports.  Moya was out of sight somewhere behind the drifting spacecraft, and they might have been the last two sentient beings in the entire universe for all the motion they could make out in front of them.  Everything was serene and silent.

“Frelling miracle,” John said, referring to the peace and quiet.

“Maybe our luck is changing.”

“Do you really believe that?”

She wriggled, working her way further into his embrace.  “No.”

“Talk?  Or should we go back to smooching?” he asked.

“Smooching?”  She repeated the syllables slowly but without any of the awkward unfamiliarity that had laced her early attempts at English.  “I don’t know that one.”

“Smooch.  It means kiss.  Suck face.  Neck.  Make out in the front seat of the car until the cops show up and shine a flashlight on us just as things are approaching climactic.”

“That sounds as if it has some promise, but … would you mind if I ask you a question first?” Aeryn said, finishing hesitantly.  “It’s important to me.  I have wanted to know the answer for a rather long time.”

He tensed, half expecting a question as uncompromising the one he had asked her one day on Command:  “Any other oaths of silence I should know about?”

It had been a trap, and at the time he had felt absolutely no remorse over luring Aeryn into it.  “So you could tell me if you were pregnant,” had followed, every bit as unforgiving as his initial question.  That exchange, as much a punishment as a true inquiry, was like a bad dream.  It had become part of his past that felt like it belonged to someone else, a borrowed feeling of anger and betrayal that had nothing to do with the woman sitting contentedly inside his arms.  John relaxed, calmed by the certainty that her question would be a true query and not a challenge.

Although it had been a transient fleeting reaction, one that had lasted less than a split-microt, Aeryn had felt the brief change in his body.  “You don’t want to talk.  You only want to make out,” she said.

“No,” he said, and rubbed his hand along her upper arm.  “That’s not it.  Fire away.”

“We don’t have to.”  Aeryn tried to sit up.  Her body had gone as rigid as his had moments earlier, only in her case the tension was not dissipating.  She was showing all the classic Officer Sun signs of hurt and anger.

“That was not what I was thinking!”  John wrapped both arms around her and held on to the squirming package of well-toned muscles, trying to prevent her from pulling away without hurting her.  “Jesus, Aeryn.  How can something so simple turn into an instantaneous argument between us?  You made me nervous for a microt there, that’s all.  I want to know what you were going to ask me.  Why won’t you …”

He had been intending to say ‘trust me’.  His jaw snapped shut before he could utter the poorly chosen pair of words, and the sentence remained unfinished.

“Why won’t I what?” Aeryn said, still sounding angry.

“Nothing.”  He took a breath and tried to get his thoughts and reactions under control.  It had taken a single, isolated microt of carelessness to transform the idyllic moment of hanging in space enjoying Aeryn’s company into one of their usual emotional obstacle courses.

Before he could put together a rational sounding alternative to his still unfinished sentence, Aeryn eased back against his shoulder, took two deep breaths, and relaxed.  “Smooching?  I don’t know that one,” she repeated.

He stared at her for a microt, wondering if he had missed something.  Then he realized what she was doing.  She was starting the conversation over, setting the small miscues aside entirely and giving them both a second chance.  He leaped in before she could change her mind, playing along with relief.  “It means kissing.  Making out.  Which all sounds very nice, but I think we should take advantage of the peace and quiet to talk for a while.  Is there anything you would like to ask me?”

Aeryn gave him her sweetest, widest smile, and said in a breathy mockery of awe, “How did you know that I wanted to ask you a question?”

“Just a hunch … and the fact that you may have broken one of my ribs trying to get out of my arms a few microts ago.”  He shifted underneath her so she was leaning against the side of the cockpit rather than his arm, and boldly headed back into the territory that had caused the original problem.  “Go ahead and ask.”

Aeryn was sitting sideways across his lap with her feet propped up on the edge of the equipment panel that was normally underneath his right elbow.  With the seat shoved all the way back to give them some room, it provided an adequate footrest as long as she was careful not to place her heels on any of the circuits.  Aeryn tugged at the open front of his overcoat, capturing and fiddling with one of the buckles for several microts, clearly gathering courage to ask her question.  Crichton caught one of her hands and kissed each of the knuckles in sequence.  Then he interlaced his fingers into hers and hung on.  “Just spit it out,” he said.

Aeryn nodded, ran the backs of her fingers down his cheek in a caress that he decided was a form of thank-you for his encouragement, took one more hesitant breath, and asked, “When did you first know you loved me?  And do not give me any of your usual dren about right from the start.  When was the first time that you were really sure and how could you tell?”

He rested his head against the back of the seat, stared at the curved underside of the module’s canopy, and thought back.  Examined as an unbroken whole, the days since he had met Officer Aeryn Sun blurred into a single theme of desire and heartbreak, loneliness, longing, and the undiminished hope that some day they might find the time to sit just like this and do little else than love each other.  There were bright moments along that pathway, and dips in the road that were hidden within impenetrable shadows of grief.  And at the distant end of that remembered journey lay the shining moment when she had tipped her helmet forward, taken it off, and looked at him for the first time.  But Aeryn was not mistaken in her accusation.  That had not been the defining moment when his love for her had begun to rule his life.  He had felt a jolt in his stomach and a mild quickening of his pulse that day, but it had been drowned under the more critical demands of coping with a life that had gone completely out of control.  It had not been until later that he had lost his heart to her.

“Do you not remember, or would you rather not tell me?” Aeryn asked softly.

“I’m just taking a microt to think about those first days on board Moya.  I know when it happened.  How could I possibly forget the moment when you stole my heart, woman?”

From Aeryn’s reaction to his last comment John concluded that for once in his life he had managed to say the right thing.  In the space between one breath and the next, her entire body softened.  It was not anything as simple as Aeryn relaxing; it was more a case of her body becoming more malleable, as though some of the steel had been leached out of her soul, willingly given up in the pursuit of becoming more flexible and yet more resilient at the same time.  Stiffness had given way to a yielding strength.

“Will you tell me?” she asked.

“It was after the Zelbinion,” he said, still staring at the canopy.  Aeryn did not respond, so he waded in even though he was not sure he could explain it so she could understand.  “Remember when it was all over, and you said goodbye to Gilina and walked off through the tier?”

“Too well.”

The dry tone brought his gaze down to check on her expression.  She did not look entirely pleased at his choice of moments, but she did not look irate either, which was reassuring considering the limited amount of space available in the module’s cockpit.  “Don’t shoot me until I have a chance to explain.”

Her smile forgave him his long ago association with Gilina.  She said, “Go on.”

The day had been one of his worst in terms of conflicting emotions.  Repairing the defense screen had given him a taste of everything that he had left behind when he had slammed into the first wormhole, as had working in uncomplicated partnership with Gilina.  For a few arns he had been John Crichton the Scientist, instead of a star-hopping, on-the-run refugee.  He remembered laughing with Gilina, mutual understanding easily achieved because at heart she was a scientist like him and thus spoke a similar language.  It was a welcome change from the daily battle he waged to establish any sort of connection with Aeryn, D’Argo, and the others.  And that was the first time he had truly understood Aeryn’s loss.  He had seen how hers was a deeper, more intense grief since she had no hope of ever returning to the life she had unknowingly forfeited the instant that she had stood up for him.

On that day, a short-lived return to the person he had been on Earth and a fuller understanding of Aeryn’s loss had intertwined into the first layer of confusion.

The turmoil had compounded when he watched Aeryn make the conscious decision to give Gilina her life back.  An arn or two later, he had watched the exiled officer talk to Gilina again and that was when emotional lightning had struck.

Head high, back ramrod straight, with full knowledge that the blond-haired technician was returning to a way of life that Aeryn could never regain, she had said, “I wish I had been so smart”, and had marched away without a backward glance, never giving in to the overwhelming loss she must have felt at that moment.  In the days following their encounter with the Zelbinion, he had spent dozens of arns thinking about what kind of ‘smart’ Aeryn had intended … or whether his microbes had translated it correctly in the first place.  His certainty began and ended with the conviction that the look in Aeryn’s eye meant that she was referring to something more complex than Gilina’s decision to lie about what had happened.  Beyond that, he was baffled.

Had Aeryn meant that Gilina was smart enough not to mortgage her past, present, and future for an alien?  Smart enough not to ignore a lifetime of training for a split microt because a stranger had snuck past her cycles of indoctrination?  Or had it been her own way of implying that Gilina was just plain lucky enough that Crais had not been around to declare her irreversibly contaminated?  He had turned the puzzle over and over in his mind, and only become more uncertain.

He had lingered in the corridor to say goodbye to Gilina -- voicing silly sentiments, taking his time, touching a body that did not stiffen in surprise when he took her face in his hands and kissed her.  Later he had come to realize that those moments had been his last attempt at hanging on to his previous life.  Like Aeryn, he had no choice except to stay aboard Moya and watch the slender, intelligent tech slide back into her comfortable, well-known slot within the Peacekeepers.  Another tangled layer had been added to the inner quagmire, and cycles would pass before he sorted it all out:  how he and Aeryn were alike, how they were different, where they belonged in the universe, and how Aeryn’s unintentional sacrifice while defending him should have taught her never to put someone else’s interests before her own … and had not.

The doors of the pressure hatch had slid shut behind Gilina, and he had stood there for over an arn before going in search of Aeryn.  He had spent the time trying to figure out why he did not hurt from saying goodbye to Gilina, who had been accepting, smart, and even a little fun, and yet ached for Aeryn, who spent most of her time pushing him away.

And that was when he had known for sure.  If the odd queasy feeling in his stomach and the buzzing electrical charge running up his spine were not enough to tell him what was happening, the ache he felt whenever she turned her back and walked away from him eliminated any doubt.

John sat in the module with Aeryn in his lap, and struggled to explain what had happened that day.  He worked his way through it all, omitting only the detail of a sweet, gentle kiss against the corner of his eyebrow.  It took almost a full arn to untangle the concepts that were clear as long as they were securely stowed inside his head, and transform them into clumsily worded explanations.  Aeryn sat calmly through the entire tale, never taking her hand out of his, and interrupting only when he thoroughly confused her.

“So it was right then, in the corridor when I walked away and left you two alone, that you knew?” she asked when he had finished.

“You finished talking to Gilina, stared at her for a microt as if there was some way to take back everything that had happened since that moment when you spoke to Crais on the Commerce Planet, and then you tucked that damned pulse rifle under your arm and marched away like none of it bothered you.  I was pretty clueless about what was going on in your head at that point, but I knew one thing.  I was sure you weren’t calm, cool and collected on the inside at that moment.  And you just … marched away, head up, carrying your weapon, holding on to what little you still had of your life.”  With a little tug, he pulled her forward so she was resting against his chest with her head on his shoulder.  “A part of me wanted to run after you and rip that stupid rifle out from under your arm, pick you up, and kiss the stuffin’ out of you.”

“But you didn’t and you’ve been trying to make up for it ever since, haven’t you?”  She raised her head to look at him, inviting further proof.

John kissed her, taking his time, feeling the hollowness of physical excitement build in his stomach until it spilled loose and spread like a warm flood throughout his body.  Chest, back, arms, legs, and especially the inside of his head:  every bit of him was consumed by the thought that he was alone with Aeryn, and that for once they had some time together without anyone else to interrupt them.  He broke away first, licking his lips, trying to imprint the sensation on his memory for all time.

“You haven’t asked,” Aeryn said into the brief moment of silence that followed the kiss.

“Asked what?”

“When I knew for sure that I loved you.”

“I don’t care.  As long as you love me now, the rest is ancient history.”

“You’re not afraid of the answer,” she said.

He straightened up so he could look at her better.  “That’s not true.  There’s one answer you could come up with that I wouldn’t want to hear.  It scares me half to death, as a matter of fact.  But I trust you not to stab me in the guts like that.”

“You trust me with your heart,” she said slowly.

He smiled, acknowledging her deliberate use of those particular words.  “I don’t have a choice, Aeryn.  You own it.  You always have.”

Aeryn did not answer.  She raised a hand to his face and traced its contours, her eyes following its progress.  The backs of her fingertips brushed along his cheekbone, swept up alongside the corner of his eye, and then dove back across his temple.  Firm and whispering soft, thumb, fingertips, and the backs of her fingers equally put to use, she explored his features, eyes trained intently on his face the entire time.  “I do love you very much,” she whispered in the end.  Her arm snaked around the back of his neck, and she pulled him down for what he quickly decided was the kiss of his life.

His body reacted predictably to the enthusiastic provocation, and he could feel the peculiar sort of muscular vibration coming from Aeryn that meant she had begun to respond in kind.  “Not much room in here,” he said into her lips.

“I’m sure you can figure something out.  You’re imaginative,” she said.

“Not to mention motivated.”

The cockpit seemed to become overly crowded after that, full of arms and legs attempting to move at impossible angles and bumping into control surfaces at every opportunity.  Pulse pistols were unfastened mid-embrace and fumbled over the back of the seat to drop with a double ‘thunk’ into the back of the cockpit.  There was a brief hailstorm percussion of fasteners being released, the fast slide of zippers and then the first flurry of desire died down, replaced by something with greater need and longevity.  Deep sighs and labored breaths, small chuckles, and whispered exchanges became the only noises for a short time, gradually replaced by more metallic thumps and clanks as they work in tandem to find suitable positions.  The heel of a boot activated the comms; Crichton reached past Aeryn to slap at the panel.  An alarm started chirping, warning that a power cell had inadvertently been shut down; two hands fumbled together for the appropriate switch.

“Watch it.  Canopy jettison,” John mumbled halfway through a kiss.  He cupped one hand over the button to prevent an accident, and helped Aeryn move her leg past the danger zone with the other.

“Explosive release,” she whispered in a breathless, husky voice.

“Yup,” he agreed, breathing hard.

“Like you.”

“I should be so lucky.”

They laughed together, and went on doing their best to achieve their chosen goal despite the obvious obstacles of too little space, too many clothes, and a seat that would not recline.  Unnoticed by either of the craft’s occupants the windows began to fog:  Warm, moisture laden air condensed on the space-chilled viewports until small rivulets began to streak down the smooth surfaces.  The whispers and strained breathing increased; the small laughs and quiet, ecstatic noises occurred more frequently and became increasingly strident with every passing microt.  The DRD peered at the occupants for several microts, and then spun around and trained its eyestalks steadfastly on where the stars would have been if they could be seen through the thickening layer of moisture coating the inside of the windows.

“AERYN!  CRICHTON!”  The transmission reverberated throughout the tiny cockpit, bringing the activities there to an abrupt, heart-pounding stop.

“Frell.  Chiana,” Aeryn sighed into John’s shoulder over the span of two poorly controlled breaths.

“Cops and flashlights,” John groaned, and then called more loudly, “Chi, we’re a little busy right now.  Can this --”

“You … you have to get back to Moya right now … right now, Crichton.  You have to hurry.  Hurry, it may already be too late.”

He recognized the nebari’s stumbling, uncertain phrasing, and did his best to sit up quickly, carrying Aeryn along with him.  “What is it, Chiana?  What did you see?”

“Hurry, Crichton.  Come back to Moya now.  Right now,” was all she would say.  The words tumbled over the comms repeatedly.

“Pilot, haul us in!” he yelled.  “Get the docking web powered up, and yank us back.”

“I am already attempting to retrieve you, Commander.  For some reason, the docking web will not keep your ship netted.  The web sensors refuse to maintain a reliable fix on your ship.”

“Energy.  Energy disrupts the frelling docking web,” John said, his voice gone low and quiet with urgency.  “Frelling energy must be surrounding the module.”  He leaned forward, reaching for the controls.

“You’re hurting me,” Aeryn ground out between clenched teeth.  She was pushing against him hard, trying to disentangle herself and straighten up at the same time.

John realized that his attempt to reach for the controls had Aeryn twisted to one side and bent doubled over, a position that would be agonizing to barely healed abdominal muscles.  He squirmed to the side, giving her room to slither off his body to one side.  It put the power switches out of his reach.  “Those.  Hit all of those, Aeryn.  Quick.”

She tried, but she was facing the back of the cockpit, and it meant twisting around toward the front.  The motion stopped short of what she needed to reach the toggles.  Her right hand grabbed on to his shoulder, dug in more deeply than it had at any time over the past two days, and with an extended screech of pain, she wrenched herself the rest of the way around by force and slapped the switches upward.  “Go!” she said, letting herself unwind and sagging back against his shoulder.

“We’re too late!”

The module was already encased in light.  Miniature strokes of lightning were jumping from surface to surface within the cockpit, the controls fizzed and sparked within his hands, sending small jolts of cramping discomfort all the way to his shoulders, and Aeryn’s hair had begun to drift away from her body in an expanding corona of dark filaments:  all signs that their ship was being bombarded by a level of energy it had never been designed to handle.  Crichton wasted a split-microt worrying about radiation, the susceptibility of human DNA to damage, and a fetus held in stasis, and then forced his attention back to the more immediate crisis.

“We’re screwed!” he yelled over an increasing din of sparking equipment and sizzling displays.

“Shut up and fly this pile of dren!”

He did his best.  Ignoring the constant discharges of electricity that were flowing from the controls into his hands and from there into the metal frame of his seat, he held on tight and tried to guide the ship toward Moya.  Displays fizzled, sparked, shivered into lines of meaningless black and white, and winked out, leaving him robbed of sensors and navigational guides.  They were sitting jammed side by side now, and Aeryn did her best to help him.  She wiped the condensation away from as many ports as she could reach, and searched for a point of reference that would guide them in the correct direction.

“You’re going the wrong way, Crichton!”  Pilot’s distorted yell screeched and scratched amidst the static coming from the comms equipment.  “Turn around!”

“A star.  There!”  Aeryn pointed to one side.  “Fix on that.”

Crichton banked the module hard over, ignored the fact that he could not see the star she was pointing at, and rammed the controls forward, asking the stubby little craft for every bit of power it possessed.  It slogged its way forward as though it were a toboggan mired in a bog, fighting its way through intangible strands of energy.  Behind the crackle and hiss of an overloaded comms system, John and Aeryn could hear a chorus of voices calling to them, urging them to break free, to escape, to return to Moya:  D’Argo bellowing, Pilot sounding frantic, Chiana continuing her broken, mildly confused entreaties, and Rygel adding his gruff sounding pleas to the chaos.

“We’re pulling free,” Aeryn said.  “We’re going to make it.”

The view turned from smelter brilliant to merely sunshine unbearable, and then cooled to the darker shades of uncluttered space.  Black took over from rainbow hues of light, and more of the stars came into view.

“We’re going to make it,” she said again.

The words were barely out of her mouth when module bucked and flipped end for end.  A surge of energy slammed into John’s hands where they gripped the biometallic controls, and from there fired into the rest of his body.  He grunted in pain, every muscle in his body seizing up for the length of time it took for the charge to pass through him, and then, once he could move again, he resumed his efforts to wrestle the module free.  But the space-dark sky was gone.  Looking out the windshield was like staring into a glass-blower’s oven filled with white-hot glass.  There was nothing to see but the searing brightness -- colorless, pulsing with radiant energy alone, malevolent in its intensity.

In the last instant before they were completely enveloped, Crichton delivered a one-word commentary on their predicament.

“Frell.”

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

CHAPTER 4

If someone had taken an old-fashioned clothes wringer and run one of his wild wormhole rollercoaster rides through it more than once, compressing the journey into a fraction of its former self, it might have felt similar to what happened when the anomaly hit.  Nothing of the chaotic ride was missing from the experience.  All the light, all the motion, commotion, and confusion, and every bit of the noise were bundled into a well-packaged five microt event, encased in a burst of pain that Crichton had never experienced in a wormhole, and then it had seemingly been set adrift in space to wait for the opportunity to run over the module.

The blessing was that it was over in a matter of microts.  The drawback was that the elongated instant was one of the worst he had ever lived through -- Aurora Chair included.  The moment he realized that they were in for an impact of some sort, Crichton grabbed for Aeryn and tried to get his feet jammed in place to keep both of them from being thrown around.  The ride was over before he could get a decent grip on her.  The serenity that followed was almost worse than the confusion, if only because of the impression it lent that the preceding few microts had never happened.

John released his grip on Aeryn and pressed both hands against his forehead.  He had developed a headache fit for a budong, and the rest of his body was working hard to convince him that it was absolutely essential that he vomit.  “Oh … god.  We got …”

Aeryn had her head resting against the side view port and both arms were wrapped around her midsection.  As John watched, she turned and pressed her cheek against the chilled plexiglass, obviously deriving some relief from the cold.  He thought of how the smooth, icy surface would feel against his aching head and was mildly jealous.  The view port on the other side of the cockpit was available, except it would require moving Aeryn out of his lap to reach it, and he did not have the strength or willpower to do that quite yet.

“We hit something,” Aeryn said in a weak moan.

“More like …”  John took several slow breaths in an attempt to convince his stomach to leave its contents where they belonged, and tried again.  “More like something ran us over.  I feel like road kill.”

“John?” she said in an unfamiliar, guttural squawk.

The voice alarmed him.  He leaned close to see what was wrong.  “What?”

Without bothering to turn her head, she pushed him away with one hand.  “I’m going to vomit.  I just wanted to let you know ahead of time.”

“There’s one thing you need to know before you blow chunks in here.”

“You had better make it quick.”

“If you puke, I’m gonna puke, and I ate about three times as much as you did this morning.  And it’s not going to be any of that low grade mostly digested puke either.  Mine is going to be --”

Aeryn’s hand fumbled at his face for a microt.  Cool moist fingers located his nose and eyes by touch before finally clamping themselves firmly over his mouth, cutting off the description of what might be contained in his stomach.  “Stop,” she ordered in a half-choked voice.  “Enough.  I get it.”

“I thought you deserved fair warning.”

Aeryn rolled her head far enough to one side so she could look at him.  When she spoke, her voice still emanated from the back of her throat, as though she might have had her tongue clamped between her back teeth, but she did not sound as shaky as she had a microt earlier.  “I don’t feel sick anymore.”

“Didn’t think so.”  John swallowed several times, finding each successive effort more difficult than the last, and spent some time praying that he could hold up -- or perhaps ‘down’ was a better term in this particular instance -- his portion of the implied agreement.  Focusing his attention on something other than his roiling stomach seemed like a good idea.  “’kay.  Where are we in relation to Moya?”

Aeryn flapped a hand toward the darkened navigational displays, and turned to face the window again.  Not a single screen was working.  John waggled the controls.  Nothing happened.  Reaching carefully behind him -- carefully because it meant twisting around to his left, and twisting meant putting strain on his stomach -- he tried resetting the power breakers.  The module remained lifeless.

“Herby,” he said on an involuntary belch, “you alive?  Time to wake up.”  When he rapped the yellow shell of the DRD with his knuckles, he received an answering chirp.  It was weak, as though perhaps the DRD felt just as sick as everyone else aboard the module, but it was a chirp.

“What’s the matter?” Aeryn asked.

“Guppy’s dead.  The DRD isn’t.  Power cells may have been zapped.”

Aeryn added a quiet burp to the proceedings and straightened up.  Despite a pale face and a clammy sheen to her skin, she was starting to look more alert.  “Our --”  She gulped, looked panic stricken, and then sat with her eyes closed for several microts before continuing.  “If it is just the power supply, then our personal comms may still work.”

John leaned over and spoke toward the comms badge on his belt.  “Pilot? … Can anybody out there hear us?  Pilot?  Pilot, pick up the phone!”  There was no answer.  “These must be toasted as well.”

“Why hasn’t Pilot deployed the docking web?” she said.

“Maybe they got fried too.  Power cells and comms are biomechanoid; a DRD is purely mechanical.  Hopefully Moya was far enough away that she didn’t get as badly crisped as we are.”

“Do we have maneuvering thrusters?” she asked.

“Dead.  Hang on.  Don’t move.”  John squirmed around until he was facing the back of the cockpit, and worked his way over the back of the seat until it was digging into his stomach.  “Oh god, this is so dangerous.”  The pressure against his gut was doing little to quell his nausea.

“If you puke, I puke,” Aeryn said behind him.

“Not gonna hurl, not gonna hurl, not gonna hurl.”  Continuing the optimistic chant, he leaned down until his upper body was inverted, and groped under the seat for the spare fuel cells.  Fifteen microts after his fingers brushed across the hidden objects, he was safely upright, the fuel cell had been snapped into the appropriate socket, and the module’s systems were coming back to life one by one.  John slid into place next to Aeryn with the dead one in his hand.  He examined it for several moments, looking for signs of damage.  Without a diagnostic unit there was no way to tell what was wrong with it.

Aeryn said, “The one we were using could have shorted out, or it may have been drained by whatever hit us.”

“Guess so.  No sign of electrical charring.  Probably sucked dry.”  John tossed the useless item over his shoulder, ignoring the battering clatter of its unguided trajectory, and turned his inquisitive look toward her.  “How you doing?  You yanked yourself around pretty hard a little while ago.  Any damage?  Did you reopen any of the wounds?”

Aeryn shook her head and raised the hem of her shirt as proof that she was all right, revealing the top two puncture wounds.  They bent over her midsection together, checking to make sure that all was well.  “Outside looks as good as ever,” John said, leaning in close for a careful scrutiny of her stomach.  His comment earned him a small pat on the head.  It might have been a low-powered substitute for a slap, he decided.  “How are things on the inside?”

“A little sore, that’s all.”

“Sore as in sore, or sore like a severed paraphoral nerve isn’t a serious injury?”

“Sore as in sore.  Stop fussing over me, John.  Let’s get back to Moya so we can figure out what to do about this energy thing that’s in Moya’s path.”  Aeryn yanked her shirt down into place and spent several microts tugging her clothes back into place and closing various fasteners.

John followed her example, wrestling pants, jacket, and overcoat back into something resembling order.  Once they were both squared away, he slithered to one side and then tucked his hip in under the edge of Aeryn’s butt and shimmied his way into the pilot’s seat.  As soon as he was settled with the harness fastened around him, he placed a hand on her hip, and guided her into his lap for the short flight back.  He concentrated on getting the engines engaged while Aeryn adjusted the navigational displays and punched the circuit to bring the comms back to life.  The cockpit was quiet except for their quiet instructions to each other and the hushed clattering of switches being thrown.

The stillness was broken by a sharp, “Where is she?” from Aeryn.

“Where’s who?”  It was a dumb question.  There was only one ‘she’ in the universe that Aeryn could be referring to, but it seemed like the only thing to say when presented with ‘where is she?’

“Moya.  She’s gone.”

John gave the controls several brief sideward nudges, letting them settle back to their neutral position in between each small shove.  The steering thrusters fired in response, coaxing the module into a slow counterclockwise drift.  Stars began to ease from left to right.  Aeryn was right; there was no sign of Moya.  He offered a theory, somehow knowing he was clutching at straws even as he spoke, and yet unwilling to give in to the obvious answer without at least a small fight.  “Maybe she starburst out of here while we were getting toasted by that whatever that was.”

Aeryn was more aggressive about finding their missing leviathan home.  She was realigning the module’s sensors, hunting for some sign that Moya had been there or the direction she had taken.  “There’s no sign of the residual energy that gets left behind when a leviathan starbursts.  Did we lose consciousness at any point?  If we were knocked out for even a short time, it could have given her time to move away under standard thrust.”  She bent closer to the limited number of displays that John had been able to install in the module’s crowded instrument panel, looking for some indication of the missing ship.

“Aeryn,” John said.

There was a tight feeling building in the center of his chest that had nothing to do with his fading nausea.  It had to do with power supplies, air reserves, and his folly in letting Aeryn come with him in the module.  It had to do with her life and the life she carried inside her, and a fate that he had faced more than once and fervently had not wanted to share with anyone else.  And the uncomfortable pressure behind his sternum was a product of knowing that a great cosmic joke had been played on him for the fourth time in his life, and this time he had brought Aeryn along for the unpleasant ride.

“Aeryn!” he said again.  “Stop.  It’s a waste of time.”

“Looking for Moya is not --”  The nimble fingers stopped their fast dance across the sensor controls, and she twisted to look over her shoulder at him.  Realization began turning to anger before John’s eyes.  She shook her head.  “We didn’t.  Tell me we aren’t.”

“Down the frelling storm drain again.  It’s not Moya who has gone missing; it’s us.  Take a look out there and tell me what looks familiar.”

Aeryn leaned to the side, nose brushing against the thick plexiglass in an attempt to make out some details of the surrounding starfield.  “I don’t recognize a single system.  Crichton, you idiot!  You said this wasn’t a frelling wormhole!”

“It wasn’t!  It isn’t!  I still don’t know what it was, but it was not a wormhole!  I know wormholes, and that was not a wormhole!”  He rapped a knuckle against the viewport in time with his shout.  “Wormholes are tunnels through time and space, kind of like a big alimentary tract that spits me out like a bear dumping its load in the middle of an interstellar forest!  In case you did not get a chance to notice, there was no tunnel to that thing.”

“I could not help but notice.  But if that was not a wormhole, then where the frell are we?”  Aeryn returned to her futile examination of the sensor data.

“I … don’t … KNOW!” he shouted at her from a distance of barely four denches.  Each word was emphasized with a frustrated wave of his hands.  “I never know where I am when I come out of a wormhole, and don’t even ask me to tell you what the date is when I surf one of those things!  And this was not a wormhole!  You cannot expect me to know where the mystery sphincter of the galaxy deposited us this time.”

“So … we’re lost.”

“Welcome to my universe, Aeryn.  There seems to be some evil god out there who gets his or her jollies by doing this to me whenever I give it half a chance.”  John blew a long breath out through pursed lips, felt the pent up anger and frustration sail away with the air, and began to calm down.  “I’m just sorry I dragged you along for the ride this time.”

Aeryn’s hand dropped away from the sensor controls and she stared down at her feet.  The bowed head and slumped body spelled out defeat.  “No, it’s not your fault that I’m here.  I would not have let you off Moya by yourself.  Maybe if you had been alone, this would not have happened.”

She was referring to the activities that had distracted them for the critical few microts that would have allowed them to escape the energy anomaly instead of being enveloped by it.  John wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in against his chest.  “The way I remember it, you wanted to talk.  I was the one who wanted to neck.  I’m the one who frelled this up … again.  I thought bad things were supposed to happen in threes, not fours.”

“Three?”  Aeryn turned to peer over her shoulder at him.  “I thought there were only two.”

“Two wormholes.  Three times getting stranded.  The first wormhole, then the time Moya bugged out and I wound up huntin’ Godzilla-sized water roaches on Acquara, and then the time Moya went down the storm drain.”

“You weren’t stranded the first time.”

“Good point.  Just big ass, major league type lost.”

Agreement and partnership were restored as quickly as they had been disrupted.  The brief interval of strife was put aside, and they sat in easy companionship, Aeryn leaning back against John, enfolded in his arms.  Together they watched the slow drift of unfamiliar stars outside the module, contemplating their predicament in silence.

“It’s going to get cold in here if we don’t find some atmosphere to bounce off of once or twice,” John said finally.  He freed a hand and felt around alongside the seat, finally locating their gloves after several microts of searching.  He handed Aeryn’s to her, and then went back to sitting with his arms around her, making no effort to put his on.  “Or maybe all we need is a little friction inside the module.  That would heat things up.”

She ignored his second suggestion.  “What do we do now?  You’re the expert on this lost stuff.”  Aeryn waved a hand in the general direction of their surroundings.  “Where do we go?”

“Dunno.  You got anything on sensors that looks like signs of civilization or at least a breathable atmosphere?”

“No.  Nothing.  All I have is …”  Aeryn bent forward, studying a readout carefully.

“Is what?”  John tried to peer around her.  Shifting from right to left did not help.  He could not spot whatever she had found on the sensors.  “Is what, Aeryn?”

“Starburst energy.”  Without bothering to ask for his input or permission, Aeryn grabbed the controls, jammed the throttles wide open, and yanked the module around in a steep turn.  When she spoke again, the quietly triumphant tone had shifted to a softly voiced mumble that carried a hint of derision.  “Genius wormhole expert.  Crichton, someone needs to teach you some basic interstellar navigation.  We were only separated from Moya by enough distance that we could not pick her up on the sensors.”

“Hey, it wasn’t a wormhole.  How should I know we only got flung half way across this sector of space?”  It was a half-hearted complaint, voiced in a distracted murmur as John concentrated on making adjustments to the power supply and navigational displays, leaving Aeryn free to concentrate on flying.

Aeryn tossed her head to one side, dismissing his excuse, and for a moment John was magically transported back in time to the day when he had regained consciousness in the back of the Prowler and had been dismissed with the same fast movement of the dark-haired head.  He half expected a sharp ‘tsk’ to follow the sideways jerk.  It did not.  She remained every bit as focused on flying as she had that day almost four cycles ago.  None of the gentle chiding bothered him though.  When Aeryn was truly annoyed, she kept it bottled up inside until she was ready to explode, and then unleashed a sharp, aggressive, often cryptic attack.  Receiving a light toasting for being this badly mistaken about their location in time and space was Aeryn’s equivalent of a relieved pat on the cheek.

Something about the reported readings began to nag at him, whispering to his subconscious that there was a problem they had overlooked.  “Was that an incoming starburst or outgoing?”  The energy dispersion signatures were vastly different.

“Incoming.”

“How did she find us?”

“Moya has better long range sensors than the ones you installed in this … this …”

It did not matter that Aeryn’s voice faded into silence or that he could not see the expression on her face.  Even from behind her, John could tell that she was still searching for a word to describe the module, almost certainly a derogatory one.  “Don’t start bustin’ on the module again, Aeryn.  I know what you think of it.  That’s not a good enough answer.  How could Moya spot us at a distance that required starburst to come get us?”

“You can ask Pilot yourself in another few microts.  We’re coming up on her fast.”  She flipped the comms channel open.

John slapped it closed before she could make a transmission, leaned forward so his chest was pressing hard against her back, and pointed, extending his arm past her right ear.  “Take a closer look, babe.  That’s not Moya.”

“Of course, it’s Moya.  What other leviathan would be this far into …”  Aeryn pulled the throttles back and let the module coast on momentum.  After a microt’s examination of the ship floating ahead of them, she was agreeing with John.  “That’s not Moya.  That’s --”

“--big,” John said slowly, making the small word last for almost two microts.  “That’s --”

“--really big,” Aeryn finished for him.  “It’s got to be at least twice the size of Moya.”

“More than that.  It’s more like triple her size.”  He was quiet for several microts before asking, “Aeryn, have you ever seen a leviathan that big?”

She shook her head emphatically.  “I was in a convoy that captured a fully grown male that had grown to maturity in the wild without a control collar.  It was a little larger than half again the size of Moya.  I’ve never seen one like this.  John, I’ve never even heard of them getting this large.”

The leviathan looming in the forward windshield was a behemoth among a species of giants.  It remained rounded and sleek, just as a creature born to swim the emptiness of interstellar space ought to be, but with easily noticed differences from what they were accustomed to seeing.  Where Moya consisted of graceful curves and long sweeping arcs, this was a creature of bulging massive flanks and a gargantuan dorsal protrusion.  It was as though the ship had been originally grown with great reinforced ramparts and flying buttresses, after which some god, apparently dissatisfied with the resulting angular surfaces, had rubbed its thumb over the still-malleable clay of the leviathan’s body and smoothed the sharp edges into humped afterthought additions.

If Moya’s tail-booms were kite streamers seemingly added on for beauty and balance, then this creature’s booms were thick-hewn, muscle-bound structures essential to its propulsion.  It was black-hulled and matte-finished:  a great lumbering shadow trudging through space greedily sucking in stray beams of light and hoarding them instead of performing the magical Moya-trick of transmuting silvery starlight into gold and sending it gleefully on its way in a new form.  The scattered pinpoints of light coming from view portals mapped out invisible joints and grooves along the hull, just as they did on Moya; but on this beast, those tiny beacons, telling a tale of life and warmth within, only served to emphasize the absence of light being reflected by the creature’s exterior.

Aeryn broke the hush that had fallen over the module’s cockpit.  “What do you want to do?”

“Check for comms traffic.”  John flipped the appropriate toggle.  “Let’s see if we can figure out who is on board.  It would be nice to know if we would be walking into a nest of bad guys.”

Aeryn nodded but also offered a different opinion.  “That ship may be our only chance of surviving, John.  If it starbursts while we’re sitting out here waiting to hear something, there’s nothing else close enough for us to reach with our current supply of air.”

“And if its name is Rohvu, Sr., then freezing to death or suffocating are better choices, Aeryn.  Just give it a couple of microts.  It won’t be able to starburst right away.”

“Moya can’t starburst twice in a short period of time,” Aeryn countered, “but as you just said, that’s not Moya.”

“It’s still a leviathan.  It’ll need to recover before it can blast out of here.  We’ve got a little time.  Is it doing anything other than sitting there?”

“It looks like a smaller ship has docked with it … fighter craft size or maybe a courier ship of some sort.  There hasn’t been any movement since the hangar doors closed.  It’s just sitting there.”

“Then we can hang out and spy on it for a little bit,” John said.

They waited, huddling together in the increasingly chilly cockpit.  The comms remained stalwartly silent.  There was not so much as a crackle of static to suggest that anyone was alive on board the monster leviathan.

“What do you think?” Crichton asked after a quarter arn.

“I think I’m getting cold and I’m tired of sitting here doing nothing.”

Crichton flipped several switches.  “You’ve got maximum draw on the power cells in case we have to boogie out of here in a rush.  Hetch drive is warmed up and ready to go.  Any last thoughts before we barge in without knocking?”

“I love you,” Aeryn said quietly.

“Love you, too.”  John hugged her, remaining mindful of things like the buckles on his safety harness that would dig into her back and recently impaled midsections.  After several moments of sitting like that, he released her and straightened up.  “Damn the torpedoes.  Full speed ahead.”

Aeryn pushed the controls forward.  “As usual.”

For all their expectations of disaster, the approach to the mysterious leviathan was uneventful.  Coasting in on nothing more than momentum from the module’s maneuvering thrusters, they were greeted by no transmissions, no alarmed queries about their identity, and more importantly, no docking web.  Every hangar door on the treblin side of the leviathan remained closed.  Aeryn guided the module up and over the top of the floating beast to check the hamman side hangars.

“Someone is home and knows we’re coming for a visit,” John said, pointing.  Near the rear flank, a hangar door was sliding open.  It looked as much like a maw opening to devour them as it did a welcoming gesture for a pair of lost space travelers.

“The hangar doors are deliberate,” Aeryn said.  “They want us in a particular spot.”

“Best not to disappoint them.  You know how cranky the neighbors get if they think we’re being snobbish.”

She nodded once and took them in, guiding the small craft skillfully through the snaking approach that was normally handled by a docking web.

Aeryn’s task was made even more difficult than usual due to the absence of light inside the leviathan.  As with the exterior surfaces, the interior bulkheads were a light-absorbing matte black.  From what little John could make out, they resembled thick, forge-hardened wrought iron plating.  The arching support columns wore the same overlapping scales that Moya did, but without any of the bronzed and gleaming grace.  There were no crawling motes of light streaming along the energy conduits to light their way or enchant their eyes.  Instead, barely visible gnarled patterns made their way up the walls as though the plating had grown over the conduits, leaving only a lumpish wandering trace of where they lay beneath.

“By the grace of Cholak,” Aeryn breathed as they emerged into the hangar bay.  The cavern was not just huge; it was gargantuan.  The small amounts of light that managed to penetrate this far inside hinted of an infinite expanse, as though the module was being sucked into an intestinal black hole.  The occasional mote of illumination glimmered off distant darkly gleaming walls, beckoning the eye further and further into the blackness and imparting disorientation in the process.  It was the module’s sensors that told the full extent of the story.  As with everything else about the leviathan, this massive chamber was fully three times as large as Moya’s largest hangar, perhaps even more.

“Jonah was a frelling amateur.  This is the Cecille B. DeMille extravaganza version of getting swallowed by a whale,” John said, sounding every bit as awestruck as Aeryn.

Aeryn calmly ignored his indecipherable comparisons and made one of her own.  “A Vigilante would fit in here.  Possibly two.”

“Do you have a visual reference?” he asked, returning to the hazardous task of setting the module down in the darkness of the unlit hangar bay.  As if in response to his question, a lane of lights flush mounted into the floor suddenly came on.

“Yes,” Aeryn answered.

John’s attention snapped from the runway that had appeared just as they needed it to the inside of the module where he could see a reflection of Aeryn against the windshield.  The curved plexiglass was distorting her image, which made it difficult to be absolutely sure, and the muted, yellowish landing lights outside the module were doing strange things to the shadows and highlights on Aeryn’s face, but he could have sworn she was smiling.  “Are you making funnies at a time like this?” he asked.

Aeryn ducked her head, apparently concentrating on some of the readouts in preparation for landing.  “You asked me a question, John.  I answered it.”

He was preparing to challenge her again when the module set down with a quiet thump.  Aeryn was and always would be far more expert at piloting spacecraft than he could ever hope to become.  He could have flown the module into Moya’s hangar without a docking web; he had done it more than once.  But Aeryn had navigated the ups and downs and twists of this approach with almost no visual guidance.  A well-timed tease, if that’s what it was, seemed like a small price to pay for a smooth, uneventful landing.

He persisted anyway, if only because he enjoyed the thought that Aeryn might be developing a sense of humor.  “I think that was a joke.”

“This is hardly the time for jokes.”

“Yeah, I know.  That’s what makes it even more amazing.  Pressure outside is Earth-normal.”  He did not bother responding to the quiet snort he received in response to the standard he had used, and went on with his report, referring to the readouts tucked into one corner of the instrument panel.  “Oxygen levels are the same as Moya.  We won’t croak from the air.”

Aeryn triggered the canopy release and stood up.  “No welcoming committee … yet.  Pulse pistols.”

A jab of her hand emphasized that she was referring to their weapons, which had been so casually tossed into the back of the module a short time earlier.  They were not given a chance to retrieve them.  Before either Aeryn or John could lean over the pilot’s seat to sort out the tangle of belts, tie-down straps, holsters, and weapons, the door to the maintenance bay slid open and a squad of armed soldiers bolted through the opening.

“Holy crap,” John breathed.  “We aren’t in Kansas any more, Toto.”

Every member of the party surrounding the module had a weapon of some sort aimed at the small spacecraft and its two momentarily frozen occupants.  That part was no surprise.  But the group that spread out until it was ranged across the hangar bay was a conglomeration of almost every species John had run into over the preceding four cycles.  Almost half the squad was made up of delvians; there were several sheyang, two hynerians -- each one flying what looked like a cross between a miniature fighter jet and a hovercraft -- half a dozen sebaceans, one nebari, and half a dozen other species.  They were all dressed in what looked like a basic, unadorned uniform consisting of a one-piece black jumpsuit, the only variations being those that allowed for differences in physiology.  Lacking badges, rank insignia, or similarity of features, the group looked like a bunch of interstellar recruits doing their best to present a united defensive front without the benefit of any training.

One of the male delvians took two steps forward and jerked the muzzle of his weapon first at John and Aeryn and then down at the floor.  “Get down,” he yelled.

“Sir?” one of the sebaceans began.

“Shut up.  I can see it,” the delvian said, and then issued what was clearly an order to a subordinate.  “He’s in his quarters.  Tell him what we’ve found and ask him to come down here.”

The sebacean hesitated, looking confused.

The delvian explained, “I don’t want to attempt to describe everything over the comms.  Brief him.”

“Sir!”  The sebacean subordinate snapped a fast nod in the delvian’s direction, and left the hangar bay at a run.

Crichton raised both hands to chest level, doing his best to look unthreatening.  “Don’t shoot us.  We’re just --”

“Get down!  Now!” the delvian ordered.  He spared a hand long enough to indicate several members of the squad, and then nodded toward the module.  “Search them for weapons and check their ship.”

“Better do as we’re ordered,” Aeryn said under her breath.  “Until we figure out what’s going on.”

“You first, buttercup.”  John stepped to one side, giving her room to swing her legs over the side of the module.  Grabbing both of Aeryn’s wrists, he lowered her carefully to the hangar floor, mindful of her recent injuries and how miserable an abrupt landing might feel.  His own descent was a fast slide down the curved side of the fuselage, ending with a small stagger to one side that brought him nose-to-muzzle with a weapon.  Crichton raised both hands and backed up until he bumped into Aeryn.  “No threat.  No need to shoot me.”

“Buttercup?” Aeryn asked in a flat, monotone whisper once the weapon-wielding guard backed away.

“It was either that or honeycakes.  Blame it on the stress of having guns pointed at us,” he said.

“Poor excuse.  You should be used to this by now.”

“Good point.”  Without lowering his hands from where he still had them raised to shoulder height, Crichton pointed one index finger in the direction of the single nebari in the hangar and the weapon that individual was carrying.  “What the frell is that thing?”

“No idea.”

“Any guess what it does?”

“I’m a soldier, John, not a mind reader,” she hissed back.

The person in question held what looked like a cross between an anemic bag-pipe and a Rip Van Winkle style blunderbuss.  The portion tucked under his arm was rigid, bulbous, and covered in plating that might have been leviathan in origin:  an oblong metalloid gourd.  From there it narrowed into the beginnings of a rifle barrel, only to widen again so that the business end of the construct -- the portion facing John and Aeryn -- resembled a wide-mouthed clarinet more than it did a lethal weapon.  The manner in which it was being wielded left no doubt about the nature of the object, however.  Weapon it was, although how it worked and its effects remained in question.

The weapons held by the remainder of the group ringing John and Aeryn were less peculiar looking than the nebari’s bagpipe-blunderbuss, but they were also no more familiar despite a more standard arrangement of stock, trigger assembly, and barrel.  Crichton was in the midst of reflecting that the weapons held a passing resemblance to an AK-47 -- based on what looked like a curved energy chamber protruding from the bottom of the weapon -- when he was distracted by Aeryn’s next comment.

“They’re well trained,” she whispered.  “Alert, focused, relaxed, and they’re responding entirely to body signals.”

“Pros,” John said.

“More like exceptionally experienced amateurs.  Too many of their methods are non-standard.”

“Non-standard to a Peacekeeper,” he said.

Aeryn turned her head and stared at him.  One corner of her mouth twitched upward for a half-microt before settling down again.

He scrambled to recover from what he had just been informed was a gross verbal blunder.  “And if a Peacekeeper doesn’t recognize it then it’s not standard military protocol because you guys have seen it all.”

“You’re finally catching on.”

The entire exchange had taken less than forty microts.  In that time, the half-dozen soldiers who had responded to the delvian’s orders had searched John and Aeryn for hidden weapons, relieved Aeryn of a boot knife, and rummaged through the cockpit of the module, coming up with both pulse pistols as well as the rifle she had stowed in a storage compartment.  The DRD was brought out as well, examined by several of the squad, and then placed on the floor.  The drone let out a burst of clattering squeaks and then scurried over to join its owners.  Once safely positioned behind John’s feet, it peered around his ankles, watching the activities in the hangar with furtive interest.

“Just a knife?” John asked Aeryn.  “No cannon hidden under your overcoat?”

She glared at him for several microts before answering.  “They all needed maintenance or I would have brought one.”

“Stop talking!” the delvian ordered.

“Let us explain why we’re --” John began.

Responding to another subtle signal from the delvian, one of the sheyang waddled forward and placed the muzzle of his weapon against Aeryn’s temple.  “No more talking,” the soldier ordered.

Fury, frustration, and guilt combined to form a level of recklessness that Crichton could only just barely hammer into submission:  fury over the fact that they were using a threat to Aeryn’s life to control both of them, frustration that no one in the hangar would let him explain that they were harmless, and guilt because it was his fault that they were lost and here in the first place.  John’s foot rose in preparation for taking a step toward Aeryn, and then eased back to the floor when the muzzle pressed harder against the side of her head.  He jammed his molars down on his tongue until it hurt, the only way he could be sure not to blurt something out, and fought down a second, more intense surge of anger.  Aeryn’s eyes were fixed on his, warning him that this moment was every bit as perilous as he suspected.  They were a single syllable away from disaster.

“Stand down,” the delvian ordered after a full ten microts of silence, and then added another of the enigmatic comments.  “He’s on the tier.”

The sheyang backed away from Aeryn.  John let his breath out in an extended sigh, and looked toward the delvian.  Impassive, solid blue eyes met his squarely, and he got a slow shake of the head, warning him to remain silent.  Everyone stopped moving.  The hangar was silent except for a bass-noted, non-stop grumble emanating from the walls.  What he was hearing was this leviathan’s life sounds, John realized, and wanted to say something to Aeryn about it.  He spent the microts paying attention to the heavy thrum coming from every surface instead.  Even the floors were transmitting a constant, unquenchable symphony of different wavelength vibrations through the soles of his boots.  It was a song of the unimaginable level of power that would be necessary in order to accelerate a leviathan of this size to light speed velocities.

Once again, John came dangerously close to making a comment to Aeryn.  This time it would have concerned what the energy and starburst chambers must look like, and whether the central neural plexus would span the entire height of the leviathan, as it did on Moya.  He was saved from any more close calls by the arrival of another sebacean.  The moment he strode through the doors separating the hangar from its associated maintenance bay it was immediately apparent that this was the person the crew had been waiting for.  No one snapped to attention.  It was nothing that overt.  It was simply a case of everyone in the hangar suddenly becoming more alert and shifting a portion of their attention to the new arrival.

For all his apparent importance, he was magnificently unimpressive.  Dressed in the same black coverall as everyone else, he was shorter than Crichton by three or four denches, tended toward wiry rather than muscular, and he was easily the smallest person in the hangar with the possible exception of Aeryn and the two hynerians.  A shock of disheveled sandy brown hair topped off the otherwise unremarkable presentation, creating an unavoidable impression that he had been asleep until very recently.

The sebacean made a beeline for the module, ignoring both the leviathan’s uninvited visitors and the gaggle of its regular crew.  Hands propped on his hips, he circled the small craft twice, stopping several times to examine various details.  Several fingers trailed across the faded ‘United States of America’ on the side, shifted into an entire palm to drift across the American flag, and ended by patting the IASA emblem several times.  Inspection completed, he turned to face John and Aeryn.

Greenish-gray eyes flickered over Crichton, lingering barely long enough to inspect him before they jumped to Aeryn.  He stared at her for nearly twenty microts, his thoughts hidden behind a thoroughly blank stare, and then turned in a circle, taking in the view of the hangar bay, the parked module, and waiting complement of uniformed personnel.

“Kill them,” he said abruptly.  “And jettison the bodies before our next starburst.”

“NO!  We’re no danger to you!”  John lunged toward the sebacean, thinking of little other than Aeryn and whether he could reach her in time to save both her and the baby.

For an instant, he thought Einstein had put in appearance.

Time slowed to a nightmarish crawl.  All sound disappeared except for the percussive thud of his pulse, measuring out a scant two microts between the instant the guards made the first move necessary to carry out the sebacean’s order and the moment when Crichton’s world came to an end.

Tha--

Instead of turning toward the module, which would provide some cover from the weapons, Aeryn’s head began a slow-motion swing toward him, her eyes widening in shock and her mouth already open to say something.  He had time to watch how her hair shifted on her shoulders, several strands floating wraithlike through the air from the force of her movement, and how one lock trailed in the opposite direction, curling protectively under her chin as though it could shield her neck from harm.

--thump

Pivoting toward her, redirecting the momentum he had already generated in order to throw himself between her and the weapons that were being aimed at them, the deck plates sent an unpleasant vibration through his boot soles to his feet.  If he could have heard anything other than the pounding of his heart, there might have been the hair-raising squeal of rubber on metal to mark the force of his turn.

Tha--

The sebacean’s head turned toward his men.  His hand began a slow journey upward, motioning toward the crew, perhaps exhorting them to fire more quickly.  Crichton’s stomach felt as though he had swallowed an entire block of ice:  cramped and aching, making it hard to move fast enough to save Aeryn.  He watched the finely honed soldier’s reflexes go into motion.  Her weight shifted toward the module, completing the transition from standing to moving much faster than he could have managed, and John knew it was already far too late for her to get behind cover.

--thump

No one had pulled a trigger yet.  He was close enough to Aeryn that he thought he might be able to knock her down and then fall on top of her so he could protect her body with his own.  The hangar bay resonated with the crack of an energy discharge from one of the weapons, he did not see where the shot went, and so far neither of them was hit.  Somewhere a light year or two beyond his single-minded focus on Aeryn’s survival, John could hear the sebacean shouting to his men, and just as he barreled into Aeryn, he knew that there was something horribly wrong with the words coming out of the man’s mouth.

Tha--

The nebari’s gourd-gun made a sloppy farting noise that would have been more at home coming from a pie-wielding clown at the circus than from a blunderbuss wielded by a space-going alien, John shouldered Aeryn out of the way, flinging her two motras across the hangar in his haste, and then something incredibly painful enveloped his entire body, and the universe disappeared.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

CHAPTER 5

It felt as though someone was resetting his circuit breakers one by one, inconsiderately taking their own sweet time between each small restoration of his internal operating systems.  The feeling in his ribs returned first, followed closely by some of his hearing.  Crichton did not bother trying to move; there was not enough of his body or brain functioning yet to attempt anything as simple as opening his eyes.  His ribs ached abominably, which might have been why they were the first portion of his body to make an impression on the blank area formerly occupied by his brain, and just enough of his hearing returned for him to know that someone was talking to him.  It seemed that memory was further down on the repair schedule.  He could not remember where he was or why he felt so miserable.

Time passed.  The slow-moving repairman got around to restoring a few more circuits.  Most of the sensation in his torso and legs returned, accompanied by a few bursts of recall that explained the wide spread physiological malfunctions.  He remembered the mysterious leviathan, its hangar bay, trying to protect Aeryn, and being shot by the bagpipe-blunderbuss.  He also remembered the last few microts of what -- since he was fairly sure he had died -- he assumed was a previous life.  Once again, dying had been incredibly painful.  He had been allowed a fraction of a microt to register that he had been hit by the discharge from an energy weapon, after which it had felt as though every synapse in his body had misfired at once.  This time he had been subjected to death by electrocution.

More of his memory and the feeling in his arms were returned to service.  By applying every last remnant of surviving brain matter to his surroundings, John managed to figure out that someone was supporting his head in their lap and was slowly stroking his cheek.  The touch was unmistakable.  Aeryn.  The relief that she was alive came close to undoing all the progress his personal electrician had made so far:  his stomach did a fast flip-flop and the universe seemed to spin around him for a microt.  An effort to inform her that he was alive and was going to recover came out sounding like the noise his mother’s parrot made whenever it was feeling anti-social and was about to bite someone’s finger.

“Gwawk?”

“Take your time.  Don’t rush it,” Aeryn’s voice told him.  Either she knew what he had been trying to say or did not care.  Based on the parrot noises, his money was on the latter.

Taking his time involved relaxing.  Relaxing resulted in fading out for a while.  When he came back, Aeryn’s lap was gone.  His head was resting on an uncomfortable, lumpy cushion that was nowhere near as warm and forgiving as the Aeryn Sun padding that had been there earlier.  It motivated him to open his eyes and make an attempt at moving.  Sight worked; movement was not as successful.  He was lying on the floor of what looked like a fairly standard leviathan cell except that this one had no bed, no storage shelves, and was less than a quarter of the size of the ones aboard Moya.  Considering the size of this ship, the cramped quarters seemed out of character.  His muddled thinking did not proceed much further than that.

“Awake?” Aeryn asked, moving into view.

His mouth was not attached to the rest of his body yet.  He managed to produce something more intelligible than his earlier comment anyway.  “Sort … of.  Did … I die?”

That drew a familiar ‘indulge-the-peculiar-human’ smile from her, which probably meant that nothing catastrophic had happened while he was unconscious.  Aeryn confirmed it.  “No.  You were only knocked out, although it may feel like you died for another arn or two.”

It took Aeryn several microts to work her way from standing over John to sitting cross-legged on the floor beside him.  Her movements were slower and more cautious than they had been that morning.  It was not the progression he would have expected with the passage of time.  That thought triggered another query.

“How long … ‘s I out?”

“About four arns.”

“You get hurt?”

She shook her head, and gestured toward her midsection.  “This is from twisting in the module.  I’m stiff, not damaged.  You took the full charge.  I only caught some of the backlash; I never lost consciousness.”

“Good.”  John laid still and thought for a while.  He was having trouble getting all the pieces to fit together, and a ghost of an idea kept wafting past his attention too fast to be captured.  Aside from being annoying, it repeatedly distracted his already wandering thoughts.  Whatever piece of information had gone missing was an important one.  The sense of urgency was overwhelming; it was creating an intensely unpleasant tight feeling between his shoulder blades even though he could not reassemble the underlying cause.

“Is the baby ‘kay?” he asked after several more microts’ consideration, thinking that this might be the important topic.

Aeryn’s smile disappeared.  It was replaced by a grimace that was in imminent danger of becoming a frown.  She leaned over him, and spoke slowly and deliberately, delivering a short lecture.  “The baby is in stasis, John.  There are a small number of toxins that could cause it to abort, and it could not survive a pulse blast to my stomach, but there is very little else that can harm it at this stage of development.  You have to stop basing every one of your decisions on protecting me and the baby.  What you did in the hangar was possibly the stupidest thing I have ever seen you do.”

What looked and sounded like anger was nothing more than Aeryn’s way of venting her anxiety.  He tried to joke his way out of a situation that he knew could easily turn into full-blown fury if he handled it wrong.  “Glad to hear it was … worth it.”

“It was worth it and I understand why you did it.  What you have to understand,” she said, thumping a fist in the center of his chest for emphasis, “is that protecting me is a waste of time if you get yourself killed in the process.  I do not want to have this child alone, John.  Do not pull anything like that again.  We do this together or we don’t do it at all.”

“’kay.  Point taken.”  John bit back several other far less agreeable responses.  He could not remember feeling this humiliated by a scolding since the time he had been chewed out by his teacher in front of the entire First Grade class.  His efforts to keep the conversation from turning into a full-blown argument began to crumble before an onslaught of hurt and resentment.  It did not seem right that he should have to put up with a verbal flogging as a reward for trying to protect her.  Before he had time to think about it, what might have been the most foolish thing he had ever said to Aeryn popped out of his mouth.  He recognized that it was a mistake even as his lips were forming the words, and could not get his mouth to stop.  “Next time just spank me.”

She did not even blink.  If he’d had more control over his body, he would have braced himself for a punch … or something worse.  Instead, Aeryn closed her eyes for several microts, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

“I didn’t mean that,” John said carefully into the silence.

She nodded several times, still with her eyes closed, before saying, “When you were shot, you stopped breathing for several microts.  I thought you were dead.”  Aeryn opened her eyes and looked at him.

In spite of the short, cryptic explanation, her message was clear.  Although the inside of Crichton’s head continued to feel as though half the connections were shorted out, the memory that gave her comment deeper meaning was readily accessible and as achingly vivid as if it had happened just arns earlier.

“Guarantee you won’t die in my arms again.”

His attempt to protect Aeryn had brought her most frightening nightmare to life right before her eyes.  If their roles in the hangar had been reversed, seeing her start to breathe again would have brought him close to emotional collapse.  What those handful of microts had done to Aeryn, he could only guess at.  An apology did not seem like enough at that moment, and he was incapable of providing any sort of physical reassurance.  In the end, he used Aeryn’s own words to let her know that he understood and would do his best to avoid a repeat of the day’s events.

“Together or not at all.”

It was enough.  The rigidity in her spine melted away, and Aeryn bestowed a mild, almost tolerant smile upon him, as if to say that some chivalry on his part would always be welcomed, but not the degree of blind, unthinking protectiveness that he had shown that day.

“Good,” she said.  “Do you want to get up?”

“Not yet.  I’m missing something that happened, Aeryn … something important.  What have I forgotten?”

She hesitated before answering, “There’s a lot we need to discuss and I do not know how much time we have.  I want to be sure you’re thinking clearly first.”

“My head is clear.  Fire away.”

Aeryn nodded several times.  “Start by telling me your father’s name.”

Although John knew the answer was safely stashed in his head, he could not pull it out of storage.  “I know my father’s name, and so do you,” he said, feeling both angry at her trivia question and mildly unsettled by his lapse of memory.  “Quit with the IQ tests, and get on with the important stuff.”

“Not until you tell me your father’s name.”

He made another attempt at finding the information.  The answer to what should have been a simple question remained a micro-dench out of reach no matter what he tried, teasing him with a mental version of Hide-and-Seek.  “I don’t remember,” he finally confessed.

“Then we’ll wait.  I do not want to have to repeat everything.  Let’s see if you can sit up.”

“Why can’t I remember certain things?  What’s wrong with me?”

“It’s the weapon they used.  The same thing happened to me except it wasn’t as severe.  It will pass.  Sit up, John.”  She had her hands under his shoulders and was trying to coax him into moving.

It took three tries and a significant amount of help from Aeryn.  In the end he was upright, giving him his first opportunity to examine their surroundings.  The first thing to catch his attention was his lumpy pillow, which turned out to be Aeryn’s long overcoat folded into a compact bundle.  John stared at the hummock of black leather for several microts, bombarded by an assault of memories involving the number of times throughout his childhood that his parents’ sweaters or coats had served as his pillow.  Aeryn’s effort to make him comfortable set off a peculiar reaction that involved a painfully large lump in his throat and an unwelcome urge to cry.

It was rarely the critical moments in his life that affected him in this manner.  Things like running into the intergalactic equivalent of carnivorous seaweed, getting bitten in the ass by a six-legged dog, and having Moya invaded by an unfriendly, armored version of Land of the Giants never triggered the mourning for a life he could not and did not want to resume.  It was usually something small and innocuous that set it off; it might be the turn of someone’s head that reminded him of an old friend, the growling sound that Moya sometimes made that could have been one of his dogs dreaming underneath his bed, or the quiet clank of the door to the refrigeration unit in the Center Chamber closing, which continued to remind him of a couple of beer bottles rattling against each other.  He added a new item to his list of things that could make him homesick:  Aeryn’s coat tucked under his head in order to make him more comfortable.

Aeryn’s voice interrupted his wandering contemplation of how some things never changed no matter where he was in the universe.  “Any better yet?” she asked.

He stared at her for several microts before he managed to pull his thoughts back to the present.  “No.  I feel like I’ve been lobotomized.  How long is this going to take?”

“I don’t know.”  Aeryn got to her feet and wandered around the perimeter of the cell.

John continued to sit in the middle of the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him and, since there was little else to do, idly examined their cell.  Aside from the fact that every bit of metalloid plating looked like wrought iron, the small chamber resembled a cell aboard Moya in every other way save one.  From the thick, arching support ribs to the organic looking lights, to the triangular air vents and DRD access hatches, everything was the same as a room aboard their own spacing-faring home.  The singular exception was the door.  Instead of the diagonal grating typical to a prison-ship leviathan, this was an uninterrupted sheet of biomechanoid-grown metal that looked like it would slide into the wall when opened.  Careful not to upset his balance, Crichton checked to either side and behind him.  There was no waste alcove, no water tap, and no waste funnel.

All of the clues settled into place.  “This isn’t a cell.  We’re in a storage area!  What the frell is going on?”

“Father’s name,” Aeryn said.

“Jack.”  Somewhere inside his head, the elusive repairman threw a massive circuit breaker.  Everything came back at once, including the fleeting thought that had been eluding capture.

“Kill them.  And jettison the bodies before our next starburst.”

“Damn!  He was speaking English.  Help me up.”

Aeryn did not help him to his feet.  She had him shuffle into the corner furthest from the door instead, and then she sat down facing him.  With both of them sitting cross-legged and leaning forward, they were close enough to talk without being heard from as little as a motra away.  Unless the cell was bugged, their conversation could not be overheard even if there was someone stationed outside the door.

“I tried to tell you that in the hangar,” she began.  “You weren’t listening.”

“It sank in too late.  What happened while I was busy pretending to be Tarzan saving Jane?”

“The moment you yelled, he changed the order,” Aeryn said.  “He was the one who slapped the rifle aside and kept you from getting shot by one of the other weapons.”

“Which would have killed me instead of just turning me into a moron for a few arns.”

“Correct.”  Aeryn smiled at him and bumped her forehead lightly against his.  “I didn’t notice much of a difference.”

“Thanks a bunch.”  He took one of her hands in his.  “What else did I miss?”

The briefing he received from Aeryn was so thorough and concise he assumed she had spent most of the last four arns organizing it in her mind.  She began with the instant he collapsed on the hangar floor, explaining that he had landed right on top of the DRD.

“My ribs,” he said, interrupting her.  “I assumed someone had kicked me.”

“They took you to a medical bay to make sure nothing was broken,” she said, and then recounted her trip through the leviathan, first to the medbay where both she and John were examined for injuries, and then to this closet-sized holding cell.

Aeryn described what she had seen in precise, factual terms, layering only the most strongly supported conclusions and interpretations on top of it.  By the end of the first sentence, Crichton realized that he was receiving a military reconnaissance report, and kept silent, doing his best to memorize everything she was telling him.  The summation laid out what it was like to be on a leviathan jammed with personnel, instead of wandering through Moya’s empty corridors and deserted tiers.  It meant cells that housed between six and twelve people each, based on Aeryn’s observation of multi-tiered bunks; supplies stacked to the ceiling along the walls of the corridors, maintenance bays converted into small manufacturing centers, another that had been turned into what she thought might be a vegetable garden; and passageways filled with chattering, multi-species, multi-lingual personnel, some moving purposefully while others lounged or sat on the floor, which Aeryn took as a sign that the common spaces aboard the ship were filled to overflowing.

“The medbay might take up an entire tier,” she finished.  “At a minimum, there were sixty medbeds in the section where we were taken, and there were medical scanners spaced out one to every ten beds.  I counted fifteen medical personnel on duty, including two diagnosans circulating through the area.”

“Troop transport,” John theorized, once she had delivered the last of her report.

Aeryn shook her head.  “Troop transports don’t have gardens for growing food or industrial sections for building weapons.  Several other details aren’t right either.”

“Such as?”

“No rank insignia.  There is a hierarchy because people were giving orders, but there is nothing to identify officers versus enlisted or conscripted troops.”

John rubbed the side of his head, trying to ease a lingering headache that he assumed was a byproduct of being shot with an electrified, mutant bagpipe, and then looked around the tiny chamber.  “So the closet is because they didn’t have an empty cell available.”

“That was my conclusion.”  Aeryn straightened up, stretched her back for a moment and then hunkered down close to John again.

“What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?” he said, musing over the facts Aeryn had given him.  “What’s your best guess?”

“I don’t have enough information to form a reasonable theory,” she began.

He flapped a hand back and forth several times, cutting off her objection.  “Take a wild ass guess, Aeryn.  I don’t need a mathematical proof.  You’re the expert on things that go boom, and they’ve got lots of things that go boom aboard.  Take a stab in the dark.”

She held up one finger, indicating that more than a one possibility was about to be presented for his consideration.  “They may be deserters from a larger force.”

“Except you don’t like that idea for some reason,” John said, interpreting her tone of voice.

“From what I saw, their morale is good.  There were no arguments, no fights.  These people are living in extremely close quarters without bickering.  And they’re disciplined.  Someone is maintaining order.”

“We could use some lessons from them aboard Moya.  Okay, toss the deserters theory.  What’s next?”

Aeryn raised a second finger.  “Remnants of a larger force.”

“Cut off from everyone else or the only survivors?” John asked.

“No way to know.”

“You like that theory,” he said.

Aeryn nodded her agreement.  “I haven’t seen enough to be sure, but what I did see, fits well.”

“Okay, call that Choice Number One.  What’s the next option?”

Aeryn held up three fingers.  “I haven’t a frelling clue what’s going on here.”

“With our track record, that’s probably the most likely.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.  Your turn, John.  How could he know English?”

Crichton held up three fingers.

“No frelling clue,” Aeryn said.

The lock mechanism let out its peculiar, quiet warble and the door began to slide open.  “We may be about to find out,” John said.

It took Crichton two tries before he managed to stagger to his feet, and an additional four microts to grab Aeryn’s outstretched hand and help her up as well.  By the time they turned to face their visitors, there were three armed guards stationed on either side of the open door, and the sandy-haired sebacean was standing two steps inside the cell.  The delvian who had been issuing orders in the hangar bay was there as well, a step behind and to one side of the sebacean.  No one spoke.

After several microts of silence, Crichton said, “Eight against one.  You must think I’m a real dangerous man!”

The sebacean started to speak, paused to look at John more closely, and then shook his head.  He paced the scant motra to one side, and then back again.  Everyone in the room remained silent.  Finally, apparently coming to a decision, he used a fast jerk of his chin to indicate that he was addressing John, and said, “You need to answer some questions.  If I don’t like what I hear, I will shoot her in an arm or a leg, and then we will try it again.  If I don’t like the next set of answers, we will work our way toward the center of her body until you cooperate.  There isn’t going to be any screwing around here.  Got that?”

For the second time in a matter of arns, they were using a threat against Aeryn to control him.  John understood that he had foolishly revealed a vulnerable spot in his defenses, and they were not going to be hesitant about exploiting that weakness if it meant getting whatever they wanted.  The danger to Aeryn was real and imminent.  Smothering an overwhelming desire to argue or at least demand a few answers of his own, Crichton nodded.

“Who trained you?”  The sebacean watched John intently.

“Trained me to do what?” John fired right back.

“Shoot her in the foot,” the sebacean ordered.

“NO!  Wait!  No, you don’t have to do that!”  John waved his hands desperately at the guards and stepped in front of Aeryn, blocking them from taking a shot.  “Just tell me what you want to know!  Trained me to do what?  If you mean getting shot by Dr. Skreeth and his Electronic Mayhem, that part comes natural to me!  The only thing I do better than pointing guns at the wrong people is get complete strangers pissed off at me enough to shoot first and ask questions later.  Ask her!”  He pointed over his shoulder at Aeryn.

Her response was far calmer than Crichton’s desperate attempt at an explanation.  “It’s the truth. He does.”

The sebacean’s shoulders slumped and he began shaking his head again.

“Sir?” the delvian asked.

Crichton focused his attention on the relationship between what he had previously assumed were a superior and a subordinate, seeing and hearing for himself the lack of definitive rank that Aeryn had mentioned.  The delvian’s quiet prompt was delivered with the deference expected of a lower ranked officer, but there was also a relaxed familiarity that could only come from an equal … or a highly trusted advisor.  John continued to watch the interplay between the two, adjusting his assumptions with each additional word and movement.

“He’s almost too good.  There’s no way they could know a couple of the things he’s said just in the past few seconds.  But at the same time, everything is skewed a few degrees off center.  It’s as though they didn’t get their intelligence right or he memorized it a hair wrong.  They’ve been word perfect up until now.  So this could be something other than what we think or a new ploy.”

The sebacean turned from the hushed conversation and considered the pair of prisoners.  He pointed at Aeryn and then at John as he began what was for them a bewildering explanation.  “The scans indicate that she’s off-the-shelf sebacean with nothing tricky thrown in.  You, on the other hand, set off every single one of the alarms we’ve installed in the scanners.  But they’ve had some success in the past at altering sebacean genetics to appear human, so that’s not definitive.”

He ran his hand through his hair several times, setting free a lavish cowlick in the back and an equally unruly section of bangs.  The combination gave him a deceptively boyish look, as though a roguish, older version of Huck Finn was hiding inside his body and had made a half-hearted takeover bid.  That was as far as the similarity extended, however.  There was no mistaking the thoroughly adult, potentially lethal level of tension radiating from the wiry body.  He took a step back so he was behind the guards instead of in front of them, propped his hands on his hips, and closed his eyes.

Crichton used the moment to look directly at Aeryn for a microt.  Her eyes flickered in his direction, she nodded, and then she returned to watching the group by the door with the deceptively calm expression that meant she was in full Peacekeeper mode, ready for a fight.  John did his best to copy her relaxed vigilance.  He let his eyes rest on one spot, watching no specific person and concentrating on the entire group by the door at the same time.  His attention kept wandering, however, drifting back to the small bit of information that Aeryn’s nod had confirmed was significant.  The trip to the medbay while he was unconscious had not been to check for injuries.  It had been to verify that they were -- or in John’s case, were not -- sebacean.  Their futures seemed to hang on that one revelation, and he did not like where his train of thought was leading him.

Even worse, it was distracting him from the more immediate life or death crisis.  Crichton shoved the mystery to one side, and focused on the sebacean and his entourage.

After several more microts had passed in silence, the delvian asked, “What do you want to do?”

The sebacean rubbed one eyebrow with his thumb several times before answering.  “If I was smart, I’d space them this instant.”

John started to argue.  Aeryn’s hand caught his and gave him a warning squeeze.  When he checked to see why she was stopping him, he received a headshake so small he doubted anyone else in the chamber would have noticed it.  It was followed by a flicker of her eyes toward the sebacean and back, and then a mild narrowing that told him to stay silent and wait.

“Do it.  It is the only safe alternative,” the delvian said.

The sebacean straightened up, stretched his neck to one side for a microt, and then relaxed.  “You know why I can’t.”

“That is not a good enough reason,” the mystifying argument went on.  “Let me take care of them.”

“No.  We’re not going to play this one safe.”  The sebacean met Crichton’s gaze squarely.  “The dangerous man line.  Who were you quoting?”

“What’s going on?” Aeryn asked quietly.

John held three fingers up where she could see them.  “It was a line from a movie,” he said for her benefit.  Turning back to what he now knew was either another human or the weirdest trick that had been played on him in the last four cycles, he said, “Either John Wayne or Richard Boone.  Take your pick.  They both used it.”

“And then the fucking Muppets.  There’s no way they know about Muppets,” the man said.  “Next question, and don’t screw with it because the wrong answer will get you both dead in a hurry.  Who am I?”

Crichton held up three fingers, deliberately ignoring the fact that it would not have any meaning to anyone but Aeryn.  “No frelling clue.  It’s pretty obvious that you’re from Earth, which raises three or four thousand questions about how you got here -- wherever here is -- but you could be Marvin the Martian for all I know.”

The man stood with one hand on his hip, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand for several microts, and then seemed to come to a decision.  He gestured to his escort, including the delvian with a jerk of his head.  “Take off.  You too, Kaillin.  I’ll risk it.”

The delvian held his ground.  “We won’t risk it,” he said.

“Take a hike.  As much as I can’t believe it, I think this is exactly what it looks like.  Right now it’s impossible to find a spot aboard this tub without a couple dozen people standing around anyway, so I’ll have help if this goes sour.  Get some rest.  You’re going to need it.”

The guards filed out of the crowded space without an argument.  The delvian, Kaillin, lingered to make one more suggestion.  He made no effort to disguise his hostility toward the leviathan’s two most recent arrivals.  “We have not finished checking their ship.  We need to starburst in case someone is tracking them … and now us.”

There was a five microt delay during which no one moved, and then the man John had begun to think of as ‘Huck Finn’ said, “Pat says we can starburst in a little over a quarter of an hour.”  He waved Kaillin away, waited for him to leave, and then turned his attention back to John and Aeryn.

“I’ve got it now,” Crichton said immediately.  “From the way he’s watching over you, he’s got to be Commander Ryker.  That would make you Captain Picard and we’re on board the Enterprise!”

“I can tell you’re going to be real fun to have around,” the man shot back.  “Either that or a complete pain in the ass.”

Aeryn stepped closer to John and slid her arm into his.  “My advice would be to put your money on the second.”  The comment was light-hearted; her tone was not.

“You come as a boxed set,” the man said, eyeing their proximity.

It was the closest thing to a relaxed comment anyone aboard this ship had said to them so far, and it teased John with the possibility that he might be allowed to ask some questions of his own.  There was so much he wanted to know; things like who ‘Huck Finn’ was and how he had gotten here, and more importantly, where the frell ‘here’ was in the first place, and whether he knew how they could get back to Moya.  One thing about the situation was clear however:  they had not yet reached the point where they were welcome aboard the leviathan, and that meant that his questions were better saved for later.  He settled for draping his arm around Aeryn’s shoulders and leaning against her, trying hard to create an air of nonchalance.  “Call us Butch and Sundance.  We’re the Bonnie and Clyde of the Uncharted Territories.”

“Don’t get too relaxed,” the man said, “I haven’t made up my mind about this yet.  I’m going to call you John, because that’s what she called you.  I’d prefer you keep your mouths shut until we sort this out, but if you need to get my attention, I answer to Nate.”  He raised his eyebrows in Aeryn’s direction.

“Aeryn,” John said, fighting down an urge to provide her entire name and rank as he had received it the first day he had met her.  Aside from any other consideration, spouting ‘Officer Aeryn Sun, formerly Special Peacekeeper Commando, Icarian Company, Pleisar Regiment,’ would give away too much information under their current circumstances.  Ignoring the fact that he probably would have received a swift kick from Aeryn, which was reason enough keep quiet, he decided that if Nate was going to play it close to the vest with information, then so was he.

“From the way you’re behaving, I’m assuming he’s human,” Aeryn said to John.

“How am I behaving?”

“The way a Ghorellian fire lizard does when it is fighting over disputed breeding territory.”

Nate shook his head.  “There’s no dispute here.  I’m the Big Dog on this patch of turf.  What I say goes, so don’t piss me off.  Keep your gonads set on low, your manners set on high, and we’ll get through this without either of you getting summarily tossed out an airlock.  Let’s go.  This is easier to explain with a little Show-and-Tell than by talking it through.”  He waved his hand for them to follow, turned his back on the two people he claimed he considered a threat, and strode into the corridor with a carelessness that bordered on antagonism.  His relaxed, hands-in-the-pockets stroll seemed to say, ‘Attack me if you think you can succeed’.

Crichton stepped aside, allowing Aeryn to go next, and together they hurried after the other human.  The microt they stepped into the corridor, they discovered the source of Nate’s confidence.  Just as he had said to Kaillin, the tier was jammed with black-uniformed personnel.  Only a complete fool or someone on a suicide mission would have attempted to attack the person who -- provided his ‘Big Dog’ claim was accurate -- was the ship’s leader.

Nate set a fast pace, weaving through the crowds and striding over out-stretched legs or the occasional sleeping body with the sort of ease that comes from extensive practice.  Aeryn did almost as well by putting her arrogant Peacekeeper glower to good use, in most cases opening a path with little more than a look.  In part because it required less effort but also because he did not want to get separated from Aeryn for even an instant, John stayed right on her heels, sacrificing dozens of opportunities to examine the interior of the ship in more detail.  Assuming they survived whatever this other human had in store for them, there would be sufficient time later to learn more about this oversized leviathan and its galactically cosmopolitan crew.

Dodging around groups of chattering uniformed personnel and trying to keep up with Aeryn left John little time to consider the only two theories he had formed to explain Nate’s presence aboard the ship.  The first possibility was that he had been part of a mission to recreate the Farscape 1 experiment and had suffered an identical fate.  A different entry angle would have sent the second ship careening through an entirely different portion of the wormhole nexus, with the result that he would have been spat out somewhere other than the Uncharted Territories.  The biggest flaw with this theory was that if this Nate person had been sent to recreate the flight of the Farscape 1, he should have known who John Crichton was and what he looked like.  And Nate very definitely had not recognized him.

John put on a burst of speed to keep up with Aeryn, and wished they could slow down enough for him to discuss his thoughts with her.  As humbling as it was to have his preconceptions filleted and handed back to him on a platter, Aeryn rarely overlooked the portions of a situation that lay in his habitual blind spots.

Before he could move on to considering Unpleasant Explanation #2, the constant din of chatter was drowned out by three deafening whoops from what sounded like an alarm claxon.  Nate swerved to one side and grabbed on to a protruding edge of some bulkhead plating.  For as far as John could see in both directions, every single person had moved to the outsides of the passageway and were either hanging on to some portion of the walls or lights, or had at least one arm wrapped around someone else who did.

Nate pointed toward a half-motra section of unoccupied wall alongside a support rib.  “You’re going to want to hold on to something, and you had better do it fast.”

There was only one logical explanation for the claxon and the way everyone was behaving.  John lunged for the free bit of internal bulkhead, jammed himself into the corner so he was securely braced with his legs, and then wrapped both arms around Aeryn and held on tight.  She snaked an arm behind his head and grabbed on to something behind his body.

“Starburst,” she said, using tone of voice to turn it into both a statement and a question.

Their noses were barely a dench apart.  It was too good an opportunity to waste.  He stole a quick kiss.  She did not seem to mind.  The opposite, in fact.  It lasted longer than he had expected.  “That’s my guess.  How you holding up?”

She grasped him a little tighter with the arm that was wrapped around his waist and bestowed a subdued but contented smile on him.  “I’m fine as long as I’m with you.”

“What do you suppose happens when something this big --”

Later he would have time to be thankful that he had been facing toward the front of the ship instead of the rear, since it meant that the burst of acceleration wound up slamming the thick support rib into his body instead of abruptly moving away from him.  The other situation would have left them both suspended in midair with nothing to cushion their impact against the nearest solid object.  At the time it happened, however, it was all he could do not to yell with pain when the sudden increase in velocity smashed Aeryn’s body into his already-aching ribs and then pinned his ostensibly round body into a square corner.  Luckily the entire process lasted less than ten microts.  There was a sizzling crackling sort of a boom, a split-microt sensation of weightlessness, and then the ride steadied out.  All that remained to let them know they were still in starburst was a deep thrumming that emanated from the floor plates, as though a city-sized generator was located denches below their feet.

John set Aeryn back on her feet, and then pried his way out of his corner with both elbows.  “You okay?”

She nodded, looked up and down the passageway, and rubbed her midriff absentmindedly.  “That was impressive.  It did not feel like a standard entry into starburst.”

“More like a running start,” he said.  “Now I’m a little concerned about what happens when this monster comes out of starburst.  Hope it’s not as bad as getting into it.”

They stood side by side and watched while all around them people untangled themselves and resumed whatever they had been doing before the claxon had sounded.  In the space of five microts the corridor looked no different than it did prior to starburst.

“Move it!” Nate yelled at them.  He was already at the end of the corridor, gesturing for them to catch up.

“Rush, rush, rush,” John muttered, and then asked Aeryn, “You know where we’re going?”

“Some place located treblin side and marginally aft of mid-hull.  If this were Moya, I would say we were headed for a hangar bay.”

Aeryn’s assessment turned out to be correct.  They followed their guide down several vertical shafts, worked their way cross-tier so they were approaching the leviathan’s outer hull, moving faster as the crowds of personnel gradually thinned out, and finally emerged into an empty maintenance bay.  It was the first empty chamber Crichton could remember seeing since they had left the closet-sized prison cell.  In light of the uniformly crowded passageways, it seemed like a waste of available space.

“Off limits to most personnel,” Nate said, anticipating John’s question.

“The door is wide open,” Crichton said.  “Anyone could wander in here.”

Nate wove his way around the workbenches and several unidentifiable chunks of circuitry, headed for the hangar doors.  “They have their orders.  Aside from gambling, drinking, farting, and fornicating, they tend to do what they’re told … when they feel like it.”

“Soldiers, but not soldiers,” Aeryn said to John, confirming her earlier guess.

“Resistance fighters would be a better label,” Nate yelled over the rumble of the hangar doors opening.  “There’s only one formal military organization in this stretch of the universe, and trust me, you would not want to join them.”  He gave the activator circuit a slap, bringing the doors to a halt, and motioned for John and Aeryn to lead the way into the hangar.

“Awwwwww … FRELL!” Crichton yelled the moment he passed between the huge doors.  “I knew it.  I just frelling knew it!”

“What’s going on?” Aeryn asked.

John stepped to one side.  Sitting half hidden in the shadows was another Farscape module, clearly not the one that had brought them to this leviathan.  This one was larger than Crichton’s by slightly more than half, and was far less battered and scorched.  There were no soot streaks, no pitting or fading, and the heat-resistant ceramic fuselage looked as new as the day it had been launched, which made it easy to read the logos emblazoned on the side.  The familiar blue and red circle with white lettering was there, except this one said NASA instead of the more familiar IASA.  And in front of it, gleaming under the muted glow of leviathan lights, where John’s had no decoration at all, it read “Farscape 1”.

“Not only are we not in the right portion of the universe, Aeryn, we’re not even in the right god damn reality!  We’ve jumped realities.”

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

CHAPTER 6

Aeryn let out the deep breath she had been holding.  It emerged in the form of a hushed guttural snarl, forced out between tightly clenched teeth.  The small exercise in physical restraint was supposed to help get the rest of her reactions under control.  It did not work the way she had hoped.

Dismay, disbelief, disappointment, and several other unpleasant emotions that she could not put a name to tangled into an overwhelming, unstoppable monster that carried the metallic flavor of fury.  Riding on the crest of that wave was a form of grief she had never experienced before:  one that had to do with an intense yearning to spend just one or two solar days in the relative tranquility of Moya’s tiers.  The opportunity had been ripped away from her just as she was beginning to adjust to the reality of being returned to the safety of Moya, and the resulting ache was urging her to do something physically violent.

It was more than losing the brief interval to rest and heal.  It was linked to the deep, dreamless sleep she had enjoyed last night after John had convinced her that it was all right to sleep draped on top of him.  Just thinking about lying in bed with him, feeling safe, protected, and loved, ratcheted the anger up an additional notch.  She had been counting on at least two more such nights before they reached Katratzi, peaceful nights when she could reacquaint herself with John Crichton and all the facets of him that she loved so much.  Standing in the hangar bay, staring in shock at the proof that they were even more lost than they had suspected, she felt as though that interval had been stolen from her, ripped out of her hands by a cheerful, blue-eyed thief who had been more interested in exploring a quirk of space and energy than he had been in spending time with her.

Logic said it was not true.  From the instant she had regained consciousness to discover that she had been freed from the scarrans and was already in John’s arms, he had shown nothing but concern for her health and welfare.  He had not wanted to bring her along when he went out in the module; he had argued against it.  If the brief idyll she had hoped for had been cut short, it was her own fault.  But the cold, unadorned truth of how she had arrived aboard this strange leviathan could not hold up against the disappointment she experienced the moment John announced that they had been flung into an entirely different reality.

Hurt won out over reason and restraint.  She turned on John.

“You … IDIOT!  You were certain that was not a wormhole!  After all the cycles you’ve spent chasing after those useless things, are you telling me now that you cannot recognize one when you are about to fly into it?”

“I told you!  That was not a wormhole!” John yelled back.  “I know wormholes the way Rygel knows his way around the foods storage unit, and that was not a wormhole!  And I didn’t choose to fly into it, Aeryn!  Just like every other weird spatial anomaly on this end of the universe, it reached out and gobbled me up!”

“And me along with you!”

“Not … by … choice!” he yelled, spacing out the words with a full microt’s delay between each short syllable.  Finished, John spun around and stalked toward the dimly gleaming spacecraft squatting in the shadows, hands on his hips and his shoulders tucked up in the familiar position that said he was fighting to control his own anger.

“I should have shot you,” she said more quietly.  “I knew we should not have gone out there.”

“Hey!”  He crossed the short distance between them in three long steps and jabbed a forefinger at her, using it to punctuate his sentences.  “I did not make this decision on my own.  I don’t remember you coming up with a better plan!  The floor was open to suggestions, Aeryn.  The best idea you managed to come up with involved threatening to shoot something!  It’s the Aeryn Sun solution to every crisis!  Shoot it!  Doesn’t matter if it’s animal, mineral or vegetable, the solution is always the same!”

She slapped his hand away.  “I at least knew your plan was not going to work out the way you expected!  D’Argo was right.  Leaving Moya was asking for trouble.”

“And if we didn’t do what Pilot asked, Moya would have done her impression of a beached whale.  We could have sat in that one spot until we were all old and gray, slowly driving each other absolutely frickin’ NUTS!”  John turned on his heel and strode toward the duplicate module.

“As if this is any better!” she yelled after him.

John spun to face her.  “You’re free to leave any time you want!” he bellowed.  “Keys are in the ignition.”

Feeling impossibly juvenile and at the same time incapable of getting it to stop, she continued to yell at him.  “Maybe I will!”

Expending an entire lung full of air on three small words felt good.  Venting her frustration felt better.  Being together with John and having him yell back at her instead of giving her a cold stare and walking off without a comment felt as though she had stumbled into Cholak’s paradise.  It was a schizophrenic kind of anger:  consisting of equal amounts pleasure and inflamed irritation, both joy and trial.  “Maybe I will!” she yelled a second time, putting more effort into it, finding satisfaction in the release.

“Good!”

“FINE!”

“Pick up a quart of milk and some bread while you’re out!”  John flicked his hand at her, motioning her away, and resumed his trajectory toward the duplicate module.

Aeryn went after him, still furious but with the first twinges of interest in the look-alike module starting to replace the worst of the anger.  “Anything else you need while I’m shopping for you?” she taunted once she caught up to John.

“No!  Have a good time!”

“I WILL!”  They came to a stop next to the module, turned and glared at each other, noses a scant four denches apart.

Nate’s voice cut into the brief interval of peace.  “Hey!  Fred and Ethel!  You done arguing yet?”

“NO!” they yelled together, followed by John’s solo bellow, “We’re barely getting started!”

Nate had remained at the half-open hangar door, right where he had stopped when they first entered the oversized chamber.  He had one shoulder propped nonchalantly against the dull black surface, raised eyebrows almost hidden beneath the disorderly shock of bangs, all of which reminded Aeryn of an instructor watching a pair of exceptionally inept recruits practicing with shock weapons:  simultaneously amused and wary.

“Don’t stop on my account,” he said.  “Just let me know when it’s safe to come over there.”

“You haven’t given us our weapons back,” John said.  “We never haul off and punch total strangers.  Shooting them is quicker and easier.”

Aeryn used the distraction to shoulder her way in front of John.  She stretched up with one hand, intending to grab one of the handholds and pull herself up until she could reach the step with her foot.

“Wait,” John said, suddenly quiet.  “You’re already stiff from this morning.  Don’t make it worse.”  Both of his hands grabbed her firmly about the hips and she was levitated upward.  Her assisted flight lasted just long enough for her to notice the way her pelvis fit neatly into his hands, neither too large for him to grasp her securely nor so small that he had to dig in with his fingers.  It was a comforting pressure, similar to the all around clasp of the padded harness she had worn for arns at a time while undergoing her initial null-gravity training.  It held the promise of protection, safeguarding her from harm, and was so perfectly designed that she could quite happily remain within its confines all day.

Somewhere between the hangar floor and the moment when Aeryn jammed her foot into the module’s indented step, the anger disappeared.  She was not sure how it happened or why.  It might have been the reminder resting beneath her hands and feet that John had been stranded in his module on several occasions over the past cycles and had survived every time; or it might have been the realization that she was happier here, alongside him, than she would have been if she had stayed aboard Moya and watched him disappear into the mysterious anomaly.  For all that her current situation was infuriating, the other prospect -- wandering Moya’s corridors arn after endless arn, unable to sleep or eat, wondering where John was and what was happening to him -- was far worse.  If she had been given the choice in advance, she would have eagerly accepted this particular outcome.

John’s hands stayed with her for several additional microts, pressing firmly but with care against her lower back, ensuring that she would not lose her balance until she located and triggered the canopy release.  He did not let go until she had a firm grasp on the lip of the cockpit.  Aeryn stepped to the side, making the awkward transition onto the module’s wing so he could climb up beside her.

When she looked down to make sure he had enough room, John was no longer there.  He had begun a circuit of the larger, newer-looking module, occasionally peering beneath it, examining the external features.  She enjoyed watching him at moments like this, on the rare occasions when John was allowed to step back into his natural element.  When it happened, a subtle transformation always occurred, consisting primarily of a shift in the way he carried himself.  In spite of the black leather and the hardened, more competent movements, the person she had met for the first time several cycles earlier always seemed to emerge:  eager, enthusiastic, delighting in the pursuit of new knowledge, concentrating more on what was going on inside his head than what his body was doing.

On this particular day she caught a glimpse of the Earth-trained pilot he had been before his fateful mission, one who was performing a preflight inspection similar to the checks she always performed on the Prowler before taking it out.  She tried to envision what he might have looked like then:  a few cycles younger, blissfully unaware of the cruelties that lay ahead, possibly dressed in a uniform, with Earth’s yellow sun beating down on him as he inspected the ship he had designed and helped build.  A mixture of past and present, old habits overlain with new behaviors, moved around the nose of the module and began a methodical journey down the far side, hands drifting lightly along the gleaming hull.

John came to a stop at the front of the wing.  Glancing over his shoulder to make sure Aeryn was watching, he pointed at the smooth, unbroken surface.  There were no hinges.  Unlike his module, the wings on this one would not fold upward.  All he offered in the way of commentary was, “Fixed.”

“So what?” Nate asked.  He had left his spot by the door and was drifting along behind Crichton.

“How did you get it in the shuttle?” John asked.

Nate blinked several times, looked at Aeryn, and then looked back at John.  “What shuttle?”

“Never mind.  Wrong universe.”  John shook his head and continued the inspection, gradually working his way around the tail and back toward where Aeryn was standing on top of the second wing.  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating Nate.  “You do realize this bastard knew we didn’t belong in this universe right from the first moment his trusty blue sidekick summoned him to look at my module, and he was going to shoot us anyway.  Right?”

“That occurred to me.”  For several microts the image of John collapsing to the hangar floor seemed more real to Aeryn than her current surroundings.  The aching knot in her stomach and the unpleasant chill lodged between her shoulder blades were every bit as intense as when she had originally felt the sensations.  Fury made a vigorous attempt at an encore.  Aeryn fought it down, for once thankful that she was not armed.  If she had been standing closer to Nate, the urge to lash out might have more than she could resist.

Their host did not seem perturbed by the anger aimed in his direction.  If anything, he looked as though he had been expecting it.  “The motherfu--”  Nate stopped short, glanced guiltily at Aeryn, and then started over.  “The force we’re up against has tried infiltrating this command several times.  We couldn’t take a chance that they had come up with something new.”

“Shoot first, oops later?  Hell of a way to greet people,” John said.  “You’ll never win over the neighbors that way.”

“I’m not interested in winning over my damned neighbors.  Shoot first works just fine in this part of the universe.”

Nate’s reply held a new tone, one that Aeryn had not heard in his voice up until that particular moment.  She had detected anger, aggression, and caution while he was talking to them in their storage closet prison cell, and had already seen the same light-hearted humor that John continued to display even after surviving four cycles at this end of the universe.  What she had not heard or observed so far was the emotion lacing his latest comment:  Hate.  She watched the two humans finish the inspection, seeing more than a few similarities in the way they moved and behaved, and wondered about the sorts of people and events Nate had encountered since he had emerged from his version of a wormhole.  Any conclusions she might have reached were interrupted by John’s arrival beside her.  External inspection completed, John pulled himself up so he was perched next to Aeryn, giving him his first look at the interior.

“Two seater,” he said immediately.

“Pilot in the front, brains in the back,” Nate explained.

“That would make this my spot.”  Aeryn slid into the rear seat.

John stayed where he was, clinging to the outside of the module.  “What happened to that whole superior pilot thing you’ve been flogging me over the head with for the last four cycles?”

Without a word, Aeryn got to her feet, stepped carefully over the bank of instrumentation packed into the limited space in the rear of the cockpit, and dropped into the front seat with a quiet whoosh of air from the seat cushions.

“That’s what I thought.”  John made the vaulting transition from the recessed step to the back seat in one bounding leap.

Nate leaned on the nose of the craft, propped his chin on top of crossed forearms, and watched them as they examined the interior of his ship.

Aeryn flipped the main power breaker to the on position.  The instrumentation and display screens came to life.  “The controls are identical to how yours used to look.”

“Mmmm,” John agreed from the back seat.  “No hetch drive though, and no biomechanoid circuity or power cells.”

“I was just the chauffeur,” Nate called to them.  “The front seat is mine.  Someone else was in back.  I understand enough to do preflight and make sure it’s space worthy, and that’s about it.  Installing a hetch drive in the golf cart is way down on our resident mechanic’s to-do list.”

“You don’t know anything about wormholes,” John said, sounding thoughtful.  “So you’re stuck here.”

Nate made a half-shrugging, half-nodding motion, suddenly reticent about his past.  “Correct.”

John jumped down from the module’s cockpit, then turned and extended a hand to Aeryn, steadying her descent.  When they were both securely on the hangar floor he turned to address Nate.  “Great!  We’ve had the grand tour, and now you know we don’t belong here!  Take us back to where you picked us up, let us hop back in our own ship, and stuff us back down the rabbit hole so we can go home.”

Nate motioned for them to leave the hangar, herding them back through the doors.  “It’s not that simple,” he began.

“Why not?” John and Aeryn asked together.

“Because the rabbit hole isn’t there anymore.”

“Crap,” John said.  “Ask me how I knew that was coming.  Where is it?”

Nate hesitated for more than ten microts, clearly debating whether to confide in them, before admitting, “It’s right here with us.”  He gestured toward the off-limits maintenance bay and its assorted chunks of electronics.  “It’s an experimental project we’ve been working on.”

“Turn it on and let us go back where we belong,” Aeryn said.

Nate slapped the circuit that triggered the hangar door mechanism.  Everyone waited while the doors rumbled shut.  He shrugged, looking inexplicably embarrassed.  “We can’t.  It doesn’t work very well.  It’s erratic as all hell and totally unpredictable, which is why we were somewhere else while the test was being conducted.”

Aeryn said, “The small ship we saw docking.  You were coming back to pick it up.”

“We didn’t realize the device had worked at all until Kaillin got a look at your ship,” said Nate.  “The thing is so unstable, the only safe way to test it is to drop off an unmanned craft that’s programmed to run a series of tests and collect data, and then come back to pick it up.”

“Your new toy was working all right,” John said.  “It was punching into our universe at random.  It was our bad luck that random happened to be right in our path.  It was --”  He turned in a circle, running a fast glance over the equipment scattered around the maintenance bay.  Aeryn watched with rapt interest, having recognized the look John frequently got whenever all the pieces of a galaxy-sized puzzle were falling into place inside his mind.  “Parallel universes!  You’re working on an interdimensional gateway of some type!  You’re trying to jump into alternate realities.”

Nate took the exclamation in stride.  “We call the openings rifts … interdimensional rifts.  We didn’t intend to use it to travel from one universe to another.  You winding up here wasn’t part of the plan.”

John said, “Rift, tear, corridor, storm drain, butt crack:  it doesn’t matter what you call it.  We don’t need one of your rifts to get back where we belong.  Just drop us off at the nearest wormhole and I should be able to slither our way home on our own.”

Aeryn stepped in front of John, forcing the excited movements and gestures to come to a stop.  “The last time you tried that, you didn’t wind up where you planned.”

“I’m getting better at it.  The alternative is staying here … wherever here is!”

“And if you get it wrong?  Again?  Where will that leave us this time?”

“Excuse me!” Nate broke in.  “Before you launch into another family love fest, let me point out that no one here knows how to find a wormhole, least of all me.  Unless you have a Triple-A map with the entrance ramps clearly marked and numbered, there isn’t going to be any dropping you off anywhere.”

Before either of the men could say anything more, Aeryn interrupted with a new question.  She had been considering the presence of the look-alike Farscape module and the two humans ever since Nate had claimed that he did not have the skills or knowledge necessary to modify the module’s systems.  His latest stream of intermittently unintelligible English, so similar to the sorts of comments that would pour out of Crichton -- usually at the most inopportune moments -- triggered the thought that had been escaping her grasp for some time.  “John, if this is an unrealized universe, shouldn’t he be you?”

“It’s not a given.  If I never got interested in physics, things might have turned out differently.”

“The Farscape project was your theory,” she said, still confused by the combination of discrepancies and similarities.  “How can he be here without you?”

“It’s just science.  It doesn’t need me for it to work.  If my parents had dropped me on my head one time too often when I was little, I might never have made it into MIT or come up with the theoretical basis for the Farscape project.  Sooner or later, someone was going to figure it out.  All I did was beat everyone to it.  In this reality, I’m probably on Earth flipping burgers or practicing psychology, and someone else came up with the theory.  Him.”

Nate waved a hand in the direction of the hangar doors, indicating the larger-sized module parked out of sight on the other side of the barrier.  “Not me, brother.  I already told you:  I was nothing more than the driver.”

“None of this” -- Aeryn gestured toward the maintenance bay and the hangar doors -- “seems to bother you.  Our presence here does not seem to bother you.”

Nate scrubbed at his scalp for several moments.  The rough massage left even the normally less unruly sections of his hair standing on end.  It created a mildly astonished look that did not fade when his expression shifted.  “After everything I’ve been through over the last few years, having someone show up from a parallel universe doesn’t seem all that strange.  Plus I’ve got advanced training in coping with the unexpected.”

John eyed him warily.  “NASA pilot training.”

“Yup!  Among other things.”  Nate grinned at him, clearly expecting something more.

John ventured a guess. “Military though, not civilian.”

“You got it.”

“Air Force or Navy?”

“Neither.  Lieutenant Colonel Nate Grissom, Hornet driver, U.S. Marines, at your service.”

“Good god.  It doesn’t get any worse than that.”

“John,” Aeryn said.  In the space of a few microts, the conversation had shifted from merely confusing to total gibberish.

He turned toward her before she could ask him to translate the more baffling portions.  “You’re going to like this guy a lot.  With the exception of the Hell’s Angels, his outfit is about as close to the Pleisars as Earth has to offer.  The two of you can sit around for arns swapping stories about shooting people and blowing things up.”

“Hornet driver,” she said next, repeating an especially baffling portion of the fast exchange between the two men.  “I thought a hornet was some kind of insect.”

“Also the name for a military airplane,” John said.  “Think Prowler built for flying in the atmosphere.  Supersonic, lots of missiles, one pilot.  Goes fast, stops short, lands on boats.  It’s right up your alley, Aeryn.”

“Ply-sar?” Grissom asked next, trying out what was obviously a new word for him.

John provided yet another succinct explanation.  “Regiment within the Peacekeepers.”

“Peace keepers?  You mean like U.N. troops?” Nate said.

Aeryn’s voice was soft and low, delivering a hushed insight meant for John’s ears only.  “There are no Peacekeepers here.”  She asked more loudly, “Sebacean military?”

Nate made a fast, dismissive gesture with both hands.  “No such critter.  Sebaceans are peaceful folk.  They’re mostly farmers and artisans, with a few religious mystics thrown in just to keep things from getting boring.  The nebari had the beginnings of a defense force pulled together at one point, but they got their asses kicked about two hundred years ago and never recovered.”

John looked toward Aeryn, raised eyebrows asking her if she had any additional input.  When she gave him a shrug and a minimal shake of the head for an answer, he swiveled back toward Nate.  “Then who are you fighting?  Who are the bad guys?”

Their host’s expression switched from an amiable grin to a wary grimace in under a microt.  It stayed that way for about two microts, then eased back into something friendlier, but no less cautious.  “That,” he said slowly, “is going to have to wait until I get a better idea of who you are.  I don’t know the first thing about your allegiances or how stuff works in your universe.”

Anything Aeryn had intended to say was pre-empted by a series of quiet chiming tones that, as far as she could tell, emanated from the walls themselves.

“Coming out of starburst,” Grissom said.  “Relax.  It’s nothing like entry into it.”

Both Aeryn and John grabbed on to a workbench anyway.  It wasn’t necessary.  The transition from starburst to normal space was every bit as anti-climatic as their entry had been awe-inspiring.  A quiet susurrence ran from one end of the maintenance bay to the other, as though the leviathan itself was exhaling, a mild tremor was transmitted through her boot soles, triggering an irritating itch under the arch of each foot, and then it was over.  By the time they relaxed their grip, Grissom, who had not bothered to brace himself, was already half way to the door.

“Long starburst,” John said.  “That had to be over half an arn.”

“You can expect a longer one in a few hours,” Nate said.  “We’ve got a long way to go, and we’re in a bit of a hurry.”

John ushered Aeryn forward so she was following Nate, and then fell in behind her.  “That’s a load of dren.  You’re in so much of a hurry you decided to stop along the way to pick up your automated space guinea pig!  You’re taking us on along on your magical mystery tour whether we want to come or not, and in the meantime, you’re feeding us half truths and outright lies.  How about a little human-to-human honesty here!”

Nate stopped walking.  “Look --”  He paused long enough to scratch at a spot behind his right ear, took a deep breath, and started over.  “It’s been four years since I’ve been around anyone who understands the things I talk about.”

“I know the feeling,” John said.

Nate ignored the interruption.  “Part of me wants to treat you like a long lost brother.  Every time I open my mouth there are half a dozen things I want to tell you.  But I don’t know you, and I can’t trust you with some of the things that are going on here.  Not yet.  Not until I find out a little more about what you know about the Uncharted Territories and what’s going on in this little corner of the universe.”

John held both arms out to the sides.  “Trust your instincts.  I’m lovable, loyal, and trustworthy.  What more do you need to know?”

“Depending on the person you ask, the last two might be right,” Aeryn said.  “The first one is still in question.”

Nate laughed.  “That actually tells me more than you might think.  Just the same, we need to take this slow.  The two of you get very furtive and sneaky from time to time.  You trust me just as much as I trust you.”

“Gut says yes, head says no,” John said.

“Precisely.”  Nate motioned for them to follow and set off through the corridors again.

“Time and patience,” Aeryn suggested.

Nate glanced at her over his shoulder, eyebrows raised in surprise.  “That’s Kaillin’s favorite phrase.  I swear he chants it in his sleep.”

John said, “It’s a delvian thing.  We knew someone who recommended it as Dr. Feelgood’s remedy for every ailment.”

“Knew,” Nate repeated, emphasizing the past tense.

“Long story,” John said.

Nate raised both hands in the air, silently exclaiming that something he had been waiting for had just arrived.  “There you go again.  Keeping secrets.”

“No,” John said, drawing the word out over the space of several microts.  “It’s just that it is a very long, complicated, confusing story.  If you want to pull up a couple of armchairs, make yourself comfortable and pass around the tea and crumpets, we’ll tell you about it.  You told us you were in a hurry.”

Aeryn slowed, allowing the two men to get ahead of her by several motras.  The small amount of distance, combined with the constant low-level racket in the corridors, was enough to shut out what was turning into an irritating contest between Grissom and Crichton to prove which of them could be more stubborn.  She drifted along behind them, using the time to study her surroundings.  They had passed out of one of the smaller corridors running cross-ship into what she was certain was the primary fore-aft passageway.  It was twice the width of any of Moya’s corridors, and once again it was jammed with personnel, both moving and stationary.  There were also stacks of equipment lashed into place between every set of ribs, and cloth bundles that Aeryn assumed were personal gear bags were lined up end to end along both sides of corridor for as far as she could see.  If the Command Carrier she had grown up on had been ordered to transport four or five times as many personnel as it was designed to hold, its hallways might have looked similar to this leviathan.

The mental comparison triggered a number of possible explanations for the overcrowding that she would have liked to discuss with John.  But by that time he and Nate were far enough ahead of her that she was losing sight of them for tens of microts at a time.  They were drawing farther away with every step, moving much faster than her leisurely stroll.  No one was paying any attention to her at all.  If she had chosen to veer into one of the passageways or maintenance shafts branching off to either side of the main corridor, she doubted that anyone, least of all Crichton or Grissom, would have noticed.  Aeryn had not learned enough about Grissom or his crew yet to decide if that was a good sign -- indicating that he had begun to trust them -- or further proof that he did not have any reason to fear their presence.

Any additional conclusions would have to wait.  John and Nate had reversed course.  They reached her in a matter of microts.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

John held up three fingers.  “No clue.  One microt we were going that way” -- he pointed toward where they had been headed -- “the next microt we’re going that way.”  A second fast wave of his hand indicated the portion of the corridor they had just traversed.

“Because --” Aeryn prompted.

“Because the wind changed direction, or we made a sudden course adjustment, or maybe the gravity is a little stronger in this section of the ship and it sucked us back to this particular spot!  I don’t know Aeryn.  He just turned around for no reason I could see.”

“Kaillin is two tiers above this one,” Grissom called over his shoulder.  He veered toward one of the ladders that pierced the tier at regular intervals.  “He wants to talk to me about something.”

A microt later, as though summoned by Grissom’s mention of him, Kaillin dropped through the opening over their heads, ignoring the more standard method of descent via the ladder, shifted sideways at the precise moment necessary to stop his freefall, and landed next to the threesome without so much as a grunt.

“You want to try that?” John said to Aeryn in awe.  “I’d miss the floor and keep right on going.”

“Not unless I’m feeling suicidal,” she said.

Nate threw one of his fast, flashing grins in their direction.  “It’s a delvian thing.  No one else on board has the balls to learn how they do it.  The learning curve is too steep.”

“So is the drop off,” John said, peering downshaft.

Aeryn joined him.  She was able to make out sixteen tiers before the details blurred into a repetitive, indistinguishable theme of alternating light and dark concentric circles.  Starting the descent would not be the problem; transitioning sideways at the precise moment necessary for a landing would be the hardest part of the trick.  And the timing would become more critical the farther they fell since their velocity would increase with each additional tier.  Her stomach twisted at the thought of getting a leg tangled in one of the rungs of the ladder.  She wondered if the delvians started near the bottom of the leviathan and worked their way up as they gained experience, or if they had some sort of training area where mistakes would not be lethal.

Kaillin gave them a calm but not unfriendly look before transferring his attention to Nate.  “We need the hangar bay for drills.”

“You didn’t need to chase me down to tell me that,” Nate said.  “You’re checking up on me again.”

“Your leadership is critical at this juncture.”

“Yeah.  I know.  What you’re really saying is I’m not allowed to get my ass shot off until our little soiree is over, after which I’ll be expendable.”  Turning toward John and Aeryn, he said, “You’ll have to paddle your dingy to another berth.  Put it in with mine.  I need to be somewhere else right now.  Can you find your way to the hangar bay without a guide?”

“Yes,” Aeryn said.  “We need to cut almost directly across this level, working aft no more than five sectors in the process.  I’m not sure how many tiers we have to drop down though.  No more than three.”

“Close.  Back four junctions, down two tiers.”  Nate’s gaze shifted toward John, widened eyes paying tribute to Aeryn’s ability to remain oriented inside the huge ship.  “She’s good.”

“You have no idea.  I’ll tell you just how good she is when we have time.”

“It’s a date.  I believe you when you say you can find your way, but just in case, let me make sure.”  He looked up at the ceiling, gazed into nothingness for several microts, and then spoke to thin air.  “We have two friendlies crossing middeck, moving from starboard to port.  Destination is Hangar Bay Six.  Make sure they get there without difficulty.”  He waited another two microts then nodded with satisfaction.  “All hands are alerted.  You shouldn’t get shot more than once or twice.”

“So kind of you,” John drawled.  “Open comms?”

Nate gave him a peculiar look -- one that suggested Crichton had said something in a language that he did not entirely understand.  “Something like that.  Look, I know there’s a lot for us to compare and for you to figure out, but we’ve got some major league crap coming up which means that the good old times bull session is going to have to wait.  Once this thing is over, we’ll either have plenty of time to sort everything out or it won’t matter because we’ll all be dead.  Stay out of the way the best you can and I’ll think about letting you in on some of the secrets.”

“We can do a better job of staying out of your way if you tell us what is going on,” Aeryn said.

“I’ll think about it.  For now, go move the golf cart.”

John opened his mouth to protest the fast dismissal.  “Later,” Nate said.  “Don’t tempt me into changing my mind about shoving you out an airlock.”

Crichton subsided, looking accepting of the pronouncement and frustrated at the same time, and nodded.  “Are we in a rush?” he asked.

All three of them looked to Kaillin for the answer.  The delvian said, “First units are scheduled in three hours.”

Nate bestowed a thin, humorless looking smile on Kaillin.  “Always worrying, always taking extra precautions.”  He turned toward John and Aeryn.  “He’s making sure you don’t see what we’re doing.”

Kaillin’s composure remained intact despite the implied criticism.  “My vigilance --” he began.

“-- has hauled my sorry ass out of more sticky situations than I care to remember, and kept all of us from getting blown to smithereens countless times,” Grissom finished.  He clapped the delvian on the shoulder.  “Don’t ever stop.”  Motioning for Kaillin to lead the way up a vertical access shaft, he stepped lithely onto the ladder once there was room.  He paused long enough to say, “Get moving.  I’ll find you later,” and then disappeared from sight.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

CHAPTER 7

John and Aeryn stood without speaking for several moments, simply watching the now empty ladder leading up-tier and the flow of personnel moving through the corridor.  After their rapid journey from the undersized prison cell to the hangar bay, the shocking revelation that they were in a different reality, and the frequently uninformative conversation with Grissom, the moment of relative calm was positively disorienting.  The mental state that settled over Aeryn reminded her of the silence that followed arns of maximum thrust on a command carrier -- a surcease of noise and vibration that left everyone feeling as though some essential element of their lives was missing, that the only way to bring their environment back into balance would be to restore the constant, often annoying, rumblings.

Beside her, John took in a deep breath, ran one hand through his hair several times, and let out a long sigh.  “You okay?” he said.

“No,” she said.

Aeryn was bothered by Grissom’s fast dismissal of so many of their questions, as well as by his willingness to give them what amounted to free run of the ship.  Less than two arns earlier, they had come within microts of being executed and then had been imprisoned, suspected of being enemy infiltrators.  Now they commanded a small amount of trust and were free to roam about the ship.  The abrupt reversal did not feel right.  There were too many unknowns, too many tidbits of knowledge that refused to fit together, too much that did not make sense.  She felt as though her entire universe had been turned halfway inside out and then twisted into a shape that her senses and her brain had not been designed to comprehend.

She knew why she felt this way.  Not enough of what was going on around them fit into her experience of how things were supposed to function.  Each time they learned something that should have restored their comprehension of their surroundings, some facet of the information was either missing or defied logic.  Understanding why she felt this way did not help.  In the end, the situation was unsettling and it was making her feel sick.

John put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a gentle sideward hug.  It helped.  The embrace steadied her, gave her something tangible to anchor her when she felt as though she was on the verge of being hurled into the cold emptiness of space where nothing could survive; it grounded her at a moment when she felt on the brink of total dissipation.

“How about you?” she said.  “How are you doing?”

“I’ve had better days.”  He looked up and down the corridor, and continued standing there, where Grissom had left them.  A rare lull in the traffic left them in a temporarily deserted portion of the corridor.  The privacy did not last long.  The never-ending torrent of chattering personnel resumed, subjecting the two motionless individuals to a gentle, unintentional battering.  It also stripped away any hope of conducting a private conversation.  The best they could do was not draw any attention by doing anything as overt as withdrawing into a corner and hope that no one made a point of stopping in order to listen to the entire exchange.

Moving closer, John lowered his voice.  She had to lean close enough that his lips were brushing against her ear to hear what he was saying.  “Hours, Aeryn.  Kaillin said hours not arns.”

“I caught that.”  There had also been Grissom’s use of the terms port and starboard, which she did not need to mention to John, and the mystery of how Grissom had known that Kaillin was looking for him.  “Is there any possibility that humans in this reality are telepathic?” she asked.

She felt as much as saw John’s answering shrug.  “Anything’s possible,” he said.  “But if he’s telepathic, why didn’t he know who and what we are from the start?  Why all the questions and suspicion?  And what’s going on with the magical mystery comms?”

“They would not require comms if they’re telepathic.”

“I could buy that if it was only Grissom and the delvians.  But everyone on board, Aeryn?  They’ve got more than a dozen different species wandering around this tub.  I don’t buy that they’re all telepathic.  Aside from that, can you imagine the racket inside their heads?  No one would be able to think straight with all that mental noise.”  He shook his head several times, each side-to-side swing more emphatic than the one before it.  “No.  I’ve seen people wearing comms badges, and Kaillin mentioned comms when we were in the hangar.  There has to be some other explanation.”

Aeryn stepped away from John and made several slow revolutions, surveying their surroundings while she considered all the unanswered questions and the absence of reasonable explanations.  “When it comes to useful information, we’re worse off than when we first landed here.”

“The more we learn, the fewer answers we have.  It’s not supposed to work that way,” John said.

“When does anything work the way we expect?”

“Never.  What’s your best guess?  Why are our hosts being so cagey?”

Aeryn held up three fingers, and then wandered a motra to one side in order to peer down the access shaft, this time paying more attention to the flickering shadows being cast by the personnel moving about on each of the lower tiers.  The rapidly shifting patterns of light and dark offered no enlightenment.  All it confirmed were the two things they already knew for sure:  that the leviathan was carrying more people than a ship this size was designed to hold; and that the lights were whiter and brighter than Moya’s in order to compensate for the black walls, which in turn cast better defined, more distinct shadows.  In some instances, she was able to determine what species were passing by the shaft on the tiers below based on their shadows alone.

She straightened up, propped a hip on the low protective wall surrounding the access shaft and contemplated the bustling corridor, absentmindedly making note of all the different species and the number of personnel on board the ship.  From everything they had seen so far, the leviathan was crammed to capacity with troops.  She spent a single microt wondering if they had resorted to using biomechanical areas such as the central neural plexus and the maintenance tunnels to house personnel before turning her attention back to their current predicament.

“We need accurate, first-hand information.”

Crichton stepped closer.  “Are you suggesting a little two-person reconnaissance?  Me and you skulking about hand in hand?”

“We have three arns at most.”

“Snoop first, move the module later,” he said, making it a suggestion.

Aeryn considered the question for several microts, weighing the various benefits of each choice against the possible drawbacks.  The lack of reliable intelligence made it difficult to assemble any theories or assumptions.  They did not know enough about this vessel for her to predict what sort of response they could expect if the crew discovered that their two visitors were wandering around unescorted.  Her best option was to assemble their meager supply of irrefutable observations, imagine how things would be handled aboard the command carrier where she had grown up instead of aboard the monstrous leviathan surrounding them, and assume that the neo-military group here would react in a manner similar to Peacekeeper Security.

“No,” she said, stepping past John.  “If your module isn’t where they want it, it will alert them that we aren’t where we are supposed to be.  If they are concerned about security --”

“Which they seem to be,” John interjected.

“-- which they seem to be,” she said, nodding, “then they should send out a squad to find and restrain us.  I want a better look at that hangar before that happens.”

“In order to figure out what kind of drills they might be running in there,” John said.

“They’re running battle drills.  There is no other reasonable explanation.”

“You’re hoping for a clue of some sort,” he said.

“The location of any damage, scoring on the walls or the floor, certain types of maintenance equipment --” she began.

“-- should give us some idea of what sort of ships have been in there,” John finished.  He stepped to one side, waving her forward.  “Excellent thinking, Sherlock.  Lead on.  Aside from knowing that the butt-end of the ship is that way” -- he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb -- “I’m totally lost.”

She glanced in both directions, considering the time limitations they had just discussed, and then, with a jerk of her head to indicate that John should follow, Aeryn set off toward the front of the leviathan.

It took John two long strides to catch up and fall in beside her.  “Honey?” he started out in an excessively sweet whisper, “You’re going the wrong way.”

There was no fast urge to anger as there so frequently was when he questioned her actions; John’s tone of voice had taken care of that.  The carefully delivered statement was nothing more than his way of asking where they were headed.  “I said we should move your ship first.  I didn’t say we had to take the most direct route to get there.”  She slid her hand into his and hung on tight.  “We need more information.  This is one way to get it.”

Aeryn concentrated on their route through the ship, using small nudges and tugs to keep John on course while he took advantage of his first opportunity to examine their surroundings.  He was using the same method of guidance, only in reverse:  a squeeze on her hand let her know that he wanted to slow down; a light pressure toward her body informed her that he was done looking and they could speed up; gentle twists left or right were a silent request to change sides of the corridor when he wanted to get a better look at some bit of machinery or a particular chamber.

They lingered for several microts outside a common area that was four or five times larger than Moya’s Center Chamber.  The cavernous room was jammed with more of the multi-species, black uniformed ship’s personnel -- most of them eating, all of them talking.  A cacophony of languages washed over the two observers, temporarily overwhelming Aeryn’s microbes.  Words broke down into their component sounds, shifting from a dozen chattering conversations into a flood of senseless noise for several microts at a time, and then sorted themselves out into reasonable patterns before once again descending into linguistic chaos.

She moved closer to the doorway, caught up not in the scenery before them, but in the revelation of what John’s first arn aboard Moya must have been like.  The effect faded quickly.  Her microbes, in their frequently inexplicable manner, managed to compensate for the linguistic mayhem being thrown their way, and the racket quickly sorted itself into the familiar bedlam that resulted anytime there were several dozen separate conversations being held at the same time in one place.  Aeryn turned to check on John, struck for the second time in a matter of microts by an insight into his first day in the Uncharted Territories.

“What am I missing?” he said, noticing that her attention was focused on him.

“Nothing.  I was overlooking something for a while.  It’s clearer now.”  She squeezed his hand to let him know it was nothing of consequence before turning her attention back to the crowd in the large chamber before them.  The smell of food cooking wafted out into the corridor on a billow of warm air.  The noise, the warmth, the chattering, and the odors combined into a single impression of an exceedingly large family sitting down to dinner.

Beside her, John’s stomach grumbled.  “Let’s keep moving,” he said.

They paused even longer outside a small manufacturing center similar to the ones she had seen earlier, moving on when all of the heads inside began turning in their direction.

“They were building weapons,” John said in a whisper.  They were attempting to make their way through an exceptionally busy corridor.  There were black-uniformed personnel everywhere, some of them standing three and four deep along the sides of the passage, others elbowing their way through the throngs muttering non-stop apologies for the frequently rough, inadvertent physical contact.

“Nothing I’m familiar with.  Those weren’t pulse weapons.”

John linked his arm into hers, the only way they could ensure that they would stay close to each other.  “There are no Peacekeepers in this universe,” he said, “therefore no tannot being turned into chakan oil and no pulse weapons.  From the looks of it, no one else got around to developing the technology.”

Aeryn pulled him to a stop.  Two nebari females nearly ran into them.  The gray-skinned pair grumbled out a string of curses at the suddenly motionless obstruction in their path before continuing on their way.

“What’s the matter?” John said.

He was standing close, once again with one arm resting lightly across her shoulders.  It seemed to be as much to prevent them from getting jostled apart as it was to keep their conversation private.  Whatever the reason, it felt nice.  She tore her thoughts away from the comforting warmth and pressure of his body where it pressed against hers and refocused her attention on the revelation that had just struck her.

“John, have you seen a luxan yet?”

His eyes took on the vague, middle distance stare that meant he was reviewing everything he had seen since they left the closet-sized cell where they had been briefly imprisoned.  “No,” he said after several microts worth of contemplation.  “I’ve seen sheyang, delvians, nebari, sebaceans --”

Aeryn added to the rapidly expanding list.  “-- plenty of hynerians, there were diagnosans in the medbay, I spotted several vocarians, and I heard what I’m sure was a halosian while you were unconscious.  I passed a group that might have been tavleks.  It was difficult to tell.  They aren’t as --”  She stopped, searching for a way to express what she had seen.

“Not as chewed up here?” John said.

“Correct.”

“Still using the gauntlet though?”

“Yes.  That’s why I assumed they were tavleks.”

“No luxans aboard, then.”  Light pressure from his arm turned her to the left.  They started walking again.  John stayed close, tucked in alongside her with his arm draped across her shoulders.  “They’ve chosen not to join this force,” he said, tossing out an initial theory for their consideration.

“This is a resistance force, not an alliance,” she threw back.  “Everyone on board this ship has banded together against --”

“-- a vastly superior enemy,” John finished for her.  He was silent for several dozen microts before proposing another possibility.  “Luxans are on the other side of this fight.  Either they’re the enemy, or they’re part of an alliance with the bad guys.”   He did not sound like he believed it; he sounded as though he was suggesting it just to eliminate it from the list of alternatives.

Aeryn spent several microts comparing what she had seen with his speculation.  Just as John’s tone had suggested, what little they had seen did not support the idea.  “Most of the species from this portion of the Uncharted Territories are on board this ship.  They all act similar to how they do in our universe.”

“Hynerians are still short and ugly.  Delvians make the rest of look like beginners on the road to evolution.  It doesn’t track that the luxans would be that much difference,” John said.  “Okay, so they’ve been wiped out by the local bad asses.  If we assume that everyone in this reality lives in the same zipcode as our universe, then the luxans would be the first species to get flattened if the invasion steamroller was being driven by --”

“-- the scarrans,” they said together.

“That would explain who defeated the nebari two hundred cycles ago,” Aeryn said, fitting more of the puzzle together.  Envisioning various territories and alliances jostled loose another clue.  “We have not seen any illonics or scorvians on board either.”

“Because they were located in the same general chunk of real estate as the luxans and they were next door neighbors with the nebari” John said, catching on immediately.  “Everyone in that area has been wiped out or enslaved, and with no Peacekeepers around, there’s no one left who can stand up to the scarrans, which means that the mysterious light bright show we got sucked through has to be a weapon.  They would not be wasting their time with pure science if they’re faced off against the scarrans with no military to back them up.”

He stopped walking.  “We need to find Grissom.  We need to get off this boat mucho pronto.”

“Does that mean right away?” Aeryn asked.

“Yes, as in before we find ourselves stuck on the losing side of a war.”

The idea of coming face to face with scarrans so soon after escaping from them generated an unpleasant cramping pang in the pit of her stomach.  She did her best to ignore the sensation, concentrating on their current predicament instead of where it might lead if everything went wrong.

“Should we bother moving the module?”

John looked left and right.  Anyone else might have assumed he was choosing which direction to go.  Aeryn knew he was looking far beyond their immediate surroundings.  He was considering their limited number of options, what few facts they had managed to assemble, and all the possible outcomes.  His head tilted to one side, signaling a shift from indecision to a conclusion.  “If we don’t get it out of their way in time, I would not put it past Kaillin to just dump it into space.  He strikes me as a jettison first, ask questions later kind of guy.”

“We move it,” Aeryn said.  “Come on.”

She set off at a half run, paying more attention to their route through the ship than to what was going on around them.  John stayed right on her heels where there was little chance that they would get separated.  Aeryn could feel him back there without bothering to look, knew when he had gotten held up by a jam of personnel, when he had managed to catch up, and adjusted her pace each time.  They reached one of the largest of the vertical shafts, dropped down two tiers as they had been instructed, and then began cutting cross-ship, moving aft and hamman side as the corridors and junctions permitted.

Their progress toward the hangar was interrupted only once. They were making their way through a relatively uncrowded corridor -- which meant that there was a narrow aisle down the center of the passageway that was miraculously clear of feet, bodies, and equipment -- when everyone who was standing up suddenly dropped to the floor.  One moment at least two thirds of the personnel were upright; four microts later, every single individual within sight was sprawled flat on the floor or on top of other bodies.  There wasn’t a head higher than half a motra for as far as Aeryn could see.

“What is this, the intergalactic version of Dead Bug?” John yelled to the hallway in general.

As far as Aeryn was concerned, the reason for the widespread collapse was not important.  The only thing that mattered was that several dozen members of a military unit had all done the same thing at the same time.  It could mean only one thing.  They needed to copy everyone else.  She shoved John toward a sliver of unoccupied floor.  “Get down!”

“Move it!” several voices called simultaneously.  “Quick!”

John continued to hesitate, still looking for an explanation for the peculiar behavior.  Before Aeryn could kick his legs out from under him, several of the black uniformed personnel lunged forward, grabbed both of the ship’s visitors, and flung them to the floor.  “Stay down!” one of the prone soldiers said.  “The Air Force is coming through.”

John had come to rest somewhere on the far side of a small heap of sebaceans, out of sight from where she found herself in the midst of a struggle to extricate herself from a tangle of arms and legs that might have been amusing under any other circumstances.  Not being able to see him did not deprive her of the treat of envisioning the expression on his face during his next exclamation, however.  The disbelief in his voice more than compensated for the lack of visual cues.  She could imagine every one of his physical reactions right down to his body language and hand gestures.

“Air Force?” he demanded.  “What Air Force?  We’re inside a frelling space ship!”

Any answer -- assuming that someone in the corridor had bothered to provide one -- was lost beneath the shriek of what sounded like atmospheric thrust engines in the distance.  Aeryn yanked her left arm out from under someone’s rump, wriggled around so she was facing in the direction of the rapidly approaching cacophony, and peered cautiously over the shoulder of the person next to her.  What had started out as a distant echoing scream of machinery and compressed air had shifted into a painfully loud howl.

“Stay down,” someone behind her yelled, pressing down on Aeryn’s shoulder.  “There won’t be much room to spare.”

“What is it?  What’s making the noise?” Aeryn bellowed back.

“The Royal Hynerian Air Force.  Look out!”

All along the passageway, the heaped masses of bodies did their best to flatten themselves against the floor, shrinking in upon themselves, squirming into corners and the few unoccupied areas of space on the deck.  On the far side of the corridor, one slender individual was worming her way through a DRD hatch, fleeing the passageway entirely.

Fifteen motras from where Aeryn was doing her best to make herself part of the floor, what appeared to be a miniature atmospheric fighter rounded the corner tipped up on one wing.  It came within drenches of one of the internal ribs, veered away, straightened out, and accelerated down the passageway … upside down.  The howling increased.  The rest of the squadron burst into view, jostling for airspace, weaving crazily as the pilots jockeyed for position, some right side up, others inverted.  The pilots were yelling to each other, cheering, cursing, exhorting each other to move faster, take the turns tighter, be bolder, to get out of the way!  Aeryn was certain she heard one pilot yelling at another to shift his arse to one side so there would be room to pass by.

The bedlam lasted for twenty microts.  Then they were gone.  In the aftermath, the silence was so intense, it was painful.  Aeryn placed one hand against the deck, preparing to get to her feet.

“No, no, no!” someone called.  A fist grabbed at her arm, yanking her back toward the floor.  “There are four squadrons on board,” the voice said.  “The other three --”

The explanation was lost as the other three squadrons converged on a single intersection from three different directions.  From the yells and bellows, Aeryn concluded that this was a competition.  Each of the three trailing squadrons was intent on arriving in the hangar bay in second place, risking a catastrophic collision inside the leviathan if it meant they would not come in last.

The mechanized stampede went on long enough this time that she was able to cobble together a series of glimpses into a single impression of the aircraft passing overhead.  They were not as large as Aeryn had initially thought.  They were three or four times the size of Rygel’s throne sled at most, which meant that if they had been traveling slower and in single file, there would have been plenty of room in the passageways for them to pass without being in danger of a collision.  And they were not atmospheric aircraft after all, although they had wings.  The ability of the ships to remain aloft while tipped up on their side testified to that.  They had cockpits with clear domed enclosures, many of which had been open, and the stubby wings and the fuselage bristled with attachment points -- to carry armaments, she assumed.

The mayhem disappeared around a corner at the end of the tier, the last fighter traveling faster than all the rest in an attempt to catch up, and once again silence reigned in the corridor.  All around her, people began untangling themselves from the piles of bodies and getting to their feet.  Aeryn closed her eyes for a moment, suddenly exhausted, and made no attempt to get up.  The fatigue was an unpleasant leftover from her torture by the scarrans.  It came and went without warning, as though some capricious personal diety was flipping a power switch on and off.  It tended to strike without warning, often when she was feeling her best, it never lasted long, and it was debilitating until it passed.  If she relaxed, she would be asleep in less than three microts.  It was extremely annoying and in their present surroundings, it was dangerous.

“You okay?”

She opened her eyes.  John was squatting beside her.

“Fine.”  She offered him one of her hands, allowing him to pull her to her feet.

“Batteries are running low,” he said quietly.  It was a statement, not a question.

Aeryn took a deep breath, let it out slowly, waiting for a wave of lightheadedness to pass, and finally gave him a single nod.  “I get --”

“-- tired,” John said before she could bring herself to admit it.  “It is going to take time for your body to recover, Aeryn.  You can’t fight this.  The only way to beat it is to give in to it.”

“We do not have time for me to be weak.  Right now, we need to get moving again.”

For once, John did not argue.  He grimaced, as if to say that she might have a point, and gestured in the direction of the hangar bay, indicating that she should take the lead.  They could not move, however.  The corridor was clogged solid with people getting to their feet, looking for their possessions, and sorting themselves into the groups they had been in before the hynerian ships had come through.  It was going to take several microts to reestablish any kind of order and with it room for people to walk.

“How many of those do you lose inside the ship?” John said to the crowd around them, taking advantage of the temporary blockage.  “How many crash doing that sort of thing?”

“None so far,” someone said.

“Hynerians have fast reflexes,” said another voice.  “Faster than any species except the delvians.”

“And they’re totally fearless,” someone else chimed in.

“More like totally insane, if you ask me,” John said.

A nebari standing next to John looked at him for several microts and then shrugged.  “Fearless.  Insane.  Around here, with what we’re about to do, there might not be much difference between the two.”

Aeryn did not like the comment or the implied acceptance that the lives of everyone on board might be forfeit.  Too much of the last four cycles had been lived that way.  Since the moment she had first laid eyes on John Crichton, there had been too many moments when fearlessness or insanity had dictated their actions.  John’s solution in too many situations was to put his life or the lives of others at risk.  The plan they had come up with to rescue Scorpius from Katratzi had been bad enough.  Once again, John had insisted that only he could fulfill the role that faced the greatest danger.  He was right, but at least with that plan they understood the various factions involved and how they interacted; they had people they could rely on, and knew which forces could be manipulated into taking their side, even if only temporarily and for their own gain.  There were too many unknowns in this universe, and no friends or allies.  She had to get John out of here while they were both in one piece -- before they found themselves, out of necessity, putting together a plan for survival that she was certain would ultimately result in his death.

The clog of personnel standing in the middle of the corridor began to break up.  Some personnel headed off in various directions, resuming journeys that had been interrupted by the fly-by; others began settling into groups, making themselves as comfortable as possible in the cramped, crowded conditions.  Aeryn shoved the sickening thoughts of death and loss to the back of her mind, exiling them to a place where she could ignore them, and began picking her way past bodies and feet, resuming their journey toward the hangar bay.

“Space or atmospheric?” John said from behind her.

It took her several microts to figure out what he was asking.  “Both, I think.  My guess is that they are used as aerial assault craft.  They’re not large enough to be effective fighters.”

John remained silent while they threaded their way through and around several groups who, from what Aeryn could see, were gambling or playing other games to while away the arns.  “Air cover for a ground assault?” he said once they could walk closer together again.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said.  “It implies an offensive maneuver.”

“Not what you would expect out of a resistance force.”

A furtive thought having something to do with strategy, military maneuvers, and vastly outnumbered forces flitted about in the back of her head for an instant and then was gone.  Aeryn slowed, trying to divert more attention to the phantom idea.  It had been generated by John’s comment about the ground assault.  She replayed his sentence in her mind several times, trying to trigger the sequence it had set loose the first time.

“Watch it.”  John snared her elbow and tugged her to one side of the corridor, breaking her reverie.

Ahead of them, everyone was doing the same thing, clearing a path for six individuals coming the other way.  They were huge, taller than every other species that Aeryn had seen so far aboard the ship and broad enough that even travelling single file they were having trouble making their way through the crowded corridors.  There were tendrils, horns, fleshy spikes jutting from their skulls, and thick mats of coarse hair, all of which added to the impression of size.  They sported tattoos and intricately patterned scars on their faces and arms, and the one in front was missing an eye.  They moved with malevolent aggression, a threat of impending violence in every step, every glance, every small twitch or shift of their bodies.  Weapons clattered and clanked, armor-reinforced clothing made a grinding metallic growl as they passed by, and they left a swath of silence in their wake.

Everyone stood silently, not daring to move, until they disappeared from sight.  Only then, when the group was gone, did sound and movement resume.  Aeryn glanced up and down the passageway, reorienting herself, and then resumed their journey toward the hangar bay.

“What, in the name of all that is ugly, were those?” John said.  He was half a step behind her and slightly to her right, glancing back over his shoulder.

“Grizzolians.  Fierce fighters.  This command is fortunate to have them as part of their forces.”

The moment she said it, she knew there was something wrong with both her statement and her conclusion.  A warning claxon blaring two drenches from her ear could not have created more alarm than what was going on in her mind at that instant.  Aeryn reconsidered the significance of the grizzolians’ presence aboard the leviathan, weighing what she knew of them against what little they had learned so far about this reality.

“This is not good,” she said after twenty microts of contemplation.

“How do you mean?” John said.

“At no time in their history have grizzolians entered into an alliance with another species.  They are isolationists, John.  Extremely xenophobic.  They cannot stand being around other species.  They have never entered into an alliance, even when it meant the difference between victory and defeat.  If they are here, part of this force, working together with this many different species, then the situation here is even worse than we thought.”

It took her several microts to realize that Crichton had stopped.  By that time, she was twelve steps ahead of him.  She stopped and waited for him to catch up.  “What’s the matter?”

“Aeryn, we are stuck in an unrealized reality, cut off from Moya and our friends, with no idea where to find a wormhole to get home or who to ask for directions, and once again we are up against the scarrans.  If we’re right -- and when it comes to bad news we usually are -- no species in this hunk of space has a military force capable of even slowing the scarran advance.”

“Your point?” she asked.

“Do you really think that having grizzolians on board could make this situation any worse than it already is?”

She stared at him for several microts, using the time to allow all of the implications to sink in.  “You might be right.”

“Might be?”

“Fine.  I stand corrected.  Unless we get captured by the scarrans, it can’t get any worse than this.”

John blinked twice, as though someone had rapped him over the head two times very quickly.  “Congratulations.”

“For what?”

“You win.  You managed to think of something worse.  That possibility hadn’t occurred to me yet.”

“John --” she began, intending to say something to the effect that death would be preferable to being taken prisoner by the scarrans again.

He shook his head, cutting her off.  “You don’t have to say it.  I feel the same way.”

She wanted to say more.  She wanted to put the recently buried thoughts into words, to tell him how badly she wanted to find a way back to Moya, where she could relax and feel safe, even if it only lasted the one or two solar days it would take to reach Katratzi.

“I know,” he said.  “I wish we had never gone out in the module.  I wish I could take it back, Aeryn.  I would do anything to get a cosmic-sized do-over and be able to take it all back.”

Somehow, he had known what she was thinking.  It made the unpleasant possibilities more tangible.  Knowing that John felt the same way she did freed her fears from their brief imprisonment, and gave them more weight and certainty.  His sentences reignited the sick feeling in her stomach and disintegrated the flimsy walls she had hastily erected to keep the thoughts from distracting her from what was important.

She stepped close, and leaned in against him.  John’s arms enfolded her, for the second time in an arn restoring some small measure of peace and sanity to her universe.  The feel of his body against hers gave her the strength to batten down the runaway emotions, to reassert control over her thoughts and feelings, and to steel herself for whatever the days ahead would bring.

“Next time, I shoot you in the leg,” she said into his chest.

“Deal.  In fact, if you don’t, I’ll do it myself.”

“I am going to hold you to that.”  She indulged herself by allowing an additional ten microts of weakness, counting them off in her head, then straightened up and pulled loose from his arms.  “Come on.  We’re almost there. The hangar bay is around that corner.”

They arrived just in time.  John led the way into the hangar bay, already angling to one side, toward where the module was parked, to discover that a drama similar to their arrival was playing out.  The DRD they had brought with them was surrounded, spinning about in a futile attempt to escape a rapidly tightening cordon, emitting a steady stream of distressed squeals and chirrups.  The circle around it consisted of a dozen black metallic spheres, each one bearing a tiny laser and two glowering red-lit protrusions near the top.

“What the --?” John said the moment he spotted the heavily out-numbered yellow drone.

“DRDs,” Aeryn said.  “Those are this ship’s DRDs, and --”

“-- they don’t like visitors!”  John accelerated to a full-out run.  “Hey!  Leave him alone!”

The instant John called out, every laser and every pair of visual receptors turned in his direction.  The circle broke apart, milled about in a well-choreographed pattern for two microts, and before John had crossed half the distance to the besieged DRD, a well-armed glowering phalanx was advancing toward the running human instead.  He yelped and reversed course, nearly falling in his haste to begin a retreat.  The single yellow DRD, forgotten for the moment, let out a screech of relief and headed for John’s module at maximum speed.

“We come in peace!  We’re the good guys!” John yelled over his shoulder, still in retreat.  “We’re here to move our ship.  Check with Grissom!”  He skidded to a stop next to Aeryn, panting slightly, watching the approaching squadron of black DRDs warily.  “Check with Pilot!” he called when the small fleet showed no sign of slowing.  “We’re not a threat!”

The formation rumbled to a halt.  Twelve DRDs glared at the wary pair of biological beings for close to ten microts.  Then, without any warning, all of the weapons retreated out of sight, the visual receptors sank into the spherical housing until there was nothing but a gleaming slit left in view, and the robotic defense force rolled off in twelve separate directions.

Aeryn turned so she could look at John squarely.  “You are on a leviathan that you know is headed into a war, and you threaten the DRDs.  You are making stupid a habit.”

“It’s what I do best. Why should I give it up now?”

“Let’s go.  It’s taken us too long to get down here.  We need to find Grissom and get off this ship.”

John gave her a boost up to where she could get her foot into one of the indented steps on the side of the module.  He waited while she rummaged around in the back seat, retrieving and untangling their pulse pistols and holsters, then he scooped up the yellow DRD, which continued to look both relieved and overjoyed to see them, and handed it to her.  “Can’t leave Herbie behind.”

Aeryn handed John his pulse pistol in return.  “Do I want to understand the name Herbie?”

“Probably not.”  He fastened the holster’s buckles, shifted it several times until the weight of the pulse pistol settled comfortably into place, and then scrambled up into the cockpit.  He paused there, facing the wrong way, watching her fasten the holster tie-downs.

When he continued to stare at her without speaking even after she had finished, she asked, “What?”

“Options.  Do we have any other options?  Do we want to cut and run?”

“You’re asking me?  You’re supposed to be the expert when it comes to all this traveling between universes dren.”

John did not move, and his expression did not change.  There was no indication that they were in a hurry … or that he was even thinking, for that matter.

“Can we get back to Moya?” she said, hoping that it would kick loose whatever information John was seeking.  “If we leave this ship, can you find a wormhole and get us home?”

“No, not unless this ship’s pilot can help us find a wormhole.  The module doesn’t have enough to range for us to hunt blindly.  We don’t even know where we are, let alone which way we should go to find the closest wormhole.  We need to find a wormhole nexus or get a fix on our location so I can figure out where one might be located.”

“Then we need to stay with this ship long enough to talk to the pilot, at the very least,” Aeryn said.  “Yes?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then let’s go.  The sooner we move the module, the sooner we find Grissom and the ship’s pilot, and the sooner we find out how to get back to Moya.”  Aeryn folded herself into the cramped confines of the rear seat, buckled the harness, and began the start-up sequence.

John remained frozen for an additional two or three microts, then shook himself once, as though shaking off an alien substance that had been causing his hesitation.  A moment later, he too was strapped in, the canopy was sealed, and the module was lifting off.  Sixty microts later, they had arced up and over the leviathan, entered a different hangar bay, and were coasting to a stop beside Grissom’s module.

“Any idea where the Den is located on this ship?” John asked as he slid down the side of the module.

Aeryn vaulted over the edge of the cockpit and landed beside him.  “I thought we wanted to find Grissom first.”

“I changed my mind.  Screw Grissom, his merry men, and whatever they are up to.  Our first concern is getting away from this universe as fast as possible, and that means talking to Pilot.  I say the Den should be our first stop, and after that we make like shepherds and get the flock out of here.”

“I agree,” Aeryn said.  “This way.”  She set out at a run.

The journey to the Den turned out to be simpler and faster than their trek to the hangar bay.  Aeryn led John toward the center of the ship, until she was certain they were close to the central neural plexus, then found a ladder and began to climb.  Most of the corridors were as crowded as all of the others they had traversed, but she had noted earlier that all of the traffic on each ladder was moving in a single direction, either up or down.  Once they began their ascent, there were no traffic jams to slow their progress.

“Try here,” Aeryn said, stepping off the ladder.  “I believe we are on the correct tier.”

John stepped around her, and took the lead.  “Some day you have to tell me how you can navigate around this ship like you grew up on it.”

“Superior breeding, John.”  She nudged him in the correct direction.  “There. Try that door opening.”

He waved a hand across the door sensor, stepped back while it opened, and then ducked inside.  Aeryn caught a quick glimpse of the view ahead before she moved forward to follow him.  She had gotten it right.  She could see several bridges leading to Pilot’s station; the thick, heavily reinforced primary neural conduit in the center of the cavern; and best of all, Grissom was there, hunkered down on his heels, undoubtedly talking to the ship’s pilot.  Then Aeryn stepped through the doorway and her view was blocked by John, who had begun to sprint the moment he spotted Grissom.

“You bastard!  You’ve shanghaied us right into the middle of a … Whoa!”

John came to a skidding stop.  Aeryn danced in place for a split-microt, putting all of her coordination and attention into not running into him.  She regained her balance, and waited for him to move.

He stayed where he was, blocking both her view and her access to the bridge, and said, “Oh my heavens.”

“What?” she said.  “You’re in the way, John.  Move!”  Allowing her impatience to take over, Aeryn shouldered him roughly to one side and then stepped forward, intending to cross to the pilot’s center island.  The moment she stepped around John and saw what he was looking at, she froze in place, just as John had.

“That’s … impossible,” she said, floundering to find the right words.  “Leviathans can’t … they aren’t designed to do that.”

John waved a hand toward the island suspended above the central neural plexus.  “Tell that to them!”

At the far end of the familiar, narrow walkway spanning the leviathan’s neural abyss, Grissom squatted on the outer bulwarks of the pilot’s consoles, one hand resting familiarly on the cranial shell of a standard-sized leviathan pilot.  Grissom was in much the same position where both Aeryn and John had perched beside Pilot on dozens or possibly hundreds of occasions.  There was nothing surprising or remarkable about that.  If the cavern had not been more than double the height of Moya’s and had not been clad in the same matte black material as the rest of the ship, it could have easily been their own Pilot residing within the reinforced walls surrounding his station.  It was what lay suspended one tier below their feet that brought Aeryn to a shocked, speechless halt.

Evenly spaced around the plexus, each one located halfway between the outer rim of the cavern and the center so they were visible from Pilot’s central platform, were four more pilots -- each installed in its own station and busily attentive to their respective readouts and controls.

The ship had five pilots.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

CHAPTER 8

“Leviathans can’t do that,” Aeryn repeated, this time loud enough for Grissom to hear.  “They bond for life with a single pilot.”

Sliding down the front of Pilot’s consoles, Nate landed lightly and then waved for them to join him on the central island.  “Under normal circumstances, you’re correct,” he said as they traversed the walkway toward him.  “But a few years back we came across a leviathan that had been badly damaged.  It was only a matter of time before it was going to die, taking the pilot with it.  Pat was feeling overwhelmed …”

“Pat,” John interrupted.

“Yes.  Pat.”  Nate gestured toward the pilot he had been conversing with when they had entered the Den.  “Master Chief Pilot Pat.”

“You call your pilot Pat,” John said.

“Yes,” Nate said again, this time with an overly condescending tone, as though he was speaking to an exceptionally dimwitted child.  “What do you call yours?”

“We call our pilot Pilot.”

“How stunningly original!  It must have taken you days to come up with that!”

Aeryn jumped in before John could form a reply.  “Finish explaining,” she said.  “Five pilots.”

“Pat,” Nate said, emphasizing the name, “couldn’t keep up with the demands we were putting on him.  Leviathans and their pilots --”

“-- and their Pats,” John muttered.

“--and their pilots,” Nate tried again, “weren’t designed for what we’ve been asking Mike to do.”

“Wait!  Pat and Mike?” John said.

Grissom grinned broadly.  “Me grannie was from the auld country.  She always was a bit partial to those two names.  It was just her hard luck she had nothing but daughters.  She tried though.  My aunts are named Patricia and Michaela.”

“You two are going to drive me insane!” Aeryn said.  “Finish explaining this” -- she gestured toward the four additional islands one tier below where they were standing -- “then I can leave and the two of you can spend the rest of the day being incomprehensible, if that is what you want.”

“Pat was being overwhelmed by the volume of neural traffic.  He couldn’t handle the load we were putting on him and keep track of Mike’s primary systems at the same time.  Everything from environmental control to comms traffic began to suffer.  By the time we came across the dying leviathan, Mike was willing to try anything as long as Pat remained in primary control of his systems.  We managed to keep the other leviathan alive long enough for Mike to grow a rudimentary pilot’s station down there.”  Nate pointed toward one specific auxiliary pilot.  “We planted Junior, gave him a quarter-cycle’s vacation to concentrate on bonding with Mike, assigned him a range of duties to perform that didn’t conflict with Pat’s authority, and never looked back.  Mike started growing another pilot’s station just in case we came across another damaged leviathan --”

It was Aeryn’s turned to interrupt.  “Which you did.”

“Which we did,” Nate agreed, nodding.  “We added that pilot, delegated some more duties, and kept on growing.  Right now we’ve got a navigation officer, officer in charge of all internal and environmental systems, communications officer, and our specialist in charge of Mike’s data stores.”  He pointed to each of the pilots in turn as he listed their functions.  “Pat has primary control of all systems, and he buffers all neural traffic between the Georges and Mike so he knows, in a general way, what they’re doing at all times.”

“George.  As in Foreman.”  John’s tone of voice made it clear that he was guessing.

“George, George, George and George.”  Nate was laughing by the time he finished.  “God, you’re the first person who gets it!  Four years here, and someone finally gets it!”

“The only person who gets it,” Aeryn said.  “This isn’t what we came here for, John.  You’re forgetting the scarrans.”

To Be Continued …