Cholak's Demon
Chapter 2
A crowd of techs swept out of an open doorway, turning in Aeryn’s direction. She bit down on a curse and
allowed herself to be herded by the mass of bodies, checking over her shoulder periodically for an opportunity
to reverse course and head back the way she’d come. The laughing group spanned the corridor from side to
side, leaving no room for her to ease past them. The stealth suit continued to work perfectly, allowing her to
move around the carrier with complete impunity, but crowded corridors such as this one presented the single
hazard of bumping into someone physically.
She approached an intersection and spared a longer look behind her, hoping for some indication as to which
way they were going to turn. The group was caught up in a boisterous discussion of technological trivia,
apparently following a familiar route by habit, so she resorted to taking the right hand turning simply because
she was on that side of the corridor and turning in that direction kept her close to the wall.
The group went past her, continuing straight through the junction of hallways, and she spun around, heading
back to the largest of the ship’s planetary terrain reconstructions. She was tired, thirsty and hungry, and hadn’t
found a safe location to sit down in almost ten arns. The trees and shrubs in the terrain setting offered some
cover and an excuse for a fall if someone tripped over her invisible body. In addition, although it wasn’t
particularly palatable, she knew that the water in the small lake contained nothing harmful if she chose to drink
it.
She crouched by the entrance to the artificial habitat, scanning up and down the corridor as she waited for
someone else to pass through the doors: the only way for her to enter without raising suspicion. The double
doors slid open and she froze as a double line of young cadets began filing out, marching in precision. One
youngster lagged behind, marginally understandable since his patches indicated that he was not yet six cycles
old, and the cadre leader yelled at him to catch up. Eyes wide with alarm, the boy ran after his unit, falling into
step with an ease born of practice.
Aeryn smiled inside the hood as she slid around the corner, continuing to hug the wall. When she was that
age, the barracks leaders had tried to scare her unit with the tale of Cholak’s demon, a bloodthirsty creature
that supposedly snatched and devoured lagging cadets, leaving no trace of their bodies. The idea of a
monster had been fascinating at best. As with the small soldier she had just seen, the more immediate
prospect of being punished for substandard performance had been a far more terrifying threat.
The parkland was nearly empty -- a few adult wandering along the water and no sign of inquisitive children.
Aeryn straightened up, indulging in a normal gait for the first time in arns, confident that the suit would hide her
as she stepped through some bushes and entered the small stand of trees. She let out a sigh as she moved
into the midst of the tiny forest, relaxing even more once she was out of sight of the handful of officers. She
found a small area of bare ground at the base of a tree and sat down, leaned against the rough trunk, and
closed her eyes.
She’d accomplished very little so far. Her reconnaissance of the ship had revealed no weakness in the security
that she thought could be manipulated to help John escape. Despite everything she had told him, their
chances of getting off the carrier alive diminished with every passing arn. John undergoing some sort of
interrogation was a certainty; torture was a reasonable assumption. Peacekeeper interrogation techniques
were designed to achieve a complete physical breakdown in three to five solar days, luxans providing the only
reliable exception to that standard. The Aurora Chair would achieve that end much sooner.
When John had been imprisoned on the Gammak Base, they’d held him for less than two solar days, by which
time he was almost too exhausted to make the climb out of the underground levels. He was a stronger person
now, she reasoned, experienced in the techniques of interrogation and more accustomed to physical brutality.
It might give her one more day’s leeway before his physical condition decayed to the point where he wouldn’t be
able to move. Three days was her time limit then, four at the outside. After that, she assumed they would both
die in the attempt to escape. But she would not leave him here, no matter what the cost.
Aeryn opened her eyes, focusing on the greenery overhead instead of the imagined horrors she envisioned
John enduring. Standing aside impotently while several burly security officers dragged him out of the ship had
violated every instinct. She’d decided in advance that leaving the ship immediately was the safest course of
action, and had hurried down the steps from the cockpit while they were still bouncing under the weight of the
guards. A quick leap had gotten her off the flexing surface before the last man had stepped down, and she’d
lain flat on the deck, nearly eye-to-eye with John as he was flung sprawling across the metal hangar floor.
She’d been a scant three motras away from him, hugging one of the landing struts, when the personnel in the
hangar had gone silent at the entrance of a group of officers. The sight of the commanding officer stepping
away from the group had generated no pleasure, other than the small relief that John would not have to face
Scorpius one more time.
“John Crichton.” The silky, confident voice had broken the chilled atmosphere of the hangar. Commandant
Mele-On Grayza stalked toward him, trailed by two of her personal guard. “Perhaps you remember me.”
John watched her advance from his spot on the floor, not bothering to get up. “Yeah. I remember a couple of
things,” he mumbled, eyeing first Grayza and then the larger group of black uniforms waiting several motras
away.
“You have eluded us for too long. It has taken too many of our resources to track you down.”
“Does the phrase ‘Give it a rest’ mean anything to you?” he asked sarcastically. “It’s been two cycles since that
little accident with your boat. Get over it.” Aeryn winced as a guard stepped toward him, raising his pulse rifle
for a blow. This was why she’d told him not to be stupid.
“Stop!” the order echoed clearly in the cavernous hangar. “I want John Crichton unharmed.” Aeryn relaxed
slightly, using the brief moment of suspended violence to scan her surroundings, looking for the least busy
route out of the hangar. Colliding with another person was the only way they would know she was on board
until they came across her belongings in the engine nacelle. The usual route past the security checkpoint was
too risky, requiring that she pass through an area perpetually crowded with personnel.
She looked back and John was still on the floor, his head propped up on one hand, with one of his most
irritating looks of arrogant impudence in place. Aeryn shook her head, aware that his uncaring attitude was an
act, a way of controlling his fear, but also aware that it would invite the guards to treat him more harshly. As
she watched, he was pulled roughly to his feet and his hands shackled behind his back.
“Small accident,” Mele-On Grayza repeated slowly, moving close enough that John took an involuntary step
back before stopping himself. “Boat.” She circled him. “You were responsible for destroying a command
carrier. You will pay for that … after I am done with you.”
The muscles in the back of his neck tensed, tendons standing out clearly, but John held his ground as she
returned to the overly close spot in front of him. Aeryn smiled and nodded unseen, pride replacing the thought-
fragmenting concern for him. She recognized the small signals his body was giving off, and knew that he was
afraid -- rightfully so since he was facing the possibility of being put back in the Aurora Chair -- but the stiff
shoulders and infinitesimally cocked head meant that he had mastered his fear and had prepared himself to
face whatever lay ahead.
“All this because I pointed a gun at you,” John said after several microts of silence. “I really have got to stop
doing that.”
“That was the least of your crimes,” Grayza responded, stepping away from him. “But it is a good place to
start. Bring him.” She gestured to the guards and he was alternately shoved and dragged toward the exit.
Aeryn watched until the group disappeared from sight, then headed toward a doorway leading into a
maintenance compound. She wanted to follow him, to learn where he was going to be held and make sure that
he was all right, but the risk was too great. The rescue, however she was going to accomplish that, and all of
its logistics had to come first, even before her own need to learn what lay ahead for John.
None of the security personnel wandering the hangar noticed the infinitesimal distortion that dodged two
grease-smeared techs, then drifted into the maze of storerooms, repair shops and tech labs, efficiently
categorizing where certain items could be found.
Her first foray deeper into the carrier took her on a search for some sort of weapon, the quest made more
difficult because even if she found a weapon of some sort, she had to be sure that no one was around before
picking it up. The sight of an object floating through midair would baffle even the most dull-minded grot for less
than five microts. The Peacekeepers didn’t have stealth suits, but they were aware of the light-bending
technology, and would recognize the phenomenon for what it was.
She located an armory where a supply of knives lying in a jumble invited theft, but two officers entered just as
she was preparing to hide one inside the suit, and she retreated when they settled down to conduct an
inventory. In the ensuing arns she managed to locate the Aurora Chair in an enclosure two levels below the
detention cells, and was also lucky enough to come across a tech reprogramming a door lock outside a
monitoring control room. Holding her breath to avoid detection, she leaned over his shoulder and memorized
the codes he was using as he punched them into the display pad. If she could steal the necessary equipment,
the string of numerals would allow her to program her own palm print into any lock aboard the carrier.
Quiet laughter broke into her review of the situation, two voices intertwining as they moved closer to where she
was sitting. A man and a woman wandered through the trees, talking quietly and holding hands. Initially, Aeryn
watched them as a precaution. When they moved off through the trees her attention remained fixed on the pair
in response to a sharp pang of jealousy. They bumped against each other comfortably as they wove through
the growth, and were spending more time looking into each other’s eyes than they were watching their feet,
resulting in a great deal of stumbling and crashing into bushes. There never seemed to be enough time for her
and John to do that sort of thing. The nine-day idyll aboard the small prototype ship had been an anomaly in
their lives, and it had been all too brief.
She surveyed the couple with more interest after noticing that the woman was almost exactly her own height
and build. The man was marginally taller than John. Aeryn got to her feet and floated along behind them,
using their own smashing noises to cover her quieter passage as she drew close. The pair was as perfect a
match physically for her and John as she could hope for, chance putting two uniforms within her reach in a
secluded, unmonitored location.
The pair stopped, looked around, and then laid down, still talking and laughing as they set aside some of their
outer garments. Aeryn watched for a few microts, then turned and worked her way back toward the expanse of
grass, abandoning the idea of taking the uniforms. It would mean killing them. They would be missed and their
bodies discovered far too soon -- long before she was ready to free John. She would have to find uniforms
somewhere else once she had the rest the escape arranged.
She took a last look at the simulated sunlight and green grass, thinking of the day she had stood in a nearly
identical place with John. She had called him ‘Crichton’ then and could barely stand to look at him, never
meeting the eyes that reminded her too much of the other one. That day she’d only been able to see what had
been lost, instead of focusing on the second chance that a quirk of fate and Jool’s pathetic piloting had
delivered to her.
“Why?” she whispered to herself. Why had she turned away from him? Why had she wasted all that time? It
seemed so reasonable back then, the pain demanding that she never let anyone become that important to her
ever again. She hadn’t anticipated that the tiny discomfort of leaving John would grow over time into an agony
far greater than the prospect of losing him again.
Aeryn settled onto one knee near the doors, rubbing her forehead through the slick cloth of the hood as she
waited for someone to enter or exit. The smooth slide of the fabric across her skin reminded her that she was
lucky to have a fourth generation version of the technology. The earlier models were uncomfortable, and more
critically for a sebacean, they were hot. This one was cool, lightweight, and didn’t retain moisture like the
earlier versions, meaning she could wear it for as long as it took to get free.
She scanned her surroundings as she waited by the exit. She was alone now, apparently having chosen a time
when the landscape got little use, which might explain why the two officers had decided to recreate in such a
public place. Aeryn went back to considering how she was going to get John free, starting with where she might
be able to hide a body when she finally chose to acquire a uniform or a weapon. What she really needed was
to be able to make the bodies simply disappear, increasing the interval before anyone confirmed that the
officers were actually missing.
An officer who missed a duty period faced severe penalties, but it did occur on rare occasions. A missing
officer would give them time; a dead body would generate a security lock-down that even a ghost would have
trouble negotiating.
What she needed was for Cholak’s demon to come and take the bodies away, leaving behind no sign of the
devoured victims.
Aeryn grinned inside the suit, thinking of that fable and how little it had frightened her. A few of the cadets in
her unit had believed it though, hurrying to stay with their cadre and lying awake in fear at night. The barracks
leader had been ordered to stop using the monster to instill obedience once Training Command discovered
that even disciplined and regimented children could be frightened by the prospect of the supernatural. Aeryn’s
head came up and she turned to look at the park behind her, some small portion of her mental wanderings
triggering an idea.
She knew where she could hide the bodies.
The second largest logistical problem had been solved, and if there was anyone on board this carrier who had
ever been frightened by Cholak’s demon, she might even instill a small number of the ship’s compliment with a
miniscule amount of uncertainty.
“Forgive me,” she offered quietly, apologizing as much to John as to any listening deity for what she was about
to do. Aeryn Sun, no longer an assassin but willing to do anything to save John Crichton, ran silently toward
the trees to procure two uniforms and to let a myth loose on the command carrier.
* * * * *
Crichton rolled onto his back and tried to pull the black shimmering sheet over his body, the drifting air chilling
him as the sweat slowly evaporated. Grayza’s quiet chuckle generated an additional shiver along his spine as
she pulled the covers out of his grasp.
“That won’t be necessary,” her voice slid across him like one of her touches, generating another stomach
churning wave of revulsion. “Drink this,” she instructed, sliding alongside him with a wide-mouthed flask in her
hand.
“Eye of newt, wing of bat? I don’t think so.” John pulled away from her, his attempt to roll to the far side of the
wide bed turning into an exhausted facedown sprawl as his arms slid out from under him. “What the frell did
you do to me?” Her hand wandered up and down his back, and he closed his eyes, shuddering under her
touch. The insane, overwhelming desire to touch and be touched by the commandant had faded at last,
leaving him sickened and confused. He assumed he’d been drugged, but he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything
since being taken prisoner, nor had he been injected. This was not the torture he’d expected, and a piece of
him longed for a nice, simple beating.
When they’d towed him out of the hangar, he had expected to be hauled straight off to the Aurora Chair, but
the following arns had been free of any overt abuse. They’d started by escorting him to a medical facility where
he’d been scanned, poked and prodded for several arns. When he’d been announced fit, healthy and without
defects, he’d assumed the rough stuff was going to begin and had again braced himself for the mind-frelling of
the Chair. His expectations were given another good jolt when they’d herded him into a starkly bare cell and
left him alone.
Arns of restless pacing yielded nothing more than sore wrists from the chafing of the binders and a pair of
mildly tired feet. He eventually realized that they’d already started the psychological games, allowing the
uncertainty to work on him before starting in with something more direct. It was a simple yet effective method to
soften him up. The binders made it impossible to get comfortable lying down, so he settled for sitting cross-
legged on the hard metal slab that passed for a bunk, anticipating that as soon as he relaxed they would start
the next phase.
As expected, within two hundred microts the guards appeared to shove him through the maze of corridors. He
let them propel him forward without resisting, focusing inwardly on the ordeal ahead, committing to memory
what it felt like to have a body that didn’t shriek and throb with pain. He closed his eyes as he was dragged
forward and used the time to build a mental wall around every thought concerning Aeryn and her present
activities. He wasn’t sure how he’d blocked the agonizing invasions of the Chair the last time, but the stakes
were even higher now and he had to assume that he would need to hold out longer. A Stykera could survive
over one hundred sessions in the Aurora Chair. Crichton wondered how many a human could endure before
turning into a slobbering, gibbering idiot.
A door rolled aside. He opened his eyes as he was thrust into a senior officer’s living quarters -- another
surprise. John took two more steps on his own, then stopped, waiting to see what was going to happen next.
The guards removed the manacles, then stomped out of the chamber. The surroundings were familiar, similar
to the quarters Scorpius had occupied on the destroyed command carrier.
There were a few minor differences. The bed, which was three times as large as the scarran half-breed’s and
lacked the temperature stabilization equipment, was located on the upper level this time, the desk with the inlaid
displays and control circuitry was on the lower level near the door, and a sybaritic bath was over to the right,
also on the upper level.
He wandered further into the room, rubbing his wrists as he remembered the last time he’d been in a chamber
like this one. He’d stood facing Scorpius that time, his body aching from head to foot from the clobbering he’d
taken during the fight in the generator room. Grayza had been behind that assassination attempt, using him to
get to Scorpius. John wondered what information she was after this time. She’d ridiculed wormhole technology
two cycles ago, but time could change anyone’s attitudes. He explored her quarters as he waited, increasingly
apprehensive about the inexplicably gentle treatment.
“Tell me what you’re thinking about,” Grayza whispered into his ear, drawing him away from his thoughts. One
finger stroked him along his neck behind his earlobe and he pulled away from her with a jerk. He knew how
he’d gotten here, sprawled naked and depleted on the soft, expansive playground, but that didn’t explain why
he’d done what he’d just done or why he’d felt like he was enjoying it. Crichton crawled toward the edge of the
bed, on the verge of vomiting.
When he’d prepared himself mentally to ‘hang on’ as Aeryn had exhorted him, he’d envisioned the pain and
mental violation of the Aurora Chair, assuming that no beating or physical torture could exceed that double
agony. The events he hadn’t prepared himself for were the arrival of Grayza, the slow verbal sparring followed
by her moving close and drawing her fingers across his lips in a not quite seductive manner, or for the complete
and total loss of control, both mental and physical.
It had been Grayza who had slowed his hands as he fought to pull the clothes from their bodies, the overly
solicitous commandant who had guided him to the oversized bed, the ice-blue eyed interrogator who had
slowed his feverish grasping and thrusting, guiding his body as she whispered questions into his ear. It had
been Grayza controlling every move, allowing him to satiate himself bit by bit as he relinquished one piece of
information after another into her care. In the end it was Grayza who encouraged his arousal in order to draw
one more fact out of him -- and then another, and then another, and another. Until he lay panting and
exhausted, rational thought returning to him one breath at a time to reveal that he’d told her about every
experience from the moment he’d watched Moya slide into a wormhole until the day he’d met Gallenn for the
first time.
John lay at the side of the bed, stared dully into space, and prayed that his nausea would turn into full-blown
puking, an outward expression of his inward self-loathing.
“You will need this if we are to continue,” Grayza encouraged him, pulling at his shoulder. “Drink this and then
we can begin again.”
“Over my dead body,” John mumbled, trying to find the energy to get to his feet. Whatever she had done to
him, it was finally wearing off, leaving him sapped of strength but in control of his words and actions.
“Not yet, but that’s a possibility if you don’t provide your body with fluids and nutrients.” Her grasp was stronger
this time, yanking him violently onto his back where a knee pinned his arm, eliminating the possibility of rolling
away from her a second time.
John scowled up at her, any conjecture of how she had gotten him to act this way fleeing before the humiliation
of lying naked before the Peacekeeper officer. “What did you do to me?” he repeated. “How did you make me
do that?”
Grayza looked away from him, gazing distractedly into space as she lightly fingered her chest between her
breasts, a calm contemplative look suggesting that she was considering his question. She rested the hand
holding the flask on the soft surface and leaned over him, fingering his lips, running her thumb slowly along the
curve of his upper lip as she gazed into his eyes. Crichton jerked away from the oily, overly sweet odor,
involuntarily inhaling as the scent bit at the back of his sinuses. The familiar fragrance signaled the destruction
of his willpower.
“Nnn …” He’d meant to say ‘no’ as he recognized both the scent and the beginnings of its affects, the
knowledge insufficient to stop the recurrence of his waking nightmare. His head was filled with the fumes, each
breath spurring another fast intake. It spun into his mind like a whirlwind, loosened his brain from the
attachments holding it in place, and spun out again, taking reason with it.
Mindless desire flooded into the vacuum, the heat of the specialized insanity flooding through his body until the
hottest part of it came to rest between his legs. Her voice was inside his head, magically entering without first
touching his ears, and this time he drank from the flask when he was told to because he knew that if he did, that
she would let him … that he could … that there would be the heat and the passion … the physical ecstasy.
The answers would be a small price to pay as long as she permitted him to satisfy his growing hunger with her
body.
Crichton gathered Mele-On Grayza into his arms, rolled them over and over, aware of little else than the
softness of her body against his, her warmth, the grappling arms, the desire to do whatever she wanted of him,
and deep inside where she couldn’t reach his basic essence, he screamed and screamed at what she was
doing to him.
* * * * *
Aeryn drifted back and forth behind the officers manning the control room for the detention block. She watched
and remembered -- memorizing the layout, learning the door codes, and watching for any piece of information
that would tell her which cell was John’s and where he was at that moment. She’d just come from the level
where the Aurora Chair was located, relieved to find no sign of him but concerned because he wasn’t in any of
the holding cells either.
Her initial relief that John didn’t have to face Scorpius had given way to a deep foreboding. Mele-On Grayza
had been on the verge of removing the scarran half-breed from his command when they’d destroyed his carrier
two cycles earlier, demonstrating a level of power within the Peacekeepers even greater than Scorpius’. No
officer, regardless of politics or specialty, rose to that level without demonstrating total ruthlessness. If they
hadn’t placed John in the Aurora Chair, it suggested that he was facing something even worse. She revised
her time scale downward, committing herself to working faster, finding a solution in less time.
Half an arn in the control room had provided several security codes that would be useful over the next few
days, and a look at a duty roster that showed a miniscule gap in the daily schedule when there was only one
officer on duty during a shift change in the middle of this sector’s sleep-cycle. She started to rub one arm, an
unconscious habit, but stopped herself before the slither of fabric on fabric gave her away.
One of the officers punched idly at a button, scrolling through the views of the cells again and again without
even looking at the video images. He only seemed interested in seeing how fast he could depress the button,
striving to exceed the measured pace of the change to the monitor. His mindless repetition was another
miraculous gift.
Aeryn watched the flickering views without trying to focus on each one, allowing her subconscious to evaluate
the nearly subliminal images. After twenty microts she saw an image of a prisoner flicker by that she’d seen
earlier, which meant that the series was repeating itself and that John wasn’t in any of the cells. They must
have started the interrogations. There was nothing she could do about that, and nothing in the control room
indicated where he had been taken. She stuck her head out of the open door, checked both ways before
stepping into the corridor, and went in search of the next requirement of her developing plan.
* * * * *
Mele-On Grayza straddled the inert body, alternating between stroking the sweat soaked hair at his temples
and daubing several long scratches on his back with a disinfectant compound.
“Explain the drive system to me,” she urged, continuing a line of questioning that so far hadn’t produced an
intelligible answer. “Start with the components of the engine.” Crichton flinched as she swabbed a deeper
gash, but remained silent. “List the components necessary to make the system work,” she said more
forcefully.
“You need … ” He trailed off into a long sigh.
“List the components,” she ordered into his ear, spacing her words out.
John opened his eyes, staring into space. “Flour … milk … butter … eggs …”
“What are these things? Explain,” she demanded loudly, abandoning the seductive tones.
“Baking powder. Can’t have … biscuits without it,” he finished, the syllables slurred by the pressure of his face
against the pillow.
Grayza let out a noise of frustration, the snarling exclamation revealing that the session had yielded fewer
results than she’d hoped. She jostled his shoulders, watching as the body beneath her slopped from side to
side, showing a complete lack of muscle tension. “Crichton, we need to begin again,” she urged, leaning
closer. He answered with a quiet snore.
“Perhaps a short recuperation is warranted,” she told the senseless human. “An arn or two and then we’ll start
again.”
* * * * *
Aeryn drifted along behind a technician, silence and patience feeling more natural after nearly twenty arns of
movement around the ship. She didn’t want to attack this non-combatant, but she was in desperate need of the
food the man was carrying. The constant, moderate exercise was draining her energy, and the giddy sensation
that said her body required fuel had become a permanent companion. The idea of killing this man solely for a
meal was repugnant, and she’d almost let him walk away from her. Her stomach had grumbled at that precise
moment, issuing a clearly audible reminder of what was a stake. John’s life rested on her fitness. She would
have to set aside her reluctance to kill for plate of rations, and do what was necessary.
This portion of the ship was a long distance from any of the planetary terrain enclosures where she was
concealing the bodies, but she had figured out how to resolve that problem before she begun watching the exit
from the commissary for a potential target.
The tech turned down a narrower corridor, picking at the food on his tray, and activated the door sensor to his
quarters with his elbow. He moved inside slowly, distracted by his meal, never noticing the rippling distortion or
the small breeze that moved inside with him.
* * * * *
“The good news is, it’s not the Aurora Chair,” Crichton mumbled to himself as he tried to sit up. Fatigue spun
the metal-walled cell around him in a lazy loop and he pitched over on his side. “Bad news is … I think this is
worse.” He tucked his knees against his chest and pulled the thin covers over his shoulders, failing to get all of
his legs under the small square of insulation. He’d been nine tenths asleep when the guards had wrestled him
into his coveralls and carried him out of Grayza’s quarters, but there’d been enough awareness left for him to
hear and remember her orders.
“He is not to be harmed in any way. Lower the temperature in his cell until he has trouble sleeping, then raise it
one degree. Bring him back here in four arns.”
“Death by degrees,” John said out loud, then snickered at the unintended pun. The temperature hadn’t
dropped to freezing, but it was close, preventing him from falling into a deep sleep. Grayza’s orders, issued
when she thought he was unconscious, had revealed that she intended to pick away at his stamina gradually
until he only had enough energy left to answer her questions, all reason lost to exhaustion and whatever drug
she was using on him. John closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep despite the cold, his body crying for rest.
Knowing what they were doing to him wasn’t going to stop it from happening; it would only increase the mental
anguish as the exhaustion increased and he slowly lost the ability to control his responses.
“You hang on,” Aeryn whispered into his ear, her tone implying that he wasn’t.
“I am,” he objected, waking as the mumbled words spilled out of his mouth. He lectured himself to stop talking
out loud, afraid that he would utter Aeryn’s name in his sleep. John closed his eyes and tried again, the cold
chill of the metal slab fading as he slid away.
“You have to trust me, John. Can you do that?” Aeryn knelt beside him, the hood of the stealth suit thrown
back, her hair cascading across the silvery fabric.
“Yes. I trust you.” He jerked awake again, the sound of his own voice in his ears. “Stop that,” he ordered
himself, and burrowed back into the comfort of unconsciousness.
“John, wake up and talk to me for a microt.” She was sitting next to him, bugging him when he would prefer to
sleep.
“Leave me …” John raised himself far enough to shake his head, trying to make the full transition from sleep to
waking this time. The cold was holding him in a not quite waking state where his subconscious reigned,
providing enough signals to his body for it to participate in the imagined conversations. This was just as
dangerous as the sweaty slime that Grayza was using on him in her quarters.
He laid down again, thinking about how he could keep Aeryn safe, how he could keep his mouth from blurting
out his most vital secret whenever he went to sleep.
“Help me,” he whispered to her, not caring if the surveillance devices picked up the generic plea. “Show me
how.” Sleep claimed him before he could find an answer.
“What does that taste like?
“Yesterday.”
“Well, no one can compete with that! I am so much better off dead.”
He had the answer. John sat up, the only way he could ensure that he was truly awake. He wrapped the thin
covers around his shoulders before squirming to sit with his back against the wall. Rocking helped him stay
alert as he closed his eyes intentionally and took himself back to the moment that his brief dream had recreated
for him. The emotions were available, just as raw and painful as the day it had happened. Nine days of
reconciliation hadn’t been enough to temper that hurt.
He rocked back and forward, and wallowed in the memory, trying to smell Moya’s maintenance bay, hear her
noises around him as he stood with the loneliness coursing through him, and watched the coin flip end over
end, hearing Aeryn’s rejection as clearly as if it had happened just yesterday.
“What? Like that side you stay?”
“Just make a frelling wormhole, and go home.”
“No. You're not listening to me. It's too late for me.”
The memories slashed aside the thin layers of healing that had been laid down during their days in the
prototype ship. Crichton switched to a small battering thump of fist against his forehead as his heart resumed
the ache he’d thought he had left behind forever. “She left, she left, she left, she left,” John chanted to himself,
the words emerging so quietly that even he had trouble hearing them. He wrapped himself in a new form of
chill, one that touched his thoughts and emotions instead of his body. Then he reverted to the slow, evenly
paced rocking and built a new history for himself -- one in which Aeryn Sun never came back to find him.
* * * * *
Aeryn finished lashing her hair into the tight Peacekeeper queue, fingers checking one last time to make sure
that it was even and that no strands had escaped. She hadn’t worn her hair in the bound pigtail in nearly five
cycles, not since she’d been declared irreversibly contaminated, and it had taken four tries to get it right. She
shrugged into the stiff black jacket she had taken off the female officer in the terrain reconstruction, yanked the
waist down into place, and checked herself in the mirror. The face that had looked back at her an arn earlier
had been pale with hunger and fatigue. This person appeared merely tired, as though she’d just come off
duty.
The next half arn was going to be tricky. She’d run a careful reconnaissance of the hallways between these
quarters and the nearest terrain hall, and most of them were no more than three body-widths wide. It was the
middle of this deck’s sleep cycle though, and if she could avoid any roving patrols, she had a good chance of
dumping the body without being detected. The doors slid open with a hiss, and she checked in both directions
before returning to the seating area of the tech’s quarters.
It took two probes into empty air to locate the slumped body inside the suit. She hoisted the corpse onto her
shoulders. Another look in the mirror revealed a strange rippling void where her upper back and one shoulder
were supposed to be, the lack of any visual feedback interspersed with occasional flashes of her uniform or the
wall behind her.
“Frell it all!” she exclaimed, shifting the body to a different position to see if it made a difference. This time her
body disappeared altogether, the suit somehow transmitting the image of the wall behind her. She’d hoped that
the technology could cope with the contact against her own body, hiding only the dead tech, but it was
obviously having trouble interpreting and recreating the correct inputs. This would make her trip through the
corridors even more hazardous. If she heard anyone approaching during her travels, she’d have to dump the
body on the floor, hope no one tripped over it as she moved on, and then double back for it.
“The things I do for you, Crichton,” she grumbled, staggering under the load. The passageways were
deserted, and she moved a little faster, praying to any deity who chose to listen, asking that her luck would hold
a day or two longer.
* * * * *
Grayza leaned back in her chair, fingers idly turning a data chip over and over as she listened to the report
from the officer in charge of the detention block.
“He’s begun talking in his sleep, ma’am. Small comments mostly.” The burly security specialist pulled himself
up straighter as she raised her head to look up at him. “We have not detected any names or technical data
yet.”
“I would prefer to judge that for myself. Compress the recordings from his cell and deliver them to me in one
arn. If he stops talking, lower the temperature. Let him rest but not sleep. Do you understand the
difference?”
“Yes, ma’am!” The officer snapped to attention, nodded his acknowledgement, and hurried from her quarters.
“Braca!” Grayza called, summoning her aide. “What progress has been made evaluating the engines on
Crichton’s ship?”
The lieutenant hurried in, clearly anxious about the query. “None, commandant. We were not … I ordered the
techs to stay away from the ship in the event that Crichton had booby trapped it in some way.” Grayza’s furious
glare goaded him into a more rigid stance at attention. “They began examining the drive system, they
discovered that Crichton had disconnected the power source for no apparent reason. It seemed reasonable to
conclude that restoring the power might set off some type of destructive device.”
Grayza subsided, eyeing her subordinate as she considered his report. “Well done,” she said after some
deliberation. “Search the ship. I want a list of the contents and any information stored in the databanks. Do
not power up any of the systems, do not alter the ship in any way except for whatever is necessary to conduct
the search. I will continue my interrogation of Crichton in two arns, and will find out what he has done to the
engines at that time. Dismissed.”
The commandant lazed back in her chair, considering this latest bit of data. “You had time to rig your drive
system for destruction, Crichton. You would prefer to take the chance that we would capture it rather than
escape. Why?” The slender fingers tapped at the surface of her desk as she considered the mystery, then
punched a comm circuit.
“Bring Crichton to my quarters in half an arn.” The information was too important to wait the two arns she’d
originally specified. They would have to begin the next round of questioning a bit sooner than she’d
intended.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
Chapter 2
A crowd of techs swept out of an open doorway, turning in Aeryn’s direction. She bit down on a curse and
allowed herself to be herded by the mass of bodies, checking over her shoulder periodically for an opportunity
to reverse course and head back the way she’d come. The laughing group spanned the corridor from side to
side, leaving no room for her to ease past them. The stealth suit continued to work perfectly, allowing her to
move around the carrier with complete impunity, but crowded corridors such as this one presented the single
hazard of bumping into someone physically.
She approached an intersection and spared a longer look behind her, hoping for some indication as to which
way they were going to turn. The group was caught up in a boisterous discussion of technological trivia,
apparently following a familiar route by habit, so she resorted to taking the right hand turning simply because
she was on that side of the corridor and turning in that direction kept her close to the wall.
The group went past her, continuing straight through the junction of hallways, and she spun around, heading
back to the largest of the ship’s planetary terrain reconstructions. She was tired, thirsty and hungry, and hadn’t
found a safe location to sit down in almost ten arns. The trees and shrubs in the terrain setting offered some
cover and an excuse for a fall if someone tripped over her invisible body. In addition, although it wasn’t
particularly palatable, she knew that the water in the small lake contained nothing harmful if she chose to drink
it.
She crouched by the entrance to the artificial habitat, scanning up and down the corridor as she waited for
someone else to pass through the doors: the only way for her to enter without raising suspicion. The double
doors slid open and she froze as a double line of young cadets began filing out, marching in precision. One
youngster lagged behind, marginally understandable since his patches indicated that he was not yet six cycles
old, and the cadre leader yelled at him to catch up. Eyes wide with alarm, the boy ran after his unit, falling into
step with an ease born of practice.
Aeryn smiled inside the hood as she slid around the corner, continuing to hug the wall. When she was that
age, the barracks leaders had tried to scare her unit with the tale of Cholak’s demon, a bloodthirsty creature
that supposedly snatched and devoured lagging cadets, leaving no trace of their bodies. The idea of a
monster had been fascinating at best. As with the small soldier she had just seen, the more immediate
prospect of being punished for substandard performance had been a far more terrifying threat.
The parkland was nearly empty -- a few adult wandering along the water and no sign of inquisitive children.
Aeryn straightened up, indulging in a normal gait for the first time in arns, confident that the suit would hide her
as she stepped through some bushes and entered the small stand of trees. She let out a sigh as she moved
into the midst of the tiny forest, relaxing even more once she was out of sight of the handful of officers. She
found a small area of bare ground at the base of a tree and sat down, leaned against the rough trunk, and
closed her eyes.
She’d accomplished very little so far. Her reconnaissance of the ship had revealed no weakness in the security
that she thought could be manipulated to help John escape. Despite everything she had told him, their
chances of getting off the carrier alive diminished with every passing arn. John undergoing some sort of
interrogation was a certainty; torture was a reasonable assumption. Peacekeeper interrogation techniques
were designed to achieve a complete physical breakdown in three to five solar days, luxans providing the only
reliable exception to that standard. The Aurora Chair would achieve that end much sooner.
When John had been imprisoned on the Gammak Base, they’d held him for less than two solar days, by which
time he was almost too exhausted to make the climb out of the underground levels. He was a stronger person
now, she reasoned, experienced in the techniques of interrogation and more accustomed to physical brutality.
It might give her one more day’s leeway before his physical condition decayed to the point where he wouldn’t be
able to move. Three days was her time limit then, four at the outside. After that, she assumed they would both
die in the attempt to escape. But she would not leave him here, no matter what the cost.
Aeryn opened her eyes, focusing on the greenery overhead instead of the imagined horrors she envisioned
John enduring. Standing aside impotently while several burly security officers dragged him out of the ship had
violated every instinct. She’d decided in advance that leaving the ship immediately was the safest course of
action, and had hurried down the steps from the cockpit while they were still bouncing under the weight of the
guards. A quick leap had gotten her off the flexing surface before the last man had stepped down, and she’d
lain flat on the deck, nearly eye-to-eye with John as he was flung sprawling across the metal hangar floor.
She’d been a scant three motras away from him, hugging one of the landing struts, when the personnel in the
hangar had gone silent at the entrance of a group of officers. The sight of the commanding officer stepping
away from the group had generated no pleasure, other than the small relief that John would not have to face
Scorpius one more time.
“John Crichton.” The silky, confident voice had broken the chilled atmosphere of the hangar. Commandant
Mele-On Grayza stalked toward him, trailed by two of her personal guard. “Perhaps you remember me.”
John watched her advance from his spot on the floor, not bothering to get up. “Yeah. I remember a couple of
things,” he mumbled, eyeing first Grayza and then the larger group of black uniforms waiting several motras
away.
“You have eluded us for too long. It has taken too many of our resources to track you down.”
“Does the phrase ‘Give it a rest’ mean anything to you?” he asked sarcastically. “It’s been two cycles since that
little accident with your boat. Get over it.” Aeryn winced as a guard stepped toward him, raising his pulse rifle
for a blow. This was why she’d told him not to be stupid.
“Stop!” the order echoed clearly in the cavernous hangar. “I want John Crichton unharmed.” Aeryn relaxed
slightly, using the brief moment of suspended violence to scan her surroundings, looking for the least busy
route out of the hangar. Colliding with another person was the only way they would know she was on board
until they came across her belongings in the engine nacelle. The usual route past the security checkpoint was
too risky, requiring that she pass through an area perpetually crowded with personnel.
She looked back and John was still on the floor, his head propped up on one hand, with one of his most
irritating looks of arrogant impudence in place. Aeryn shook her head, aware that his uncaring attitude was an
act, a way of controlling his fear, but also aware that it would invite the guards to treat him more harshly. As
she watched, he was pulled roughly to his feet and his hands shackled behind his back.
“Small accident,” Mele-On Grayza repeated slowly, moving close enough that John took an involuntary step
back before stopping himself. “Boat.” She circled him. “You were responsible for destroying a command
carrier. You will pay for that … after I am done with you.”
The muscles in the back of his neck tensed, tendons standing out clearly, but John held his ground as she
returned to the overly close spot in front of him. Aeryn smiled and nodded unseen, pride replacing the thought-
fragmenting concern for him. She recognized the small signals his body was giving off, and knew that he was
afraid -- rightfully so since he was facing the possibility of being put back in the Aurora Chair -- but the stiff
shoulders and infinitesimally cocked head meant that he had mastered his fear and had prepared himself to
face whatever lay ahead.
“All this because I pointed a gun at you,” John said after several microts of silence. “I really have got to stop
doing that.”
“That was the least of your crimes,” Grayza responded, stepping away from him. “But it is a good place to
start. Bring him.” She gestured to the guards and he was alternately shoved and dragged toward the exit.
Aeryn watched until the group disappeared from sight, then headed toward a doorway leading into a
maintenance compound. She wanted to follow him, to learn where he was going to be held and make sure that
he was all right, but the risk was too great. The rescue, however she was going to accomplish that, and all of
its logistics had to come first, even before her own need to learn what lay ahead for John.
None of the security personnel wandering the hangar noticed the infinitesimal distortion that dodged two
grease-smeared techs, then drifted into the maze of storerooms, repair shops and tech labs, efficiently
categorizing where certain items could be found.
Her first foray deeper into the carrier took her on a search for some sort of weapon, the quest made more
difficult because even if she found a weapon of some sort, she had to be sure that no one was around before
picking it up. The sight of an object floating through midair would baffle even the most dull-minded grot for less
than five microts. The Peacekeepers didn’t have stealth suits, but they were aware of the light-bending
technology, and would recognize the phenomenon for what it was.
She located an armory where a supply of knives lying in a jumble invited theft, but two officers entered just as
she was preparing to hide one inside the suit, and she retreated when they settled down to conduct an
inventory. In the ensuing arns she managed to locate the Aurora Chair in an enclosure two levels below the
detention cells, and was also lucky enough to come across a tech reprogramming a door lock outside a
monitoring control room. Holding her breath to avoid detection, she leaned over his shoulder and memorized
the codes he was using as he punched them into the display pad. If she could steal the necessary equipment,
the string of numerals would allow her to program her own palm print into any lock aboard the carrier.
Quiet laughter broke into her review of the situation, two voices intertwining as they moved closer to where she
was sitting. A man and a woman wandered through the trees, talking quietly and holding hands. Initially, Aeryn
watched them as a precaution. When they moved off through the trees her attention remained fixed on the pair
in response to a sharp pang of jealousy. They bumped against each other comfortably as they wove through
the growth, and were spending more time looking into each other’s eyes than they were watching their feet,
resulting in a great deal of stumbling and crashing into bushes. There never seemed to be enough time for her
and John to do that sort of thing. The nine-day idyll aboard the small prototype ship had been an anomaly in
their lives, and it had been all too brief.
She surveyed the couple with more interest after noticing that the woman was almost exactly her own height
and build. The man was marginally taller than John. Aeryn got to her feet and floated along behind them,
using their own smashing noises to cover her quieter passage as she drew close. The pair was as perfect a
match physically for her and John as she could hope for, chance putting two uniforms within her reach in a
secluded, unmonitored location.
The pair stopped, looked around, and then laid down, still talking and laughing as they set aside some of their
outer garments. Aeryn watched for a few microts, then turned and worked her way back toward the expanse of
grass, abandoning the idea of taking the uniforms. It would mean killing them. They would be missed and their
bodies discovered far too soon -- long before she was ready to free John. She would have to find uniforms
somewhere else once she had the rest the escape arranged.
She took a last look at the simulated sunlight and green grass, thinking of the day she had stood in a nearly
identical place with John. She had called him ‘Crichton’ then and could barely stand to look at him, never
meeting the eyes that reminded her too much of the other one. That day she’d only been able to see what had
been lost, instead of focusing on the second chance that a quirk of fate and Jool’s pathetic piloting had
delivered to her.
“Why?” she whispered to herself. Why had she turned away from him? Why had she wasted all that time? It
seemed so reasonable back then, the pain demanding that she never let anyone become that important to her
ever again. She hadn’t anticipated that the tiny discomfort of leaving John would grow over time into an agony
far greater than the prospect of losing him again.
Aeryn settled onto one knee near the doors, rubbing her forehead through the slick cloth of the hood as she
waited for someone to enter or exit. The smooth slide of the fabric across her skin reminded her that she was
lucky to have a fourth generation version of the technology. The earlier models were uncomfortable, and more
critically for a sebacean, they were hot. This one was cool, lightweight, and didn’t retain moisture like the
earlier versions, meaning she could wear it for as long as it took to get free.
She scanned her surroundings as she waited by the exit. She was alone now, apparently having chosen a time
when the landscape got little use, which might explain why the two officers had decided to recreate in such a
public place. Aeryn went back to considering how she was going to get John free, starting with where she might
be able to hide a body when she finally chose to acquire a uniform or a weapon. What she really needed was
to be able to make the bodies simply disappear, increasing the interval before anyone confirmed that the
officers were actually missing.
An officer who missed a duty period faced severe penalties, but it did occur on rare occasions. A missing
officer would give them time; a dead body would generate a security lock-down that even a ghost would have
trouble negotiating.
What she needed was for Cholak’s demon to come and take the bodies away, leaving behind no sign of the
devoured victims.
Aeryn grinned inside the suit, thinking of that fable and how little it had frightened her. A few of the cadets in
her unit had believed it though, hurrying to stay with their cadre and lying awake in fear at night. The barracks
leader had been ordered to stop using the monster to instill obedience once Training Command discovered
that even disciplined and regimented children could be frightened by the prospect of the supernatural. Aeryn’s
head came up and she turned to look at the park behind her, some small portion of her mental wanderings
triggering an idea.
She knew where she could hide the bodies.
The second largest logistical problem had been solved, and if there was anyone on board this carrier who had
ever been frightened by Cholak’s demon, she might even instill a small number of the ship’s compliment with a
miniscule amount of uncertainty.
“Forgive me,” she offered quietly, apologizing as much to John as to any listening deity for what she was about
to do. Aeryn Sun, no longer an assassin but willing to do anything to save John Crichton, ran silently toward
the trees to procure two uniforms and to let a myth loose on the command carrier.
* * * * *
Crichton rolled onto his back and tried to pull the black shimmering sheet over his body, the drifting air chilling
him as the sweat slowly evaporated. Grayza’s quiet chuckle generated an additional shiver along his spine as
she pulled the covers out of his grasp.
“That won’t be necessary,” her voice slid across him like one of her touches, generating another stomach
churning wave of revulsion. “Drink this,” she instructed, sliding alongside him with a wide-mouthed flask in her
hand.
“Eye of newt, wing of bat? I don’t think so.” John pulled away from her, his attempt to roll to the far side of the
wide bed turning into an exhausted facedown sprawl as his arms slid out from under him. “What the frell did
you do to me?” Her hand wandered up and down his back, and he closed his eyes, shuddering under her
touch. The insane, overwhelming desire to touch and be touched by the commandant had faded at last,
leaving him sickened and confused. He assumed he’d been drugged, but he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything
since being taken prisoner, nor had he been injected. This was not the torture he’d expected, and a piece of
him longed for a nice, simple beating.
When they’d towed him out of the hangar, he had expected to be hauled straight off to the Aurora Chair, but
the following arns had been free of any overt abuse. They’d started by escorting him to a medical facility where
he’d been scanned, poked and prodded for several arns. When he’d been announced fit, healthy and without
defects, he’d assumed the rough stuff was going to begin and had again braced himself for the mind-frelling of
the Chair. His expectations were given another good jolt when they’d herded him into a starkly bare cell and
left him alone.
Arns of restless pacing yielded nothing more than sore wrists from the chafing of the binders and a pair of
mildly tired feet. He eventually realized that they’d already started the psychological games, allowing the
uncertainty to work on him before starting in with something more direct. It was a simple yet effective method to
soften him up. The binders made it impossible to get comfortable lying down, so he settled for sitting cross-
legged on the hard metal slab that passed for a bunk, anticipating that as soon as he relaxed they would start
the next phase.
As expected, within two hundred microts the guards appeared to shove him through the maze of corridors. He
let them propel him forward without resisting, focusing inwardly on the ordeal ahead, committing to memory
what it felt like to have a body that didn’t shriek and throb with pain. He closed his eyes as he was dragged
forward and used the time to build a mental wall around every thought concerning Aeryn and her present
activities. He wasn’t sure how he’d blocked the agonizing invasions of the Chair the last time, but the stakes
were even higher now and he had to assume that he would need to hold out longer. A Stykera could survive
over one hundred sessions in the Aurora Chair. Crichton wondered how many a human could endure before
turning into a slobbering, gibbering idiot.
A door rolled aside. He opened his eyes as he was thrust into a senior officer’s living quarters -- another
surprise. John took two more steps on his own, then stopped, waiting to see what was going to happen next.
The guards removed the manacles, then stomped out of the chamber. The surroundings were familiar, similar
to the quarters Scorpius had occupied on the destroyed command carrier.
There were a few minor differences. The bed, which was three times as large as the scarran half-breed’s and
lacked the temperature stabilization equipment, was located on the upper level this time, the desk with the inlaid
displays and control circuitry was on the lower level near the door, and a sybaritic bath was over to the right,
also on the upper level.
He wandered further into the room, rubbing his wrists as he remembered the last time he’d been in a chamber
like this one. He’d stood facing Scorpius that time, his body aching from head to foot from the clobbering he’d
taken during the fight in the generator room. Grayza had been behind that assassination attempt, using him to
get to Scorpius. John wondered what information she was after this time. She’d ridiculed wormhole technology
two cycles ago, but time could change anyone’s attitudes. He explored her quarters as he waited, increasingly
apprehensive about the inexplicably gentle treatment.
“Tell me what you’re thinking about,” Grayza whispered into his ear, drawing him away from his thoughts. One
finger stroked him along his neck behind his earlobe and he pulled away from her with a jerk. He knew how
he’d gotten here, sprawled naked and depleted on the soft, expansive playground, but that didn’t explain why
he’d done what he’d just done or why he’d felt like he was enjoying it. Crichton crawled toward the edge of the
bed, on the verge of vomiting.
When he’d prepared himself mentally to ‘hang on’ as Aeryn had exhorted him, he’d envisioned the pain and
mental violation of the Aurora Chair, assuming that no beating or physical torture could exceed that double
agony. The events he hadn’t prepared himself for were the arrival of Grayza, the slow verbal sparring followed
by her moving close and drawing her fingers across his lips in a not quite seductive manner, or for the complete
and total loss of control, both mental and physical.
It had been Grayza who had slowed his hands as he fought to pull the clothes from their bodies, the overly
solicitous commandant who had guided him to the oversized bed, the ice-blue eyed interrogator who had
slowed his feverish grasping and thrusting, guiding his body as she whispered questions into his ear. It had
been Grayza controlling every move, allowing him to satiate himself bit by bit as he relinquished one piece of
information after another into her care. In the end it was Grayza who encouraged his arousal in order to draw
one more fact out of him -- and then another, and then another, and another. Until he lay panting and
exhausted, rational thought returning to him one breath at a time to reveal that he’d told her about every
experience from the moment he’d watched Moya slide into a wormhole until the day he’d met Gallenn for the
first time.
John lay at the side of the bed, stared dully into space, and prayed that his nausea would turn into full-blown
puking, an outward expression of his inward self-loathing.
“You will need this if we are to continue,” Grayza encouraged him, pulling at his shoulder. “Drink this and then
we can begin again.”
“Over my dead body,” John mumbled, trying to find the energy to get to his feet. Whatever she had done to
him, it was finally wearing off, leaving him sapped of strength but in control of his words and actions.
“Not yet, but that’s a possibility if you don’t provide your body with fluids and nutrients.” Her grasp was stronger
this time, yanking him violently onto his back where a knee pinned his arm, eliminating the possibility of rolling
away from her a second time.
John scowled up at her, any conjecture of how she had gotten him to act this way fleeing before the humiliation
of lying naked before the Peacekeeper officer. “What did you do to me?” he repeated. “How did you make me
do that?”
Grayza looked away from him, gazing distractedly into space as she lightly fingered her chest between her
breasts, a calm contemplative look suggesting that she was considering his question. She rested the hand
holding the flask on the soft surface and leaned over him, fingering his lips, running her thumb slowly along the
curve of his upper lip as she gazed into his eyes. Crichton jerked away from the oily, overly sweet odor,
involuntarily inhaling as the scent bit at the back of his sinuses. The familiar fragrance signaled the destruction
of his willpower.
“Nnn …” He’d meant to say ‘no’ as he recognized both the scent and the beginnings of its affects, the
knowledge insufficient to stop the recurrence of his waking nightmare. His head was filled with the fumes, each
breath spurring another fast intake. It spun into his mind like a whirlwind, loosened his brain from the
attachments holding it in place, and spun out again, taking reason with it.
Mindless desire flooded into the vacuum, the heat of the specialized insanity flooding through his body until the
hottest part of it came to rest between his legs. Her voice was inside his head, magically entering without first
touching his ears, and this time he drank from the flask when he was told to because he knew that if he did, that
she would let him … that he could … that there would be the heat and the passion … the physical ecstasy.
The answers would be a small price to pay as long as she permitted him to satisfy his growing hunger with her
body.
Crichton gathered Mele-On Grayza into his arms, rolled them over and over, aware of little else than the
softness of her body against his, her warmth, the grappling arms, the desire to do whatever she wanted of him,
and deep inside where she couldn’t reach his basic essence, he screamed and screamed at what she was
doing to him.
* * * * *
Aeryn drifted back and forth behind the officers manning the control room for the detention block. She watched
and remembered -- memorizing the layout, learning the door codes, and watching for any piece of information
that would tell her which cell was John’s and where he was at that moment. She’d just come from the level
where the Aurora Chair was located, relieved to find no sign of him but concerned because he wasn’t in any of
the holding cells either.
Her initial relief that John didn’t have to face Scorpius had given way to a deep foreboding. Mele-On Grayza
had been on the verge of removing the scarran half-breed from his command when they’d destroyed his carrier
two cycles earlier, demonstrating a level of power within the Peacekeepers even greater than Scorpius’. No
officer, regardless of politics or specialty, rose to that level without demonstrating total ruthlessness. If they
hadn’t placed John in the Aurora Chair, it suggested that he was facing something even worse. She revised
her time scale downward, committing herself to working faster, finding a solution in less time.
Half an arn in the control room had provided several security codes that would be useful over the next few
days, and a look at a duty roster that showed a miniscule gap in the daily schedule when there was only one
officer on duty during a shift change in the middle of this sector’s sleep-cycle. She started to rub one arm, an
unconscious habit, but stopped herself before the slither of fabric on fabric gave her away.
One of the officers punched idly at a button, scrolling through the views of the cells again and again without
even looking at the video images. He only seemed interested in seeing how fast he could depress the button,
striving to exceed the measured pace of the change to the monitor. His mindless repetition was another
miraculous gift.
Aeryn watched the flickering views without trying to focus on each one, allowing her subconscious to evaluate
the nearly subliminal images. After twenty microts she saw an image of a prisoner flicker by that she’d seen
earlier, which meant that the series was repeating itself and that John wasn’t in any of the cells. They must
have started the interrogations. There was nothing she could do about that, and nothing in the control room
indicated where he had been taken. She stuck her head out of the open door, checked both ways before
stepping into the corridor, and went in search of the next requirement of her developing plan.
* * * * *
Mele-On Grayza straddled the inert body, alternating between stroking the sweat soaked hair at his temples
and daubing several long scratches on his back with a disinfectant compound.
“Explain the drive system to me,” she urged, continuing a line of questioning that so far hadn’t produced an
intelligible answer. “Start with the components of the engine.” Crichton flinched as she swabbed a deeper
gash, but remained silent. “List the components necessary to make the system work,” she said more
forcefully.
“You need … ” He trailed off into a long sigh.
“List the components,” she ordered into his ear, spacing her words out.
John opened his eyes, staring into space. “Flour … milk … butter … eggs …”
“What are these things? Explain,” she demanded loudly, abandoning the seductive tones.
“Baking powder. Can’t have … biscuits without it,” he finished, the syllables slurred by the pressure of his face
against the pillow.
Grayza let out a noise of frustration, the snarling exclamation revealing that the session had yielded fewer
results than she’d hoped. She jostled his shoulders, watching as the body beneath her slopped from side to
side, showing a complete lack of muscle tension. “Crichton, we need to begin again,” she urged, leaning
closer. He answered with a quiet snore.
“Perhaps a short recuperation is warranted,” she told the senseless human. “An arn or two and then we’ll start
again.”
* * * * *
Aeryn drifted along behind a technician, silence and patience feeling more natural after nearly twenty arns of
movement around the ship. She didn’t want to attack this non-combatant, but she was in desperate need of the
food the man was carrying. The constant, moderate exercise was draining her energy, and the giddy sensation
that said her body required fuel had become a permanent companion. The idea of killing this man solely for a
meal was repugnant, and she’d almost let him walk away from her. Her stomach had grumbled at that precise
moment, issuing a clearly audible reminder of what was a stake. John’s life rested on her fitness. She would
have to set aside her reluctance to kill for plate of rations, and do what was necessary.
This portion of the ship was a long distance from any of the planetary terrain enclosures where she was
concealing the bodies, but she had figured out how to resolve that problem before she begun watching the exit
from the commissary for a potential target.
The tech turned down a narrower corridor, picking at the food on his tray, and activated the door sensor to his
quarters with his elbow. He moved inside slowly, distracted by his meal, never noticing the rippling distortion or
the small breeze that moved inside with him.
* * * * *
“The good news is, it’s not the Aurora Chair,” Crichton mumbled to himself as he tried to sit up. Fatigue spun
the metal-walled cell around him in a lazy loop and he pitched over on his side. “Bad news is … I think this is
worse.” He tucked his knees against his chest and pulled the thin covers over his shoulders, failing to get all of
his legs under the small square of insulation. He’d been nine tenths asleep when the guards had wrestled him
into his coveralls and carried him out of Grayza’s quarters, but there’d been enough awareness left for him to
hear and remember her orders.
“He is not to be harmed in any way. Lower the temperature in his cell until he has trouble sleeping, then raise it
one degree. Bring him back here in four arns.”
“Death by degrees,” John said out loud, then snickered at the unintended pun. The temperature hadn’t
dropped to freezing, but it was close, preventing him from falling into a deep sleep. Grayza’s orders, issued
when she thought he was unconscious, had revealed that she intended to pick away at his stamina gradually
until he only had enough energy left to answer her questions, all reason lost to exhaustion and whatever drug
she was using on him. John closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep despite the cold, his body crying for rest.
Knowing what they were doing to him wasn’t going to stop it from happening; it would only increase the mental
anguish as the exhaustion increased and he slowly lost the ability to control his responses.
“You hang on,” Aeryn whispered into his ear, her tone implying that he wasn’t.
“I am,” he objected, waking as the mumbled words spilled out of his mouth. He lectured himself to stop talking
out loud, afraid that he would utter Aeryn’s name in his sleep. John closed his eyes and tried again, the cold
chill of the metal slab fading as he slid away.
“You have to trust me, John. Can you do that?” Aeryn knelt beside him, the hood of the stealth suit thrown
back, her hair cascading across the silvery fabric.
“Yes. I trust you.” He jerked awake again, the sound of his own voice in his ears. “Stop that,” he ordered
himself, and burrowed back into the comfort of unconsciousness.
“John, wake up and talk to me for a microt.” She was sitting next to him, bugging him when he would prefer to
sleep.
“Leave me …” John raised himself far enough to shake his head, trying to make the full transition from sleep to
waking this time. The cold was holding him in a not quite waking state where his subconscious reigned,
providing enough signals to his body for it to participate in the imagined conversations. This was just as
dangerous as the sweaty slime that Grayza was using on him in her quarters.
He laid down again, thinking about how he could keep Aeryn safe, how he could keep his mouth from blurting
out his most vital secret whenever he went to sleep.
“Help me,” he whispered to her, not caring if the surveillance devices picked up the generic plea. “Show me
how.” Sleep claimed him before he could find an answer.
“What does that taste like?
“Yesterday.”
“Well, no one can compete with that! I am so much better off dead.”
He had the answer. John sat up, the only way he could ensure that he was truly awake. He wrapped the thin
covers around his shoulders before squirming to sit with his back against the wall. Rocking helped him stay
alert as he closed his eyes intentionally and took himself back to the moment that his brief dream had recreated
for him. The emotions were available, just as raw and painful as the day it had happened. Nine days of
reconciliation hadn’t been enough to temper that hurt.
He rocked back and forward, and wallowed in the memory, trying to smell Moya’s maintenance bay, hear her
noises around him as he stood with the loneliness coursing through him, and watched the coin flip end over
end, hearing Aeryn’s rejection as clearly as if it had happened just yesterday.
“What? Like that side you stay?”
“Just make a frelling wormhole, and go home.”
“No. You're not listening to me. It's too late for me.”
The memories slashed aside the thin layers of healing that had been laid down during their days in the
prototype ship. Crichton switched to a small battering thump of fist against his forehead as his heart resumed
the ache he’d thought he had left behind forever. “She left, she left, she left, she left,” John chanted to himself,
the words emerging so quietly that even he had trouble hearing them. He wrapped himself in a new form of
chill, one that touched his thoughts and emotions instead of his body. Then he reverted to the slow, evenly
paced rocking and built a new history for himself -- one in which Aeryn Sun never came back to find him.
* * * * *
Aeryn finished lashing her hair into the tight Peacekeeper queue, fingers checking one last time to make sure
that it was even and that no strands had escaped. She hadn’t worn her hair in the bound pigtail in nearly five
cycles, not since she’d been declared irreversibly contaminated, and it had taken four tries to get it right. She
shrugged into the stiff black jacket she had taken off the female officer in the terrain reconstruction, yanked the
waist down into place, and checked herself in the mirror. The face that had looked back at her an arn earlier
had been pale with hunger and fatigue. This person appeared merely tired, as though she’d just come off
duty.
The next half arn was going to be tricky. She’d run a careful reconnaissance of the hallways between these
quarters and the nearest terrain hall, and most of them were no more than three body-widths wide. It was the
middle of this deck’s sleep cycle though, and if she could avoid any roving patrols, she had a good chance of
dumping the body without being detected. The doors slid open with a hiss, and she checked in both directions
before returning to the seating area of the tech’s quarters.
It took two probes into empty air to locate the slumped body inside the suit. She hoisted the corpse onto her
shoulders. Another look in the mirror revealed a strange rippling void where her upper back and one shoulder
were supposed to be, the lack of any visual feedback interspersed with occasional flashes of her uniform or the
wall behind her.
“Frell it all!” she exclaimed, shifting the body to a different position to see if it made a difference. This time her
body disappeared altogether, the suit somehow transmitting the image of the wall behind her. She’d hoped that
the technology could cope with the contact against her own body, hiding only the dead tech, but it was
obviously having trouble interpreting and recreating the correct inputs. This would make her trip through the
corridors even more hazardous. If she heard anyone approaching during her travels, she’d have to dump the
body on the floor, hope no one tripped over it as she moved on, and then double back for it.
“The things I do for you, Crichton,” she grumbled, staggering under the load. The passageways were
deserted, and she moved a little faster, praying to any deity who chose to listen, asking that her luck would hold
a day or two longer.
* * * * *
Grayza leaned back in her chair, fingers idly turning a data chip over and over as she listened to the report
from the officer in charge of the detention block.
“He’s begun talking in his sleep, ma’am. Small comments mostly.” The burly security specialist pulled himself
up straighter as she raised her head to look up at him. “We have not detected any names or technical data
yet.”
“I would prefer to judge that for myself. Compress the recordings from his cell and deliver them to me in one
arn. If he stops talking, lower the temperature. Let him rest but not sleep. Do you understand the
difference?”
“Yes, ma’am!” The officer snapped to attention, nodded his acknowledgement, and hurried from her quarters.
“Braca!” Grayza called, summoning her aide. “What progress has been made evaluating the engines on
Crichton’s ship?”
The lieutenant hurried in, clearly anxious about the query. “None, commandant. We were not … I ordered the
techs to stay away from the ship in the event that Crichton had booby trapped it in some way.” Grayza’s furious
glare goaded him into a more rigid stance at attention. “They began examining the drive system, they
discovered that Crichton had disconnected the power source for no apparent reason. It seemed reasonable to
conclude that restoring the power might set off some type of destructive device.”
Grayza subsided, eyeing her subordinate as she considered his report. “Well done,” she said after some
deliberation. “Search the ship. I want a list of the contents and any information stored in the databanks. Do
not power up any of the systems, do not alter the ship in any way except for whatever is necessary to conduct
the search. I will continue my interrogation of Crichton in two arns, and will find out what he has done to the
engines at that time. Dismissed.”
The commandant lazed back in her chair, considering this latest bit of data. “You had time to rig your drive
system for destruction, Crichton. You would prefer to take the chance that we would capture it rather than
escape. Why?” The slender fingers tapped at the surface of her desk as she considered the mystery, then
punched a comm circuit.
“Bring Crichton to my quarters in half an arn.” The information was too important to wait the two arns she’d
originally specified. They would have to begin the next round of questioning a bit sooner than she’d
intended.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
