Cholak's Demon
Chapter 9
Aeryn turned the corner into the Den with a small sense of foreboding. Pilot had commed her within microts of
touching down in the hangar bay to ask her to visit him personally. There were few topics that could not be
discussed with reasonable privacy over a discrete channel on the comms, which meant that whatever he
wanted to discuss had to be of a more sensitive nature than usual. She forced what she hoped was a relaxed
smile into place and crossed the bridge to his station.
“Hello, Pilot,” she greeted him warmly. Her concerns about the pending conversation aside, it was nice to have
the symbiotic pair consisting of ship and pilot watching over her again. She had missed their presence every
day that she’d been gone. Her brief visits to Moya during her long search for John hadn’t amounted to much
more than a total of ten days over the past cycle, and it wasn’t until four days ago that she’d begun to feel that
she was finally home.
“Officer Sun,” he responded with his more formal address. She put a fraction more effort into the smile, trying
to override the increasing anxiety. Pilot had rarely called her ‘Aeryn’ in the past, but he’d been using it more
frequently over the past few days, showing how pleased he was to have her back aboard. “Commander
Crichton has requested that you meet him outside the starburst chamber,” he announced.
She waited for something more. This did not warrant a trip to the Den, especially since it required climbing up
several tiers only to turn around and head back down almost to the bottom of Moya. “I’ll head right down,” she
said slowly, puzzled by the request. “Is that all, Pilot?” He was at his most enigmatic. It was never easy reading
Pilot’s emotions, but when he shut down all expression it was like trying to decipher the inner thoughts of a
rock. She didn’t receive a response, so she turned to leave.
“Aeryn,” his voice said hesitantly behind her, stopping her feet. She turned around, moving back to stand close
to the walls surrounding him, watching with astonishment as a veritable flood of expressions crossed the large
face. “I do not mean to intrude upon personal matters,” he started, embarrassment taking over for the
moment.
“There’s nothing you can’t ask me, Pilot.” It took more effort to smile this time. His hesitation was starting to
alarm her.
“Do you know if Commander Crichton intends to leave Moya again?” Pilot lowered his head, looking dispirited.
“He does not seem happy here.”
“Did he say something to make you think he was leaving?” she demanded quickly. Aeryn took a breath and
tried to control the rush of dismay. “Did he say he was leaving?”
“No, but he was asking some very peculiar questions, and he has demonstrated very few of his customary,
irritating behaviors.” Pilot paid an inordinate amount of attention to his controls for a few moments, appearing
to stall for time. “The DRDs report that he has not unpacked the possessions he brought back with him. He is
not making any attempt to make Moya his home.”
“He hasn’t said anything to me about leaving, Pilot.” She wanted to reassure him, but it was difficult to find the
right words when the dread was increasing with every passing microt. “Would it bother you if he left again? He
hasn’t been on board in almost two cycles, you must be used to it by now.”
“Both Moya and I were very pleased when you communicated that you thought you had located him. We were
looking forward to having both of you living here again. I would be greatly disappointed if he were to leave so
soon, as would Moya.” He let out a huge sigh, and scanned his panels, tapping in a few commands.
“I’ll talk to him and find out. Maybe that’s why he wants me to meet him.” Aeryn reached over the barricade to
touch one claw, trying to offer some comfort. The gesture felt empty and false, lacking any confidence that the
outcome would be the one that both she and Pilot desired. John seemed too remote, too damaged, for her to
be sure he wouldn’t chose to go his own away. “Is Moya preparing to starburst as we asked?”
“Yes. She will be ready to starburst in approximately six hundred microts. This is Moya’s fourth starburst in a
very short time, however. She will require at least twelve arns before she can do it again.”
Aeryn watched the levers and slides being manipulated, feeling the strange warm rush of pleasure she always
did whenever she knew what he was doing with the controls. It was the first time she’d had a chance to access
the nearly subconscious, genetically-stored knowledge since she’d returned, and was mildly surprised to
discover how much she had missed that as well. “I’d better find John,” she concluded, patted his claw one last
time, and headed for the bottom of the leviathan.
* * * * *
She ducked into the narrower passageway leading to the starburst chamber, moving slower until her eyes
adjusted to the dark. Looking ahead she could just make out the silhouette of John’s body where he was
leaning against the wall. The inner hull members were heavily reinforced here, designed to accept the
enormous stress created by a full charge of starburst energy. Support ribs jutting out every motra, demanding
that she move more carefully through the confined area to keep from tripping. The only light was coming from
the corridor behind her, filtering in to reflect off the black, hardened walls in glittering patterns resembling those
of a distant starfield.
She drew to a halt two motras away from John, giving him his buffer area, and waited for him to start the
conversation.
“Down and back without any problems?” he inquired easily.
“No problems. I received a flash transmission from the transport ship while I was on my way back. Gallenn was
aboard, no sign of anyone following him or even interested in him.” She watched him relax, saw how tense he
had been until that microt, and tried to reassure him. “Moya starburst three times getting to this system, John.
His ship will be long gone by the time anyone manages to trace us to this planet. No one is chasing him -- it’s
us they’re after.”
“He lost his business and got put in the Chair because of me,” he rationalized his concern.
“You don’t have to explain it. I understand.” She examined their surroundings again. “It’s going to get kind of
loud here in a few microts. Moya is getting ready to starburst.”
“I know.” John positioned himself between two of the ribs, jamming himself into the depression formed there.
“You don’t have to stay,” he told her. Aeryn answered by copying his stance, bracing herself in place as the
roar of the energy gathering in the adjacent chamber made it impossible to talk. The shriek continued to climb
until the walls themselves seemed to vibrate with the sound, the howl abruptly turning into a deep, deafening
roar. The floor shifted beneath their feet, the entire corridor seeming to dance side to side as the leviathan slid
into starburst.
“Are you enjoying this?” she yelled at John over the racket. The ride got rougher, suggesting that Moya was
preparing to punch back into normal space, and she clutched at the ridged reinforcing ribs to hold herself in
place. There was no loud noise, no great jolting deceleration as they exited starburst -- it just went quiet and
still in a single microt, the silence almost tangible after the noise. “That was a fascinating experience,” she
concluded somewhat sarcastically.
John raised his eyebrows at her, suggesting that he had found it enjoyable. He rolled out of his niche
awkwardly, forced to pull himself upright with one hand, and approached the door to the sealed starburst
chamber. It slid open and he wandered inside without speaking, rounding the three-pronged collector in the
middle of the floor that served to coalesce the starburst energy.
“Pilot said you wanted me to come down here.” Aeryn asked at last. She stepped inside, running a hand along
the wall. It was still warm, releasing the heat gradually. John shrugged with one side of his body. “Why? Why
here?”
“It’s where I was when you got back,” he evaded her question.
Aeryn watched the angular set of his shoulders, concluding that the jerky movements were because he was
uncomfortable with the situation, not from his injuries. “What do you want, John?” she tried again.
He stood in the center of the chamber and looked up, staring toward where Pilot was located somewhere far
above, and didn’t answer.
“Fine.” She turned to leave, suddenly tired of trying to break through to him. The fear that he was going to
leave Moya was still there, pushing almost every other concern to one side, but his unwillingness to talk was
finally too much for her. It seemed as though she’d done nothing else but try to batter past his reticence ever
since she’d found him at Gallenn’s repair facility, pounding down one barrier after another … only to have
another one erected at the last microt.
“Wait.” She turned around. At least he was facing her this time. It was a step forward from having to stare at
his back. “I stand outside the door when Moya starbursts because there’s a part of me that wants to burn the
outer layer off my body.” He scrubbed at his right forearm as though it weren’t encased inside the bandages,
as though he were trying to remove something from his skin. “There’s this layer of … filth. It wasn’t a
conscious thing at first. When Moya starburst two days ago, I found myself standing outside the door with my
forehead against it, wanting to feel the energy incinerate the slime, burn it all away.”
Aeryn didn’t bother answering. The confession wasn’t a complete surprise. A quiet discussion with Jool and
Pilot five days earlier had revealed that he was showering four or five times a day, giving in to an obsessive
need to get clean. Jool had switched to using a waterproof synthetic as a final layer over the rest of the
bandages to keep them dry, and there had been no further discussion of his behavior. She’d asked them not
to pursue the matter, declined to explain the cause, and had waited to see if, given enough time, John would be
able to convince himself that he was clean.
John wandered around the perimeter of the chamber, running his left hand along the wall. “What else?” she
asked when he didn’t continue.
“I don’t know.” He sat down on the lip of one of the huge conduits used to channel the energy, his face
obscured in the dark.
“Why did you ask me to come down here?” she demanded again. He didn’t answer. “Are you leaving Moya?”
she asked. The dark silhouette of his body shrugged in the half-light. “Was that a yes or a no? Pilot thinks
you’re getting ready to leave.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said quietly from the dark.
Aeryn shook her head, frustrated by his unwillingness to talk to her. “Let me know when you make up your
mind!” she snapped, turned and hurried out of the chamber.
She was almost to the main corridor, the golden walls gleaming ahead, when the scene in the starburst
chamber triggered a memory of a similar moment. The night she’d confronted him in the dust-coated room in
the command carrier wreckage he’d been sitting exactly the same way -- in the dark, in the silence, hunched
over against a pain that wasn’t physical, refusing to acknowledge his own feelings. She spun around and
headed back.
John chosen a place just as dark and secluded this time, where he was barely visible if she more than an arms
length away from him. But in addition to that, he’d chosen the one place that lacked sensors of any sort.
Unless a DRD was present or their comms were open, there was no way for Moya, Pilot, or any of the crew to
know what was happening in this chamber. She couldn’t begin to guess whether John had come here
deliberately or if his subconscious had driven him to this spot, but in either event she was certain it was
because he was trying to tackle a subject that he didn’t really want to talk about.
He hadn’t moved a dench when she’d stalked out. He was still sitting on the rounded lip of the energy outlet,
his head propped on his hand, staring at the floor. “Comms,” she ordered him, holding out her hand. He
looked up in confusion, saw her own badge sitting on her palm, and turned his over to her. “Pilot,” she called,
activating one of the units.
“Yes, Officer Sun,” came the usual calm reply.
“John and I are in the starburst chamber without any comms. We would appreciate it if Moya didn’t starburst
until we tell you we’ve left.” Without waiting for a reply, she pitched both bits of biomechanoid circuitry out the
door, closed it, and returned to where John was sitting. She crossed the last distance slowly and sat down next
to him, deliberately letting her hip rest against his. The jerk away from her was barely detectable this time.
“You weren’t talking about the decision to leave. Were you?” she prompted. “You meant you don’t know what
you’re doing at all.” He nodded. Aeryn stroked the hair at the back of his head, gently at first, then more firmly
when the flinches died down. “Why didn’t you tell me I’d misunderstood you? You let me leave.”
He didn’t answer.
“I can’t do this by myself, John. You’ve closed yourself up inside, and I’m tired of fighting to get you to talk to
me. It’s only been twelve solar days since we escaped, so I don’t expect miracles, but if you won’t talk to me this
will never get better. You’ll use me to help you get dressed, but you don’t even look at me half the time. And
it’s been getting worse.” He shrugged away from her hand.
She tried something else, using his own words to try to break through to him. “You made me promise never to
leave you again. Your words were ‘Don’t kill me, Aeryn Sun’. I will not leave until you tell me you don’t want me
here, but you have to be fair to me. You’re not really here. Do you think it’s any easier for me to go through
this again? How do you think I feel?” Aeryn stopped, fighting back the tears.
“I’m not leaving Moya.” He finally answered a question, but he’d jumped so far back in the conversation it took
her a microt to adjust her focus.
“I’m glad.” A chill of relief ran up her spine. She decided to wait him out, hoping for something more.
“You killed some people,” John stated flatly. “To get me out.” He’d shifted the conversation again, getting
closer to the subject of the command carrier without actually bringing it up.
“Yes, I did. Without regret.” She tried touching him again. This time he sat still but he didn’t seem to be
enjoying the fingers running slowly through his hair. “I would have killed more people if it meant saving you.”
He closed his eyes as if it would shut out her caresses, so she stopped.
“How did it feel?” he asked hesitantly. There was no trace of accusation in his voice, only curiosity.
“I didn’t like doing it, if that’s what you’re asking. If there had been another way, I wouldn’t have chosen to kill
them.” They hadn’t visited her in her sleep yet, as some of her victims had in the past, but she sometimes woke
drenched in sweat with the memory of a sound in her ears -- a cry, a crack of bone, or a last breath. The day
might come when she’d tell him of the price she was paying, but this was not the time.
John reached out and picked up her hand. He turned it palm up and stared at it, cradled in his, then placed his
hand palm to palm with hers and intertwined his fingers. They sat silently like that for several microts, the only
sound the hushed, distant sounds of Moya’s internal systems. “What are you thinking?” she asked, trying to
prompt any sort of reaction from him.
“I’m trying to feel what it would be like for you. To understand what it cost you.” He got up and wandered
around the dark chamber, ending up leaning against one of the upright spokes in the middle of the floor, his
back turned to her.
“I didn’t think it would be like that,” he said at last, momentarily confusing her by changing direction again.
“There have been times when it felt like every sick bastard in the Uncharted Territories has had a chance to
mess with me since I got here, but when I decided to let them catch me --”
“We decided,” she interrupted. “It was my plan that put you in that situation. I asked you to let yourself get
captured.”
“You did the right thing,” he asserted. “We’ve already discussed that, and I haven’t changed my mind.” He
wandered for a bit before starting up again. “I was ready to have someone mess with me again. I was even
ready to have them screw with my head with the Aurora Chair. I know what that’s all about. But what she did …
I wasn’t ready for that … not for that to happen.” He stopped with his back to her again, hunched over his arm,
looking as though his body was drawing in on itself. She’d seen that sort of position before when they’d worked
thing out on the rhotarri ship. It was John literally trying to pull inside himself, crumbling under the weight of his
own emotional discomfort.
“It took something different away from you,” she suggested. “Something that hadn’t been touched before.”
“No,” he countered. “It took everything this time. Knowledge, control, dignity, self-respect. Everything.
There’s nothing left. I thought I knew what it felt like to be empty inside, but it never felt this bad. She took
everything away from me.”
Aeryn got to her feet and went to stand next to him, looping her arm through his. “You’re wrong. It’s still there
-- you’re just having trouble finding it. You lied to her, there’s knowledge that you didn’t give her. You found a
way to resist, there’s control. You kept her from getting any information about where I was, and that means she
never got to you entirely. She failed.”
He gave her a fast glance. “Go ahead and try to fix dignity. There’s nothing less dignified than what she did.”
“I can’t fix that with words. Given time, I can show you that she didn’t take it away.” She pulled her arm out of
his and ran her hand gently across his cheek, trying to soothe a wound that couldn’t be seen with her eyes. “I
know it’s not gone, because it’s standing next to me, but I’ll admit that it might be difficult for you to see it.”
“And self-respect?”
“That can’t be taken from you, John, only given away, and you haven’t done that. It’s still there.” He shook his
head, denying it. “If you didn’t have self-respect, you wouldn’t care about any of this. It wouldn’t matter to
you.”
That seemed to get through to him. His head came up and he looked around him as though seeing the
chamber for the first time. “You been chatting with Sigmund Freud behind my back?”
Aeryn began shaking her head, denying it vigorously. “I haven’t …”
“Relax, Aeryn. It was a joke. He’s dead.” She glared at him. “Okay, it was a bad joke.” Her expression
relented.
“There’s something else,” he confessed slowly. The small moment of humor was over.
Aeryn led him back to the opening in the wall. He went unwillingly, one step dragging after another, but sat
down next to her when she tugged at his hand. He resumed the hunched over position, running his thumb over
his lower lip several times in indecision.
“Just say it,” she ordered.
“You stood there and let it happen,” he blurted out all at once. “You let her do that to me. You could have
stopped it, and you watched.” He was on his feet again, moving to the far side of the chamber to bang at the
wall repeatedly with the side of his fist, battering at the thick, reinforced surface with furious energy. “You could
have stopped it!” he yelled, the anguish ringing clear and loud.
Aeryn went after him, grabbing his arm to stop the pounding before he could hurt the remaining useful hand.
“I’m sorry. I’d go back and change it if I could.”
“I know that,” he admitted. He pulled loose and slammed his fist against the wall one more time. “And I know
that if you’d killed her that we’d both be dead right now, and I wouldn’t have wanted that. But there’s this …
anger inside.”
“Aimed at me,” she verified.
“Yes. It’s more than that, but I can’t even begin to look at it without it getting out of control. It’s rage and a
dozen other things all mixed together.” He pulled loose from her and began pacing, moving faster than before,
circling the chamber repeatedly. “You need to know that it’s there … God! She touched me!” He came to rest
with his left shoulder against the wall and began banging his head sideways, venting his revulsion.
“She did more than touch you,” she said, moving closer to him. “She -- ”
“DON’T say it!” he yelled at her.
“Then you say it. Just once.” He turned away from her, circling the room like a trapped animal. Aeryn watched
him from the center, pivoting as he orbited around her. “Just once, say the word,” she demanded. He shook
his head vehemently, and a suspicion hardened into a certainty. “Men on Earth don’t get … that doesn’t
happen to them, does it?” She changed the sentence midstream at his furious glare, skirting the word that he
was avoiding.
“Not usually. There are exceptions, but it’s usually more a case of getting seduced.” He finished another circuit
of the room, and slid down to sit on the floor with his back against the wall. “I don’t know whether to vomit or kill
something.”
Aeryn went to stand over him, waiting until he gestured an invitation before sitting down next to him. “Say it,”
she ordered him firmly. “Just once.” He shook his head, looking almost as exhausted as when he’d been held
on the command carrier. “She was torturing you. No one is immune to heppel oil, not even the infamous John
Crichton.”
“Who goes around pointing guns at people,” he added.
“That’s the guy.” She leaned against him with more force, taking a microt to appreciate the strength and
warmth that pressed against her side from hip to shoulder, the strength that was keeping Grayza’s insidious
damage hidden from his friends. “John, if you had to make a choice right now, which would you chose? Don’t
think, just answer. Get put in the Aurora Chair or get taken to Grayza’s quarters?”
“I’d take the Chair,” he answered immediately, then looked surprised at his answer.
“It wasn’t interrogation, it was torture,” she insisted one more time. “She was frelling with your mind every bit as
viciously as the Chair. Say it … just once.”
John hung his head, staring at the floor and refused to answer. The silence stretched out into hundreds of
microts, and Aeryn finally sighed and started to get to her feet.
“She raped me.” It was close to a whisper, but sufficient to carry clearly in the silence of the chamber.
Aeryn subsided beside him, wrapping her arm around him when he leaned his head against her shoulder.
They’d covered enough for one day. It was a start. There were things they’d have to work through, but they’d
managed to batter their way to an understanding, and that was enough to start. She leaned her head against
the top of this head, and asked “What do you want to do about the anger? Do you want me to leave you alone
to get over it?” He shook his head against her. “Do you want me to leave?”
“I want you to stay. You needed to know it was there … inside. This sucks big time, but as empty as I feel right
now, if I tried living without you again, it would be even worse. That isn’t going to change, Aeryn. For a little
while I thought getting away from you was the answer, but someone made me realize that I didn’t want to go
through another day without knowing that you were somewhere close.”
“Gallenn?” she asked.
“No. Pilot.” He was still leaning against her, so she could feel the laughter even though she couldn’t hear it.
“The interstellar expert on love.” She laughed with him this time. John raised his head off her shoulder,
brushing his lips across her cheek as if testing to make sure they worked. She turned toward him, letting him
take the initiative, and he lightly, tentatively kissed her, barely making contact.
“How’d that go?” she asked when he’d broken the contact.
“Not real good.” He turned away from her, looking embarrassed and unhappy.
“Now what do we do? How do we fix this?” She leaned across, and tried a soft kiss against the edge of his
eyebrow. He closed his eyes and endured it, with none of the relaxed body language that would have
suggested he was enjoying it.
He fingered a loose strand of hair back away from her face, tucked it behind her ear, and smiled at her, letting
her back into his heart. “Time and patience, maybe. Replace one memory at a time.”
“Time and patience,” she repeated the proposed remedy. John nodded, looking happier. “Zhaan’s solution for
almost everything.”
“Pretty good advice. She knew what she was talking about.” He pulled her closer, fitting her in under his arm.
“We can take it one step at a time.”
“Pilot says Moya won’t be ready to starburst for arns. We could stay here for a while if you’d like. It’s quiet and
the others won’t find us down here.” Aeryn leaned carefully against him, ducking her head to rest it against his
chest. His heart thumped steadily beneath her ear.
“Maybe we could practice for a little while,” he suggested, rubbing his thumb up and down her shoulder. This
time when she looked up much of the sullen depression of the last days had dropped away, leaving a much
happier person behind. This was the John Crichton she’d gotten to know again during their nine days on the
small transport ship.
“What would you like to practice?” she inquired, providing an opening for him to insert one of his ridiculous
suggestions.
“This and that. You know … practice to make sure I know how when we start replacing one memory at a time.”
He smiled at her.
Aeryn raised her head to kiss him, and this time he didn’t pull away.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
Chapter 9
Aeryn turned the corner into the Den with a small sense of foreboding. Pilot had commed her within microts of
touching down in the hangar bay to ask her to visit him personally. There were few topics that could not be
discussed with reasonable privacy over a discrete channel on the comms, which meant that whatever he
wanted to discuss had to be of a more sensitive nature than usual. She forced what she hoped was a relaxed
smile into place and crossed the bridge to his station.
“Hello, Pilot,” she greeted him warmly. Her concerns about the pending conversation aside, it was nice to have
the symbiotic pair consisting of ship and pilot watching over her again. She had missed their presence every
day that she’d been gone. Her brief visits to Moya during her long search for John hadn’t amounted to much
more than a total of ten days over the past cycle, and it wasn’t until four days ago that she’d begun to feel that
she was finally home.
“Officer Sun,” he responded with his more formal address. She put a fraction more effort into the smile, trying
to override the increasing anxiety. Pilot had rarely called her ‘Aeryn’ in the past, but he’d been using it more
frequently over the past few days, showing how pleased he was to have her back aboard. “Commander
Crichton has requested that you meet him outside the starburst chamber,” he announced.
She waited for something more. This did not warrant a trip to the Den, especially since it required climbing up
several tiers only to turn around and head back down almost to the bottom of Moya. “I’ll head right down,” she
said slowly, puzzled by the request. “Is that all, Pilot?” He was at his most enigmatic. It was never easy reading
Pilot’s emotions, but when he shut down all expression it was like trying to decipher the inner thoughts of a
rock. She didn’t receive a response, so she turned to leave.
“Aeryn,” his voice said hesitantly behind her, stopping her feet. She turned around, moving back to stand close
to the walls surrounding him, watching with astonishment as a veritable flood of expressions crossed the large
face. “I do not mean to intrude upon personal matters,” he started, embarrassment taking over for the
moment.
“There’s nothing you can’t ask me, Pilot.” It took more effort to smile this time. His hesitation was starting to
alarm her.
“Do you know if Commander Crichton intends to leave Moya again?” Pilot lowered his head, looking dispirited.
“He does not seem happy here.”
“Did he say something to make you think he was leaving?” she demanded quickly. Aeryn took a breath and
tried to control the rush of dismay. “Did he say he was leaving?”
“No, but he was asking some very peculiar questions, and he has demonstrated very few of his customary,
irritating behaviors.” Pilot paid an inordinate amount of attention to his controls for a few moments, appearing
to stall for time. “The DRDs report that he has not unpacked the possessions he brought back with him. He is
not making any attempt to make Moya his home.”
“He hasn’t said anything to me about leaving, Pilot.” She wanted to reassure him, but it was difficult to find the
right words when the dread was increasing with every passing microt. “Would it bother you if he left again? He
hasn’t been on board in almost two cycles, you must be used to it by now.”
“Both Moya and I were very pleased when you communicated that you thought you had located him. We were
looking forward to having both of you living here again. I would be greatly disappointed if he were to leave so
soon, as would Moya.” He let out a huge sigh, and scanned his panels, tapping in a few commands.
“I’ll talk to him and find out. Maybe that’s why he wants me to meet him.” Aeryn reached over the barricade to
touch one claw, trying to offer some comfort. The gesture felt empty and false, lacking any confidence that the
outcome would be the one that both she and Pilot desired. John seemed too remote, too damaged, for her to
be sure he wouldn’t chose to go his own away. “Is Moya preparing to starburst as we asked?”
“Yes. She will be ready to starburst in approximately six hundred microts. This is Moya’s fourth starburst in a
very short time, however. She will require at least twelve arns before she can do it again.”
Aeryn watched the levers and slides being manipulated, feeling the strange warm rush of pleasure she always
did whenever she knew what he was doing with the controls. It was the first time she’d had a chance to access
the nearly subconscious, genetically-stored knowledge since she’d returned, and was mildly surprised to
discover how much she had missed that as well. “I’d better find John,” she concluded, patted his claw one last
time, and headed for the bottom of the leviathan.
* * * * *
She ducked into the narrower passageway leading to the starburst chamber, moving slower until her eyes
adjusted to the dark. Looking ahead she could just make out the silhouette of John’s body where he was
leaning against the wall. The inner hull members were heavily reinforced here, designed to accept the
enormous stress created by a full charge of starburst energy. Support ribs jutting out every motra, demanding
that she move more carefully through the confined area to keep from tripping. The only light was coming from
the corridor behind her, filtering in to reflect off the black, hardened walls in glittering patterns resembling those
of a distant starfield.
She drew to a halt two motras away from John, giving him his buffer area, and waited for him to start the
conversation.
“Down and back without any problems?” he inquired easily.
“No problems. I received a flash transmission from the transport ship while I was on my way back. Gallenn was
aboard, no sign of anyone following him or even interested in him.” She watched him relax, saw how tense he
had been until that microt, and tried to reassure him. “Moya starburst three times getting to this system, John.
His ship will be long gone by the time anyone manages to trace us to this planet. No one is chasing him -- it’s
us they’re after.”
“He lost his business and got put in the Chair because of me,” he rationalized his concern.
“You don’t have to explain it. I understand.” She examined their surroundings again. “It’s going to get kind of
loud here in a few microts. Moya is getting ready to starburst.”
“I know.” John positioned himself between two of the ribs, jamming himself into the depression formed there.
“You don’t have to stay,” he told her. Aeryn answered by copying his stance, bracing herself in place as the
roar of the energy gathering in the adjacent chamber made it impossible to talk. The shriek continued to climb
until the walls themselves seemed to vibrate with the sound, the howl abruptly turning into a deep, deafening
roar. The floor shifted beneath their feet, the entire corridor seeming to dance side to side as the leviathan slid
into starburst.
“Are you enjoying this?” she yelled at John over the racket. The ride got rougher, suggesting that Moya was
preparing to punch back into normal space, and she clutched at the ridged reinforcing ribs to hold herself in
place. There was no loud noise, no great jolting deceleration as they exited starburst -- it just went quiet and
still in a single microt, the silence almost tangible after the noise. “That was a fascinating experience,” she
concluded somewhat sarcastically.
John raised his eyebrows at her, suggesting that he had found it enjoyable. He rolled out of his niche
awkwardly, forced to pull himself upright with one hand, and approached the door to the sealed starburst
chamber. It slid open and he wandered inside without speaking, rounding the three-pronged collector in the
middle of the floor that served to coalesce the starburst energy.
“Pilot said you wanted me to come down here.” Aeryn asked at last. She stepped inside, running a hand along
the wall. It was still warm, releasing the heat gradually. John shrugged with one side of his body. “Why? Why
here?”
“It’s where I was when you got back,” he evaded her question.
Aeryn watched the angular set of his shoulders, concluding that the jerky movements were because he was
uncomfortable with the situation, not from his injuries. “What do you want, John?” she tried again.
He stood in the center of the chamber and looked up, staring toward where Pilot was located somewhere far
above, and didn’t answer.
“Fine.” She turned to leave, suddenly tired of trying to break through to him. The fear that he was going to
leave Moya was still there, pushing almost every other concern to one side, but his unwillingness to talk was
finally too much for her. It seemed as though she’d done nothing else but try to batter past his reticence ever
since she’d found him at Gallenn’s repair facility, pounding down one barrier after another … only to have
another one erected at the last microt.
“Wait.” She turned around. At least he was facing her this time. It was a step forward from having to stare at
his back. “I stand outside the door when Moya starbursts because there’s a part of me that wants to burn the
outer layer off my body.” He scrubbed at his right forearm as though it weren’t encased inside the bandages,
as though he were trying to remove something from his skin. “There’s this layer of … filth. It wasn’t a
conscious thing at first. When Moya starburst two days ago, I found myself standing outside the door with my
forehead against it, wanting to feel the energy incinerate the slime, burn it all away.”
Aeryn didn’t bother answering. The confession wasn’t a complete surprise. A quiet discussion with Jool and
Pilot five days earlier had revealed that he was showering four or five times a day, giving in to an obsessive
need to get clean. Jool had switched to using a waterproof synthetic as a final layer over the rest of the
bandages to keep them dry, and there had been no further discussion of his behavior. She’d asked them not
to pursue the matter, declined to explain the cause, and had waited to see if, given enough time, John would be
able to convince himself that he was clean.
John wandered around the perimeter of the chamber, running his left hand along the wall. “What else?” she
asked when he didn’t continue.
“I don’t know.” He sat down on the lip of one of the huge conduits used to channel the energy, his face
obscured in the dark.
“Why did you ask me to come down here?” she demanded again. He didn’t answer. “Are you leaving Moya?”
she asked. The dark silhouette of his body shrugged in the half-light. “Was that a yes or a no? Pilot thinks
you’re getting ready to leave.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said quietly from the dark.
Aeryn shook her head, frustrated by his unwillingness to talk to her. “Let me know when you make up your
mind!” she snapped, turned and hurried out of the chamber.
She was almost to the main corridor, the golden walls gleaming ahead, when the scene in the starburst
chamber triggered a memory of a similar moment. The night she’d confronted him in the dust-coated room in
the command carrier wreckage he’d been sitting exactly the same way -- in the dark, in the silence, hunched
over against a pain that wasn’t physical, refusing to acknowledge his own feelings. She spun around and
headed back.
John chosen a place just as dark and secluded this time, where he was barely visible if she more than an arms
length away from him. But in addition to that, he’d chosen the one place that lacked sensors of any sort.
Unless a DRD was present or their comms were open, there was no way for Moya, Pilot, or any of the crew to
know what was happening in this chamber. She couldn’t begin to guess whether John had come here
deliberately or if his subconscious had driven him to this spot, but in either event she was certain it was
because he was trying to tackle a subject that he didn’t really want to talk about.
He hadn’t moved a dench when she’d stalked out. He was still sitting on the rounded lip of the energy outlet,
his head propped on his hand, staring at the floor. “Comms,” she ordered him, holding out her hand. He
looked up in confusion, saw her own badge sitting on her palm, and turned his over to her. “Pilot,” she called,
activating one of the units.
“Yes, Officer Sun,” came the usual calm reply.
“John and I are in the starburst chamber without any comms. We would appreciate it if Moya didn’t starburst
until we tell you we’ve left.” Without waiting for a reply, she pitched both bits of biomechanoid circuitry out the
door, closed it, and returned to where John was sitting. She crossed the last distance slowly and sat down next
to him, deliberately letting her hip rest against his. The jerk away from her was barely detectable this time.
“You weren’t talking about the decision to leave. Were you?” she prompted. “You meant you don’t know what
you’re doing at all.” He nodded. Aeryn stroked the hair at the back of his head, gently at first, then more firmly
when the flinches died down. “Why didn’t you tell me I’d misunderstood you? You let me leave.”
He didn’t answer.
“I can’t do this by myself, John. You’ve closed yourself up inside, and I’m tired of fighting to get you to talk to
me. It’s only been twelve solar days since we escaped, so I don’t expect miracles, but if you won’t talk to me this
will never get better. You’ll use me to help you get dressed, but you don’t even look at me half the time. And
it’s been getting worse.” He shrugged away from her hand.
She tried something else, using his own words to try to break through to him. “You made me promise never to
leave you again. Your words were ‘Don’t kill me, Aeryn Sun’. I will not leave until you tell me you don’t want me
here, but you have to be fair to me. You’re not really here. Do you think it’s any easier for me to go through
this again? How do you think I feel?” Aeryn stopped, fighting back the tears.
“I’m not leaving Moya.” He finally answered a question, but he’d jumped so far back in the conversation it took
her a microt to adjust her focus.
“I’m glad.” A chill of relief ran up her spine. She decided to wait him out, hoping for something more.
“You killed some people,” John stated flatly. “To get me out.” He’d shifted the conversation again, getting
closer to the subject of the command carrier without actually bringing it up.
“Yes, I did. Without regret.” She tried touching him again. This time he sat still but he didn’t seem to be
enjoying the fingers running slowly through his hair. “I would have killed more people if it meant saving you.”
He closed his eyes as if it would shut out her caresses, so she stopped.
“How did it feel?” he asked hesitantly. There was no trace of accusation in his voice, only curiosity.
“I didn’t like doing it, if that’s what you’re asking. If there had been another way, I wouldn’t have chosen to kill
them.” They hadn’t visited her in her sleep yet, as some of her victims had in the past, but she sometimes woke
drenched in sweat with the memory of a sound in her ears -- a cry, a crack of bone, or a last breath. The day
might come when she’d tell him of the price she was paying, but this was not the time.
John reached out and picked up her hand. He turned it palm up and stared at it, cradled in his, then placed his
hand palm to palm with hers and intertwined his fingers. They sat silently like that for several microts, the only
sound the hushed, distant sounds of Moya’s internal systems. “What are you thinking?” she asked, trying to
prompt any sort of reaction from him.
“I’m trying to feel what it would be like for you. To understand what it cost you.” He got up and wandered
around the dark chamber, ending up leaning against one of the upright spokes in the middle of the floor, his
back turned to her.
“I didn’t think it would be like that,” he said at last, momentarily confusing her by changing direction again.
“There have been times when it felt like every sick bastard in the Uncharted Territories has had a chance to
mess with me since I got here, but when I decided to let them catch me --”
“We decided,” she interrupted. “It was my plan that put you in that situation. I asked you to let yourself get
captured.”
“You did the right thing,” he asserted. “We’ve already discussed that, and I haven’t changed my mind.” He
wandered for a bit before starting up again. “I was ready to have someone mess with me again. I was even
ready to have them screw with my head with the Aurora Chair. I know what that’s all about. But what she did …
I wasn’t ready for that … not for that to happen.” He stopped with his back to her again, hunched over his arm,
looking as though his body was drawing in on itself. She’d seen that sort of position before when they’d worked
thing out on the rhotarri ship. It was John literally trying to pull inside himself, crumbling under the weight of his
own emotional discomfort.
“It took something different away from you,” she suggested. “Something that hadn’t been touched before.”
“No,” he countered. “It took everything this time. Knowledge, control, dignity, self-respect. Everything.
There’s nothing left. I thought I knew what it felt like to be empty inside, but it never felt this bad. She took
everything away from me.”
Aeryn got to her feet and went to stand next to him, looping her arm through his. “You’re wrong. It’s still there
-- you’re just having trouble finding it. You lied to her, there’s knowledge that you didn’t give her. You found a
way to resist, there’s control. You kept her from getting any information about where I was, and that means she
never got to you entirely. She failed.”
He gave her a fast glance. “Go ahead and try to fix dignity. There’s nothing less dignified than what she did.”
“I can’t fix that with words. Given time, I can show you that she didn’t take it away.” She pulled her arm out of
his and ran her hand gently across his cheek, trying to soothe a wound that couldn’t be seen with her eyes. “I
know it’s not gone, because it’s standing next to me, but I’ll admit that it might be difficult for you to see it.”
“And self-respect?”
“That can’t be taken from you, John, only given away, and you haven’t done that. It’s still there.” He shook his
head, denying it. “If you didn’t have self-respect, you wouldn’t care about any of this. It wouldn’t matter to
you.”
That seemed to get through to him. His head came up and he looked around him as though seeing the
chamber for the first time. “You been chatting with Sigmund Freud behind my back?”
Aeryn began shaking her head, denying it vigorously. “I haven’t …”
“Relax, Aeryn. It was a joke. He’s dead.” She glared at him. “Okay, it was a bad joke.” Her expression
relented.
“There’s something else,” he confessed slowly. The small moment of humor was over.
Aeryn led him back to the opening in the wall. He went unwillingly, one step dragging after another, but sat
down next to her when she tugged at his hand. He resumed the hunched over position, running his thumb over
his lower lip several times in indecision.
“Just say it,” she ordered.
“You stood there and let it happen,” he blurted out all at once. “You let her do that to me. You could have
stopped it, and you watched.” He was on his feet again, moving to the far side of the chamber to bang at the
wall repeatedly with the side of his fist, battering at the thick, reinforced surface with furious energy. “You could
have stopped it!” he yelled, the anguish ringing clear and loud.
Aeryn went after him, grabbing his arm to stop the pounding before he could hurt the remaining useful hand.
“I’m sorry. I’d go back and change it if I could.”
“I know that,” he admitted. He pulled loose and slammed his fist against the wall one more time. “And I know
that if you’d killed her that we’d both be dead right now, and I wouldn’t have wanted that. But there’s this …
anger inside.”
“Aimed at me,” she verified.
“Yes. It’s more than that, but I can’t even begin to look at it without it getting out of control. It’s rage and a
dozen other things all mixed together.” He pulled loose from her and began pacing, moving faster than before,
circling the chamber repeatedly. “You need to know that it’s there … God! She touched me!” He came to rest
with his left shoulder against the wall and began banging his head sideways, venting his revulsion.
“She did more than touch you,” she said, moving closer to him. “She -- ”
“DON’T say it!” he yelled at her.
“Then you say it. Just once.” He turned away from her, circling the room like a trapped animal. Aeryn watched
him from the center, pivoting as he orbited around her. “Just once, say the word,” she demanded. He shook
his head vehemently, and a suspicion hardened into a certainty. “Men on Earth don’t get … that doesn’t
happen to them, does it?” She changed the sentence midstream at his furious glare, skirting the word that he
was avoiding.
“Not usually. There are exceptions, but it’s usually more a case of getting seduced.” He finished another circuit
of the room, and slid down to sit on the floor with his back against the wall. “I don’t know whether to vomit or kill
something.”
Aeryn went to stand over him, waiting until he gestured an invitation before sitting down next to him. “Say it,”
she ordered him firmly. “Just once.” He shook his head, looking almost as exhausted as when he’d been held
on the command carrier. “She was torturing you. No one is immune to heppel oil, not even the infamous John
Crichton.”
“Who goes around pointing guns at people,” he added.
“That’s the guy.” She leaned against him with more force, taking a microt to appreciate the strength and
warmth that pressed against her side from hip to shoulder, the strength that was keeping Grayza’s insidious
damage hidden from his friends. “John, if you had to make a choice right now, which would you chose? Don’t
think, just answer. Get put in the Aurora Chair or get taken to Grayza’s quarters?”
“I’d take the Chair,” he answered immediately, then looked surprised at his answer.
“It wasn’t interrogation, it was torture,” she insisted one more time. “She was frelling with your mind every bit as
viciously as the Chair. Say it … just once.”
John hung his head, staring at the floor and refused to answer. The silence stretched out into hundreds of
microts, and Aeryn finally sighed and started to get to her feet.
“She raped me.” It was close to a whisper, but sufficient to carry clearly in the silence of the chamber.
Aeryn subsided beside him, wrapping her arm around him when he leaned his head against her shoulder.
They’d covered enough for one day. It was a start. There were things they’d have to work through, but they’d
managed to batter their way to an understanding, and that was enough to start. She leaned her head against
the top of this head, and asked “What do you want to do about the anger? Do you want me to leave you alone
to get over it?” He shook his head against her. “Do you want me to leave?”
“I want you to stay. You needed to know it was there … inside. This sucks big time, but as empty as I feel right
now, if I tried living without you again, it would be even worse. That isn’t going to change, Aeryn. For a little
while I thought getting away from you was the answer, but someone made me realize that I didn’t want to go
through another day without knowing that you were somewhere close.”
“Gallenn?” she asked.
“No. Pilot.” He was still leaning against her, so she could feel the laughter even though she couldn’t hear it.
“The interstellar expert on love.” She laughed with him this time. John raised his head off her shoulder,
brushing his lips across her cheek as if testing to make sure they worked. She turned toward him, letting him
take the initiative, and he lightly, tentatively kissed her, barely making contact.
“How’d that go?” she asked when he’d broken the contact.
“Not real good.” He turned away from her, looking embarrassed and unhappy.
“Now what do we do? How do we fix this?” She leaned across, and tried a soft kiss against the edge of his
eyebrow. He closed his eyes and endured it, with none of the relaxed body language that would have
suggested he was enjoying it.
He fingered a loose strand of hair back away from her face, tucked it behind her ear, and smiled at her, letting
her back into his heart. “Time and patience, maybe. Replace one memory at a time.”
“Time and patience,” she repeated the proposed remedy. John nodded, looking happier. “Zhaan’s solution for
almost everything.”
“Pretty good advice. She knew what she was talking about.” He pulled her closer, fitting her in under his arm.
“We can take it one step at a time.”
“Pilot says Moya won’t be ready to starburst for arns. We could stay here for a while if you’d like. It’s quiet and
the others won’t find us down here.” Aeryn leaned carefully against him, ducking her head to rest it against his
chest. His heart thumped steadily beneath her ear.
“Maybe we could practice for a little while,” he suggested, rubbing his thumb up and down her shoulder. This
time when she looked up much of the sullen depression of the last days had dropped away, leaving a much
happier person behind. This was the John Crichton she’d gotten to know again during their nine days on the
small transport ship.
“What would you like to practice?” she inquired, providing an opening for him to insert one of his ridiculous
suggestions.
“This and that. You know … practice to make sure I know how when we start replacing one memory at a time.”
He smiled at her.
Aeryn raised her head to kiss him, and this time he didn’t pull away.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
