Whispers
Chapter 8
The deep cracking boom of D’Argo’s Qualta rifle set off a second round of frantic squawking somewhere
nearby: a frenetic expression of alarm rather than injury. Crichton didn’t have time to figure out who was
making the noise or why. He flung up a hand to protect his throat, lost another layer of leather off his glove to
the lashing barbed tongue, and felt the cockspur sink into leather instead of flesh. He rolled desperately to one
side in an attempt to toss his attacker clear. The glistening flash of the sharpened spur flicked by his eyes,
missing him by no more than a fraction of a dench. It snagged at the shoulder of his jacket and tore free,
taking a chunk of jacket with it. It lacked the vigor of the other strikes, delivered half-heartedly rather than with
the furious strength of every other slash. There was a final gouging pressure against his stomach without the
lethal intent, the hvisk using him like a trampoline, and then the weight was gone.
Crichton rolled to his knees, gasping from the kick he had just gotten in his guts, and saw the vivid blue and
green crests of their attackers dodging through the crowd.
“Those are …” He wanted to yell to Hox that the two hvisk were infected and couldn’t find the breath to
complete the short sentence.
D’Argo dragged him to his feet. “We figured that out! Go!”
Hox fell behind in a matter of microts. John barely noticed that they were leaving him behind, too caught up in
the pursuit as he and D’Argo charged after the pair of would-be assassins. The chase took them out of the
smaller street were the scuffle had occurred, cut across one of the main avenues, and plunged into a
secondary artery. Dodging around most of the pedestrians, occasionally tripping over children or shrubs,
sometimes shoving adults aside in their hurry, they snaked into one street after another, always moving up-
station toward the outward fringes of the Kyelligg’s structure. Their quarry began choosing increasingly smaller
avenues, shoving their way through crowds more ruthlessly than John and D’Argo, leaving a twittering, whistling
trail of concern behind them.
“We’re losing them!” Crichton cried. The two hvisk, although not fast runners, had a sinuous, slinking gait that
carried them through the crowds faster than their pursuers. He could see little other than the bobbing crests,
and then even those disappeared from sight.
“Left!” D’Argo called. The luxan’s greater height gave him an advantage. He could see over the other
pedestrians.
Ten motras ahead of them, the street split into two of the smallest alleys they had encountered so far. Each of
their choices made one of the strange twists so common aboard the Kyelligg. They were presented with a
choice of taking what appeared to be either the left or the right wall of each of the narrower passageways.
“Which left?” John asked. “Left-left or right-left?”
“Just pick one!”
There was no time to figure out which side of the tunnel the infected hvisk had chosen. With D’Argo treading
close on his heels, Crichton barged through a planting of shrubs and took what looked like the more ‘down’ side
of the left-hand choice. He stumbled, momentarily disoriented by the gravity shift. D’Argo hauled him up,
propelled him forward with a shove, and they picked up speed now that the crowds had disappeared.
“Where did they go?” D’Argo asked. There was no sign of the hvisk ahead of them.
“Frell that! Where did our walkway go?”
Their side of the alleyway came to an end in a lushly planted embankment. Thick shrubbery climbed upward
for a distance of three motras then abruptly turned upside down. No more than a motra above his head,
hanging baskets of flowers and a trellis of vinery levitated into the air, dangling toward the surface on the other
side of the structure. This smallest branch of the station had become too narrow to allow for a surface on both
sides of the interior, and they had chosen the wrong floor.
“Shit!” Crichton exploded in frustration.
“There!” D’Argo grabbed him by the shoulders of his jacket, swung him around and propelled him toward what
he at first thought was nothing more than a garden. Trusting his friend, he accelerated toward a narrow
pathway, and discovered what D’Argo had already seen: it arced around the curving side of the tunnel to
reach the opposite side. Fifteen microts later they were on the far side of the tunnel, upside-down to where
they had been moments earlier, and searching for some sign of the fleeing hvisk.
“They’re gone. We lost them,” John said. Except for the occasional hvisk lounging outside a living structure,
the street was deserted. “Can you smell them?”
D’Argo shook his head and let out a long sigh of resignation. “Hvisk all smell the same.”
Crichton spun around in a circle, looking for any sign that their attackers had passed this way. Serenity
reigned in every direction. There were no trampled flowers, no shocked and twittering bystanders, no bobbing
green and blue crests to be seen. “Crap! Heckle and Jeckle weren’t the ones we’re looking for, but they
probably could have led us to the boss bird.”
He gestured at D’Argo and moved off a fast walk, continuing in the direction they’d last seen the two hvisk
headed. Thirty microts later the narrow alleyway came to a dead end.
“They waited until we got stuck and then reversed course,” John concluded.
“Or ducked into one of the structures,” D’Argo said. “They couldn’t have counted on us taking the wrong side
of the tunnel.”
Crichton lashed out at a small planter filled with blue bulbous flowers. His kick sent the entire container sailing
five motras into a garden, spewing dirt and vibrantly hued petals in every direction. “I want this out of my head!
It could be over by now if we hadn’t lost them!” He indulged in a growling shriek of frustration, sighed,
reassembled his self-control, and started walking back the way they’d come.
“Can you find them the other way, John?” D’Argo asked after several dozen microts of silence. “With your
mind? They might be nearby. Any one of these whatevers,” D’Argo gestured at the neat rows of hvisk
dwellings, “might be concealing them.”
“Cubblings,” Crichton provided the equivalent of the hvisk word for their residences. It was a mindless comment
provided to give him time to consider D’Argo’s query. His control was so tenuous. There was no way to
describe to D’Argo the hair-thin margin between having it all neatly contained and a complete loss of command
over his ability. During the chaos of the fight and then the chase, the innate ability that Hox had sensed had
taken over while he was busy with more important things. Now that he had time to think about it, he could feel
the pressure of millions of thoughts pressing against that instinctively erected barricade.
Crichton bit his lower lip and considered the advantages of finding the elusive source of the hvisk insanity so
quickly, weighing it against the risk of letting down the barriers in his mind. The sooner he pinpointed the
infection, the sooner the hvisk would agree to reverse what they’d done to him.
They emerged from the narrow alley, hurried back through a larger street, and finally came to a stop where it
intersected one of the second largest avenues. There were hundreds of hvisk in sight, squawking and whistling
as they went about their business. One of the flocks of children flooded by, watched over by a single female,
many of them greeting the comparatively odd-looking pair with cheerful toots.
John surveyed the mass of living creatures and considered his options one more time, hoping that Hox would
appear out of the crowd to help him with what he was about to try.
“Never mind. Don’t do it,” D’Argo said.
“No, I can do it. It’s just that --”
It was just that if he lost control, he wasn’t sure what it would do to him. The ability was getting stronger with
every passing arn, allowing him to eavesdrop on more and more people each time he opened his mind. If the
recently bestowed talent broke loose, he wasn’t sure it would stop with just the occupants of the Kyelligg and
Moya. The idea of listening in on all of the Uncharted Territories without being certain he could silence it
scared him. John shoved that fear aside, and thought of everything he would gain: the search of the Kyelligg
might be finished in a matter of microts instead of arns, the unwanted telepathy would be shut down, and he
could get back to dealing with relatively simple things like trying to destroy information stored on a Peacekeeper
Command Carrier.
“Aeryn needs us back aboard Moya. I’ll do this, and if I come up empty, we’ll head back. Don’t go away.” He
felt the unvoiced jolt of protest next to him, saying that the honor-bound warrior would never abandon him at a
moment when he needed D’Argo’s help so much. “You’re a good friend, D’Argo,” he assured his companion.
The borrowed pang of emotion evaporated.
John started by envisioning a clenched fist, all five fingers crunched into an aching tightness, then eased the
mental pinky away from the rest no more than a micro-dench. The first thoughts oozed in, and he assessed
them, searching for the chill he had felt for a split-microt before the attack. The deluge washed over him, each
element feeling normal, and he loosened the knotted grip on his consciousness another fraction.
“Breathe, John,” he was reminded by someone else.
He took several breaths, and then eased outward along the corridors of the Kyelligg, searching. Joy, love,
sorrow, someone on the verge of dying of old age; he slid past the emotions and kept going. A couple
celebrated conception, crooning over the bulge in the female’s abdomen that would become an egg. John
paused long enough for his imagination to create the ludicrous mental vision of a large egg sitting in a
bassinette wearing a frilly bonnet, took time to smile, and moved on. Streaming up-station, outward along the
great arms of the Kyelligg, sliding in and out of alleyways, he spun through homes and businesses, sensing
only the thrum of normal minds.
Reaching the limits of how far he assumed the two hvisk could have traveled by then, he reversed course,
flowed past D’Argo, and tried in the other direction.
“You’re not breathing,” said the deep-voiced guardian of his body. Air flooded into starved lungs. He
dedicated several microts to the task of keeping his body alive, then resumed his search, moving down-station
this time.
He discovered what felt like a rock, as cold as a chunk of granite that stood forever hidden from the sun. It was
a dense spot of no emotion, of denied thoughts and feelings. John targeted the abnormal mind and lunged
toward it, seeking the owner.
His body has grown cold while she lies against him, unmoving, unfeeling, unseeing. There are no tears left,
and her head and throat ache from crying. She sits up slowly, letting the shimmering thermal sheet fall away,
and takes her last look at him. The features are familiar, but the person is no longer there. Half an arn ago
she could have tricked herself into believing he was only sleeping, that she need only wait for him to wake and
tell her it was all a hideous joke. The time for denial is over …
“Crap!” Far too late to save himself the shared despair, John realized who he had located. He backed away
with frantic haste, trying to get clear before any more of the remembered sights were loosed on him. His focus
began to fragment. He fought against the encroaching bedlam, trying to reconstruct the questing locus he had
been using to search the station.
“What’s wrong?” D’Argo’s alarmed response sounded next to him.
Aeryn, D’Argo, himself, remembering to breath, the Kyelligg, Hox was somewhere, he touched the vast
awareness of Moya, there were millions of hvisk, Chiana was in the Den worrying about Pilot, Rygel was hungry
as usual. Desperate to locate some sort of safe mental haven, John widened out his reach … and lost control
entirely. He was allowed a single, final microt to reflect that this was exactly what he had been afraid would
happen, and then the dam in his mind bulged, cracked, and gave way before the mass of thoughts. He was
aware of a painful grip on his upper arms to remind him that D’Argo was near his body watching over him, and
then there was nothing but the impossible number of thoughts invading his mind.
* * * * *
“Crichton, move your feet.” D’Argo shoved the stumbling, disoriented human to one side until the black clad
body came up against a wall with a heavy thump. The impact had no effect on the unfocussed stare, nor did it
change the irregular rasping breaths that seemed to take all of Crichton’s energy to produce.
Jamming a forearm against John’s chest to keep him upright, D’Argo stripped the glove off his left hand,
scowled at the already bloodied palm, then folded the fist in on itself and compressed John’s hand, deliberately
trying to recreate the pain that had helped him regain control arns earlier. This time it didn’t work. There was
no change except that John was having more trouble breathing.
“Crichton!” he bellowed into John’s ear. “Concentrate. You can do this yourself.”
“Duh … Duh … D’Argo,” came the stuttering, confused reply. “Make … make it … it … Stop it.”
Never in all his cycles of battle or imprisonment had he ever felt so helpless. Not even the moment when he
had found Lo’lann’s lifeless body had held this level of torment; she had been dead and beyond the reach of
pain and suffering. His friend had not asked for this burden, or done anything to bring it upon himself, and the
injury -- the torture -- was beyond D’Argo’s ability to repair. Battle injuries he understood. Those could be
bandaged, the flow of blood stemmed, the mangled portion of the body treated in some manner. The damage
to Crichton was hidden from sight and touch, and there was only one person D’Argo could think of who could
help him.
“John, where is Hox? Listen to me. Tell me which way to go to take you to Hox!” His shouts yielded only a slow
motion back-and-forth swing of the head. D’Argo took Crichton’s head in both hands, trying to steady both it
and the swaying body beneath it. “Focus, John. You were doing it a few microts ago. You can get it back.”
“Too … many,” Crichton gasped. He had begun to shake, a shock driven palsy that was increasing with every
passing microt.
“Me, listen only to me,” the warrior shouted at him, trying to break in to wherever his friend was suffering. “You
said you were learning to control this. Shut them out of your mind! Do it, John!” Nothing improved.
A soft whistling sounded near his left knee, and D’Argo spared a fast, annoyed glance downward. A young
hvisk stood there, peering up at the shuddering human with curious eyes and a wilting crest. Three more
gathered around, all whistling an identical tune, gently patting both D’Argo’s and Crichton’s legs. John started
to moan. His hands pulled weakly at D’Argo’s, trying to get free of the stabilizing grasp.
“He’s suffering,” D’Argo snapped at the little ones. “He’s hearing too many of you.”
He had meant to scare them away with the barking growl, hoping to lessen the chaos in his friend’s mind, but
the flock of youngsters that had passed several dozen microts earlier was suddenly swarming around them,
compressing into a slowly surging wave of iridescent crests and gleaming black eyes. The patting touches
were constant now, battling to make contact as the whistling melody strengthened and grew louder.
“Down. Let me … sit down,” John demanded.
D’Argo turned him around, pulled him into a firm embrace beneath his arms and around his chest, then
carefully lowered him in stages to sit in the space the flock had cleared for him. The small three-fingered hands
returned, patting at the bowed head and shoulders in time with their tune. Hesitant to disturb the melody,
D’Argo called quietly to the nearly buried human. “John?”
A quiet sob of relief reached him, followed by, “It’s better. There’s only one noise now, and it’s kind of
peaceful.” The words were slurred, as though Crichton couldn’t hear his own voice speaking. Instead of
reassuring him, it served to make D’Argo more anxious.
He straightened up and scanned left and right, searching for some sign of Hox. The blue-crested female he
had seen chaperoning the children was hurrying toward him, several other adults trailing in her wake, but there
was no sign of the one individual who could control the runaway ability. “Can you help him?” he asked the
female when she reached the outer rim of the group gathered around his knees.
She bobbed and nodded, gesturing toward the other adults clattering toward them. The children greeted her,
and the chorus began to break up into individual chirps. She whistled sharply at the group, apparently ordering
them to continue since the recital immediately resumed in full strength. The other adults, all males, arrived.
They spaced themselves evenly around the group before wading carefully into the children to reach Crichton.
Their lower pitched warbling matched the tune two octaves below the immature serenade, taking over the
chant. Relieved of their rescue mission, the children scattered, tootling happily as they waved and scampered
away.
“Are they controlling it? Is it quiet?” D’Argo asked. The four older hvisk were pulling John to his feet.
“No. They’re sort of drowning it out.” Crichton turned to look at his friend. His eyes were wandering in
separate directions. It looked as though each eye wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be focusing on
and didn’t know what the other one was doing. “It’s a single noise, but …” He staggered and was steadied by
the hvisk before he could collapse. “It makes it … it’s hard to think. Loud inside. Have them take us back … to
… to …”
“To Moya?” D’Argo finished for him. John nodded wearily, continuing to look distracted. “Can you take us to
our ship?” the luxan asked the escort. Four heads bobbed a response that allowed them to continue the song
without a break. They wheeled around, supporting John between two of them, and began a weaving, stumbling
journey through the streets of the station, all the while continuing the repetitive melody that was blunting the
assault on the defenseless mind.
“You’re almost there,” D’Argo told John several hundred microts later. He recognized some of the landmarks.
“Hox.” John stopped walking.
“What?”
“Hox is close.” The shambling, ill-directed movements came to a stop. John straightened up and took several
deep, relaxed breaths. “Thank you,” he said, nodding to his escort. The group chirped their response, bowed
toward him several times each, and made their way back the way they had come.
“He’s restored control?” D’Argo asked. “From a distance this time?”
John rubbed one temple with the heel of his hand and nodded. “He’s not that far away, and it’s getting easier.
He didn’t do it for me this time. He showed me how to do it myself.” He shook his head deprecatingly. “I kind of
lost it completely that time.”
“Is there any damage from what happened? How do you feel?”
“Like the Roto-Rooter man got in there and scoured out the inside of my skull. I’m okay, D. A little rattled, and
it feels like my brain got dry cleaned and pressed, but I’m okay.”
It was so like Crichton, D’Argo thought. It was a perfect example of the way he somehow managed to keep
slogging forward no matter what obstacles were set in his way, often summing it up with something that made
absolutely no sense. It had been a long and difficult three cycles since the day he had grabbed what he
thought was a sebacean by the throat and threatened to kill him, and through it all, he had only seen Crichton
ready to give up on three occasions -- each of which involved Aeryn.
Two realizations hit home with a nearly physical impact. First, that John was every bit as distraught over his
relationship with Aeryn as he had ever been in the past; and second, that Crichton very likely was listening to
every one of his thoughts. D’Argo glanced quickly to the side, checking on his friend. A furtive flicker of blue
eyes caught his own.
“I’m sorry, John.”
“It’s okay, man. Nothing you can do about it. She’s back on Moya, that’s all that counts. We’ll figure it out
eventually.”
The heel of John’s fist thumped hard against D’Argo’s shoulder, the third time John had done that to him in a
single day. It was a sign of the degree of stress he was enduring. He normally didn’t make that sort of contact
without a great deal of cause, and never more than once per debacle. D’Argo stepped aside and motioned
John forward, then fell in behind where he could watch both Crichton and their surroundings. The problem
aboard Moya had to be resolved, after which they still had to find the mysterious source of the hvisk infection.
* * * * *
Rygel hovered alongside Pilot’s motionless bulk, watching Aeryn’s efforts with uncharacteristic interest. Jool
was a half motra behind him and to one side, leaning over the consoles in an attempt to view the
indecipherable displays. “Any improvement?” the interion asked.
“Give her a microt,” Rygel growled. “She’s checking.”
Aeryn depressed another large button and watched the results. Half an arn’s relentless work with the controls
had finally yielded a reading that indicated a pressure buildup in some of the lines feeding Pilot’s circulatory
system. It meant that they had somehow become clogged. Several attempts to clear them or reroute the flow
had resulted in a momentary improvement in Pilot’s condition only to be followed by a relapse microts later.
The frustration mounted. If only she had a neural transponder, she would be able to follow Moya’s impulses
directly to the source of the problem.
Moya groaned. An extended, rolling rumble of emotional distress emanated from the walls themselves,
reminding everyone present that the leviathan was unlikely to survive for very long if Pilot died. Finding
another of his species to take his place would involve heading deep into Peacekeeper occupied space. The
life expectancy of the entire crew would drop to fewer than one or two dozen solar days if Moya’s guide and
partner didn’t recover and they chose to remain aboard her. They had too many enemies in this sector of
space. Without Pilot, their fate would be transferred into the care of Crais and Talyn, and would hinge on the
erratic pair’s willingness to take the entire crew on board the young gunship.
“Where the frell is Crichton?” Goaded by concern and impatience, Aeryn slapped at a lever. The indicators
flashed out a warning and she pulled it back to the correct setting. “It’s the same as every other attempt I’ve
made to clear the pressure buildup. There was a fifteen-microt improvement and then it reverted. He’s dying.”
Moya let out another groan, longer and more distressed than the one microts earlier. This time it didn’t end. It
changed into a moaning shriek and the entire chamber began to shake. The noise shifted up several octaves,
turning into a howl of over-stressed biomechanoid plating.
“She’s pulling away from the station!” Aeryn yelled over the din. “No! Moya, stop!” She lunged to the far side
of Pilot’s station and depressed several control surfaces, trying to shut down the leviathan’s flow of calorics to
her drive system. The tremors beneath their feet died away. A moment later the noise and shuddering
returned, even stronger than before. It was getting hard to stay on her feet. “Moya, stop! Shut down your
engines!”
“Stop her!” Jool lost her balance and toppled to one side. Her desperate cry changed from one of mere
concern over what Moya was doing to a scream of pain and dismay.
Rygel’s deeper pitched voice joined the chaos, and then everyone was yelling at once, trying to break through
the leviathan’s panic. Chiana joined the cacophony, yelling over the comms first to find out what was
happening and then adding her own entreaty for Moya to remain calm.
Clinging to one of Pilot’s motionless arms to keep from being tossed off her feet, Aeryn opened a channel
routed directly from her comms into the leviathan’s receivers and tried one more time. “Moya, if you leave the
Kyelligg we may never find out what is causing this. To save Pilot, you have to remain calm and stay here!
You have to trust us, Moya!”
It worked.
“Frell me,” Chiana transmitted into the abrupt silence. “What caused that?”
“Moya is scared,” Rygel answered.
“Well, she scared the dren out of me, so tell her she’s not alone in the frightened department and ask her not
to do that again. And there’s a huge frelling crack in the internal bulkhead down here now, just in case anyone
cares.” The comms channel let out a peculiar crackling chirp, suggesting that Chiana had either slapped it or
crushed it under her boot, and went silent before anyone could ask about the extent of the crack.
“Now what do we do?” Jool asked. Her ringlets had cooled from an iridescent scarlet to a shade closer to its
normal, eye-watering hue.
“We wait for John.” Aeryn ducked beneath the forward edge of Pilot’s cranial shell on her way to the far side of
his station. She could tuck herself into the shadows there, perched behind one of Pilot’s shoulders where there
wasn’t enough light for anyone else to see her clearly. Sitting in the gloom, half-obscured from view, gave her
an opportunity to think without having to worry that the others might see her expression. She could allow
herself to get angry that John hadn’t appeared yet, be afraid of what he might pick up from her thoughts once
he arrived, and she could take a few microts to wallow in the disorganized mixture of emotions that got loose
every time she thought of John Crichton and didn’t know which one she was thinking about.
It happened again the moment she made herself comfortable. A stray thought about John, consisting mostly of
impatience, billowed out of control. The memory of one face, full of love and passion in the throes of the first
night they had spent together aboard Talyn, was overlaid by another set of identical features, this time looking
hurt and bewildered when she turned away from him and left the damaged transport pod without speaking. The
same. Not the same. John Crichton, and yet … John Crichton.
As if cued by her thoughts, his voice burst from the comms. “Aeryn? We’re on our way. There was a … sort of
a problem here. I’ll be there in forty microts.”
It was less than that. It was barely fifteen microts before Crichton jogged into the Den with D’Argo following
close behind; which meant that he had been within range of her thoughts the entire time. She ducked her head
to check on a readout, giving herself time to organize and contain her runaway emotions.
“What’s the problem?” John started to haul himself up on the consoles, looked more carefully at the raised wall
around Pilot made of living leviathan components, and backed away without touching it. “What’s wrong with
Moya?”
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, referring to his retreat.
Rygel answered Crichton’s question, ignoring Aeryn’s query. “It’s not Moya. It’s Pilot. He’s dying and no one
knows why.”
Crichton laid a gloved hand on the outer surface of Pilot’s station, paused for two microts, then climbed up to
kneel beside the inert bulk of Pilot. “Touching someone makes things worse. I never know when it’s going to
blow right through my ability to control it.” He surveyed the controls for several microts, considering the
problem, and then suggested, “Check with Moya. See if she can help.”
“We did that!” Aeryn snapped at him.
John didn’t respond by getting angry or impatient the way she had become accustomed to over the past three
cycles. He simply looked away from her the way he had begun to with increasing frequency. “Okay, I’ll assume
you’ve already tried everything I could possibly think of. You know more about Pilot and Moya than anyone
else on this side of the universe. So why did you haul my sorry ass back here?”
“You have to listen to Moya. You’re the only person who can hear her.”
John slid down off the consoles and backed away from her, shaking his head. “You’ve -- you have just got to
be kidding, Aeryn. Please tell me that this is your version of a really bad joke.”
Over the cycles, Aeryn had become accustomed to even the most peculiar of John’s Earth-behaviors, but the
rapid headshakes that had begun looked more like the deranged behavior that had appeared when the neuro-
chip had begun to take control than one of his usual quirks. She tried again, more calmly. “We don’t have any
other choice. Pilot is running out of time.”
His reaction grew more vehement, not less. “Try walkie-talkies, a cell phone, communicators from the
Enterprise. Try a couple of cans with a string between them, sign language, cue cards, or a teleprompter. I
don’t care what you try, but if I link up with Moya, she is going to toast what little remaining unaltered gray
matter I’ve got left!”
“John --”
“No! You can’t ask me to do that. She damn near blew every circuit breaker from my toes to my nose the last
time I tapped in on her. This is the Aurora Chair in reverse. It takes every memory and thought on this side of
the universe and jams it into my head!” He emphasized the shouted description with a fast thrust of his hand,
pantomiming stuffing an object into his ear, and then headed for one of the bridges leading out of the Den.
D’Argo reached to grab his arm, trying to stop him. Crichton swatted his hand away, took two more steps, and
then came to a halt, fidgeting indecisively. “You tell her,
D’Argo. She’ll believe you.”
D’Argo dropped his voice to a whisper. “John, you’re getting better at controlling it. You said so yourself on the
station. We’re talking about saving both Pilot and Moya.”
“Better doesn’t mean good at it, D’Argo. You saw what happened the last time I tried a solo act.” John touched
both hands to the sides of his head for a moment then flailed outward, indicating his loss of control a quarter-
arn earlier. “I still feel like my brain got run through a food processor, and now you’re asking me to do it again.
Moya is … she is more than I can handle, D’Argo. You have no idea what it’s like.”
D’Argo slapped John lightly on the shoulder, accepting the explanation, and turned to face Aeryn. “There has
to be another way. What else can we try?”
“I’ve tried everything. This is the only way,” she insisted.
Crichton looked around the Den, first staring up toward the ceiling then down into the neural plexus. He
wandered to one side, working his way along the edge of the central platform, all the while staring down into the
depths of Moya’s neural cavern.
“Crichton,” Jool began.
He waved her into silence. “Give me a microt. I’m thinking about committing mental hari-kari here.”
D’Argo moved to catch up to him. “John, don’t do it. You said it yourself. It’s too much to ask.”
“Aeryn’s right. It’s Pilot. We can’t just let him die.”
“Then at least get Hox. Just in case you lose --”
“Shut up, D’Argo!” John interrupted, stopping him before he could blurt out what had happened aboard the
Kyelligg.
Aeryn zeroed in on D’Argo’s concern and John’s reaction as if she were the one who could read minds. “What
happened? What went wrong?”
“If you can call --” D’Argo started.
“Nothing went wrong,” John cut in before his friend had a chance to reveal the unadorned truth. “I’m not so
sharp at aiming this talent in any particular direction, that’s all.”
“You’re not so sharp with any talent,” Rygel interjected.
“Shut up, Rygel!” Aeryn and D’Argo barked as one.
“Someone has to do something, Crichton.” Jool reentered the argument. “If Pilot dies, we’re going to loose our
home and our friend. This isn’t about --”
“This is about more than Pilot! I know that,” John snapped at the interion. “And what if it kills me? Or fries
every neuron in my skull?” He stumbled, caught his balance, and straightened up with one gloved hand
pressed against his forehead. When he continued, he was calmer. “It’s like that all the time. I can’t even spare
a fraction of my brain to walk, let alone think. There has to be another way to figure this out aside from asking
me to do a Vulcan mind-meld. If we figure out when this began, we’ll be able to work out what’s going on.”
“We’re out of time,” Chiana interjected before anyone could say anything else. The slim nebari scrambled up
one of the ladders leading to the tier below the Den and leapt off to land in the middle of the group. “Naj Gil
says it’s getting too hard for him to pump by hand. He can’t force the fluids through anymore.”
The group turned as one to look at Pilot. In the few microts since the argument had begun, the symbiote had
begun turning colors. The normally mottled shell had already begun fading to a dull, lusterless brown that
spoke of internal starvation.
“I’ll see if I can help,” D’Argo said. “Maybe with the strength of two of us --” He disappeared down a ladder
without finishing his sentence.
“No time left.” Aeryn’s whisper echoed briefly in the suddenly quiet chamber. “We’re out of options.”
Crichton paced from one side of the central platform to the other, stopped near the edge and looked down into
the shadow-obscured depths of the neural cluster. “Pilot has his own internal organs and circulatory system.
Why isn’t that keeping him alive?”
Aeryn jumped down from where she had been perched for so many futile arns and went to stand behind him.
He was clutching at hopeless possibilities. She knew it because she had spent too many arns doing the same
sort of thing, clinging to the empty hope that he would recover even as she watched him dying. She tried to be
patient despite the urgency of the situation, and explained what he already knew. “Pilot gets all of his body’s
nutrients from Moya. It would be like you or me being deprived of every bit of fuel in our bodies all at once.”
John nodded once. “We’d faint, go into a coma, and eventually die.”
Behind them, the remaining trio of Jool, Chiana, and Rygel had gone quiet, awaiting the outcome of the
subdued discussion.
“When Moya was pregnant, she was diverting most of her resources, but she hadn’t cut Pilot off entirely. This
is far worse. His entire circulatory flow is being affected.” Aeryn waited through ten microts of silence. His
reluctance was radiating off him, stiff shoulders and small jerky movements speaking as clearly as words how
much he didn’t want to do what she was asking. “If it were anyone but Moya and Pilot, I wouldn’t --”
John gave a fast shake of his head, as though flicking something away from him instead of the emphatic side-to-
side denial that she had seen just a few moments earlier. “Okay. Fine. What the hell, everyone else at this
end of the universe has run their fingers through my skull, might as well let Moya come on in.” Crichton turned
and gestured at the assembled group. “Take a hike.”
“I think you --” She wanted as many people as possible with him in case something went wrong.
“No! Everyone get out.” John grabbed her arm and propelled her toward one of the bridges, shoving her
toward where Jool and Rygel were already headed for the door. “If I open up enough to hear Moya, I’ll get
everyone else at the same time. No audience. You too, Chiana. Out.”
“No way, Old Man. We all saw how blezzed out you were after you and Moya got it on the first time around. I’m
stayin’.”
“‘Got it on’, Pip?” He grinned at her, then shook his head and steered her toward the door.
“Yeah. You, Moya, and a little meeting in the middle, right? Just you and her and nobody else.” She dodged
around his outstretched arm and bounded toward the center of the Den. “You two can’t be trusted alone.”
Their easy bantering and humorous camaraderie freed something that Aeryn thought she had buried securely
for all time. A harsh, metallic-tasting flood of hurt washed over her, jealousy riding along to amplify the
sensation. It was a breathing-catching, agonizing, control-dissolving ache; one that begged for the numbing
effects of any kind of alcohol she could get her hands on, for oblivion to make it stop. Once freed, the
emotions resisted containment; it threatened to drown her.
Crichton slapped both hands to his temples and stumbled to one side, once again dangerously close to falling
off the edge of the flooring.
“John!” she yelled at him. Her shout was overlain by Chiana’s higher-pitched call of alarm.
He recovered, took three long steps away from the dangerous drop-off, and waved the two women away. “I’m
fine.”
“That’s exactly why someone’s got to stay with you,” Chiana resumed the argument.
“That’s exactly why I’m going to do this somewhere other than in the Den,” he shot right back at her. “Now get
lost, Chiana. Your head is like the heap of trash behind my Granddaddy’s barn. There was more damned junk
in there, most of it useful at one time, all of it fascinating, and no two pieces fit together into anything
functional.” He jerked his head at her, indicating the direction toward the door.
She refused to move, unbothered by his description. “Someone has to stay.”
“I’ll stay,” Aeryn said. Both heads came around fast in surprise. She addressed John, ignoring Chiana for the
moment. “You don’t believe I can keep you from getting hurt while you’re listening to Moya?”
“No, that’s not it, Aeryn.”
“Not at all,” Chiana chimed in. “It’s good that you’ll stay --”
“That’ll be fine,” John added. All three were making the transition across the narrow span leading out of the
Den.
“Real good. You stay here to make sure he doesn’t fall down a shaft. I’ll see if I can do anything to help with
Pilot … to give you more time, you know?” Chiana gave them one last slanting look from beneath her bangs,
nodded, and disappeared at a run.
John spun around so fast Aeryn nearly lost her balance trying to stop in time. He stepped out of her way and
motioned for her to leave the Den. “Thanks for getting Chiana to split. You can take off now.”
Aeryn shook her head. “You might need help.”
His fast reversal in attitude was every bit as puzzling as his change in direction had been surprising. It added to
the sense of unease that had begun the moment he had agreed to her request and had multiplied when he had
stumbled. So many of the usual hints, the small bodily reactions that told her what he was thinking and feeling,
were hidden beneath an unfamiliar set of reactions that she didn’t recognize. It was as if her translator
microbes were functioning only half the time, sending through portions of unintelligible speech to jumble the
segments she understood. Only in this case, it was his movements that were being turned to gibberish instead
of his words.
John continued to motion her out of the Den. She tried again. “Someone needs to be here in case you have
trouble with this.”
“What I need is a lot of silence, and that means I need to be alone. Stop arguing with me and let me get this
party started.”
They faced each other in nearly identical stances, feet spread, hands on hips, neither one showing any sign
that they were going to give in. John would have called it a ‘stare down’. It was that memory of one of his
peculiar phrases that broke her determination to stay with him. In the space of a microt, Pilot’s dilemma was
forgotten, buried under a stampede of memories.
She had wanted John beside her so badly when she’d had Talyn’s transponder implanted, and the discussion
had descended into anger, shouting, and an unequalled level of misunderstanding. Now their roles were
reversed. It was his turn to bond with a leviathan, although in an entirely different manner, and she wanted to
be the one to yell, to stalk off in fury, punishing him in kind for the way he had treated her half a cycle earlier.
Only it wasn’t John and he wouldn’t understand. And it was John, and they were acting exactly the same way
they had before. She wanted to be with him, and he was demanding that she leave him alone. Two sets of
blue eyes seemed to be watching her for a microt, one overlaid by the other: one set of eyes remembered and
the other set no more than a motra away.
John closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out shakily, and the moment was broken. She was standing
in Moya’s corridor and he was turning his head to the side so he wouldn’t have to look at her.
“I’m sorry.” There didn’t seem to be anything else worth saying, and even less reason to bother asking if he
had picked up what she had been thinking. The look on his face said it all.
“Go away, Aeryn. I can’t do this with you here.” His voice cracked and jumped the way it always did when he
was battling to keep his emotions in check. “You’re the one who asked me to do this. Just go away.”
She left, walking slowly and yet feeling like she was running away, headed into Moya’s corridors in search of a
place where every sight and sound didn’t provide a constant reminder of John Crichton.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
Chapter 8
The deep cracking boom of D’Argo’s Qualta rifle set off a second round of frantic squawking somewhere
nearby: a frenetic expression of alarm rather than injury. Crichton didn’t have time to figure out who was
making the noise or why. He flung up a hand to protect his throat, lost another layer of leather off his glove to
the lashing barbed tongue, and felt the cockspur sink into leather instead of flesh. He rolled desperately to one
side in an attempt to toss his attacker clear. The glistening flash of the sharpened spur flicked by his eyes,
missing him by no more than a fraction of a dench. It snagged at the shoulder of his jacket and tore free,
taking a chunk of jacket with it. It lacked the vigor of the other strikes, delivered half-heartedly rather than with
the furious strength of every other slash. There was a final gouging pressure against his stomach without the
lethal intent, the hvisk using him like a trampoline, and then the weight was gone.
Crichton rolled to his knees, gasping from the kick he had just gotten in his guts, and saw the vivid blue and
green crests of their attackers dodging through the crowd.
“Those are …” He wanted to yell to Hox that the two hvisk were infected and couldn’t find the breath to
complete the short sentence.
D’Argo dragged him to his feet. “We figured that out! Go!”
Hox fell behind in a matter of microts. John barely noticed that they were leaving him behind, too caught up in
the pursuit as he and D’Argo charged after the pair of would-be assassins. The chase took them out of the
smaller street were the scuffle had occurred, cut across one of the main avenues, and plunged into a
secondary artery. Dodging around most of the pedestrians, occasionally tripping over children or shrubs,
sometimes shoving adults aside in their hurry, they snaked into one street after another, always moving up-
station toward the outward fringes of the Kyelligg’s structure. Their quarry began choosing increasingly smaller
avenues, shoving their way through crowds more ruthlessly than John and D’Argo, leaving a twittering, whistling
trail of concern behind them.
“We’re losing them!” Crichton cried. The two hvisk, although not fast runners, had a sinuous, slinking gait that
carried them through the crowds faster than their pursuers. He could see little other than the bobbing crests,
and then even those disappeared from sight.
“Left!” D’Argo called. The luxan’s greater height gave him an advantage. He could see over the other
pedestrians.
Ten motras ahead of them, the street split into two of the smallest alleys they had encountered so far. Each of
their choices made one of the strange twists so common aboard the Kyelligg. They were presented with a
choice of taking what appeared to be either the left or the right wall of each of the narrower passageways.
“Which left?” John asked. “Left-left or right-left?”
“Just pick one!”
There was no time to figure out which side of the tunnel the infected hvisk had chosen. With D’Argo treading
close on his heels, Crichton barged through a planting of shrubs and took what looked like the more ‘down’ side
of the left-hand choice. He stumbled, momentarily disoriented by the gravity shift. D’Argo hauled him up,
propelled him forward with a shove, and they picked up speed now that the crowds had disappeared.
“Where did they go?” D’Argo asked. There was no sign of the hvisk ahead of them.
“Frell that! Where did our walkway go?”
Their side of the alleyway came to an end in a lushly planted embankment. Thick shrubbery climbed upward
for a distance of three motras then abruptly turned upside down. No more than a motra above his head,
hanging baskets of flowers and a trellis of vinery levitated into the air, dangling toward the surface on the other
side of the structure. This smallest branch of the station had become too narrow to allow for a surface on both
sides of the interior, and they had chosen the wrong floor.
“Shit!” Crichton exploded in frustration.
“There!” D’Argo grabbed him by the shoulders of his jacket, swung him around and propelled him toward what
he at first thought was nothing more than a garden. Trusting his friend, he accelerated toward a narrow
pathway, and discovered what D’Argo had already seen: it arced around the curving side of the tunnel to
reach the opposite side. Fifteen microts later they were on the far side of the tunnel, upside-down to where
they had been moments earlier, and searching for some sign of the fleeing hvisk.
“They’re gone. We lost them,” John said. Except for the occasional hvisk lounging outside a living structure,
the street was deserted. “Can you smell them?”
D’Argo shook his head and let out a long sigh of resignation. “Hvisk all smell the same.”
Crichton spun around in a circle, looking for any sign that their attackers had passed this way. Serenity
reigned in every direction. There were no trampled flowers, no shocked and twittering bystanders, no bobbing
green and blue crests to be seen. “Crap! Heckle and Jeckle weren’t the ones we’re looking for, but they
probably could have led us to the boss bird.”
He gestured at D’Argo and moved off a fast walk, continuing in the direction they’d last seen the two hvisk
headed. Thirty microts later the narrow alleyway came to a dead end.
“They waited until we got stuck and then reversed course,” John concluded.
“Or ducked into one of the structures,” D’Argo said. “They couldn’t have counted on us taking the wrong side
of the tunnel.”
Crichton lashed out at a small planter filled with blue bulbous flowers. His kick sent the entire container sailing
five motras into a garden, spewing dirt and vibrantly hued petals in every direction. “I want this out of my head!
It could be over by now if we hadn’t lost them!” He indulged in a growling shriek of frustration, sighed,
reassembled his self-control, and started walking back the way they’d come.
“Can you find them the other way, John?” D’Argo asked after several dozen microts of silence. “With your
mind? They might be nearby. Any one of these whatevers,” D’Argo gestured at the neat rows of hvisk
dwellings, “might be concealing them.”
“Cubblings,” Crichton provided the equivalent of the hvisk word for their residences. It was a mindless comment
provided to give him time to consider D’Argo’s query. His control was so tenuous. There was no way to
describe to D’Argo the hair-thin margin between having it all neatly contained and a complete loss of command
over his ability. During the chaos of the fight and then the chase, the innate ability that Hox had sensed had
taken over while he was busy with more important things. Now that he had time to think about it, he could feel
the pressure of millions of thoughts pressing against that instinctively erected barricade.
Crichton bit his lower lip and considered the advantages of finding the elusive source of the hvisk insanity so
quickly, weighing it against the risk of letting down the barriers in his mind. The sooner he pinpointed the
infection, the sooner the hvisk would agree to reverse what they’d done to him.
They emerged from the narrow alley, hurried back through a larger street, and finally came to a stop where it
intersected one of the second largest avenues. There were hundreds of hvisk in sight, squawking and whistling
as they went about their business. One of the flocks of children flooded by, watched over by a single female,
many of them greeting the comparatively odd-looking pair with cheerful toots.
John surveyed the mass of living creatures and considered his options one more time, hoping that Hox would
appear out of the crowd to help him with what he was about to try.
“Never mind. Don’t do it,” D’Argo said.
“No, I can do it. It’s just that --”
It was just that if he lost control, he wasn’t sure what it would do to him. The ability was getting stronger with
every passing arn, allowing him to eavesdrop on more and more people each time he opened his mind. If the
recently bestowed talent broke loose, he wasn’t sure it would stop with just the occupants of the Kyelligg and
Moya. The idea of listening in on all of the Uncharted Territories without being certain he could silence it
scared him. John shoved that fear aside, and thought of everything he would gain: the search of the Kyelligg
might be finished in a matter of microts instead of arns, the unwanted telepathy would be shut down, and he
could get back to dealing with relatively simple things like trying to destroy information stored on a Peacekeeper
Command Carrier.
“Aeryn needs us back aboard Moya. I’ll do this, and if I come up empty, we’ll head back. Don’t go away.” He
felt the unvoiced jolt of protest next to him, saying that the honor-bound warrior would never abandon him at a
moment when he needed D’Argo’s help so much. “You’re a good friend, D’Argo,” he assured his companion.
The borrowed pang of emotion evaporated.
John started by envisioning a clenched fist, all five fingers crunched into an aching tightness, then eased the
mental pinky away from the rest no more than a micro-dench. The first thoughts oozed in, and he assessed
them, searching for the chill he had felt for a split-microt before the attack. The deluge washed over him, each
element feeling normal, and he loosened the knotted grip on his consciousness another fraction.
“Breathe, John,” he was reminded by someone else.
He took several breaths, and then eased outward along the corridors of the Kyelligg, searching. Joy, love,
sorrow, someone on the verge of dying of old age; he slid past the emotions and kept going. A couple
celebrated conception, crooning over the bulge in the female’s abdomen that would become an egg. John
paused long enough for his imagination to create the ludicrous mental vision of a large egg sitting in a
bassinette wearing a frilly bonnet, took time to smile, and moved on. Streaming up-station, outward along the
great arms of the Kyelligg, sliding in and out of alleyways, he spun through homes and businesses, sensing
only the thrum of normal minds.
Reaching the limits of how far he assumed the two hvisk could have traveled by then, he reversed course,
flowed past D’Argo, and tried in the other direction.
“You’re not breathing,” said the deep-voiced guardian of his body. Air flooded into starved lungs. He
dedicated several microts to the task of keeping his body alive, then resumed his search, moving down-station
this time.
He discovered what felt like a rock, as cold as a chunk of granite that stood forever hidden from the sun. It was
a dense spot of no emotion, of denied thoughts and feelings. John targeted the abnormal mind and lunged
toward it, seeking the owner.
His body has grown cold while she lies against him, unmoving, unfeeling, unseeing. There are no tears left,
and her head and throat ache from crying. She sits up slowly, letting the shimmering thermal sheet fall away,
and takes her last look at him. The features are familiar, but the person is no longer there. Half an arn ago
she could have tricked herself into believing he was only sleeping, that she need only wait for him to wake and
tell her it was all a hideous joke. The time for denial is over …
“Crap!” Far too late to save himself the shared despair, John realized who he had located. He backed away
with frantic haste, trying to get clear before any more of the remembered sights were loosed on him. His focus
began to fragment. He fought against the encroaching bedlam, trying to reconstruct the questing locus he had
been using to search the station.
“What’s wrong?” D’Argo’s alarmed response sounded next to him.
Aeryn, D’Argo, himself, remembering to breath, the Kyelligg, Hox was somewhere, he touched the vast
awareness of Moya, there were millions of hvisk, Chiana was in the Den worrying about Pilot, Rygel was hungry
as usual. Desperate to locate some sort of safe mental haven, John widened out his reach … and lost control
entirely. He was allowed a single, final microt to reflect that this was exactly what he had been afraid would
happen, and then the dam in his mind bulged, cracked, and gave way before the mass of thoughts. He was
aware of a painful grip on his upper arms to remind him that D’Argo was near his body watching over him, and
then there was nothing but the impossible number of thoughts invading his mind.
* * * * *
“Crichton, move your feet.” D’Argo shoved the stumbling, disoriented human to one side until the black clad
body came up against a wall with a heavy thump. The impact had no effect on the unfocussed stare, nor did it
change the irregular rasping breaths that seemed to take all of Crichton’s energy to produce.
Jamming a forearm against John’s chest to keep him upright, D’Argo stripped the glove off his left hand,
scowled at the already bloodied palm, then folded the fist in on itself and compressed John’s hand, deliberately
trying to recreate the pain that had helped him regain control arns earlier. This time it didn’t work. There was
no change except that John was having more trouble breathing.
“Crichton!” he bellowed into John’s ear. “Concentrate. You can do this yourself.”
“Duh … Duh … D’Argo,” came the stuttering, confused reply. “Make … make it … it … Stop it.”
Never in all his cycles of battle or imprisonment had he ever felt so helpless. Not even the moment when he
had found Lo’lann’s lifeless body had held this level of torment; she had been dead and beyond the reach of
pain and suffering. His friend had not asked for this burden, or done anything to bring it upon himself, and the
injury -- the torture -- was beyond D’Argo’s ability to repair. Battle injuries he understood. Those could be
bandaged, the flow of blood stemmed, the mangled portion of the body treated in some manner. The damage
to Crichton was hidden from sight and touch, and there was only one person D’Argo could think of who could
help him.
“John, where is Hox? Listen to me. Tell me which way to go to take you to Hox!” His shouts yielded only a slow
motion back-and-forth swing of the head. D’Argo took Crichton’s head in both hands, trying to steady both it
and the swaying body beneath it. “Focus, John. You were doing it a few microts ago. You can get it back.”
“Too … many,” Crichton gasped. He had begun to shake, a shock driven palsy that was increasing with every
passing microt.
“Me, listen only to me,” the warrior shouted at him, trying to break in to wherever his friend was suffering. “You
said you were learning to control this. Shut them out of your mind! Do it, John!” Nothing improved.
A soft whistling sounded near his left knee, and D’Argo spared a fast, annoyed glance downward. A young
hvisk stood there, peering up at the shuddering human with curious eyes and a wilting crest. Three more
gathered around, all whistling an identical tune, gently patting both D’Argo’s and Crichton’s legs. John started
to moan. His hands pulled weakly at D’Argo’s, trying to get free of the stabilizing grasp.
“He’s suffering,” D’Argo snapped at the little ones. “He’s hearing too many of you.”
He had meant to scare them away with the barking growl, hoping to lessen the chaos in his friend’s mind, but
the flock of youngsters that had passed several dozen microts earlier was suddenly swarming around them,
compressing into a slowly surging wave of iridescent crests and gleaming black eyes. The patting touches
were constant now, battling to make contact as the whistling melody strengthened and grew louder.
“Down. Let me … sit down,” John demanded.
D’Argo turned him around, pulled him into a firm embrace beneath his arms and around his chest, then
carefully lowered him in stages to sit in the space the flock had cleared for him. The small three-fingered hands
returned, patting at the bowed head and shoulders in time with their tune. Hesitant to disturb the melody,
D’Argo called quietly to the nearly buried human. “John?”
A quiet sob of relief reached him, followed by, “It’s better. There’s only one noise now, and it’s kind of
peaceful.” The words were slurred, as though Crichton couldn’t hear his own voice speaking. Instead of
reassuring him, it served to make D’Argo more anxious.
He straightened up and scanned left and right, searching for some sign of Hox. The blue-crested female he
had seen chaperoning the children was hurrying toward him, several other adults trailing in her wake, but there
was no sign of the one individual who could control the runaway ability. “Can you help him?” he asked the
female when she reached the outer rim of the group gathered around his knees.
She bobbed and nodded, gesturing toward the other adults clattering toward them. The children greeted her,
and the chorus began to break up into individual chirps. She whistled sharply at the group, apparently ordering
them to continue since the recital immediately resumed in full strength. The other adults, all males, arrived.
They spaced themselves evenly around the group before wading carefully into the children to reach Crichton.
Their lower pitched warbling matched the tune two octaves below the immature serenade, taking over the
chant. Relieved of their rescue mission, the children scattered, tootling happily as they waved and scampered
away.
“Are they controlling it? Is it quiet?” D’Argo asked. The four older hvisk were pulling John to his feet.
“No. They’re sort of drowning it out.” Crichton turned to look at his friend. His eyes were wandering in
separate directions. It looked as though each eye wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be focusing on
and didn’t know what the other one was doing. “It’s a single noise, but …” He staggered and was steadied by
the hvisk before he could collapse. “It makes it … it’s hard to think. Loud inside. Have them take us back … to
… to …”
“To Moya?” D’Argo finished for him. John nodded wearily, continuing to look distracted. “Can you take us to
our ship?” the luxan asked the escort. Four heads bobbed a response that allowed them to continue the song
without a break. They wheeled around, supporting John between two of them, and began a weaving, stumbling
journey through the streets of the station, all the while continuing the repetitive melody that was blunting the
assault on the defenseless mind.
“You’re almost there,” D’Argo told John several hundred microts later. He recognized some of the landmarks.
“Hox.” John stopped walking.
“What?”
“Hox is close.” The shambling, ill-directed movements came to a stop. John straightened up and took several
deep, relaxed breaths. “Thank you,” he said, nodding to his escort. The group chirped their response, bowed
toward him several times each, and made their way back the way they had come.
“He’s restored control?” D’Argo asked. “From a distance this time?”
John rubbed one temple with the heel of his hand and nodded. “He’s not that far away, and it’s getting easier.
He didn’t do it for me this time. He showed me how to do it myself.” He shook his head deprecatingly. “I kind of
lost it completely that time.”
“Is there any damage from what happened? How do you feel?”
“Like the Roto-Rooter man got in there and scoured out the inside of my skull. I’m okay, D. A little rattled, and
it feels like my brain got dry cleaned and pressed, but I’m okay.”
It was so like Crichton, D’Argo thought. It was a perfect example of the way he somehow managed to keep
slogging forward no matter what obstacles were set in his way, often summing it up with something that made
absolutely no sense. It had been a long and difficult three cycles since the day he had grabbed what he
thought was a sebacean by the throat and threatened to kill him, and through it all, he had only seen Crichton
ready to give up on three occasions -- each of which involved Aeryn.
Two realizations hit home with a nearly physical impact. First, that John was every bit as distraught over his
relationship with Aeryn as he had ever been in the past; and second, that Crichton very likely was listening to
every one of his thoughts. D’Argo glanced quickly to the side, checking on his friend. A furtive flicker of blue
eyes caught his own.
“I’m sorry, John.”
“It’s okay, man. Nothing you can do about it. She’s back on Moya, that’s all that counts. We’ll figure it out
eventually.”
The heel of John’s fist thumped hard against D’Argo’s shoulder, the third time John had done that to him in a
single day. It was a sign of the degree of stress he was enduring. He normally didn’t make that sort of contact
without a great deal of cause, and never more than once per debacle. D’Argo stepped aside and motioned
John forward, then fell in behind where he could watch both Crichton and their surroundings. The problem
aboard Moya had to be resolved, after which they still had to find the mysterious source of the hvisk infection.
* * * * *
Rygel hovered alongside Pilot’s motionless bulk, watching Aeryn’s efforts with uncharacteristic interest. Jool
was a half motra behind him and to one side, leaning over the consoles in an attempt to view the
indecipherable displays. “Any improvement?” the interion asked.
“Give her a microt,” Rygel growled. “She’s checking.”
Aeryn depressed another large button and watched the results. Half an arn’s relentless work with the controls
had finally yielded a reading that indicated a pressure buildup in some of the lines feeding Pilot’s circulatory
system. It meant that they had somehow become clogged. Several attempts to clear them or reroute the flow
had resulted in a momentary improvement in Pilot’s condition only to be followed by a relapse microts later.
The frustration mounted. If only she had a neural transponder, she would be able to follow Moya’s impulses
directly to the source of the problem.
Moya groaned. An extended, rolling rumble of emotional distress emanated from the walls themselves,
reminding everyone present that the leviathan was unlikely to survive for very long if Pilot died. Finding
another of his species to take his place would involve heading deep into Peacekeeper occupied space. The
life expectancy of the entire crew would drop to fewer than one or two dozen solar days if Moya’s guide and
partner didn’t recover and they chose to remain aboard her. They had too many enemies in this sector of
space. Without Pilot, their fate would be transferred into the care of Crais and Talyn, and would hinge on the
erratic pair’s willingness to take the entire crew on board the young gunship.
“Where the frell is Crichton?” Goaded by concern and impatience, Aeryn slapped at a lever. The indicators
flashed out a warning and she pulled it back to the correct setting. “It’s the same as every other attempt I’ve
made to clear the pressure buildup. There was a fifteen-microt improvement and then it reverted. He’s dying.”
Moya let out another groan, longer and more distressed than the one microts earlier. This time it didn’t end. It
changed into a moaning shriek and the entire chamber began to shake. The noise shifted up several octaves,
turning into a howl of over-stressed biomechanoid plating.
“She’s pulling away from the station!” Aeryn yelled over the din. “No! Moya, stop!” She lunged to the far side
of Pilot’s station and depressed several control surfaces, trying to shut down the leviathan’s flow of calorics to
her drive system. The tremors beneath their feet died away. A moment later the noise and shuddering
returned, even stronger than before. It was getting hard to stay on her feet. “Moya, stop! Shut down your
engines!”
“Stop her!” Jool lost her balance and toppled to one side. Her desperate cry changed from one of mere
concern over what Moya was doing to a scream of pain and dismay.
Rygel’s deeper pitched voice joined the chaos, and then everyone was yelling at once, trying to break through
the leviathan’s panic. Chiana joined the cacophony, yelling over the comms first to find out what was
happening and then adding her own entreaty for Moya to remain calm.
Clinging to one of Pilot’s motionless arms to keep from being tossed off her feet, Aeryn opened a channel
routed directly from her comms into the leviathan’s receivers and tried one more time. “Moya, if you leave the
Kyelligg we may never find out what is causing this. To save Pilot, you have to remain calm and stay here!
You have to trust us, Moya!”
It worked.
“Frell me,” Chiana transmitted into the abrupt silence. “What caused that?”
“Moya is scared,” Rygel answered.
“Well, she scared the dren out of me, so tell her she’s not alone in the frightened department and ask her not
to do that again. And there’s a huge frelling crack in the internal bulkhead down here now, just in case anyone
cares.” The comms channel let out a peculiar crackling chirp, suggesting that Chiana had either slapped it or
crushed it under her boot, and went silent before anyone could ask about the extent of the crack.
“Now what do we do?” Jool asked. Her ringlets had cooled from an iridescent scarlet to a shade closer to its
normal, eye-watering hue.
“We wait for John.” Aeryn ducked beneath the forward edge of Pilot’s cranial shell on her way to the far side of
his station. She could tuck herself into the shadows there, perched behind one of Pilot’s shoulders where there
wasn’t enough light for anyone else to see her clearly. Sitting in the gloom, half-obscured from view, gave her
an opportunity to think without having to worry that the others might see her expression. She could allow
herself to get angry that John hadn’t appeared yet, be afraid of what he might pick up from her thoughts once
he arrived, and she could take a few microts to wallow in the disorganized mixture of emotions that got loose
every time she thought of John Crichton and didn’t know which one she was thinking about.
It happened again the moment she made herself comfortable. A stray thought about John, consisting mostly of
impatience, billowed out of control. The memory of one face, full of love and passion in the throes of the first
night they had spent together aboard Talyn, was overlaid by another set of identical features, this time looking
hurt and bewildered when she turned away from him and left the damaged transport pod without speaking. The
same. Not the same. John Crichton, and yet … John Crichton.
As if cued by her thoughts, his voice burst from the comms. “Aeryn? We’re on our way. There was a … sort of
a problem here. I’ll be there in forty microts.”
It was less than that. It was barely fifteen microts before Crichton jogged into the Den with D’Argo following
close behind; which meant that he had been within range of her thoughts the entire time. She ducked her head
to check on a readout, giving herself time to organize and contain her runaway emotions.
“What’s the problem?” John started to haul himself up on the consoles, looked more carefully at the raised wall
around Pilot made of living leviathan components, and backed away without touching it. “What’s wrong with
Moya?”
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, referring to his retreat.
Rygel answered Crichton’s question, ignoring Aeryn’s query. “It’s not Moya. It’s Pilot. He’s dying and no one
knows why.”
Crichton laid a gloved hand on the outer surface of Pilot’s station, paused for two microts, then climbed up to
kneel beside the inert bulk of Pilot. “Touching someone makes things worse. I never know when it’s going to
blow right through my ability to control it.” He surveyed the controls for several microts, considering the
problem, and then suggested, “Check with Moya. See if she can help.”
“We did that!” Aeryn snapped at him.
John didn’t respond by getting angry or impatient the way she had become accustomed to over the past three
cycles. He simply looked away from her the way he had begun to with increasing frequency. “Okay, I’ll assume
you’ve already tried everything I could possibly think of. You know more about Pilot and Moya than anyone
else on this side of the universe. So why did you haul my sorry ass back here?”
“You have to listen to Moya. You’re the only person who can hear her.”
John slid down off the consoles and backed away from her, shaking his head. “You’ve -- you have just got to
be kidding, Aeryn. Please tell me that this is your version of a really bad joke.”
Over the cycles, Aeryn had become accustomed to even the most peculiar of John’s Earth-behaviors, but the
rapid headshakes that had begun looked more like the deranged behavior that had appeared when the neuro-
chip had begun to take control than one of his usual quirks. She tried again, more calmly. “We don’t have any
other choice. Pilot is running out of time.”
His reaction grew more vehement, not less. “Try walkie-talkies, a cell phone, communicators from the
Enterprise. Try a couple of cans with a string between them, sign language, cue cards, or a teleprompter. I
don’t care what you try, but if I link up with Moya, she is going to toast what little remaining unaltered gray
matter I’ve got left!”
“John --”
“No! You can’t ask me to do that. She damn near blew every circuit breaker from my toes to my nose the last
time I tapped in on her. This is the Aurora Chair in reverse. It takes every memory and thought on this side of
the universe and jams it into my head!” He emphasized the shouted description with a fast thrust of his hand,
pantomiming stuffing an object into his ear, and then headed for one of the bridges leading out of the Den.
D’Argo reached to grab his arm, trying to stop him. Crichton swatted his hand away, took two more steps, and
then came to a halt, fidgeting indecisively. “You tell her,
D’Argo. She’ll believe you.”
D’Argo dropped his voice to a whisper. “John, you’re getting better at controlling it. You said so yourself on the
station. We’re talking about saving both Pilot and Moya.”
“Better doesn’t mean good at it, D’Argo. You saw what happened the last time I tried a solo act.” John touched
both hands to the sides of his head for a moment then flailed outward, indicating his loss of control a quarter-
arn earlier. “I still feel like my brain got run through a food processor, and now you’re asking me to do it again.
Moya is … she is more than I can handle, D’Argo. You have no idea what it’s like.”
D’Argo slapped John lightly on the shoulder, accepting the explanation, and turned to face Aeryn. “There has
to be another way. What else can we try?”
“I’ve tried everything. This is the only way,” she insisted.
Crichton looked around the Den, first staring up toward the ceiling then down into the neural plexus. He
wandered to one side, working his way along the edge of the central platform, all the while staring down into the
depths of Moya’s neural cavern.
“Crichton,” Jool began.
He waved her into silence. “Give me a microt. I’m thinking about committing mental hari-kari here.”
D’Argo moved to catch up to him. “John, don’t do it. You said it yourself. It’s too much to ask.”
“Aeryn’s right. It’s Pilot. We can’t just let him die.”
“Then at least get Hox. Just in case you lose --”
“Shut up, D’Argo!” John interrupted, stopping him before he could blurt out what had happened aboard the
Kyelligg.
Aeryn zeroed in on D’Argo’s concern and John’s reaction as if she were the one who could read minds. “What
happened? What went wrong?”
“If you can call --” D’Argo started.
“Nothing went wrong,” John cut in before his friend had a chance to reveal the unadorned truth. “I’m not so
sharp at aiming this talent in any particular direction, that’s all.”
“You’re not so sharp with any talent,” Rygel interjected.
“Shut up, Rygel!” Aeryn and D’Argo barked as one.
“Someone has to do something, Crichton.” Jool reentered the argument. “If Pilot dies, we’re going to loose our
home and our friend. This isn’t about --”
“This is about more than Pilot! I know that,” John snapped at the interion. “And what if it kills me? Or fries
every neuron in my skull?” He stumbled, caught his balance, and straightened up with one gloved hand
pressed against his forehead. When he continued, he was calmer. “It’s like that all the time. I can’t even spare
a fraction of my brain to walk, let alone think. There has to be another way to figure this out aside from asking
me to do a Vulcan mind-meld. If we figure out when this began, we’ll be able to work out what’s going on.”
“We’re out of time,” Chiana interjected before anyone could say anything else. The slim nebari scrambled up
one of the ladders leading to the tier below the Den and leapt off to land in the middle of the group. “Naj Gil
says it’s getting too hard for him to pump by hand. He can’t force the fluids through anymore.”
The group turned as one to look at Pilot. In the few microts since the argument had begun, the symbiote had
begun turning colors. The normally mottled shell had already begun fading to a dull, lusterless brown that
spoke of internal starvation.
“I’ll see if I can help,” D’Argo said. “Maybe with the strength of two of us --” He disappeared down a ladder
without finishing his sentence.
“No time left.” Aeryn’s whisper echoed briefly in the suddenly quiet chamber. “We’re out of options.”
Crichton paced from one side of the central platform to the other, stopped near the edge and looked down into
the shadow-obscured depths of the neural cluster. “Pilot has his own internal organs and circulatory system.
Why isn’t that keeping him alive?”
Aeryn jumped down from where she had been perched for so many futile arns and went to stand behind him.
He was clutching at hopeless possibilities. She knew it because she had spent too many arns doing the same
sort of thing, clinging to the empty hope that he would recover even as she watched him dying. She tried to be
patient despite the urgency of the situation, and explained what he already knew. “Pilot gets all of his body’s
nutrients from Moya. It would be like you or me being deprived of every bit of fuel in our bodies all at once.”
John nodded once. “We’d faint, go into a coma, and eventually die.”
Behind them, the remaining trio of Jool, Chiana, and Rygel had gone quiet, awaiting the outcome of the
subdued discussion.
“When Moya was pregnant, she was diverting most of her resources, but she hadn’t cut Pilot off entirely. This
is far worse. His entire circulatory flow is being affected.” Aeryn waited through ten microts of silence. His
reluctance was radiating off him, stiff shoulders and small jerky movements speaking as clearly as words how
much he didn’t want to do what she was asking. “If it were anyone but Moya and Pilot, I wouldn’t --”
John gave a fast shake of his head, as though flicking something away from him instead of the emphatic side-to-
side denial that she had seen just a few moments earlier. “Okay. Fine. What the hell, everyone else at this
end of the universe has run their fingers through my skull, might as well let Moya come on in.” Crichton turned
and gestured at the assembled group. “Take a hike.”
“I think you --” She wanted as many people as possible with him in case something went wrong.
“No! Everyone get out.” John grabbed her arm and propelled her toward one of the bridges, shoving her
toward where Jool and Rygel were already headed for the door. “If I open up enough to hear Moya, I’ll get
everyone else at the same time. No audience. You too, Chiana. Out.”
“No way, Old Man. We all saw how blezzed out you were after you and Moya got it on the first time around. I’m
stayin’.”
“‘Got it on’, Pip?” He grinned at her, then shook his head and steered her toward the door.
“Yeah. You, Moya, and a little meeting in the middle, right? Just you and her and nobody else.” She dodged
around his outstretched arm and bounded toward the center of the Den. “You two can’t be trusted alone.”
Their easy bantering and humorous camaraderie freed something that Aeryn thought she had buried securely
for all time. A harsh, metallic-tasting flood of hurt washed over her, jealousy riding along to amplify the
sensation. It was a breathing-catching, agonizing, control-dissolving ache; one that begged for the numbing
effects of any kind of alcohol she could get her hands on, for oblivion to make it stop. Once freed, the
emotions resisted containment; it threatened to drown her.
Crichton slapped both hands to his temples and stumbled to one side, once again dangerously close to falling
off the edge of the flooring.
“John!” she yelled at him. Her shout was overlain by Chiana’s higher-pitched call of alarm.
He recovered, took three long steps away from the dangerous drop-off, and waved the two women away. “I’m
fine.”
“That’s exactly why someone’s got to stay with you,” Chiana resumed the argument.
“That’s exactly why I’m going to do this somewhere other than in the Den,” he shot right back at her. “Now get
lost, Chiana. Your head is like the heap of trash behind my Granddaddy’s barn. There was more damned junk
in there, most of it useful at one time, all of it fascinating, and no two pieces fit together into anything
functional.” He jerked his head at her, indicating the direction toward the door.
She refused to move, unbothered by his description. “Someone has to stay.”
“I’ll stay,” Aeryn said. Both heads came around fast in surprise. She addressed John, ignoring Chiana for the
moment. “You don’t believe I can keep you from getting hurt while you’re listening to Moya?”
“No, that’s not it, Aeryn.”
“Not at all,” Chiana chimed in. “It’s good that you’ll stay --”
“That’ll be fine,” John added. All three were making the transition across the narrow span leading out of the
Den.
“Real good. You stay here to make sure he doesn’t fall down a shaft. I’ll see if I can do anything to help with
Pilot … to give you more time, you know?” Chiana gave them one last slanting look from beneath her bangs,
nodded, and disappeared at a run.
John spun around so fast Aeryn nearly lost her balance trying to stop in time. He stepped out of her way and
motioned for her to leave the Den. “Thanks for getting Chiana to split. You can take off now.”
Aeryn shook her head. “You might need help.”
His fast reversal in attitude was every bit as puzzling as his change in direction had been surprising. It added to
the sense of unease that had begun the moment he had agreed to her request and had multiplied when he had
stumbled. So many of the usual hints, the small bodily reactions that told her what he was thinking and feeling,
were hidden beneath an unfamiliar set of reactions that she didn’t recognize. It was as if her translator
microbes were functioning only half the time, sending through portions of unintelligible speech to jumble the
segments she understood. Only in this case, it was his movements that were being turned to gibberish instead
of his words.
John continued to motion her out of the Den. She tried again. “Someone needs to be here in case you have
trouble with this.”
“What I need is a lot of silence, and that means I need to be alone. Stop arguing with me and let me get this
party started.”
They faced each other in nearly identical stances, feet spread, hands on hips, neither one showing any sign
that they were going to give in. John would have called it a ‘stare down’. It was that memory of one of his
peculiar phrases that broke her determination to stay with him. In the space of a microt, Pilot’s dilemma was
forgotten, buried under a stampede of memories.
She had wanted John beside her so badly when she’d had Talyn’s transponder implanted, and the discussion
had descended into anger, shouting, and an unequalled level of misunderstanding. Now their roles were
reversed. It was his turn to bond with a leviathan, although in an entirely different manner, and she wanted to
be the one to yell, to stalk off in fury, punishing him in kind for the way he had treated her half a cycle earlier.
Only it wasn’t John and he wouldn’t understand. And it was John, and they were acting exactly the same way
they had before. She wanted to be with him, and he was demanding that she leave him alone. Two sets of
blue eyes seemed to be watching her for a microt, one overlaid by the other: one set of eyes remembered and
the other set no more than a motra away.
John closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out shakily, and the moment was broken. She was standing
in Moya’s corridor and he was turning his head to the side so he wouldn’t have to look at her.
“I’m sorry.” There didn’t seem to be anything else worth saying, and even less reason to bother asking if he
had picked up what she had been thinking. The look on his face said it all.
“Go away, Aeryn. I can’t do this with you here.” His voice cracked and jumped the way it always did when he
was battling to keep his emotions in check. “You’re the one who asked me to do this. Just go away.”
She left, walking slowly and yet feeling like she was running away, headed into Moya’s corridors in search of a
place where every sight and sound didn’t provide a constant reminder of John Crichton.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
