Whispers
Chapter 10
“D’Argo, cut that line.”
Crichton was sitting on the half-height wall surrounding a vertical access shaft letting Aeryn treat his hand while
he issued instructions. The entire crew plus Naj Gil were assembled in the area directly below Pilot, standing
around in varying degrees of anxiety. More than a dozen pairs of DRD eyestalks peered around the edges of
the doorways as well, evidence that Moya was equally concerned with the outcome of the next few moments as
everyone else aboard. John jabbed the forefinger of his right hand in the direction of one of the largest
umbilicals connecting Pilot to Moya, indicating which item he wanted sliced open. “You’re going to want to get
out of the way quick once you do,” he added.
“That’s the primary fluidic line to Pilot,” Aeryn said. It was a quiet, un-emphatic reminder: a mere suggestion
that he might have forgotten what he was pointing at without any hint of accusation behind it. She finished
coating his palm with a thick layer of antiseptic burn gel, spared him a fast glance to check on his reaction to
her comment, and began bandaging his hand.
John tried to waggle his fingers, testing to make sure that he could still grab things. Aeryn stopped, unwound
the bandage, and began again, lower this time so it didn’t pin his fingers together. He had already noticed how
much care she was taking to avoid actually touching him with her fingers. As little as half an arn earlier, he
would have assumed that it was to spare herself the emotional cost of feeling his hand in hers. But along with
everything else he had been through in the last several arns, he had gained some insight and understanding.
As best she could while working within her self-imposed limits, Aeryn still cared about him. Avoiding any contact
was to spare him the uncontrollable blasts of telepathy. She glanced up, met his eyes for less than half a
microt, and then turned her attention back to making sure the burns were well protected.
“He won’t live for much longer than a tenth of an arn once D’Argo cuts that line,” she said.
“I know. But it isn’t delivering much of anything to his body right now anyway, so we cut it, and we’ll hook things
up in a couple of microts to compensate for it.” He waved D’Argo forward with his free hand, commanding the
luxan to proceed.
D’Argo fingered the fibrous, reinforced conduit, testing the resistance of the substance. “My Qualta blade won’t
cut through this cleanly. A ragged edge will be difficult to repair later.” He turned and accepted a laser cutter
from Chiana. She was standing half a motra to one side with a fistful of maintenance tools at the ready.
Flicking it on, D’Argo adjusted the cutting area, took half a step back in preparation for Crichton’s
recommended retreat, and sliced through the line in one fast, assured motion.
“YECCHHH!” Chiana yelled, dancing back out of range. The lower, severed end of the line wriggled about on
the floor, spewing dribbles of the nutrient liquid and disgorging enormous clots of black glistening worm-like
creatures. Carelessly tossing the tools aside to free her hands, Chiana leaped up on the wall next to Crichton,
and watched with revulsion as the line continued to belch out hundreds of the wriggling, squirming eels. “What
the frell are those?”
“I missed that episode of Zaboomafoo. I haven’t got a clue,” John said. He, like Chiana, had pulled his feet up
off the floor. It had been only microts since D’Argo had cut the line, and already more than a quarter of the
area directly beneath Pilot was covered with the dark-colored writhing mass. They continued to stream out of
the line in surges -- a living, moving, repulsive leviathan vomit. “They’ve been inside her for more than a solar
day though. I’m guessing they’ve been breeding and multiplying like crazy.”
“That would explain why Pilot got worse so rapidly.” Aeryn secured the last of the wrappings around his hand
and swiveled around to consider their newest problem. She, like Chiana, was squatting on the wall, feet well
out of range of the slick little invaders.
“This isn’t any better than before,” Jool said. She let out a screech as the leading edge of the pond of worms
surged toward her, and she retreated toward the doorway. “This doesn’t help Pilot.”
“Yes, it does,” Crichton said. He pointed at Naj Gil. “Pump some of that goo-stuff for a microt.”
The scarran obediently swung the handle of the hand-pump they had set up earlier. The line, disconnected
from Pilot just microts earlier in preparation for D’Argo's fast surgery, belched out a burp of air and began
streaming clear, unaffected liquid onto the floor.
Aeryn caught on immediately. “They haven’t gotten into the storage tanks yet. We can feed Pilot directly.”
John waved for Naj Gil to stop. “Exactly. We close off all the valves between Moya’s conduits and the storage
tanks so they can’t get into the tanks, and then hook that line directly into Pilot. You’ll have to keep pumping by
hand for a while --”
D’Argo was already nodding his understanding. “That shouldn’t be a problem now that the lines to Pilot are
clear of these creatures. It will be easy.”
“And I’ll head back aboard the Kyelligg and find out if they know what these things are and how they got on
board Moya,” John finished.
“Is that wise?” Rygel asked. The hynerian had swooped low to capture one of the creatures. He had an eel in
one hand and was licking the fingers of his other hand, sampling a little of the slime that coated the creature.
“Perhaps this was deliberate sabotage. They may have put these inside Moya on purpose.” He gave the slick
parasite a delicate sniff, treated everyone to a voracious smile, and popped it in his mouth. It took two gulps for
him to get it down. The limber black tail flickered madly from the corner of his mouth for an instant before he
sucked it in and swallowed.
Crichton turned away, his tongue extended in an exaggerated gag, and was met by nearly the same expression
on Aeryn’s face. She looked surprised, recovered, and gave him a look that, while not quite a smile, rekindled
his hope that he would some day see that expression again. He turned back to the deepening layer of
squirming parasites. The cut line continued to disgorge them without showing any sign that the supply might be
running low.
“How many of these are in Moya? Could you tell?” Aeryn asked.
“They’ve spread all through her. As far as I could tell from what she was able to show me, they’re only feeding
on the stuff that keeps Pilot alive, which is why they kept clogging these conduits.” He gestured toward where
D’Argo, ankle deep in eels, had just finished splicing the temporary line into Pilot’s lower body. “I was
wondering how we were going to clean this mess up, but it looks like Sparky’s going to eat them all.” Rygel had
set his Throne Sled down on the floor and was happily sucking down as many of the unexpectedly provided
delicacies as he could get his hands on without actually moving from his seat.
“Repulsive.” Jool spun around in a bouncing halo of iridescent red ringlets, and disappeared from sight, her
judgment made and delivered.
“Was she talkin’ about the squirmies or about Shamu the killer frog over there wolfing down the slippery
munchies?” John gagged in earnest this time, responding to the sight of four eels disappearing into the
hynerian’s maw in a single gulp. He spat on the floor, temporarily unable to swallow even his own saliva. “Ugh.
That is a new level of gross.”
Aeryn agreed. “Rygel, even for you, that is disgusting.”
Rygel paused long enough to ask, “Does anyone else have plans for this food source? They are very tasty
and I am hungry.” He returned to his feast.
Aeryn grimaced and looked away. “Hvisk and a solution,” she said, reminding everyone that the problem wasn’t
fully resolved.
“I don’t think this was deliberate,” John said.
“What?” D’Argo and Chiana asked together. They glanced at each other and did it again. “Not deliberate?”
Crichton held up his hands, trying to still the duet. “I know. They haven’t been honest with us --”
D’Argo began arguing immediately. “They abducted you against your will! They haven’t told any of us the
whole truth about anything, and they have the power to affect other people’s thoughts. John, I believe --”
“No, they don’t, D’Argo. They don’t have the power to influence what other people think. Not the way you
mean. They can’t inflict their will on someone else, and they can’t put thoughts in a person’s mind. It doesn’t
work that way; it’s the other way around.” Crichton gestured with his hands, flipping them from palm up to palm
down to emphasize the reversal he was attempting to describe. “None of them can avoid seeing what other
people think of them. It’s like walking around all day long looking in a mirror. Every thought and every action
has an impact on every person around you, and you can’t help but know how the things you do affect every
other person in your society.”
“It sounds hideous,” Chiana said. “I couldn’t live in a world like that.” She leaned against his shoulder for a
moment, lending him her sympathy.
John nudged her with a small, sideward nod of his head. “You’d definitely have a problem, Pip. You can’t go
around stealing things when everyone in town knows who pilfered the goods. But we can get into all this
psycho-mumbo-jumbo later. Time’s a wastin’.” He stood up on the wall surrounding the vertical shaft, looked
down at the ever-expanding tide of eels, and stepped onto the ladder, hanging on with his one good hand. “I’m
heading back to the Kyelligg to find out where these suckers --” Rygel wolfed down another eel with a loud
slurp. Crichton shuddered then continued, “-- where these suckers came from, and whether the hvisk know
how to get rid of them.”
“I’m coming with you.” Aeryn was similarly on her feet, balanced on the narrow parapet, one hand on the
ladder.
“I --” he began.
“I’m coming with you.” Her tone made it clear that if he chose to argue, he was going to lose. “I’ll need a
quarter arn to make sure all the valves to the storage tanks are closed, and to check on Pilot. Give me that
much time.” Please don’t say no.
The last portion startled him. It was clearer and more focused than anything he had overheard from anyone so
far, including Hox. It sounded like an attempt to intentionally send him a message. When he looked down to
check on her expression, Aeryn had her head turned toward where Naj Gil had resumed his efforts to keep Pilot
alive. There was nothing there to suggest whether she had sent the comment deliberately or whether it had
been the usual, inadvertently loosed thought.
Aeryn, perched four rungs below where he had stopped on the ladder, looked up at John. “Problem?”
“Uhh … no. No problem at all.” He scrambled the rest of the way up to the Den, hindered by the use of only
one hand, and made an awkward transition off the ladder. Aeryn landed beside him with a great deal more
grace, and was inside consoles standing beside Pilot almost before John could regain his balance.
“It’s working,” she said. “He’s better.”
“Any sign that he was starved too long? Any permanent damage?”
“I don’t think so. It’s going to be an arn or two before I’ll be able to tell for certain. Moya could tell us if there
has been -- Aeryn’s head came up slowly, eyes wide with concern. “I didn’t mean that. I’m not asking you to --”
“It’s okay, Aeryn. I know.” Crichton waved away the last of her apology. He had felt the fast lurch of guilt
associated with the idea of him linking up to the leviathan again, and knew that it had been another of the stray
mental wanderings that most people couldn’t keep contained. There was something else contributing to his
easy dismissal of Aeryn’s thought, however. It was the look of confused mortification on her face, which exactly
mirrored his own feelings whenever he accidentally listened in on someone’s thoughts. There was something
reassuring about discovering that he wasn’t the only one who felt that way, even if the source of the problem
did reside inside his head. It made him feel less like a freakazoid aberration and more like ‘John Crichton,
Astronaut’.
“I’m headed over to the Kyelligg. We need to figure out how to get those ugly little dudes out of Moya. Letting
Rygel eat his way through them is going to take too long.”
“John, wait for me,” D’Argo said over the comms. “You should not go alone.”
“Crap. Forgot these things were open,” Crichton said, referring to the comms. Damn, open channel. He
stumbled, disoriented by the echo, and then, for a microt, he felt like he was floating in zero gravity. This time
he went down on one knee before he could recover from the disorientation. It happened again. Moya’s walls
disappeared for a microt and he saw himself floating outside an open hatch --Talyn’s hatch. John slammed his
left hand down on his thigh, deliberately pummeling the burns, and he was suddenly back in Moya’s Den with
Aeryn poised halfway across Pilot’s consoles looking at him as though he had just thrown a wild foam-at-the-
mouth fit.
He waved her back and finished what he had started to say. “D’Argo, stay here and help Aeryn make sure
those leeches can’t spread any further. If they get into the main storage tank, Pilot is screwed.”
Aeryn opened her mouth with the beginnings of a protest.
“I’ll wait for both of you -- It’s dangerous. They already attacked him once. He’ll get killed … again. -- on board
the Kyelligg.” Belatedly, John remembered that no one had told Aeryn, or anyone else aboard Moya for that
matter, about the search for the infected hvisk or about the unexplained attack by the blue and green crested
males he had dubbed Heckle and Jeckle. He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his good hand, and decided
that the explanations would have to wait.
“All I’m going to do is find the guy we were dealing with over there and let him know we’ve got a problem. You
have to take my word on this, the hvisk aren’t a danger. I’ll wait for you to catch up before I do anything other
than talk to Hox.” He has to promise or it doesn’t mean anything. He does what he wants. “I promise.”
“Quarter of an arn,” she said. “That’s when I’ll be there.”
“Take as much time as you need.” He grimaced, hearing the double meaning that he hadn’t intended to put
into his words, and tried again. “Make sure Pilot and Moya are okay. Don’t cut things short on this end. I’ll
wait. Comm me when you’re aboard the Kyelligg, and I’ll tell you where I am.” He flapped a fast wave in her
direction, and headed into the corridor at a run.
* * * * *
John yanked himself through the hatch with a lunge, having discovered at some point during their wild pursuit of
the two infected hvisk that momentum helped him make the transition to a new gravitational orientation.
Straightening up, he scanned his surroundings for some sign of Hox. The hvisk was somewhere nearby;
Crichton had felt him before he had even left Moya. Hox’s presence smoothed out the inconsistencies in his
control. Without Hox’s assistance, the barrier he put up was a wandering, overgrown hedge: full of lumps, thin
spots, prickling thorns, and the occasional gap. With the help of the elderly creature’s gentle guidance, it
turned into something far stronger and intricate: smooth and resilient when he wanted to shut everything out,
and yet capable of letting through as much or as little noise as he needed when he wanted to listen for
something specific.
“Where are you, old man?” John whispered, craning his neck in an attempt to look over the heads of the
crowd. The faded purple crest was nowhere in sight. “Is this cranial hide-and-go-seek?”
A passing female, two youngsters bouncing along beside her, gave him a squinting smile. One of the little ones
tooted a squawking series of notes at Crichton and waved. For the first time since the telepathy had been
inflicted on him, John was able to feel their emotions without going so far that he intruded on their thoughts.
They liked him. He reached farther into the crowds passing by, sampling more of the reactions to his
presence. In less than ten microts, he learned that with the exception of the very young and the very old, every
single hvisk living on board the Kyelligg knew who the oddly dressed stranger was and -- despite his rather
peculiar appearance and the unmelodious noises he emitted -- they all liked him.
“That’s definitely a first.” Two males, eyes glistening with good spirits, trilled a pair of rapid laughs in his
direction. “Sorry,” he said, apologizing for his leaking thoughts. They bobbed a fast, cheerful response and
continued on their way.
“Who are these juveniles of your species that you see?”
“JEE-sus Christ!” Crichton spun around. Hox was standing a motra away, laughing at him. “You frelling scared
me half to death, old man. You can’t be sneaking up on me like that!” The dual surprise of the whistled
message delivered in time with the mental translation had startled him worse than usual. “How long have you
been standing there listening to me make a jackass of myself?”
“Not long,” Hox sang. “I became aware that you were on your way, and was coming to meet you. Who are the
two juveniles pictured in your mind? Are they your hatchlings?”
“Hatchlings?” Still a bit shaken from his mild scare, it took John a moment to figure out what Hox meant. “No!
No, I don’t have any hatchlings. I was thinking about a couple of pint-sized know-it-alls who were in first grade
with me. I got along with everyone in the class except those two. Probably the closest I’ve ever come to having
everyone like me all at the same time.” He was on the verge of launching into a description of the day he had
managed to make a lifelong enemy out of Miles Ramsey by smearing a thin layer of glue on the other boy’s
chair, thus adhering his classmate’s pants to the seat, when he realized that he had lost Hox’s attention.
“What is this? What is this?” It was a fast, repetitive five-note combination sung twice without a noticeable
break. Suddenly serious, Hox stepped closer, and grabbed Crichton’s wrist. He studied the bandaged hand
carefully, head twisting left and right in order to view it independently with each eye. “Your mind envisions a
deliberate injury. Why? What occurred that required this mutilation?”
“Things got out of control. Listen, we have a --”
“That should not have happened. Not to the extent that this should be required.” The hvisk’s distress came
across clearly. “Your ability to control your mind is more than adequate to prevent this necessity. This is
wrong.”
“No, it’s not. Stop freakin’ out over this and pay attention to me for a second, old man. I tried to listen in on a
creature that was too big for me to handle, that’s all. Our ship is in trouble. She’s been infected.” He closed
his eyes and created a mental image of him touching Moya’s wall, then backed his viewpoint away from that
scenery to show the extent of the leviathan. His reward was a soft jolt of surprise from Hox. “Yes, she’s alive
and she’s sentient. And something -- we think it came from this station -- has gotten inside her. It almost killed
our pilot.”
The chipped, aged beak clacked together several times without any accompanying whistles or notes. Hox
clattered several motras to one side, stared up at the street above/below on the other side of the station’s
interior, and then made his way back to where John was waiting for him. “I do not understand much of what you
wish to explain to me. There is great urgency. Is this correct?”
“Humongous urgency,” John agreed. “We need to get these critters out of our ship mucho pronto.”
“Would you be willing to show me? It will require that you relinquish a greater degree of privacy.”
“Relinquish how? You going to drag what you need to know out of my head?” He felt uncomfortable even
asking the question. Everything he had learned of the hvisk said that they would never do anything that
intrusive. If the answer was yes, it was going to radically alter his opinion of the entire species, not to mention
the person standing in front of him. In the few arns that he had known Hox, John had come to like and respect
him as much as his friends aboard Moya. He didn’t want to find out that he had been wrong.
“No! Never!” The pale-greenish skin turned an unpleasant shade of yellow at the thought. “No member of our
society would ever do such a thing.”
Warm, gut-softening relief flooded through Crichton’s lower body. For a moment, all he had been able to
envision was a hvisk version of the Aurora Chair, perhaps consisting of a group of specially trained individuals
ganging up on him to tear what they wanted to know out of his mind. When he had assured D’Argo that the
hvisk could not do anything like that, he had earnestly believed it. For a brief interval, however, Hox’s request
had left him uncertain about that assessment.
Hox let out a sharp, distressed clacking. “What? What? What?” He backed away from Crichton. “What is this
abomination?”
“It’s called the Comfy Chair. I didn’t mean for that to get loose. I’ll try to keep it locked up in the closet from
here on in.”
Hox stepped closer to John than he had at any time, even closer than when he had needed to maintain physical
contact to help control the telepathy. Black eyes gazed intently into blue ones. John took a step away from
Hox’s too-close proximity, and did his best to bury his memories of the Gammack Base. But trying to hide them
meant thinking of those hideous arns in the Chair, if only for a fleeting instant. That single flash was enough for
Hox, the expert on controlling thoughts. He let out a long, eerie hoot, followed by a mournful series of notes.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is wrong to do such a thing to another living being. No hvisk would ever commit this
crime.”
“Yeah, I know first hand about the wrong part. Hox, old buddy, old pal, we need to concentrate on something
else right now. Focus. Moya. Our ship. There’s a problem, and you need to understand what we found so
your people can help us get these slippery slugs out of her.”
“Come. We require solitude in order to do this.”
Motioning for John to follow, Hox cut across the primary street, clattered down a narrow path between two
walled gardens, and emerged into a secluded seating area. Surrounded on all sides by thickly grown vines,
with tree branches arching overhead to create a porous, natural roof, the enclosure was both quiet and
emotionally soothing. An occasional rustle in the undergrowth suggested that there were more wild creatures
on board the station than just the flocks of birds John had seen on his first visit. Instead of a stone-paved floor,
the ground here was covered in ankle-deep moss of varying shades of blue and green, seeded in an intricate
artful pattern.
John hesitated at the edge of the moss, pressing lightly with his boot to determine how badly he would damage
the growth if he walked on it.
“There is no reason to withhold,” Hox whistled. He gathered up the bottoms of his robes in both hands,
exposing wrinkled, skinny knees, and began jumping up and down, deliberately mashing the moss. The three-
toed feet sank in deeply; the moss came close to obscuring the hooking fourth toe on the back of his leg with
each impact. The growth sprang up every time, no matter how heavily he landed.
Crichton turned away from the sight of Hox hopping about the enclosure, desperate to smother the mental
image he had conjured up of an old man in a nightshirt bouncing on his bed.
“Think of something else quick!” he ordered himself in a whisper. He managed to come up with a memory of his
father in t-shirt and shorts doing flips on a trampoline when he was training for his first EVA. It wasn’t a huge
improvement, but it was better than … He slid back to the first image. “Crap!” Hox was sure to pick it up any
microt. He resorted to the one thing that too easily occupied his every waking thought. Aeryn. It worked
perfectly. The familiar ache returned, ending the short, cheerful interlude.
When he turned around, he was relieved to find that Hox had ended his exuberant demonstration and was
making himself comfortable on one of the carved benches arranged around the perimeter of the shady area.
John took a cautious step onto the ankle deep moss, testing to make sure there wasn’t a bog underneath.
Squashy but firm, springy, and far more stable than he would have guessed, he imagined that walking on an
enormous marshmallow might feel similar. He wanted to take off his boots and socks in order to explore what
the surface felt like under bare feet. But Pilot’s dilemma awaited a solution, and there was rarely enough time
in his life for the simpler pleasures.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“It is easiest if you would agree to sit here.” Hox pointed to a spot on the ground at his feet.
John poked a finger into the growth, checking for moisture. The last thing he needed was to spend the rest of
the day walking around with wet leather chafing his butt. It was dry, and he flopped down by Hox’s feet and
then swiveled around so his back was to the hvisk.
“Is this going to be some Unity sort of thing where we merge into each other?” He was willing to do almost
anything if it would speed Pilot’s recovery, but the idea of entering a Unity-like state with Hox made him queasy.
Zhaan had been close to humanoid, and on that first occasion when he had badgered her into sharing Unity
with him, he hadn’t yet learned that she was a plant. Hox was an entirely different situation.
“No merging. You will think, and I will listen. It is highly efficient.”
“Just tell me what to do.”
Hox rested both hands on Crichton’s shoulders. “Do not attempt to explain to me. Before we begin, decide
what knowledge is required if I am to assist you and your companions. Organize it in your mind. Then you
must carefully remember when you yourself learned each bit of knowledge. Attempt to remain focused.
Wandering is customary and is not considered offensive, but it is inefficient.”
“I’m giving you my memories. Sharing them with you,” Crichton said, summarizing in order to make sure he
understood what Hox was telling him.
“Correct. This method is much quicker and more thorough than a verbal exchange,” Hox sang.
“Okey dokey.” John squirmed in place, discovering that his current position was every bit as uncomfortable as
sitting cross-legged in the hvisk chairs, and gathered a mental list of everything Hox would need to know about
leviathan physiology and the parasitic eels that currently infested her innards. He would need to go back to
some of his first days on board Moya -- days when he routinely got lost and was baffled by much of the alien
world around him. Showing Hox the moments when he had learned about Moya was going to be
embarrassing.
“What the hell. Everyone else thinks I’m a bit of an idiot. No reason you shouldn’t join in.” He closed his eyes,
took a deep breath, and dove into his memories.
It was almost like dreaming. Suspended somewhere between idly revisiting his past and a waking dream state,
he started with his first day on board Moya when Zhaan had proclaimed, “She's a Leviathan, a bio-mechanoid,
a living ship,” and worked forward in time from there. Feeling much as he had when psychically slipping and
sliding through Moya’s conduits, he rushed forward to his first lesson in leviathan anatomy, once again
tobogganed on his butt down the rough surface of an access shaft, and relearned about starburst, energy
conduits, neural and energy nodal points. Moya’s first pilot died in a mentally produced rerun, and he replayed
the recording Chiana had found, seeing how a Pilot’s dead body had to be dug out of the surrounding matrix of
living leviathan tissue, and how a new, eager young creature was artificially bonded into place. He made the
huge lunge forward in time and did his best to relive his brief residence inside Moya, complete with the
nauseating internal churning he had shared. And finally, together they watched Chiana bound out of the way in
a hailstorm of thrown tools when the first deluge of eels gushed onto the floor.
Hox broke the connection between their minds and John re-emerged into the tranquil, tree-lined park aboard
the Kyelligg with a mumbled, “Whoa!” The dim light and muted sounds were painful in the aftermath of his
mental excursion, and Hox’s reason for bringing him to this hushed, deserted place became clear. Emerging
into the usual level of noise and confusion along the streets would have been agonizing. Crichton wondered if
this was the way a coma patient felt when waking up after a multi-year sleep. “Did you do something to me?”
“I assisted, nothing more. It is normal in an endeavor such as this for the listener to assist in keeping the
teacher focused. Sit here while I explain to those who will resolve this situation.” Hox patted the bench beside
him.
John obediently shifted from mossy spot at Hox’s feet to the less forgiving but more comfortable stone bench.
“Ma Bell long distance? Semaphore? How do you contact someone?”
“I think about the person I need to reach. When he notices my thoughts, he will think about me and I will then
know that he is listening. It is very simple.”
The idea of so many individuals thinking about each other all at the same time struck John as incredibly funny.
He laughed. Once started, the mild case of the giggles refused to stop. On top of the bubbling, inappropriate
humor, he was feeling mildly disoriented and shivery. It was shock, he realized. Some element of the constant
demands being put on him and his telepathy was driving him into a mild case of physical shock. His mind was
being asked to do something it wasn’t designed to accomplish, and his body was starting to object.
He clipped the buckles of his jacket and tucked his hand under his armpits, doing everything possible to
preserve body heat, and tried to concentrate on the things around him that were familiar. There wasn’t much to
choose from; even the trees and plants were peculiar looking. He found one area of the vines that reminded
him of the honeysuckle that had engulfed the fence behind their house when he was growing up, and kept his
eyes fixed on it. Beside him, Hox had stopped moving and was gazing off into middle space. Crichton huddled
in on himself, wondering how long it would take for the mental smoke signals to relay their problem to the
correct person.
He had barely finished the thought when Hox sat up straighter and scratched at the tip of his beak with one
claw. “You are correct. It is our fault,” he whistled. “Although we had heard accounts of such a beast, we have
never encountered a living ship such as yours and did not take sufficient care to avoid this situation. Please
request of your crew that they reopen all internal valves. The creatures will be summoned out of your ship.”
“That was quick.” John hesitated with his hand hovering over his comms. “If this process gets screwed up,
you’ll kill our pilot and Moya will die along with him. If that happens, we’ll be stranded here, and the way our
luck has been running lately, everyone on board this station will either die or wind up imprisoned by the
Peacekeepers. Bad luck follows us around the way Boo-Boo follows Yogi. You’re sure you can just Pied Piper
the squiggly things out of Moya?”
Hox tilted his head to one side, then the other, and back again, all without making a single note.
“You’re sure your people can control them,” John said, clarifying the confusing reference.
“Definitely. The creatures have no ability for reasoning, but they can be drawn to a particular point when it is
required.” Hox placed a hand on Crichton’s shoulder, and instructed, “Listen carefully.”
There was a fast, painless, slamming impact against his mind. It wasn’t an invasion; it was information arriving
faster than he could separate it out. When it was over, he blinked several times, feeling even more chilled and
unsettled than he had before, and suddenly knew what the eels were, how they were used aboard the Kyelligg,
and how they had gotten aboard Moya. And he also knew for certain that it had been a genuine oversight by
the hvisk, not some form of deliberate sabotage. He activated his comms. “Aeryn?”
“We’re on our way. D’Argo and I are almost to Tier One,” she answered.
“Turn around and go back to the Den.” Frelling Crichton! Why couldn’t he have told us this when … Dren!
He’s probably listening to me. Crichton ducked his head to the side, covering up a grin. There were aspects of
the telepathy that were excruciating, and others that were close to comical.
“Go back to the Den and reopen all the valves you just closed. The hvisk are going to --” He searched for a
word that would describe what was going to be accomplished. “They’re going to deworm Moya. They need all
the lines to be open so they can suck Rygel’s new food supply out of her.” Neither ‘deworm’ or ‘suck’ was
accurate, but they were the best terms he could come up with that had a chance of forestalling an argument.
“This will take us at least another quarter arn. Probably closer to half an arn,” she commed back.
“I’ll wait.” He remembered one of her earlier stray thoughts. “I promise.”
“We’re on our way back to the Den. We’ll comm you when we’re ready for the hvisk to begin.”
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
Chapter 10
“D’Argo, cut that line.”
Crichton was sitting on the half-height wall surrounding a vertical access shaft letting Aeryn treat his hand while
he issued instructions. The entire crew plus Naj Gil were assembled in the area directly below Pilot, standing
around in varying degrees of anxiety. More than a dozen pairs of DRD eyestalks peered around the edges of
the doorways as well, evidence that Moya was equally concerned with the outcome of the next few moments as
everyone else aboard. John jabbed the forefinger of his right hand in the direction of one of the largest
umbilicals connecting Pilot to Moya, indicating which item he wanted sliced open. “You’re going to want to get
out of the way quick once you do,” he added.
“That’s the primary fluidic line to Pilot,” Aeryn said. It was a quiet, un-emphatic reminder: a mere suggestion
that he might have forgotten what he was pointing at without any hint of accusation behind it. She finished
coating his palm with a thick layer of antiseptic burn gel, spared him a fast glance to check on his reaction to
her comment, and began bandaging his hand.
John tried to waggle his fingers, testing to make sure that he could still grab things. Aeryn stopped, unwound
the bandage, and began again, lower this time so it didn’t pin his fingers together. He had already noticed how
much care she was taking to avoid actually touching him with her fingers. As little as half an arn earlier, he
would have assumed that it was to spare herself the emotional cost of feeling his hand in hers. But along with
everything else he had been through in the last several arns, he had gained some insight and understanding.
As best she could while working within her self-imposed limits, Aeryn still cared about him. Avoiding any contact
was to spare him the uncontrollable blasts of telepathy. She glanced up, met his eyes for less than half a
microt, and then turned her attention back to making sure the burns were well protected.
“He won’t live for much longer than a tenth of an arn once D’Argo cuts that line,” she said.
“I know. But it isn’t delivering much of anything to his body right now anyway, so we cut it, and we’ll hook things
up in a couple of microts to compensate for it.” He waved D’Argo forward with his free hand, commanding the
luxan to proceed.
D’Argo fingered the fibrous, reinforced conduit, testing the resistance of the substance. “My Qualta blade won’t
cut through this cleanly. A ragged edge will be difficult to repair later.” He turned and accepted a laser cutter
from Chiana. She was standing half a motra to one side with a fistful of maintenance tools at the ready.
Flicking it on, D’Argo adjusted the cutting area, took half a step back in preparation for Crichton’s
recommended retreat, and sliced through the line in one fast, assured motion.
“YECCHHH!” Chiana yelled, dancing back out of range. The lower, severed end of the line wriggled about on
the floor, spewing dribbles of the nutrient liquid and disgorging enormous clots of black glistening worm-like
creatures. Carelessly tossing the tools aside to free her hands, Chiana leaped up on the wall next to Crichton,
and watched with revulsion as the line continued to belch out hundreds of the wriggling, squirming eels. “What
the frell are those?”
“I missed that episode of Zaboomafoo. I haven’t got a clue,” John said. He, like Chiana, had pulled his feet up
off the floor. It had been only microts since D’Argo had cut the line, and already more than a quarter of the
area directly beneath Pilot was covered with the dark-colored writhing mass. They continued to stream out of
the line in surges -- a living, moving, repulsive leviathan vomit. “They’ve been inside her for more than a solar
day though. I’m guessing they’ve been breeding and multiplying like crazy.”
“That would explain why Pilot got worse so rapidly.” Aeryn secured the last of the wrappings around his hand
and swiveled around to consider their newest problem. She, like Chiana, was squatting on the wall, feet well
out of range of the slick little invaders.
“This isn’t any better than before,” Jool said. She let out a screech as the leading edge of the pond of worms
surged toward her, and she retreated toward the doorway. “This doesn’t help Pilot.”
“Yes, it does,” Crichton said. He pointed at Naj Gil. “Pump some of that goo-stuff for a microt.”
The scarran obediently swung the handle of the hand-pump they had set up earlier. The line, disconnected
from Pilot just microts earlier in preparation for D’Argo's fast surgery, belched out a burp of air and began
streaming clear, unaffected liquid onto the floor.
Aeryn caught on immediately. “They haven’t gotten into the storage tanks yet. We can feed Pilot directly.”
John waved for Naj Gil to stop. “Exactly. We close off all the valves between Moya’s conduits and the storage
tanks so they can’t get into the tanks, and then hook that line directly into Pilot. You’ll have to keep pumping by
hand for a while --”
D’Argo was already nodding his understanding. “That shouldn’t be a problem now that the lines to Pilot are
clear of these creatures. It will be easy.”
“And I’ll head back aboard the Kyelligg and find out if they know what these things are and how they got on
board Moya,” John finished.
“Is that wise?” Rygel asked. The hynerian had swooped low to capture one of the creatures. He had an eel in
one hand and was licking the fingers of his other hand, sampling a little of the slime that coated the creature.
“Perhaps this was deliberate sabotage. They may have put these inside Moya on purpose.” He gave the slick
parasite a delicate sniff, treated everyone to a voracious smile, and popped it in his mouth. It took two gulps for
him to get it down. The limber black tail flickered madly from the corner of his mouth for an instant before he
sucked it in and swallowed.
Crichton turned away, his tongue extended in an exaggerated gag, and was met by nearly the same expression
on Aeryn’s face. She looked surprised, recovered, and gave him a look that, while not quite a smile, rekindled
his hope that he would some day see that expression again. He turned back to the deepening layer of
squirming parasites. The cut line continued to disgorge them without showing any sign that the supply might be
running low.
“How many of these are in Moya? Could you tell?” Aeryn asked.
“They’ve spread all through her. As far as I could tell from what she was able to show me, they’re only feeding
on the stuff that keeps Pilot alive, which is why they kept clogging these conduits.” He gestured toward where
D’Argo, ankle deep in eels, had just finished splicing the temporary line into Pilot’s lower body. “I was
wondering how we were going to clean this mess up, but it looks like Sparky’s going to eat them all.” Rygel had
set his Throne Sled down on the floor and was happily sucking down as many of the unexpectedly provided
delicacies as he could get his hands on without actually moving from his seat.
“Repulsive.” Jool spun around in a bouncing halo of iridescent red ringlets, and disappeared from sight, her
judgment made and delivered.
“Was she talkin’ about the squirmies or about Shamu the killer frog over there wolfing down the slippery
munchies?” John gagged in earnest this time, responding to the sight of four eels disappearing into the
hynerian’s maw in a single gulp. He spat on the floor, temporarily unable to swallow even his own saliva. “Ugh.
That is a new level of gross.”
Aeryn agreed. “Rygel, even for you, that is disgusting.”
Rygel paused long enough to ask, “Does anyone else have plans for this food source? They are very tasty
and I am hungry.” He returned to his feast.
Aeryn grimaced and looked away. “Hvisk and a solution,” she said, reminding everyone that the problem wasn’t
fully resolved.
“I don’t think this was deliberate,” John said.
“What?” D’Argo and Chiana asked together. They glanced at each other and did it again. “Not deliberate?”
Crichton held up his hands, trying to still the duet. “I know. They haven’t been honest with us --”
D’Argo began arguing immediately. “They abducted you against your will! They haven’t told any of us the
whole truth about anything, and they have the power to affect other people’s thoughts. John, I believe --”
“No, they don’t, D’Argo. They don’t have the power to influence what other people think. Not the way you
mean. They can’t inflict their will on someone else, and they can’t put thoughts in a person’s mind. It doesn’t
work that way; it’s the other way around.” Crichton gestured with his hands, flipping them from palm up to palm
down to emphasize the reversal he was attempting to describe. “None of them can avoid seeing what other
people think of them. It’s like walking around all day long looking in a mirror. Every thought and every action
has an impact on every person around you, and you can’t help but know how the things you do affect every
other person in your society.”
“It sounds hideous,” Chiana said. “I couldn’t live in a world like that.” She leaned against his shoulder for a
moment, lending him her sympathy.
John nudged her with a small, sideward nod of his head. “You’d definitely have a problem, Pip. You can’t go
around stealing things when everyone in town knows who pilfered the goods. But we can get into all this
psycho-mumbo-jumbo later. Time’s a wastin’.” He stood up on the wall surrounding the vertical shaft, looked
down at the ever-expanding tide of eels, and stepped onto the ladder, hanging on with his one good hand. “I’m
heading back to the Kyelligg to find out where these suckers --” Rygel wolfed down another eel with a loud
slurp. Crichton shuddered then continued, “-- where these suckers came from, and whether the hvisk know
how to get rid of them.”
“I’m coming with you.” Aeryn was similarly on her feet, balanced on the narrow parapet, one hand on the
ladder.
“I --” he began.
“I’m coming with you.” Her tone made it clear that if he chose to argue, he was going to lose. “I’ll need a
quarter arn to make sure all the valves to the storage tanks are closed, and to check on Pilot. Give me that
much time.” Please don’t say no.
The last portion startled him. It was clearer and more focused than anything he had overheard from anyone so
far, including Hox. It sounded like an attempt to intentionally send him a message. When he looked down to
check on her expression, Aeryn had her head turned toward where Naj Gil had resumed his efforts to keep Pilot
alive. There was nothing there to suggest whether she had sent the comment deliberately or whether it had
been the usual, inadvertently loosed thought.
Aeryn, perched four rungs below where he had stopped on the ladder, looked up at John. “Problem?”
“Uhh … no. No problem at all.” He scrambled the rest of the way up to the Den, hindered by the use of only
one hand, and made an awkward transition off the ladder. Aeryn landed beside him with a great deal more
grace, and was inside consoles standing beside Pilot almost before John could regain his balance.
“It’s working,” she said. “He’s better.”
“Any sign that he was starved too long? Any permanent damage?”
“I don’t think so. It’s going to be an arn or two before I’ll be able to tell for certain. Moya could tell us if there
has been -- Aeryn’s head came up slowly, eyes wide with concern. “I didn’t mean that. I’m not asking you to --”
“It’s okay, Aeryn. I know.” Crichton waved away the last of her apology. He had felt the fast lurch of guilt
associated with the idea of him linking up to the leviathan again, and knew that it had been another of the stray
mental wanderings that most people couldn’t keep contained. There was something else contributing to his
easy dismissal of Aeryn’s thought, however. It was the look of confused mortification on her face, which exactly
mirrored his own feelings whenever he accidentally listened in on someone’s thoughts. There was something
reassuring about discovering that he wasn’t the only one who felt that way, even if the source of the problem
did reside inside his head. It made him feel less like a freakazoid aberration and more like ‘John Crichton,
Astronaut’.
“I’m headed over to the Kyelligg. We need to figure out how to get those ugly little dudes out of Moya. Letting
Rygel eat his way through them is going to take too long.”
“John, wait for me,” D’Argo said over the comms. “You should not go alone.”
“Crap. Forgot these things were open,” Crichton said, referring to the comms. Damn, open channel. He
stumbled, disoriented by the echo, and then, for a microt, he felt like he was floating in zero gravity. This time
he went down on one knee before he could recover from the disorientation. It happened again. Moya’s walls
disappeared for a microt and he saw himself floating outside an open hatch --Talyn’s hatch. John slammed his
left hand down on his thigh, deliberately pummeling the burns, and he was suddenly back in Moya’s Den with
Aeryn poised halfway across Pilot’s consoles looking at him as though he had just thrown a wild foam-at-the-
mouth fit.
He waved her back and finished what he had started to say. “D’Argo, stay here and help Aeryn make sure
those leeches can’t spread any further. If they get into the main storage tank, Pilot is screwed.”
Aeryn opened her mouth with the beginnings of a protest.
“I’ll wait for both of you -- It’s dangerous. They already attacked him once. He’ll get killed … again. -- on board
the Kyelligg.” Belatedly, John remembered that no one had told Aeryn, or anyone else aboard Moya for that
matter, about the search for the infected hvisk or about the unexplained attack by the blue and green crested
males he had dubbed Heckle and Jeckle. He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his good hand, and decided
that the explanations would have to wait.
“All I’m going to do is find the guy we were dealing with over there and let him know we’ve got a problem. You
have to take my word on this, the hvisk aren’t a danger. I’ll wait for you to catch up before I do anything other
than talk to Hox.” He has to promise or it doesn’t mean anything. He does what he wants. “I promise.”
“Quarter of an arn,” she said. “That’s when I’ll be there.”
“Take as much time as you need.” He grimaced, hearing the double meaning that he hadn’t intended to put
into his words, and tried again. “Make sure Pilot and Moya are okay. Don’t cut things short on this end. I’ll
wait. Comm me when you’re aboard the Kyelligg, and I’ll tell you where I am.” He flapped a fast wave in her
direction, and headed into the corridor at a run.
* * * * *
John yanked himself through the hatch with a lunge, having discovered at some point during their wild pursuit of
the two infected hvisk that momentum helped him make the transition to a new gravitational orientation.
Straightening up, he scanned his surroundings for some sign of Hox. The hvisk was somewhere nearby;
Crichton had felt him before he had even left Moya. Hox’s presence smoothed out the inconsistencies in his
control. Without Hox’s assistance, the barrier he put up was a wandering, overgrown hedge: full of lumps, thin
spots, prickling thorns, and the occasional gap. With the help of the elderly creature’s gentle guidance, it
turned into something far stronger and intricate: smooth and resilient when he wanted to shut everything out,
and yet capable of letting through as much or as little noise as he needed when he wanted to listen for
something specific.
“Where are you, old man?” John whispered, craning his neck in an attempt to look over the heads of the
crowd. The faded purple crest was nowhere in sight. “Is this cranial hide-and-go-seek?”
A passing female, two youngsters bouncing along beside her, gave him a squinting smile. One of the little ones
tooted a squawking series of notes at Crichton and waved. For the first time since the telepathy had been
inflicted on him, John was able to feel their emotions without going so far that he intruded on their thoughts.
They liked him. He reached farther into the crowds passing by, sampling more of the reactions to his
presence. In less than ten microts, he learned that with the exception of the very young and the very old, every
single hvisk living on board the Kyelligg knew who the oddly dressed stranger was and -- despite his rather
peculiar appearance and the unmelodious noises he emitted -- they all liked him.
“That’s definitely a first.” Two males, eyes glistening with good spirits, trilled a pair of rapid laughs in his
direction. “Sorry,” he said, apologizing for his leaking thoughts. They bobbed a fast, cheerful response and
continued on their way.
“Who are these juveniles of your species that you see?”
“JEE-sus Christ!” Crichton spun around. Hox was standing a motra away, laughing at him. “You frelling scared
me half to death, old man. You can’t be sneaking up on me like that!” The dual surprise of the whistled
message delivered in time with the mental translation had startled him worse than usual. “How long have you
been standing there listening to me make a jackass of myself?”
“Not long,” Hox sang. “I became aware that you were on your way, and was coming to meet you. Who are the
two juveniles pictured in your mind? Are they your hatchlings?”
“Hatchlings?” Still a bit shaken from his mild scare, it took John a moment to figure out what Hox meant. “No!
No, I don’t have any hatchlings. I was thinking about a couple of pint-sized know-it-alls who were in first grade
with me. I got along with everyone in the class except those two. Probably the closest I’ve ever come to having
everyone like me all at the same time.” He was on the verge of launching into a description of the day he had
managed to make a lifelong enemy out of Miles Ramsey by smearing a thin layer of glue on the other boy’s
chair, thus adhering his classmate’s pants to the seat, when he realized that he had lost Hox’s attention.
“What is this? What is this?” It was a fast, repetitive five-note combination sung twice without a noticeable
break. Suddenly serious, Hox stepped closer, and grabbed Crichton’s wrist. He studied the bandaged hand
carefully, head twisting left and right in order to view it independently with each eye. “Your mind envisions a
deliberate injury. Why? What occurred that required this mutilation?”
“Things got out of control. Listen, we have a --”
“That should not have happened. Not to the extent that this should be required.” The hvisk’s distress came
across clearly. “Your ability to control your mind is more than adequate to prevent this necessity. This is
wrong.”
“No, it’s not. Stop freakin’ out over this and pay attention to me for a second, old man. I tried to listen in on a
creature that was too big for me to handle, that’s all. Our ship is in trouble. She’s been infected.” He closed
his eyes and created a mental image of him touching Moya’s wall, then backed his viewpoint away from that
scenery to show the extent of the leviathan. His reward was a soft jolt of surprise from Hox. “Yes, she’s alive
and she’s sentient. And something -- we think it came from this station -- has gotten inside her. It almost killed
our pilot.”
The chipped, aged beak clacked together several times without any accompanying whistles or notes. Hox
clattered several motras to one side, stared up at the street above/below on the other side of the station’s
interior, and then made his way back to where John was waiting for him. “I do not understand much of what you
wish to explain to me. There is great urgency. Is this correct?”
“Humongous urgency,” John agreed. “We need to get these critters out of our ship mucho pronto.”
“Would you be willing to show me? It will require that you relinquish a greater degree of privacy.”
“Relinquish how? You going to drag what you need to know out of my head?” He felt uncomfortable even
asking the question. Everything he had learned of the hvisk said that they would never do anything that
intrusive. If the answer was yes, it was going to radically alter his opinion of the entire species, not to mention
the person standing in front of him. In the few arns that he had known Hox, John had come to like and respect
him as much as his friends aboard Moya. He didn’t want to find out that he had been wrong.
“No! Never!” The pale-greenish skin turned an unpleasant shade of yellow at the thought. “No member of our
society would ever do such a thing.”
Warm, gut-softening relief flooded through Crichton’s lower body. For a moment, all he had been able to
envision was a hvisk version of the Aurora Chair, perhaps consisting of a group of specially trained individuals
ganging up on him to tear what they wanted to know out of his mind. When he had assured D’Argo that the
hvisk could not do anything like that, he had earnestly believed it. For a brief interval, however, Hox’s request
had left him uncertain about that assessment.
Hox let out a sharp, distressed clacking. “What? What? What?” He backed away from Crichton. “What is this
abomination?”
“It’s called the Comfy Chair. I didn’t mean for that to get loose. I’ll try to keep it locked up in the closet from
here on in.”
Hox stepped closer to John than he had at any time, even closer than when he had needed to maintain physical
contact to help control the telepathy. Black eyes gazed intently into blue ones. John took a step away from
Hox’s too-close proximity, and did his best to bury his memories of the Gammack Base. But trying to hide them
meant thinking of those hideous arns in the Chair, if only for a fleeting instant. That single flash was enough for
Hox, the expert on controlling thoughts. He let out a long, eerie hoot, followed by a mournful series of notes.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is wrong to do such a thing to another living being. No hvisk would ever commit this
crime.”
“Yeah, I know first hand about the wrong part. Hox, old buddy, old pal, we need to concentrate on something
else right now. Focus. Moya. Our ship. There’s a problem, and you need to understand what we found so
your people can help us get these slippery slugs out of her.”
“Come. We require solitude in order to do this.”
Motioning for John to follow, Hox cut across the primary street, clattered down a narrow path between two
walled gardens, and emerged into a secluded seating area. Surrounded on all sides by thickly grown vines,
with tree branches arching overhead to create a porous, natural roof, the enclosure was both quiet and
emotionally soothing. An occasional rustle in the undergrowth suggested that there were more wild creatures
on board the station than just the flocks of birds John had seen on his first visit. Instead of a stone-paved floor,
the ground here was covered in ankle-deep moss of varying shades of blue and green, seeded in an intricate
artful pattern.
John hesitated at the edge of the moss, pressing lightly with his boot to determine how badly he would damage
the growth if he walked on it.
“There is no reason to withhold,” Hox whistled. He gathered up the bottoms of his robes in both hands,
exposing wrinkled, skinny knees, and began jumping up and down, deliberately mashing the moss. The three-
toed feet sank in deeply; the moss came close to obscuring the hooking fourth toe on the back of his leg with
each impact. The growth sprang up every time, no matter how heavily he landed.
Crichton turned away from the sight of Hox hopping about the enclosure, desperate to smother the mental
image he had conjured up of an old man in a nightshirt bouncing on his bed.
“Think of something else quick!” he ordered himself in a whisper. He managed to come up with a memory of his
father in t-shirt and shorts doing flips on a trampoline when he was training for his first EVA. It wasn’t a huge
improvement, but it was better than … He slid back to the first image. “Crap!” Hox was sure to pick it up any
microt. He resorted to the one thing that too easily occupied his every waking thought. Aeryn. It worked
perfectly. The familiar ache returned, ending the short, cheerful interlude.
When he turned around, he was relieved to find that Hox had ended his exuberant demonstration and was
making himself comfortable on one of the carved benches arranged around the perimeter of the shady area.
John took a cautious step onto the ankle deep moss, testing to make sure there wasn’t a bog underneath.
Squashy but firm, springy, and far more stable than he would have guessed, he imagined that walking on an
enormous marshmallow might feel similar. He wanted to take off his boots and socks in order to explore what
the surface felt like under bare feet. But Pilot’s dilemma awaited a solution, and there was rarely enough time
in his life for the simpler pleasures.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“It is easiest if you would agree to sit here.” Hox pointed to a spot on the ground at his feet.
John poked a finger into the growth, checking for moisture. The last thing he needed was to spend the rest of
the day walking around with wet leather chafing his butt. It was dry, and he flopped down by Hox’s feet and
then swiveled around so his back was to the hvisk.
“Is this going to be some Unity sort of thing where we merge into each other?” He was willing to do almost
anything if it would speed Pilot’s recovery, but the idea of entering a Unity-like state with Hox made him queasy.
Zhaan had been close to humanoid, and on that first occasion when he had badgered her into sharing Unity
with him, he hadn’t yet learned that she was a plant. Hox was an entirely different situation.
“No merging. You will think, and I will listen. It is highly efficient.”
“Just tell me what to do.”
Hox rested both hands on Crichton’s shoulders. “Do not attempt to explain to me. Before we begin, decide
what knowledge is required if I am to assist you and your companions. Organize it in your mind. Then you
must carefully remember when you yourself learned each bit of knowledge. Attempt to remain focused.
Wandering is customary and is not considered offensive, but it is inefficient.”
“I’m giving you my memories. Sharing them with you,” Crichton said, summarizing in order to make sure he
understood what Hox was telling him.
“Correct. This method is much quicker and more thorough than a verbal exchange,” Hox sang.
“Okey dokey.” John squirmed in place, discovering that his current position was every bit as uncomfortable as
sitting cross-legged in the hvisk chairs, and gathered a mental list of everything Hox would need to know about
leviathan physiology and the parasitic eels that currently infested her innards. He would need to go back to
some of his first days on board Moya -- days when he routinely got lost and was baffled by much of the alien
world around him. Showing Hox the moments when he had learned about Moya was going to be
embarrassing.
“What the hell. Everyone else thinks I’m a bit of an idiot. No reason you shouldn’t join in.” He closed his eyes,
took a deep breath, and dove into his memories.
It was almost like dreaming. Suspended somewhere between idly revisiting his past and a waking dream state,
he started with his first day on board Moya when Zhaan had proclaimed, “She's a Leviathan, a bio-mechanoid,
a living ship,” and worked forward in time from there. Feeling much as he had when psychically slipping and
sliding through Moya’s conduits, he rushed forward to his first lesson in leviathan anatomy, once again
tobogganed on his butt down the rough surface of an access shaft, and relearned about starburst, energy
conduits, neural and energy nodal points. Moya’s first pilot died in a mentally produced rerun, and he replayed
the recording Chiana had found, seeing how a Pilot’s dead body had to be dug out of the surrounding matrix of
living leviathan tissue, and how a new, eager young creature was artificially bonded into place. He made the
huge lunge forward in time and did his best to relive his brief residence inside Moya, complete with the
nauseating internal churning he had shared. And finally, together they watched Chiana bound out of the way in
a hailstorm of thrown tools when the first deluge of eels gushed onto the floor.
Hox broke the connection between their minds and John re-emerged into the tranquil, tree-lined park aboard
the Kyelligg with a mumbled, “Whoa!” The dim light and muted sounds were painful in the aftermath of his
mental excursion, and Hox’s reason for bringing him to this hushed, deserted place became clear. Emerging
into the usual level of noise and confusion along the streets would have been agonizing. Crichton wondered if
this was the way a coma patient felt when waking up after a multi-year sleep. “Did you do something to me?”
“I assisted, nothing more. It is normal in an endeavor such as this for the listener to assist in keeping the
teacher focused. Sit here while I explain to those who will resolve this situation.” Hox patted the bench beside
him.
John obediently shifted from mossy spot at Hox’s feet to the less forgiving but more comfortable stone bench.
“Ma Bell long distance? Semaphore? How do you contact someone?”
“I think about the person I need to reach. When he notices my thoughts, he will think about me and I will then
know that he is listening. It is very simple.”
The idea of so many individuals thinking about each other all at the same time struck John as incredibly funny.
He laughed. Once started, the mild case of the giggles refused to stop. On top of the bubbling, inappropriate
humor, he was feeling mildly disoriented and shivery. It was shock, he realized. Some element of the constant
demands being put on him and his telepathy was driving him into a mild case of physical shock. His mind was
being asked to do something it wasn’t designed to accomplish, and his body was starting to object.
He clipped the buckles of his jacket and tucked his hand under his armpits, doing everything possible to
preserve body heat, and tried to concentrate on the things around him that were familiar. There wasn’t much to
choose from; even the trees and plants were peculiar looking. He found one area of the vines that reminded
him of the honeysuckle that had engulfed the fence behind their house when he was growing up, and kept his
eyes fixed on it. Beside him, Hox had stopped moving and was gazing off into middle space. Crichton huddled
in on himself, wondering how long it would take for the mental smoke signals to relay their problem to the
correct person.
He had barely finished the thought when Hox sat up straighter and scratched at the tip of his beak with one
claw. “You are correct. It is our fault,” he whistled. “Although we had heard accounts of such a beast, we have
never encountered a living ship such as yours and did not take sufficient care to avoid this situation. Please
request of your crew that they reopen all internal valves. The creatures will be summoned out of your ship.”
“That was quick.” John hesitated with his hand hovering over his comms. “If this process gets screwed up,
you’ll kill our pilot and Moya will die along with him. If that happens, we’ll be stranded here, and the way our
luck has been running lately, everyone on board this station will either die or wind up imprisoned by the
Peacekeepers. Bad luck follows us around the way Boo-Boo follows Yogi. You’re sure you can just Pied Piper
the squiggly things out of Moya?”
Hox tilted his head to one side, then the other, and back again, all without making a single note.
“You’re sure your people can control them,” John said, clarifying the confusing reference.
“Definitely. The creatures have no ability for reasoning, but they can be drawn to a particular point when it is
required.” Hox placed a hand on Crichton’s shoulder, and instructed, “Listen carefully.”
There was a fast, painless, slamming impact against his mind. It wasn’t an invasion; it was information arriving
faster than he could separate it out. When it was over, he blinked several times, feeling even more chilled and
unsettled than he had before, and suddenly knew what the eels were, how they were used aboard the Kyelligg,
and how they had gotten aboard Moya. And he also knew for certain that it had been a genuine oversight by
the hvisk, not some form of deliberate sabotage. He activated his comms. “Aeryn?”
“We’re on our way. D’Argo and I are almost to Tier One,” she answered.
“Turn around and go back to the Den.” Frelling Crichton! Why couldn’t he have told us this when … Dren!
He’s probably listening to me. Crichton ducked his head to the side, covering up a grin. There were aspects of
the telepathy that were excruciating, and others that were close to comical.
“Go back to the Den and reopen all the valves you just closed. The hvisk are going to --” He searched for a
word that would describe what was going to be accomplished. “They’re going to deworm Moya. They need all
the lines to be open so they can suck Rygel’s new food supply out of her.” Neither ‘deworm’ or ‘suck’ was
accurate, but they were the best terms he could come up with that had a chance of forestalling an argument.
“This will take us at least another quarter arn. Probably closer to half an arn,” she commed back.
“I’ll wait.” He remembered one of her earlier stray thoughts. “I promise.”
“We’re on our way back to the Den. We’ll comm you when we’re ready for the hvisk to begin.”
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
