FARSCAPE

Previously, on Farscape, the Freebooter Era:

Crichton has finally uncovered Scorpius' plan: using Furlow, and records gained from Crais' old Carrier, Scorpius has pinpointed the location of the wormhole that originally deposited John Crichton in Peacekeeper space! Waiting only for his Command Carrier to be finished being fitted with the means to allow it to traverse the wormhole safely – while hiding in the V'masque Wasteland; he means to threaten Earth and force John to surrender the totality of his wormhole knowledge! Crichton knows he must get there before Scorpius does… and he has done so, but not in any manner he would have ever guessed!

AND NOW, ON FARSCAPE:

EARTHFALL:

…WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE…

"...I cannot hide what I am:

I must be sad when I have cause and smile at no man's jests,

eat when I have stomach and wait for no man's leisure,

sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man's business,

laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour…"

Don John, Act One, Scene III, Much Ado About Nothing

William Shakespeare

P R O L O G U E

HE WASN'T THE KIND TO GIVE UP.

He'd faced some rather daunting odds in his time. He'd stared death in the face a hundred times and flipped it off. He'd avoided obliteration half-a-dozen times by the slimmest of slim chances.

He'd had his encounter with the Ancients, finally, and this is how they'd left him:

He was in his favorite spacesuit - the one he'd found on the Vengeance – his 'hardsuit' - the one built for soldiers to fight in space, leaping from ship to ship, or 'hard-dropping' from orbit to a planet's surface - that made him look like he was wearing black samurai-like armor, with his guns and usual paraphernalia intact – and he was floating in orbit of the one planet he figured he'd never see again. No ship, no backup, his suit already low on oxygen, maybe four arns left.

Four arns to orbit Earth and contemplate his mortality.

He found himself laughing.

Somewhere down there was John Crichton and Aeryn Sun, no doubt happily up to their eyeballs in domestic dren, and the one they'd left behind to die in their stead had managed to come all the way back to die alone and unnoticed on their doorstep – but he wasn't going to be alone for long.

Scorpius was coming.

So, this time he'd be long-gone mad and then dead of anoxia before he had to witness any of it. He wasn't sure if it were ironic, but it was pretty damn close.

Crichton tried to calculate where he was, decided he was in low orbit – not the most desired and stable of orbits especially when you wanted to stay in orbit. He gave the Ancient more credit as he thought about it. His orbit would likely decay rather quickly – so he might just possibly enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up before he ran out of oxygen. Wicked sense of humor you've got there, Hawking.

Bastard.

Below him, Europe was rotating lazily left to right, a storm over Germany, clear skies over England. The Atlantic reflected the sunlight back up and the clouds below were cottony and white. A minute more, and North America rolled under, Canada swathed in cloud and the northern US likewise, the south clear. A cyclone was churning across the Pacific, away from any land. He couldn't see Australia. He waited until Japan came into view and then rolled himself onto his back.

Ah… there she was. The moon was a bright silver orb, following him around the Earth. John's father had landed right about… there. He looked out into the black, mused on how flat space actually looked. There were no stars to be seen – the reflected light from Earth and moon would be more than enough to hide them – if the sun's glare wasn't omnipresent.

Well, what now? Wait until all the air runs out and suffocate, or just pull the suit decouplers and empty it all at once? Or just yank the helmet? Over in seconds then. I could wait and become a meteor. That'd be a pretty spectacular death. The V'rom of Pershets'm send their elderly into the beyond that way. How do I want to die today?

Crichton rolled back over, looked back down at the Earth. China and Russia rolling by. He flipped on his suit comm system, tuned through channels, seeing if he could tap in on any stations below. He picked up a few Asian stations, his microbes making it more interesting than it might have been. It was almost odd that they'd translate languages he knew so well – or at least knew to hear. He listened to the music for a while, some of the propaganda of the Communists still in power, tuned around.

Over Europe he managed the BBC International, learned about another 'war' in Iraq, climate change and immigration concerns, as well as whether Tony Blair would be remembered as a good leader or a warmonger. The even cadences of the English news reader were almost soothing, but he tuned out, not caring at all about the nonsense that passed for "important" on this stupid rock. One Carrier in orbit would make it all seem rather pointless, petty and pathetic, anyway. He thought, with a moment of black humor, that it might be worth letting the one on its way actually come.

As the Atlantic rolled over, he knew he was getting closer to that with which he remembered was most familiar – endless ads for useless crap, endless hip-hop stations and the shrill bleating 'infotainment' noise that passed as news in North America. He tuned around, found a music station he liked, closed his eye and just listened. He'd not heard anything like this in a long time, and he'd actually …missed it.

It almost sounded like …home. That snapped his eye open again, and he contemplated his own reflection on the inside of his visor. It looked back at him, skeptical.

Home.

Interesting concept. He shut the radio off. Almost. He'd almost let this backward planet lull him into lying to himself.

His birthplace had shredded itself in a frenzy of agony, as John and Chi, D, Jool and himself had high-tailed it the hell away. Everyone left on Rovhu had went when the Leviathan went. Kaarvok would copy no one else.

He was the only one of his kind now. Kaarvok's Creature had no home, only space. Only the stars. Only the cold, empty places in-between.

Seemed appropriate though, that he should have been born amidst despair and horror. It fit so well with the motifs that ran through his dreams, through his life.

Down there was coffee and ice cream, cheeseburgers, fries, and deep-fried chicken by the bucket, smooth brown girls in thong bikinis and rock 'n' roll and the blues and smoky jazz clubs, pay television, race cars, movies, Thai food and twelve-year-old Scottish scotch and real frelling beer – and one man who could make the whole Galaxy go away if Scorpius ever got his hands on him.

He couldn't do a thing about it. If he'd even needed any more proof that he was not a legit Crichton, the choice of execution "Hawking" had chosen was poetry indeed.

He'd tried, though. He had tried to do the right thing. He hadn't had to, y'know, but he went for it. It had cost him an eye and friends and the hope for a life.

He'd tried.

"Oh, dear," Harvey said, startling him from his reverie. He was floating alongside Crichton over the slowly-spinning Earth below.

"What? You don't like the view?"

"The view is spectacular, John. That is hardly my concern."

"Right. Fiery death. Needs adjustment."

"Most definitely. Do you have a plan?"

"A plan? For this? I appreciate the faith, but you're frelling crazy, Harve. We're in orbit. No ship, no jetpack, no rocket-pants. Savvy?"

"This is not the way I had hoped we would end our days."

Crichton snorted an ironic snort.

"No shit, Sherlock. You're the supposed genius. You figure something out."

He waited, stared at Harvey for a good two minutes. Harvey appeared to be thinking as fast as he could. After another two minutes he looked defeated.

"Yeah. Pain in the ass, ain't it? You take the cards you're dealt, and all those other stupid clichés. Go away, if you have nothing useful to contribute."

Harve sighed the largest sigh of his benighted existence and vanished.

He rolled himself back over so that he was looking into space, turned off his radio completely and closed his eye.

Yeah, he'd done everything he could. He'd always known he was living on borrowed time anyway, and his death would not change much of anything. His crew knew that if they never heard from him again what they were supposed to do. Well, Shiv did. Scorpius would still be stopped, and the frelling Crichtons could live happily ever after. His crew would have a helluva ship and the keys to a rather substantial amount of loot. The knowledge of wormholes would be safe from the universe at large.

All-in-all, not too shabby. It hadn't been finished conclusively, not in the way he'd have liked, not how he had planned, but beggars couldn't be choosers. He'd expected to die from a pulse blast, or in the spectacular explosion of his ship, or some incredible display of pyrotechnics as he took out Scorpy once and for all, ruined his plans and laughed in his face, something of his own choosing, but this was okay.

Live, die, neither mattered, as long as you chose.

He had chosen.

Crichton relaxed, let his arms and legs float, flipped off fate, checked his oxygen. Three arns. His entire body ached.

He closed his eye, let the weariness wash over him, lull him. He was always tired, he noticed. Always. He slept, but he never rested.

"One hundred bottles of beer on the wall… "

HE'D COUNTED DOWN TO SIXTY-FIVE BOTTLES when …something… prompted him to open his eye. He was looking into the black of space, saw nothing, rolled over. He was over the Atlantic, his rolling onto his back and flipside must have altered his vector or something, as he was 'lower', now, orbiting toward the southern US. He wouldn't have thought he could have altered his orbit by that much just doing that, but he must have, because here he was. What caught his eye was a pillar of fire rising slowly from below.

What the frell? A shuttle launch?

A quick command to his onboards dropped the HUD over his visor and he used the suit's camera to zoom in on the rising plume. Shuttle confirmed, and rising fast. In about two minutes, he'd be almost directly over its ascent vector. He killed the magnification, thought a moment.

If you'd asked him afterward, he couldn't have told you why he decided to do what he did. He didn't know himself. Something reared up and snarled at the idea of meekly surrendering to death. Laying there and taking it just wasn't his style.

He sucked a few deep breaths in, felt preternaturally calm – remembered D'Argo telling John once that calmness "heralded the certainty of death", smiled grimly at the memory and rolled himself into a ball, head pointed at the Earth below, and using an arn's worth of air from his suit as a propellant – kicked himself toward the planet.

HE NEVER UNDERSTOOD HOW, BUT IT MADE IT INTO THE LEGENDS.

As he plummeted, Crichton uncoiled from the ball, tried to orient himself. His suit made him heavier than he would be normally, increased his mass, so he fell a bit faster than he would have otherwise. Air resistance was practically non-existent at these heights.

He had a quick flash of how suicidal-crazy what he was doing truly was, but just shrugged it off. Frell it – he had nothing to lose.

His suit had started to get warm, not much, as friction from the air was still low, and he activated the anti-glare filter on his visor verbally, could see the shuttle literally a few miles below him, that big orange booster coming at him like a giant bullet.

Not that that was all that impressive. He was approaching almost a thousand kilometres an hour without a ship at all, plummeting at almost 300 meters a second, the thinness of the upper atmosphere exerting almost no upward pressure on him. He would fall for approximately 9 or so minutes at this speed before gravity took lethal notice and started to really exert some grip. If he remembered correctly, he would then have just under two minutes or so as he achieved terminal velocity and air pressure balanced him out – and slowed him down. Three minutes after that, he would hit the ground, with luck only doing on or about 195 kph, which was just in his suit's survivability range. It was, after all, designed for precisely what he was doing – well, more or less.

If he kept arms and legs splayed like a sky diver – he'd fall at around a paltry 220 kph. It would be a little too fast when he got low enough. The acceleration gauge told him that he was already comfortably above that. Somehow, he had to slow himself down by at least 40 kph.

At what seemed a stone's throw away, the Space Shuttle was streaking up, up, and then by him, and he had the most unique view of it of anyone in history as it passed, not more than a hundred meters away from him. He didn't ponder it. His suit's gauges were starting to protest that it would soon be far too hot for comfort, and too close to the suit's heat failure threshold. With some effort, he rolled over, pointed his back at the ground and activated the suit's ablation shield, which unfolded, putting him in a flexi-ceramic half-shell that took some of the heat, bled off some acceleration. His gauge said: not enough.

Crap.

Above him now, the big orange booster climbed rapidly, and the two auxiliary ones to the side separated from that.

He watched them tumble, saw the contrails spring from them as they fell, re-entered Earth's atmosphere.

Crichton suddenly remembered that those boosters were what the IASA boys called "recoverable vectors."

They had parachutes.

A quick glance showed the shuttle vanishing rapidly into space, and then he noticed a hollow, bright-hot section tumbling directly at him.

No frelling way! his brain shouted at him. The rapidly-cooling tube rolled down, flipping end-over-end, and Crichton saw its shadow cross over him. It was falling faster than he was, because it was heavier by a considerable margin… the booster tumbled toward him, aiming to go past him, almost balletic, seeming to slow as it passed, he could almost reach out and touch it…

…without thinking Crichton retracted the ablation shield and tucked his arms and legs in, accelerated toward the booster section. He came closer, watched it flip end-over-end, did all he could to keep pace with it. One moment he'd come so close he could almost reach out and touch it, and it was all he could do to avoid having the thing bat him away as it flipped over.

He had the absolute slimmest of slim chances. His suit had a layer of impact-absorbing gel, stuff they used as inertial cushioning in starships. It was meant to help absorb the gravities of what they called 'hard drops' - assault insertions to a planet's surface from space – of course, they also had drop-pods to do what he was doing now, and to take up a hunk of the impact. If luck was with him, he could use that booster and its parachutes to slow his descent just enough for his ablation shield and impact gel to be enough – maybe. He could lock the actuators in the suit – the load-assisting ones, the ones that made him 'stronger' while in it - make the suit even more of a shield around him – but he'd have to do that just before he hit the surface.

Tricky, but not impossible.

That's why he'd pushed himself into the plunge. A chance was a chance was a chance. Yeah, maybe he'd tried - cry himself a frelling river - but damn it all to hell, he wasn't beaten just yet. If he failed, well hell, it'd be one spectacular failure – and it'd be a failure on his own terms.

The booster had been a happy accident.

Right?

His onboards told him that air pressure was increasing, and though he couldn't actually see it, acceleration gauges indicated that he would soon be approaching a relatively steady descent speed. The booster section was still falling faster than he, but once they both fell far enough, it's parachutes would easily slow it into the survivability range of his suit if he needed to kick off. He had, at most, two minutes to catch the thing.

As plans went, it was up there with his absolute craziest.

He continued to splay and stoop, splay to slow, tuck in limbs to stoop like a falcon and accelerate, getting incrementally closer and in a position near the tube he wanted. He was watching its tumble, calculating… he pulled in next to it on his last stoop, splayed and managed finally to keep pace with it, but he knew he had only microts.

Just as the tube swung past, he activated the magnetic coils in his boots and gloves, turned them up to their highest intensity, and rolled himself in under the tube as it tumbled directly at him. The impact drove the air out of his lungs, dazed him for a few seconds, but the magnetics held.

He'd gone from pursuer to passenger.

He turned down the magnetics until a hand was pulled free and then evened it out. He focused his eye down to the surface of the tube, counting rivets, trying to ignore the whipping of the scenery around and around – the last thing he wanted was to throw up in his helmet. The booster slowed in its roll, wind resistance balancing out its fall. Crichton checked his temperature gauges, all in the green, the tube's steel shielding him from the majority of the friction and the heat it generated, allowed himself a fierce grin and then risked a look out across its surface.

The tube stabilized, falling horizontally, and then the parachutes deployed, jerking it vertical. He was almost thrown off the side, but his magnetics held. Crichton knew he had two choices: stay on the booster until it hit the ocean, and then surrender to the pickup crews who came to retrieve it, or kick off and hope his suit could function in sea water. Spacesuits and scuba gear were not even remotely the same thing, however. He also had to hope that hitting the water didn't exceed the impact capacity of his suit – especially with the weight of the booster conceivably above him.

Sink or swim? He knew that two specialized retrieval ships from IASA – the Liberty's Sun and the Freedom Wave - what they were called in John's memories, at any rate - would already be on their way to recover the boosters for reuse. Each had a crew of 24 - but, as far as he knew, no soldiers, no heavy arms.

Well, then.

He'd just have to improvise.

SOMETHING CRACKLED, POPPED, ROUSING HER.

The acrid smell of burnt circuitry hung in the air, the smell of spent Chakkan oil, blood, metal and plastic. The Vengeance was dark, main power offline. Her wits returning, she began assessing her surroundings with more detail. To her right, a crimson light blinked, above that, two blue ones pulsed a separate beat in tandem. She knew what that meant, just couldn't remember at the moment. There was a weight on her chest, and with a start she remembered it was a 'borg.

A dead 'borg. She'd managed to kill it before it'd plowed into her.

With a muttered imprecation, Miriya Breannados thrust the corpse from her, pulled herself to her knees, using the console before her as leverage.

She looked over the controls, realized that the Vengeance's main computer was out, the backup in standby mode, and groggily hit a few switches, bringing the ship back to minimum life. Red emergency lights boosted on, machinery fired back to life. She heard the whirr of atmosphere scrubbers kick in, the air beginning to clear. Fortunately, there were no fires. Suppression protocols had activated, and handled any that had flared. That red light and those two blue yet blinked. She suddenly remembered what they meant, checked.

What the frell…?

On the pilot station, she noticed 1812, dark and silent. The droid had his cannon deployed, and she suddenly suspected that she might actually owe the thing her life.

"Hey," she reached over, slapped the DRD on the flank. "Wake up." 1812 squeaked, came to life. "In one piece?" A chirp. She pointed to the lights. "The mains are down. Go see what you can do." Another chirp, and 1812 sped off.

Hezmana… she checked the door – wide open. She grimaced as pain shot through her head. She felt gingerly at the main locus of the pain, felt a large lump on her head.

"Well, my present situation is 'among the living'." Miriya told the bulkhead. "My head is the least of my problems."

"And..." She looked around, pursed her lips. "We appear to be in one piece. So far."

Miriya sat down, ran what diagnostics she could. All was not well, but far better than she'd expected.

Frell - power failures all over. The mains are down, and everything aft of the treblinside thruster assemblies is dark. She shook his head. No eyes or ears, either.

She glanced back at the corpse on the floor.

That was close. Too close. She looked out the open door to see a set of boots in the access way. Another 'borg lay out there. Had she managed to kill that one? She couldn't remember.

"Chak'sa? Shiv?" Miriya tried the comms. Even as she did, Chak'sa thrust her head into the Command-pit.

"Are you all right?" she inquired. She appeared to have a large burn across her face and neck. A nod answered her question. Miriya looked back from her diagnostic, saw the burn.

"You need help for that?" Chak'sa shook her head. Burns were not something Scarrans worried overmuch about.

"It is superficial." She looked down at the dead 'Borg. "We have three more of those onboard. All dead. I cannot find Shivi'na." She frowned. "We also have several open external hatches." Miriya blinked. Not really a surprise, but she would have thought emergency protocols would have closed them – well, they were still alive with atmosphere, so they were somewhere – safe was a relative term.

"I can't do any internal scans. We must be in atmos, if we have open hatches and no depressurization. We'll have to look for Shiv the old fashioned way."

They went aft, separated. Miriya checked the main computer core. Four. Not bad against 'Borg, she thought, seeing the inert form of another. It had been neatly bisected by something very sharp. She checked it over – it still clutched a black box that she recognized as one of the Vengeance's AI slaved-'lightboxes': a CPU that used silicon-based lasers to utilize photons to process data. The technology was a little old, but it was adequate. The Vengeance's AI had twelve of them. She took it, reinserted it, restarted the computer's boot sequence. The ship went dark for a few moments, then returned to partial life.

"Frell. At least it's something."Miriya muttered. She hit her comm. "Have to go back to the secondary work bay and trace a line for some sensors. We're blind in here."

"I will do it." Chak'sa told her, not waiting for a reply. A pause. "Hatches have closed." Miriya just shrugged and returned to the Command Deck.

Miriya had activated one of the small, independently-powered cameras on the hull of the ship – meant to allow them to check their surroundings, even if trapped, which, at the moment, they effectively were. She peered out, saw an island, angry water, heavy downpour and whipping wind. Definitely planetside, then.

"Where the frell are we?" She muttered, turned back into the dark of the interior, found a locker, pulled out a light, went to the main computer area. "And …where the frell is that damned Revenger?"

Miriya tried the emergency power, cursed to find still only half her systems respond, went aft, darkly muttering various dooms on the designers of the things, spent a third of an arn with Chak'sa wrestling with it and getting it finally working.

Back in the Ops area, she checked her now-all-up systems (after querying the AI extensively to the point she could have sworn the normally-emotionless computer was becoming exasperated), realized the Vengeance had come down and come down hard. They were nose-deep somewhere reasonably soft, but she couldn't tell damage-extents just yet. Couldn't have been too bad – she'd designed this ship to survive one Hezmana of a lot.

What telemetry she could call up showed they had fallen fast and far, and their stealth system had been intermittent. She couldn't find anything sophisticated out there technology-wise, and knew she wouldn't until she could find and repair whatever damage they had incurred, get main power back up. She patted the console before her.

The Vengeance had survived quite well, and Miriya congratulated herself. She built better than well. She batted away on the controls before her for a few moments, managed at least a ship-round scan of several hundred motras.

There it is. She locked onto it. The Revenger was just twenty motras away, two-thirds submerged, literally dead in the water. She heard her companion coming back, turned to watch her enter.

"No Shiv, I take it?" Chak'sa shook her head. "That figures." A nod. Miriya licked her lips, thought. The Vengeance had been grappled by the Revenger. John was nowhere on the ship, and Miriya had an uneasy feeling that he'd been ejected from it at some point prior to the wormhole gulping them down. She wasn't sure how she knew that, but she was very certain that that is what happened.

What, Miriya wondered, were the odds of Shiv being alive, or of Crichton being alive? What were the odds of any of them being alive? She shrugged internally, looked around. So far, as disasters went, this one was going better than expected. Go with that.

Dren. They couldn't do anything until the Vengeance was shipshape and could tell them exactly where they were.

What did John always say was his motto? Oh, yes.

"First things first," she muttered, eliciting another nod from the Scarran gladiator. "Let's get this ship running. Everything else can wait." She hoped it could wait, as she went back to the computer core and Chak'sa went aft to the engines.

She suddenly had an odd premonition that she knew already where they were – and she knew it was the last place Crichton had wanted any of them to be.

SHIV AWAKENED SLOWLY, uncharacteristically, the distant sound of wind about her.

The ship had landed hard. The Revenger had been built to be tough, like all Peacekeeper ships, but even it couldn't stand a pounding from Vengeance, wormhole and pell-mell plummet. Smoke drifted lazily through the smashed compartment, just off the Command Deck. Shiv had managed to kill the remaining crew when the ship had suddenly rolled, all internal power vanished and she was tossed about like a pinka nut in a infant's rattle. She had hit the floor – or a wall, or the ceiling, she could not be certain – with tremendous force and had been rendered unconscious. She knew, however, that every 'borg she had confronted was well and truly dead.

She sat up gingerly, checked herself over - her left side, from bottom rib to her left breast hurt rather quite a bit. Pulling off her interlocked cuirass of blades, and peeling her tunic top up revealed a large bruise, from hip to collarbone, wrapping around her slim side. Shiv flexed her chest muscles and shoulders, left arm and back muscles. A considerable amount of pain, but nothing was broken. She pulled her tunic back down, put her blades back in their place and then focused her mind away from any pain she had. It was of no consequence. Her movement was impeded by it by only a small percentage, and while not at an optimum she preferred, she was fairly certain that it would still far outclass most kinds of opposition.

She paused for a few heartbeats to calm herself and centre her mind:

I am. I live in a perpetual Now surrounded by relics of the Past. Where I am, there I am. I seek nothing, I desire nothing, I exist. That is enough.

The litany, as always, brought her focus down and sharply on the necessities of the now. With a sigh no one would have heard, Shiv looked about, the ship obviously still at a sharp angle wherever it had crashed. She made her way to the pilot's chair and reached over, tried a scan, but this ship was dead.

Somewhere in all that, she had also lost her comm.

Shaking her head slightly, she made her way from the Command back toward the hatchway she had at first boarded this ship.

The Revenger was in pieces internally. She picked her way through the silent corridors, a few with blown-out walls or shorting circuitry, finally coming across a dead 'borg - down, inoperative – cut to ribbons by her blades. She did not remember killing this one, frowned. At a corridor junction, another, cut neatly in two, shoulder-to-side. She found two other 'borg, these obviously dead, crushed by a caved-in bulkhead, at last came to the hatchway, but it was crumpled. Outside, wind howled and she could see water sloshing through the cracks. Peering out, she saw that the ship was partially submerged, realized she needed an alternative route out.

She did not see the eyes watching her do it.