Chill Wind
by YT
First, a disclaimer: Farscape and all the characters and concepts therein do not belong to me, but to the series' creators and the SciFi channel. I am only borrowing some of them, briefly. I'm not selling this story and I don't have lots of money, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't sue me.
This fic was inspired by and contains spoilers for "Incubator."
If you want to post my fanfic on another site, I'm honored, but please ask me first.
Commander K'zarack woke groggily to an enervating chill in the air and a throbbing pain in his chest that seemed to resonate with the powerful ambient vibrations of an unfamiliar ship's engines. There should not be engines, was his first thought. He opened his eyes and jerked himself upright, or tried to, only to find that his limbs were bound in restraints. Bright light seared his eyes, and the sudden motion made his head swim, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut and lay back down. Fear rose up from the pit of his stomach, buoyed by the pain and the cold. He forced it back down. K'zarack was Scarran, and a warrior: fear and weakness were for lesser species.
As K'zarack calmed himself with this thought, his military conditioning took over. His mind, though tangled in his extreme discomfort and a fog he could not identify, began to assess the situation. The last thing K'zarack remembered was doing an inspection of the listening post he commanded deep in Peacekeeper territory – a prestigious assignment, especially for one not of the ruling caste. As the watch was changing, the perimeter alarms had sounded, and suddenly there were Peacekeeper commandos everywhere... Try as he might, he could recall nothing more than that.
And now there were engines. Obviously the Peacekeepers had captured him and taken him aboard one of their ships. That would explain the restraints, as well as the cold and the pain in his chest. The Peacekeepers always surgically removed the heat-producing gland from their Scarran prisoners, thus nullifying the captive's heat probe and severely weakening him. His circumstances were grim, but now that he had thought through them, they made sense.
One thing, however, did not quite fit. The Peacekeepers generally used Leviathans as prison transports. K'zarack had been aboard a few Leviathans in his time, and their engines had a complex, fluid, organic sound. The engines he was hearing were too regular and mechanical to be those of a Leviathan. The sight that greeted his eyes, when he at last opened them, confirmed his suspicions. Above him was a dull gray metal ceiling, adorned only by two bright light-strips and a securely bolted ventilation grate. So this was definitely not a Leviathan: in all liklihood it was a Peacekeeper military vessel of some kind.
Lifting his head to survey his surroundings (a difficult operation, as he was still weak and the restraints on his limbs and torso severely limited his movements), K'zarack took stock of his surroundings. He was in a cell about ten samats on a side, in which the only visible objects were a waste funnel in the corner directly to his left and the black hemisphere of a security sensor in the facing corner of the ceiling. A red light blinking on and off beneath the sensor's translucent surface told him that it was active and watching him, though he would not have expected otherwise. K'zarack himself was bound to some sort of cot or rack – he couldn't really tell, since he was unable to see it. The cot was perpendicular to the cell wall, in such a way that K'zarack's feet pointed directly at the cell's reinforced door.
K'zarack came to the conclusion that his cell was aboard a Peacekeeper capital ship – perhaps even a command carrier. If he was aboard a carrier and not a Leviathan prison ship, it implied that he was somehow important to the Peacekeepers. Which meant that he could expect to be interrogated, painfully and at great length.
The fear he had forced down before came creeping back up. I am Scarran, he told himself. No matter what they do to me, I will tell them nothing. It was the only option left to him, since the possibility of escape was so small as to be nonexistent. Oddly enough, the certainty of imminent death calmed him. It would not be as glorious as falling in battle, but it would be a warrior's death nonetheless. So he told himself.
The metal leaves of the cell door parted, startling K'zarack from his reverie. He lifted his head in time to catch a glimpse of the three people entering his cell. The first was a soldier carrying a pulse rifle: the second was a round-faced female in a pale blue tunic and trousers, carrying a kit in one hand and a medical scanner in the other. He could not keep his head up long enough to get a good look at the third.
The soldier positioned himself next to the door, while the female went to the right of his cot and the third individual moved to his left, staying out of his field of vision. He did not intend to submit quietly to whatever humiliation these Peacekeepers were planning. As K'zarack felt the female draw closer to him, he turned his head and hissed at her, satisfied when she jumped back from him with fear in her eyes. He heard a clatter from beside the door, no doubt the soldier assuming a combat stance and threatening K'zarack with his rifle – as if that mattered. Weak species.
"He is restrained and still weak from surgery," the person on his left said in an almost conversational tone. The speaker stepped forward, so that he was standing directly over K'zarack, looking down on him as if he were some kind of laboratory specimen. "He cannot harm you. There's no need to be afraid."
The man wore no uniform or insignia: he was clad in black, with scaled armor covering his shoulders and torso. A close-fitting hood covered his head, all but his face, and that was divided into thirds by a strip of material that went down to the bridge of his nose before splitting off into branches that sloped down across his cheeks to rejoin the hood near his jawline. Where his ears should have been there were instead nodes on which small red lights glowed. The suit was odd enough, but the strangest thing by far about the man was his face – it looked mostly Sebacean, but the cheekbones jutted out too much, creating deep hollows beneath, and there were clusters of ridges that resembled scales under the eyes. And his skin was too pale and slick for a Sebacean. K'zarack could not identify his species: he resembled nothing so much as a walking corpse. Perhaps that was why K'zarack found him so unsettling. Or perhaps it was because, in spite of his strangeness, he was also somehow...familiar.
Though K'zarack glared at him, the man seemed totally unaffected. There was no fear in his eyes, no disgust – there was mild interest, as if the man wanted to see how K'zarack reacted to what was going on around him. There was something else behind his eyes as well. K'zarack was not naturally attuned to the facial expressions and body language of Sebaceans: while his specialized surveillance training had mostly compensated for his lack of instinct in this regard, he still had trouble with some of the subtlties. And this particular Sebacean – or whatever he was – seemed to hide his true feelings very well.
Suddenly motors started to move under the cot, and the strange man stepped back. While K'zarack had been distracted, the female had worked a control somewhere. The head of the cot began to rise as the foot descended, until K'zarack was at a forty-five degree angle to the floor.
While the female ran her scanner over K'zarack and entered data on an infopad from her kit, avoiding her patient's eyes the whole time, the strange man stood off to the side, hands clasped behind his back, watching K'zarack intently. K'zarack snarled at him, causing the female to fumble and almost drop her scanner, but the man remained completely unruffled. He briefly flashed an expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace, giving K'zarack a glimpse of small, sharp teeth – as a Scarran might have done in the same situation. The man was mocking him. K'zarack jerked against his restraints, but they held good. He did not even enjoy the small victory of scaring the female again – she only gave him a wary glance before continuing her scan. The soldier had raised his rifle, but the strange man waved for him to lower it, which he did.
The female concluded her work and, with sweat on her brow and relief on her face, backed away from the cot. "He's recovering on schedule, sir," she informed the strange man. "He should be ready in three or four solar days, minimum – a weeken at most."
"That is satisfactory," the strange man proclaimed. He gave K'zarack a quick looking-over before turning again to the female. "You are dismissed." The female nodded and exited the cell at just short of a run.
"Officer," the strange man said, turning to the soldier with the rifle, "please wait outside and close the door. I will comm you when I am finished here."
The soldier hesitated. "Are you sure, sir?"
"My answer to that question," the strange man said, "is always yes. Never ask me again."
The soldier stiffened, then nodded. "Yes, sir. Sorry sir." He inclined his head towards the strange man before slipping out the door. The leaves of the portal joined behind him, leaving K'zarack and the strange Peacekeeper alone in the cell.
"Now then..." The strange man turned his attention back to his Scarran prisoner. "We have certain matters to discuss."
K'zarack distrinctly remembered the female saying that he was not yet ready for whatever it was they were planning to do to him, so the strange man's announcement was confusing. Perhaps it was some kind of trick. "Are you going to interrogate me, Peacekeeper?"
The man lowered his eyes and smiled, as if at some private amusement. "Eventually, yes. But not at the moment." The man paused and, producing a control wand from somewhere about his person, turned towards the security sensor and pressed a switch. As the sensor's red light died, the strange man lowered the control wand and turned back to K'zarack. "This is a more personal discussion."
Definitely a trick. "Personal? I don't even know you."
The man smiled again. "No, of course you don't." He began walking back and forth across the cell floor – not pacing, but doing something between a stroll and a stalk. Then he said, in perfect Scarran, "Your name is Commander K'zarack, correct?"
Thrown off by the man's too-relaxed demeanor, not to mention his use of the Scarran tongue, K'zarack was startled into answering before he could muster the sense to keep silent. "Yes."
"I have been looking for you for some time," the strange man informed him. He stopped his pacing and looked K'zarack directly in the eye. "Since I know your name, I suppose it is only fair that you should know mine. I am Scorpius." No rank, no surname, no explanation.
"You say that as if it should mean something to me," K'zarack sneered. "I am sorry to disappoint, but I've never heard of you." He would not let this arrogant Sebacean...whatever...intimidate him.
Scorpius turned away, suddenly disinterested. "I did not expect that you had." He recommenced walking back and forth across the cell, and said nothing more for a full twenty microts.
K'zarack did not like being ignored as if he were nothing – even by a potential torturer. "Tell me what you want, Peacekeeper."
Scorpius stopped, facing the wall to K'zarack's right. He glanced at K'zarack over his shoulder, then turned himself completely to face him. "First I will tell you," he began, "what I do not want. I am not interested in what information you have collected at your listening post, the number and power of Scarran forces, or what spies you have in our territory."
A laughable trick, this is. "Of course you do," K'zarack countered. "Do you think I am a fool?"
"Your intellect is not the issue here." Scorpius walked towards K'zarack, his slow, deliberate steps ringing on the cell's metal floor. "When you were a corporal, oh, about thirty cycles ago, you participated in a Scarran breeding experiment, did you not?"
K'zarack wondered why he would be interested in a mere breeding experiment, especially one from so long ago. He saw no harm in answering the question – and, perhaps, an opportunity to put a barb in his inquisitor. "Yes," he hissed, "with Sebacean females. But it was a failure – there is nothing of value to us in your race's genetic code." Scorpius may not have been Sebacean, but he was a Peacekeeper officer, which to K'zarack meant that there was little meaningful distinction. To this man, he was just another Scarran – and to him, this man was just another Peacekeeper.
Unfortunately, K'zarack's attempt to goad his captor to indignation did not have the intended effect. Scorpius halted in mid-step and looked towards the ceiling. "My race," he muttered to himself. He emitted a brief, humorless chuckle, and looked at K'zarack once more. He took two more steps forward, so that he was standing directly over K'zarack. Then he put one hand on top of the cot, above K'zarack's head, and leaned down until they were looking at each other across a distance of only a few denches. "I have one last question," Scorpius said, almost whispering. "Were you ordered to participate in that experiment, or did you volunteer?" His heretofore dispassionate voice had suddenly taken on a faint but unmistakably vicious edge.
At that point, whatever patience K'zarack had possessed at the start of Scorpius' questioning deserted him utterly. "Do you think any Scarran would volunteer to mate with a Sebacean tralc?" he snarled. "I was given orders. I carried them out."
Scorpius glared into K'zarack's eyes for several microts, as if he were trying to determine the veracity of this statement. K'zarack parried with his own stony glare. He had spoken the truth, for all that it mattered. Abruptly, Scorpius turned away and withdrew. He seemed deflated and, somehow, disappointed. Scorpius walked to the cell door and stood with his back to K'zarack. "I see," he said at last. He turned around, and K'zarack saw on his face the emotion that he had so carefully surpressed before – cold, naked hate.
A terrible realization clicked into place in K'zarack's mind. He knew now what Scorpius was, why he spoke fluent Scarran, and why he had been asking about a breeding experiment. He was not just another Peacekeeper. And to Scorpius, K'zarack was not just another Scarran. K'zarack became acutely aware of the pain in his chest, and the chill that seemed to eat through to his bones.
"What will you do with me now, Peacekeeper?" he asked.
The expression of loathing vanished from Scorpius's face, replaced by a mask of calm. "Nothing, yet," Scorpius said, his tone even. "However, when you are recovered, you will have the distinction of being the first sentient test subject for the Aurora Chair." He was smiling again, just slightly. "I am eager to see how well my design works, but I can wait a few solar days for your...convenience." With that, he lifted the control wand again, and reactivated the security sensor. "Officer," he said, speaking now in Sebacean, "I am ready to leave now." The door opened, and Scorpius, after pausing for one last anticipatory glance at his prisoner, stepped through.
The door closed, leaving K'zarack alone with the cold, the pain, and the fear.