"The long and winding road that leads to your door
Will never disappear
I've seen that road before it always leads me here
Leads me to your door"
-Paul McCartney/John Lennon
Sand got into her eyes at the bottom of the gorge. A blazing sun burned from above, hovering at its highest point in the sky that day, and the hunched and scaled Kurojji scuttled from tent to tent to avoid its touch. He beckoned her with his jagged crab-like claws, and Chiana followed.
"I recommend you buy," Fango Kray-Kray told her, and as Chiana looked into his beady black eyes, which glistened like marbles, he blinked with his second eyelids. Chiana smiled, and his three rows of orange teeth smiled back at her, making her glad she wasn't a fish.
There were cracks between the hard rocks, through which the sound of a powerful river oozed upwards, and some gaps were greater than others. Chiana moved carefully to avoid them. She jumped from platform to platform, and some rocks wiggled beneath her feet, while others stood so firm, Chiana could hardly believe they weren't plummeting into the watery depths. There was a shadow below her and eyes looking back at her, making Chiana skip a platform and jump underneath the nearest white tent.
Everything was white. The tents, the tables, even her clothes had to be white so as not to be offending to the Kurojji. It had been hard to track down a suitable tailor to make something in her size, and whether it was worth it remained to be seen. Luckily, Chiana liked the outfit. And the crabmen liked her, as Scorpius had predicted, especially her Nebari skin. They took great care in pleasing her, and making her feel like the only girl at a party, although in the end even they tried to sell her their urine to drink.
"No, thank you," she said, with a mouth drier than an Interion's scalp. "Just show me the merchandise."
Far away, the heat distorted the air. An entire desert looked to Chiana as a magnificent shining ocean, in which she could swim forever, and all of it was a lie. With their orange, white-spotted shells, the Kurojji could blend in neatly with their background, and sometimes Chiana saw one scuttle away into the caves below, only to realize two others were looking back at her. They maneuvered the cracks with ease.
She desperately tried to understand their native 'click-clacking' language, but she restrained herself from leaning in too close, having heard stories of people having had their faces ripped off. Again, the Kurojji smiled at her.
Impatiently, she threw away the gifts they presented her, throwing caution and etiquette to the wind. "You got something else for me, huh? Don't think I'm here for my frelling pleasure."
The sun started to get to her. The sky seemed to turn yellow and every outline in sight started to look blurred.
"Such foul language!" Fango hissed. If he put his hind legs to work he could have easily towered over her, but instead all the crabmen worked a head below her eye line. Chiana was starting to see how she could tell them all apart. Fango had impressive whiskers and there were horns growing from his snout, which almost seemed to form the shape of a small goatee.
"Why are you being so difficult?" he asked her. "You weren't like this before, on the Leviathan."
"Yeah? Well, it's called salesmanship. Now show me the goods or I'm heading back, to the Leviathan."
He hissed again, displeased.
"Where is your companion?"
Fess Argolius Traal was asleep when Chiana got back. He was commed six times but didn't wake until he heard the doors to his quarters swing open. The mechanics rattled, and then the lights turned on. He groaned as he turned over. Chiana hadn't even changed out of her traveling clothes yet. All the whites hurt his eyes.
"Are we under attack?"
A big hulk of a man growled beneath a thin golden sheet.
"Shut up," Chiana told him, and kneeled by his bed. "I want you to taste something."
Beneath a messy curtain of wild black hair, a long blue face stretched into an even longer disgusted grimace, showcasing his yellow fangs and scaly tongue.
"Haven't you got anything better to do? I'm sleeping."
"I'll make it worth your while," she added. "Taste it."
His red eyes widened at the sight of the plug in her hands, and quickly he sat upright. It was of a design he had never seen before.
"You went down to the planet without me? That's dangerous."
Chiana thanked him for being concerned, then handed over the object.
Fess examined the merchandise by placing it on his big palm and lifting it up to his nose so he could smell it. Then he opened his mouth wide until Chiana could see the plaque between his molars and stretched out his tongue so it almost touched the device. His tongue moved to split in half, and seemingly operated independently like a butterfly's antennae, to feel and taste the device all over. Chiana felt pleased, watching him put that tongue of his to good use again.
"Pilot has finished analyzing the other parts," she said. "He says he's not sure, but it's possible they belong to the same machine. Crichton's device."
Fess retracted his tongues, looking worried.
"This has been through many hands."
It took him a while to come up with that assessment.
"Ew," Chiana said. "Any tastes you recognize?"
The Hanarian tracker spit on the ground. "Charrids, definitely Charrids. Somewhere in the Rogus sector. Also, Scarran. With a touch of raslak."
He looked at her then, and Chiana expected him to wink at her, but he didn't. His red eyes simply stared.
"There are also others I don't recognize."
He tried to hand her the object, but Chiana pointed instead to the nightstand where he could leave it. Politely he set it down.
"So, definitely black market, then."
"It would seem so."
Chiana got to her feet, her mind spinning with excitement and dread.
"Scorpius was right then. They're building a wormhole weapon. That's what they took from Moya's data archives! It has to be. Bastards. This is the ninth object on the list we've found so far, and all the dealers say the same thing, that they got it from a Kalish trader , and if that's true..."
"Are you done?"
Suddenly it felt like someone had thrown a bucket of ice cold water over her. Chiana lost her train of thought, and stood up to make room for Fess as he got out of bed, stark naked. He moved as if she wasn't there.
Golden light fell softly on his muscular blue torso, but faded once it reached the black fur that covered his shoulders, spine and waist. Yellow tattoos covered anything that wasn't covered in fur. Fess looked lean, capable of killing a man, although he never had. Chiana always thought of him as younger than her, even though they were of the same age.
Turning his back on Chiana, he gathered metal chains from the floor and placed them on the hooks in the ceiling. Then, in preparation for his morning workout, he lifted himself off the floor, and flung his whole body upside down, so this time, he looked at Chiana face to face. His long hair almost touched the ground. As he opened his mouth to speak, Chiana could see his tongues dancing behind his teeth.
"This is important," Chiana said.
"So? You didn't need me to tell you that. Pilot could've analyzed it for you. Or are you afraid he'll find out?"
"Frell you."
"Yes, frell me," Fess said. His red eyes seemed to accuse her, 'cause he never blinked.
Chiana snatched the plug from the nightstand, and caught her hand shaking. It was hard to find the right words. What the frell did he want from her?
"It was you who cheated on me, remember?"
Chiana spat it out, more than a statement than an accusation. She didn't want it to hurt. She just wanted it to be over.
"I know," he said.
He stared at her, upside down, his body pumped, and the muscles in his arms strenuously fighting to hold on. Veins throbbed on his forehead, and yet he did not break his calm. The hooks on the ceiling creaked under the pressure of the metal chains. Fess started huffing and puffing, and staring, and Chiana refused to rise to the bait. She would not fight.
"Is this all you've got?" she said.
Chiana turned, and on her way out of the room, she turned off the lights and swiped the door controls to make the doors swing shut again, leaving Fess to finish his exercises in the dark. It was petty, she admitted, but worth it.
Halfway down the corridor, she couldn't remember why she bothered to find him anyway. She'd gotten so caught up in her own little mission, she'd forgotten to be mad at him. Days she'd spent avoiding him, tolerating him, trying to forget him, and then he pulls a stunt like this, just to spite her.
Asshole. She liked that Earth word. It described Fess perfectly: an orifice which only ever lets out dren and stank, and shits over everything, just to get it out of its system.
Pointlessly, she flung the plug in her hand back towards his quarters. There were countless of these now, so it didn't matter; they were all over the black market by now, and created for a single purpose, a single machine. Its design stolen from an unlikely source.
DRD's whizzed past on her way to Pilot. Their little grunts and buzzes pierced an otherwise eerie quiet. After spending time stuck above a desert oasis, Moya's corridors felt awfully cold, and outside there was only darkness and silence. The sounds of her footsteps were dulled by the hard, smooth floor, as she turned the corridor and dove inside an alcove to drink from a water basin.
It was a small bathroom, one of many along Moya's longest tiers grown specifically to service the needs of many Peacekeeper soldiers that walked down these corridors almost fifteen cycles ago. Chiana had almost forgotten it existed. Unused, the stalls seemed to have been slowly reabsorbed back into Moya's system, the organic material from which it had been created had slowly degraded and fallen apart. There were layers that seemed to come off like dry, flayed, skin, or molten cheese, burnt at the edges.
When Chiana leaned in to drink from the small water fountain she mashed the button with the bottom of her fist, but no water would come out of it. After the third attempt at hurting her hand, she looked around and left again.
Chiana marched on, alone. The same old walk she always used to walk.
She could see the doorway that lead to Pilot then, but she kept on walking as soon as her wrist started to itch. Then her clothes seemed to fit too tight and she wanted to rip it all off.
In those desperate times she'd spent alone on Moya, and whoever was left was still sound asleep, of course she'd done it, of course she'd walked down these corridors naked. It was too funny not to. She stopped though, once she realized who was watching. Moya she didn't mind, who glided naked into starlight, but Pilot was male, Pilot was different. And then it occurred to her Pilot had always been watching, had seen them all naked, had seen them all for who they truly were, at their most private and personal.
She dressed uneasily then, one item at a time, as she insisted on ridding herself of the smell of crab before heading back to the den, where Pilot would see her coming.
Whereas in the corridors her footfalls were absorbed by the flat floors, in the magnificent and massive chamber from which Pilot operated, every single whisper seemed to reverberate down below, and every little step made a noise of its own. Chiana nervously tapped along the bridge, comfortable in her own black leathers again, as she called for Pilot. His massive shape was partly obscured by shadow.
Chiana could barely stand to look at his face. Half paralyzed, he rarely spoke these days, as the left side of his mouth drooped causing an incessant slur. Through his left eye, he could no longer see. It hung from the socket, almost dangling sadly, yellow and empty, because it had been that soft tissue through which the Kalish had stuck their needle and invaded his mind.
He could still operate as fast as he used to, although at times his shaking claws were prone to make mistakes.
"I'm sorry..." he softly muttered. "Chiana... I wanted... to say hello."
She jumped on to his forward console and clung to him to press her tears into his neck.
"You don't have to say anything, Pilot. Not if it hurts you."
"I... I'm all right."
"I know you are."
