"'Who's the she?'
'Some men's reach should never exceed their grasp;
she could kill you five times before you hit the floor.'
'That dangerous, eh?'
'Like making love to a razor blade.'"
- Crichton and Ovid Dar'shanne on Shiv
NEXUS WATCHED CRICHTON MOVE.
She found it fascinating, she admitted to herself, 'her' Crichton had been an able fighter, but he never took it to these levels. She sat in the engine room control as he ran through a work-out routine, tried to make it a game as to which moves or discipline or fighting style she could identify.
There might have been some admiration for an attractive male body in there as well, though she figured it hurt nothing to appreciate his level of fitness.
So far she recognized jirin-dho, a Sebacean self-defence used by Commandos, then he did a catrakello - a Luxan boxing style. The in-the-air-direct-kick-to-the-face move was very impressive.
He was strong, agile and professional.
Nexus went back to checking the engine output given the presence of the integrated DiDE, a much more profitable use of her time. Shiv's Bladeship had been docked and was a minimal power drain, so she logged it and checked power transfers instead. It was essential maintenance, to make sure everything was running properly. As long as the DiDE was in place, the Maliform couldn't touch them. They would keep their movements hidden, find that abomination, crush it, kill it, end it, wipe it from all existences once and for all…
Crichton finished his routine and rolled his shoulders. She watched him flex his artificial hand and frown at it. She was still faintly disconcerted that he had it already, as it were. It went on her list of discrepancies in her search for where she'd went wrong the first time. Very little was adding up as yet.
As he towelled off, she joined him out in the main room.
"The DiDE's fully integrated," she told him, "I ran a couple of extra diagnostics on the engines just to be sure. They're in perfect shape."
"Good." He glanced at the chrono in the control room. He nodded to himself and turned to exit, and she followed. Draped the towel around his neck and snagged a T-shirt from where he'd hung it as he went by.
"We're only a couple arns out from Baal'chepheron," he continued.
"You still think an infobroker will know anything about Shiv?"
"Any bog-standard broker?" He slicked his hair back and padded past her. "No. My broker? That's something else."
"Why is he special?"
"'They' and they're a voyant."
"Voyant? Not very reliable. Too unpredictable."
Crichton turned toward Command. He ran the towel over his head and neck then tossed it into a bin. He had a scar on his back she'd not seen before, a very precise, straight one that ran halfway diagonally across his left shoulder blade. It didn't look all that old. He pulled his T on as he entered Command.
"That's because most people want them to tell 'em where things are going to be." He dropped into his Command chair and checked the ship's status. Nexus continued to the Pilot's station. "This one doesn't see any past or future. They see the 'Now', as it were."
"Where she is, instead of where she was?" Nexus confirmed that the ship was on course. "That would be more expedient."
"That's the idea, yeah."
She leaned against the back of the pilot's seat and regarded him.
"How long has - had - will have been - stupid tenses - Shiv been with you?"
Crichton shrugged.
"I dunno - three, four cycles. Important?"
"I sound like a stuck data recorder here, but I've been in half a hundred Divergences and the relationships vary - of course they do - but this partnership of you and Shiv - your counterparts, is always rather specific - at least in the ones I've seen."
Crichton looked up.
"How so?"
"Well, there's the rarest of the rare ones - you two are lovers, or mated. Been together forever more or less, that sort of thing. In one Divergence, she was the one to encounter you first when you came out of the wormhole in Influence space."
Crichton cranked up an eyebrow at that.
"I'm assuming," she continued wryly, "nothing like that happened here?"
Crichton scoffed.
"The woman hasn't a clue what real intimacy really is; I mean, I tease her on occasion and she's no fool - she gets it intellectually." He shook his head. "I'd be a liar if I said I hadn't thought about it - she's amazing and just…"
"Exotic?" Nexus offered with a slight smile.
"That's a good word," he agreed, "but… no. I'd feel like I was taking advantage of her somehow." He sniffed. "One reason I'm no fan of No'Halladan."
"Why not?"
"Idiot shows up outta nowhere an' starts yappin' about how he was 'made for her' and 'let's get it on now!'" He scowled. "Creepy, classless and got on my frellin' nerves."
"Well, he was made for her specifically - and someone has to be a gal's first time."
"Yeah, sure, though not me in this case. Or No'Halladan." A grumble then. "Dickhead doesn't deserve her."
Nexus crossed her arms.
"That sounds a bit like jealousy, Crichton."
"Look - I don't care what it sounds like." He jabbed a finger at her. "Everything else aside, I consider Shiv a friend - and a damn good one at that. It's only natural I think she be with someone who deserves her. Is worthy of her."
"What does she think?" Nexus asked. "That's more important, isn't it?"
"She left with him for a cycle's one-way trip back to her homeworld," he replied pointedly.
"It's odd. In my Divergence, it was Thadon that had been your SIC - your valued 'right arm'. We travelled with him for cycles."
"That is odd." He said dryly.
"You respected him there, is all I'm saying."
"We're not there - and I don't, here."
"You respect her though, that's obvious."
"Damn right I do, almost more than anybody else."
Nexus nodded and sat down, swivelled the Pilot's chair out.
"That's also rare," she told him, "too many other Crichtons I've encountered often see her as a toy - or a weapon."
"Eventually you're gonna realize I'm not them."
Nexus appeared thoughtful and offered him a small smile.
"You're really not."
"I'm gratified," he said sarcastically. She took it in stride.
"There's no war, here, either," she said, changing the subject.
"You makin' comparisons? Is there supposed to be?"
"In a lot of others, it was pretty much full-on by now. Peacekeepers, Scarrans and everyone else."
Crichton shrugged.
"There's rumours going around. A lot of the pirates are getting antsy over them."
Nexus turned back and checked her board.
"You'd think they'd want one - all that plunder while the fleets are engaged elsewhere?"
"You'd be wrong. War's bad news for pirates. Can't plunder much if the lanes are choked with refugees with nothin' or warships."
"Is that what you did, uh, do? Rob ships and the like?"
He shook his head. Still at the comparing them in her head, he and that other Crichton who became the Monster. What was she looking for that was so different between him and the one who'd become the Maliform, other than the fact that he had no desire to use wormholes for pretty much anything? How different yet alike did he have to be?
"No. I'm not that kind of pirate. Steal, sure." He crooked an eyebrow at her. "I only ravish on request; I skip the raping, looting and I'm not a fan of wholesale killin'. I doubt Shiv would have stuck with me as long as she did if I was." He sent her a sardonic smile. "I'm more the 'gentleman' kinda pirate."
"Right." She smirked. "It's a hobby."
"I am repulsively wealthy at the moment."
He saw her start, just a slight jerking of her shoulders. She turned to regard him.
"How wealthy?"
"Why? You need some cash?"
She shook her head.
"No - how wealthy, please?"
"Revoltingly so. A couple cycles ago, the Bardaradhan Shadow Depository liquidated all their assets and turned it into cash, which I happened to grab from a Wacko Veix recently. Fifty lifetimes worth of obscene amounts." He held up his right hand. "Where I lost my hand."
"All right, that's significant."
"Is it?"
She nodded.
"Enough." He saw her switch thoughts midstream and wondered how she did it so smoothly. "The Wäko Nhevar… we had them too." She tilted her head at him. "Do you know where they come from?"
"Supposedly nobody knows."
"Call me 'Nobody'. I know the where and I know the why of them."
Crichton leaned forward, suddenly intensely interested as she'd known he would be. It had been a mystery in her universe too.
"You wanna tell me?"
"What's in it for me?" Again a smirk with a similar crooked eyebrow that he was beginning to find irritating.
"What'd you want?"
"A little more trust and less antagonism," she said, serious, "that's all. I am on your side. I would rather like if you were on mine."
"You don't…"
She cut him off.
"I like you fine." She swallowed. "You're so much like mine that it's a fight, all right? It's a fight to not try and treat you the same way. I wanted… but we were nothing."
"What was his problem?" He gestured to his inhibitor.
"No. He just wanted… everything else. I don't know if it was greed or fear or some grand ambition I couldn't see… some thing that led him on to become the thing he did." Another sigh, this one from very deep within. "He just couldn't see anything not that. We were partners in every other way. I was at least his friend until it turned…" he heard real pain there and softened, "…and I was pretty damn good pirate, if I do say so myself."
She took a deep breath and something like pride riding on good memories flashed through her eyes.
Nexus - the Aeryn she had been, he corrected himself - had loved someone like him once and it had all gone the worst way possible. Yet, she persevered and somewhere deep down, down inside herself, in a place very similar to that place inside himself, she still did. Damn him if he didn't admire that, respect that kind of strength - he knew Aeryn had it and now didn't doubt that it was highly likely they all did, no matter where they'd come from.
Nexus more than any of them, it seemed, carrying the burden - whether it had been true or not and he had his suspicions concerning that - that she had somehow created a universe-destroying madman.
"You've been away from home a long time, huh?" He asked gently.
"As far and as long as someone can be." She told him after a good while, a haunted look in her eyes now.
"I'm a serious asshole," he told her and she looked at him sharply, "but you're right - I need some help." He fixed a steady gaze on her. "I could use a good partner."
"Really?" Skeptical.
A short nod.
"I hear a proviso or two coming," she said, the clouds in her eyes dissipating, faintly amused.
"You do know me, don't'cha?" A smirk of his own. "I don't need all your secrets, Nexus. Just no more lies or distortions." He scratched his chin with his thumb. "My ship, my rules."
"Agreed." She seemed more relaxed after that, some weight had fallen from her. "Jeth'ard'rhon. Heard of it?"
A shake of his head in the negative.
"System or planet?"
"It's neither." She swivelled back around in her chair to face him. "It's an installation in the remains of a system that had been destroyed about a hundred thousand cycles ago. It's not on any charts. I know this, because we'd looked." She turned and activated the Nav array on her board, then pointed to a section that was easily a two weeken flight away. "That's the Aan Gedron Repulse and the Vrod Intersection."
Crichton squinted at it. He saw the red slash that denoted a hazard beacon.
"That's a gravimetric hell," he told her, "twelfth-level mag shear, and gravity in the tenth hexadon -range. Quickest way to suicide outside a magnetar."
"We found it running from a Dreadnought." Nexus traced a line with her finger. "There's a 'dead-zone corridor' a few hundred metras wide that runs straight into it. Just enough to take a largish Vigilante through. Most of that damage output is manufactured. It's a shield." She tapped a single spot. "Dead centre of all that is the Jeth'ard'rhon War Production Facility. From what we could glean from the records that remained, it was the WMD of the losing side of an ancient war; completely automated, powered by a slaved micro-singularity and matter transmuters that convert rubble into matériel. Perpetual soldiers, weapons and ships." Another smirk. "A lot of the control systems - the ones that give orders - were fried. That's why the Wäko Nhevar follow those who can take out their commanders. The swarms are the ones who manage to get out."
"Son of a bitch…!" Crichton exhaled. "Son of a bitch!"
"Whomever controls that controls an utterly obedient and inexhaustible army of non-living flash-clones who come with their own endless equipment and ships." She smiled that full-on-Aeryn-smile at him. "Imagine what an ambitious pirate could do with that."
Crichton sat back, his brain flipping over.
"Who else knows this?"
"As far as I know, just me and now you." Her smile faded a little. "Even the Wäko don't know. That's why no one's found it yet."
"Fuck." She watched him consider possibilities and discard just as many. "Fuh-uck." He breathed as he tensed, then relaxed to rise and turn to go.
"As I am famed for - first things first. We're getting Shiv." He halted in the door. "I'm gonna get a shower in, eat, shit, shave, all that. You, uh - do you, y'know?"
"Of course."
As he padded out, Nexus ran her hands through her hair and shook the anxiety from her head, starting to see a few new possibilities herself.