Spoilers: up through Dog With Two Bones
Rating: R (some difficult topics)
Summary: J&A angst, some Butch and Sundance.
Disclaimers: Blah, blah, blah. Not mine.
Huge thanks to my betas: Aeryncrichton and WalkingTheBeam
DISPOSSESSION
PART 1a
************
"Stupid!" Aeryn shouted at herself as a spark burned her fingertips. "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" She nearly slammed her fists on her prowler's consoles and caught herself right in time, she had done enough damage to those consoles already. She clenched her fists hard until her nails drew blood from her palms and breathed deeply to gain some control back. She couldn't afford losing another feature on her crippled Prowler, she already had to repair her comms, her radars and her maneuvering controls; even her automatic environmental regulators were showing signs of weakness.
She had started not knowing exactly where she was going and what she would find there but now, she wasn't even able to go anywhere. Why did it have to be so hard?
She had left. Alone. So fate had decided. She didn't want to go but she had to and was relieved at the time that the outcome of the coin toss had turned out that way. It made it easier, for John. No more questions without answers, he had to bow before fate too. And he did.
She had kept her comms channel open for as long as her Prowler had remained able to receive a transmission from Moya. Pilot knew she had, even though he hadn't said anything about it, he had just left his end of the comms channel open too, rerouting anything that could come his way and so she had listened to the farewells the others had said to John before silence settled in on Moya. Then she had heard him take off in his module and had listened to his ragged breathing reverberating in the confines of his small craft until her comms had gone dead, overcome by the distance she had put between them. Finally, with tears streaming down her face, she had lashed out on her craft, feeling an overwhelming urge to destroy whatever was in her way, striking blindly, unable to even keep her rage aimed at the sturdiest and less important features of her Prowler. She had to let something out and that had been the only way she had found but now, she was stranded in the middle of nowhere and she could only blame herself for it. A wry smile crept unbidden on her face. Even John can last longer on his own.
She let out a shaky sigh and resumed her repairs on her maneuvering controls. The first thing she needed was to be able to pilot her craft since she knew she could weave her way around this particularly empty blotch of space without comms and radars for now. Once her automatic course was restored, she would have time to take care of the rest.
She did not realize they were around her until it was too late, with no radars left to alert her of the danger and no comms to be hailed in warning for peaceful surrender. When the marauder loomed in front of her windshield, she had already lost consciousness, only halfway through erasing her databases. Peacekeepers knew their own weaknesses well and she could not have made it any easier for them. Their well-applied stun beam should only have further crippled her already crippled craft but with her weakening environmentals, she had not been able to compensate the intense heat the beam had generated on the hull and had quickly collapsed on her consoles. I'm sorry, John.
*************
"You have got to be kidding me…" John whispered in frozen stupor as he stared at the stretch of space before him. He blinked several times to make sure he wasn't having a particularly not funny bout of sudden near- sightedness and then squirmed in his seat, trying to get a better look at his now empty surroundings only to realize with growing dread that they were indeed so. Totally and irreversibly empty.
He pressed his lips together and stared hard at the dark space in front of him, trying to squeeze some sensible thought into his mind and, failing to, resorted to the automatic reach of his hand for his data recorder, flicking switches on and off to force some meaning out of it. The device came bursting through life and sputtered endless lists of figures and charts.
"Frell…" John breathed out as the data slowly took form before his eyes.
"Finally!" Harvey interjected in a grunt.
John shook his head, his brows deeply furrowed in utter disbelief. "This can't be…"
"John, John, John…" Harvey sighed dejectedly. "Sometimes I wonder if your eyes are connected to your brain."
John simply ignored him and continued studying the puzzling data. The figures his recorder was displaying over and over again were hinting at two wormhole occurrences in the past few arns: one was located where Moya had been not long ago, the other farther away in time and space stood exceedingly close to the spot where D'Argo's ship had blown the rogue Leviathan to inexistence and, as he read more of the data, he slowly came to realize that the weapon on D'Argo's ship had generated a proto-wormhole able to blow up a celestial body the size of the Earth's moon.
He eyed the data with growing despair. Would he ever see an end to the number of players involved in that frelling wormhole game?
It wasn't even as if he had to actually interpret that data or extrapolate on it, the answer was as evident as if written in plain English: the weaponry on that old Luxan ship was undoubtedly based on wormhole technology. There was no denying it, no other possible explanation for the data swirling before his eyes. He cut off the display with a shaking hand, overcome with the unfolding repercussions of that finding. The thought had crossed his mind when he had seen the awe-inspiring power unleashed by the old Luxan ship but he was trying so hard not to think of wormholes at the time that he had firmly squashed it. Wormholes had always equalled a possible way home but that was no longer true, worse than that, it was dangerous and thinking of the home he would never have again crushed his heart in an iron vice.
Yet, it seemed that wormholes refused to abandon him and he was getting really tired of it. He dug the palms of his hands in his red-rimmed eyes and felt his weary body start to spin and fall…
"So, which way is down?"
Harvey's high-pitched quip startled him. His eyes flew open and failed to recognize his surroundings. Dark space with specks of light still shrouded him but he no longer was in his module. He groped for something to hang on to, panicked at the uncontrolled sense of weightlessness his body was experiencing. His outstretched hand gratefully closed over what felt like a handhold but an unexpected momentum brought him crashing against the invisible black wall the handhold was on and he let out a muffled grunt of surprise.
"Which way is down?" Harvey repeated with the same high-pitched voice yet now tinged with impatience.
John examined the strange jumpsuit he was in, feeling here and there pieces of padding that had protected his body from hurt when he had crashed against the wall. He moved slowly about, his body still experiencing some sort of null gravity banning any swift movement. Then he turned his head toward Harvey and blinked, unbelieving. Harvey was dressed with the same kind of jumpsuit and looking very much like an 8-year-old version of a Sebacean-Scarran hybrid.
"What the frell?" John muttered, looking around him as frantically as he could without sending his own smaller body into a spin.
"Down is toward the enemy's door." Harvey recited, insisting on each word as if believing that John was being particularly slow-witted and he pointed toward a lighter huge opening across from them.
"I don't remember th…" John grew suddenly silent and looked at his surroundings again. He had never been in a place like this and yet it felt eerily familiar. He saw a group of kids dressed in matching jumpsuits position themselves around the opening across and realization dawned. "My memories are not enough, you also had to go through the books I've read and recreate them?!" He growled toward Harvey.
"And a marvellous job I did, don't you think?" Harvey beamed.
"Frell off, Harv'!"
"Oh, come on, John! You loved that book!"
"Yeah. And you know what? I don't wanna play anymore either." He started crawling toward the battleroom exit on his side.
"All right then," Harvey seemingly relented before catching John's free arm in a strong grip and bringing his head close to his. "Do you remember when your third-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, told you to go and introduce yourself to your new classmates?" He susurrated in John's ear.
John jerked away and banged his elbow on the wall, painfully this time. He couldn't stop the lump from forming in his throat. This was one memory whose most intimate details he had never shared with anyone, one memory that, though extremely vivid, had seemed to escape the repeated and defiling plunderings perpetrated on his brain, one memory that he particularly cherished.
"Of course you do…" Harvey's whispered words sent his heart stomping in his chest and his teachers' voice floated in his mind.
John?
"No…" John moaned, trying to resist Harvey's pull on his mind but the memory was so strong that it escaped the cradle of his arms and seeped through his fingers.
John? Why don't you take a few minutes to go and introduce yourself to your new teacher and classmates?
John gazed up at Miss Johnson with what he hoped looked like detachment even though his heart was thumping wildly in his chest. "Sure, Ma'am" he replied with a polite smile and his coolest well-rehearsed shrug. He silently said goodbye to Meg, Charles and Calvin as he put a stop to their eventful journey on Camazotz. For once, he had been happy to bid his time with a little bit of leisure reading while the other kids in the class finished their exercises, but this was so much more exciting.
He got up from behind his desk and swiftly made his way out of the class, aware of the stares following him to the door. He managed to keep his poise until he closed the door behind him and found himself in the school's main corridor, entirely alone. His gaze immediately flew to another door at the other end of the corridor and a huge grin spread on his face. An irresistible urge to giggle accompanied him on his frantic race, his legs pumping silently on the corridor's floor. It was over too soon, the distance covered in hardly more than 3 seconds and as he checked his surroundings once more and made sure he was still alone, he dashed around again back and forth between the two doors, racing so hard toward his goal that his heart felt like bursting through his chest and then he skidded to a stop, panting slightly, exhilaration reddening his cheeks and lighting his eyes. He raised himself on his toes to take a peek inside the classroom and spotted Mrs. Grimes, the fourth-grade teacher, sitting behind her desk. Even though he was actually not very fond of Miss Johnson, he would forever be grateful to her for asking his parents if they would agree to let him skip the rest of the third grade to move up to fourth grade immediately. His breathing abated slowly as he remained still before the door, his hand poised over the handle, readying himself to enter a new universe that he imagined to be full of greater and faster learning. Not to mention that DK would be his classmate now.
He was only mildly surprised to see another eight-year-old kid dressed in the scariest Halloween costume he'd ever seen sidle up to him.
"How do you feel?" The other boy asked with what seemed to be longing in his voice.
John looked at him, his face beaming in happiness. "Unique…" he breathed out and then his features grew suddenly serious and thoughtful as he tried to express himself further. "I can be me… at last. " He gave the other boy a wistful and crooked smile to which the boy answered with a slight shake of the head…
"You have to give up that line of thought, John," Harvey's words sliced through John's memory but John refused to open his eyes, trying to hold on to the little boy he had been then, still seeing the small hand poised over the handle.
"I have," John croaked. "The hard way."
"No you haven't," Harvey corrected him. "You think you have but you haven't." Harvey's voice became gentler. "You're not unique, John. You've never been unique. Scorpius only went after you because you were easier to access… or so he thought. But he had other options. Wormholes have been a long-running obsession on this side of the universe, many have had a brush with them over the course of millennia: Tithians, Boorises, Phots, the ones you call The Ancients… even Luxans at some point, though everyone still wonders how those dim-witted warriors ever found themselves with wormhole technology. Even 'they' don't know."
John felt Harvey's push on his shoulder.
"Open your eyes, John!"
Push came to shove and John slammed into a wall. His eyes opened reluctantly. They were back in the null gravity battleroom, still dressed in jumpsuits, still small but certainly not alone. Hundreds of other kids from different species were drifting in, pouring into the room from openings that seemed to be located everywhere.
"That's correct. You're not unique and you're not alone. They aren't either."
John recoiled as Harvey's concerned face intruded on his private space in the pressing confines of the module, sending the battleroom into oblivion. He averted his eyes and resolutely focused his gaze on his consoles and the empty stretch of space before him.
"You don't have to bear the weight of the universe on your shoulders, John. Let it spin without you for a while, forget about wormholes and the likes… unless you really think they can help you get Aeryn back."
John's heaving at the direct stab to his heart turned into a fit of coughing. "Too late," he whispered.
"It is NEVER too late."
John chuckled ironically and coughed harder at the same time. "Say that to the oxygen tank. It's empty," he stated with a calm he had not expected to have. He could have sworn he felt the clone push him away to press his nose on the consoles and the frustrated growl in his ears was no less real. He cut off the blinking red light of the oxygen tank's sensor and let his hand slide down in a caress on the consoles. There was nothing left to do. He wasn't giving up, just surrendering to his abilities. An arn ago he still would have had the energy to fight his way to the other end of the universe but this was just so way out of his league. Alone, without fuel or oxygen and without Aeryn, gone God only knew where. One evil at a time, one impossible deed at a time was the best he could do. "You know, Harvey…" he turned and looked the clone squarely in the eyes. "I AM unique… to you."
He smiled ruefully at Harvey's crestfallen expression then leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms on his chest, settling in for what he hoped would be a painless death this time. He could already feel his conscience slipping away with the lack of oxygen in spite of Harvey's accurate rendering of a wolf's desperate howling.
knock, knock, knock…
"Well, look who's here!" Mrs. Grimes exclaimed in good humor as she ushered John in front of her class. "John has come to say hello."
John shuffled on his feet, a bit ill at ease before the older kids' scrutiny.
"As I told you yesterday, John will be joining our class next Monday," Mrs Grimes continued with a reassuring squeeze on his shoulder, "and about just in time to help us out with the Halloween decorations."
John finally caught DK's gaze and gave him a conniving smile.
"Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, John?"
John looked at the attentive pupils before him and opened his mouth to speak…
A gleam over a prowler's dark hull suddenly flashed before his windshield and made his eyes flutter in automatic response to the stimulus.
"Aeryn…" he let out with his last breath.
Rating: R (some difficult topics)
Summary: J&A angst, some Butch and Sundance.
Disclaimers: Blah, blah, blah. Not mine.
Huge thanks to my betas: Aeryncrichton and WalkingTheBeam
DISPOSSESSION
PART 1a
************
"Stupid!" Aeryn shouted at herself as a spark burned her fingertips. "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" She nearly slammed her fists on her prowler's consoles and caught herself right in time, she had done enough damage to those consoles already. She clenched her fists hard until her nails drew blood from her palms and breathed deeply to gain some control back. She couldn't afford losing another feature on her crippled Prowler, she already had to repair her comms, her radars and her maneuvering controls; even her automatic environmental regulators were showing signs of weakness.
She had started not knowing exactly where she was going and what she would find there but now, she wasn't even able to go anywhere. Why did it have to be so hard?
She had left. Alone. So fate had decided. She didn't want to go but she had to and was relieved at the time that the outcome of the coin toss had turned out that way. It made it easier, for John. No more questions without answers, he had to bow before fate too. And he did.
She had kept her comms channel open for as long as her Prowler had remained able to receive a transmission from Moya. Pilot knew she had, even though he hadn't said anything about it, he had just left his end of the comms channel open too, rerouting anything that could come his way and so she had listened to the farewells the others had said to John before silence settled in on Moya. Then she had heard him take off in his module and had listened to his ragged breathing reverberating in the confines of his small craft until her comms had gone dead, overcome by the distance she had put between them. Finally, with tears streaming down her face, she had lashed out on her craft, feeling an overwhelming urge to destroy whatever was in her way, striking blindly, unable to even keep her rage aimed at the sturdiest and less important features of her Prowler. She had to let something out and that had been the only way she had found but now, she was stranded in the middle of nowhere and she could only blame herself for it. A wry smile crept unbidden on her face. Even John can last longer on his own.
She let out a shaky sigh and resumed her repairs on her maneuvering controls. The first thing she needed was to be able to pilot her craft since she knew she could weave her way around this particularly empty blotch of space without comms and radars for now. Once her automatic course was restored, she would have time to take care of the rest.
She did not realize they were around her until it was too late, with no radars left to alert her of the danger and no comms to be hailed in warning for peaceful surrender. When the marauder loomed in front of her windshield, she had already lost consciousness, only halfway through erasing her databases. Peacekeepers knew their own weaknesses well and she could not have made it any easier for them. Their well-applied stun beam should only have further crippled her already crippled craft but with her weakening environmentals, she had not been able to compensate the intense heat the beam had generated on the hull and had quickly collapsed on her consoles. I'm sorry, John.
*************
"You have got to be kidding me…" John whispered in frozen stupor as he stared at the stretch of space before him. He blinked several times to make sure he wasn't having a particularly not funny bout of sudden near- sightedness and then squirmed in his seat, trying to get a better look at his now empty surroundings only to realize with growing dread that they were indeed so. Totally and irreversibly empty.
He pressed his lips together and stared hard at the dark space in front of him, trying to squeeze some sensible thought into his mind and, failing to, resorted to the automatic reach of his hand for his data recorder, flicking switches on and off to force some meaning out of it. The device came bursting through life and sputtered endless lists of figures and charts.
"Frell…" John breathed out as the data slowly took form before his eyes.
"Finally!" Harvey interjected in a grunt.
John shook his head, his brows deeply furrowed in utter disbelief. "This can't be…"
"John, John, John…" Harvey sighed dejectedly. "Sometimes I wonder if your eyes are connected to your brain."
John simply ignored him and continued studying the puzzling data. The figures his recorder was displaying over and over again were hinting at two wormhole occurrences in the past few arns: one was located where Moya had been not long ago, the other farther away in time and space stood exceedingly close to the spot where D'Argo's ship had blown the rogue Leviathan to inexistence and, as he read more of the data, he slowly came to realize that the weapon on D'Argo's ship had generated a proto-wormhole able to blow up a celestial body the size of the Earth's moon.
He eyed the data with growing despair. Would he ever see an end to the number of players involved in that frelling wormhole game?
It wasn't even as if he had to actually interpret that data or extrapolate on it, the answer was as evident as if written in plain English: the weaponry on that old Luxan ship was undoubtedly based on wormhole technology. There was no denying it, no other possible explanation for the data swirling before his eyes. He cut off the display with a shaking hand, overcome with the unfolding repercussions of that finding. The thought had crossed his mind when he had seen the awe-inspiring power unleashed by the old Luxan ship but he was trying so hard not to think of wormholes at the time that he had firmly squashed it. Wormholes had always equalled a possible way home but that was no longer true, worse than that, it was dangerous and thinking of the home he would never have again crushed his heart in an iron vice.
Yet, it seemed that wormholes refused to abandon him and he was getting really tired of it. He dug the palms of his hands in his red-rimmed eyes and felt his weary body start to spin and fall…
"So, which way is down?"
Harvey's high-pitched quip startled him. His eyes flew open and failed to recognize his surroundings. Dark space with specks of light still shrouded him but he no longer was in his module. He groped for something to hang on to, panicked at the uncontrolled sense of weightlessness his body was experiencing. His outstretched hand gratefully closed over what felt like a handhold but an unexpected momentum brought him crashing against the invisible black wall the handhold was on and he let out a muffled grunt of surprise.
"Which way is down?" Harvey repeated with the same high-pitched voice yet now tinged with impatience.
John examined the strange jumpsuit he was in, feeling here and there pieces of padding that had protected his body from hurt when he had crashed against the wall. He moved slowly about, his body still experiencing some sort of null gravity banning any swift movement. Then he turned his head toward Harvey and blinked, unbelieving. Harvey was dressed with the same kind of jumpsuit and looking very much like an 8-year-old version of a Sebacean-Scarran hybrid.
"What the frell?" John muttered, looking around him as frantically as he could without sending his own smaller body into a spin.
"Down is toward the enemy's door." Harvey recited, insisting on each word as if believing that John was being particularly slow-witted and he pointed toward a lighter huge opening across from them.
"I don't remember th…" John grew suddenly silent and looked at his surroundings again. He had never been in a place like this and yet it felt eerily familiar. He saw a group of kids dressed in matching jumpsuits position themselves around the opening across and realization dawned. "My memories are not enough, you also had to go through the books I've read and recreate them?!" He growled toward Harvey.
"And a marvellous job I did, don't you think?" Harvey beamed.
"Frell off, Harv'!"
"Oh, come on, John! You loved that book!"
"Yeah. And you know what? I don't wanna play anymore either." He started crawling toward the battleroom exit on his side.
"All right then," Harvey seemingly relented before catching John's free arm in a strong grip and bringing his head close to his. "Do you remember when your third-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, told you to go and introduce yourself to your new classmates?" He susurrated in John's ear.
John jerked away and banged his elbow on the wall, painfully this time. He couldn't stop the lump from forming in his throat. This was one memory whose most intimate details he had never shared with anyone, one memory that, though extremely vivid, had seemed to escape the repeated and defiling plunderings perpetrated on his brain, one memory that he particularly cherished.
"Of course you do…" Harvey's whispered words sent his heart stomping in his chest and his teachers' voice floated in his mind.
John?
"No…" John moaned, trying to resist Harvey's pull on his mind but the memory was so strong that it escaped the cradle of his arms and seeped through his fingers.
John? Why don't you take a few minutes to go and introduce yourself to your new teacher and classmates?
John gazed up at Miss Johnson with what he hoped looked like detachment even though his heart was thumping wildly in his chest. "Sure, Ma'am" he replied with a polite smile and his coolest well-rehearsed shrug. He silently said goodbye to Meg, Charles and Calvin as he put a stop to their eventful journey on Camazotz. For once, he had been happy to bid his time with a little bit of leisure reading while the other kids in the class finished their exercises, but this was so much more exciting.
He got up from behind his desk and swiftly made his way out of the class, aware of the stares following him to the door. He managed to keep his poise until he closed the door behind him and found himself in the school's main corridor, entirely alone. His gaze immediately flew to another door at the other end of the corridor and a huge grin spread on his face. An irresistible urge to giggle accompanied him on his frantic race, his legs pumping silently on the corridor's floor. It was over too soon, the distance covered in hardly more than 3 seconds and as he checked his surroundings once more and made sure he was still alone, he dashed around again back and forth between the two doors, racing so hard toward his goal that his heart felt like bursting through his chest and then he skidded to a stop, panting slightly, exhilaration reddening his cheeks and lighting his eyes. He raised himself on his toes to take a peek inside the classroom and spotted Mrs. Grimes, the fourth-grade teacher, sitting behind her desk. Even though he was actually not very fond of Miss Johnson, he would forever be grateful to her for asking his parents if they would agree to let him skip the rest of the third grade to move up to fourth grade immediately. His breathing abated slowly as he remained still before the door, his hand poised over the handle, readying himself to enter a new universe that he imagined to be full of greater and faster learning. Not to mention that DK would be his classmate now.
He was only mildly surprised to see another eight-year-old kid dressed in the scariest Halloween costume he'd ever seen sidle up to him.
"How do you feel?" The other boy asked with what seemed to be longing in his voice.
John looked at him, his face beaming in happiness. "Unique…" he breathed out and then his features grew suddenly serious and thoughtful as he tried to express himself further. "I can be me… at last. " He gave the other boy a wistful and crooked smile to which the boy answered with a slight shake of the head…
"You have to give up that line of thought, John," Harvey's words sliced through John's memory but John refused to open his eyes, trying to hold on to the little boy he had been then, still seeing the small hand poised over the handle.
"I have," John croaked. "The hard way."
"No you haven't," Harvey corrected him. "You think you have but you haven't." Harvey's voice became gentler. "You're not unique, John. You've never been unique. Scorpius only went after you because you were easier to access… or so he thought. But he had other options. Wormholes have been a long-running obsession on this side of the universe, many have had a brush with them over the course of millennia: Tithians, Boorises, Phots, the ones you call The Ancients… even Luxans at some point, though everyone still wonders how those dim-witted warriors ever found themselves with wormhole technology. Even 'they' don't know."
John felt Harvey's push on his shoulder.
"Open your eyes, John!"
Push came to shove and John slammed into a wall. His eyes opened reluctantly. They were back in the null gravity battleroom, still dressed in jumpsuits, still small but certainly not alone. Hundreds of other kids from different species were drifting in, pouring into the room from openings that seemed to be located everywhere.
"That's correct. You're not unique and you're not alone. They aren't either."
John recoiled as Harvey's concerned face intruded on his private space in the pressing confines of the module, sending the battleroom into oblivion. He averted his eyes and resolutely focused his gaze on his consoles and the empty stretch of space before him.
"You don't have to bear the weight of the universe on your shoulders, John. Let it spin without you for a while, forget about wormholes and the likes… unless you really think they can help you get Aeryn back."
John's heaving at the direct stab to his heart turned into a fit of coughing. "Too late," he whispered.
"It is NEVER too late."
John chuckled ironically and coughed harder at the same time. "Say that to the oxygen tank. It's empty," he stated with a calm he had not expected to have. He could have sworn he felt the clone push him away to press his nose on the consoles and the frustrated growl in his ears was no less real. He cut off the blinking red light of the oxygen tank's sensor and let his hand slide down in a caress on the consoles. There was nothing left to do. He wasn't giving up, just surrendering to his abilities. An arn ago he still would have had the energy to fight his way to the other end of the universe but this was just so way out of his league. Alone, without fuel or oxygen and without Aeryn, gone God only knew where. One evil at a time, one impossible deed at a time was the best he could do. "You know, Harvey…" he turned and looked the clone squarely in the eyes. "I AM unique… to you."
He smiled ruefully at Harvey's crestfallen expression then leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms on his chest, settling in for what he hoped would be a painless death this time. He could already feel his conscience slipping away with the lack of oxygen in spite of Harvey's accurate rendering of a wolf's desperate howling.
knock, knock, knock…
"Well, look who's here!" Mrs. Grimes exclaimed in good humor as she ushered John in front of her class. "John has come to say hello."
John shuffled on his feet, a bit ill at ease before the older kids' scrutiny.
"As I told you yesterday, John will be joining our class next Monday," Mrs Grimes continued with a reassuring squeeze on his shoulder, "and about just in time to help us out with the Halloween decorations."
John finally caught DK's gaze and gave him a conniving smile.
"Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, John?"
John looked at the attentive pupils before him and opened his mouth to speak…
A gleam over a prowler's dark hull suddenly flashed before his windshield and made his eyes flutter in automatic response to the stimulus.
"Aeryn…" he let out with his last breath.
