Chapter Three
"Chiana..." Pilot's somewhat shaky voice was barely audible above the pounding on the doors.
"Ye...yeah, Pilot?" the young and frightened Nebari responded. She was standing on Pilot's control console, feet planted firmly between some of his currently useless controls and being careful not to step on any of them.
"Do you think your companion will make it to Command?" The terror and despair in his voice made Chiana turn her attention to him, looking into his wide orange eyes. She had never heard such a tone in Pilot's voice back on Moya, even during their worst times.
"Yeah, I do." She was surprised to realize that she honestly did believe Crichton would make it. "Crichton's really lucky, you see. He always...always lands on his feet." Her attention shifted back to the door through which her friend had gone just a quarter arn earlier. "He'll make it, Pilot. He has to."
Particularly violent pounding at another door brought her attention – and Crichton's Winona – to bear, just as the door slid open.
"Chiana!" Pilot's voice was urgent, this time.
"I see 'em, Pilot!" she shouted, firing the pulse pistol at two dirty, disheveled Xarai. Their random pounding – at least, she hoped that it was random, not wanting to think about them actually knowing how the doors worked – had apparently found those door controls. As she continued to fire, hitting one of them between the eyes but missing the other, she leaped from the control console to the catwalk and sprinted, still firing, to get the frelling door closed again.
***
The corridor heading more or less in the right direction to reach Command had been devoid of Xarai when John had opened the door and ventured out into the distressed Leviathan.
The first thing that hit him was the smell. Closing the door behind him, he shook his head, trying to clear it of the fumes that assailed him. Looking down, he saw piles of bone and rotting flesh intermingled with Human – Sebacean – feces. He gagged and forced his way through, carefully stepping around the smelly hazards to navigation, just as carefully forcing his mind to consider them just that – hazards to navigation.
John made his way as quietly and cautiously as he could, doing his best not to attract unwanted attention to his unarmed ass, but still, rounding the third corner, he nearly tripped over a Xarai female relieving herself in the corner created by one of Rohvu's ribs. They were both surprised, and John was able to knock her out with a quick blow to the head before she could alert any others who might be nearby to his presence.
A quick search of the unconscious woman and the surrounding area turned up nothing he could use as a weapon. Damn. He kept going, he had no idea for how long, following the twists and turns of the corridors, transitioning between tiers.
Transitioning between one tier and the next, the last transition, he thought, John found his way blocked by three Xarai right in the middle of his path – two male and one female. One of the males watched, apparently waiting his turn, as the other...uh, recreated...with the female. Everything stopped when John appeared. All eyes locked on him.
"Hey, kids, don't mind me. I'm just passin' through." Not paying attention to a word John said – the old translator microbes must not stand up to repeated twinning – the Xarai who had been waiting his turn stood up and began to come toward the Human, intentions clearly violent.
Looking to his left, then his right, John spotted the only thing he had seen so far that could even remotely work as a weapon – a rather large femur. Clamping down on nausea, he grabbed one end – thank God it had been picked clean – and swung it at the head of his attacker.
The knobby end of the femur connected with the man's temple with a sickening thud and the Xarai dropped like a stone. The other two had gone back to what they had been doing before. John leaped over them, still hanging onto his makeshift club, running through the corridor, heedless of any living obstacles in his path.
Finally, he stopped running, hanging onto the edge of a doorway to steady himself as he allowed his heart rate and breathing to return to some semblance of normality.
Focusing on his surroundings, he realized that he was getting close to the area in which he and Chi had watched Kaarvok murder D'Argo, which he had to go through in order to reach Command. Holding his breath, he listened intently for sounds of pursuit. He heard nothing. He let out the breath he had been holding and accidentally took a deep breath to refill his lungs. John realized, not without being a little grossed out, that he had gotten used to the smell that permeated the ship.
Taking a better grip on his club – it's just a frelling club, nothing more! – John set off on the last leg of the harrowing trip, praying that Command would not house any more Xarai and wishing – in a cowardly way – that the Xarai had left the area and taken D'Argo's corpse with them.
"Shit. Why don't my wishes ever come true?" he asked himself, as he rounded a corner only to be confronted with a living Xarai female and the dead bodies of both D'Argo and Chiana. He had managed to forget that Chi had been twinned and that one of her had been...harvested, as the other ran off.
Avoiding Chiana's dead, sightless eyes, he watched in horrified fascination as the blonde Xarai tried repeatedly to wake D'Argo, poking him in the ribs and on the shoulder.
"Ain't gonna happen, missy," he said to her. Whether she understood him or not, he didn't know, but she did stop prodding D'Argo's shoulder and whirled around to look at him, crouched and ready to spring.
He raised the club, ready to defend himself, but she didn't attack. Instead, she stood, raising her arms, palms out, in a gesture of supplication. She said something to him, but it didn't seem to be in any language his translator microbes were familiar with. It was guttural and sounded vaguely like Sebacean, only...not.
"I don't know what you're saying, but I won't hurt you if you don't try to hurt me." In a cautious good-faith gesture, he lowered the club. She pointed to D'Argo, looking at him with pleading eyes.
"He's dead. There isn't anything I can do for him," he told her, shaking his head. He wished otherwise – D'Argo alive would be a really welcome sight right about now. Looking beyond his friend, he saw D's Qualta blade lying on the floor nearby.
Moving slowly around the Xarai woman, not taking his eyes off her, he moved over to the Qualta and knelt, picking it up. "D, man, I wish you were here, but I'll take any help I can get."
The girl hadn't moved, except to watch him as he passed her. He took the risk of taking his full attention off her and turning it instead to the blade he held in his hands. He shifted the club from his hand to under his arm, holding it against his ribs as he examined the Qualta.
D'Argo had shown him how to work it, even allowing him to fire it a couple of times. This one, though, didn't seem to be equal and original, as Kaarvok had claimed of the twinned Sebaceans – of course, he had already seen enough to put the lie to that claim, anyway. It looked like this one would work just fine as a sword, but not as a rifle.
Whatever. A huge fucking sword in the hand beat a femur upside the head, any day. He dropped his club and, with a glance back at the girl, who was still standing near D'Argo's body, he headed on toward Command.
He ran into no other Xarai on his way to Command, but John did become aware, after a few minutes, that the girl had abandoned D'Argo to follow him. She was keeping her distance, though, and didn't seem to mean him any harm.
John breathed a sigh of relief when the next turn took him to the open door of Command. Moving slowly forward, he stopped just outside and peered in. There were four Xarai immediately visible, sleeping in a pile near the main console.
He quietly crept into the room, sword at the ready, looking as near to all directions at once as he could. There were two more Xarai asleep just around the corner from the door, but that seemed to be it. Six, huh? With a glance at the sword and a deep breath, he flung himself toward the largest group of Xarai, hoping he could kill them before the other two could reach him, wishing he didn't have to kill them at all.
It was over quickly, with little resistance. He turned to face the other two, who couldn't have possibly slept through his attack, the Qualta slipping a bit in his grasp.
He was still breathing hard, adrenalin pumping through his veins, ready for a fight when he realized that it was indeed over. The Xarai female who had followed him had picked up the "club" he had dropped and used it on the other two. Seeing the mess she had made of their heads, making the connection to the slipperiness of the Qualta's hilt in his hands, John dropped the blade to the floor and sank to his knees, vomiting helplessly.
***
The pounding at the doors had stopped about a half arn ago, but still Chiana could not relax. Relaxing would be a very bad idea. Just because the Xarai seemed to have lost interest in Pilot's den for now, didn't mean they wouldn't be back.
She sat on Pilot's console, Winona cradled in her arms, while Pilot, she thought, might be asleep behind her. "Come on, Crichton," she said softly to herself, not wanting to wake Pilot if he really was able to let his guard down enough to sleep. She didn't think the poor guy had been able to get much sleep in the past few cycles, according to the things he had told her. "You...you've gotta come back."
"Pip, are you there?" Crichton's voice came from the console, somewhere near her left boot, making her jump.
"Crichton!" she screamed, no longer in any way worried about waking Pilot, who was now yelling incoherently, startled into wakefulness by Crichton's voice. He would've been flinging his arms around, too, she thought as she laughed hysterically, if the Xarai hadn't eaten them.
"Come on, Pip, answer me." Crichton sounded a little frazzled.
"Pilot, what do I do? How do I get him to hear me?" She looked at the controls on the console but didn't have a clue which one to press to open the ship's internal comms to a two-way conversation.
"What? I don't..." Pilot didn't really sound like he knew which one to press either.
"Which control works the comms, Pilot?" she shouted at him as Crichton's voice sounded again.
"Chiana, dammit, answer me!"
"Push the green button next to the speaker, Chiana," Pilot said. "I think that's the right one. It's been so long since there has been anyone here to communicate with..."
She jammed her hand down onto the control. "I'm here, Crichton!"
"Thank God! Chiana, we're in Command. Pilot, do you know off hand what the control collar controls look like?"
Chiana's eyes widened. "You said you knew what to look for!"
"I lied. Pilot?"
"I do not know what the controls look like," Pilot sounded apologetic. "I have never seen them."
She heard Crichton swear in his native language, then, "All right. I'll figure something out. What?"
"We didn't say anything, Old Man."
"Jesus, will you shut up, Har—" Crichton cut himself off. "Wait a second. I think we – I think I found it."
"Who's 'we,' Crichton?" Chiana asked.
"Um, frell." He hesitated, then said, "A Xarai chick helped me out, I don't know why."
"You're fahrbot, Crichton! Crichton...John...please, don't trust her. Don't...don't get yourself killed, okay?" She was close to tears. "I need you alive, okay?"
"I'm not gonna get myself killed, Chi. Hey, you and Pilot work on figuring out the controls to seal off his den and vent the rest of the ship to space. I and, uh, Raquel here'll take out this control collar and head back to you."
"Crichton." He didn't respond. "Crichton!" Still nothing. "You frellnik!" She pounded a fist on the console. "You turned off the comms, didn't you?"
***
"Yes, John, this is the one," Harvey said, pointing at a black, white, and red console a few feet away from the one John knew to be the main ship's controls. The neural clown was dressed up like something out of that cheesy movie One Million BC, or whatever it was called, to go along with his Raquel Welch reference to the Xarai girl.
John walked over to the console. "All right, pal, you say these are the right controls... Prove it. Which ones release that collar?"
"I can't tell you that, pal. I, as a Peacekeeper, can't give away our secrets to just anyone, you know."
"Quit with the crap, Harv. You're no more a Peacekeeper than I am. And if I die here, you die here. Now, which controls?"
He watched as Harvey seemed to deflate. "I honestly don't know, John. Scorpius was never on a Leviathan to find out which controls would be used."
"Then how do you know this is the right console?"
"I've seen schematics. It looks like the right one."
"Shit." John closed his eyes, trying to recall his very first minutes on this side of the universe. Minutes filled with confusion and shouting and fear and a Luxan in hyperrage, tearing out cables and wires at random. His memory seemed to confirm the location and look of the console Harvey claimed was the right one, but he wasn't sure how reliable his memory of that day was. It could just be wishful thinking.
What the hell, he thought, if I can't get that collar off Rohvu, we're dead anyway. Since there were no loose wires waiting to be yanked, he lifted his sword and brought it down hard in the center of the console. There was a shower of sparks as the blade did its work, parting the covering to the console like a knife through butter, exposing all sorts of wires and cables.
Before pulling any of them, hoping that just smashing the console might do the trick, he went back to the main console and turned the comms back on. "Pilot, man, I don't suppose you and Rohvu can tell whether or not that collar's off...?"
There was a short pause, during which John imagined Pilot was relaying his question to the Leviathan.
"No, Crichton, the collar is still functioning."
Oh, well, time to pull some wires. With a glance over at the girl, verifying that she was still not a threat, he returned to the loose wires and started pulling. Having left the comms channel open, he said, "Pilot, you guys make sure you let me know as soon as anything changes."
"We will," Pilot affirmed. John was glad to hear that the poor guy's voice was getting stronger and steadier each time he heard it. Hope was an amazing thing.
After about the fourth wire yanked, John heard the words he most wanted to hear, just then.
"You did it!" Pilot sounded excited. "The control collar is breaking free!"
"Yee haw!" John shouted jubilantly! Not wasting a minute, he grabbed Raquel's hand and the Qualta blade and started running back toward the den.
"Chiana..." Pilot's somewhat shaky voice was barely audible above the pounding on the doors.
"Ye...yeah, Pilot?" the young and frightened Nebari responded. She was standing on Pilot's control console, feet planted firmly between some of his currently useless controls and being careful not to step on any of them.
"Do you think your companion will make it to Command?" The terror and despair in his voice made Chiana turn her attention to him, looking into his wide orange eyes. She had never heard such a tone in Pilot's voice back on Moya, even during their worst times.
"Yeah, I do." She was surprised to realize that she honestly did believe Crichton would make it. "Crichton's really lucky, you see. He always...always lands on his feet." Her attention shifted back to the door through which her friend had gone just a quarter arn earlier. "He'll make it, Pilot. He has to."
Particularly violent pounding at another door brought her attention – and Crichton's Winona – to bear, just as the door slid open.
"Chiana!" Pilot's voice was urgent, this time.
"I see 'em, Pilot!" she shouted, firing the pulse pistol at two dirty, disheveled Xarai. Their random pounding – at least, she hoped that it was random, not wanting to think about them actually knowing how the doors worked – had apparently found those door controls. As she continued to fire, hitting one of them between the eyes but missing the other, she leaped from the control console to the catwalk and sprinted, still firing, to get the frelling door closed again.
***
The corridor heading more or less in the right direction to reach Command had been devoid of Xarai when John had opened the door and ventured out into the distressed Leviathan.
The first thing that hit him was the smell. Closing the door behind him, he shook his head, trying to clear it of the fumes that assailed him. Looking down, he saw piles of bone and rotting flesh intermingled with Human – Sebacean – feces. He gagged and forced his way through, carefully stepping around the smelly hazards to navigation, just as carefully forcing his mind to consider them just that – hazards to navigation.
John made his way as quietly and cautiously as he could, doing his best not to attract unwanted attention to his unarmed ass, but still, rounding the third corner, he nearly tripped over a Xarai female relieving herself in the corner created by one of Rohvu's ribs. They were both surprised, and John was able to knock her out with a quick blow to the head before she could alert any others who might be nearby to his presence.
A quick search of the unconscious woman and the surrounding area turned up nothing he could use as a weapon. Damn. He kept going, he had no idea for how long, following the twists and turns of the corridors, transitioning between tiers.
Transitioning between one tier and the next, the last transition, he thought, John found his way blocked by three Xarai right in the middle of his path – two male and one female. One of the males watched, apparently waiting his turn, as the other...uh, recreated...with the female. Everything stopped when John appeared. All eyes locked on him.
"Hey, kids, don't mind me. I'm just passin' through." Not paying attention to a word John said – the old translator microbes must not stand up to repeated twinning – the Xarai who had been waiting his turn stood up and began to come toward the Human, intentions clearly violent.
Looking to his left, then his right, John spotted the only thing he had seen so far that could even remotely work as a weapon – a rather large femur. Clamping down on nausea, he grabbed one end – thank God it had been picked clean – and swung it at the head of his attacker.
The knobby end of the femur connected with the man's temple with a sickening thud and the Xarai dropped like a stone. The other two had gone back to what they had been doing before. John leaped over them, still hanging onto his makeshift club, running through the corridor, heedless of any living obstacles in his path.
Finally, he stopped running, hanging onto the edge of a doorway to steady himself as he allowed his heart rate and breathing to return to some semblance of normality.
Focusing on his surroundings, he realized that he was getting close to the area in which he and Chi had watched Kaarvok murder D'Argo, which he had to go through in order to reach Command. Holding his breath, he listened intently for sounds of pursuit. He heard nothing. He let out the breath he had been holding and accidentally took a deep breath to refill his lungs. John realized, not without being a little grossed out, that he had gotten used to the smell that permeated the ship.
Taking a better grip on his club – it's just a frelling club, nothing more! – John set off on the last leg of the harrowing trip, praying that Command would not house any more Xarai and wishing – in a cowardly way – that the Xarai had left the area and taken D'Argo's corpse with them.
"Shit. Why don't my wishes ever come true?" he asked himself, as he rounded a corner only to be confronted with a living Xarai female and the dead bodies of both D'Argo and Chiana. He had managed to forget that Chi had been twinned and that one of her had been...harvested, as the other ran off.
Avoiding Chiana's dead, sightless eyes, he watched in horrified fascination as the blonde Xarai tried repeatedly to wake D'Argo, poking him in the ribs and on the shoulder.
"Ain't gonna happen, missy," he said to her. Whether she understood him or not, he didn't know, but she did stop prodding D'Argo's shoulder and whirled around to look at him, crouched and ready to spring.
He raised the club, ready to defend himself, but she didn't attack. Instead, she stood, raising her arms, palms out, in a gesture of supplication. She said something to him, but it didn't seem to be in any language his translator microbes were familiar with. It was guttural and sounded vaguely like Sebacean, only...not.
"I don't know what you're saying, but I won't hurt you if you don't try to hurt me." In a cautious good-faith gesture, he lowered the club. She pointed to D'Argo, looking at him with pleading eyes.
"He's dead. There isn't anything I can do for him," he told her, shaking his head. He wished otherwise – D'Argo alive would be a really welcome sight right about now. Looking beyond his friend, he saw D's Qualta blade lying on the floor nearby.
Moving slowly around the Xarai woman, not taking his eyes off her, he moved over to the Qualta and knelt, picking it up. "D, man, I wish you were here, but I'll take any help I can get."
The girl hadn't moved, except to watch him as he passed her. He took the risk of taking his full attention off her and turning it instead to the blade he held in his hands. He shifted the club from his hand to under his arm, holding it against his ribs as he examined the Qualta.
D'Argo had shown him how to work it, even allowing him to fire it a couple of times. This one, though, didn't seem to be equal and original, as Kaarvok had claimed of the twinned Sebaceans – of course, he had already seen enough to put the lie to that claim, anyway. It looked like this one would work just fine as a sword, but not as a rifle.
Whatever. A huge fucking sword in the hand beat a femur upside the head, any day. He dropped his club and, with a glance back at the girl, who was still standing near D'Argo's body, he headed on toward Command.
He ran into no other Xarai on his way to Command, but John did become aware, after a few minutes, that the girl had abandoned D'Argo to follow him. She was keeping her distance, though, and didn't seem to mean him any harm.
John breathed a sigh of relief when the next turn took him to the open door of Command. Moving slowly forward, he stopped just outside and peered in. There were four Xarai immediately visible, sleeping in a pile near the main console.
He quietly crept into the room, sword at the ready, looking as near to all directions at once as he could. There were two more Xarai asleep just around the corner from the door, but that seemed to be it. Six, huh? With a glance at the sword and a deep breath, he flung himself toward the largest group of Xarai, hoping he could kill them before the other two could reach him, wishing he didn't have to kill them at all.
It was over quickly, with little resistance. He turned to face the other two, who couldn't have possibly slept through his attack, the Qualta slipping a bit in his grasp.
He was still breathing hard, adrenalin pumping through his veins, ready for a fight when he realized that it was indeed over. The Xarai female who had followed him had picked up the "club" he had dropped and used it on the other two. Seeing the mess she had made of their heads, making the connection to the slipperiness of the Qualta's hilt in his hands, John dropped the blade to the floor and sank to his knees, vomiting helplessly.
***
The pounding at the doors had stopped about a half arn ago, but still Chiana could not relax. Relaxing would be a very bad idea. Just because the Xarai seemed to have lost interest in Pilot's den for now, didn't mean they wouldn't be back.
She sat on Pilot's console, Winona cradled in her arms, while Pilot, she thought, might be asleep behind her. "Come on, Crichton," she said softly to herself, not wanting to wake Pilot if he really was able to let his guard down enough to sleep. She didn't think the poor guy had been able to get much sleep in the past few cycles, according to the things he had told her. "You...you've gotta come back."
"Pip, are you there?" Crichton's voice came from the console, somewhere near her left boot, making her jump.
"Crichton!" she screamed, no longer in any way worried about waking Pilot, who was now yelling incoherently, startled into wakefulness by Crichton's voice. He would've been flinging his arms around, too, she thought as she laughed hysterically, if the Xarai hadn't eaten them.
"Come on, Pip, answer me." Crichton sounded a little frazzled.
"Pilot, what do I do? How do I get him to hear me?" She looked at the controls on the console but didn't have a clue which one to press to open the ship's internal comms to a two-way conversation.
"What? I don't..." Pilot didn't really sound like he knew which one to press either.
"Which control works the comms, Pilot?" she shouted at him as Crichton's voice sounded again.
"Chiana, dammit, answer me!"
"Push the green button next to the speaker, Chiana," Pilot said. "I think that's the right one. It's been so long since there has been anyone here to communicate with..."
She jammed her hand down onto the control. "I'm here, Crichton!"
"Thank God! Chiana, we're in Command. Pilot, do you know off hand what the control collar controls look like?"
Chiana's eyes widened. "You said you knew what to look for!"
"I lied. Pilot?"
"I do not know what the controls look like," Pilot sounded apologetic. "I have never seen them."
She heard Crichton swear in his native language, then, "All right. I'll figure something out. What?"
"We didn't say anything, Old Man."
"Jesus, will you shut up, Har—" Crichton cut himself off. "Wait a second. I think we – I think I found it."
"Who's 'we,' Crichton?" Chiana asked.
"Um, frell." He hesitated, then said, "A Xarai chick helped me out, I don't know why."
"You're fahrbot, Crichton! Crichton...John...please, don't trust her. Don't...don't get yourself killed, okay?" She was close to tears. "I need you alive, okay?"
"I'm not gonna get myself killed, Chi. Hey, you and Pilot work on figuring out the controls to seal off his den and vent the rest of the ship to space. I and, uh, Raquel here'll take out this control collar and head back to you."
"Crichton." He didn't respond. "Crichton!" Still nothing. "You frellnik!" She pounded a fist on the console. "You turned off the comms, didn't you?"
***
"Yes, John, this is the one," Harvey said, pointing at a black, white, and red console a few feet away from the one John knew to be the main ship's controls. The neural clown was dressed up like something out of that cheesy movie One Million BC, or whatever it was called, to go along with his Raquel Welch reference to the Xarai girl.
John walked over to the console. "All right, pal, you say these are the right controls... Prove it. Which ones release that collar?"
"I can't tell you that, pal. I, as a Peacekeeper, can't give away our secrets to just anyone, you know."
"Quit with the crap, Harv. You're no more a Peacekeeper than I am. And if I die here, you die here. Now, which controls?"
He watched as Harvey seemed to deflate. "I honestly don't know, John. Scorpius was never on a Leviathan to find out which controls would be used."
"Then how do you know this is the right console?"
"I've seen schematics. It looks like the right one."
"Shit." John closed his eyes, trying to recall his very first minutes on this side of the universe. Minutes filled with confusion and shouting and fear and a Luxan in hyperrage, tearing out cables and wires at random. His memory seemed to confirm the location and look of the console Harvey claimed was the right one, but he wasn't sure how reliable his memory of that day was. It could just be wishful thinking.
What the hell, he thought, if I can't get that collar off Rohvu, we're dead anyway. Since there were no loose wires waiting to be yanked, he lifted his sword and brought it down hard in the center of the console. There was a shower of sparks as the blade did its work, parting the covering to the console like a knife through butter, exposing all sorts of wires and cables.
Before pulling any of them, hoping that just smashing the console might do the trick, he went back to the main console and turned the comms back on. "Pilot, man, I don't suppose you and Rohvu can tell whether or not that collar's off...?"
There was a short pause, during which John imagined Pilot was relaying his question to the Leviathan.
"No, Crichton, the collar is still functioning."
Oh, well, time to pull some wires. With a glance over at the girl, verifying that she was still not a threat, he returned to the loose wires and started pulling. Having left the comms channel open, he said, "Pilot, you guys make sure you let me know as soon as anything changes."
"We will," Pilot affirmed. John was glad to hear that the poor guy's voice was getting stronger and steadier each time he heard it. Hope was an amazing thing.
After about the fourth wire yanked, John heard the words he most wanted to hear, just then.
"You did it!" Pilot sounded excited. "The control collar is breaking free!"
"Yee haw!" John shouted jubilantly! Not wasting a minute, he grabbed Raquel's hand and the Qualta blade and started running back toward the den.