Left Behind, Chapter 20
Rounding a corner, Chiana smiled when she saw Crichton up ahead and shouted, "Hey, Crichton!" before she realized that Furlow was with him. Seeing the Human stop and turn, Chiana loped after him as Furlow disappeared into the corridor that would eventually take her to Rohvu's main hangar.
"What's up, Pip?" He shot a glance toward Furlow, who had stopped a couple of motras down the corridor to wait for him – Chiana thought they must be going to do some more work on either Furlow's ship or the remaining transport pod, which they had brought over from Kala when Reyna and Tokar left. There was a frown on Crichton's face when he turned back toward her that she couldn't interpret.
She skidded to a stop in front of him, still smiling. With a breathless laugh, she replied, "Nothing much, Old Man. Where…where're you going?"
"We're headed to the hangar for a little Wormhole 101," he said, confirming her initial guess. Crichton surprised the hezmana out of her a microt later when he pushed her in toward one of Rohvu's scarred ribs. He leaned in close with another sideways look toward Furlow and whispered in her ear, "Pip, do me a favor."
After a couple of shocked microts, Chiana nodded. She couldn't take her eyes off Crichton's and for another microt, she thought he might kiss her. Instead, he said, "Check out the fuel and food stores. I think Furlow is up to something."
With a quick intake of breath, starting to be able to think past his nearness, Chiana nodded again. Playing along with his apparent desire to keep Furlow's suspicions at bay, she cocked her head and reached up around Crichton's shoulders, pulling him in even closer. There was no longer any space separating them and she was gratified to hear his own sharp intake of breath and feel his pulse jump under her fingertips, resting against his neck. She nipped playfully at his lower lip before answering. "Anything you want, Crichton."
She laughed as she slipped away from him and watched as he rested his head for a microt against Rohvu's rib, eyes closed. It made her feel better when she saw the rueful smile stretch his lips just before he pushed away and turned back toward Furlow, still waiting patiently down the corridor.
Chiana waved at Furlow before retracing her steps. She didn't know what made Crichton think Furlow might be stealing food or fuel, but she'd collect Bel and the two of them would start going through their meager stores. There was an added bounce to her step as she headed for Belima's quarters, two tiers up.
xxx
Okay, John, that might've been a mistake, he thought as he walked away from Chiana, each step more than a little uncomfortable. He should've known better than to play that kind of game with her, but he had wanted to keep Furlow off guard when he asked Pip to check on things for him, not wanting her to catch on to his suspicions, and he couldn't think of a better way to throw her off track.
"Maybe you didn't want to think of another way, John."
He threw Harvey a rude gesture as he rejoined Furlow, who was quiet the rest of the way to the hangar, where previously she had been outlining new ideas for the Farscape Two.
Unfortunately, Harvey didn't take the hint. "I think she's jealous of your pet Nebari," came the neural clone's voice next to his ear.
"Did I ask you?" John whispered back.
Furlow quickly brought him back to reality. "Did you say something, Johnny?"
"No, Furlow, I was, ah, just talking to myself, going over something Chiana said. Sorry." Dammit, Harvey, just go away! She didn't pursue the slip further, seeming to be preoccupied with her own demons.
When he had headed to the center chamber for breakfast earlier, he had left the data chip he had recorded the night before in the terminal in his room. An hour or so later, he had returned to his quarters and found his journal still in the drawer and a data chip in the slot, but Furlow had commed him about working on the engine design before he'd had a chance to fire up the comp and see if it was his chip or a replacement. That comm was why he was here in the first place, giving him the opportunity to finally ask Chiana to check out their supplies.
Man, I'm a suspicious bastard. Harvey chose to remain silent on that one. It was always a possibility that his fears were groundless, but he didn't think so. Just in case, though, he was going to hold back on some things while he and Furlow worked.
xxx
Belima hadn't been in her quarters when Chiana had gotten there, so she had gone to talk to Pilot about Crichton's request. The DRD Crichton had dubbed Thor – she still hadn't gotten an explanation for that name – had gone with her when she'd left for the main storage hold and was here now, checking out the level of their water supply and comparing it to what it had been a few solar days ago.
According to the manifest that Pilot had printed out for her and taking into account the crate they had loaded onto the modded transport pod the day before for Tokar and Reyna, there should still be thirty-two crates of food cubes in main storage. Chiana only counted twenty-nine. There were three crates missing. She had counted the frelling things at least four times and each time came up short. "Well, frell me. Crichton was right… That…that tralk is stealing our food."
"Chiana," Pilot commed, his voice puzzled, "the DRD that is with you just reported that our fresh water supply is at least 13,000 cubic denches short." Chiana did a quick calculation in her head – that was over fifty gallets!
"We're short three crates of food cubes, too." She angrily slammed a fist down onto one of the remaining crates, ignoring the pain the blow caused. "How do Rohvu's fuel levels look?"
"I don't know, Chiana. Rohvu's propulsion system is directly linked with his calorics and the other fluids that he's currently taking in from Kala. The levels keep fluctuating, so I cannot get a definitive reading."
Furlow no doubt knew that they wouldn't be able to keep track of fuel right now because of the transfusions. "I'm gonna frelling kill 'er."
xxx
"What the hell?" John stopped short at the sight of what appeared to be the same type of generator they had just installed on the pod for Reyna and Tokar, only this one was in Furlow's Marauder knock-off. The two of them had been working on the blueprints for about an arn and he had done just what he was afraid he might do – zoned out on the math. Furlow wasn't there when he came out of it, equations written on his left arm and even on the table next to the flimsies, nor had she answered when he'd called out to her, so he'd gone to look for her. Funny thing happened on the way to the exit ramp…
"Crichton, you there?" Chiana commed.
He took a step closer to the generator. "Yeah, Pip, I'm here." This was definitely a modification that would allow the little ship to travel greater distances. DamBaDa was a two-week trip from here…
"Crichton, there's…there's both food and water missing."
"Dammit." So, the bitch was planning to betray them. John went back to the table to grab the blueprints before heading down the ramp. He didn't know where Furlow was at the moment, but he thought it might be a good idea to destroy those blueprints. He ran for the waste disposer next to the workbench, where one of the reassembled and refitted DRDs was waiting, in need of only a power cell to get it back on line.
Opening the shoot to the disposer, he was about to deposit the plans for the Farscape Two that he had been working on so diligently for weeks, when he hesitated. He had enjoyed the work, and it had opened up a lot of the wormhole information the Ancients had hidden in his brain. He looked at the semi-crumpled sheets in his hand. Maybe I can—
Suddenly, his vision went white and then all the lights went out.
xxx
"I can't let you do that, Johnny." Furlow dropped the spanner she had just used on John Crichton's head. The man crumpled to the floor of the hangar more slowly than the spanner and with a lot less noise. Reaching down, she took the flimsies from his slack hand and the pulse pistol from its holster, noting in passing that the spanner had left a smear of red on the floor. She looked at him, face down, one arm flung out to the side, blood pooling on the back of his neck. She must've hit poor Johnny harder than she thought.
"Crichton?" his comms buzzed.
"Sorry, Chiana, our Johnny's asleep." She kicked him once to make sure he was out cold. "You shoulda taken me up on that partnership." Furlow shook her head with regret and pulled a device from one of the many pockets in her jumpsuit. She pushed a button on the remote which, if it worked the way she had programmed it, would lock the doors to the hangar and cut Pilot out of the loop so that he couldn't override the locks.
"Crichton, you there?"
Leaving John where he lay, Furlow hurried back to her ship. She wouldn't have much time to get away, even with her safety precautions. If it was only Belima to worry about, she wouldn't be worried, but Chiana was not just smart, she was street smart. She probably knew all about picking locks, even electronic ones that were designed not to be picked.
She heard movement behind her, a scraping against the floor from the general direction of Crichton's body, a bump against something heavy. Rather than turning to see if it was him – what else could it be? – Furlow broke into a full run back to her ship, dashing up the ramp just in time to avoid what sounded like a pulse blast.
She tossed Crichton's pistol onto the co-pilot's seat, dropped into the pilot's seat, and flipped her engines on, not bothering to strap herself in. Realizing that she still held the blueprints to Crichton's module and that she didn't have a good place to put them right now, she shifted a bit so she could sit on them. At least they wouldn't go flying around the ship, if things got rough.
A pounding started on the hatch and she could hear Johnny shouting something at her, although it was too muffled to hear what he was shouting. Probably nothing nice. A weird hissing sound started up in the vicinity of the hatch, too. She reached over and flipped on her external monitor which showed her a highly tinked John Crichton, pounding impotently on the hatch, and a not so impotent DRD in the process of cutting a hole in the hatch that would give Johnny a way in.
"Oh, frell it all, Johnny, I didn't want to have to do this…" Furlow hit a button on her remote and the view from the monitor suddenly changed. The blue DRD was sucked out the opening to the hangar, it's laser saw still trying to cut through a bulkhead that was no longer in reach. Crichton was holding onto one of the struts to her landing gear for all he was worth. The force of the venting atmosphere tore his grip free from the strut and he disappeared from her sight.
"Good bye, John Crichton." Furlow didn't want to see what happened to him, so she switched off the monitor and took her ship out into space.
xxx
With nothing better to do, Belima thought that she might look for John and see if he wanted any help repairing the remaining DRDs. The little yellow ones from Kala all worked well, but the red and blue ones from the other Leviathans, the dead ones, needed to be adapted to work with Rohvu's systems. When she had been unable to find him in his room or in the center chamber, she had gone looking for him on Command, but he wasn't there either.
Then it occurred to her that they all wore the pretty comms and that was what they were there for – to talk to each other when they weren't in the same room. She frequently left hers turned off, which was the case now, so she pulled it off her tunic and switched it on.
"John?" she said into her comms.
His response startled her. "Belima!" he shouted. "Stop Furlow!" She could barely hear him over a roaring sound in the background. Belima didn't know what to do.
"Chiana?" she commed, a little frantic.
Before Chiana could answer, though, Pilot spoke. "Chiana! Belima! The doors to the main hangar are locked and the atmosphere is being vented! I cannot shut it off!"
"Frell," Chiana's voice came to her from the comms. "Belima, run as fast as you can to the hangar. Crichton's in trouble."
"Where are you, Chiana?" Belima's voice shook with fear. She had gone from bored to terrified in the space of just a handful of microts as events suddenly spun out of control.
"I'm on my way to the hangar. Hurry!"
xxx
God, I hate vacuum! John thought as he tried desperately to hold onto – hell, he didn't even know what he had hold of, only that it was keeping his sorry ass from being sucked out into space. Again.
He couldn't hear anything beyond the roar of the air venting out of the hangar. He hoped Belima had heard him and understood, hoped that she had gotten Pilot to lock down the outside access to the hangar so Furlow didn't get away… He could feel his vision start to go again as the oxygen became too thin for him to breath.
xxx
Chiana stopped her headlong dash into the hangar by slamming into the closed and locked door. She was so focused on getting to Crichton that she didn't even feel the impact. Belima was already there, trying to pry the door open, but with no success.
"Crichton!" Chiana shouted. No response. With a scream, she pulled her pulse pistol and fired at the door controls, which blew apart with a shower of sparks. Something must've come loose with the blast, as she could now feel air flowing past her and through a crack between the door and the jamb into the hangar.
"Belima, help me!" She shoved her fingers into the crack, scraping the skin from her knuckles, and began to pull at the door open with all her strength. Belima moved to do the same from a few denches below the spot Chiana gripped. Between the two of them, the door began to slowly swing open with a grinding of gears.
xxx
Pilot was beginning to panic at his inability to control anything in the hangar. It wasn't like before, when he simply couldn't reach his controls. No, this was deliberate sabotage by someone he had trusted. Furlow's betrayal shook him to his core – he had begun to think of her as his friend.
His internal monitors indicated that the atmosphere in the hangar was almost gone and that Furlow's ship was no longer on board. Another monitor showed him her ship's power signature as it sped away. Switching to visuals in the hangar, Pilot was appalled as he watched John Crichton pulled from the hangar toward open space – as soon as his grip on the ring that served as an attachment point for safety lines loosened, he would be gone.
As Pilot watched, helpless to do anything to save the Human, he saw the shimmer of the docking web as it moved into place at about the same time that John's grip gave way. He closed his eyes and said a quick prayer of thanks to the Builders for all that had come to pass that allowed Rohvu the independence and the quick wit to make such a move on his own initiative, utterly amazed to realize that Kaarvok had managed to do some good for them after all. His short prayer finished, he set Rohvu's newly acquired DRDs to work at preventing the loss of any more atmosphere.
xxx
"Crichton!" Chiana shrieked in horror as he lost his grip on the tether ring in the wall. He appeared to be unconscious as he was torn from the hangar. Tears streaming down her face, Chiana turned to Belima. "Keep…keep the door open." Both women fought against the pull of the air, now rushing through the door into the still-venting hangar.
With a lightning survey of the hangar for a path that had enough obstacles to keep her from being sucked into space, too, Chiana dashed into the room, fighting to keep her feet. With a surge of relief, all too brief because of the still dire situation, she saw that Pilot must've been able to deploy the docking web – Crichton appeared to be hanging from nothing as the web pulled him slowly back into the hangar.
"Pilot, thank you," she cried. "Oh, Crichton, please… Please don't be dead." She was almost to him when suddenly the air stopped flowing. Debris, rather than funneling out the main hangar door, dropped or fluttered to the floor, depending on its weight. No longer fighting against the pull of the wind, Chiana stumbled, but then ran to Crichton, who now lay on the hangar floor like a child's discarded toy.
Belima came running into the room as Chiana dropped to her knees next to Crichton, gathering his limp body into her arms. There was no sign of life in his open blue eyes.
"NO!" she screamed. "No! I won't… I won't let you do this!" Chiana carefully, gently laid him down flat on the floor. "Belima, stay with him," she ordered as she stood. Eyes still on Crichton, she backed toward the doorway. Then she turned and ran for the med bay.
xxx
"Frell! Where is it?" Think, Chiana, think! Reyna had cleaned things up and put things in what was, to her, a logical order, but that meant that nothing was where it had been that very first day, when the two of them had done an inventory. To compound the problem, new things had been recently added to the mix. That first day, they had found something that Reyna had called "kill shots and their antidotes" – it was the antidote that she frantically searched for now. It had to be here somewhere, but she couldn't frelling remember where it had been moved to.
There! In the back of the cupboard. With a leap, Chiana snatched two of the vials and dashed back to the hangar. She had no idea if this would work, but it was the only thing she had to try.
A hundred microts later, she slid into the hangar. Belima sat on the floor, her face wet from her own tears, Crichton's head resting in her lap, his sightless eyes staring toward the ceiling.
"Is he gone, Chiana?" she asked.
"He's not allowed to be dead, Bel." Chiana looked at the vial in her hand. The vial itself appeared to have a needle built right in, so all she had to do – she hoped – was stick it in him and push the plunger. Not knowing where to inject him, she decided to go for the spot where he had said his heart was.
She slammed the needle into Crichton's chest, through the black shirt he wore. "Live, you frellnik!"
Nothing happened, at first, and Chiana started to fumble with the second vial when Crichton abruptly threw himself from Belima's lap, coughing, wheezing, gasping for air, but very much alive. The force of his movement caused Chiana to sit back hard, sending her feet and legs out from under her.
"Chiana!" Belima shouted, her green eyes wide with wonder.
Crichton was on his hands and knees, body wracked by great, wrenching coughs. Chiana scrambled to his side, crawling the short distance. "Crichton?" She reached out to him and pulled him toward her as she knelt.
His coughing finally subsided and he seemed to become aware of her presence as he leaned into her. "Pip?" His pupils were so large there was only the barest hint of blue in his eyes as he stared at her.
Unblinking, he reached up to thread his fingers through her hair, his hands cold against her skin. She felt a shudder run through him as he whispered, "Oh, God," and pulled her into his arms, holding her as though he'd never let her go.