The Virginia countryside sure did look lush this spring, John thought to himself as he made one last pass over the airfield in the module in order to visually confirm the presence of various TV news crews amongst the assembled throng. The reporters were identifiable by their familiarly branded vans and through the presence of the film crews: Equipment laden trios and quartets of people, dressed in civilian clothing. He banked the module to bring them back towards the agreed landing site, giving a final thumbs-up to Aeryn, lining up to bring them in to land on a gentle trajectory.
After his bad experience on the Ancients' false earth, there was no way he wasn't taking precautions this time, no way he was going to risk Aeryn and himself being quietly and secretly whisked away, hidden from the eyes of the world in some high-security military base. He had demanded the presence of the journalists at the landing site as part of his conditions before coming down from orbit.
The module rolled to a halt, only about two hundred yards from the welcoming committee. He gave one last cursory check, making sure that the eyes of the media were on them, for their own protection against the machinations of his own government. Satisfied, he popped the module's canopy open.
He stood, looking around him, squinting in the sun and shielding his eyes with one hand. He nodded in satisfaction and began to climb down the short distance to the ground. He couldn't quite believe it. After two and a half years of unbelievable adventures, he had finally made it home to Earth, safe and sound.
He heard Aeryn begin to clamber out of the cockpit behind him. She had made it quite clear, earlier, that she did not entirely share John's confidence in his precautions, but she had finally agreed to accept his assurances because it was his world, his rules. John looked over his shoulder in time to see her reach out a hand, leaning on the bulky displacement engine to steady herself against the heat. The contraption was useless now, burnt out, but was still secured to the module behind the cockpit. John had been in such a hurry to get home to Earth after Dam Ba Da that he had not gotten around to removing it from the module. He smiled reassuringly up at Aeryn and offered her his right hand to steady herself with as she began to climb down. She returned his smile with a more uncertain one of her own, took the offered hand for a moment, and then leapt down. She landed with easy grace on the concrete beside him. As he turned back towards the crowd, John gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and tried to hang on to it, but she wriggled free of his grip. He glanced her way, wondering what was up, only to see that her hand had come to rest in its accustomed place, hovering over the stock of the pulse pistol holstered on her thigh. She began to strum her fingers lightly on her 'comfort blanket.'
Satisfied that she wasn't going to shoot anyone, at least not yet, John looked back towards the welcome party. A four star general, no less, flanked by a handful of suits, another handful of military types and two news crews, had been walking forwards while they were getting down and were now almost upon them.
"Commander Crichton?" the general saluted, then smiled and held out his hand.
"That's me," John replied, leaning forwards and grinning as he took the outstretched hand.
"And..." The general paused and frowned as his eyes raked Aeryn, who had positioned herself on John's right hand side, keeping her gun-arm free and unencumbered. John could almost guess what he might be thinking: She looks human. Aliens should look Alien. If only he knew. Did Spielberg ever get it wrong or what? "Officer Aeryn Sun?"
"That's my girl." John beamed proudly. "The Radiant Aeryn Sun. Saved my ass out there more times than I care to count." Aeryn nodded curtly but did not speak, not that she knew many words in English anyway, thought John, and no one here but him could understand Sebacean. Someone motioned that they should walk a few yards to where a podium and some seats had been set up. It looked like they'd planned an impromptu news conference to record the historic moment. It was all working out just fine. All except for the rattlers he was suddenly starting to feel in the pit of his stomach at the thought that his plans never worked.
Suddenly, at a nod from the general, a gun appeared in every human hand. Aeryn, through a mix of life-long training and genetically enhanced reactions, was ahead of most of them and probably would have shot the general first had John not swiftly moved between them and stilled her arm.
"No, babe!" John pleaded, using his own body to block her shot. "It's hopeless." They were in the open and outgunned fifty to one. He could see the thought processes going on in her head. Surrender or go down fighting? And he knew that her every instinct, drilled into her from birth, was to fight. And that would mean that she would surely die. "They've got us. For now. Let's live to fight another day." He pleaded, desperate to keep her alive. She pushed back against him, as though struggling to line up the shot, but it was half-hearted. He knew that if she really wanted to then he couldn't have stopped her.
John could see her fuming, see the muscles in her jaw flexing as she ground her teeth, but she did not resist or fight back when a nervous pair of soldiers stepped forward to relieve her of her pulse pistol and him of Winona, his own matching, but still-holstered, Peacekeeper weapon.
As John and Aeryn were led away towards a pair of anonymous looking prisoner transfer trucks, all around them the fake news crews began quietly packing their equipment away.
'~'
Aeryn had to concede that her cell was really quite comfortable. In some ways it was more opulent than her quarters when she had been a Peacekeeper officer. The humans, for all their faults, really could be most accommodating in that way. She had a comfortable bed, a table and chair, books, storage for clothes, a small, private washroom and sanitary facility and even a TV, although she was only allowed to view pre-recorded programmes approved by her captors. An odd show called Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which voiced all of her snarkiest thoughts about what she was watching, was her current favourite. The food, too, had been superb - everything Crichton had led her to believe it would be - not that she had much to compare any of it to, of course. She'd lived most of her life in Spartan conditions. The humans could be feeding her dren, by their standards, and she'd be none the wiser. She'd spent most of her life eating bland, utilitarian Peacekeeper rations and then the last couple of cycles being happy for whatever food she and her shipmates could find. In comparison, human food tasted pretty good to her.
She put down her book - some trashy fantasy adventure set in space - another very human thing. It had been hard to keep learning English without John's constant, gentle and ever-patient encouragement - she had not seen him now for monens - but she and her jailors had found ways for her to keep learning. She had spent arns watching Sesame Street in those first few weekens, when she wasn't undergoing medical tests, before the interrogations had started in earnest. It was funny, really: they had probably only helped her to learn English because they couldn't understand Sebacean and they wanted to be able to interrogate her. John would probably have had some strange, incomprehensible saying about their motives. She snorted in amusement at the thought.
John. John Crichton. She felt a most un-Peacekeeper like strain at the back of her throat and behind her eyes. Was it sadness? Regret? Anger? How the frell should she know? What did she know about feelings except what John, and more recently a bunch of tacky Earth entertainments, had taught her? She wiped an eye. She missed him terribly, yet she was coldly furious with him for leading her into this mess, for allowing them both to be captured by his people and treated like some sort of laboratory specimen. She wanted him, yet she was angry with him, blamed him for her current situation. It made no sense. Why did emotions have to be so frelling confusing?
The clatter of locks at the door to her cell told her she had company. Her captors never knocked - they didn't have to. She folded over the corner of the page that she was on and gently put her book down on the small table beside her solitary chair. Hopefully she'd be able to continue it later - she never knew, for sure, whether she would be coming back to the cell which had become her home.
The door opened to reveal the unmemorable-looking, dark-suited, early middle-aged man she had come to know as Hobbes, along with two heavily-built, uniformed male guards, both holding the strange guns which they called Tazers at the ready.
"Officer Sun," Hobbes grunted, stopping two steps inside her room. He looked away from her, scratching just above his eyebrow. He seemed bored. If he couldn't be bothered to be civil, neither could she. She made a show of picking up a fashion magazine which was lying on her table, turning her head away from him and crossing her blue-jean clad legs as she began to flick disinterestedly through its almost incomprehensible pages.
"Umm, we, umm, need to take you to the interview suite," Interview suite - she almost laughed. What a nice, human way of describing the interrogation room. Didn't the crazy frellers understand how difficult it was for her to understand what they meant when they so often refused to call a manual earth moving tool a manual earth moving tool? Hobbes was mumbling in that annoying, semi-detached way of his. Aeryn had been allowed to watch a couple of Colombo movies during her incarceration. Hobbes reminded her of the outwardly bumbling detective, and was consequently inclined to regard Hobbes's apparent ineptitude as a sham.
"I see," She sighed, putting down the magazine. It was no great loss, not being able to read it now. If it was just going to be a standard verbal interrogation, or interview or debriefing as she knew the humans preferred to term them, then it was a chance for her to get out of her room, stretch her legs, have a conversation, maybe even learn something about her imprisonment, if they let anything slip. It would all be a relief from the boredom, so long as they didn't plan on anything unpleasant. She stood and held out her arms, presenting Hobbes with her wrists. She'd been through the routine enough times - she didn't need them to tell her what to do.
One of the guards moved forwards to shackle her and she eyeballed him threateningly, just because she could. He didn't flinch, but he did look away. She smiled, enjoying her little victory. Both she and the guard knew that even if she overpowered the humans, as she had done a few times in the early days of her captivity, then there was nowhere for her to go, just another pair of guards and another locked door beyond her cell. All the doors were opened remotely from she knew not where. There was no escape. Been there, done that, as Crichton might have said. Bought the T-shirt and used it to gag an unfortunate guard, having already secured him with his own handcuffs.
The guard who was cuffing her stepped back and Hobbes pulled a blindfold bag over her head. Just routine, they did it every time they took her out of her cell. Just another precaution, mild by Peacekeeper standards.
"OK," mumbled Hobbes as she simultaneously felt a gentle push forwards on her shoulder and a gentle tug on the lead attached to her shackles.
As she shuffled from her cell she started to speculate as to what they might want this time.
'~'
The door to John's cell opened without warning, as it always did. No frelling courtesy, these guards, interrupting a guy's workout like that. He finished his forty-second push-up, just to spite his visitors, and curled round to sit, slightly sweaty and cross-legged on the floor as a prelude to standing.
"Wassup?" he asked. As he pushed up to his feet he grabbed a towel from the end of his bed and pulled it round his neck.
"We need you to answer some questions," demanded a slightly built man in a dark suit. He was a new one on John. The guy could definitely use some manners. But then, couldn't everyone here?
"OK, I'll just get a shower and..." he started to turn away towards his small bathroom.
"Now!" insisted the suit, his voice rising slightly in pitch, betraying that the man's patience was near the end of a fairly short leash. No one ever made demands like that, at least not in his cell. John stopped and turned his head, looking over his shoulder. He sniffed ostentatiously at his armpit and grimaced.
"You don't want me like this," John suggested, waving his arm up like a chicken-wing in an attempt to waft some of the smell towards his captors.
"I must insist!" the suit persisted. A snap from his fingers brought the two military guards forwards, their body language threatening.
Well, after months of the same old shit every day, this was at least a new development. John shrugged, turning round to face them. Plus ca change, huh?
"It's your dollar, your nose," John remarked stepping forwards, arms outstretched and held together, ready for the routine cuffing which accompanied all of the trips out of his cell. "No skin off mine." He winked. No one else seemed in the least amused.
"Done," the guard closest to John slapped on the cuffs, tugging at them to demonstrate that they were secure.
"Best cancel my room service order," John remarked as the guard stepped back to allow the second to double-check the cuffs. "Actually, could you have it sent to the terrace? I thought I'd breakfast by the pool today." John continued to joke as a hood was pulled over his head. There was no terrace. There was no pool. Not that he'd seen, anyway. Just a cell, an interrogation room and a couple of labs. One of the guards prodded him in the back with what felt like his Tazer, encouraging John to move towards the door. Something had gotten them riled today. Maybe Aeryn had tried to escape, beaten up some guards? He hoped it was something like that, not least because that would mean she was still alive, that some crazy Mengele-fan hadn't tried an experiment too far on her. He just hoped that, if they were agitated over something Aeryn had done that they hadn't hurt her or punished her. She couldn't help trying to escape, or using whatever force she thought it might take to do so. It was just the way she was - born and raised a Peacekeeper commando.
They arrived at the interrogation room and removed the hood. The day wasn't working out anything like he had expected. It wasn't working out anything like he had previously experienced, either, during his last few months back on Earth. They seemed to have forgotten about supplying the usual light breakfast. An oversight like that told him that something had definitely spooked his captors.
"Sit down. We've got some questions about your time in the Uncharted Territories." The rude newbie demanded. John sighed and sat. They'd been over all of this already, ad nauseum. He wasn't sure what the hell they were expecting him to tell them now that he hadn't already told them.
"It's your dollar," he shrugged.
After nearly an hour and several pointed complaints from John, his ever more aggravated interrogator had eventually sent for a selection of comestibles into the interview room, along with a TV for him to watch while he ate. As he sat and began to munch on his pastry, he got his first inkling as to what had upset his guards: The only programme in town was the news coverage, such as it was, of the rapid and systematic degradation of Earth's military strength by some unidentified extraterrestrial force.
Well, that was unexpected.
"I take it this isn't a new Independence Day movie?" John remarked. They ignored his remark, so, as he was hungry, he went back to eating. It wasn't that he wasn't disturbed by what he had seen, but he'd been hardened by the last few years and going hungry wouldn't change a thing.
"Tell us," the new man in black demanded as John tried to munch on his second pastry, "who they are and if there's anything we can do." For all that John was angry about the treatment of him and Aeryn, at that point he would have done anything he could to help. Unfortunately, he could only guess who the attackers might be or how they might be countered. However, that didn't mean he couldn't use the opportunity to try and extract a concession or two from his captors.
"I'll tell you what I can. And so will Aeryn. But this persecution of us has to end."
The man in black looked at John with a blank expression for all of five seconds before nodding his assent. John was so shocked he almost dropped his food. None of his similar demands over the last few months had been met with anything more positive than a casual brush off. This must be serious. Perhaps serious enough to cast Jeff Goldblum as himself and Will Smith as Aeryn?
"How about some sort of show of trust?" John demanded, chancing his arm a bit more, trying to see how far he could get. "I want to see Aeryn! I want to know she's alright!"
Again, to his surprise, the man-in-black nodded, gesturing to someone behind the one-way glass.
A few minutes later a handcuffed and shackled female, blindfolded with a heavy hood and dressed in a white t-shirt, blue jeans and flip-flops was walked into the room by two burly MPs and another man-in-black. He could only presume that Aeryn had been granted limited sartorial choices, as he couldn't imagine her choosing such an outfit of her own volition. Flip flops, of all things!
Once they were all inside, and the door locked, one of the MPs pulled off the hood to reveal that it was indeed Aeryn. Her hair was longer than he remembered, hanging loose across her shoulders in an ebony waterfall. She blinked in the light for a second or two then glared first at the nearest MP and then at everyone else in turn, including John.
John rushed over to her, throwing his arms round her and holding her tight for a few, long deep breaths before releasing her and running his hand down her cheek.
"Aeryn, you're OK... I've missed you so much..." He was so relieved to see her alive and well that it took him until the second pass of his hand down her cheek to register how stiff and silent she was at their reunion.
"How have you been, Crichton?" she asked in Sebacean. Frell, she must be pissed with him if she was calling him Crichton rather than John. Whether she chose to use his Christian name or surname had always been a pretty good barometer of how she was feeling about him.
"Aeryn, I've been here, in prison too... I'm so sorry... I never meant..." he began to apologise and explain.
"You look well." Was that an accusation?
"I'm fine. But I've been worried sick about y..."
"You ruined my life," she interrupted. Apart from the whispered delivery there was little sign now of the humour or affection that had been evident in her voice when she had last said those words, months ago aboard Talyn. She stood rigid, as though on attention. Frell, was he in trouble.
A suspicion began to grow in John's mind that their captors might have fed her all sorts of stories over the last few months in order to try to break her, to get her to talk. Some of those stories probably involved him betraying her. He turned angrily on the agents "What did you bastards do or say to her?!"
"We did what we had to do, Commander Crichton," one of them replied evenly. John looked back towards Aeryn, but she was silent, and that poker-faced mask she so often wore was firmly in place, letting no emotions or insights in or out.
"Now you deliver," a second agent added. They were clearly in no mood to allow John and Aeryn time and space to get reacquainted. "Tell us what you know about this:" he flicked a remote, turning on a monitor showing scenes of destruction from around the planet. Whether they were live or recorded was difficult to tell, but as before it didn't look to John like normal, human weapons were responsible. John and Aeryn moved closer to the monitor and peered at it, John resting his arm around Aeryn's shoulder although she would have been unable to respond to his physical overtures, even if she had been inclined to do so, as her hands were still cuffed behind her back.
"Difficult to tell from all this," John remarked, waving it away casually, although inside he was in turmoil, trying to understand what he was seeing, trying to guess where he and Aeryn stood with each other.
"One enormous explosion looks much the same as another," Aeryn added. She shrugged to emphasize her apparent casual disinterest.
"Do you have any pictures of the people doing the shooting?" John asked with slightly more animation as the possible significance of what he was seeing started to dawn on him. Could the Peacekeepers have followed them all the way to Earth? It was insane!
"One moment," replied the agent, pausing the video feed and scrolling through a series of options, looking for something.
"Anyone with the technology to come to your planet and attack you would probably be able to utterly destroy you from orbit." Aeryn commented while the agent fiddled with the recording.
"Umm." One of the agents regarded her quizzically and maybe a bit nervously. "Go on..." he encouraged.
"Meaning that they probably want something from you. Other than your destruction."
"They sent ships down to a number of botanical gardens, zoos, that sort of thing."
"Biological specimens, then," John ventured. The agent got his video working and they all turned to watch.
"Scarrans," Aeryn stated after a couple of seconds. John looked at her frowning.
"But the one on the Royal Planet..." John protested. "It had a different shaped head."
"They are Scarrans, Crichton." Aeryn repeated with a sigh, grimly adamant. "I know what I am talking about. I am... was a Peacekeeper. I was trained all my life to fight them. They are the Peacekeepers' most dangerous enemy."