WIP Amnesty Day, Part 2
Feb. 6th, 2004 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bktheirregularLook Up And See, Part II
* * * * * * *
Some time earlier:
"So the game ends just as I'm about to capture your king? Why can't I just capture it and be done with it?"
"D'Argo, the point is to run the other guy out of options. As long as each of you has a choice, the game continues."
"What if you have an inevitable sequence ending in capture?" the Luxan asked, frowning at the board.
"Then you call it. If you can see three moves ahead that he's toast, then you tell him checkmate in three. If you're done for, you can concede." Crichton smiled. "Another way out is to offer a draw. But that'll only work if you know you're gonzo and he doesn't. And the offer might get him suspicious."
D'Argo leaned back. "It's complicated."
"Like there's something in life that isn't, D?"
"What's complicated?" Aeryn asked, wandering down the hallway.
"Chess," Crichton and D'Argo answered at the same time.
"That frelling game? I still don't see the point of it," she muttered. "I mean it's just pieces moving along a tile. No combat, no uncertainty, just ... moving."
"It's all about the strategy," D'Argo answered. "Think of it as a small-scale simulation of a battle."
Crichton grinned. "What he said. And you've got different capabilities--"
D'Argo held up a hand. "Please, John. I want to see if I've got it right. The first rank of pieces are the soldiers, throw-aways, like infantry or Prowler pilots. Behind them you've got more specialized units, with different capabilities."
"Right."
"The most important is the commander of the troops. The King, right? The objective is to capture your opponent's king without giving him an opportunity to capture yours."
Crichton put his hands behind his head. "By Jove, I think he's got it," he drawled.
Aeryn smiled back. "Now I see why you were trying to interest me in the game. I take it you were some sort of expert on it back on Earth?"
"Please. Once I got to college, I was getting my butt kicked every time I sat down to play a game. Some of the experts they've got on Earth? They're assassins. Well, not literally, but they can map out the game like twenty moves ahead, have a counter-move ready for anything you attempt, and if you try something random to throw them off, they'll smear you all over the board."
D'Argo grimaced. "Now I see why Scorpius likes the game."
Crichton stood. "You mean to tell me he's been stealing my chess board again? That's it. Aeryn, I don't care what we promised, now he's dead--"
"He didn't steal your board," Aeryn said, cutting him off.
"What?"
"He made one of his own," D'Argo said.
"He made ... his own ... chess set?" John hissed, clenching his fists.
"Well ... I think Sikozu helped him with the pieces."
"You're saying I can't even get mad at him for stealing my game. Abso-*frelling*-lutely great. Roto-rooters my mind. Kills Gilina. Hijacks my mind, drives me insane and then yanks me back, tries to kill everything that means anything to me, leaves me for gorked on an operating table, comes to us like a beggar and demands that everything be forgiven, and now I can't even get pissed that he stole *my* game."
"It wouldn't be rational to get mad at him," D'Argo said soothingly.
"Since when has that stopped *you*?"
D'Argo opened his mouth, closed it with a snap, and laughed. "Would you believe I was just about to make that exact point?"
Crichton smothered a chuckle, shook his head, tried to stop the laughter and failed. D'Argo's laugh intensified, and Aeryn had to turn away lest she fall under the spell as well.
It was just like old times, Crichton thought. Which was why he shouldn't have been surprised that Pilot's shout broke into it.
"D'Argo! Crichton! Aeryn! There is a ship approaching Moya rapidly!"
"Den?" Aeryn asked.
"Oh yeah," Crichton shot back, already on his feet.
"Frell, yeah," D'Argo chimed in, standing with a jolt, upending the board.
The pieces scattered, forgotten as their owners ran.
* * * * * * *
"It's signaling us," Pilot announced. "According to the hail, it is ... an Interion courier."
"Interions? This far out?"
"Not surprising," Sikozu said from her perch on the wall. "The Interion courier is one of the fastest ships in known space. They don't get captured because you literally can't build a warship that can catch one."
"So if they run too fast to get caught in trouble, what do they need from us?" John asked.
"Maybe they have a message for us," Sikozu answered archly.
"I don't know," John sighed. "We're only on speaking terms with one Interion, and somehow I don't see Jool needing us urgently enough to hijack a hot-rod to get the message out to us."
"I have the ship in the docking web," Pilot said. "They have signaled passengers disembarking."
"Come on. Docking bay," Crichton snapped, already at a dead run out of the Den.
* * * * * * *
"Okay, since when does Guido the Sixteenth take point guard duty against invaders?" Crichton asked as he got the the bay. "And who the *frell* gave Leatherface the gun?"
"I appropriated it from Officer Sun's stores," Scorpius answered conversationally as he steadily trained the pulse rifle on the ship in the landing bay. "I am not about to see the Sebacean species doomed because someone stormed this Leviathan and put a pulse blast through your brain."
"What, now you can't stand that someone might do more damage in my noggin than you did?" Crichton snapped. He grabbed the gun away. "Gimme that. You do *not* get to play soldier on this ship, Scorpy. I thought we were pretty frelling clear on that point." Crichton pointed the rifle at the ship's hatch, still outgassing. "What about you, Ryg? What's got you so spooked?"
"Scorpius claims to be concerned about your life," Rygel snorted, pointing a pulse pistol in a rifleman's grip while his throne-sled held steady. "I happen to be worried about *mine*."
"Okay, Rygel. Just watch your aim."
"One day," Sikozu said, "I will figure out why you trust a self-serving Hynerian with a weapon when you won't trust Scorpius."
Crichton sighed. "Lemme explain something. Again. Rygel is a double-dealing, backstabbing, self-serving slug, but he's up front about being a double-dealing backstabbing self-serving slug. Scorpy'll have you ready to buy a condo on LoMo right up until he drops your brain into the Cuisinhart, kid."
"One day you will learn, human," Sikozu sniffed.
Crichton sighed and rolled his eyes. He cast a glance back to the inner door, checked to see that Chiana and Aeryn were there, pulse rifles ready. D'Argo strode up to the hatch of the sleek-looking ship with four DRD's flanking him, Qualta rifle ready. The hatch opened and a face peeked out: silver hair, dark clothes, dark eyes, ash-colored skin.
"Aw, frell," Crichton spat, and heard something in Luxan that his microbes were probably too prissy to translate. "Okay, just stay right where you-"
From the inner door there was a shriek, a clatter, and then Chiana was past him, streaking to the ship, pulse rifle abandoned behind her. She jumped on the Nebari at the door and brought him to the deck in a messy tackle. Crichton and D'Argo were just in time to see them rolling around, with shrieks of...
...laughter?
Oh yeah, they were definitely enjoying this, Chiana rolling around fussing over him like ... hell, if Crichton didn't know better, he'd say Chiana had just seen her long-lost brother.
He was just about to break it up when Chiana said, her voice three parts ecstatic and one part brassed-off, "Nerri, you fekwit, what the hezmana are you *doing* here? I thought it was dangerous for you to get out in the open like this?"
*Duh. Guess you don't know better after all.*
"It is, Chi. But there's something important. Something I had to find you for."
All of a sudden, Chiana's voice dropped ten degrees. "So *now* all of a sudden it's important for you to find me? You cut me off so I'd be safe, remember?"
"Well, something's changed," Nerri said, picking himself up. "Something big. The Establishment's about to make a move that could upset the entire balance of power down the line."
"So what's the big deal?" Crichton asked, walking up. His pulse rifle was pointed at the deck, but he still had a good grip on it. "Why is this our problem on top of everything else?"
Nerri looked up. "You're John Crichton, aren't you?"
Crichton snorted. "The one and only. You're the brother, right?"
"The one and only," Nerri said with a wry smile. "Nerri."
"John," Crichton answered, extending his hand. Nerri cocked an eyebrow at it a moment before clasping it.
"You're the one I really needed to find."
* * * * * * *
"Must've been about sixty cycles ago, a Nebari scout unit came across a planet way the frell out there, I'm talking so far out you couldn't see it from Prime with an opti-scope the size of one of your Command Carriers. The report came back, and within the cycle, they had a long-range pacification unit prepped and underway to bring the planet into the fold."
"Lotta work for a dustball out in the middle of nowhere," Crichton mused.
"Yeah, there were some Nebari wondering about that too," Nerri said with a grimace. "Got washed through the cleanser for their trouble. I mean, the Establishment thinks in the long term, hundreds of cycles, but why isolate an entire frelling fleet on one lousy proto-Sebacean colony that the Peacekeepers probably forgot ten thousand cycles ago?"
Crichton sighed. "Nerri, I appreciate you came all the way out here, put your neck on the line to tell us this, but what is the *point*?"
"My people got hold of the original reports a few monens ago, John. We looked them over very carefully, figuring that if it was that important to them back then, maybe there was something we could use. There's a few shots from the scout using an opti-scope at max power; they were skipping through the atmosphere, trying to keep from being detected." Nerri slid over a set of flimsies.
"People. Look Sebacean, all right."
"That plus two other species, we thought at first. Couldn't identify either of the others; the image quality's not good enough to pick out features, and I guess it was too much to hope that they would have gotten any good shots of signage." He shrugged. "That's not the important thing, though."
"What is? Just another planet."
"Ambient temperature where that one photo was taken was optimum plus forty."
Crichton whistled. "Heat wave." Then the penny dropped. "*Fatal* heat wave."
"Exactly," Nerri said with a tight smile. "No Sebacean could withstand that kind of heat, and yet here they are, going about their business in temperatures that should have had every Sebacean within range of the opti-scope right past heat delirium and deep into the Living Death."
"So if they're doing what no Sebacean can do, then they're not Sebacean, which means..." Crichton sucked in a breath. "Oh, hell."
"Human," Nerri confirmed. "I didn't make the connection until the Peacekeeper wanted beacons started hollering about a human, and even then, it wasn't until recently that we discovered that one little tidbit: that humans weren't susceptible to heat delirium. Headed for the first planet in disputed territory that might lead to you; it was just my luck that planet was Arnessk."
"Jool helped you find us," Crichton rasped.
"Jool? Oh ... Joolushko ... yeah. She ... she figured you'd want to know quick as possible. Me too. I don't want to have it on my conscience that a human colony world got wiped out when I could have done something about it. And you can see why I had to tell you myself."
"It's not a colony world," John whispered.
"I thought you said they were humans," Nerri objected, puzzled.
Chiana put a hand on her brother's shoulder. "Nerri, the humans don't have *any* colony worlds. If there's a world out there with humans on it ... then it's Earth."
"How long?" Crichton croaked.
Nerri winced. "They'll reach the system within the cycle. Monens, weekens ... could be any day now."
Crichton slumped.
"Oh, frell," Chiana whispered, blinking back tears. "Oh, *frell*."
end part two
* * * * * * *
Some time earlier:
"So the game ends just as I'm about to capture your king? Why can't I just capture it and be done with it?"
"D'Argo, the point is to run the other guy out of options. As long as each of you has a choice, the game continues."
"What if you have an inevitable sequence ending in capture?" the Luxan asked, frowning at the board.
"Then you call it. If you can see three moves ahead that he's toast, then you tell him checkmate in three. If you're done for, you can concede." Crichton smiled. "Another way out is to offer a draw. But that'll only work if you know you're gonzo and he doesn't. And the offer might get him suspicious."
D'Argo leaned back. "It's complicated."
"Like there's something in life that isn't, D?"
"What's complicated?" Aeryn asked, wandering down the hallway.
"Chess," Crichton and D'Argo answered at the same time.
"That frelling game? I still don't see the point of it," she muttered. "I mean it's just pieces moving along a tile. No combat, no uncertainty, just ... moving."
"It's all about the strategy," D'Argo answered. "Think of it as a small-scale simulation of a battle."
Crichton grinned. "What he said. And you've got different capabilities--"
D'Argo held up a hand. "Please, John. I want to see if I've got it right. The first rank of pieces are the soldiers, throw-aways, like infantry or Prowler pilots. Behind them you've got more specialized units, with different capabilities."
"Right."
"The most important is the commander of the troops. The King, right? The objective is to capture your opponent's king without giving him an opportunity to capture yours."
Crichton put his hands behind his head. "By Jove, I think he's got it," he drawled.
Aeryn smiled back. "Now I see why you were trying to interest me in the game. I take it you were some sort of expert on it back on Earth?"
"Please. Once I got to college, I was getting my butt kicked every time I sat down to play a game. Some of the experts they've got on Earth? They're assassins. Well, not literally, but they can map out the game like twenty moves ahead, have a counter-move ready for anything you attempt, and if you try something random to throw them off, they'll smear you all over the board."
D'Argo grimaced. "Now I see why Scorpius likes the game."
Crichton stood. "You mean to tell me he's been stealing my chess board again? That's it. Aeryn, I don't care what we promised, now he's dead--"
"He didn't steal your board," Aeryn said, cutting him off.
"What?"
"He made one of his own," D'Argo said.
"He made ... his own ... chess set?" John hissed, clenching his fists.
"Well ... I think Sikozu helped him with the pieces."
"You're saying I can't even get mad at him for stealing my game. Abso-*frelling*-lutely great. Roto-rooters my mind. Kills Gilina. Hijacks my mind, drives me insane and then yanks me back, tries to kill everything that means anything to me, leaves me for gorked on an operating table, comes to us like a beggar and demands that everything be forgiven, and now I can't even get pissed that he stole *my* game."
"It wouldn't be rational to get mad at him," D'Argo said soothingly.
"Since when has that stopped *you*?"
D'Argo opened his mouth, closed it with a snap, and laughed. "Would you believe I was just about to make that exact point?"
Crichton smothered a chuckle, shook his head, tried to stop the laughter and failed. D'Argo's laugh intensified, and Aeryn had to turn away lest she fall under the spell as well.
It was just like old times, Crichton thought. Which was why he shouldn't have been surprised that Pilot's shout broke into it.
"D'Argo! Crichton! Aeryn! There is a ship approaching Moya rapidly!"
"Den?" Aeryn asked.
"Oh yeah," Crichton shot back, already on his feet.
"Frell, yeah," D'Argo chimed in, standing with a jolt, upending the board.
The pieces scattered, forgotten as their owners ran.
* * * * * * *
"It's signaling us," Pilot announced. "According to the hail, it is ... an Interion courier."
"Interions? This far out?"
"Not surprising," Sikozu said from her perch on the wall. "The Interion courier is one of the fastest ships in known space. They don't get captured because you literally can't build a warship that can catch one."
"So if they run too fast to get caught in trouble, what do they need from us?" John asked.
"Maybe they have a message for us," Sikozu answered archly.
"I don't know," John sighed. "We're only on speaking terms with one Interion, and somehow I don't see Jool needing us urgently enough to hijack a hot-rod to get the message out to us."
"I have the ship in the docking web," Pilot said. "They have signaled passengers disembarking."
"Come on. Docking bay," Crichton snapped, already at a dead run out of the Den.
* * * * * * *
"Okay, since when does Guido the Sixteenth take point guard duty against invaders?" Crichton asked as he got the the bay. "And who the *frell* gave Leatherface the gun?"
"I appropriated it from Officer Sun's stores," Scorpius answered conversationally as he steadily trained the pulse rifle on the ship in the landing bay. "I am not about to see the Sebacean species doomed because someone stormed this Leviathan and put a pulse blast through your brain."
"What, now you can't stand that someone might do more damage in my noggin than you did?" Crichton snapped. He grabbed the gun away. "Gimme that. You do *not* get to play soldier on this ship, Scorpy. I thought we were pretty frelling clear on that point." Crichton pointed the rifle at the ship's hatch, still outgassing. "What about you, Ryg? What's got you so spooked?"
"Scorpius claims to be concerned about your life," Rygel snorted, pointing a pulse pistol in a rifleman's grip while his throne-sled held steady. "I happen to be worried about *mine*."
"Okay, Rygel. Just watch your aim."
"One day," Sikozu said, "I will figure out why you trust a self-serving Hynerian with a weapon when you won't trust Scorpius."
Crichton sighed. "Lemme explain something. Again. Rygel is a double-dealing, backstabbing, self-serving slug, but he's up front about being a double-dealing backstabbing self-serving slug. Scorpy'll have you ready to buy a condo on LoMo right up until he drops your brain into the Cuisinhart, kid."
"One day you will learn, human," Sikozu sniffed.
Crichton sighed and rolled his eyes. He cast a glance back to the inner door, checked to see that Chiana and Aeryn were there, pulse rifles ready. D'Argo strode up to the hatch of the sleek-looking ship with four DRD's flanking him, Qualta rifle ready. The hatch opened and a face peeked out: silver hair, dark clothes, dark eyes, ash-colored skin.
"Aw, frell," Crichton spat, and heard something in Luxan that his microbes were probably too prissy to translate. "Okay, just stay right where you-"
From the inner door there was a shriek, a clatter, and then Chiana was past him, streaking to the ship, pulse rifle abandoned behind her. She jumped on the Nebari at the door and brought him to the deck in a messy tackle. Crichton and D'Argo were just in time to see them rolling around, with shrieks of...
...laughter?
Oh yeah, they were definitely enjoying this, Chiana rolling around fussing over him like ... hell, if Crichton didn't know better, he'd say Chiana had just seen her long-lost brother.
He was just about to break it up when Chiana said, her voice three parts ecstatic and one part brassed-off, "Nerri, you fekwit, what the hezmana are you *doing* here? I thought it was dangerous for you to get out in the open like this?"
*Duh. Guess you don't know better after all.*
"It is, Chi. But there's something important. Something I had to find you for."
All of a sudden, Chiana's voice dropped ten degrees. "So *now* all of a sudden it's important for you to find me? You cut me off so I'd be safe, remember?"
"Well, something's changed," Nerri said, picking himself up. "Something big. The Establishment's about to make a move that could upset the entire balance of power down the line."
"So what's the big deal?" Crichton asked, walking up. His pulse rifle was pointed at the deck, but he still had a good grip on it. "Why is this our problem on top of everything else?"
Nerri looked up. "You're John Crichton, aren't you?"
Crichton snorted. "The one and only. You're the brother, right?"
"The one and only," Nerri said with a wry smile. "Nerri."
"John," Crichton answered, extending his hand. Nerri cocked an eyebrow at it a moment before clasping it.
"You're the one I really needed to find."
* * * * * * *
"Must've been about sixty cycles ago, a Nebari scout unit came across a planet way the frell out there, I'm talking so far out you couldn't see it from Prime with an opti-scope the size of one of your Command Carriers. The report came back, and within the cycle, they had a long-range pacification unit prepped and underway to bring the planet into the fold."
"Lotta work for a dustball out in the middle of nowhere," Crichton mused.
"Yeah, there were some Nebari wondering about that too," Nerri said with a grimace. "Got washed through the cleanser for their trouble. I mean, the Establishment thinks in the long term, hundreds of cycles, but why isolate an entire frelling fleet on one lousy proto-Sebacean colony that the Peacekeepers probably forgot ten thousand cycles ago?"
Crichton sighed. "Nerri, I appreciate you came all the way out here, put your neck on the line to tell us this, but what is the *point*?"
"My people got hold of the original reports a few monens ago, John. We looked them over very carefully, figuring that if it was that important to them back then, maybe there was something we could use. There's a few shots from the scout using an opti-scope at max power; they were skipping through the atmosphere, trying to keep from being detected." Nerri slid over a set of flimsies.
"People. Look Sebacean, all right."
"That plus two other species, we thought at first. Couldn't identify either of the others; the image quality's not good enough to pick out features, and I guess it was too much to hope that they would have gotten any good shots of signage." He shrugged. "That's not the important thing, though."
"What is? Just another planet."
"Ambient temperature where that one photo was taken was optimum plus forty."
Crichton whistled. "Heat wave." Then the penny dropped. "*Fatal* heat wave."
"Exactly," Nerri said with a tight smile. "No Sebacean could withstand that kind of heat, and yet here they are, going about their business in temperatures that should have had every Sebacean within range of the opti-scope right past heat delirium and deep into the Living Death."
"So if they're doing what no Sebacean can do, then they're not Sebacean, which means..." Crichton sucked in a breath. "Oh, hell."
"Human," Nerri confirmed. "I didn't make the connection until the Peacekeeper wanted beacons started hollering about a human, and even then, it wasn't until recently that we discovered that one little tidbit: that humans weren't susceptible to heat delirium. Headed for the first planet in disputed territory that might lead to you; it was just my luck that planet was Arnessk."
"Jool helped you find us," Crichton rasped.
"Jool? Oh ... Joolushko ... yeah. She ... she figured you'd want to know quick as possible. Me too. I don't want to have it on my conscience that a human colony world got wiped out when I could have done something about it. And you can see why I had to tell you myself."
"It's not a colony world," John whispered.
"I thought you said they were humans," Nerri objected, puzzled.
Chiana put a hand on her brother's shoulder. "Nerri, the humans don't have *any* colony worlds. If there's a world out there with humans on it ... then it's Earth."
"How long?" Crichton croaked.
Nerri winced. "They'll reach the system within the cycle. Monens, weekens ... could be any day now."
Crichton slumped.
"Oh, frell," Chiana whispered, blinking back tears. "Oh, *frell*."
end part two