WIP Amnesty Day, Part 6
Feb. 6th, 2004 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bktheirregularLook Up and See, Part VI:
Jack was not normally a man to gape. He had seen all sorts of things over the years, and was one of only twelve men on earth who had ever walked on the moon, one of only four to have ever driven on the moon. He'd seen the Earth towering over lunar mountain ranges, been able to squint and see the curls of the Florida coastline.
But the sight in front of him had reduced the iron-willed pilot to slack-jawed wonder.
Farscape One was skimming the rings of Saturn, and the ringed planet had never seemed so *alive* before. The woman in front of him, flying the little spacecraft like a teenager taking out Dad's Ferrari, had whipped them past Jupiter at a terrifying pace, like something out of the Voyager simulations or maybe a computer game, and then had come in to Saturn's orbit, dancing along the rings, and even though Jack knew that the debris was widely enough spaced to be safe, he'd still gripped the back of the pilot's chair.
"It has been a while since I flew without having to worry about being chased," she said calmly.
"There's nothing on Earth that can even get close," Jack rasped. "How the hell did you manage to get this thing to go so fast, anyway?"
She turned back to him. "I do not know." She tapped a gauge, frowned, tapped it again, and sighed in relief. "I assume your son made the modifications, though frankly it amazes me that the module functions at all."
"I thought you knew everything about what had happened to this ship."
"Only what I have been told, and what I have learned from examining it," she responded. "I am ... a somewhat recent acquaintance of Crichton's."
"Is there someone out there who *does* have the answers?"
"Your son, undoubtedly. Others of Moya's crew could tell you stories, but without translator microbes, you would not be able to understand them."
"Translator ... huh?"
"Translator microbes," she explained patiently as she jinked around a bit of rock. "Most species in Peacekeeper, Scarran, or disputed space are injected while in infancy."
"So they do ... what?"
"Convert the language spoken by others into a form that the host brain can understand."
Jack frowned. "And how the hell can a microbe do *that*?"
"I do not know," she sighed. "I am not an expert on microbiology. Suffice to say that they work."
"Okay, so ... how is it that I can understand *you*, if I don't have these microbe things in my brain?"
"I do not have them either," she answered. "The Kalish - my people - cannot tolerate the microbes. We learn others' speech in the ancient manner: by listening."
"So you learned English ... from my son," Jack said, chuckling.
"It was not easy," she said archly. "Particularly because he sometimes appears to be speaking three languages at once, not to mention the odd expressions he always uses."
Jack shook his head. "Yeah, that's my boy, all right."
They both flinched as a sleek craft shot past, circled, and lined up alongside the Farscape. Then Jack cringed as a new sound entered the cabin: it sounded like a bassoon and a trombone were trying to perform an obscene act together.
The redhead gave an irritated snort, and then spoke up in a language that Jack would have mistook for Italian if he hadn't been stationed there during his military days. The bassoon came back, followed by a blurping sound, more pseudo-Italian, and then suddenly quiet.
Jack looked over her shoulder to see a particularly large piece of ring debris coming closer. "Um, shouldn't we be avoiding that?"
"Of course not. That's our destination."
Jack was about to say it looked just like every other rock in the ring, but then he looked closer and saw it didn't look anything like the rest of the ring; it was too smooth, too sleek, and it appeared to have some sort of tail. As the Farscape and its shadow approached, Jack began to get an idea of just how large the thing was. "What the *hell* is that?"
"That, Colonel Crichton, is Moya."
* * * * * * *
The landing bay wasn't as big as the Vehicle Assembly Building back on Canaveral; maybe it just seemed that way because it was a cavern inside a freakin' *spacecraft*, for God's sake. There were odd structures all over, and a couple of odd, blocky-looking examples of what could be nothing else but spaceships - shuttles? Jack wondered - and small devices skittering around all over the place.
The landing gear locked, and the Farscape came to rest, rolling into a smaller portion of the hangar, wings folding up as though the pilot had been doing this for years. She opened the canopy and vaulted out; Jack followed, only to step on a rolling yellow lump on the floor and nearly fall flat on his back.
He waved his arms about wildly, felt something grab on, straightened up, looked over to say thank you-
-and his jaw dropped again. The creature in front of him, holding his arm, had tentacles sprouting from its head, braids in odd places, and a nearly murderous expression in its eyes - one that quickly softened when the thing looked more carefully at him. It opened what had to be a mouth, and the bassoon sounds came again, this time sounding more gentle.
Then the blurping came again, and the tentacled creature whirled its head around, sending bits of flesh spinning around like a tornado, and the bassoon became more strident. Jack followed the gaze helplessly to see a toad-like creature bobbing in midair, approaching them. Eyes snapped over to see him, and the blurping died off into a gasp.
"I'm sorry," Jack said. "I can't understand a word you're saying."
One of the yellow rolling devices scuttled over to him. He looked down, smiled, looked back up to the redheaded woman, and asked, "Could you translate? I'm sort of lost-YIPE!"
He jumped to see the yellow device roll away from his foot, withdrawing a needle into its body. "What was that for? I didn't mean to step on you!"
The bassoon started again, and Jack frowned, because the sounds were becoming ... different. Then the toad spoke up: "Mnurt vlothak emnlionless pilot is annoyed; then the diardees can certainly show a temper."
The tentacled creature sighed. "I've never seen them show a temper," he said, and somehow the bassoon had been transformed into a gentle, deep voice.
"Of course not, D'Argo. They're afraid that you'll smash them into scrap," the toad said haughtily. He twitched a control at his arm, and the elaborate platform on which he sat turned to face Jack. "You must be Jack Crichton."
D'Argo gaped. "This is ... you're John's father?"
"Yeah," Jack said, frowning. "Was that ... did that thing just shoot me up with those microbe things?"
"Can you understand what I'm saying?"
"Uh ... yeah."
"Then you've got translator microbes in you." He smiled; for a creature that looked unnervingly like the squid from Twenty Thousand Leagues, he had a charming smile, and his eyes crinkled. "I am Ka D'Argo. Captain of Moya."
"So this is your ship?"
The toad laughed. "Moya would debate that point, certainly." He bobbed closer. "I am Rygel the Sixteenth, rightful Dominar of the Hynerian Empire. I believe we could make rapid progress in our task here if a meeting could be arranged between myself and the ruler of your world."
D'Argo snorted. "Rygel, were you paying attention? It is anarchy down there. Nation-states at war, religious groups fighting a hundred battles that make no sense to anyone but themselves, and the information networks are spewing out gibberish."
"I choose to believe that we simply have to learn the truth from the natives. They certainly must understand the management of their world better than we can. We've only been here thirty arns or so."
Jack cleared his throat. Loudly. "Excuse me. Whatever is going on here, we can sort it out later. Right now, I want to see my son."
D'Argo nodded firmly. "Of course. He's in the medical bay." He strode off down a hallway, only to run right into a gray woman moving like a cat, giving off so much energy in her movements that Jack thought he'd get electrocuted just from being near her.
The reason for the heat became obvious the moment she opened her mouth: "D'Argo, I swear, if you don't keep that crazy old bat away from Crichton, I'm going to shoot her. Then skin her. No, first I'll skin her, *then* shoot her! I don't know-"
"Chiana, calm down!" D'Argo shouted.
"No, I will *not* calm down, D'Argo! I was talking with John and all of a sudden Wrinkles hit me with a face full of that damned powder of hers, and when I woke up, John was dead asleep and wouldn't even respond to my voice!" she hissed.
Jack felt his blood begin to boil, and he opened his mouth to ask what the hell was going on-
"Of course he's not waking up," another voice snapped. "He's knitting bones, and that takes a lot out of a person."
"What did you give him, Wrinkles?" Chiana snapped.
Wrinkles came out into the open, an old crone with tattered clothing, enormous ears, and a glowing eye in the middle of her forehead offsetting the two she bore on either side of her nose. "Very simple formula to strengthen bones."
D'Argo growled, and it sounded less like a person and more like a black bear or something. "What did you give him, Noranti?" he asked with considerable force.
"A calcovic ointment, applied to the break, to give him the necessary minerals for repair. A healing stimulus, essence of vaktoth with a little laka to keep him calm-"
"Laka?" D'Argo thundered. "You gave him *laka*? After all the time it took to get that dren out of his system-?"
"Hold it! Hold it!" Jack shouted. He whirled to D'Argo angrily. "What the *hell* has happened to my son?"
D'Argo turned to face him, a dangerous look in his eyes, but then the gray girl - Chiana - had stepped between them. "Hey, hey, easy! Don't kill each other!" She turned to glare at the crone. "Not when there's people who really need it." Then she looked at Jack - looked really close - and Jack saw something in her, something familiar. Like the astronaut groupies, back in the day, tempting him, sorely tempting him to forget his vows of faith and honor for a day. He'd never broken, but it had been a battle-
"You're his father? Crichton's your son?"
"Yeah. I'm his father. Is ... is he going to be okay?"
"He will sleep for at least another nineteen arns," the old woman said. "His body needs it, his soul needs it. He has traveled very far, and the path he walks ... well, it doesn't end here." She blinked once, an odd pattern from three eyes. "He won't set foot on Earth, you know. No matter how much he wants to." Then she smiled. "But that's no reason for you not to see him." She took his hand and dragged him onward, with the rest of the ragtag group following.
When Jack finally saw his son again, he had to press his thumb hard against his teeth to fight the urge to cry; the kid looked so ... weary. John had always had an incredible zest for life, but the man on the table before him lacked that. Even asleep, John Crichton showed how hard the past four years had been to him. Scars Jack didn't want to guess at the source of, gray in his hair, lines in his face.
The old woman slowly undid a set of straps from John's ankle, looking with a critical eye at his leg, at a purple discoloration halfway up his thigh, mostly hidden by a white paste. "He doesn't need the traction bracing any more, but he won't be able to put weight on the leg for at least eighteen solar days," she muttered. "If Leviathans didn't have gravity bladders, the healing would be so much easier - but then atrophy would be so much more dangerous - why do Leviathans have gravity bladders anyway? It's not like they need the gravity..."
"But will he be all right?"
"Oh, hard to say, hard to say. Some would say he wasn't, ah, 'all right' from the day he fell into Peacekeeper space. Labeled mentally deficient from the start, he was." At a growl from D'Argo, she blinked. "The leg will be fine. Nothing else was injured. At least, not recently. No more brain chips clouding his judgment, no more Aurora Chair to dig for his secrets."
"I want to talk to him," Jack said through set teeth.
"Of course you do," she replied. "Parent wants to know the child's doing well. Only natural. You can't. He needs sleep. And there are secrets. Things he mustn't tell anyone."
"Secrets?" Jack snapped. "Like what?"
"Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Can't tell you what the secrets are, silly man. Then you'd know what the secrets are, you see."
The redhead snapped, "We will watch over him. It is *very* important that he recover." She turned. "D'Argo. You searched for the Nebari. Did you *find* the Nebari?"
"We know the direction they're coming from," D'Argo answered with a sigh. "Rygel insisted we go sideways instead of forward once we detected them, so we have no idea how far away they are."
Rygel harrumphed. "The lateral movement lets us know *exactly* how far away they are," he snorted. "Triangulation, you dumb grot. I don't have the mathematical tools for it myself, but Sikozu or Pilot certainly would." He glared at Noranti. "Crichton could probably do it in a microt ... if he were *awake*!"
"The calculations are complete," a voice announced, and Jack whirled to see an enormous clam come to life - actually, it just sprouted an image of a clam-like organism within it, purple and fuzzy. "The Nebari strike force will breach the comet cloud within four hundred arns. Adjusted for the planet Earth's rotational cycle, that equals nineteen days." The clam turned slightly, and if Jack hadn't known better, he'd think it was staring right at him. "I am sorry, Jack Crichton." Okay, so it *was* staring right at him. "Moya and I had hoped circumstances would be different."
"Yotz," Rygel muttered. "Nineteen solar days. We can't do *anything* in nineteen solar days."
Jack frowned and pinched his nose. "How tough are they?"
Chiana spoke up. "They'd overwhelm your defenses in a hundred microts, whatever defenses those are. You haven't got the technology to put up the slightest fight." She looked sadly at him. "No offense."
"None taken," Jack groaned.
"They'll put down in the capital city, assuming there is one, and then give you a choice: submit or suffer the consequences. They might destroy a city or two to make the point if you resist. No more than necessary," she said bitterly.
Jack shook his head. "They're not going to believe it down there. And even if they did, there's no way the world can get together on something like this. There's too much bad blood, too many grudges, too much distrust," he spat.
"Scorpius might have better luck at convincing them," Sikozu offered.
"Couldn't have picked a worse time for it," Jack growled. "The woman down there doesn't even speak the language, and the other one ... something inside me is screaming not to trust him for a second."
D'Argo shook his head and laughed. "And here I thought humans were stupid."
"Look, the longer we stand around vinshing, the closer they get." Chiana turned to face Jack. "They're not about to trust any of us. Will they trust *you*?"
"Maybe," Jack mused. "Possible. Doubt it, but ... there's nothing left to lose, is there?"
"There's everything to lose," Rygel countered. "Which is why you have to convince them to trust us."
"Yeah," Jack groused. "Trust you. Sure. But trust you to do what, exactly?"
The aliens around him traded looks that varied from puzzled to hopeless.
"Look, one thing at a time, okay?" D'Argo finally said. "First, we get you back to your planet. Rygel, you want to negotiate? Here's your chance. Pilot, have a transport pod prepared."
Pilot sighed. "At once, Ka D'Argo."
Jack looked at the motley group. "You've done this before, right? Saved planets facing the end of the world?"
"Uh, well, that is..." D'Argo began, but Chiana broke in.
"Yeah."
"Sure!" D'Argo affirmed, maybe a bit too quickly.
"Lots of times. We're famous for it," Chiana said with a bright smile.
Jack looked from one to the other, then at various scornful expressions from the others. "Really?" he asked, staring down Chiana.
"Well, maye not so much 'save' as 'try to help', which generally leads to ... things not going so great," she admitted, wilting.
"This is great," Jack moaned. "First contact with intellgent life. We could be visited by the benevolent supreme beings, or at least evil monsters that we know we've got to fight. Why did it have to be the Marx Brothers?"
"We'll think of something. I promise," Chiana said. "Right now, you guys gotta get back to the home planet."
Rygel floated up to Jack's shoulder. "This way," he said imperiously.
* * * * * * *
They were at the transport pod, one of the blocky craft Jack had noted on the way in, when the gray girl caught up to them. "Wait!" she hollered.
"What is it?" Rygel snorted. "You can't come, Chiana. They'll have enough shock facing a Dominar for the first time; it's begging for trouble to have a rogue Nebari thief scampering around down there."
"No, no, no," Chiana protested. "Just ... I thought you'd want this," she said to Jack, pressing something into his hand.
Jack looked at it and stared: it was a micro-cassette recorder, emblazoned with the IASA logo, and with a tape inside. "How ... where did you get this?"
"Snurched it from Crichton's quarters," Chiana said. "First year or two he was here, he'd be talking into it. He said he was leaving messages for you, only you'd never get them, except here you are, and ... well, here you are."
"I ... uh ... thank you," Jack stammered. "I don't know what to-"
"He wanted you to get them," Chiana said. "He'd want you to listen. I'll tell him when he wakes up."
Jack couldn't find words for a moment.
"I'll look out for him," she continued. "Don't you worry."
Jack didn't say a word as Rygel and Sikozu started the pod, didn't notice as they exited the enormous ship and circled Saturn for the trip back to Earth. As they passed Titan, he finally pushed "play".
His son's voice came out, and he closed his eyes, imagining John sitting right there, talking to him:
"Hey, Dad. It worked. D.K.'s and my theory, it actually ... worked. Sort of. Look, I know this is, ah, crazy, I mean you're never gonna get this message, but I just ... wanted to let you know that I'm alive ... oh, hold still, hold still," he was saying to something or other. Then back into the tape: "Don't know where I am, technically I don't know how I got here, but I'm not gonna stop trying to get home. See? You're fixed. Go play." Jack frowned; he thought he'd heard a squeak like one of the little robots on Moya, but there was nothing around. Then a hum, and John snapped: "What the hell are you doing?"
"Your equipment might be worth something in trade," someone answered on the tape. Jack glared up at the cockpit. "Pay no attention to that," Rygel snapped.
On the tape, John mumbled something, to which the Rygel on the tape responded: "Are you a light sleeper?"
After a moment, John continued: "And there's life out here, Dad. Weird, amazing, psychotic life. And death. In Technicolor," he said, his voice already weary.
"Hey, Dad, you know those rattlers in the stomach we talked about? Well ... I got them now," John Crichton concluded from the past.
And in the present, his father felt the snakes wake up once more within him.
end part six
I had to leave the story behind at this point. *sigh* I can't find the muse for it any more, and even though I had a plan for how to continue and complete the story, somehow, there didn't seem to be much point. Maybe after the bar, I'll hash out the outline for what was supposed to have happened...
Jack was not normally a man to gape. He had seen all sorts of things over the years, and was one of only twelve men on earth who had ever walked on the moon, one of only four to have ever driven on the moon. He'd seen the Earth towering over lunar mountain ranges, been able to squint and see the curls of the Florida coastline.
But the sight in front of him had reduced the iron-willed pilot to slack-jawed wonder.
Farscape One was skimming the rings of Saturn, and the ringed planet had never seemed so *alive* before. The woman in front of him, flying the little spacecraft like a teenager taking out Dad's Ferrari, had whipped them past Jupiter at a terrifying pace, like something out of the Voyager simulations or maybe a computer game, and then had come in to Saturn's orbit, dancing along the rings, and even though Jack knew that the debris was widely enough spaced to be safe, he'd still gripped the back of the pilot's chair.
"It has been a while since I flew without having to worry about being chased," she said calmly.
"There's nothing on Earth that can even get close," Jack rasped. "How the hell did you manage to get this thing to go so fast, anyway?"
She turned back to him. "I do not know." She tapped a gauge, frowned, tapped it again, and sighed in relief. "I assume your son made the modifications, though frankly it amazes me that the module functions at all."
"I thought you knew everything about what had happened to this ship."
"Only what I have been told, and what I have learned from examining it," she responded. "I am ... a somewhat recent acquaintance of Crichton's."
"Is there someone out there who *does* have the answers?"
"Your son, undoubtedly. Others of Moya's crew could tell you stories, but without translator microbes, you would not be able to understand them."
"Translator ... huh?"
"Translator microbes," she explained patiently as she jinked around a bit of rock. "Most species in Peacekeeper, Scarran, or disputed space are injected while in infancy."
"So they do ... what?"
"Convert the language spoken by others into a form that the host brain can understand."
Jack frowned. "And how the hell can a microbe do *that*?"
"I do not know," she sighed. "I am not an expert on microbiology. Suffice to say that they work."
"Okay, so ... how is it that I can understand *you*, if I don't have these microbe things in my brain?"
"I do not have them either," she answered. "The Kalish - my people - cannot tolerate the microbes. We learn others' speech in the ancient manner: by listening."
"So you learned English ... from my son," Jack said, chuckling.
"It was not easy," she said archly. "Particularly because he sometimes appears to be speaking three languages at once, not to mention the odd expressions he always uses."
Jack shook his head. "Yeah, that's my boy, all right."
They both flinched as a sleek craft shot past, circled, and lined up alongside the Farscape. Then Jack cringed as a new sound entered the cabin: it sounded like a bassoon and a trombone were trying to perform an obscene act together.
The redhead gave an irritated snort, and then spoke up in a language that Jack would have mistook for Italian if he hadn't been stationed there during his military days. The bassoon came back, followed by a blurping sound, more pseudo-Italian, and then suddenly quiet.
Jack looked over her shoulder to see a particularly large piece of ring debris coming closer. "Um, shouldn't we be avoiding that?"
"Of course not. That's our destination."
Jack was about to say it looked just like every other rock in the ring, but then he looked closer and saw it didn't look anything like the rest of the ring; it was too smooth, too sleek, and it appeared to have some sort of tail. As the Farscape and its shadow approached, Jack began to get an idea of just how large the thing was. "What the *hell* is that?"
"That, Colonel Crichton, is Moya."
* * * * * * *
The landing bay wasn't as big as the Vehicle Assembly Building back on Canaveral; maybe it just seemed that way because it was a cavern inside a freakin' *spacecraft*, for God's sake. There were odd structures all over, and a couple of odd, blocky-looking examples of what could be nothing else but spaceships - shuttles? Jack wondered - and small devices skittering around all over the place.
The landing gear locked, and the Farscape came to rest, rolling into a smaller portion of the hangar, wings folding up as though the pilot had been doing this for years. She opened the canopy and vaulted out; Jack followed, only to step on a rolling yellow lump on the floor and nearly fall flat on his back.
He waved his arms about wildly, felt something grab on, straightened up, looked over to say thank you-
-and his jaw dropped again. The creature in front of him, holding his arm, had tentacles sprouting from its head, braids in odd places, and a nearly murderous expression in its eyes - one that quickly softened when the thing looked more carefully at him. It opened what had to be a mouth, and the bassoon sounds came again, this time sounding more gentle.
Then the blurping came again, and the tentacled creature whirled its head around, sending bits of flesh spinning around like a tornado, and the bassoon became more strident. Jack followed the gaze helplessly to see a toad-like creature bobbing in midair, approaching them. Eyes snapped over to see him, and the blurping died off into a gasp.
"I'm sorry," Jack said. "I can't understand a word you're saying."
One of the yellow rolling devices scuttled over to him. He looked down, smiled, looked back up to the redheaded woman, and asked, "Could you translate? I'm sort of lost-YIPE!"
He jumped to see the yellow device roll away from his foot, withdrawing a needle into its body. "What was that for? I didn't mean to step on you!"
The bassoon started again, and Jack frowned, because the sounds were becoming ... different. Then the toad spoke up: "Mnurt vlothak emnlionless pilot is annoyed; then the diardees can certainly show a temper."
The tentacled creature sighed. "I've never seen them show a temper," he said, and somehow the bassoon had been transformed into a gentle, deep voice.
"Of course not, D'Argo. They're afraid that you'll smash them into scrap," the toad said haughtily. He twitched a control at his arm, and the elaborate platform on which he sat turned to face Jack. "You must be Jack Crichton."
D'Argo gaped. "This is ... you're John's father?"
"Yeah," Jack said, frowning. "Was that ... did that thing just shoot me up with those microbe things?"
"Can you understand what I'm saying?"
"Uh ... yeah."
"Then you've got translator microbes in you." He smiled; for a creature that looked unnervingly like the squid from Twenty Thousand Leagues, he had a charming smile, and his eyes crinkled. "I am Ka D'Argo. Captain of Moya."
"So this is your ship?"
The toad laughed. "Moya would debate that point, certainly." He bobbed closer. "I am Rygel the Sixteenth, rightful Dominar of the Hynerian Empire. I believe we could make rapid progress in our task here if a meeting could be arranged between myself and the ruler of your world."
D'Argo snorted. "Rygel, were you paying attention? It is anarchy down there. Nation-states at war, religious groups fighting a hundred battles that make no sense to anyone but themselves, and the information networks are spewing out gibberish."
"I choose to believe that we simply have to learn the truth from the natives. They certainly must understand the management of their world better than we can. We've only been here thirty arns or so."
Jack cleared his throat. Loudly. "Excuse me. Whatever is going on here, we can sort it out later. Right now, I want to see my son."
D'Argo nodded firmly. "Of course. He's in the medical bay." He strode off down a hallway, only to run right into a gray woman moving like a cat, giving off so much energy in her movements that Jack thought he'd get electrocuted just from being near her.
The reason for the heat became obvious the moment she opened her mouth: "D'Argo, I swear, if you don't keep that crazy old bat away from Crichton, I'm going to shoot her. Then skin her. No, first I'll skin her, *then* shoot her! I don't know-"
"Chiana, calm down!" D'Argo shouted.
"No, I will *not* calm down, D'Argo! I was talking with John and all of a sudden Wrinkles hit me with a face full of that damned powder of hers, and when I woke up, John was dead asleep and wouldn't even respond to my voice!" she hissed.
Jack felt his blood begin to boil, and he opened his mouth to ask what the hell was going on-
"Of course he's not waking up," another voice snapped. "He's knitting bones, and that takes a lot out of a person."
"What did you give him, Wrinkles?" Chiana snapped.
Wrinkles came out into the open, an old crone with tattered clothing, enormous ears, and a glowing eye in the middle of her forehead offsetting the two she bore on either side of her nose. "Very simple formula to strengthen bones."
D'Argo growled, and it sounded less like a person and more like a black bear or something. "What did you give him, Noranti?" he asked with considerable force.
"A calcovic ointment, applied to the break, to give him the necessary minerals for repair. A healing stimulus, essence of vaktoth with a little laka to keep him calm-"
"Laka?" D'Argo thundered. "You gave him *laka*? After all the time it took to get that dren out of his system-?"
"Hold it! Hold it!" Jack shouted. He whirled to D'Argo angrily. "What the *hell* has happened to my son?"
D'Argo turned to face him, a dangerous look in his eyes, but then the gray girl - Chiana - had stepped between them. "Hey, hey, easy! Don't kill each other!" She turned to glare at the crone. "Not when there's people who really need it." Then she looked at Jack - looked really close - and Jack saw something in her, something familiar. Like the astronaut groupies, back in the day, tempting him, sorely tempting him to forget his vows of faith and honor for a day. He'd never broken, but it had been a battle-
"You're his father? Crichton's your son?"
"Yeah. I'm his father. Is ... is he going to be okay?"
"He will sleep for at least another nineteen arns," the old woman said. "His body needs it, his soul needs it. He has traveled very far, and the path he walks ... well, it doesn't end here." She blinked once, an odd pattern from three eyes. "He won't set foot on Earth, you know. No matter how much he wants to." Then she smiled. "But that's no reason for you not to see him." She took his hand and dragged him onward, with the rest of the ragtag group following.
When Jack finally saw his son again, he had to press his thumb hard against his teeth to fight the urge to cry; the kid looked so ... weary. John had always had an incredible zest for life, but the man on the table before him lacked that. Even asleep, John Crichton showed how hard the past four years had been to him. Scars Jack didn't want to guess at the source of, gray in his hair, lines in his face.
The old woman slowly undid a set of straps from John's ankle, looking with a critical eye at his leg, at a purple discoloration halfway up his thigh, mostly hidden by a white paste. "He doesn't need the traction bracing any more, but he won't be able to put weight on the leg for at least eighteen solar days," she muttered. "If Leviathans didn't have gravity bladders, the healing would be so much easier - but then atrophy would be so much more dangerous - why do Leviathans have gravity bladders anyway? It's not like they need the gravity..."
"But will he be all right?"
"Oh, hard to say, hard to say. Some would say he wasn't, ah, 'all right' from the day he fell into Peacekeeper space. Labeled mentally deficient from the start, he was." At a growl from D'Argo, she blinked. "The leg will be fine. Nothing else was injured. At least, not recently. No more brain chips clouding his judgment, no more Aurora Chair to dig for his secrets."
"I want to talk to him," Jack said through set teeth.
"Of course you do," she replied. "Parent wants to know the child's doing well. Only natural. You can't. He needs sleep. And there are secrets. Things he mustn't tell anyone."
"Secrets?" Jack snapped. "Like what?"
"Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Can't tell you what the secrets are, silly man. Then you'd know what the secrets are, you see."
The redhead snapped, "We will watch over him. It is *very* important that he recover." She turned. "D'Argo. You searched for the Nebari. Did you *find* the Nebari?"
"We know the direction they're coming from," D'Argo answered with a sigh. "Rygel insisted we go sideways instead of forward once we detected them, so we have no idea how far away they are."
Rygel harrumphed. "The lateral movement lets us know *exactly* how far away they are," he snorted. "Triangulation, you dumb grot. I don't have the mathematical tools for it myself, but Sikozu or Pilot certainly would." He glared at Noranti. "Crichton could probably do it in a microt ... if he were *awake*!"
"The calculations are complete," a voice announced, and Jack whirled to see an enormous clam come to life - actually, it just sprouted an image of a clam-like organism within it, purple and fuzzy. "The Nebari strike force will breach the comet cloud within four hundred arns. Adjusted for the planet Earth's rotational cycle, that equals nineteen days." The clam turned slightly, and if Jack hadn't known better, he'd think it was staring right at him. "I am sorry, Jack Crichton." Okay, so it *was* staring right at him. "Moya and I had hoped circumstances would be different."
"Yotz," Rygel muttered. "Nineteen solar days. We can't do *anything* in nineteen solar days."
Jack frowned and pinched his nose. "How tough are they?"
Chiana spoke up. "They'd overwhelm your defenses in a hundred microts, whatever defenses those are. You haven't got the technology to put up the slightest fight." She looked sadly at him. "No offense."
"None taken," Jack groaned.
"They'll put down in the capital city, assuming there is one, and then give you a choice: submit or suffer the consequences. They might destroy a city or two to make the point if you resist. No more than necessary," she said bitterly.
Jack shook his head. "They're not going to believe it down there. And even if they did, there's no way the world can get together on something like this. There's too much bad blood, too many grudges, too much distrust," he spat.
"Scorpius might have better luck at convincing them," Sikozu offered.
"Couldn't have picked a worse time for it," Jack growled. "The woman down there doesn't even speak the language, and the other one ... something inside me is screaming not to trust him for a second."
D'Argo shook his head and laughed. "And here I thought humans were stupid."
"Look, the longer we stand around vinshing, the closer they get." Chiana turned to face Jack. "They're not about to trust any of us. Will they trust *you*?"
"Maybe," Jack mused. "Possible. Doubt it, but ... there's nothing left to lose, is there?"
"There's everything to lose," Rygel countered. "Which is why you have to convince them to trust us."
"Yeah," Jack groused. "Trust you. Sure. But trust you to do what, exactly?"
The aliens around him traded looks that varied from puzzled to hopeless.
"Look, one thing at a time, okay?" D'Argo finally said. "First, we get you back to your planet. Rygel, you want to negotiate? Here's your chance. Pilot, have a transport pod prepared."
Pilot sighed. "At once, Ka D'Argo."
Jack looked at the motley group. "You've done this before, right? Saved planets facing the end of the world?"
"Uh, well, that is..." D'Argo began, but Chiana broke in.
"Yeah."
"Sure!" D'Argo affirmed, maybe a bit too quickly.
"Lots of times. We're famous for it," Chiana said with a bright smile.
Jack looked from one to the other, then at various scornful expressions from the others. "Really?" he asked, staring down Chiana.
"Well, maye not so much 'save' as 'try to help', which generally leads to ... things not going so great," she admitted, wilting.
"This is great," Jack moaned. "First contact with intellgent life. We could be visited by the benevolent supreme beings, or at least evil monsters that we know we've got to fight. Why did it have to be the Marx Brothers?"
"We'll think of something. I promise," Chiana said. "Right now, you guys gotta get back to the home planet."
Rygel floated up to Jack's shoulder. "This way," he said imperiously.
* * * * * * *
They were at the transport pod, one of the blocky craft Jack had noted on the way in, when the gray girl caught up to them. "Wait!" she hollered.
"What is it?" Rygel snorted. "You can't come, Chiana. They'll have enough shock facing a Dominar for the first time; it's begging for trouble to have a rogue Nebari thief scampering around down there."
"No, no, no," Chiana protested. "Just ... I thought you'd want this," she said to Jack, pressing something into his hand.
Jack looked at it and stared: it was a micro-cassette recorder, emblazoned with the IASA logo, and with a tape inside. "How ... where did you get this?"
"Snurched it from Crichton's quarters," Chiana said. "First year or two he was here, he'd be talking into it. He said he was leaving messages for you, only you'd never get them, except here you are, and ... well, here you are."
"I ... uh ... thank you," Jack stammered. "I don't know what to-"
"He wanted you to get them," Chiana said. "He'd want you to listen. I'll tell him when he wakes up."
Jack couldn't find words for a moment.
"I'll look out for him," she continued. "Don't you worry."
Jack didn't say a word as Rygel and Sikozu started the pod, didn't notice as they exited the enormous ship and circled Saturn for the trip back to Earth. As they passed Titan, he finally pushed "play".
His son's voice came out, and he closed his eyes, imagining John sitting right there, talking to him:
"Hey, Dad. It worked. D.K.'s and my theory, it actually ... worked. Sort of. Look, I know this is, ah, crazy, I mean you're never gonna get this message, but I just ... wanted to let you know that I'm alive ... oh, hold still, hold still," he was saying to something or other. Then back into the tape: "Don't know where I am, technically I don't know how I got here, but I'm not gonna stop trying to get home. See? You're fixed. Go play." Jack frowned; he thought he'd heard a squeak like one of the little robots on Moya, but there was nothing around. Then a hum, and John snapped: "What the hell are you doing?"
"Your equipment might be worth something in trade," someone answered on the tape. Jack glared up at the cockpit. "Pay no attention to that," Rygel snapped.
On the tape, John mumbled something, to which the Rygel on the tape responded: "Are you a light sleeper?"
After a moment, John continued: "And there's life out here, Dad. Weird, amazing, psychotic life. And death. In Technicolor," he said, his voice already weary.
"Hey, Dad, you know those rattlers in the stomach we talked about? Well ... I got them now," John Crichton concluded from the past.
And in the present, his father felt the snakes wake up once more within him.
end part six
I had to leave the story behind at this point. *sigh* I can't find the muse for it any more, and even though I had a plan for how to continue and complete the story, somehow, there didn't seem to be much point. Maybe after the bar, I'll hash out the outline for what was supposed to have happened...