Angle Of Incidence Sequel to
In Need Of Sunlight* * * * *
First posted at Kansas on: February 27, 2004.
Rating: G.
Category: Alternate Universe.
Disclaimer: I do not own (nor am I ever likely to) the characters or universe of Farscape. If I did, they would be plotting out Season 9 by now, and there would be a ‘Farscape Channel’. I have not profited from writing this story, except to prevent the Youses Muses Gang from turning me into Purina Budong Chow. (They’re very short tempered when they’re waiting for me to record the story they want me to relay to everyone.)
Spoilers/Time Frame: No spoilers, no specific time frame. Just plain old Farscape.
Beta-reader: Scrubschick.
Note to the reader: This time around, I think you really need to read the preceding story, In Need Of Sunlight, in order to understand what is going on in this one. It picks up right after that one left off.
HOWEVER, In Need Of Sunlight has a high-R/low NC-17 rating for the second part (the ‘Addendum’). It has what I’ve jokingly begun referring to as Smut-Lite, so if you would prefer NOT to get into that sort of stuff, you can stop reading when you get to the Addendum, and you’ll have all the information necessary for this tale to make sense.
Hope you enjoy it,
* * * * *
Part 1Waking to find she was already sitting up -- sweating, heart hammering away like a recoilless defense cannon, skin buzzing with leftover tension -- was always a bad way to start the day. Aeryn Sun took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and devoted several microts to battening down her emotions. Working herself into a frenzy of desperation wasn’t going to help them find John. Another day of careful searching, doing everything possible to make sure that no one on the planet discovers that the blind ‘sebacean’ is of value, will require every bit of patience she can muster.
Then she remembered.
They had found him. He was all right. Battered, half-starved, and exhausted beyond anything she’d seen except after the Gammak Base, but basically unharmed. The painful clenched knot in her stomach loosened, released its strangling grip on the rest of her intestines, and she began breathing more easily. Aeryn turned, reaching for where she knew John was lying sound asleep -- and found nothing but empty bed. There wasn’t even a vestige of warmth to suggest he had been there.
The second lurch of shock was far worse than the one that had woken her. The first had been the product of a dream; this was the continuation of a waking nightmare. For one microt, it had felt real. She had been certain that they had located John, the antidote had worked, and he had fallen asleep beneath her, the quiet whoosh of his breathing lulling her into a hypnotic state where she could finally fall into the first deep sleep in days. Now she wasn’t so sure. Two sets of images were tangled into a sleep-dazed knot, one that she was having trouble sorting out. A quick scan of the cell showed no sign of him, hinting that the less pleasant version was the correct one.
“No,” she whispered. She rolled over, across the barren section where John belonged, and swung her feet over the side of the bed. “Oh, Cholak save me.” They had found John after all. All the proof she needed to convince her of that event was amply provided by her own body, and every bit of uncertainty melted away in an split-microt. She ached. It was the quiet, pleasant morning-after discomfort of tired, over-stretched muscles, interspersed with sharper pangs testifying to the knobs and protrusions on the shower wall and the desperation-induced frenzy of their evening’s activities.
Aeryn got up slowly, fighting her way upright with muscles that hadn’t been given enough food or rest over the past several days, muscles that also testified she hadn’t been asleep for more than a few arns. She reached over her shoulder to gently finger a sore spot near her spine. “Frelling leviathan,” she whispered to the quiet chamber. The raw area was the reason she had asked John to move from the shower to some place less abrasive and unyielding. Her fingers found and caressed another abused area. This one was at the top of her shoulder near her throat. Her shirt would never cover it; it was too high on her neck. “Frelling Crichton,” she cursed the source of the small injury.
Saying his name reminded her why she was awake at that arn. Aeryn slid into the loose-fitting shirt and pants she preferred as nighttime wear, and ducked cautiously through the shimmering drapes that provided marginal privacy to the chamber’s occupants. As she expected, the cell doors were open, undoubtedly left that way by John in an attempt to not wake her. The corridor outside their quarters was empty and silent. That wasn’t unusual. The current crew roster of six was not large enough to ever fill the tiers with noise and movement, not even when they were at their busiest. But this was the pervading silence of mid-sleep-cycle -- ‘nighttime’ as John insisted on calling it. Aeryn glanced left and right, made a guess at where he might have gone, and headed for the Center Chamber.
She found him right where she expected. John was lounging with his back against the wall, turned so he could look out the portals, working his way through one of several trays of food arranged haphazardly on the table. He greeted her by dropping his feet to the floor and deftly popping several protruding bits of food into his mouth with a finger. “Hey. Didn’t mean to wake you,” he slurred through the mouthful.
“You didn’t. I woke on my own.” Aeryn slid onto a seat next to him and then devoted several microts to surveying the array of dishes. “This looks like more than your usual midnight snack.”
“I was too hungry to sleep. I came down here to get a fistful of munchies. Once I got started, I couldn’t seem stop. Call me ‘garbage disposal’.” He waved a small dish in her direction, inviting her to join in.
She caught the flailing crockery, peered inside to see what he was working on, and snared one of the delicacies. They sat silently for the time it took her to crack the carapace between her teeth and extract the meat. Aeryn plucked the container out of his hands, reserving the last few for herself. “Hedrian beetles. You hate these.”
John responded by dragging a different dish closer and starting in on a congealed mass of leftover stew. “I was dying for some protein. You keep saying there isn’t any food this side of Jupiter higher in protein than those ugly little varmints.”
“So you’ve finally learned to like them.”
“No. They still taste like steamed inner tubes to me.” He watched her crack another of the multi-legged like creatures, and shook his head. “I can’t believe you actually enjoy those things. It’s like eating a cockroach.”
“You like the fried Kolfrinian eels,” she said, pointing down the table to a platter of the crunchy strips. “Now there’s a disgusting food. Those things squirm when they’re alive. They’re more like worms than --”
“Don’t ruin it! Aside from your steamed rubber bugs, it’s the only type of meat on this table that doesn’t taste like chicken, Aeryn.” He punctuated his sentence by pointing at the last beetle in her dish, then stretched to one side and snared a fistful of the fried eels. “Don’t screw it up by reminding me what these look like before they’re cooked. For now, I can pretend they’re onion rings.” Crichton eyed one of the strips for a moment, then added, “only straightened out a bit,” and tossed it in his mouth.
Aeryn finished the last of her snack, pushed the empty dish to one side, and checked the contents of a large flask. She poured herself a raslak and leaned back where she could watch John more easily. He paused to look at her, eyebrows raised in silent inquiry.
“Keep eating. You need it,” she said.
“That’s not what I was thinking.” He leaned closer, tilting his head to look at something.
John’s proximity gave her a chance to look at him more closely without feeling as if she was conducting some sort of Peacekeeper inspection. It gave her an opportunity to note the gaunt hollows that she wouldn’t have predicted would appear in just five short days, signs of how little he’d managed to find to eat; to spot the lingering dusky streaks of dirt embedded in his skin that his vigorous scrubbing hadn’t removed; and to register the pinkish tinge to his eyes, evidence of the antidote that would continue to circulate through his body for several more days.
John glanced up to find her staring at him. “Everything okay?”
She brushed a knuckle against the lower lid of one of his eyes, carrying away a smear of moisture, then turned her hand so he could see it. If gathered in greater amounts, as when his eyes had been streaming after the injection of the antidote, his tears were a dark red.
“I know. If I concentrate on it, the colors I’m seeing are a little off.” John grinned more widely. “Want to see what happens when I --”
“No! You’ve shared that with me twice already. It’s a lovely color, John.” After his initial shock had worn off, he’d been delighted with the change being produced by the interaction of the antidote’s enzymes and his renal organ. She decided it was a good time to change the subject. “What has got you so fascinated?”
He lightly fingered the spot on her neck that she had found before leaving their quarters. “You need to be more careful around wild animals. Something bit you.”
“You bit me!” Aeryn checked the doorway, inexplicably convinced that she would find the rest of the crew standing there listening. “How many times have I asked you not to do that? At least not where it shows.”
“I got carried away,” he said. John shrugged and nonchalantly popped several more strips of fried eel into his mouth. “I’m not the only one.”
It brought her up short, stilling her next objection before it could be given voice. “What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded. Something stirred inside her stomach and chest, something irrational and angry. She fought it down and tried to concentrate on what he was doing. John was on his feet, turning his back toward her. He lifted his shirt, revealing the spattered, darkening pockmarks left behind by fingers that had grabbed too tight, the artwork of a grip that had clutched so frantically at his back and shoulders that it had left the quick-fading superficial bruises.
She was supposed to blush and laugh it off; especially since there was no one in the chamber to see what they had done to each other in their exuberance. Relief at having him back, safe and unharmed by the toxin, was supposed to override any mild embarrassment and turn it into laughter and more teasing. None of those things happened. Aeryn fought it, trying to control whatever was happening, only to lose ground to an inexplicable, all-encompassing fury. John yanked his shirt down, and turned around with his foolish grin already in place, ready to parry her next humorous attack with his own special brand of silliness. She knew she had to get away before she exploded and said something that would lead to days of misunderstanding and shared pain. Aeryn slammed her raslak down, and spun out of her seat, wanting only to get away from him. But John was on his feet, and caught her easily before she could bolt.
“Hey, I didn’t mean anything by it. Aeryn, what the hell is going on?”
“Let me go!” She slapped at his hands, trying to get loose without hurting him. “Just leave me the frell alone!”
He ducked his head, taking most of the half-hearted blows on his shoulders and arm where they wouldn’t do any damage. “No! Stop it. Just tell -- Aeryn, cut it out!” He spun her around, over-powering her more easily than he should have been able to, and wrapped both arms around her, ending the brief spat. She bucked and yanked anyway, driven by something she didn’t recognize. John tightened his embrace, lifted both of her feet off the ground, and hung on.
“What was that all about?” he asked when she stopped struggling. He lowered her feet to the ground.
“Let me go,” she said. It came out flat and harsh. She could hear for herself the complete absence of emotion in her voice and, for a moment, was carried back to her early days with Crichton when feelings were a greater threat than the strange alien human who had destroyed the only life she had ever known. She tried again, more softly. “Please, let me go. I’m sorry.”
John retained a light grip on her arm, making sure she couldn’t leave. “Sit down,” he said, managing to make it sound like a request rather than a demand. He waited while she chose a seat across the table from him, and then plunked her raslak down in front of her. John returned to his half-reclined spot against the wall, his intense gaze the only hint that anything unusual had happened. He pulled a platter toward him, plucked out half a dozen rice balls, tossed one into the air and caught it in his mouth.
“Drink,” he ordered around the mouthful.
“I don’t need any more to drink.” It had to be fatigue and what little raslak she had already consumed that had combined to make her act so irrationally. There was no other explanation for her behavior. One moment she had felt nothing but love and relief that he was safe, thinking of how the poison had robbed him of everything necessary for survival on his own, and the next microt she had been acting like an emotionally overcharged lunatic.
“You need something.” His murmur teetered perfectly on the edge of being audible: just loud enough so she could hear it, and yet quiet enough that he could argue he hadn’t meant her to make out the words. Aeryn bit her lip and turned away from him.
“Aeryn --”
She turned when he didn’t continue. John was resting his head on his hand, slowly rolling the five remaining rice balls around on the table in front of him.
“I don’t know what set that off. I said I’m sorry.”
“I don’t have the energy to cope with this. I’m tired, Aeryn, and in case it doesn’t show, that crap you injected into me hasn’t quit. I’m on fire from cranium to crotch, and it’s not a real pleasant sensation. I don’t mind because it’s better than doing the three blind mice act, but I don’t have what it takes to dig through to whatever is bothering you.” He slid down until his head rested on his folded arms and looked up at her from his slumped position.
“Then don’t. For once in your life, let it go. There’s no regulation that says we have to resolve every one of these things as they happen. Let it go, John.” Aeryn skirted the table to resume the seat she’d taken earlier, and began rubbing his back. “We should go back to bed. You need sleep.”
“Aeryn, you went from the glowing warrior princess on the white stallion thundering in to save the injured hero to the flipped-out expert in avoidance in under five microts flat --”
“Crichton,” she warned. Less than half of his sentence had made any sense to her. Even after allowing for his exhaustion, that was approaching a record.
“You went from smiling and joking to full shutdown mode in record time, Aeryn. Don’t sit there and tell me nothing is bugging you. I’ll understand if you’re pissed at me for managing to get into that mess. I still don’t understand what that guy used on me. There’s no way I would know what to avoid the next time around.” He sat up, fingered one of the discarded rice balls, and tossed it toward the waste funnel. It missed and fell to the floor with a quiet moist-sounding smack.
“I’m not angry with you.” Aeryn laid her head on his shoulder and leaned into him, renewing her familiarity with the solid feel of his body. “That wasn’t it.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know. I give you my word of honor; I don’t know why I got so angry. It was simply there before I knew what was happening -- unfocussed and uncontrollable. I didn’t want you to have to deal with this. That’s why I tried to leave.” She rubbed his back again, a simple up-down motion along his spine. She could feel the quivering muscles of fatigue, some of them knotting under the simple strain of staying awake. “Let’s go back to bed. We can figure this out later.”
His stomach chose that moment to growl, delivering a clear message into the suddenly silent chamber. “I’m not going to be able to sleep until I get some more to eat. I’d only just gotten started when you arrived. Talk to me while I munch.”
“I don’t want to talk about --”
“Then don’t. Tell me about something else.” Crichton nudged her, asking her to sit up, and pulled a different container toward him. He sniffed at the contents, shook his head, and exchanged it for a different one.
Aeryn tossed the discarded rice balls one by one into the center of the waste funnel. John’s snort of disbelief at the accuracy of her aim finished what his relaxed unspoken forgiveness had begun. The guilt surrounding her irrational behavior melted away, leaving the earlier lightheartedness in its wake. “Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
His shrug was a hair too nonchalant. It was the carefully constructed façade that John used whenever he had a particular goal in mind and wasn’t ready to reveal it. She knew better than to attack him head on. Finding out what he was up to required a subtle approach. Distracting him with something else was always an effective start. “You want me to talk, tell me what to talk about.”
“What happened after the fight? Last thing I remember is getting hit with something wet. Tell me what that stuff is, and how to avoid it next time.”
Aeryn sighed, made herself more comfortable, and tried to dredge the facts out of her memory. Concocting the antidote several days earlier had required that she recreate a dimly remembered training lecture on how to counteract the poisonous substance. The briefing on how to create the poison itself, which had occurred cycles ago when she was a sub-officer, was even more deeply buried. No one had paid much attention beyond what was necessary to complete the evaluation at the end of the instructional unit. Sebaceans were too susceptible to the toxin; no soldier in her right mind would ever attempt to formulate it without a full lab and a protective suit.
“Aeryn?” John nudged her, bringing her back from those days of comradery and shared competition. Those were predominantly good memories, filled with pride and a sense of accomplishment, and yet as she returned to the reality of Moya’s Center Chamber, Aeryn was shocked to find that she was on the verge of another angry explosion.
“Give me a microt,” she snapped. He turned away, clearly smothering whatever response came most naturally to him. “It was a long time ago. I need some time to remember what I was taught.”
“Fine.” John stuck his nose into a flask and slurped noisily at the contents for a few moments.
“It’s a toxin that interacts with the victim’s own body fluids --”
“Thanks. I figured that much out on my own.”
It was John at his worst, making things difficult for her just when she needed patience. The desire to go back to bed and leave him to his extensive snack expanded to the point that it overrode her anger. She managed to remain relatively calm, challenging him with, “Do you want to know about the toxin or not?”
“Yes, please.”
“It’s made by distilling watruka sap. The process separates out the lethal toxins, leaving behind a compound that creates blockages of some sort in the victim’s synapses. Some species carry it around for no other reason than to disable someone in a fight, just like someone did to you. The toxins accumulate primarily in the brain, but it affects the entire body.”
“I remember that my feet always seemed numb,” John interjected.
“It was cold out. They probably were.” He glared at her and she relented. “Some of that would have been the poison, but it was cold at night. You’re lucky your feet didn’t freeze.”
He nodded and kept munching. “So the antidote dissolves all that crap.”
“Most species have the right combination of chemicals or whatever in their bodies to do it on their own. As far as I know -- As far as I was taught, sebaceans are the only species that can’t recover without some sort of antidote.”
“Sebaceans and humans,” John corrected.
It happened again. Anger, or something closely related to it, flared up, making it hard to respond to his mindless comment reasonably. Aeryn turned to look out the portals. If she got up and left, he would know that something was bothering her, and would almost certainly come after her, badgering her to talk about it. But if she stayed, she was just as certain to lash out with a hurtful comment. She searched for something else to talk about, something close enough to the topic of the poison that John wouldn’t object to the change in subject, but far enough away that she might calm down before it was too late.
“What do you remember about the barfight?” she asked.
“Fists, yelling, chaos, nothing -- in that order,” he answered.
Aeryn took a slow breath and began telling him what it had been like from her perspective.
* * * * *
Behind her, the yelling and smashing eased from a full-out din to a level she would have described as merely deafening. Aeryn ducked a wildly thrown punch, backhanded her opponent into a corner, and then, using the momentum to spin her around, turned to see how Chiana was faring. She wasn’t fighting … exactly. Chiana was using a different selection of talents keep from getting harmed in the midst of the riot. The nebari’s sinuous, sexually suggestive motions had two males transfixed. The pair was standing motionless, open-mouthed, staring at the slender, devious enchantress.
“You think you might like some of this?” Chiana’s customary purr was elevated to a growl in order to be heard over the bedlam. Her hands stroked the inside of her thighs. Both nodded eagerly, for the moment rendered oblivious to the chaos around them. “Well, try some of this first!” she yelled, and kicked one and then the other squarely in the mivonks.
A flickering motion to one side drew Aeryn’s attention away from the howling, suffering victims on the floor and the laughing figure standing over them. She had her pulse pistol out of its holster and aimed between the eyes of the male approaching from her right before he could begin to slow his angry rush. “That … is a very bad idea,” she said. He backpedaled furiously, slipped, and wound up scrambling away from her on hands and knees.
For a few moments, the two women stood in a clear area of the floor, as though resting in the eye of a storm, dozens of individual fights raging all around them. Aeryn had enough time to spot Noranti perched on the bar, smashing bottles over the head of anyone who got close enough to her to receive her hard-swung benediction, and to locate D’Argo near the door. The luxan was grabbing one brawler at a time by the scruff of the neck and whatever other piece of anatomy he could latch onto, and heaving them out the door. Although his efforts weren’t doing anything to stop the fighting, he was gradually clearing the building. Although Crichton was nowhere in sight, she wasn’t worried about him. She could hear one of his never-ending streams of mindless comments off to one side.
“Look out!” Chiana yelled.
Aeryn instinctively dodged to one side. A lifetime of training took over before she had a chance to locate the threat; all that mattered, drilled into her by brutal repetition, was that she not remain in the spot she had been occupying a microt earlier. One of the ladder-like racks used to hold bottles of raslak smashed down on the floor beside her, wielded by yet another of the brawling bar patrons. Aeryn spun away from him, one heavily booted foot lashed out with the momentum of her turn, and her attacker went sprawling under the feet of another pair of combatants.
She lost track of time and effort, lost track of everything except knuckles, elbows, knees, and feet. For a time there was nothing but block and parry, evade wildly thrown punches, try to offer a little help to Chiana whenever their respective fights took them closer to each other, and watch out for surprise attacks from behind her. It was a glorious waltz of flowing energy -- a well-conditioned body doing what it had been bred and trained to do. It came to an end all at once. The madness stopped as abruptly as it had begun, leaving her kneeling on one hapless male with her pulse pistol grinding into his forehead.
“Are we done now?” she demanded of him. He nodded with difficulty, straining against the pressure of the weapon pressing against his head. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” he insisted. “All done. No more fighting.”
“Aeryn!” D’Argo’s alarmed bellow broke into the suspended moment. “Aeryn, where are you?” D’Argo waded through the mass of panting, dazed brawlers, Chiana trailing anxiously in his wake. Already-staggering bodies were tossed to either side, propelled by a frantic luxan.
Aeryn released the frightened being lying beneath her and got to her feet. “I’m right here. What’s the matter?”
“Can you not smell it?” he demanded. “Are you sure you’re not affected?”
She sniffed cautiously. “Smell what? I can’t smell much of anything except unwashed bodies.”
“
Grefalkic.” He gave it the luxan name. “That frelling poison made by refining --”
“The sap from a watruka plant,” Chiana finished for him. “Someone in here was using it. We’ve found at least six people who got hit with it.”
“It wasn’t me. There aren’t any other --” She had meant to say ‘sebaceans in here’, addressing D’Argo’s obvious concern over the more permanent effects the poison had on her species. The planet was a spacing center, devoted almost entirely to the production and maintenance of spacecraft, which meant that every major population center was awash in hundreds of different sentient, space-going species. There were blessedly few sebaceans mixed in, and they hadn’t spotted a single Peacekeeper in the three planetary days they’d been here.
“Crichton!” she said, realizing that there was one other person at risk. Over the cycles, his human physiology had repeatedly proved to be all too similar to sebaceans. “Where’s John?”
“CRICHTON!” D’Argo bellowed over the quiet hubbub of the crowded room. There was no answering cry. “CRICHTON!” D’Argo began bulldozing his way across the room toward the corner where she had last seen John fighting, repeating his loud summons while tossing startled patrons out of his way.
“Frell!” Aeryn began a quieter but no less anxious scan of the huge room, searching for someone specific: the last person she’d had time to see fighting with John. It had been very near the end of the chaotic brawl, and very likely the last person he had been forced to fight.
Chiana trailed along behind Aeryn. “Maybe he knows what to do. Maybe he’s just curled up somewhere waiting for us to find him.”
“If he got hit with it, then he probably can’t understand anything but English at this point, Chiana. And he is almost certainly blind and confused. We have to find him quickly, before he wanders off. Only Cholak knows where he might wind up on this planet if we don’t track him down quickly.” She spotted the person she was looking for, a thick-bodied female Saultarian. Aeryn was on her in an instant, ramming the taller, heavier female up against the wall with her pulse pistol jammed up against the yellow-skinned throat. “Search her. See if she has more,” she ordered Chiana.
“Here it is. This tralk is the one who used it,” the nebari answered almost immediately. Slim, gray fingers plucked half a dozen small vials out of the female’s belt.
“Where is the sebacean male you used this on?” Aeryn demanded. “Where was he taken?”
“Thrown out the back door,” came the half-strangled answer. “With the other unconscious bodies. Always done that way. His problem if he loses a fight.”
“Frell!” Aeryn spun away, the object of her brutal attentions already forgotten. “Chiana --”
“On my way.” The slender body slipped away through the crowd before Aeryn could ask her to start hunting for Crichton.
“Keep your comms open!” Aeryn yelled after her. She waited long enough to catch the yelled acknowledgement then began searching for the rest of the crew.
D’Argo was near the bar, snarling at one of the refreshment house’s owners. Rygel floated alongside the hapless proprietor, wielding a Charrid ractor knife. The justifiably frightened man was shaking his head, eyes darting back and forth between the two equally unpleasant threats, and pointing emphatically toward the rear of the building where Chiana had just disappeared out the door. Noranti, on the other hand, was kneeling beside one of the more battered patrons of the bar, mumbling small assurances and examining a gash in his scalp. As Aeryn watched from across the room, the old woman blew one of her powders into the patient’s face. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he keeled over backward. The crack of his skull hitting the floor suggested that, as usual, the traskan’s cure would be worse than his original injury.
“Much better,” Noranti crooned. “No more pain, no pain at all.” She gathered her skirts and stepped carefully past half a dozen similarly unconscious bodies, headed for another moaning, bleeding former-brawler.
“Noranti!” Aeryn called, stopping the woman before she could administer to the next unknowing victim. “I’ve got a job for you, and it’s important. Get over here.”
“Busy, busy, busy,” came the distracted answer. “There are many to tend to, much to do. I can’t be bothered now.”
“Get over here!” Aeryn ordered more loudly, spacing out her words for emphasis. She drew her pulse pistol, considering shooting at Noranti if only to get her attention. “You have a far more important task to tend to, old woman.”
“Aeryn, we need to find John.” D’Argo was standing by her side, the noise of his approach smothered under the clatter of chairs and tables being righted. Several of the establishment’s employees were gathering damaged furniture and hauling it toward a back room. It looked like they’d had a lot of practice with this sort of event. “They threw him out the back of the building.”
“I know. Chiana is already checking there.” Aeryn darted forward, grabbed Noranti by the back of her neck, and dragged her squawking and complaining back to where D’Argo was waiting impatiently. “Listen to me, you wrinkled old bag!” Aeryn snarled at her. “You are going to go to the commerce area near the landing port, and you are going to find and purchase five things. Do you hear me?”
“A cure?” D’Argo asked.
“Yes.” Aeryn closed her eyes and concentrated on a long-ago lecture about how to reverse the toxin. “Howler’s root, oil of velkum, three quats of chakan accelerant, powdered raw jellifan, and … and … Frell!”
“Relax, you can remember it,” D’Argo encouraged her. “Relax and let it come to you.”
“Howler’s, velkum, accelerant, jellifan,” she chanted quietly, raising one finger for each item.
“Oh no. You would never want to mix those together,” Noranti interjected. “Horrible taste, terrible. Very unpleasant flavor, not to mention the damage to the cooker. Highly volatile in the presence of heat. Let me suggest --”
“Roasted Klarian husks, finely ground,” Aeryn finished abruptly. The pulse pistol was out again, its muzzle hovering a mere dench away from Noranti’s third eye. “You will buy those five items, package them, take them to the transport pod, and comm one of us to take you back to Moya. When you get there you will leave all five items in the maintenance bay. You will not cook them. You will not taste them. You will not turn them into a stew or a soup or any other of your hideous recipes. Do you understand?” The final three words of her speech were barked out with slow deliberation.
Rygel, hovering beside D’Argo, interrupted before Noranti could answer the angry demands. “You can’t possibly be suggesting that we feed a mixture of those ingredients to Crichton. He’ll either scream his way to a horrible, agonizing death or spontaneously combust after the first swallow. Not even Crichton deserves a fate like that.”
“Do you understand?” Aeryn repeated to Noranti, ignoring the hynerian.
“Yes. Of course. The most simple-minded of souls can remember that.”
The pulse pistol was jammed into its holster with excessive energy. “We’re wasting time we should be spending looking for John. Remember -- Howler’s, velkum, chakan accelerant, jellifan, and Klarian husks.” She watched Noranti for some sign that she had memorized the list. “Have you got that? It’s for Crichton, for an antidote.”
“Yes, for Crichton. I’ll take care of it right away.” Noranti spun toward the front door in a swirl of skirts and a gusting billow of odor from her unwashed body ‘juices’. The three remaining crewmembers turned away as one, nearly identical grimaces in place despite their disparate features. A wandering dialogue, barely audible, drifted in her wake. “Perhaps if poured over some Ellidrian kelp salad. Yes, of course, that would offset the acidic properties. It would need a garnish to overcome the more volatile --”
The entire population of the bar turned, startled stares looking for the source of the sizzling pulse weapon blast. Aeryn’s pistol was back in its holster before anyone could move or make a noise. Noranti, frozen in her tracks, bent forward and peered back at the threesome through the hole that had been burned through her skirt. It passed through an unknown number of layers, front and back, several denches above the level of her presumably wrinkled knees.
“Buy, transport, unload, and leave it the frell alone!” Aeryn yelled at the old woman, “or the next time I will aim higher.”
“Buy, transport, unload, and don’t touch it again,” Noranti agreed, still looking at them upside down through the hole in her skirts. “Yes, I can see the wisdom in that. Yes.” She straightened up, gave the stunned occupants of the building a haughty, three-eyed stare, and hurried out the front door.
“We are wasting time,” Aeryn repeated. “We have to find --”
“No sign of him anywhere out there,” Chiana interrupted. She slid to a stop next to D’Argo. “I checked everywhere in the alley, and for a hundred motras in both directions along the street.”
“Are there slavers of any sort on this planet?” Rygel asked. “Perhaps he’s been abducted.”
D’Argo motioned for the others to lead the way toward the door. “Not that I’ve heard of since we landed. It’s more likely that John has just wandered off. We’ll split up and start hunting. Ask the merchants if they’ve seen him.”
“Sebacean. Remember to ask if they’ve seen a blind sebacean,” Aeryn added. “And deaf. He won’t be able to understand anyone, so they’re going to think there’s something wrong with his hearing.”
Chiana paused outside the door, scanning the alley in both directions. “Maybe grefalkic isn’t as bad for humans. Maybe … maybe he can understand what people are saying, or maybe it will wear off after a while. Maybe humans are different than sebaceans.” When no one answered her, she turned around to face her three crewmates. “What did I say?”
“You of all people, Chiana,” D’Argo said in a disbelieving tone. “When have we ever beaten the odds or simply been lucky enough to have things go our way?”
“I was trying to --”
Aeryn broke into the impending argument. “Enough! We don’t have the time to waste on this. Chiana, Rygel, head that way. When the street crosses another one, split up and check in both directions. The most natural thing will be for him to stay along a wall, using it for guidance. John will be running on little more than instinct by this time, not reason. So try to do things …” She searched for a word.
“--as if we were stupid?” Rygel asked, finishing her sentence.
“Yes. Go! D’Argo and I will check in the other direction. Comm us if you find anything.” She waved them on their way, watched until they disappeared into the street, then turned the other way, deeper into the alley running behind the refreshment house.
“Chiana said she already checked here,” D’Argo said. Despite his objection, he trailed along willingly, periodically sniffing the air. “You’re looking for something.”
“I’m looking for anything that might help us. A boot print, an impression of his hand in the mud -- any sign that he was here or which way he went. We can’t assume he automatically headed out of the alley. He may have stumbled back here first, and then made his way out. Can you smell him? Anything of him at all?”
“No. All I can smell is dirt, garbage, and something incredibly rotten. It’s nothing but dren in here!” Together, working in relaxed but urgent partnership, they checked the entire alley for tracks or any other evidence that Crichton had been there. “Nothing,” D’Argo summarized their results. “How the hezmana could he wander away from here so quickly? It couldn’t have been more than five hundred microts from the time he was tossed out the door to when Chiana came out to look for him.”
Aeryn shrugged. It was useless conjecture. All that mattered at this point was that John had disappeared, and with every passing arn it would become more difficult to find him. She offered a small explanation anyway, understanding that D’Argo’s comment had been generated more by anxiety than true disbelief. “It doesn’t knock you out for very long. Two hundred microts at most. We have no idea what else was going on out here when he regained consciousness. If there was more fighting out here, he may have tried to get away from the confusion.”
She paused at the mouth of the narrow alley, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine herself in John’s situation. The sounds and smells of the street merged into a single bludgeoning confusion of input. The scream and boom of ships coming and going at the nearby landing port periodically drowned out the never-ending cacophony of traffic on the street. She could make out the deep whoosh of the ground effect vehicles, grumbling engine noises, and the higher pitched whine of electric drive units. Voices -- shouting, talking, laughing, with the occasional angry bellow mixed as a counterpoint -- merged into a single stream of sounds that would make no sense at all to someone who had lost his translator microbes. It would be nothing better than complete bedlam.
“Where next?” D’Argo asked, interrupting her sightless surveillance of the street.
“Let’s try that way,” she said, pointing. There was a sound in that direction that reminded her of Moya. When she opened her eyes, it turned out to be a manufacturing plant, belching out thick, foul billows of soot. Magically, transformed by the sight and knowledge of what she had really been listening to, what had sounded like breathy leviathan-type rumblings was transmuted into the rhythmic growling of machinery. With sight it made sense. Divorced of that input, sounds cloaked their true nature, mocking any attempt to analyze them.
“Over there,” she repeated, and led the way toward the one spot she might have been drawn to if she were in John’s situation.
* * * * *
Aeryn’s narration came to a stop. She sat staring out the view portal, seeing the bustling confusion on the planet rather than the slow wheel of stars outside the leviathan, Crichton’s presence beside her forgotten for a short time.
“It sounds like you know a little about what it was like.”
When she turned to look at him, John was studying the contents of a container with what could have been exaggerated interest -- or he might have just been looking for something more to eat. Aeryn spent several microts trying to decide if his comment was idle chatter or if he was asking a specific question, then dismissed the entire conjecture as a waste of time. Her first reaction had been another flash of the inexplicable anger, aimed primarily at John. But he wasn’t a threat. She knew that. It had been nothing more than an observation, she decided.
“Yes.” Her jaw clamped shut of its own accord, cutting off any further explanation.
“So you’ve been hit with this … what did you call it?”
“The luxan term is grefalkic. You’ll probably have more success with that than the Sebacean word for it.” Although Crichton had managed to learn a fair amount of rudimentary Sebacean over the past several cycles, certain terms continued to defy his attempts to pronounce them. The language’s prevalent consonants weren’t the problem; it was the throat-snapping clicks and unvoiced glottals that he claimed would choke him to death. He normally capped his complaints by professing that he considered Hynerian, with its babbling tangle of nearly identical phonemes, an easier language to speak.
“So you’ve run into this grefalkic before,” he repeated. For once, he hadn’t bothered to butcher the word into one of his inexplicable human variations.
“We were warned about it in training.”
“And taught how to make the antidote, right? You knew how to do that.”
Aeryn nodded and explained, “Sebaceans need to know how to reverse the effects. Other species don’t have that problem.”
Crichton padded over to the refrigeration unit, moving silently on bare feet, and rummaged around inside for several microts. “Cold barkan?” he asked, holding up a large container of the baked grain-loaf. Aeryn shook her head. He brought it back to the table anyway, and began putting together the closest version to an Earth sandwich he’d been able to come up with over the past few cycles.
“We’re out of tuna,” she said, teasing him.
John glanced at her, grinned, and went back to his food preparation. “This works out to something a little like chicken loaf on whole grain.”
He settled back with his fistful of food and propped his feet up on the seat next to her, wiggling his toes for several microts with what she thought might be nothing more than pleasure at being back aboard Moya. Aeryn bent over his ankles, checking the infected wound. “Looks better already,” she told him.
“Aeryn, have you ever been poisoned by grefalkic?”
His tone was every bit as carefully nonchalant as his first question about her knowledge of the toxin. This time she knew it was deliberate. John was being cautious, but he was probing. Aeryn turned away from him, considering her options. Retreat, evade, parry, deception, frontal assault. It had been a very stressful five days since they had begun their search for him, and she was tired. She didn’t have the energy to fence with him. “Yes. A long time ago.”
John refilled her drinking flask, pushed it across the table toward her, and then asked a question she hadn’t anticipated. “How did you guys find me? If it took you five days, it must have been a problem.”
It took her a moment to realign her thoughts. She’d been searching for some sort of half-explanation, half-evasion about her experience with the toxin, and the fast change in direction, not to mention the raslak she had consumed, left her floundering for several microts. “It took us a full planetary day to figure out which way you had gone,” she began, picking up the tale where she had left off. “We decided that the fighting must have spilled out into the alley and that you were trying to get away from the confusion. Do you remember any of that?”
“Hell, Aeryn, I don’t even remember when or how I lost my damned boots. How far away from the refreshment house was I when you found me?”
“Not far. A little less than a metra, but you managed to get across one of the busiest travel routes in the city without getting run over by any sort of vehicle. That threw us off. We were looking closer to where you started, thinking there wasn’t any way you could have gotten that far away in that particular direction.” In the space of a single microt, all the frustration and anxiety of that first day returned, treating her to an uninvited and unwanted encore. She had been concerned for his safety beyond the ability to act rationally, and it had been D’Argo who had taken over command of the tiny search party while she obediently followed orders -- moving from shop to shop, asking after a blind, drunken sebacean.
“I’m okay, Aeryn.” The small statement drew her away from the emotion-laden recollection. “It wasn’t a lot of fun, but on the Crichton-scale of disasters, it only rates about a two. Having the same thing happen when we had Scorpy on our asses would have scored closer to an eight. This was a stupid accident, nothing more.”
“It could have --” Aeryn turned away and poured herself more raslak. She didn’t need any more to drink. The intoxicant had already loosened her tongue beyond good sense, but it gave her a reason to turn her back on John. She was far too late. He hadn’t missed the slip.
“It could have what, Aeryn? What haven’t you told me about my little foray into Zombie-land?”
Enough of his sentence translated that she was able to figure out what he was saying. “Somby land?” she asked anyway, hoping to divert him away from her unspoken concern.
“The land of the living brain-dead, staggering about aimlessly, stinking to high heaven, not knowing where I was going next. Don’t try to distract me. Answer the question. What are you keeping from me? What don’t I know?”
* * * * *
Author
