Crichton managed not to scream at first. Starting out with muffled, close-lipped whines, he progressed to nasal screeches, and from there to unvoiced, arching, agonized exhalations. It wasn’t until a full quarter arn had passed that he screamed for the first time, and even then it was a scream of pain only, lacking the background layers of desperation or anguish that normally went hand in hand with torture. After that first screeching outburst, he couldn’t make it stop. At times he gave in to a full-throated, wide-mouthed howl that echoed off the ceramic-coated walls, and other times he managed a more restrained but longer lasting airy cry of pain. But no matter what form the screams took, each bolt of energy from the Chair demanded its brutal penance from John Crichton. It went on without relief for another half an arn, playing up and down the range of intensities, until Aeryn finally yanked the intensity lever down and snapped all the circuits to their closed position.
“Continue!” Scorpius demanded. He jumped down from his perch beside John and strode around the corner of the console to look at the readouts. “He is beginning to weaken.”
“No, he isn’t. It’s not working, and he is going into neural shock. He needs a rest.”
“More,” Scorpius said, and pointed to a screen depicting a neural map. “Here, here, and here. Pinpoint these locations.”
“He needs rest,” Aeryn said, reaching for the main power switch.
“If you allow him to rest, you will have wasted the past half arn. Continue.” Scorpius waited, his hand on the power switch, preventing her from turning the machinery off entirely. “Now, Officer Sun. You must not delay.”
Aeryn looked across at Crichton, who had begun the tiny, hiccupping seizures she had seen once before, and compared his physical appearance with what the monitors were telling her. His shirt was soaked with sweat from the collar to his waist, his face and chin were dripping with a combination of sweat, spit, and mucus, and there was a slow crawl of blood working its way down his chin from where he had bitten his lip. The sensor readouts told a similar tale of growing exhaustion, physical shock, and the first spiking indications that would, if this continued long enough, eventually turn into irreparable neural breakdown. But there were also weak spots growing exactly where Scorpius had indicated.
“If you cannot continue as ordered, I will have Braca take over the controls,” he said.
“Melting his brain won’t accomplish what we want,” she snapped back at him.
Scorpius leaned in close, eyes fixed on Aeryn’s. “Officer Sun, you demanded that I allow you to fill this particular role. If you do not have the stomach for what needs to be done then step aside. Now. We must continue before Crichton has the opportunity to rebuild the defenses we have torn down.”
“If we stop now, we would have to start over when we resume,” she said after several more microts of consideration.
“Correct.” Scorpius waited until she nodded, then released her hand where it rested on the power switch and returned to his place on the revolving pedestal.
“Wh … wh … why aren’t you … stripping my memories?” John panted through a spray of saliva.
“That technique failed in the past, Crichton. We are trying a new method in order to reach the information I require. Once we destroy the block you have created in your mind, we will begin the information retrieval.”
“There’s … no … block, Scorpy. There’s no … no …” He blinked in confusion several times. “I don’t remember what you wanted.”
“You will, Crichton. Very soon, you will.”
Scorpius gestured to Aeryn, and after a microt’s hesitation, she adjusted the controls and ran the intensity lever up to maximum with a fast, determined slide. This time the screams began immediately and continued without any sign of weakening as they brutalized their way into Crichton’s second arn of unrelenting agony. Around the perimeter of the room, the guards began to fidget, exhibiting small signs that the abuse and the associated screams were beginning to wear on them as well. Braca, standing in the corner behind Aeryn where he could watch her progress with the controls, caught one of the movements out of the corner of his eye. He turned and glared at the culprit. The discomforted squirming by the guards came to a halt.
The hard punching slam of energy flowing through the Chair’s circuitry continued without interruption, each jolt accompanied by another of the unemotional yet gut-wrenching screams, and the smell of ionized air, scorched electronics, and the sour tang of bile and sweat merged into a single, miasmic stench of human suffering.
“Sir,” Braca interrupted as Crichton hauled in a shrieking breath in preparation for another scream. “A break.” He stepped forward, leaned past Aeryn, and pointed. She yanked every lever down except the one controlling the rotation of the Chair, which was backed off to half speed. It revolved one more time before she brought it to a stop with John facing the door.
“Excellent,” Scorpius hissed, leaning in close to his panting victim. “It is time for a small surprise, Crichton. Someone wanted to see you very badly while you were hiding from us. Unfortunately, you have arrived too late to enjoy his company.” Behind him, Braca slid into place behind the control panel, and Aeryn hurried from the room.
“C-c-c-crais?” John stammered out. “May … maybe Gilina? Or … or … or my Mom. This is all a … bad dream, right? Scarrans makin’ things up? Or … maybe … D-d-delvians?”
“This isn’t a dream, Crichton, although I’m quite sure that in a few microts you’ll wish it was. You see, the knowledge that I require was no longer lodged in your brain alone. It was transferred to someone else through your DNA. You disappeared shortly after the signing of the armistice, making it impossible to retrieve the information from you directly. It was merely fortuitous that Officer Sun was willing to help me with my research provided I assist her in locating you.”
Aeryn reentered the room pushing one of the wheeled medbeds that were common on both Leviathans and the less organic Command Carriers. This one was different in that it was smaller than usual, and instead of a padded surface, it had a raised metal lip around the upper edge so it resembled a serving cart rather than a medbed. The top was covered with a sheet.
“Aeryn?” John asked. “What’s going on? What have you done?”
“Scorpius needed information, John. You refused to give it to him. There was only one way to get it.”
“This is some sort of trick, isn’t it? You’re still trying to make me hate so you can use that against me. Whatever this is, it won’t work.”
Aeryn yanked the sheet away from the cart, revealing what looked like an unappetizing, undercooked selection of barbeque cuts swimming in a repulsive, reddish quagmire. Crichton tried to turn his head away from the mess of glistening bone, gristle, and meat, grimacing and retching if for no other reason than the thought that someone had deliberately turned one or more unidentifiable animals into such a horrid looking mess. Some facet of the mound of flesh beckoned to him however, drawing his eyes back in fast flickers, suggesting that if he stared at it long enough, he could reconstruct what sort of creature this had once been. But looking at it only served to increase his nausea to the point that he was force to take in deep, open mouth breaths, fighting a losing battle not to vomit.
He spat out a mouthful of saliva, missing Scorpius by less than half a dench, and addressed both of his tormentors. For the first time since he had descended from the courier frigate, his armor of dispassionate calm slipped, and he spat his accusations out in a furious spray of saliva. “Roadkill show and tell. Ugly but I’ve seen worse after a couple of big rigs disemboweled some of the local wildlife on I-95. What’s your point?”
Aeryn stepped up onto the pedestal and hung over him, gripping the framework of the Chair tightly, her face denches from his. “That is not roadkill, as you call it, John. That is what is left of your son! That is all that is left of D’Argo. It was regrettable, but there was no other way.”
Shocked past the point of speech, Crichton glanced back at the cart, gagged, and then managed to recover without vomiting. “You’re sick, Aeryn. You need help. Look at what … what … ” He gasped for breath, stopped breathing for several microts, and once again reverted to the forgiving, calm person that had entered the mockup of the Gammack Base over an arn earlier. “I keep trying to tell you, Aeryn, you are sick. If this doesn’t convince you, nothing ever will.” He glanced at the cart and its gory contents, lurched, and coughed up a spattering shower of yellowish stomach acid. “You can’t make me hate. You’ll never break me, Aeryn.”
“Yes, I can, and I am going to do it right now!” she yelled, and jumped down from the raised platform. Shouldering Braca aside with a fast slam of her upper body, Aeryn moved into the confined area behind the control panel. Sparing no more than two microts to examine the information displayed on the readouts, she cranked a dial all the way to its limits, slammed the intensity lever as far as it would go, closed her eyes, and leaned on the activation switch.
The first three screams from Crichton were the same as all the rest he had let out over the last one and a half arns: agonized and yet always holding some portion of himself back, giving free vent to the pain and entirely devoid of emotion. The fourth held something new. It might have been a note of desperation or the first chord of irreparable damage, the change was too subtle to tell. The fifth lungful of air erased all doubt concerning the source of the new tone. The eerily calm acceptance of what was being done to him disappeared in the space between the end of one scream and the beginning of the next, leaving a more recognizable John Crichton howling out his agony encased in a single lyric.
“AERYYYYYNNNNNNNN!!” He sucked in another breath and repeated it, this time pleading for her to stop the torment. The seventh scream was an anguished crescendo that rose to a new level of tormented fury, stripped of every last vestige of emotional control.
Behind the control panel, Aeryn lunged for a shutoff switch. With a loud bang, everything came to a stop. Restraints popped open, the Aurora Chair lurched to a halt, and Crichton tumbled forward, bounced once off the edge of the raised base, and went sprawling across the floor. Aeryn was around the end of the control panel and headed toward him before his body finished its uncontrolled descent. Drooling, crying, sputtering out thin strings of yellowish saliva that might have been an empty-stomached excuse for vomit, John was making a floundering effort to crawl toward the cart with the hideous contents, gabbling out fragmented, spit-slobbering syllables that held a lifetime’s worth of grief and suffering in their unintelligible message.
Aeryn bolted across the final two motras separating them, and slid into place beside him on one leathered hip.
“God, what have you done? Why? Oh god, why, Aeryn?” he sobbed out, try to shove her away. “Me, I understand, but why him? Get away from me, you bitch. How could you do this to your own son, you fucking psychopath!”
She kicked his arms out from under him, stopping his efforts to reach the cart, and then lunged forward and knocked him to the floor, covering his entire upper body with hers. “It isn’t him, John. Stop. It isn’t D’Argo. I swear to you, it’s not him.”
John fought to get loose, squirming wildly, trying to reach her with his elbows or buck her off, screaming out his anguish with every heave of his body and thrashing attempt to hit her. Nothing worked. Despite his wild flailing, Aeryn was able to slide an arm under one of his shoulders, looped her hand behind his neck, and pinned him face down against the floor. Not being able to get up made no difference to John. He continued to fight, swearing continuously, and even made a sloppy, poorly aimed attempt to spit at her. “Don’t lie to me! Look at it. It’s him! What kind of trick are you playing this time?”
“Stop! Stop it. I could never do that to my son, John Crichton. Never in a thousand cycles. It is not D’Argo. Listen to me! It’s not D’Argo.”
“Not … not …” The futile attempts to get free slowed to a stop. “If it’s not him, then what was all of this supposed to be, Aeryn? The practical joke from hell?”
“The Nebari, John. You were mind-cleansed. We tried everything else. This was the only way we could think of to break through it. This was the only way. We had to create the largest shock we could think of in order to get you to fight your way out of it.”
“Shock?” he mumbled into the floor.
“Yes.” Aeryn sat up slowly, stopping several times to make sure that John wasn’t going to resume his efforts to reach the cart. He lay as she had left him, cheek pressed into the floor, staring blindly in the direction of the one thing -- the single devastating horror -- that had been able to break through the artificially constructed barriers in his mind.
“That’s not Little D?” he asked one more time.
It was Scorpius who answered this time. “You have my word of honor, Crichton. This,” Scorpius dipped a gloved finger into the ‘blood’ and rubbed the viscous fluid between his thumb and forefinger, “is not even animal in origin. When Officer Sun contacted us for assistance, our medical technicians assured me they could replicate a reasonable facsimile of a corpse from modified amorphous proteins. They will be pleased to know that their efforts were successful.”
Crichton pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. “Trick or treat meets Jeffrey Dahmer,” he mumbled and then, head hanging between his arms, arched convulsively several times, his entire body seizing in response to the news. “God, I think I’m going to be sick.”
“I believe that is my cue to leave,” Scorpius said. He waved the Braca and the remaining guards out of the room, indicating that they should take the cart with them, and then paused next to Aeryn’s shoulder. “Braca will attend to the remainder of your requests. If you should require anything else …”
“We will let you know,” Aeryn finished when Scorpius made no effort to complete his sentence. She waited until the half-breed was in the corridor before saying anything else. “Scorpius … thank you. I could not have done this without your help.”
Emotionless gray eyes turned toward where she knelt next to John, contemplating the couple for several microts before making an observation about her brief expression of gratitude. “That was not an easy admission to make,” he said.
“You have no idea.”
The black-hooded head made an infinitesimal nod, acknowledging the thanks as well as the strength it took for her to offer it, and then Scorpius disappeared from sight with his usual languid, arrogant stroll.
“Where’s the little D?” John asked. Mid-sentence, his voice jumped from a low, exhausted growl to a frantic shriek, switching from merely anxious to sounding deranged in the space of one syllable. “I need to see him, just to b-b-b-be sure. Where is he?”
“He’s here, onboard the carrier. Someone had to look out for him while we came after you, and I couldn’t think of any other place that would be safe to leave him. He’s fine. Braca has issued orders to give us an arn for you to recover, and then they’re going to bring him down here.”
“Wait. You said I was mind-cleansed. That … that t-t-t-takes cycles, Aeryn! How … how old is he? I mean,” John straightened up to look more closely at her before finishing the question, “you don’t look any dih … different, but you’re Sebacean, and Little D, he’s only …”
“Stop,” she said firmly after several attempts to still the distressed rambling. “Stop for a moment and let me tell you what’s happened.”
“I don’t remember. Aeryn, how many cycles has it b-b-b-been?” he stammered out.
“Not even half a cycle. His second birthday isn’t for another forty-eight solar days. I promised him I would have you home in time for his birthday. Now sit down, shut up, and let me sort things out for you. After what I just did to you, you may have some difficulty thinking for a few days.”
Crichton wiped his face with the heel of one trembling hand and let his rump slide off his feet so he was sitting instead of kneeling. Letting out a long, shuddering breath, he wiped his hands down his already filthy shirt and then looked squarely at Aeryn for the first time. He nodded toward the temple to jaw bruise discoloring the entire side of her face and the swollen, blackening eye. “Did I do that?”
“Yes. You got loose on the way here.”
That announcement set off a shuddering, jerking reaction from John’s entire body, one that gradually worked its way into convulsive lurches and an uncontrollable flood of tears. “What’s … wrong with me?” he gasped out through a slick tide of mucus and saliva.
“Neural shock, among half a dozen other things. It will pass. Try to relax until it does.” Aeryn retrieved his coat, draped it around his shoulders and then sat down where she could watch him. “Ready?”
John clutched the coat tightly around him and nodded.
“We dropped Rygel and Chiana off on Hyneria, and then started working our way toward the Inner Sebacean Colonies. We were still debating whether to settle on a planet or remain on Moya.” She waited for John’s nod before continuing. “We found what looked like a moderately industrialized world, and you took a transport pod down to investigate.”
“I remember that!” John blurted into her explanation. “I didn’t like the political situation and decided to beat feet.”
“A contingent of Nebari were there, recognized you, and they grabbed you.”
“Frelling wormholes again. They wanted wormhole tech,” John said, hunching in on himself. He began to shiver. “When is this galaxy going to learn that wormholes don’t solve anything?”
“We’re not sure what happened when they found out you didn’t have anything to give them. Do you remember any of that?”
Without raising his eyes from the floor in front of his knees, John swung his head from side to side. “Not yet. I don’t remember very much of what you’re describing.”
“You may never recover that part of your memory. What we did find out is that they have a new method of mind-cleansing that takes a fraction of the time to finish, and --” Aeryn stopped, looking uncertain.
“And what?” John asked, repeating, “And what, Aeryn?” when she didn’t answer right away.
“And they can use it to program people to do certain things that the Nebari aren’t willing to do themselves.”
John stared at her for several microts, jaw hanging and eyes vague while he considered what she had just told him. “Assassin,” he said finally. “They were going to use me to kill as many Eidelons as possible. I was supposed to kill the entire Council of Priests if … if I could manage it. They want to upset the balance of power in this quadrant, and they can’t do … do … do that unless the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans are … at war.” He tried to get to his feet, lost his balance, and wound up back on the floor. “Did I? Did I succeed? I don’t remember, Aeryn!”
“No. You didn’t kill any of the Eidelons, John. Calm down.” She knelt in front of the swaying, distraught figure and took his face in both hands, stilling his uncoordinated attempts to get up. “The programming didn’t work the way they had hoped. You managed to get inside the New Temple on Arnessk, but when it came time to kill the Eidelons, you couldn’t do it. I’ve seen the vid recordings of it. You were like a piece of machinery that has become stuck and keeps trying to complete an operation. You couldn’t go forward, but you couldn’t go back either.”
“Peacekeeper guards,” John said more calmly. “Protecting the priests as they did thousands of cycles ago. I … I think I remember killing some of them.”
“Yes, you did. But once you fought them off, you still would not kill the priests. The Nebari gave you fighting abilities the likes of which I have never seen, John, but they couldn’t change the core essence of who you are.”
John pulled out of her grasp, rolled onto his side, and curled into a ball, doing his best to keep the overcoat wrapped around him. “The core essence of who I am feels … like ab … absolute crap right now. Why the Chair and the horror show? Wasn’t there any … other way to break the brainwashing?”
“We did try several other things, all based on how Durkha broke his mind-cleansing cycles ago.”
You blew me up!” John yelled, and sat up again, looking more energetic. “The explosion in the cell on the ship wasn’t an accident. You damned near killed me with that, Aeryn!”
She nodded. “We decided to start with simple physical trauma, hoping that was what allowed Durkha to free himself from the mental cleansing. When that didn’t work, we began trying varying levels of emotional attacks. Nothing broke through, John.”
John rolled onto his knees for the second time, and paused there, swaying wildly and still looking dazed while he examined his surroundings. “You went for broke with this one. On a scale of one to ten for horror, this scores a twenty-two.”
His teeth chattered out an erratic Morse code telling a tale of compounding physical shock and emotional upset, and he resumed the wild full-body shuddering. Ducking his head, he wiped more tears away with one of the few remaining clean sections of his t-shirt, and then resumed the shaking. “I’m a m-m-mess, Aeryn. Can’t see the little guy this way. He’ll have nightmares about me for the … rest of his life. I need to … to go … go … go somewhere and … clean … up first.”
“No, you don’t. Sit,” she ordered, and helped him make the transition. “Stay.”
“Yes’m.” Crichton folded his arms across his knees and rested his head on them, waiting to see what Aeryn had in mind for him next.
“Look up.”
When he raised his head, Aeryn was kneeling in front of him with a damp cloth in her hands. He didn’t bother asking where she had gotten it. He simply sat with his upper body braced against his knees, and obeyed each of her quiet commands while Aeryn gently wiped away the accumulation of sweat, blood, tears, and mucus from his face, working her way slowly down his chin and throat.
“M-m-m-magician now,” John finally stammered when she moved on to his arms. “Wave your hand and presto, a towel appears.”
She looked into his eyes, glanced down toward his mouth, wiped away a trickle of blood coming from his lip, and then looked up again. “I had to act like this would work. Do you understand that? I had to plan it out as though it would succeed, and we would wind up right here the way we are now. I couldn’t let myself think any other way.”
He nodded jerkily. The motion got away from him, turning into a violent up-down physical stammer. Aeryn caught him by the sides of the head and brought it to a stop. He turned his head into one of her hands and gave her a fast sideways kiss as a thank you. “Have you got … got … a clean shirt hidden somewhere? This one’s had it.”
“As a matter of fact,” she smiled at him, “I do.” She tossed the cloth to one side, got up, and disappeared behind the control consoles. “And clean pants if you need them,” she called to him.
“No, but it was a near miss when you b-b-b-brought out the gory Halloween trick. D-d-d-d-damn near shit myself.” He spent several moments shivering and looking around the room, contemplating the trouble they had gone to in order to make it resemble the Gammak Base. “You came to Scorpius for help,” he said eventually.
“Braca first. He brought in Scorpius. I needed transportation, guards who could subdue you, and resources. And,” Aeryn reappeared carrying several items, “you have to admit that no one else can shock people like Scorpius.”
John raised his arms, letting Aeryn pull his shirt off over his head. Another one was pulled down into place, and she helped him put on his vest. When they were done, Aeryn draped his overcoat over his shoulders again, and knelt in front of him. “Need some more time?”
“Yeah. Decade ought to do it.” He glanced toward her and away several times. “I’m not mad at you.”
Aeryn took a deep breath and let it out slowly, letting her head hang for several microts before she answered him. “You would have every right to be. John, I tried to think of another way to do it, but I just couldn’t come up with anything else that would be this --”
“Horrible?” he asked.
“Shocking. After discussing it with some of the research specialists here, I felt that it had to be some form of shock that broke Durkha’s mental cleansing.”
He thought about that for an extended period of time, the shivering slowly abating as both his mind and body recovered from the battering they had endured. “The Chair and Scorpius weren’t part of the shock treatment,” he said eventually.
“That was a bit of both. We recreated the room from the Gammak Base in order to get you off balance, and hoped that it would bring back some bad memories.”
“You succeeded,” John said. “And after that you went drilling for oil and hit stupid instead.”
“If you mean were we using the Chair to create breaks in the imposed conditioning, then the answer is yes. It was intended to soften you up for the final series of shocks.”
“Aeryn?”
“What?”
John wrapped his arms around his midsection and started to shiver again. “The next time you need to scare the crap out of me, save us all some time and trouble and just ask for a divorce.”
A small, shocked sounding laugh escaped from Aeryn, after which she smiled at him and reached out to run a hand through his hair. But something went wrong half way through the process. It began when Aeryn had to fight an extended battle to keep her smile from turning into a frown. As John watched in concern, she began to collapse in upon herself, as though all the portions of her body that kept her upright were slowly dissolving. The disciplined soldier disappeared, the assured movements turned to trembling hands and brimming eyes, and a horrible mixture of sobs and laughter began to escape from her lips.
“Aeryn?” John asked, ducking his head to look into her eyes. “What’s … what is this? What’s wrong? What aren’t you telling me? Did Scorpius do something to you?”
She shook her head, covered her eyes with one hand, and started to tremble from head to toe.
John shuffled forward on his knees, controlling his own shaking long enough to do a fast, erratic inventory of her body, clothes, and the increasing level of tremors coming from Aeryn. “Babe, I’m okay,” he said at last. “You did the right thing.”
“I tortured you,” she whispered from behind her hand.
He scuffled across the distance remaining between them and carefully pulled her hand away from her face. “You saved me. You know that, right?”
Her nod was a tremulous, teary-eyed affair that went sideways as often as it went up and down. She bit her lip, tried to smile at him, and started to cry instead.
“It’s okay to go to pieces now that it’s over,” John said quietly. “We can sit here and go to pieces together, but I’m pretty far down the road already so you’ll have to do some catching up.”
“I can do that,” she said through the first trickle of tears.
He reached for her, intending to pull her into a hug. “Come here.”
“No,” Aeryn said on the first catch of a sob. “I want to hold you. And I want you to tell me that you understand why I had to be the one to do this to you. I couldn’t let Scorpius or Braca handle the controls, John. I was so afraid they wouldn’t know when to stop, or that they might take revenge for some reason we didn’t know about. I couldn’t trust them not to hurt you, so I had to be the one to do that to you.”
“It’s okay. I understand. I’m okay, I’m okay,” he repeated through the flood of explanations. “If you want to hold me, then hold me. I could use a little of that right now.” He dropped onto one hip, and from there wormed his way into her embrace so he was half lying and half sitting with his back against her legs and chest, and his head tucked in against her shoulder. Once settled, he encouraged Aeryn to wrap her arms around him. “Tighter. Hold on tight.”
They sat that way for nearly half an arn, both of them shaking from time to time, John shuddering and lurching his way through the aftermath of the Chair, and with Aeryn making a slow and thorough exploration of as much of his body as she could reach. There were occasional bouts of tears, slow whispers that were frequently interrupted by John’s chattering teeth or stammering, and together they worked their way through the first tide of residual trauma.
“John,” she whispered in anguish at one point. Aeryn had been examining his chafed wrists and in the process had turned his hand palm up. There were four deep bleeding gouges that had been carved into his hand by his own fingernails, evidence of the degree of agony he had endured. Crichton caught her right hand -- the hand that had been resting on the intensity control for the Aurora Chair -- in his, and kissed his way up her palm from wrist to fingertips. It put an end to her whispered self-recriminations, leaving only quiet assurances from both of them that their love hadn’t suffered from the events of the past several arns.
“I don’t want D’Argo to meet us here,” John eventually said in a firmer voice. Pointing toward the Aurora Chair with his chin, he explained, “I don’t want him to see that atrocity. He’s too young to have to know that things like that exist in this universe.”
“Can you walk yet?” she asked.
For an answer, John sat up and put out a hand. With Aeryn alternately pulling to help him up and pushing so he wouldn’t over balance and fall down again, he staggered to his feet. She led him to the wall near the door, propped him up, and went back for another damp towel and his coat. After several microts worth of work with the towel, and some help getting John into his coat, Aeryn stepped back and inspected him. “It’ll have to do,” she said.
John scrubbed at his face with the towel one last time before tossing it to one side, gave her a weak grin, and pushed away from the wall. “Can’t shine shit.”
“I’m not going to bother asking whether that is something you would seriously attempt.”
“Smart woman,” he said, and then demanded, “The little D. I want to see him. I need to see him, Aeryn. Just not here.”
Aeryn bent toward a Peacekeeper-issue comms device and held a brief, hushed discussion with someone. Straightening up, she explained, “I asked them to meet us in the Medical Sector. Don’t get upset when you see him though. I didn’t bring any of his clothing when I brought him here, and he loves wearing a uniform.”
“If he’s healthy and in one piece he can wear a pink tutu for all I care.”
“This way,” she said, steering him out the door and turning to the right.
“Medical Sector … I want to go home, Aeryn. We’ve got scanners aboard Moya. I just --” John stopped walking and turned away from her for a moment, wiping away more tears with the heel of his hand. He took a deep breath, shoulders rising all the way to his ears before settling down, and then turned to face her more in control of himself. “I want to grab the tadpole, and get the hell out of here, Aeryn. I just want to go home to Moya. You and the little guy are all I need right now.”
“Medical,” she said firmly. “Please, John. For me. If the Chair caused any damage or if any of the blocks the Nebari created are still in place, they have the expertise to deal with either one. It won’t take long.”
Crichton didn’t put up a fight. He looped his arm over her shoulders, and turned to resume their original course. “Okay. Whatever you want, Aeryn.”
“And while they’re making sure you are all right, I can have the surgeons release the stasis on our daughter.”
John stumbled and went down on one knee, nearly taking Aeryn with him. With one hand against the wall to steady himself, and Aeryn pulling on the other, he lurched back up faster than he had gone down. “Dau … Daughter?” He looked between her abdomen and her face several times. “Daughter? When … I mean, how long … Are you sure?”
“Positive. I arranged for a test when I left D’Argo here. It’s a girl.”
“An itty-bitty little Aeryn Sun,” he said. The beginnings of a smile faded, turning into a wary, cautious look instead. “How soon?”
Smiling, Aeryn ran a hand down his cheek, and gave him a quick kiss. “I asked them to adjust it to a normal pregnancy. As much as I’d like to get it over with, it is easier on both me and the baby if it proceeds at a pace that is normal for a Sebacean.”
The grin stayed in place this time. It was a tired looking smile, as though it might be fighting its way past pain and exhaustion, but it didn’t fade. “How long will that take?”
“About three quarters of a cycle.”
“Nine months of pickles, ice cream, and pure hormonal hell,” he said, holding on to her shoulders more tightly. “I can’t wait. I never had a free microt to tell you the last time, but you are unbelievably beautiful when you are pregnant.”
“I’m unbelievably fat and awkward when I’m pregnant,” she said, grimacing.
“No, you aren’t. You’re gorgeous, and voluptuous, and I get all excited every time I look at you. And you are so damned strong, Aeryn Sun. This entire thing took the kind of guts I’ll never have.”
“I am not,” she said. This time it was Aeryn who was showing all the signs of impending tears. “I’m weak.”
“How can you say that after what you just managed to pull off? You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known in my life!”
“I couldn’t go on without you. They,” she waved a hand to indicate the entire Command Carrier and its complement of Peacekeepers, “kept telling me the mental cleansing was irreversible. But that left me with nothing, so I couldn’t give up. This wasn’t strength, John. It was desperation.”
“Oh, god,” John sighed. Tucking her head under his chin with one hand, he leaned his cheek against the top of her head, and hugged her tightly. “What a pair we make.” They stood like that for tens of microts, little going on in the corridor other than their slow breathing and Aeryn’s occasional jerky sighs. Eventually John roused himself enough to rub a hand along her back. “You aren’t allowed to cry anymore. I already look like day old dren, and one of us has to be presentable when Little D sees us or the poor kid is gonna freak out completely.”
“Too late.” Aeryn tugged the hem of his shirt out of the waist of his pants and used it to wipe her face, after which she tucked it back in for him. “How’s that?” she asked, raising her face toward his.
“Good enough to pass kiddie inspection. Let’s go. The sooner we get you pregnant for real, the sooner we can get off this oversized tin can.”
“I was raised on one of these oversized tin cans,” Aeryn said. “I loved the certainty, the structure, knowing exactly where I belonged and what I was supposed to be doing every microt of the day. It was comforting.”
“And now?”
Tucked securely under his arm, managing to make it look like they were simply walking together rather than a case of her holding him up, she gazed at the uniformly decorated walls stretching out in front of her. “Not so much.” Aeryn held John more tightly around the waist, lending some extra stability to his wavering, stumbling excuse for a walk. “I find other things more comforting these days.”
“Glad I could be of assistance,” he said.
“I was talking about D’Argo.”
“Oh,” he said, sounding demoralized, which summoned a wider, more cheerful grin from Aeryn. He leaned against her a little harder after that, but not from fatigue or lack of balance, holding her close against his side as they walked through the labyrinth of corridors in perfectly matched steps.
After a quarter arn of Aeryn guiding their journey with a relaxed hand pointing either left or right, they turned the final corner leading into the Medical Sector, passed through the red and black emblazoned doors, and were greeted by an elated shriek that made every microt of pain, anguish, fear, and horror more than worthwhile.
“Daaaddy!”
* * * * *
Thank you for reading,
Kernil Crash
Purveyor of Hallucinations
Author
