Episode One: Waking Up Blue

Chronicles of The Moyan Group.

By Mackon

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I do not own Farscape or Battlestar Galactica. Writing this to entertain not for profit.

All power to Wikipedia, Battlestar Wiki and the Battlestar Galactica: Technical Manual for a lot of the Technical detail. Got to mention the Farscape Encyclopaedia it was a huge resource that I referred to for nearly every chapter and it will be sorely missed. Spoilers up to season three episode 'Eat Me'

A/N: 1 Much Thanks to Tweeky who did the beta work for this piece and did a brilliant job IMO.

A/N: 2 These are prequel episodes set in my Battlestar Farscape universe. Each story could be one, two or ten chapters long, nothing is planned. Anything in the back story I run across while writing Battlestar Farscape that strikes my interest is fair game. I'd also like to hear about any events, plot points or characters in the time frame between Crichton and Aeryn entering the Colonial Territories until the Moyan Group officially meets Adama's Rag Tag Fleet that anybody else is particularly interested in. Also note this is posted in the Farscape section so a certain familiarity with the canon universe is expected on the part of the author (me) so there'll be less explanation of terms and common technology.

As you've probably noticed my update speed has fallen through the floor, but nothing is abandoned.

This is a stand-alone collection, you don't need to read the rest of the story's in the BF series to enjoy these ones.

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Cauldron Artifact, Cauldron System.

Crichton blinked up at the Leviathan's curved bulkhead above his head and wondered, when had Moya redecorated the place in neon blue? John grinned up at nothing in particular, he felt great! The displaced human couldn't ever remember a time when he'd felt even half as relaxed and comfortable and just plan 'GOOD' as he did right this moment.

The nagging pains he'd collected over the last few years were completely missing from his body, even the old ache from college football in his left knee was gone. As he wallowed in the feeling of health and well being that seemed to saturate his whole body, John's right hand slid slowly towards the grip of the pulse pistol holstered on his hip. He'd have to remember to compliment whoever was responsible for this trap, whoever they were and whatever they wanted, they did some damned fine work.

And Crichton would tell them so, right before he blew their frelling heads off.

"John, wake up!" Quite possibly the least welcome voice Crichton could imagine waking up to shouted in his ear.

Oh, how John Crichton loved being right, Not!

"John, you need to wake up!" Yep sounded like the universe was gearing up to give its favourite whipping boy another good hard kick. Although Scorpius was a bit of a surprise, John had figured he was wasn't due for another couple of weekens.

The Earthman turned his head slightly to see Harvey, Hawaiian shirt and all, crouched next to him. Crichton felt a burst of relief that it was the annoying neural clone and not the original Scorpius, followed instantly by a flood of rage that the damned Clone was back again.

"You're Dead!" Hallucinations were nothing new for John Crichton, but this one had been old before it started, and there was no way Mama Crichton's little boy had had half his skull removed just to have the Vampire want-a-be, still hanging around like a bad smell, playing at haunting his brain. "You're Dead and buried and locked the damned well away!"

John didn't even remember drawing Winona, but the pulse pistol's reassuring weight was in his hand and he aimed and fired at the Scarran/Sebacean fake without a blink. "You should have frelling well stayed in your Dumpster Harvey."

Three bolts of charged plasma exploded into Scorpius's look-alike and Harvey was slammed back into one of the neon blue walls. Crichton shot him a few more times, just for the hell of it as the Earthman climbed to his feet. But John was calming down now, after the shock and surprise of seeing Harvey again after the hell he'd gone through to get rid of him last time had worn off. He knew just how useless shooting the Neural Clone was. But still, it made Crichton feel a little better, so not a total loss. The hopefully 'fingers crossed' more dead than normal, corpse gave an A-Class death rattle as Harvey's smoking body slid down the wall.

Yep, Grasshopper was doing a nice, realistic, death scene. Complete with bloody burnt holes covering his chest where Winona had hit him, but Crichton was over his shock and knew it was all for show. The bastard was just messing with John's mind again, making him see things. Crichton watched without surprise as Harvey's apparently dead body faded away, leaving only a few scorched craters in the walls to show where he'd been and where John's shots had really landed.

"Nice shooting Tex." Crichton spun to face the voice, now coming from behind him. Only just managing to stop himself from shooting again.

Harvey stood leaning casually against another of the blue walls, his arms crossed in front of him, staring at the shaking Human. "Are you finished with this nonsense John, or do you want to put a few more holes in the panelling?"

Crichton stared at the copy of his personal nightmare for a long moment, before sliding his pulse pistol back into the holster on his hip. It looked like the Scorpius clone had ransacked his memories again for more costume ideas. Just to add insult to injury Harvey was now dressed as a Hollywood good guy cowboy, complete with white ten gallon Stetson hat, oversized furry chaps, silver spurs and a big shiny Sheriffs badge pinned to his buckskin vest.

Personally Crichton thought the guitar slung over the Neural Clone's shoulder was taking things way, way too far, but that was Harvey for you.

"You're dead Harvey." Crichton told his resident bogeyman, suddenly tired, sick to death of Harvey's antics. "I had your damned chip ripped out of my head, remember? You're just some leftover garbage floating around in my subconscious. As soon as I find a decent 'Shrink' he'll explain how you're related to my unresolved issues with my dad and you'll disappear in a puff of smoke." Crichton turned around, looking at the weird blue walls, trying to get some idea of where on Moya he was. Taking the time to look closely, John could see that it wasn't the Leviathan's normal red gold bulkheads that had been coloured blue, but some kind of plastic/glass like covering that was coating every surface.

"Not quite dead yet John, I've just been resting in that lovely dumpster where you left me. By the by, a word of advice. If you ever find yourself seeing a psychologist, competent or otherwise, I think you'll find I'm the least of your problems. I live in there John and I can tell you, your head is one seriously unbalanced place." Harvey commented as he walked over to where Crichton stood, watching along with John as one of the pulse blast holes in the blue stuff was swiftly repairing itself.

The double fist sized burnt crater, bubbled with a blue foam that seeped from the surrounding blue surfaces. In seconds it filled in the hole, hardening into a smooth fluorescent blue finish. In less than a minute the watching human and neural clone couldn't tell the difference between the repair and the original. When it was finished and no trace of the weapon's fire could be seen, Crichton turned and glared at the Scorpius look alike.

"You do not 'Live' in my head Harvey, you trespass! You're a trespasser! On-site without the owner's permission, and dead! Let's not forget that! Your chip is gone and you are dead, D.E.A.D, Dead! And I'm not wasting my time talking to the dead guy who won't get a clue. I've got better and more important things to do." John started off down the corridor. Crichton headed left, having picked the direction just because it happened to be away from where Harvey was standing, but he quickly got his bearings.

He was in one of the lowest levels of the Leviathan, below the storage and living areas. This level was the last before the living ship's inner hull and the entrances to the deepest levels of Moya's interior cavity, where the nests of the symbiotic Hodian Trill Bats (1) would be.

"Do you still think you're on Moya, John?" Harvey asked as they two rounded a corner, out of the narrow service corridor they been walking along and out into one of whatever level they were on, main thoroughfares.

John was about to draw Winona and try shooting the figment again when what Harvey had said penetrated the general distrust and pissed-off-ness, that Crichton felt whenever the Neural Clone opened his mouth.

Not on Moya? The thought shook John, setting off all manner of alarm bells inside his brain, not Moya but definitely, despite the garishly colouring a Leviathan, another Leviathan! A sudden vision of an armless Pilot screaming as the Leviathan Rovhu's gentle Crustacean like symbiont remembered the tortures the debased Sebacean, Xarai, had put him through, flashed to the front of Crichton's mind. The human stumbled, grabbing onto one of the gaudily coloured walls for support, memories of Moya's luckless crew's latest horror filled brush with death galloped through his mind.

"Well damn!" Crichton stood for a second as the rush of images faded. He could remember Chiana and Aeryn (2) pushing D'Argo's flaming corpse down into the Den's pit, then finding the big Luxan chained up in one of the cells with a very nice looking Sebacean girl, although she could have done with a wash, going down on him. That didn't seem right! John shook his head trying to make some sense out of what he was remembering. Aeryn finding Chiana's body slumped against a wall and the overwhelming stab of guilt he'd felt at the Nebari girl's death. But he also had a vivid image of Chiana, D'Argo, Jool and, and John Crichton? Racing aboard the repaired Transport Pod from Moya just before it took off? And knowing that Aeryn was at the small ship's controls even with the vivid memory of him leaving the Sebacean love of his life propped up against one of Rovhu's diseased looking walls, with a broken leg pulse rifle clutched in her hands seconds before?

Damn this was odd, even for him.

"Confusing isn't it John, it took me a while to get things all in order as well." Harvey commented, he was back in the Hawaiian shirt.

"Shut Up Harvey! Just give me a minute and I'll sort this out." John turned away from Scorpius little helper and tried to put thing in order. Logically D'Argo hanging chained in the middle of a room being deep throated by a blonde Xarai must have happened before he, Aeryn and Chiana had held the little burial ceremony, but that wasn't how Crichton remembered it and he couldn't convince himself that his Luxan buddy was dead anyway, It just didn't seem right somehow.

"We might not have a minute John! This is a very strange environment, it may look like a Leviathan but this blue substance is strange, well beyond anything Scorpius ever encountered. I've been awake a lot longer than you have and it has some truly bizarre qualities. I have no idea what effect it could be having on you; we need to get out of here! Now!" Harvey demanded starting to sound slightly panicky with his last words.

"Don't even start Harvey, we are staying right here until we find Aeryn and the others." Crichton stated, still mostly focused on trying to sort his confused memories out. His back to the Clone, John didn't see the Scarran/Sebacean mental interloper's eyes narrow in anger and fear.

"Perhaps this will change your mind." The Neural clone whispered.

Crichton eyes widened as he heard Harvey's threatening tone and he spun to face the fake hybrid. Harvey's right hand was darting towards John's head, the Earthman flinched, trying to dodge, but the Scarran/Sebacean clone was too quick, his hand plunged straight into Crichton's face.

"Hey! What!" Crichton roared trying pull away from the suddenly solid feeling Harvey but the Neural Clone's left hand caught a handful of Crichton's hair, holding him in place.

As his vision turned to black and the mother of all headaches blasted into his skull, Crichton wished, not for the first time, that he'd didn't have quite such a brilliant imagination.

It got him into no end of trouble.

To an outside observer it would have looked more than a bit odd. The human had been having a heated argument with thin air, then struggled briefly with absolutely nothing, before shouting out in pain and flopping limply to the blue covered deck.

Crichton's mind twisted and spun as Harvey the Neural Clone ruthlessly dragged memories up from the forgotten depths of his mind.

He remembered landing the Transport Pod on the diseased Leviathan with D'Argo, Aeryn, Chiana and the new girl Jool, he remembered splitting the boarding party up and sending them off to look for spare parts. He remembered the insane Kaarvok and the Xarai. Chiana getting stabbed in the belly; Chiana almost catatonic after seeing her duplicate's brutal murder by Kaarvok. Aeryn getting twinned! Him getting twined! Finding D'Argo's body, the grief as he'd watched Chiana set it ablaze and let it fall. Finding D'Argo alive and well, Kaarvok murdering the poor armless Pilot. Setting the Leviathan controls to Starburst, heading for the Transport Pod, finding Aeryn knocked out in the hallway. Seeing all his friends, including himself, twice? Pile into the Pod and taking off, leaving him and Aeryn on an almost dead Leviathan about to Starburst while still locked inside a control collar. Racing desperately back to the Den, hoping to somehow avoid the suicide Starburst, the dying Leviathan shaking in his death throes, then falling from Den's bridge!

He remembered his obsession with Wormholes getting Zhaan killed, as if he'd put Winona to his friend's head and pulled the trigger himself.

Crichton opened his eyes after his latest bout of unconsciousness and groaned; waking up from being knocked out twice in less than five minutes was probably a record, even for him. There was no pleasant feeling of health and well being this time, John's whole body ached as if a herd of rhinoceroses had stampeded over him and his brain throbbed.

And he was starring at a foot?

John blinked, a foot wearing the ratty, crumbling remnants of a PK combat boot. Much like the ones Crichton himself was wearing. Crichton followed the foot up the ankle and onto a leg in equally ratty trousers until it disappeared into the shadows of one of the cells off the Leviathan's hallway.

John levered himself painfully to his feet, he wasn't surprised that Harvey was making himself scarce, not after the stunt he'd just pulled.

"Yeah! You better hide, you bleach skinned, pasty faced clown!" Crichton shouted as he staggered forward. Quickly getting his balance back after the roller coaster ride through his own head. Crichton moved cautiously into the small cell, keeping a wary eye on the doors. It would be just his luck if the doors decided to slam shut as soon as he stepped inside.

"Well, hello." Crichton whistled as he got a good look at what was connected to the foot, leg combination he'd spotted. A human looking body, although Crichton was guessing Sebacean, a Xarai, from the tattered bits of Peacekeepers uniform he was wearing. The body was covered in the blue stuff just like everything else that Crichton had seen since he'd woken up, except Harvey, of course.

This was a little different though, while the entire Leviathan seemed sheathed in the blue material, every surface John had seen was covered in what looked like an inch or two of the stuff. This Xarai looked like he'd been stuck in a big blue crystal.

John rapped his knuckles on the flat surface, surprised at the flat sound; he'd been expecting a more musical note, not a rubbery dull thud.

"You're in there good and proper, aren't you?" Crichton mused as he stared at the trapped man. John stared, after a second, the displaced astronaut decided that the Xarai looked alive, but John wouldn't have put money on it.

That was only the first encased Xarai John found. As he moved deeper into the Leviathan's more travelled areas and climbed towards the command deck and the Den, Crichton saw them everywhere. It was creepy as all hell.

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Two hours later

"Hello? Is anybody else alive and breathing around here?" Crichton had drawn Winona and had no intention of holstering her any time soon. Feeling the need to hold the pistols reassuring weight in his hand even if it made climbing from level to level a pain.

The Leviathans tomb like atmosphere and the endless unrelenting blue was starting to seriously freak the displaced astronaut out!

John had found a clamshell communication port about an hour or so ago. Like everything else, it was coated in the blue covering and Crichton hadn't been able to get it to work. Even after he'd hacked enough of the blue off with his pocketknife to open the controls and get at the relays, wires and crystals inside, all he'd uncovered was more blue stuff.

Crichton had a sneaking suspicion that if he spent the time and effort to get one of the inspection hatches off, so he could see into the DRD runs, behind the walls, he'd find a whole lot more of the stuff.

A hand- sized lump he'd broken off had turned to liquid and dripped away between his fingers, tasted like bland jello, while he watched a new layer grow over the exposed Clamshell Leviathan holo-communication device.

It was turning out to be one of those days. He'd passed hundreds of cannibalistic Sebaceans in some kind of suspended animation, this mysterious blue stuff was literally everywhere and so far, he was alone besides a resurrected Harvey who was still making himself scarce.

Crichton started up another of the short ladders between levels, it was a bit awkward one handed but John had a lot of practice. If he'd gotten it right, he should be close to the Leviathan's main level by now, where Rovhu's bridge was and Pilot's Den. The bridge far forward near the front of the Leviathan and the Den slap bang in the middle of the huge living ship.

John eased himself up through the ladder well, letting Winona lead the way.

The walls were still covered in blue. It was more than a bit depressing. John checked up and down the corridor, a lot of crystal cocooned Xarai were sprawled about along the deck or inside the cells and rooms Crichton could see into as he passed bye. Crichton barely spared them a glance anymore before setting off, he'd seen hundreds of them. He was heading, he guessed, towards the Den where hopefully there would be a few clues about what the frell was going on, and didn't have time to stop and gap at ever crystal cocooned Xarai he found.

Crichton was jogging when it caught his eye, a flash of black PK leather that even through the layer of blue stuff looked in much better condition than what the Xarai John had seen had been wearing. The astronaut stumbled to a halt.

Harvey was there between one blink and the next, police uniform in place. White gloves making broad gestures along the corridor.

"Move along, nothing to see here!" The Neural Clone was standing right in his way, waving desperately trying to direct Crichton's attention away.

"Out of the way prune head." Crichton headed towards the flash of colour.

"Crichton as a friend and colleague I'm telling you, you don't want to see this and nothing good can come of it!" Harvey told the human earnestly.

Crichton snorted but didn't bother answering. He walked straight through the immaterial Neural Clone, to stand frozen in place, as he got a good view of what Harvey had been trying to hide.

Aeryn Sun's still form lay tucked in behind one of the corridor ribs and she was blue.

"Sunshine! What have they done to you baby?" John knelt down next to the Sebacean woman. Aeryn looked peacefully asleep in her blue prison. She was covered head to toe in the same crud as everything else, but unlike every other blue body Crichton had seen so far, she wasn't inside a big blue crystal.

Aeryn, still wearing her Peacekeeper leathers, her pulse rifle slung over one shoulder and a pistol holstered at her waist, was covered with a fine film of the blue substance. John stared.

With the others he'd found, John could look past the unnatural stillness and lack of breathing and still get a sense that the Xarai he'd passed were somehow alive.

With Aeryn, all the terrified John Crichton could see was death.

"Come on John, we've got to get out of here!" Harvey hissed urgently.

John paid Harvey no attention, edging closer to Aeryn; tentatively Crichton reached out a hand. His instincts, built over a lifetime of working around things that could blow up and honed to a razor's edge over the last few years bouncing around in the Uncharted Territories where screaming at him not to touch her but at the same time, it was Aeryn!

Crichton struggled with himself for a second before letting his hand drop. He needed more information before he started messing around; he needed to find out what this blue stuff was doing!

"John we've have got to get out of here, now. I'm sorry about Aeryn but you know she'd want you to save yourself." Harvey was talking fast, sounding more and more worried.

"I thought I told you to shut up." Crichton muttered, with barely a glance at the clone. He was trying to think how he could get one of the scanners from down in the Leviathans the Medlab up here, if that whack job Kaarvok and his Xarai hadn't busted them all. They were bulky things and this blue stuff didn't have a lot of grip to it. It was going to be quite a trip, probably more than one trip.

"Or what! John I'm telling you, we need to get out of here and we can't hang around while you moon over this corpse!" Harvey finished his diatribe by waving his arm through Aeryn's chest.

"Don't! Listen Harv, I get that you're freaked out for some reason, but keep your damn ghost claws off of her, Ok!" John reigned himself in with a bit of effort and turned Winona away from the Neural Clone and holstered his trusty pulse pistol. "The only reason I haven't stuffed you back in the dumpster is lack of time and the general weirdness we're dealing with here. If you keep pushing it, if you try to mess up my chances of helping Aeryn, then back you go, Capiche?"

"No John! It's all very noble and self-sacrificing of you to want to hang around in this death trap so you can stare at your ladylove's corpse, but it's not going to happen! We need to get the frell out of here and if you're not going to move that body of ours, then I'll just do if for you! You know I can John, don't make me, it's sad and terrible that Aeryn's dead and I sympathize, really I do, but I'm not letting you go down with her." Harvey said leaning close and all but screaming in the distressed humans face.

"Get out of my way Grasshopper." Crichton pushed the figment of his imagination away, sending the Neural Clone stumbling back until he was crouched by Aeryn's body again. "She's not dead you ghoul, now just shut up. I've got to get down to this bucket's Medlab and see if I can salvage some of the gear."

"Yes she is John, Aeryn Sun is dead and we need to erk!" Harvey was cut off as he found a hyper John Crichton lunging at him.

Again, while he was speaking, the Neural Clone had swiped his arm through the Sebacean woman's still body, as if to prove a point. The fake Scorpius looked desperate, like the real one when his cooling unit was overheating.

Crichton didn't let him finish, the human's right hook caught him squarely on the chin. Doing zero harm to the Scarran/Sebacean hybrid except rocking his head back a little and Crichton acquired a new throbbing pain in his hand, it did however, shut the Neural Clone up for a second.

"OK! That's it! It Is On! You asked for this, Harv." Instead of continuing his physical attack, which after all was pretty ineffective, Crichton sat down next to Aeryn's crystal entombed body and leaning back against the wall, closed his eyes.

"John no!" Harvey's voice faded away as Crichton went through the Delvian meditations Zhaan had taught him and focused his attention inwards.

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Inside Crichton's mind. I know, I'm scared too.

Well this wasn't quite what Crichton expected. Harvey usually made these scenarios out of Johns own past and memories, so he'd been expecting something from his past on Earth, or maybe Moya, but this?

He was in a large metal walled room, high ceiling, with unfamiliar strangely shaped furniture scattered about. Odd shaped chairs, a work desk and a flat uncomfortably hard looking slab, that Crichton guessed was supposed to be a bed. There was nobody around, but it was hot, humid and the place had an unpleasant red tinge to the lighting, throwing everything slightly off to his human senses.

"Welcome to the Scarran Dreadnought 'DEVOURER', John, thirty eight cycles ago this ship was the pride of the Fourth Fleet of Extermination, the Scarran Empire's first line of defence against Peacekeeper aggression." Harvey's voice came from everywhere, filling the room. "Or the First line of offence against Peacekeeper defence, depending on who you ask."

"Where are you Harvey? There's no use hiding, your going to get the butt kicking you deserve, no matter what rock you hide under." Crichton shouted.

"Not hiding John, I've just decided to change tactics in the hopes of beating some sense into that ridiculous lump of solid stone you call a mind." Harvey's voice was smooth and persuasive and he was lying! Crichton could feel it. Here in his own mind he could literally feel the Neural Clone and Crichton could tell he was lying and ... scared?

"Now you remember our fun filled adventure on that commerce planet with the Scarran spy Grath? When he led us on that fun filled psychedelic trip through your mind." Crichton blanched, not one of his fondest memories.

He still had the odd flashback. the bastard Scarran had made him relive his mother's death by cancer in hospital; it had gone down hill from there. D'Argo coming on to him had been pretty mind warping as well, not to mention the girls in full S&M mode, or Crais dressed as a high heel wearing policeman.

"Well I think he had the right idea." Harvey continued as Crichton tried desperatly to repress the images the clone had stirred up. "He certainly got your attention. Before I rode in on my white horse and saved your ass again. This time we're not going to be playing with your pansy weight subconscious, we're going straight to the big leagues with a few choice nightmares from the mind of everybody's favourite Scarran/Sebacean Hybrid Scorpius!"

Again Crichton could tell Harvey was lying through his teeth. But the displaced astronaut didn't have time to think about that as suddenly the doors to the room slid open, revealing one of the reptilian looking Scarrans.

Despite her forward low slung extended neck and long scale covered muzzled face John could tell this Scarran was female, she had large, well developed breasts and her face and figure seemed more fine boned and slim than the two males of the race he'd encountered. One in the unchartered territories and one on the Royal Colonies. She stood there examining Crichton like he was a particularly despicable type of bug. Crichton backed away and drew his pistol.

"I'd like you to meet Tauza, she was Scorpius's mentor while he was growing up here, you could call her my mum!" Harvey laughed loudly, before continuing in a calmer voice. "And she going to show you a small taste of the parental affection she held for Scorpius."

The Scarran female raised her right hand and gestured with her flat palm at Crichton. A wave nearly invisible, like a shimmering heat mirage, rippled through the air, accelerating from her up raised hand to Crichton. It leaped the distance between them in a blink, striking him across the chest.

"Arrrg!" Crichton screamed, damn that hurt. It felt as if a red-hot poker had been slammed across his chest. Passing straight through the heavy leather jacket he was wearing as if it wasn't there.

Crichton staggered aside firing back at the Scarran. Winona spat a stream of red bolts. Half missed as Crichton was paying more attention to getting out from under the heat beam than he was to his aim, the wild shots burning holes into or ricocheting off the walls around her. Doing about as much good as the few shots that pelted her armoured hide.

The Scarran hardly noticed, flinching back a bit from an energy bolt that caught her in the throat, but that was it. Not enough to distract her from swinging her aim around and sending another boiling wave of heat at John's dodging form.

Crichton dove behind the huge bed, still firing, before ducking down as the rippling shimmer washed towards him. "What exactly is this supposed to prove Harvey?" John shouted before scrambling around the end of the bed, trying to keep it between him and the killer Scarran chick, who was stalking forward. Hissing in annoyance at the human worm who kept ducking away from her attacks.

"It's supposed to prove that I'm not messing around here John!" Harvey said the Clone was sounding more and more like Scorpius, which Crichton didn't think could be a good thing. "I'm trying to impress upon you that when I say something, you should give my advice the proper attention and respect it deserves."

"Yeah, Yeah. I don't listen enough to your sage advice, I get it and I still don't care. I'm still not leaving Aeryn behind, just because that blue stuff gives you the heebie-jeebies." John popped up from the other side of the bed from the Scarran and aimed more carefully this time taking a two handed grip to steady his aim.

He fired, sending a stream of bolts into her head, aiming for her eyes. Being hit in the face seemed to be more of a distraction to the big armoured lizard woman and with a roaring scream she stopped trying to microwave the human, in favour of shielding eyes and face with her hands and arms as she fell back a step.

John was already moving, diving over the bed again, he did a pretty neat tumble and roll to spring back to his feet already running.

Dashing past the Scarran, Crichton charged across the room and out the door. He slapped the unfamiliar control mounted on the wall next to the door but apparently they were locked open, or Harvey was cheating, because the doors didn't slide shut like he'd hoped.

With a yelp Crichton skipped aside from another wave of heat as the easily seven foot tall Scarran rushed out of the room after him.

Taking off down the corridor John fired a few shots over his shoulder not bothering to look. Hopefully it would help to slow the Scarran woman down a little, while he searched for somewhere to get out of sight for a second.

He needed a second to catch his breath, amoment to get a handle on the situation.

Crichton skidded around a corner and risked a glance back the way he'd come. Tauza the female Scarran was stalking down the corridor after him. Crichton readily accepted that he was no expert on Scarran body language but if he had to guess, John would have said she seemed pissed off for some reason. Crichton shot her in the face again before he sprinted out of sight down the new passageway.

There were a few closed doors scattered along either side of the new corridor, each with one of the control panels set next to it on the wall. As Crichton raced past he slapped at the control's hoping to find the way out or something more useful maybe a weapon a bit more affective than poor Winona who was not having a good day.

"Come on girl as soon as we get out of here I'll find you something to put some big flaming holes in, I promise! Something not built like a Abrams tank ok?" John planted a kiss on the pulse pistol and tried another door. He could hear the stamp, stamp! of marching steps behind him, as the Scarran followed him around the corner; but he didn't bother turning to look.

Crichton tried the next door's control panel and it slid open, with a loud swoosh. Crichton made a sharp right turn and skidded in.

Tauza strode forward, her long stride eating up the distance as she stalked towards the door Crichton had just disappeared into. Before the Scarran woman arrived, Crichton stepped slowly back out through the doors, back into the hallway again.

Keeping his attention glued to the room's interior starring in sick fascination, he didn't even glance at the charging Scarran. The humans attention still riveted to the room's occupant, eyes wide and jaw dropping, Crichton calmly raised Winona and pointing his pistol vaguely in the right direction, opened fire, sending a barrage of pulse blasts at the approaching Scarran. Spraying a pretty accurate spread of shots, almost absent-mindedly, as he tried to get his brain around what he was seeing.

Crichton took a second for a long hard look at what inhabited the room, before glaring up at the ceiling. "Harvey! Why is there a Moose in there? What the frell is a Room with a Moose doing inside my head!"

The door slammed closed and then faded out of existence, leaving the wall bare, with no hint that a door had ever been there. "There is no Moose! There was never any Moose!" The Neural Clone's voice screamed hysterically out of thin air from around the stunned human. Then suddenly in a complete 180 change of direction Harvey was cool and collected again. "No more playing around! You need to run John, it doesn't look like dear old mum is in a very good mood"

Crichton glanced back. "Ghaa!" Jumping away from the far too close for comfort lizard woman, Crichton spun around and continued his strategic retreat.

John ran, well he moved at fast jog. Humans seemed to have a pretty good speed advantage over Scarran, even if they weren't slowed by the freezing temperatures like the one on the Diagnosan's planet had been. Or maybe she was enjoying her ominous stalk and was taking it slow? It was hard to figure motivation for villains sometimes.

The world blinked from one step to the next the corridor and seemed to waver then snap back into focus. Before the setting seemed to have a plastic fake cleanness to it as if it were a set for a movie, now suddenly Crichton could feel the deep thrumming from the deck under his feet of the Dreadnoughts engines. The air smelled different, a hundred new smells coloured the air. The deck and walls had hundred of tiny almost unnoticeable scratches and dents from the passage of a busy crew. Before it had seemed fake some how, but now Crichton felt as if he were on a real ship with a real crew that could at any second burst around a corner to cut him off.

Crichton cast a quick look behind him; yep Miss Godzilla was still there, still coming on strong. But now instead of naked in all her reptilian glory, she was wearing a blood coloured cape like robe with a thick harness crisscrossing her chest. Hooked to the harness was a nice Scarran sized hand cannon, which Tauza was just pulling free.

"Oh crap!" Crichton doubled his pace, breaking out into a flat out sprint. The corridor was straight, no turns or corners to duck around, the doors leading off were more widely spread. In about a second he was going to be the special guest at a Scarran duck shoot and somebody else had already called dibs on the role of the Scarran, which left only the second fiddle role of duck for John Crichton!

The high pitched whine slashed from behind him and Crichton threw himself forward into a sliding dive and rolled hard to the right, slamming into the wall and squeezing himself flat, trying to make himself as small a target as possible. Gold bolts streaked over his head and sliced into the floor around him, blowing holes in decking and glancing of walls at crazy angles, showering the cringing human with sparks and burning pieces of metal. John tried to burrow into the hard deck plates arms wrapped around his head; explosions ripped the world up around him. There was no cover in the corridor; the best Crichton could spot was the next door around five meters ahead, on the other side of the hallway.

"Aarrrrrg!" Screaming, Crichton scrambled madly across the floor expecting to get hit at any second, the Gold beams slackened off as if his suicidal leap into the middle of the corridor, straight under the aim of her gun, had caught the Scarran woman by surprise.

Crichton didn't stop to wonder about it, getting his feet under him John launched himself across the last few yards , turning to face the distant Tauza. Crichton flattened himself into the scant protection of the inch or so of door recess opened up with his pulse pistol.

Red and Gold beams criss-crossed the twenty yards separating Crichton from the advancing Scarran as John flailed at the door control with his left hand. With a chime the door slid open and Crichton fell through, out of the corridor's battle ground.

Taking a second to actually study the door controls, Crichton closed off the angry pulse blasts and looked around at where he'd ended up this time. Not really sure if he'd managed to lock the door or ordered the Scarran version of a pizza messing with unfamiliar control panel, he took a second to put a energy bolt through it as he looked around.

A short hall led to a dead end rectangular chamber, about ten yards across. Each of the short sides had a single more elaborate door, bordered by a thin panel of soft white lights. Crichton sprinted to the first and activated the control, when nothing happened he moved on to the next. Just as he hit the controls for the second set of doors a chime sounded behind him and the first slid smoothly open. Crichton reversed course and dashed through the new opening into a ten yards by ten-yards room, as soon as he entered, the door slid smoothly closed, locking him in.

Looking around, Crichton spotted a more elaborate control panel next to the door he'd just entered through and John guessed he'd stumbled into the Scarran version of a lift.

John slapped at the controls hitting buttons at random, hoping for a level far, far away from the lethal lizard woman.

With another chime the decking under Crichton's feet shifted slightly as the lift was set in motion.

John leaned against the wall next to the controls, more than a little freaked out by the situation. Not so much by the fighting for his life inside his own head on a Scarran Dreadnought from Scorpius's unhappy childhood, really that was par for the course in Crichton's life since he'd discovered the joy of wormholes.

No, what was bugging Crichton was that Harvey seemed to be at least, if not more freaked out than he was. This was new and until John could figure it out, he was as jumpy as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Harvey had been messing with his mind for months before the neural chip had been removed and they had their showdown ending in Harvey taking his vacation dumpster surfing. This scenario seemed ... more random, less controlled, as if, as if Harvey wasn't running things? He certainly seemed to be able to influence this place, but real second by second godlike control that he'd shown before? Not so much.

Then there was that strange ripple when everything had suddenly become more detailed and realistic, what had that been about? Level 34, Level 35, Level 36, Level 37, Level 38, Level 39, Level 40 and since when could he read Scarran? Come to think about it, when did John Robert Crichton Junior Commander, in The International Aeronautics and Space Administration and general Uncharted Territories most wanted, know the ins and outs of Scarran elevators like the back of his hand?

Crichton jerked back from where he'd lent against the wall while he stared at the levels moving by on the display, or at least he tried to jerk back. His skull sticking to the cold red metal panel had other ideas.

"Arrrrrrrg Jeezus wept! What the frell!" John pushed, pulled and struggled with his bizarrely stuck head, cursing non-stop, until suddenly whatever had him just let go, leaving Crichton to stagger back tripping over his own feet and crashing painfully to the floor.

Sitting there panting as his heart started to slow back to something approaching normal John stared in amazement at the innocent looking panel.

With a ding the doors slid open.

Opening out into another broad hallway, straight across from the door a series of signs were fixed to the wall at head height. Crichton had seen them before but since he couldn't read Scarran he'd ignored them, now though?

The bottom sign pointing off to left reading 'Armoury 21' in the scratchy looking Scarran Hieroglyphics was as easily understandable as English and looked really inviting.

As Crichton stepped out of his lift a series of quiet tones caught his attention. Looking at the source he saw a copy of his own lift entrance down the hall set above the door another of the level displays was rapidly counting down.

Tauza was hot on his tail.

Running down the left fork Crichton made tracks towards the Scarran armoury, no offence to Winona but he needed a much, much bigger gun.

It took him about five minutes following the signs to find the armoured door marked 'Armoury 21'. It was locked, but the second Crichton touched the door controls he knew the combination as well as more than he'd wanted to know about Scarran door control panels and security systems. The big doors swished open after John typed in the fourteen digits from the Scarran mathematical figures and Crichton grinned at rack upon rack of big Scarran sized rifles and handguns was revealed.

"Isn't this a bit pat Harv?" Crichton asked as he pulled one of the oversized weapons from a rack close to the door.

"Not at all John." Harvey appeared on a display screen at what must be the Scarran quartermaster's workstation, he looked as calm and collected as always but something just seemed off.

Crichton would have said the Neural Clone was worried and desperate if that made even less sense than the freaked out astronaut just imagining things.

"You didn't expect me to leave you unarmed did you John? Oh just for your information touching the weapons in here switches the scenario from beginner to expert level! In expert setting the female Scarran has all the resources of the Dreadnought 'DEVOURER' to call upon, including calling for reinforcements from the ship's crew." Smiling like a shark Harvey started to turn from the screen before stopping and looking back at the seething Crichton. "Ta ta, for now John, I'm off to Tahiti in a nice little corner of your subconscious. A young lady, Evelyn you remember? Your forth grade maths teacher? She asked me to help with some sun tan lotion, those hard to reach places you understand."

The screen blanked on the view of Harvey wandering down a sandy stretch of beach bordered by palm trees on one side and ocean on the other, a blonde bikini babe under each arm.

"You suck Harvey, I mean really!" Crichton muttered as he raced outside the armoury, new rifle clutched at the ready. This was going to be no fun at all; Crichton just knew it.

As he ran Crichton glanced down at the bulky Scarran size bulldog looking rifle he'd grabbed, suddenly a little unsure about how to use the thing. When he'd snatched it up he'd been thinking that a gun was gun was a gun and it would only take him a few seconds of study to work the thing out, but now? Why did a rifle need a small inset computer display with six little buttons under it?

That was extra to the three larger buttons set next to the trigger that Crichton assumed were the safety, fire select and maybe a release for the energy cartridge. Now seeing the extra controls the Earthman wasn't sure and was having unpleasant flash backs to his first experience with a Peacekeeper Pulse Rifle where he'd managed to set Aeryn's rifles power cell on overload the first time he'd touched it.

Just as quickly as the running human had started to worry, Crichton was flooded with facts and figures from apparently thin air. He didn't need to fiddle with the small inset panel on the front of the stock; it was for calibrating the rifles video sight enhancement system. Crichton stared down at the gun in his hands in amazement a second ago it was an alien piece of technology he'd had only the vaguest of ideas how to use, now it was as familiar as the guidance system on his module. He knew a small books worth of specifications for the Trosk Kalvo 85 (3) Plasma Pulse Carbine's, the Scarrans empires standard issue troop rifle. Facts and figures covering power settings, rate of fire, muzzle velocity, rearming, service and field repair procedures, range calculations depending on gravity atmosphere and power settings.

Crichton was so shocked but his sudden windfall of knowledge that the seven foot tall lizard faced guard stepping out into the corridor in front of him completely escaped his notice.

The Scarran soldier saw him coming, but barely had time to turn to face the sprinting human and was just beginning to start to reach for the large pistol holstered on his weapon harness when Crichton slammed into him.

John Crichton was 6' 1" (1.85 m) tall human who was probably in the best physical condition of his life, even better than just after he'd graduated out of astronaut school, just before the Farscape mission, weighing in at about 220 pounds (100 kilogrammes) with a good muscle to fat ratio.

Serten (One of young Scorpius's instructors back when he lived on the 'DEVOURER') was 7' 1" (2.16 m) tall Scarran, in pretty good shape, he was also covered in armoured scaly skin that would make an alligators hide look like tissue paper in comparison and equipped with bones better than twice as dense as a humans, weighing in at well over 600 pounds (300 kilogrammes).

Crichton bounced.

Serten rocked back on his heels, a bit.

"Arrrrgh!" It was like running into a brick wall. Except the brick wall, if you ran into one, wouldn't normally have then reached for a bloody great gun it was carrying holstered on a harness across its chest.

John tumbled to the decking, sprawling on his back.

Crichton stared up at the towering Scarran solider in shock, caught completely by surprise and hurting all over from his sudden collision. He almost missed the clawed hand with the gun swing into line with his chest.

Things suddenly got very busy.

"Watch where you're going, you frelling suitcase!" Crichton snarled as he desperately rolled to his right, just as the Scarran opened fire. The red bolts of energy burned holes into the metal floor inches away from his shoulders as Crichton twisted away. As he moved the displaced human desperately tried to angle his new rifle for a shot. Rolling completely over, barely managing to stay ahead of the lines of gold energy chasing him, Crichton's rifle swung across his chest, briefly letting the sights aim down his body past his feet at the Scarran's lower body.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl for the human.

Serten was tracking his movements with his pistol with a simple swing of the arm.

John figured this was good enough and maybe they only chance he'd get, jerked the trigger back, setting the awkwardly held rifle bucking in his hand and filling the air with the high pitched whine as it spewed a blizzard of charged plasma down range.

Time snapped back into focus.

The first shot blew a fist-sized hole in the Scarran's left leg just under the knee.

Bellowing in shocked pain Serten leaped aside, escaping the rest of the barrage. His injured leg couldn't take his weight when he came down form the hoping evasion though and the Scarran crashed to the metal decking, losing hold of his sidearm as his armoured bulk slammed down.

The big handgun skittered across the metal floor ricocheting off the red-gold metal corridor wall, stopping well out of reach of both combatants.

Crichton scooted back from the sprawled Scarran, bringing up his rifle trying to get a proper hold on it as he aimed at the injured creature. His back smacked up against the wall on the opposite side of the corridor, giving him barely three yards distance from the enraged thrashing Scarran.

John finally got everything sorted with the rifle, dangerous end pointed at the bad guy, stock safely braced into his shoulder with his off hand holding the second grip under the barrel. Lining up he found him self looking straight at the palm of the Scarran's hand and the beginning of a simmering heat wave streaking towards his face.

Jerking the trigger back Crichton's snapshot blew the offending hand off at the wrist leaving a smouldering stump to wave in his direction. Not stopping Crichton hosed the Scarran down with a torrent of fire, flipping the Trosk 85 to full auto and just holding back the trigger.

Screaming in a hissing roar Serten lunged towards Crichton, only to place himself fully into the line of fire. Dozen's of the angry bolts of energy stitched a trail across the big Scarran's body from hip to shoulder, burning fist sized holes into his armoured body.

Serten the Scarran was very, very dead by the time Crichton ran through the hundred shot power pack in the stock of his rifle.

Panting Crichton sat slumped against the wall, trying to get his heart rate under control.

"Damn my life sucks."

--

Crichton heard it before he reached the next-door, but dashed through regardless.

Running for his life from a troop of murderous lizards didn't leave him many options, his rifle was long gone having run out of ammo in one of the running battles he'd had with Tauza and her play mates. Unfortunately it didn't look like Tauza was running out of Scarrans anytime soon and she was getting close.

So a weird noise was definitely the lesser of two evils when it came to this maze Harvey had dropped him in.

The sound, the roaring of an old Hollywood epic crowd scene, whatever was making it, might be just as bad, or even worse, than the dozen or so Scarran's chasing him. But for all the Earthman knew, maybe it wasn't! Hope springs eternal right? So best to give it a try, Crichton reckoned he was due a little good luck right about now. Who knows maybe it was a party?

It wasn't.

John slowed his headlong rush to a stumble and finally staggered to a stop, his stunned gaze fixed upwards. The room was huge, easily five hundred yards across and at least the same again high.

"What the frell?" Muttered under his breath, Crichton didn't expect an answer; there couldn't be an answer. Nothing could explain this.

But Harvey appeared, just blinked into place. One second Crichton was alone in the giant room with ... them, then Harvey was strolling towards him, his head craned back, his eyes following John's.

"Well this is a pleasant surprise, I'd forgotten all about this! Do you like it John? Gets the old scientific curiosity raring to go doesn't it? This was one of my first experiments, from back when the Neural Chip was first implanted." Harvey said wandering up to stand next to Crichton's shoulder.

Crichton watched the frantic activity in stunned disbelief for a moment, before looking at the Neural Clone standing beside him.

"You have got to be kidding me! This is what you've been doing inside my head all this time?" John asked, he knew he should be grabbing Harvey and making sure Scorpius's Neural Clone knew who was boss, but this was just too weird, even for him.

"It's an age old philosophical question John! Fascinating isn't it. I found the original premise while I was going through your memories and it seemed particularly apt, so I grabbed a few pieces of your psyche that you weren't using and set this up! It's been running for over a year now and it looks like we could have an answer soon." Harvey explained happily, completely in mad scientist mode.

Crichton watched the phalanx of well over a thousand brown haired men wearing IASA yellow flight suits as they fought in a wild scrum, battling with a mob of thousands more fur and leather clad men who were slowly retreating.

They all looked suspiciously like John Crichton.

"Who would win in a fight? Astronauts or Cavemen? That's your age old philosophical question?" Crichton asked disbelievingly.

"Precisely, and you are uniquely qualified to be the test subject, being an Astronaut who had met and interacted with his own inner Caveman." Harvey explained.

"Why are they on the ceiling?" Was the next thing to pop into Crichton's mind, as he watched the battle.

The cavemen were in a hard position. Little groups of their disorganized gang were being split off and beaten down by their more tactically savvy, if individually weaker, adversaries.

Harvey raised a single finger about to speak, as if to make a point, before stalling with a confused look on his face. "You know? I don't remember, huh! It seemed to make perfect sense at the time. But now I can't quite recall my reasoning." The Neural Clone happily contemplated that for second, before joining Crichton in watching the war raging above their heads.

John watched for a second, then with a lighting spin he lunged towards Harvey, only to be thrown completely off balance when his grasping arms met only air. Flying through the empty space where the Clone had been a split second before Crichton belly flopped painfully to the hard metal decking landing with a crash.

"None of that John, I don't think you've learnt your lesson yet." Harvey's voice echoed from all around him as the Earthman climbed back to his feet.

"Learned my lesson! Listen Harvey, I'm not the one who's had a frelling war going on inside my head for the last year! If anybody needs lessons around here, it's definitely the gate-crashing moron who's been trying to do half assed social experiments in my subconscious!" John roared, spinning around trying to catch a glimpse of where the Neural Clone had disappeared to.

"Temper, temper John. Where is your scientific wonder? Where's your need to know the answers to life's important questions? Now granted my little experiment may have caused you a few excruciating migraines now and then, but that's not important right now." Harvey drawled appearing again on the far side of the vast room at least 250 yards away, but his voice still sounding as if he were standing right next to the raging Crichton.

"I can't think of anything more important than kicking your scaly ass Harv! This time I'm putting bloody great padlocks on your Dumpster, you know that, don't you! You're never getting out." Crichton watched as Harvey leaned casually against the door frame across the room and pointed behind him.

John looked over his shoulder at the entrance he'd entered the football stadium sized room through, already knowing what he'd see.

Crichton was slightly wrong it wasn't just Tauza and her twelve Scarran troopers who'd been chasing him, or at least it wasn't only those thirteen Scarrans. It looked like they'd found some friends somewhere. There were at least a hundred of the giant lizards filing into the room, spreading out and marching at a quick trot towards him.

"Oh, you're just begging for it Harvey!" Crichton took off, sprinting towards the door where Harvey stood, growling as he saw the Neural Clone stroll casually through the opening and out of sight.

John was panting hard when he made it to the other side of the room and watched the small army of Scarran's jogging after him. They didn't seem particularly fast on their feet, but there was an unrelenting quality about their steady trot. As if they would be perfectly happy following him forever, sure that sooner or later they'd run him to ground.

"I'll give you science Grasshopper." John hissed between clenched teeth as he slowly got his breath back. "Lets have some gravity, shall we! Frell lets have lots and lots of gravity!"

"There's an age old philosophical question for you Harvey! How many John Crichtons does it take to kill a Scarran?" Crichton shouted over his shoulder at the last spot he'd seen the neural clone, grinning like a maniac. "Answer, One! At sufficient velocity!"

Crichton stared at the thousands of astronauts and cavemen battling away above the advancing horde of Scarran troopers and thought about gravity. It was a subject that Crichton knew intimately. He'd spent literally years of his life experimenting, studying, investigating, living and breathing the stuff. If there was one thing Crichton could impose on Harvey's little fantasy it was the working physical laws of the universe.

John had doubts that, even with the five hundred meter plus drop, a human body would have enough mass and momentum to smash one of the armoured lizards. At one gravity it would hurt, but probably most of the Godzilla wannabes would survive, but at ten G's or twenty? There wouldn't be anything left but paste.

Slowly, first only one or two, but soon dozens then hundreds of the battling pseudo-Crichtons shrieked in surprises as suddenly, up became down and down became up! And they were a looooong way up! The new force caught the opposing armies of cavemen and astronauts and sent them plummeting straight down at the little brown ant sized lizard people.

Turning away from the carnage John walked out of the big room and into another featureless light red and gold panelled hallways, which he got the idea, was the norm for the Scarran Dreadnought.

What was new were the four Scarran Warriors waiting for him, before he could react, two of the towering lizards grabbed him. Each taking a one handed crushing grip on his upper arms and easily hoisting him off his feet between them.

Harvey stood just beyond the group watching.

"Alright John, you don't seem to be getting it, so it's time to bring out the big guns." The Neural Clone declared. "We are going to the bridge and I'm going to pound some hard truths into your pigheaded brain, if I have to drill a hole first to let them in!"

Crichton wiggled franticly between the two towering Scarran holding him off of the floor, but it was useless. He tried a few kicks, but the two Scarran troopers didn't even seem to notice his heavy PK issue steel capped boots, bouncing of their armoured legs and after a few kicks his feet started to ache.

Harvey turned marched off down the corridor and Crichton's two new friends fell into step following him.

--

The procession through the bowls of the Scarran ship to the bridge seemed to take hours. Harvey took some kind of warped delight in showing off the dozens of flight decks full of rank upon rank of Striker Gunboats, launch bays of Predator Fighters; holds of heavy assault Overseer tanks and what must have been hundreds of weapon stations dotted throughout the giant ship.

Explaining in excruciating detail the destructive capability of each new war machine, like he was a tour guide.

John let the Neural Clone ramble only throwing in an insult now and then when it seemed appropriate. Now that he had time, he was thinking about the lies the Scarran/Sebacean copy had told him when he'd first entered this dreamscape.

They seemed odd, not that Harvey had lied; Crichton figured that at least half of what came out of the neural clone's mouth was at the very least completely biased towards Scorpius's plans and the wormhole tech agenda, if it wasn't an out and out lie. No Crichton expected some lies from Harvey.

What was odd was that Crichton had instantly known Harvey was lying, as if he were reading the clone's mind, now that was new!

Harvey led Crichton and his four silent Scarran minders down another hallway and into what looked for the entire world like a weird high tech tube train station.

No other giant lizards were around and the six walked (Well they walked Crichton was shoved along and carried if he seemed to be taking to long) straight onto one of the trains. Harvey leading them through to the forward compartment where one of the high forward leaning chairs waited for an operator, looking out through a windscreen at the tunnel and tracks in front of the train.

The consoles and control for train driver looked like they'd be more at home on the bridge of the Enterprise, the chair was surrounded on three sides by banks of the orange and green tinted Scarran touch screen controls. Harvey spun the chair around and sat down on the big oversized and uncomfortable looking contraption and spun back to look out the canopy.

Crichton's two little helpers, Tweedledum and Tweedledee?, Abbott and Costello? Since the two overgrown lizards hadn't said a word between them since they'd first grabbed him, Crichton was having a hard time deciding on just the right nicknames for Harvey's two goons. Thankfully they'd given up carrying Crichton hoisted up between them most of the time, but they both kept a firm one handed grip on his upper arms, even when they were letting him walk on his own two feet. They marched the human between them and pushed him forward until he was standing right behind Harvey's seat.

"This is one of eight tracks that run the length of the Dreadnought with these and the lifts, power walkways and zero G chute's you could if your in a hurry make it from one end of this ship to the other in just over an hour." Harvey lectured, as the train started moving picking up speed until the sides of the tunnel blurred bye.

"Yeah, yeah, it's a big, nasty, barrel o' death, I get it Harv." Crichton answered tiredly; he was getting more than a bit sick of the neural clone's never ending spiel on the subject. "Scarran Dreadnought's are the UTs answer to the Star Destroyer. I get the point, geez what are you try to do, sell me one? If you start in on how your grandma only ever used hers to go blow up planets on Sundays and how little mileage its got on the clock, I'm going to have put a TV in your dumpster that only plays Teletuby repeats, you know that don't you? Or maybe stick you in a padded cell listening to Bobby McPherin's 'Don't worry be happy' on continuous playback."

"You can dismiss what I say with your weak attempts at humour all you want John. Just keep in mind that it'll be one of these barrels o' death as you so rightly call them, that cracks the crust of your beloved Earth open like a piñata for the Scarran mining ships after the Empire has striped the surface of everything they can use." Harvey snapped back, turning from the view out the front of the car to glare at the human.

Crichton tuned the fake Scorpius out again as the clone went off on his rant about wormhole weapons again. John just stood quietly, squeezed in between his two Scarran minders, watching the sides of the tunnel whiz bye, as the train barrelled along taking them wherever Harvey's little tour was heading next.

Casually John stretched his left leg forward and rested his foot against the base of one of the train control consoles.

Like the Trosk Heavy Pulse Carbine he'd grabbed, Crichton was hoping to see what if anything he could learn from touching some new tech and maybe get some idea of what was going on by examining the process.

Crichton wedged his foot up against the lump of Scarran technology then turned his head back to look at Harvey, pretending interest in his latest monologue on the inevitability of the Scarran invasion. But keeping his attention focused on what he was feeling through his foot.

At first he got nothing, he could feel the scratchy fabric of the sock and the stiff firm stuff the PK combat boots were made from as he flexed his toes, but nothing like the tingling rush of information he'd received before.

Crichton's mind wandered after a few seconds, concentrating on your toes was pretty boring, for just a moment he wondered about his sudden ability to tell when Harvey was lying and get an apparently pretty good read on the clones emotions the rest of the time. As soon as he thought of the clone Crichton caught a surge of something, not quite the same as before, but something.

Concentrating on this new sensation that seemed to be more in his head than in his foot Crichton suddenly realised that the coarse wool like materiel that the socks he'd been wearing since he'd run out of earth supplies were made from a chemical refined from sap from a tree commonly grown on Command Carrier habitat parks and the boots themselves were a mix of an alloy that four hundred cycles ago was also the Peacekeeper standard armour but was now just the most easily and cheaply made. The boot sole and the faux-leather stuff was the vat grown, cloned Corot hide.

Crichton had no idea what a Corot was, except that its hide was pretty tough and properly treated and reinforced was used in a lot of Peacekeeper uniforms.

Crichton boggled at that, he now had completely new information in his mind. John supposed it was possible that Aeryn or one of the others might have mentioned Corot leather before, but he didn't think so. Besides the knowledge had a hard tinged, artificial feel to it.

This was definitely interesting.

He had just gotten a piece of Harvey, Crichton was sure of it, this was one of the bits of data that the Neural Clone had used to create this whacked out amusement park Harvey had set up in John's mind. Excited Crichton pushed on, past the little bits and bites, on to the big stuff.

First Crichton suddenly knew all about the control panels casing, a hard, cheap alloy with an unpronounceable name in the Scarran language. Then he got flashes of electronic components and circuit boards power feeds, it was amazing, Crichton nearly forgot to pretend to listen to Harvey.

John Crichton had just learnt everything, well not everything but a lot... everything that Harvey or Scorpius knew maybe? Just the information the Neural Clone had used to create virtual Scarran dreadnought in his mind?

Things were getting freaky, much more freaky than the normal. The 'I've got the Neural Clone of my worst enemy who's a Sebacean/Scarran hybrid with a leather fetish in my head and he's messing with me' kind of freaky that he lived with most days. No this was a new super special 'extra' freaky, with Crichton suddenly finding himself able to tell when Harvey was telling fibs and sucking the user manual for alien tech out of the lift controls, the gun locker combo lock and the kick ass rifle he'd stolen.

But freaky was good, as much as Crichton hated it, when logic no longer applied to whatever the frell was happening at the moment that was when Crichton was at his best. The truth was that Crichton had become something of an expert of 'weird' over the last few years, he was the freaky MASTER!

When thing's took a 180 degree turn into the wacky, who you gonna call? That's right! Commander John Crichton, after all the utterly bizarre crap he'd had to deal with since being dumped in the UTs Crichton considered himself the unwilling but undisputed king of the bizarre. He had a black belt in freaky fu! Right now his freaky sense was telling him things and it was time for an experiment while Harvey was enjoying himself with his rant on the evils of Scarrans.

The train was slowing down now, coming into the station. It looked like they were about to get to next leg of the tour.

The bridge was something to see, no matter how hard Crichton fought it he had to admit he was impressed as all hell at the sight before him. His two Scarran minders hustled him forward out of the lift they'd just arrived in, still following in Harvey's wake.

The room was huge reminding Crichton of the Cape Canaveral control centre only maybe three times the size and designed by someone with a thing against right angles and a fetish for purple, but following along behind Harvey Crichton quickly discarded that idea. Canaveral had never had a second story that was for all intents and purposes a throne room and huge windows looking out into open space.

Harvey spun round sweeping his arm out in a theatrical gesture. "Look at this John! The DEVOURER was a simple ship of the line, not even the most powerful Scarran dreadnought of its day, it was already fifty cycles old when it was destroyed, the newest ships that replaced this class are even bigger and more powerful!"

"So you've said Harvey and I don't even dispute it! The bit you seem to keep missing is that I don't care!" Crichton snapped back glaring at the Neural Clone that at the moment was dressed in one of Scorpius's head to toe black outfits.

"How can you say that John, there are maybe 200 top of the line Peacekeeper Command Carriers that would be able to respond to a Scarran invasion in time to meet them in some kind of fleet action. The latest intelligence reports I know of put the Scarran fleet at over 400 Dreadnoughts, each one capable of out fighting a Command Carrier. When they come the Peacekeepers won't be able to stop them, the loss of life will be beyond imagining, whole species will die and there will be nothing to stop the Scarran Empire from going straight through the Uncharted Territories and Peacekeeper Space. Then carrying on until they find you're precious Earth!"

Crichton groaned and scrubbed at his face. "And how is that my problem Harvey? Yes in a perfect universe that wouldn't be on the cards, but the only way I have of affecting things is to let your boss dig around in my brain letting him get his claws on the wormhole knowledge. So then we have the Peacekeepers wiping out the Scarrans and probably hundreds of other races in a pre-emptive strike. Or a long cold war, until the Scarran get their own super weapon of course then, BOOM! the universe is toast. Either way, that would be my fault! this current mess? Not my fault and not my problem. My priority's are keeping the wormhole knowledge the frell out of anybodies hands and looking out for my friends."

Crichton turned away from the Neural Clone and looked out the Dreadnoughts magnificent windows at the view.

"You know all this Harvey; you're in my damn brain for crying out loud!" John asked. "What do you think this is going to accomplish, dragging me through this ship? bombarding me with the same tired old arguments."

"I was hoping in this new situation you'd be a little more open to reason Crichton!" Harvey snarled and suddenly darted towards the human. Crichton heard him coming and started to turn, but wasn't fast enough.

Harvey ripped Winona from her holster at Crichton's hip and had the muzzle pressed into John's forehead before the human had a chance to react. The two Scarran guards where again almost stationed at Crichton's sides appearing almost magically as each of the towering lizards clamped onto an arm, pinning him in place.

John had had enough, and damn it! Winona was his! There was no way he'd let Scorpius's little project in schizophrenia have her and he certainly wasn't going to let the whitewashed cadaver shoot him with her.

With a grunt of effort, Crichton wrenched his arm from the guard's grip and snatched the pulse pistol from Harvey, all according to plan. What the Earthman didn't plan on was the Neural Clone's hand braking off at the wrist and staying tightly clenched around Winona's butt. John stared down at the severed hand as Harvey stumbled back clutching his haemorrhaging forearm to his chest screaming.

Ignoring the screaming Harvey, Crichton stared in sick fascination at the severed hand connected to his pulse pistol.

The Scarran/Sebacean hybrid's hand seemed to crack, tiny fault lines running across it's surface and with the sound of shattering glass, it exploded into thousands of pieces.

The cloud of Harvey bits hung in the air for a second before the cloud seemed to collect itself and make a beeline straight towards John's own hand. With a bizarre tingling sensation the torrent seemed to leap into Crichton hand to be absorbed into his skin.

"Gaarh!" Crichton danced backwards completely ignoring the two giant Scarran's as he tried to stop the stuff from soaking into his body.

"No! That's mine, what are you doing!" Crichton ignored Harvey's desperate cry as the world suddenly became shaky and tilted to one side, the command deck of the Dreadnought and the Scarran crew faded to nothing, leaving only him and Harvey floating in a sea of grey.

As the tiny pieces of Harvey's hand seamlessly disappeared, sinking without a trace through the horrified human's skin, John's mind reeled. A rush of feelings assaulted him, images and memories, just like with the elevator control, but times a thousand, maybe a million! The rush was incredible, bits and pieces seemed to be Crichton's own thoughts and memories just from an off kilter perspective, the dogfight with Aeryn's Prowler when the Neural Clone had smashed her cockpit with his module's landing gear, and the fight with D'Argo when Harvey had been trying to signal Scorpius. Things Crichton remembered but in a hazy sort of way because he'd been trapped in the back of his own mind, powerless to do anything, as Harvey had been controlling his body.

But now Harvey's own thoughts and memories slipped into place with what little he remembered. Others were straight out Crichton but things he hadn't been able to remember until just this second.

Before he'd ... absorbed? ... assimilated? Harvey's hand, John could remember falling from the bridge in Pilots Den slamming into the side of the pit walls as Rovhu had bucked and twisted around him. He would have died in the quarter-mile long drop if the Leviathan hadn't turned and lost control of gravity as he Starburst. As he fell, down had switched with left and Crichton had tumbled the last hundred or so meter in short broken trips as he tumbled across the ridged side of the pit, each bounce usually ending in a new broken bone.

Until he'd splashed into the dregs at the bottom of the pit.

That's where Crichton's memories had ended until he had woken up earlier today, but with the added pieces of Harvey floating around; John could remember the crazy lightning like charges of energy that must have had something to do with the warped Starburst Rovhu was making. Then the whole world had jumped as the familiar feeling of Starburst overtook the human, but broken and disjointed, warped beyond even the disastrous Starbursts Moya had been through.

It seemed to go on forever, the universe twisting and contorting, pain slashing through the disorientated human as his body seemed to be trying to turn itself inside out while he tried to vomit and sneeze at the same time.

It itched as well.

Finally it stopped at the same time as the last of Rovhu's control of gravity gave out Crichton had collected even more broken bones including a really good one in his left leg where the stunned Earthman could see a good three inches of thigh bone sticking out through his ripped and torn muscle and skin.

John had just decided to go into shock and maybe pass out for a bit, so he didn't have to watch as himself bleed to death, when the Leviathan slammed into something, hard!

Crichton was flung across the vast cavern of Rovhu's inner hull to smack into the far wall with a sickening crunch. If he hadn't already been completely messed up, the sound of his own spine cracking like a dry stick would have seriously worried him, as it was, as the traumatized human slid down the red gold Leviathan walls leaving a long smear of blood Crichton figured the new injury had cut his life expectancy from a nice long one minute to a crappy thirty seconds.

John was just settling down to really wallow in the pain when something grabbed his attention.The thundering roaring noise coming from above distracted him.

Looking up into the long vertical tunnel that led back up to the Den, that a life time ago (must have been a good two minutes) he'd fallen down, Crichton watched as a rushing torrent of blue liquid, a tidal wave easily a thousands tons of the stuff crashed down towards him.

John barely had time to open his mouth to scream raising his one still working arm in a useless gesture to try and ward off the plummeting doom, before it crushed down on him.

He should have been flattened like a bug on a windscreen, there was no chance anything made up of squishy fragile human flesh, could possibly survive having tons of anything, even a liquid dropped on top of it.

He should have died instantly.

Instead it was nice, like warm gentle sunlight after being in the dark for too long.

The blue washed over John's battered and broken body. Aches and pains faded away, the daggers of agony from broken bones lasting only seconds longer. Completely relaxed for the first time since long before he left Earth, John Crichton faded into a peaceful sleep.

Slowly the humans body unfolded, floating under the sea of blue liquid, his lungs pumping the thick substance easily through his mouth and nose, blood collected oxygen and tiny blue globules and ferried them through the complex highway of veins and artery's carrying them to every part of his body. More of the blue was slowly absorbed through the skin as a hard, vaguely crystalline, looking shell grew around Crichton's body.

As the strange blue liquid busily went about its business and Crichton slept like a baby, Harvey watched.

Harvey's memories were different, hard edged, more right angled and logical than Crichton's own and they were ... less real? Not like reading a book or watching a movie, more like a particularly vivid daydream. Something created inside his own imagination, as full and as detailed as real life experiences, maybe even more so, but still undeniably fake.

It was an odd sensation to be suddenly immersed in them.

Harvey, still confined to the small part of Crichton's consciousness that John had labelled the 'Dumpster', could still watch through Crichton's eyes at the world going by outside. He'd watched helplessly as Crichton blundered through life for the last few months since the crew and Moya had left the Diagnosan's ice planet. Working continually on his escape, straining against the mental chains Crichton had wrapped him in, but still a long way away from breaking out and being able to continue his mission to safeguard the wormhole knowledge.

Now as the blue liquid rode Crichton's blood into his brain, the Neural Clone felt direct sensation for the first time since his little scuffle with John ended with him locked being away.

The blue substance rocketed through Crichton's brain, soaking through every membrane and coating every cell. Harvey had watched dumbfounded, or more accurately 'felt dumbfounded ' since he couldn't really see inside John's brain, only monitor the electrical impulses as they passed from neuron to neuron, as his every understanding of biology was completely ignored.

There was no possible way a foreign substance could exist in such quantity inside a delicate and ridiculously fragile organ such as the human brain, not without causing massive and fatal damage, but there it was washing through Crichton's brain barely causing a ripple. It defied all belief and Harvey's rational understanding of how the universe worked.

The Clone followed the invader's rapid progress, the massive scars left from the operation to remove his neural chip were cocooned in a harder, more dense layer of the mystery substance, becoming thicker and thicker until the tissue around the scar tissue appeared a solid dark blue lump. Then at some unseen signal the blue faded back into the thin translucent film that covered the rest of the human's brain.

Harvey focused on the newly revealed parts of Crichton's brain and was shocked to find it in perfect working order; the scar had always interfered with the flow of electrical signals, which Harvey had interpreted as meaning massive damage had been done. Straight after the operation, Crichton hadn't even been able to move or talk, only after Harvey had rewired around the damage, so to speak, had the human returned to anything like normal. Harvey had projected a 35 percent loss of long term survivability based on his study of the damage and the radical new pathways he'd had to forge to get Crichton moving again. Losing a third of his life expectancy hadn't changed Crichton's importance to the mission, but it had cut options for long term planning badly, Harvey was quite pleased with this new development. A healthier Crichton meant safer Wormhole knowledge and Harvey had grown used to sharing a brain with the human.

Then he noticed diminishing contact with his own remaining hardware, the control tentacles that the Diagnosan surgeon had been forced to leave entwined with Crichton's brain, being too massively complex to remove with any hope of Crichton's living through the experience. Harvey watched horrified as the last bits of his physical structure were cocooned like the scar tissue had been, he lost all contact with his remaining processors and back up data storage, then the blue substance retreated and Harvey could find no trace of his systems.

Leaving him completely stranded and adrift inside Crichton's mind.

The pattern repeated itself again and again, Harvey's control tentacles, the Interon transplant tissues the Diagnosan had used to partially repair the damage from the Chip's removal, even the inoffensive colony of Translator Microbes at the base of Crichton's brain was surrounded and overrun. The micro-biological organisms faded out of existence and Harvey could find only perfectly healthy human tissue in their place, which had somehow been grown inside the blue cocoon. Harvey had no idea how long it took, with Crichton asleep he was denied a view of the outside world and there was no frame of reference inside Crichton unconscious mind. But soon, not a single alien speck had managed to survive the blue substance's devastating blitzkrieg.

Harvey floated in stunned disbelief drifting inside the grey fog of the Dumpster deep inside Crichton's sleeping mind. After some indeterminate amount of time the Neural Clone had shaken off his shock and moved tentatively to catalogue what resources he had left. First he ran a diagnostic on the solid locked area of information that was the Wormhole knowledge and was relieved to find it intact. Then he'd moved on to the other two major pieces that made up the entity John Crichton knew as Harvey, the DI control programme and the copy of Scorpius. Both had been damaged by the destruction of the control tentacles, but both were robust enough to take some loss and still keep Harvey online, but unless he made some repairs, it would start to seriously affect his performance. Harvey had just started integrating the DI more closely with Scorpius's copied memories to try and bolster them both when he felt the first twinges of worry.

Bits of code that had been whole and operating in the first diagnostic reported errors or were missing entirely. The blue substance had turned its attention to him!

Before he could react the horrified Neural Clone felt the first stab at his core programming, it was deleting HIM!

Crichton winced at the storm of raw rage and terror he felt as those last few seconds of memory merged into his own.

Harvey's memories became less and less coherent after that, a frantic rush as the Neural Clone struggled free of the Dumpster, losing more and more of his programming as the blue substance steadily deleted everything it found that didn't belong. After a confused nightmare of a useless retreat further and further into Crichton's oldest memories the rapidly disintegrating Neural Clone had noticed that the damage wasn't restricted to only his DI base and the Scorpius memories, the construct that held the wormhole knowledge was being destroyed.

That struck at the heart of Harvey's core commands!

Harvey realised it was futile to try and hide or escape and that his one primary overriding mission, to keep the Wormhole knowledge safe, was in jeopardy. Harvey had gambled everything on one last plan to save what little he had left. Throwing away his existence as an independent entity, Harvey had franticly copied what remained straight into Crichton's memory. No longer a separate entity, but just a piece of Crichton's psyche with a different outlook on life.

Harvey hoped that the blue substance would categorize him as part of Crichton and pass him bye.

The last thought John got from the lump of Harvey he'd just had crammed into his brain were two overriding thoughts that had been at the front of Harvey's mind. To get the frell away from the blue stuff and to keep John Crichton from ever finding out how weak and vulnerable the neural clone was now!

Crichton shook his head and slowly opened his eyes, the mass of new information slowly settling into place. John looked over the distance at Harvey. The Neural Clone looked like crap, he'd ripped a strip of cloth off his colourful shirt and tied a hasty tourniquet around the bloody stump of his right arm. He was on his knees staring at Crichton a look of rage and fear on his pale white face.

"Woo doggy, that puts things in a different perspective doesn't it Grasshopper?" Crichton asked after a second.

"What! What did you do to me Crichton, it feels as if I've been torn in half! I can't control the damage, I should be able to replicate my arm, its just a mental construct, a reflection of my core progra ... no, No, NO! Its mine, It's ME!" With a roar that would have done Scorpius's Scarran father proud, Harvey lurched to his feet and charged screaming incoherently at the calmly watching human.

"Give it back!" Harvey swung his remaining hand in a swipe at Crichton head. John didn't try to block or dodge, at the last instant Harvey's eyes widened in shock as he realised what was about to happen, but it was too late!

Harvey's left hand soon followed by his arm then the rest of his body slipped straight into Crichton's body, disappearing into his chest with a shimmering ripple. Crichton stood stock still, frozen like a statue, as a second later, Harvey, now whole, but less substantial than a ghost, stumbled away behind him as if he'd run through the Human.

The ghostly insubstantial Harvey screamed silently, looking down in horror at his see through body, ignoring Crichton as he slowly sank back to his knees and collapsed onto the grey nothing of the void they stood in.

Crichton's mind was in a uproar as the new information Harvey had just dumped on him tumbled about like a jig saw puzzle in a cyclone, pieces found somewhere to fit in John's mind, relating and latching onto something he knew or had done and settled.

John Crichton watched as Scorpius, the Scarran/Sebacean hybrid was born and raised on the Scarran Dreadnought 'Devourer', lived through the brutal training regime that was Scorpius's childhood, followed along with the teenager's thoughts as he planned and carried out the murder of Tauza his Scarran minder/instructor/torturer. Watched as Scorpius escaped to first a commerce world then to a Peacekeeper Command Carrier, watched Devourer's destruction as the first part of Scorpius's plan of revenge. Then followed the Scarran/Sebacean as he rose through the ranks of Peacekeeper Scientific Corps always looking for the next weapon he could unleash on the hated Scarran Empire.

It wasn't the complete story, the blue substance had erased vast tracks of Scorpius's life before Harvey managed to copy what was left into Crichton's mind. But the bulk was there, most of his early years were intact, the memories becoming more and more tattered as the years went on. By the time Crichton had first run into Scorpius, only fragments remained, small snapshots of a minute or so on some unknown day..

As Scorpius's life unfolded so did the scattered remnants of the Wormhole Knowledge, this was even more scattered and incoherent than the life and times of the Scarran/Sebacean scientist. Even one tiny misplaced symbol could make whole formula so much meaningless graffiti and here over a third of the whole thing was missing, leaving the once stunning geometric mathematical construct looking like someone had hit it with a shotgun. Still what little that remained fit seamlessly into gaps between Crichton's own ideas on wormhole physics and the newly acquired expertise from Scorpius's years of training and study, first under the Scarran whip then under his own burning drive for revenge in the Peacekeepers Scientific Corps.

Crichton's mind soaked it all up like a sponge.

Maybe it wasn't the godlike understanding of the universe that the Ancients had buried in his head, but it was a damn sight better than what he'd had an Arn ago.

The headache made the worst migraine John could remember seem like a stubbed toe. Agony throbbed through his head, Crichton wouldn't be surprised that if he ever managed to wake up from this circus he'd find blood dripping out of his ears. Curling up into a ball he tried to ignore Harvey's ghost as the raging Neural Clone tried to strangle him, his insubstantial hand passing harmlessly through Crichton s neck.

After a time, it could have been minutes or it could have been days, Crichton's raging thoughts slowed as he was able to impose some vague sense of order on the chaos of conflicting memories and knowledge poured like molten lead into his brain.

Crichton finally opened his eyes.

Well the mental image of Crichton pretended to open his eyes.

The grey nothing was the same but the ghost Harvey was missing, distantly John could feel the remains of the DI cowering in the 'Dumpster', trying to repair himself. With a thought Crichton locked the prison tight sealing the Neural Clone away.

He'd deal with Harvey later. Now he needed to wake up.

"John! Wake up! What the frell is going on!" That was much nicer, Crichton thought to himself groggily and headed towards what sounded like Aeryn's voice.

Rising back to the real world Crichton figured he'd spent way, way! too much time inside his own head lately. The neon blue Leviathan would be much less confusing to deal with!

End.

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Notes

(1) Hodian Trill Bats: Leviathans supports "a panoply of harmless parasites, many serving symbiotic functions". The effluvium of one such parasite, the Hodian Trill Bat, spreads along Leviathans inner hull, sealing any microscopic cracks. The effluvium, which seems to collect as a fluid, several feet deep, has a strong, unpleasant smell.

(2) Farscape 'Eat Me': Episode S03E06 a little re written to include Aeryn Sun.

(3) Kalvo: A Scarran unit of energy. At high levels, the energy can be harmful. For example, Kalvo Ten can kill a person.