Syndication
A "StarBurst Challenge #100" Story

I.

One-hundred monens is nearly eight cycles in Peacekeeper Standardized Time.

Peacekeeper Standardized Time, used throughout the galaxy nowadays, was bequeathed to the Sebacean race by the Eidelons, once upon a very long time ago, even though the Eidelons used no such system themselves. Why was this done? Perhaps the early Sebaceans were not fully adapted to life in space; perhaps they still required some deep, rhythmic connection to their ancestral home planet.

The turn of the Earth, the intricate dance of the Moon about the planet about the Sun—it lives deep within each Peacekeeper to this very day, and it has been foisted upon their clients and their conquered subjects and their neighbors, who all make at least some use of this system out of simple necessity. And yet, hardly any of them—Sebacean or Scarran, Nebari or Luxan, Hynerian or Interion—were ever aware that they owe this system to the primitive backwater on the other side of the galaxy, the Human homeworld of Earth.

Even the Peacekeepers forgot this fact long ago, just as they forgot the Eidelons. Just as they forgot themselves—and their own humanity.

It is a strange and seemingly arbitrary system: fifty microts to the arn, twenty-five arns to the solar day. Seven solar days to the weeken, four weekens to the monen, thirteen monens to the cycle. A bit cleaned up and streamlined compared to the sundry solar and lunar calendars used on Earth, past and present; divested from the messy and irregular wobblings of its origin, Peacekeeper Standardized Time could afford to become simple and straightforward, having no need for leap years or the occasional brute correction for axial precession or any other such contrivance. But still, the queer proportions and divisions of time hardly changed down through the millennia.

Modern historians of the Peacekeepers (to say nothing of the many races dwelling in or adjacent to their domain) always assumed that this time-measuring system must have been some reflection of the Sebacean species' original homeworld, and indeed this is the case. But finding and identifying that mysterious aboriginal planet was of no importance to any but the most pedantic of archaeologists, and even then, before the arrival of John Crichton into Peacekeeper Space, their quest would have been futile. In the absence of wormhole technology, it remains a fruitless niche, of interest to practically no one.

But the fact remains: one-hundred monens, by virtue of the fact that the "monen" is indeed a Lunar month, and the "cycle" a Terran revolution, is equivalent to seven cycles, nine monens, or if you prefer, seven-point-seven cycles.

Seven-point-seven cycles is rather a long time to a human.

In middle age, seven-point-seven cycles is time enough for a man to come to an understanding of who he is; to have the rug yanked out from underneath his feet; to become someone else entirely; and to still save enough room for a mid-life crisis later on.

It's also plenty of time to realize that some people are simply never going to change.

Scorpius has named his prototype cruiser the Conquistador, the first in a brand-new class of deep-space explorers which will always bear that name. To the rest of the Peacekeepers, it's just another word—the translator microbes see to that. The standard Sebacean language—the Peacekeeper dialect—is mostly Eidelon in origin, mutated by more than twenty-five-thousand cycles of linguistic drift, but basically unadulterated by any input from the ancient human abductees. The first Peacekeepers learned the alien tongue of their benefactors; whatever pidgins and creoles they might have employed at the outset to foster communication have been lost to the millennia. Nevertheless, a scant few words here and there have indeed survived all that vast time; or have been borrowed into Sebacean from alien tongues. This is the way of it with language: true purity, of the sort that the Peacekeepers once idealized, is a practical impossibility.

And so, for most of the Peacekeepers, "conquistador" seems utterly befitting, like "vigilante". It denotes a victor; a conqueror. And it does so in a word that sounds like it could perhaps be Ancient Sebacean, or some fringe borrowing from a rural planet. Hardly anything out of the ordinary. It's just the sort of thing that Peacekeepers ought to call their ships.

But Scorpius knows that Crichton will appreciate his little inside joke: he understands the word's other connotations without translation. Explorer. Adventurer. Colonizer. The total, brutal domination and exploitation of one culture by another using the twin edges of ruthlessness and superior technology.

From his vantage point overlooking the bridge, Scorpius gazes down at the cadre of officers, navigators, gunners. He notes with satisfaction that three of the bridge personnel are alien—not even half-breeds, just ordinary non-Sebaceans. An unusually aggressive Interion male serves as one of his gunners. He has a Kalish defector, a female, as a pilot; and Scorpius prides himself on the fact that she will advance in the Peacekeepers, or not, based on her merits—and regardless of any lingering feelings (for good or ill) that he may yet harbor for the infamous Sikozu Shanu. The third alien, a rotund and yellow-furred Yufey'yet male, stands by with his fellow techs, monitoring readings coming from the ship's unique shielding and sensor systems in real time.

The Sebacean techs, Scorpius notes, have no problem getting along with the Yufey'yet, accepting the alien as one of their own. The Sebacean soldiers—well, they're disciplined officers, and by now they certainly know better than to let any private displeasure become something public and unseemly.

The bridge of the Conquistador is brighter and more open than that of any Command Carrier. Transparent and ultra-durable windows offer a panoramic view of surrounding space. At the moment, the cruiser is warping its way through the middle of absolutely nowhere special. It has the same top speed as a Command Carrier, roughly a thousand times the speed of light when traveling at maximum hetch, and even then the distant stars only lazily drift by, barely seeming to move.

This is an utterly dull little corner of Peacekeeper space. There is almost nothing of interest here, not for a hundred light-cycles around. There are a few commerce planets, a few farming planets (most of which once produced Tannot root for the Peacekeepers, before the Scarrans glassed those worlds' surfaces from orbit some eight cycles back), and a rogue asteroid field that drifts along the caravan-route between one of those dead planets, Sykar, and the old prison-colony at Terran Raa.

Still, there's one special thing about this part of space, as Scorpius knows all too well. This is the place where a wormhole first delivered John Crichton into the fateful hands of Moya, and Tauvo and Bialar Crais, and Aeryn Sun. This is the region that holds the proof of a most startling fact: that the fate of an entire galaxy was altered by a member of a primitive species, barely space-capable, stumbling upon the most sought-after scientific secret in living memory.

In this place, space and time once converged to alter themselves and thereby make history.

This idle, grandiose musing is interrupted by the voice of one of the navigators, calling up to Scorpius's command-platform (which stands fully three motras above the floor of the command deck, and thus well above the heads of all the other officers on the bridge, seated or standing). "Sir, we're approaching the coordinates. Fifty microts"

Scorpius nods; then he addresses the Kalish pilot. "Sub-Officer Nalu, all stop."

Without a word, the pilot immediately disengages the Conquistador's hetch drive. The mighty vessel—smaller than a Command Carrier by far, but meaner in its own way than even that misbegotten mutant Talyn ever was—drops out of FTL and drifts on inertia alone.

"Take readings," orders Scorpius.

The Yufey'yet tech answers in a gruff, jowly voice. "Sensors read positive. The asteroids are orbiting an unidentified gravitational anomaly. It could be an open wormhole."

A young female Sebacean stands on the command platform with Scorpius: his attaché, Lt. Zeyn Gallara. Her blonde hair is pulled back in a tight braid; her fair skin is almost as ashen-white as Scorpius's own. Her private ambition… is useful, at the moment. She smiles. "You were correct. Congratulations, sir."

Scorpius keeps his expression neutral, but he cannot deny himself a moment's private satisfaction. "If there is one thing that I have learned in all my cycles of service, Lt. Gallara," he intones, "premature celebration of expected success is folly." He gives his attaché a sidelong glance, and—she's never quite seen that before—there's an honest-to-Cholak twinkle of mischief in his eye. How entirely disturbing. Scorpius concludes, "Or—as our guest would phrase it—'do not count your chickens before they've hatched.'"

Lt. Gallara stares blankly. "'Chickens', sir?"

Scorpius ignores her and addresses the techs. "Shielding systems?"

One of the Sebacean techs, who cannot quite keep the fear out of his voice, reports, "The boards show all systems at optimum, sir."

Scorpius nods again. Then he turns to Lt. Gallara and says, "It's time for the guests of honor to join us on command."

A short while later, Scorpius marches down into the cargo hold of his ship. Two black-armored Peacekeeper infantry stand ready as the massive metal doors rumble open. He crosses the threshold into a cavernous storage-space, brightly lit, clean, well-organized. Metallic crates are stacked everywhere, a whole cycle's worth of provisions for a crew of four hundred men and women.

Scorpius is accompanied by Lt. Gallara, the two soldiers, and two techs wheeling a boxy machine covered in lights and dials. Once the doors are open, the cargo hold is totally silent, except for the footfalls on the deck-plating and one squeaky wheel underneath the techs' device.

At last, they come to the object which has been the centerpiece of the cargo-hold for a little less than four monens: a massive pile of solidified green resin, two motras tall and twice as wide. If he were able to see it, Crichton would call it a gigantic, hardened "Jell-O mold"; or perhaps a huge, frozen snot. But Crichton cannot see the object.

Because Crichton is frozen inside of it.

"How do you get yourself into these predicaments, Crichton?" Scorpius muses aloud. "When I think about all of the time, energy, and resources that have gone into pursuing you over the last twelve cycles…" He gives a wistful shake of his head and then motions for the techs to begin their work.

At once, they set up their machine, each attaching a pair of wires to opposite ends of the resinous blob. One of the techs activates the device, causing an extremely high sonic pitch to fill the cargo-hold. The two soldiers power up their pulse-rifles and train them on the object. The tech operating the machine cranks the dial—the hum becomes an ear-splitting whine—and CRACK!

Several things happen at once.

The machine backfires, sending one of the techs careening into the deck-plating with a sickening crunch. The soldiers' pulse-rifles short out with a loud pop and a shower of sparks—both grunts drop their weapons in surprise. And the giant frozen green Jell-O mold—that shatters into a billion fragments; and a microt later, John Crichton and Aeryn Sun are coughing their lungs out and trying to wipe green amber-dust out of their eyes.

"Aer—" Crichton coughs. "Aeryn, baby—are you—?"

"I'm here," she coughs back, "I'm here, John."

They embrace each other. They support each other. "The giant—loogie-spitting lizard—did we win?"

"I… think so?" says Aeryn. Then she manages to get some of the green dust out of her eyes, and she looks around, and she sees Scorpius standing a short distance away, watching them with dispassionate curiosity. Instantly, her hand drops down to her holster; but of course, it's empty. Her gun had been knocked out of her hand during their unfortunate encounter with the Mucous Squamate of Klybar IV.

To her credit, Scorpius observes, she does not panic. She does nothing impetuous. She simply nudges Crichton. "John."

John is still trying to free his eyes of hardened snot-flakes. "I tell you what, honey. Let's never mention the lizard to the others." He coughs, loudly. "Ever."

"Agreed," says Aeryn, brushing the dust off her leather overcoat. "Not exactly our most romantic anniversary getaway."

Crichton shrugs. "Eh… it's in the top five." Then, at last, he too can see. And he sees Scorpius, who smiles and opens his arms wide.

"Crichton! Commandant Sun. Welcome aboard the—"

Before he can finish his speech, Crichton is already stumbling through the pile of shattered amber, moving to attack the nearest target, one of the PK soldiers. Scorpius rolls his eyes and shakes his head in frustration. "Crichton, you—" Crichton is trying to punch the soldier through his armor, but his blows are totally ineffectual; he is more apt to hurt himself than the Peacekeeper. "—Crichton, please cease this, this futility. You have been in stasis for a hundred solar days, you cannot—"

Crichton and Aeryn both start at that. "WHAT!?" they cry at the same time. "Three months!?" continues Crichton, while Aeryn makes her own atrophied lunge at Scorpius and shouts, "Where are our children? Where's Moya!?"

Scorpius holds up both hands. "Please, be calm! As far as I am aware, they are all safely in the Hynerian Prime System! Or at least, they were—when we left them there, a quarter of a cycle ago."

Crichton's attempts to hit the Peacekeeper have resulted in his being pushed violently down onto the deck. Now he rolls onto his hands and knees and tries to push himself up—but he can't. "THREE MONTHS!?"

Scorpius sighs and gestures to the soldier. "Help him up." The Peacekeeper roughly pulls Crichton to his feet and holds him.

"Where. Are. We?" demands Aeryn. The other soldier stands close to her; she has no more strength right now than Crichton, but she keeps herself standing upright with willpower alone.

"As I was trying to explain, you are aboard my deep-space explorer, a prototype vessel—"

"You've shanghaied us!" accuses Crichton.

"In fact, I've rescued you," insists Scorpius calmly.

"Rescued my ass," says Crichton, pushing himself onto his feet so that he can point a finger at his old foe. "The big fat line between 'rescuing' and 'kidnapping' is about three months wide!"

"I have my reasons!" Scorpius snaps. "Consider that I have done you no harm; that the paralytic venom found in the mucus of the Klybarian Lizard has kept you in comfortable suspension for—"

"Comfortable!?" retorts Crichton with a crazed giggle. "I don't feel comfortable, I feel like I've been hit by a Mack truck! How 'bout you, babe? Feelin' comfy?"

Aeryn answers at once, "Definitely not comfy. More like what you said before, about the muck-track."

Scorpius sneers and fixes his gaze on Aeryn, then Crichton. "I meant comfortable for me." He spins on his heel and makes for the cargo-hold door. As he goes, he snaps, "Lt. Gallara, have them brought to command."

As they make their way back up to the bridge, a powerful vibration flows through the ship and shakes the bulkheads for a couple of microts. Aeryn, who has lived aboard ships all her life, gives Crichton a worried look.

"S'matter, Scorpy?" asks John. "More than five-thousand since your last oil change?"

"That's his way of asking if you're having engine-trouble," supplies Aeryn, mostly for Lt. Gallara's benefit.

"Ah," says the young officer with sudden understanding. "And… if I may ask, what is a 'chicken'?"

Aeryn and Crichton both shoot Gallara the same queer look, but before either of them can answer, they arrive on the bridge. "In fact," says Scorpius as they all walk onto the command platform, "that was a gravitic distortion. It means that the wormhole at the center of this asteroid field… is about to open."

Crichton falls gravely silent, staring ahead at the empty space outside the ship's panoramic viewport.

"Scorpius," says Aeryn, "the treaty with the Scarrans bans all wormhole research—you know this. Frell, it's why you've spent most of the last six cycles working on dark energy and—and—after that didn't work—" she nudges Crichton and whispers, "what was the other thing?"

Crichton, distracted, starts at his wife's touch. "Hm? Oh, uh—heavy anti-leptons. Bombard some anti-tauons with Higgs bosons and you can build yourself a doomsday—"

"—Right, that," finishes Aeryn with a confident nod. "Wormholes are illegal, you cannot be back on wormholes!"

"All that you say is true," concedes Scorpius. "But we are not here for wormhole research. This wormhole—we're going through it."

Aeryn snaps, "Like frell!" At the same time, Crichton shakes his head and says, "Won't work."

Scorpius suddenly has a predatory grin, like a Trallxian cave-viper toying with doomed prey. He eyeballs John Crichton. "You know this wormhole."

Aeryn looks askance at John, who nods, glum. "It's the first one I came through. When I met Moya. Aeryn. …Crais."

"You still have the ability to navigate wormholes," says Scorpius. A statement of cold, hard fact with no room for questions or protestations. Crichton tries anyway, but before his mouth is even open, Scorpius has grabbed Crichton by the shoulders and pushed him violently against the railing that surrounds the command platform. Lt. Gallara holds Aeryn Sun back while Scorpius hangs Crichton half-way over the command deck and hisses in his face. "Never forget this, Crichton: Neural Clone or not, reprogrammed, self-deleted after the War—brought back by the Nebari, expunged again by the Delvians—doesn't matter. I don't even need to observe your heat-signature to know when you're lying. You recognized this wormhole; you can lead us through it!"

"Can't, won't, take your pick!" retorts Crichton. He's still too weak to fight back physically, but he never yields. "That wormhole leads to Earth! I closed it from the other side—cut Earth off from the network!"

"What do you want with Earth?" demands Aeryn. She shrugs Gallara off; her strength is returning faster than Crichton's.

Scorpius looks at Aeryn as if she is the only other adult in the room, the only one he can reason with. He composes himself, helps Crichton back to his feet, and unhands him. "Commandant Sun, I remind you that your reinstated commission and elevated rank are still in effect. You served with distinction in the Peacekeeper Diplomatic Corps for six cycles after the War and led a great many successful negotiations." Aeryn starts to object, but Scorpius raises one gloved hand imperiously. "Your honorable discharge was conditional—the High Council can reactivate you in case of emergency, and the Eidelons have decided that this is an emergency."

"Oh, here we go," grumbles Crichton. "All right, Grasshopper, let's have the exposition-dump."

"I have been monitoring this wormhole on my own, in secret, for some time. Imagine my surprise, a third of a cycle ago, when I suddenly began to detect electromagnetic signals—of Human origin."

"Radio waves from Earth," says Crichton.

"Audiovisual broadcasts—your 'television'," affirms Scorpius. "Dated to your 'year', two-thousand and eleven. Eight cycles since your last visit home. The wormhole to Earth is open again."

Aeryn turns to Crichton. "Is that possible!?"

Crichton is already fuming. "Dumbasses…" he mutters. "It is if they tried to open again!"

"That was my assessment as well," says Scorpius. "Your fellow Humans, it would seem, have every intention of following you out into the galaxy—and becoming an interplanetary pain in the eema."

Crichton stares at Scorpius in long-suffering disbelief. "You want me to take us through so that I can close the wormhole again?"

"Impractical, if your species can re-open it at will. Instead, the High Council has asked that I lead a mission to deliver you and Commandant Sun to Earth, to establish formal diplomatic ties."

"This is a bad idea," asserts Aeryn. "It's only been eight cycles, they won't be ready."

"Too primitive, too paranoid, too suspicious, too dangerous," concludes Crichton.

"Possibly," admits Scorpius. "But the High Council, the Eidelons, and the Scarran Imperium are in agreement. Your species has begun to master wormhole technology. This poses a threat to the entire galaxy. It must be dealt with."

"'Dealt with'?" echoes Crichton. "And the Eidelons were on board with this?"

"They convinced the Council to seek a diplomatic solution first!" exclaims Scorpius. "That is why you and Aeryn Sun are here! To lead the negotiations, to convince your people that wormhole weapons research would be… ill-advised."

"And if they don't go for it?" asks John.

The silence of Scorpius in the moment that follows says everything Crichton needs to know.

"Fine," says John. "But I ain't helping. Go on; fly us in and turn us all to goo."

Scorpius turns to Aeryn. "Crichton is not the only one here who has piloted a vessel through a wormhole—"

"Eat 'shit'," says Aeryn, luxuriating in the use of a human profanity, the meaning of which is nevertheless apparent to all.

"There are four-hundred souls aboard this ship," says Scorpius. "You place all of their lives at risk—"

"Not this time!" retorts Crichton. "No. If you give the order that gets us all killed, I am not responsible for it! Aeryn is not responsible for it!"

"We are going into that wormhole, with or without your willing assistance," replies Scorpius with unnerving calm. "If you will not pilot the Conquistador… then we will simply have to rely on the Phase Stabilizer."

At the very same moment that Crichton stands up straight and says, "What!?", the wormhole out in space flares up like a bright blue prominence that quickly settles back down into a swirling, semi-stable funnel.

Scorpius gives a few terse orders to the techs down on the command deck. It is the Yufey'yet crewman who activates the ship's negative phase shielding—outside the ship, lines of pink energy streak across the hull in all directions, making an odd grid of irregularly-sized, triangular laser-beams, before the energy fades away again and becomes invisible—and a few microts later, the wormhole up ahead calms down and doesn't swirl like an angry vortex in the fabric of spacetime itself quite so much. It just hangs there placidly, a funnel through reality, awaiting a traveler.

"Helm, one-quarter ahead," instructs Scorpius. While Sub-Officer Nalu engages the sub-light engines that push the Conquistador to the mouth of the wormhole, Scorpius turns to Crichton. "Did you really imagine that I never knew about Furlow? After all, the Scarrans were the ones backing her research."

"Is she still alive?" asks Aeryn with genuine curiosity and perhaps more hope than compassion.

"In a manner of speaking," replies Scorpius. "But she isn't quite the same… brilliant researcher that you once knew."

Aeryn says nothing. Some small part of her is happy to get this news.

As for Crichton, his eyes are closed. Even after all these cycles, he can still hear the hum, smell the scent, feel the tingle. What the Ancients did to his brain was deep and irrevocable. This is who he is. Trance-like, he almost cannot help it, he starts to whisper instructions. "Left… left again… high and outside… now the middle one…"

The Conquistador has plunged into the tunnel, and every time Crichton whispers a direction, Scorpius relays it down to the Kalish pilot, who does her best to follow a path through the chaotic branches and confluences. Waves of exotic energies that would reduce the whole ship to particles or send it careening into the wall of the wormhole fly by; Nalu dodges most of these, but a few still clip the ship and break against the barrier born from Furlow's ingenious design and now re-purposed to Scorpius's ends. It is Crichton's guidance, through—however unwillingly given; he is naught but a medium for the knowledge now—that saves them from an exit into an unrealized reality, or a reversal into a white hole that erases every memory of their ever having existed in any continuum.

Aeryn thinks for a microt that she might perhaps be able to get Crichton to stop giving directions, if only she were to grab his hand or speak his name. But she does not do this, because she does not want to murder four-hundred Peacekeepers, and because she wants to see her children again and to have her children see their mother and father again. Even if it puts Earth at risk. She will never speak of this moment with Crichton, ever.

And suddenly, it's all over, and the Conquistador gives a violent shudder and slides back into real space. The wormhole is behind them, and the forward viewport is filled with the brilliance of a yellow dwarf star that John Crichton knows all too well. This is the Sun, his Sun, one that he has known all his life, grown up and lived and learned and loved underneath. The Sun that shines down on his father and his sisters and the rest of his family, and also on the grave of his mother—and that of his childhood best friend and his best friend's wife. Who both died because of that one time that he wanted nothing more than to come home to Earth but shouldn't have done so, and did so by accident anyway, even though by then it was too late for him to really call it home anymore.

He's home.

That thought is more than enough to snap him out of the trance. "Are we—?"

Without a word, Aeryn takes John by the arm and points. The Conquistador is coming about, facing away from the Sun and towards the Earth, which looms large—it's so close, it's huge, northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula and a small part of southern Europe fill the viewport—because Scorpius's ship is hanging in a relatively low orbit. They have exited the wormhole right on top of the planet Earth.

"Welcome home, John," says Scorpius in his best facsimile (it's still a poor one) of genuine affection. Then he turns to Lt. Gallara and says, "Lieutenant, log this order as binding and effective immediately, command code four-four-seven-dekka: all navigation and engineering personnel are to receive an official commendation."

Momentary looks of surprise and delight appear on the faces of the bridge crew—except for the Interion gunner, who cannot quite conceal his jealousy.

While the Peacekeepers go about the business of getting their bearings and taking their initial scans of the primitive planet below—or above; the way Crichton has to look up through the viewport, "above" seems more appropriate—Aeryn sidles up close to him. Scorpius has all of his attention fixed on Earth when Aeryn whispers, "It's been eight cycles."

"Yep," says John.

"You left them your recording-device on the Moon."

"Yep."

"And—your father did say that your people were starting to come together—" Aeryn is reaching now, and she knows it, "—so is there any chance that they might have—?"

"Nope," says Crichton. And it's God's honest truth. He genuinely doesn't expect much from his fellow humans. Could they really come together as a single people? Overcome their deep divisions, understand technology so far beyond them, and muster up even a meager defense? It's impossible and he knows it, and honestly so does Aeryn.

And so does Scorpius—he's counting on it.

Which is why the sudden appearance of another battleship, racing around from behind the shadow of the Moon, comes as such a surprise to all three of them.