Ship of Ghosts Read online

  “Mistakes,” said D’Argo, “are best made at discretionary distances.” He moved out from behind his console to look at the vu-screen, his fiery hair and the quilted blood-red tunic making him look, to Crichton’s eyes, like a Mongol warrior about to launch a spear at an oncoming horde.

  “And you call yourself a man of war,” Rygel taunted, making his own violations of good manners at a discreet distance, Crichton noted. Rygel’s ThroneSled was hovering at the edge of the bridge, under the arc of one of Moya’s metallic ribs, far from the consoles where the rest of the crew stood trying to punch up information. Rygel smoothed one of the long whiskers trailing from his cheek and fingered his royal-purple collar. “Why, in my army,” he said importantly, “you would be lucky to scrub the Nebari latrines!”

  D’Argo had regained his composure. “Retreat, escape and survival are no shame to a warrior!” he intoned. “Pilot, have you found the source of that noise?”

  “Still checking,” responded Pilot, or rather Pilot’s hologram, clasped between two clamshell-shaped halves like Pilot on the halfshell. Pilot’s actual self—four-armed, carapaced and seemingly always on the alert—stayed in Moya’s innermost chamber, where, living in symbiosis, he had become a part of her neural network.

  He looked down, studying Moya’s interfaces. “Moya too is concerned for your safety, and of course her own.”

  “And yours, Pilot?” said Aeryn, gritting her teeth less as the blasting signal eased.

  “I live to serve, and I serve most humbly,” Pilot replied mildly. As the interface between the crew and the huge and splendid living starship, Pilot’s entire existence revolved around his starship. This particular starship, Moya, was a Leviathan, a species of ship normally used for peaceful purposes. She had been quite a prize for the Peacekeepers, who had fitted her with a control collar and then managed to modify her. Like the others, Pilot and Moya had been prisoners. But not only had Moya been a prisoner, she had been a prison. When Rygel, Zhaan and D’Argo had escaped the clutches of the so-called Peacekeepers, they’d also liberated Pilot and Moya. Not many escapees took their prison with them. Actually operating her was a different story entirely. Sometimes it felt to Crichton as though Moya were operating them.

  As a boy, John Crichton had often gazed up at the stars with his father, the famous twentieth-century Earth astronaut Jack Crichton. Looking up at the inky blackness his father had travelled in, he had been filled with wonder. How could he have guessed that there’d be much more terror up here than wonder!

  The distinction of being a second-generation astronaut was, for Crichton, double-edged. After earning his doctorate in theoretical sciences, Crichton spent his time as a scientist/astronaut in his famous father’s shadow, always trying to impress and please the Great Jack Crichton, Mister Extremely Right Stuff. However, John Crichton was never forced to scrabble to make a name for himself, since he was born into a legacy that seemed destined for space travel. When his experimental mission aboard the Farscape I module had shot him through a wormhole, Crichton found he was definitely not in Kansas any more. Here at last he was forced to call upon the courage and determination he’d inherited from his dad but never needed to use. Sometimes he remembered those days with a wistful nostalgia, back when travelling through Earth’s solar system had seemed like the biggest adventure possible.

  “Registering incoming transitional feedback,” Pilot said. “Analyzing. Processing. Reflecting…”

  “Pilot,” said Aeryn. “Just tell us what the frell that thing is.”

  “I sincerely wish that I could, Aeryn,” replied Pilot.

  “Sometimes I yearn for the days before control interfaces talked!” said Rygel. “Ah well. I shall amuse myself by twiddling my toes.”

  “Pilot, Moya must be able to find something!” said D’Argo, pacing from the empty vu-screen to the console and back again.

  Pilot peered down at a screen. “Yes, Moya has found it.” As he spoke, they could feel the great ship beginning to veer around. “And I can now classify it, as well. Our databanks indicate that the vessel resembles a Nokmadi Navigator, legendarily lethal to foes—”

  “And just plain legendary!” said Zhaan. “Pilot, the Nokmadi are mythical creatures, surely. How can we—?”

  “Fabled, perhaps. Mythical, apparently not.” Crichton could see Pilot’s appendages dance and sway over the controls. “Databanks do contain information on the Nokmadi as a space-faring people. I am trying to retrieve that information now.”

  Rygel’s eyebrows were nearly on the ceiling. “I withdraw my suggestion! I advocate doing what this group does best—run!”

  “Wait a moment,” said Zhaan, ever the calm voice at times such as these. “Nokmadi—Navigator.” She breathed in, breathed out. Her eyes closed. Her smooth head seemed to radiate intelligence. She was the image of concentration.

  Suddenly those large alien eyes were open again.

  “Navigation! Of course. Our Delvian myths say the Nokmadi were a race that set out to map the galaxies!”

  “Navigation?” said D’Argo, suddenly interested. “Maps, you say? Such vessels would surely be equipped with databases. Old perhaps, but—”

  Crichton could feel his adrenaline surge. “Yes!” he cried, pumping his arm in the air. “A motherlode of maps!”

  The others looked askance at Crichton and he winced. He had to remember to limit his Earth gestures. Even the translator microbe injection in his parietal cortex, which made communication possible with aliens, couldn’t always handle those references.

  “I mean,” he explained, “that sounds like the navigational material we need to find our homes.”

  D’Argo’s deep voice rumbled. “Crichton’s summation, however bizarrely expressed, is correct. We may have the opportunity here to obtain the information we need.” His eyes grew soft. “I will hazard risk if it brings me closer to a reunion with my son.”

  A rapid jumble of images swept through Crichton’s mind. Adventure in space was exciting, sure—especially if the length of your lifespan wasn’t much of a concern. And he had always looked out at the great inky expanse of space, deeper than night, with eagerness about what new discoveries might turn up under the light of those flaming stars. But now it had been months since he had had his feet firm on the soil of Mother Earth, had felt the warmth of the sun on his face, had read a newspaper or seen a movie or gorged on waffles and coffee late on a Sunday morning. Space was big, and there was a lot of room to be far from home.

  He looked around at the others and nodded. “I agree. I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t help but notice that this part of the universe is nothing but trouble. We might as well get some trouble that might help our ultimate goal.”

  The silence between them was thick. Emotions raced through eyes as they looked at one another. The flashing lights of the distress signal, registered on the bridge, formed a backdrop to their indecision. Crichton could feel the worry and the desperation, but he could also sense the hope and longing and need. He didn’t need a translator for that.

  “Pilot, I command you to depart at full possible speed!” Rygel pronounced imperiously.

  “Fool!” cried D’Argo. He grabbed the diminutive alien by his bulging neck and started throttling. Rygel’s gray skin turned even grayer than before and his face went through ineffectual gnashing contortions that suggested he was trying to sink his teeth into D’Argo’s arm.

  “Pilot,” said Zhaan. “Disregard that order. We have not yet decided—”

  “I’m getting a reading on the screens,” announced Aeryn. “Are those measurements I’m getting correct? Those specs are quite large for a travelling ship—”

  “I’m trying to countermand, but Moya is startled,” said Pilot. “StarBurst is engaging—”

  “No!” said D’Argo, dropping Rygel, who began to sputter. “We can’t—”

  “We’re giving her too many orders!” said Aeryn, flinging back her hair and punching in rapid overrides as her console began to lig
ht up in red. “The power can’t be switched back and forth like that—something’s going to fry down there!”

  Oh God, thought Crichton. He had always known that being an astronaut might be a rollercoaster ride, but he hadn’t expected a galactic amusement park.

  Moya resumed her turn toward the sound, and the gleaming floor of the bridge began to tilt slightly as they wheeled around. Abruptly the vu-scopes on the walls held a larger, darker object. Some sort of raging, wavering beam emerged from it like a streak of yellow crayon in the hands of an angry kid god. It roiled through the ether, sparking with violent energies. Before Moya could even think about engaging StarBurst engines and thus warping space into a jump across light-years, the beam enveloped her.

  “A tractor beam!” cried D’Argo. “By J’Anra’s dewlaps, I’ve never seen one bigger than—”

  Even as Zhaan and Aeryn worked madly at the controls to yank some kind of counter-maneuver from the ship, the vivid yellow spread over the screens. The bridge shook.

  Crichton grabbed hold of his station-stalk and held on for dear life. Ripples of kinetic energy passed through the bridge’s ceiling and floor. Rygel’s Throne-Sled hopped around like a Mexican jumping bean, throwing him on his small posterior. The DRD units scurried over to prevent him from rolling around.

  “Indecision!” roared D’Argo, struggling up from the floor. “It could be the death of us. And perhaps it already is.”

  “Pilot,” said Zhaan. “Status report.”

  The holographic image flickered. “Moya is surrounded by some sort of containment field linked to a nexus fulcrum anchored to a remarkable counterforce of indeterminate origin,” said Pilot.

  “As I said,” D’Argo said. “A tractor beam.”

  “It looks as though we’re going to help whatever broadcast that distress signal, whether we like it or not,” Zhaan said, yanking herself up to her station.

  “This is not Peacekeeper tech,” said Aeryn. “This is not anybody I recognize.”

  “Silver linings are good,” said Crichton. “Everything’s remarkably intact for such an onslaught of ener—”

  The beam flared to orange and Moya was shaken again. Crichton was ripped from his place and staggered toward the wall. His head slammed against a bulkhead, and blackness came down like an anvil.

  CHAPTER 2

  “John?”

  He was sitting at a table in a conference room. In front of him was a large coffee mug with a cartoon by Gary Larson. He must be back on Earth, then. Somehow it didn’t surprise him. He took a gulp of coffee, strong and hot, set the mug back on the table, and studied the cartoon. In it, aliens were descending the ramp of a flying saucer: one of the bug-eyes had fallen down and was now a jumbled pile of tentacles and eyestalks in front of clueless Earth people. “Oh,” says the alien captain sarcastically, “that will fill the Earthlings with a sense of awe and wonder.”

  “John?”

  Beyond the table was a huge window of special shock-resistant Plexiglas, looking out on the Atlantic Ocean and giant towers of scaffolding holding a Titan rocket topped with a space shuttle. A flock of seabirds were flying through, flecks of white against blue. He could almost smell the sea breeze whispering through the long grass on the marsh banks and the fuel on the tarmac, taste the salt of the sea and the—

  “John?”

  He recognized the voice—it rang with authority, yet it also had that devil-may-care Chuck Yeager the-plane’s-going-down-in-flames-but-we’re-having-a-barbecue-in-the-cockpit twang. Astronauts and airline pilots had perfected that twang to its present twenty-first-century state and Crichton himself could do it in his sleep, with Industrial Light and Magic special effects.

  It was his father. Commander Jack.

  Crichton turned. Through a haze made up of the scents of coffee and fresh carpet, he saw the Old Man rearing up before him.

  “John?”

  “Dad?”

  “John, we’ve got to talk.”

  The Old Man was in his Air Force uniform, complete with medals and epaulets. He moved until he stood just on the other side of the table, but to Crichton he felt a million miles away.

  Crichton had always been thankful for his own good looks. Even during the usual nervous adolescence, he’d always found it easy to talk to girls, and they seemed to find him attractive, thanks to his symmetrical features, sea-blue eyes and brown hair, straight and bushy when short but with a hint of a curl when it got longer. There were times, though, when he stared into the mirror and hated his face, because he knew that in thirty years it was going to look a lot like the Old Man’s. Jack Crichton looked as though he’d been chiselled on Mount Rushmore out of Right Stuff granite, come alive and stumped over to fly Apollo missions. He had a face of mythic proportions. The same kind of steely gray eyes had looked out over the prairie and said, “Yup.” Those wrinkles had been beaten out by Western skies in lawless towns when men were men and whiskey was inner hurt’s only salve. He was the kind of guy who had built America into the can-do empire it had become.

  Too bad about the sons who had been neglected along the way to glory.

  “Talk, Dad? Sure. Let’s have a good father-son talk. A real one, like I’ve always wanted. What’s going on?” said Crichton.

  “This mission of yours,” said Jack Crichton. He smelled of Old Spice after-shave. “I’m proud of you and everything, but really—faster-than-light travel? That’s a big stretch. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up too high.” The big twinkling smile widened into a hyper-American grin, greater than the Great Outdoors. “Course, there will be plenty of good rides even if we’re never able to make it out of the solar system! But listen … Even though I’m jealous as hell that you get to go out and be Buck Rogers—”

  “Dad, it works!” Crichton could feel the singular rush of scientific thrill again. For a few moments, he had been a god! “I made the mission. But I hit the gravity wave of a black hole, Dad. I got sucked in and spat out in another galaxy.” And the other gods saw his hubris and struck him down. It had been a rollercoaster ride with a downside that had never yet stopped, and his stomach was still a few light-years behind him. “Faster-than-light travel exists already—and there are plenty of extraterrestrials out there that use it!”

  The Old Man’s face creased into a frown. “I don’t understand. What happened?”

  “Dad,” said Crichton, “I was shot out of a wormhole and right into something out of Star Wars directed by Alfred Hitchcock. There are a bunch of races out there. One’s called the Peacekeepers. They keep the peace by stormtrooping around the galaxy, taking over planets. They had this great big living starship called a Leviathan, Dad. They’d collared it and turned it into a prison ship. But three of the prisoners—this beautiful blue woman named Zhaan, a huge warrior with fleshy dreadlocks called D’Argo, and a deposed midget monarch named Rygel—escaped and liberated it. Well, it’s a long story, but seems my ship smashed into a Peacekeeper’s fighter ship and killed the brother of a head honcho who’s now vowed revenge on me. I tainted a female Peacekeeper called Aeryn Sun by association, so she’s stuck on Moya—that’s the escaped Leviathan, run by a huge crab-like creature called Pilot. The Peacekeepers are after us, and all we want is to find our way home! Our problems are way bigger than finding a way out of the solar system.”

  The Old Man sniffed. He pushed a bowl toward his son. “Jellybean, son?”

  Disbelief and consternation filled Crichton. “Dad! Aren’t you listening to me?”

  “The popcorn-flavored ones are amazing.”

  “Dad, you’ve never listened to me my whole life. All I wanted was to grow up to be as strong and courageous as you. Now that there are light-years between us, I realize that’s the way it’s always been: me speaking, and you not hearing me. Listen to me this time, Dad.”

  The Old Man looked away, out toward the view. A seagull was diving down towards prey in the marsh. Clouds the color of shale were moving in from the east, over the Atlantic. “Whatever happened t
o that sweet girlfriend of yours, John? Your mom and I really liked her.”

  Crichton Senior was looking out of the window.

  Seagulls swooped onto window ledges. They stared in. They all looked like even shorter versions of Rygel XVI, Dominar of the Outer Whosiwhatsits.

  “Ashlay? Ashlay?” they squawked peevishly. One flapped up, and squirted a long white trail of droppings across the window. Two others fought over a green food cube.

  “What’s going on? Is this some kind of government conspiracy, Dad?” said Crichton. “Am I in The X-Files? Am I loaded with experimental drugs?”

  He looked at his father.

  Commander Crichton was morphing into Crais, the fanatical Peacekeeper pursuing him. Crais’s black hair shone, drawn back into a severe ponytail. His dark eyes glittered with intense hatred. He wore a belted leather robe that flapped at his ankles as he paced, his hands clasped behind his back. He smelled of spicy scented oil and gave Crichton a creepy feeling. Crais was a being for whom vengeance was the highest pleasure. He wheeled around and looked at Crichton, his face darkening.

  “You killed my brother,” said Crais, pointing a gloved finger at him as though it were a sharp weapon. “You shall die.”

  Crichton hopped up. His chair crashed back. “Look, I told you. It was an accident.”

  “I am going to cram all of these into your mouth!” said Crais. His hand reached for the bowl. The jellybeans had turned into a roiling mass of black alien insects. “They will bore through your innards like riplasers! They will eat your eyes from the inside out!”

  Crichton turned and ran. He opened the door of the room. It was a doorway into space and time. Rod Serling stood before him, arms clasped, cigarette smoke twirling around his head. “You’ve entered a dimension of sight and sound…” he said.

  “No,” said Crichton, “I’ve entered a dimension of insanity!” He turned around just in time to see the jellybean bugs growing into giant heads filled with angry eyes and razor teeth.