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They'd been waiting for two solar days to be contacted by someone from the growing underground movement that aimed to restore ex-Dominar Rygel XVI to the throne of Hyneria. The underground was getting near to ready to launch a series of coordinated attacks designed to topple the usurper Bishan from his already shaky throne. John and D'Argo were here to show good faith, to demonstrate that The Great Crichton and D'Argo were indeed involved and were prepared to appear along with Rygel once the way to the throne was clear. So far no one had been in touch.
D'Argo snorted. "I don't know, John, I'm beginning to get bad vides about this."
"Vibes," John corrected absently, pulling the window coverings back and looking out onto the busy street below. He wasn't exactly getting bad vibes, but he *was* getting tired of the confinement. He made up his mind and slapped D'Argo on the arm. "Come on, D, let's get out of here and do something!"
Equally stircrazy, D'Argo grunted his assent. "Fine by me. If the RugRats show up, they can leave a note."
John stifled the amusement he always felt whenever anyone used the name he had coined for Rygel's army. "Rygel's Underground" led to "RUG" led to "RugRats". . . . Everyone on Moya used it, even Rygel. "Damn straight they can," he said. This was basically just a confirmation meeting, though they also had a recorded message from Rygel to deliver. It was up to the Hynerians to make the first move.
D'Argo nodded decisively and opened the door. John edged around the beds and followed him out.
Once on the street they chose a direction at random and started walking with no goal in mind, just to stretch their legs. Thank goodness the larger portion of the population of this planet was *not* Hynerian, or the two of them would have been tripping over the diminutive creatures, or dodging sleds owned by wealthier individuals. As it was, human and Luxan mixed into the crowd without attracting attention.
The question was, what to do, where to go. If this had been a commerce planet, they could have used the time to shop for repair parts or weapons or foodstuffs. But this was a boringly civilized planet, and their hotel was in the downtown business area.
Cycles ago, before the Uncharted Territories had changed him, John would have enjoyed just seeing the city, looking at the architecture, storing it all up to tell his dad or his sisters about it when he got home. But Aeryn, bless her little soldier's heart, wouldn't care at all that the curvy spires on that building there appeared to defy gravity, or that the walls of the headquarters of the Royal Hynerian Bank appeared to be encrusted with precious gems. Truth be told, he didn't much care anymore himself. His world had both widened and narrowed, since he'd left the confines of his homeworld. He still loved space, his scientific curiosity would never dim, and he seemed doomed to be involved in one grand political movement after another – but the only things that really mattered any more were his family, and his friends. He hated being away from Aeryn and his son.
Lordy, he was getting broody in his old age, John thought. Enough of this! "Hey, D'Arg," he said impulsively, "Let's see what's in there!"
D'Argo followed John's eye towards what appeared to be a shopping area of some sort. Creatures of all kinds were emerging carrying packages of all sorts and containers that smelled like hot cooked food. "Why not?" the Luxan said, and they entered the building.
They drifted along, looking in shops and idly scanning the crowd for interesting faces, until John spotted a toy store. "Come on!" he said. "Help me find something to bring back to TJ!" He was trying to find something that they didn't already have on Moya in one form or another, when a shelf of small figures caught his eye. "Oh my god! Look at this!" he called to D'Argo. "This is perfect!"
"A Hynerian god?" D'Argo asked, coming over to see what John had found. "Do humans consider such things appropriate for children?"
"No, no, look at it! It's Dominar Bishan." He'd picked up one of the hollow plasticene figures to check that his assumption about its texture was correct, and he squeezed it to be sure it wasn't too hard or the edges too sharp.
D'Argo looked at him in bewilderment.
"What does TJ do with anything you give him right now?" John asked, a laugh building beneath the surface.
"He puts them in his mouth, he's teething. What does that—" D'Argo broke out in a huge guffaw. "Can you imagine Rygel's reaction to that?"
"Maybe we should get him one, too! Otherwise TJ may have trouble keeping it!"
They laughed themselves silly while John paid for the two figures and impulsively grabbed a sturdy book with pictures of flying critters off the counter as well.
Back in the mall, John found that just carrying the bag with the items he'd chosen for his son helped continue the lighthearted mood. He suddenly remembered his father returning from his many trips away from home with packages in tow. Not just bribes for the children, he realized now – touchstones for a lonely man away from his family. "You know, D'Argo," he said aloud, " I understand my father a lot better now."
D'Argo started to reply, but they were interrupted when the RugRats finally made contact.
* * * * * * *
Jool had left them to go see how Rygel was doing on command, and the rest of the group, Aeryn, Chiana, Jack and Ron, were now in the galley, seated around the table. Chiana had found some ice for TJ, and he was sitting in her lap, chewing.
"How do you know about Earth? And how do you know my name?" Jack Crichton asked abruptly, as Aeryn applied John's adage, "You can catch more flies with fellip nectar than you can with a pulse rifle," rather literally and set bottles of the mild alcoholic beverage in front of all of them.
The tone of Jack's voice stopped just short of a demand, and it was near enough to John's voice for Aeryn to detect a note of fear. She dropped into her chair, using the time to think. If John were here, he'd have had his arms wrapped around his dad in a reassuring hug before anyone knew he was moving. And he wouldn't want his dad left in suspense any longer than necessary, not about him, anyway. She chewed on her lower lip for a microt, and then cocked her head sideways. "Your son John is a member of this crew." Everything else could wait for John's return.
Jack looked at her as if she had sprouted two heads. "John is alive?"
"Yes," said Aeryn. "He's. . . .he's. . . .he will be so happy to see you after all this time," she said awkwardly.
Jack's eyes filled with tears he tried hard to blink back. "He's here? Where is he?" he asked, looking around the galley as if John might be hiding behind one of the counters or underneath the table.
Ron reached out and touched Jack on the arm, but Jack shook his head sharply. Stay out of this, was the clear meaning.
Aeryn regretted her decision to tell him without John there to back up her statement. But there was nothing she could do about it now. "I'm sorry," she said. "John is away right now, on a mission."
Jack sat back as if he had been slapped.
"He's away, huh?" Ron said angrily. "That's pretty damned convenient!"
Aeryn fixed Ron with a glare, and he glared at her in return, but clamped his jaw shut.
She turned her attention back to Jack. "You cannot imagine how deeply I wish he were here right now, for his sake as well as yours," she told him. "But I am not lying to you. John *is* a part of this crew, he is alive and well, and he will be back aboard this vessel in a few solar days."
"How do I know," said Jack, "that John has ever truly been here? Maybe you've been monitoring our news broadcasts and heard about him that way. Maybe you just want us to let our guard down."
Aeryn thought for a minute. She could see in his eyes that he wanted to believe her. She wondered what she could say. "Just before John left Earth, you gave him a ring. A special ring. For luck." She saw Jack nod, which was good, but of course, John didn't have the ring any more. "He gave it to a friend when they were about to do something very dangerous to protect this ship and its crew."
Jack blinked, thinking about that. "Did it work?" he asked at last.
Trying to break the tension, Chiana began cheerfully, "Oh, yeah, it worked great! John and D'Argo made it through that just fine. In fact, he's with D'Argo—" She broke off when TJ unceremoniously dumped the remains of his ice on the table and squirmed out of her grasp, climbing to the floor.
Jack Crichton's eyes followed the baby's movements, giving him time to compose himself.
Glancing at her son, Aeryn told Chiana, "Let him go, he'll be all right." TJ headed for the cupboard of cookpots he knew he was allowed to play with, and Aeryn's mouth twitched when Chiana cringed in anticipation of the racket she expected him to make.
"About John. . . ." Jack began, clearly beginning to allow himself to hope that he would see his son again for the first time since John had disappeared. As his friend's mood changed, Ron visibly relaxed, leaning back and draping his arms over the back of his chair.
"Look," Aeryn told the two humans, "I know you must have a lot of questions, especially about John. And John will answer everything when he gets back. But right now, there's a wormhole out there, and we need to know exactly what you have to do with it, and if it poses a threat to this ship."
Jack looked at her for a moment, a balky frown on his face, and she could almost see the soldier debating giving her only his name, rank and serial number. "Okay," he said at last. "I can see you're a practical woman. You want to know if we're a threat. We're not. If you have any kind of scanners like they have in the movies, you know we don't have any weapons. This mission is an experiment in wormhole travel, nothing more."
"There are no enemies on your tail, no threats?" Aeryn asked. "No one is following you?"
"No," said Jack firmly, wincing as TJ pulled several pots off a shelf and banged them onto the floor.
Ignoring the noise, Aeryn continued, "Then what is wrong with your module? How was it damaged?"
Ron answered this one. "I'm not rightly sure," he told her. "It might have been the wormhole, and it might just be there's something in the design that's not quite right, or something shook itself loose. I'm going to have to take a look at it when everything cools down."
"We really appreciate you taking us in," Jack said. "We'd have been dead if you hadn't been here."
That was exactly what was bothering Aeryn – that these men from John's homeworld had conveniently landed right on their doorstep. "How did you get here?"
Ron and Jack exchanged looks as if she'd suddenly lost her mind. "Through the *wormhole,*" Jack said.
"No, no," said Chiana, "she means how did you get *here*? It's pretty frelling amazing that you came through right where Moya was."
"Luck," Ron said with a grin. "Well, luck and a lot of hard work. After John disappeared, my buddy Jack here put everything he had into getting the funding to continue John's research, and to expand on it. We call it Project Crichton. If it wasn't for Jack, we would never have gotten the money, and of course, Jack did it for John. For John's work. It seemed likely that something in his original experiment must have triggered the wormhole that kil—that swallowed him."
"So you created a wormhole and just flew blindly into it." Humans, Aeryn thought in a mixture of annoyance and awe.
"Well, not completely blindly," said Jack proudly. "We didn't know what shape the Farscape One module would be in, if it survived at all, but we tried to create a wormhole with an affinity for it, based on our best guesses of what the gravitational and magnetic stresses would do to the metals. We didn't know if it would work, but I guess we were successful."
"And if you'd found the module broken, and John's desiccated body inside?" Aeryn asked, appalled at the folly.
Jack looked at her quizzically, unsure what the strained tone of her voice meant. "Then at least I would have known," he said softly.
Ron spoke up again, nodding his head sharply sideways at Jack. "He bullied us all into agreeing to let him fly the mission. It was good publicity, he said. 'Geriatric astronaut leads the search for his missing son!'" He laughed. "Just think about the publicity when we get home and say we found him!"
"Doctor Livingstone, I presume," Jack began. He broke off when TJ walked up and put a pan in his lap. "Well, hello there, little guy," he said to the child. "Are you cooking?"
TJ picked the pan up and held it out to Jack. "Fwy!" he commanded. "Go gak!"
Jack looked to Aeryn, who smiled. "I think he wants you to cook. He likes fried grolak," she said. "But he only ate a little while ago."
"Well, sport, your mom says no," Jack said, picking the baby up to soften the rejection.
TJ sat for a moment, pan still in hand but forgotten, examining the new face. He reached up and touched Jack's gray hair, patting it awkwardly. The human endured the mauling patiently, and after a moment, TJ favored his mother with a triumphant smile, though she couldn't have said why.
She couldn't have said why she wasn't terrified to see her child seated in a stranger's lap, either, a potential hostage. But she wasn't. She must have trusted he was safe. At the same time, she wasn't prepared to give up her trump card, the information that her child was a grandson Jack Crichton hadn't known existed.
When TJ moved his hand over to pat Jack's face, the human opened his mouth and pretended to bite TJ's fingers. The baby giggled and announced loudly, "Da!" Then he abruptly turned his small body around and slid down to the floor, toddling off.
Jack's eyes took on the light of speculation, and Aeryn's heart sank. She could tell Chiana had the same recollection of John playing "I'm going to eat you up!" with his son.
When the child was a few steps away, Jack said, "Hey! Teejay!"
Aeryn was sure that he was going to say something about the boy's father, and she could sense Chi stiffen defensively beside her, but when TJ turned around, Jack only told him, "You forgot your pan!"
TJ came back and got the pan, then promptly dropped it on the floor with a loud bang and wandered off again to root through the cupboards.
Jack watched him thoughtfully. "Kids seem to be the same all over. He's just like my granddaughter back on Earth." He paused, and when Aeryn didn't reply, he shrugged and continued, "She takes her mother's kitchen apart regularly."
Looking Jack in the eye, Aeryn said non-commitally, "Does she?"
He nodded. "Yep," he smiled. "She does."
"I think it's the noise TJ likes," Chiana said, cutting in, as the baby took two metal lids and banged them together.
Taking the hint, Aeryn said, "Chiana, maybe you can keep an eye on TJ for me, and I'll take Jack and Ron back to the docking bay to look at their ship." She looked at the humans for their reactions. "It will be quieter there, I'm sure."
"Well," Ron drawled, "I *would* like to take a look at her. See if there's any external damage. The engines are probably still too warm to open up right now, though."
Jack nodded. "Maybe you can tell me more about John while we walk," he said. "What he's been doing."
Aeryn smiled to cover the minefield of things she *didn't* want to tell him about, not without John here. "Of course," she said as they stood up and headed for the door, leaving their untouched fellip nectar behind. It was going to be a very long three days until John and D'Argo returned.
