SCIFI.COM | Farscape: Journey Logs

This is John Crichton, making a short story long. Things are rushed and I've gotta get this log entry done before Aeryn comes back from her ammo run to Rygel.

My alien pal, in the guise of my dear ol' dad Jack, showed up on Talyn, accusing me of sharing wormhole-stabilizing technology with some cadaverous-looking creep the Ancients had seen flying my Farscape Module. I wish. If I'd given away the tech, it would mean that I possessed it and maybe I'd be home by now.

Right at that second, helpful Harvey, the Scorpy clone in my head, pops in and tells me on the sly that Furlow probably made the knock-off of my module. Furlow is the gifted and greedy ship mechanic-entrepreneur who copped all my module's data when it was in for repairs at her shop (see "'Til the Blood Runs Clear"). She's got a taste for wormholes, and I knew she'd sell the technology to the highest bidder as soon as she figured out how it worked. I just figured it'd take her a bit longer, is all.

So we high-tail it to Furlow's solar flare-prone planet, Dam-Ba-Da, where Furlow's got her fortified bunker-repair shop. But instead of seeing racks of alien SUVs getting lube jobs, we run into these heavily-armed, creeptacular aliens, the Charrids, guarding Furlow's compound. Things were lookin' grim until Talyn streaked in and saved our asses by blasting us a path to the door. Then a solar flare fried his sensors, blinding both him and Crais.

While Stark picked up Crais in a Transport Pod and Rygel headed down to the surface, Aeryn and I shot our way inside the bunker. We zapped all the Charrids except one — we saved him for some Q&A; — and found Furlow hanging from chains. She said she'd constructed a working copy of my module and hired the Charrids for security, but after she'd developed a phase stabilizer that allowed travel through unstable wormholes, the Charrids double-crossed her. That was the party we just crashed.

We were safe inside for the moment, which gave me a chance to see the copy Furlow made of my module. Sweet. Jack started checking things out under the hood, which made Furlow antsy, so we looped her into Jack's real identity. Furlow wasn't quite convinced, so Aeryn and I kept an eye on her while Jack did his thing.

Meanwhile, Rygel snuck off to torture the Charrid prisoner and get even on a few old, Charrid- Hynerian scores. Apparently, the Charrids invaded the Hynerian Empire a while back, killed a billion of the froggy folks and ate a million of their unhatched young; some people'll eat damn near anything. Charrids are tough — and ugly — but Rygel got into the groove and made our prisoner cough up that the Charrids were in bed with the Scarrans, who were on their way to seize the phase stabilizer, cruising along in a big, bad Scarran dreadnought, twice the size of a Peacekeeper Command Carrier and way too big for Talyn to handle. But that's all we got out of the Charrid, 'cause Rygel got a little too eager with the knife.

We had squat, but we couldn't let the Scarrans get their claws on the wormhole technology, no matter what else happened. Furlow was more profit-minded and suggested — with a gun — that by selling the tech to the whole universe we could get rich and maintain a balance of power. Moot point. The Scarrans took that moment to establish a remote connection to Furlow's computer and began downloading all the phase stabilizer specs, free of charge. Quicker than you can say frell, Aeryn and I blasted the computer, but there's no way to tell how much data the Scarrans got, and the dreadnought was only minutes away from reaching orbit.

Then Jack announced that he was a man with a plan, and with my help he could build something to destroy the dreadnought by unlocking the equations the Ancients put in my brain. But first, we needed to take a shot at getting rid of Harvey — yeah, I told him about Harvey — because unlocking the wormhole secrets with the Scorpius Neural Clone evesdropping was a bad idea, with a capital BAD.

Jack and I plan to link up somehow and boot Harvey out of my skull. If I succeed, I'll finally be free of him; if I fail, Scorpius' personality will erase mine, and Aeryn'll have to put me down like Old Yeller, which is only fair, since I killed her once. It's a huge gamble, all or nothing, but I'm sick of Harvey — I mean really sick of him — and I think the risk is worth it. ... Either way, I'm rid of Harvey, once and for all.

Aeryn'll be back any second — then I'll get one deep breath before we try to save the universe.