SCIFI.COM | Farscape: Journey Logs

There are worse places to be adrift than a Leviathan graveyard. There are also better places. Hef's mansion comes to mind. But I got pretty lucky among the ghosts.

The Leviathan Elack and his old female Pilot were ancient, sleepy and decent enough to offer me a home while they waited for death. I resurrected their DRDs, chugged moonshine, and became an honest-to-goodness mad scientist. Believe it or not, ladies and gents (drumroll) —

I solved the equations for safe wormhole travel.

And I did it in the nick of time, because with Elack getting ready to go to the big Starburst in the sky, those numbers represented what would soon be my only available means of transportation.

Unfortunately, I guess blowing up other people's wormhole research ("Into the Lion's Den, Part 2: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing") was bad karma, because a tiny alien spacecraft collided with Elack and destroyed all my written notations. As a result, the craft's sole passenger and I didn't hit it off so well when she crawled out of the wreckage to find me pointing Winona at her.

Sikozu Svala Shanti Sugaysi Shanu (say it five times fast, I triple-dog dare you) was a contractor for The Organization who had been hired by Grudeks to find elderly Leviathans. Why? Because the Grudeks harvest Leviathan Neural Cluster tissue, which apparently gets better with age. This stuff is called toubray, and health-conscious rich aliens fork over massive amounts of currency for a taste of it.

Nobody involved cares that the harvesting process kills innocent Leviathans. Sikozu sure didn't. In fact, she'd naively done her job for the Grudeks too well: She discovered the Leviathans' Sacred Burial Space, a toubray jackpot. To keep the gold mine to themselves, the Grudeks decided to kill their employee. She made a run for it, and they were right behind her all the way to Elack.

The last thing I was gonna do was let these thugs kill helpless old Elack. I woulda been dead long ago if Elack and his Pilot hadn't come along and taken me in. Sikozu helped me...sorta. She had major book smarts about Leviathan physiology, but she'd never set foot on one before. She talked a good game, but mostly she ran around on the ceiling and gave me smart-ass attitude. We laid an ambush for the Grudeks, but just when silence was golden —

— Chiana's voice crackled over my Comms. Pip, love ya, but your dulcet tones nearly got me killed. The Grudeks' Brindz Hound, which had already snacked on my leg, bit off Sikozu's hand before we escaped.

We met up with Chiana and Rygel in the Maintenance Bay. They'd learned, the hard way, that our little family is starring on Grayza's Most Wanted, a show that's become an overnight galactic hit thanks to the wanted beacons the Peacekeepers put on every planet, ship and Commerce Station in a 10,000-light-year radius. Pip and Sparky were bruised, beaten and plenty pissed at me over the traumas they'd endured. Chi was disturbingly hostile, and Rygel was eerily nice — relatively speaking. Seeing them made me wonder for the eight millionth time about Aeryn. I have so many questions I need to ask her....

Anyway — at that moment, I was getting a long-overdue shave, Sikozu was cutting a deal with the enemy, Elack was weakening as the Grudeks' harvest progressed, and Cujo's psychotic alien cousin was stalking the corridors.

We were facing more than a few technical difficulties in disposing of the Brindz Hound. Worse, the Grudeks were well-armed, they outnumbered us, and Sikozu didn't want to kill her former employers so much as she wanted her job back. Our severed heads would have been a nice bargaining chip in that negotiation. Lucky for her, we clued her in that the head the Grudeks most wanted on a plate was hers.

The plan we came up with relied on Chiana's growing ability to see the world in super slow-mo, which gave her moments of exceptionally clear, detailed sight — paid for afterwards by increasingly long periods of temporary blindness. With Pip's visions, lotsa rope, Sikozu's "help" and some basic physics, we had one shot to save Elack. If we blew it, we'd be a blind Nebari, a hacked-up Hynerian and a mad scientist with multiple fractures trapped aboard a dying ship, with no hope of rescue, no chance of escape and no backup plan.

It was just like old times.