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Today is not an exploration day.
They have them, occasionally. It’s an odd kind of agreement they come to, when someone randomly mentions they’re going to go visit one of the tiers, and after a moment, everyone else decides they might as well check out an area too.
It’s hard to remember how big Moya is, sometimes. They mostly live on tiers three through eight. Six cells now called living quarters, the galley, the maintenance bay, the command, the cargo hold, the lab and Pilot’s den. But there are dozens of tiers, dozens of rooms they never enter. Because this was once a prison ship, designed to hold upwards of fifty isolated prisoners and their guards in addition to a crew. It now has six passengers and a Pilot.
Aeryn mentioned it last night. It came up in conversation because the former prisoners were feeling restless, and couldn’t understand how they’d managed their mutiny. She’d explained that no one had expected it, with so few prisoners and a command carrier docked alongside.
John had questioned it. Found out that most of the crew had gone to the command carrier for leave. It was barely a skeleton crew left behind, since really you only needed Pilot to fly the ship, and honestly, with three prisoners locked in their cages, how many guards did you need?
“This boat could service a hundred people?”
“Easily. But that will soon no longer be the case.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is not needed. Leviathans such as Moya grow to accommodate the requirements of her passengers. With so few passengers remaining, many of the living quarters are beginning to atrophy, and she will make new spaces.”
“Like space for the baby.”
“And other areas.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Surely you have noticed my lab growing in size as we use it more frequently, Crichton. And the maintenance bay.”
“Yeah, but I kind figured I was just getting used to the space, y’know? So… what happens to the stuff in the rooms that are disappearing?”
All their supplies. All those tradable goods.
So today’s job is clear. Go through everything. Pack up the things they will need. Sort the things they can trade. Destroy that which is neither.
They’ve gone through many of the rooms before. John and Aeryn have both gone through every living quarter on the ship to find clothes that fit them. Now they box up everything that doesn’t, and have a serious discussion about what they will do with all those PeaceKeeper uniforms. The black market is the only viable option to trade them, but that brings its own kind of danger.
“You really think we could? People would buy these?”
“Of course.”
“Who’s gonna be stupid enough to impersonate a PeaceKeeper?”
“You’d be surprised.”
Chiana joins Crichton on his travels and picks through the few personal effects she can find. She shows him PeaceKeeper porn and he’s a little surprised to discover it mostly varies between really vanilla and straight-up BDSM.
“Bee-dee-ess-em?”
“Yeah, you know. Bondage, dominance games.”
“Yeah, I know them… You ever play?”
“Heh heh… Should I even bother asking you the same thing?”
“All sex is about control, Crichton.”
“For some people.”
D’Argo takes the armoury, and everyone’s a little horrified to realise it’s a lot bigger than they thought, and that it’s taken them this long to go through it.
“We are never going to need to buy so much as a cartridge of Chakkan Oil.”
Zhaan is the only one brave enough to enter the torture cells, and she sorts everything into three crates – useful, tradable, and to be ritualistically destroyed. She prays the entire time.
“Hey, Pilot. Got a request for Moya.”
“Yes, Commander?”
“If she’s got any control over which areas go first…”
“Of course, Commander.”
They take a break in the recreational area, all feeling slightly out of place. They’ve collected games from it before – cards and toys and boards Crichton can’t get a handle on. Aeryn tries to explain some of the unmovable games to them – one of them is remarkably like pool.
“We could… use the room.”
“Yeah… yeah, we could do that.”
“We do all get bored quite a lot.”
They finish gathering the things that can be moved and close the doors behind them.
Rygel finds the still, deep in the tech areas of the ship. They all wait with wide eyes and twitchy fingers until he reports it dysfunctional.
“Maybe… maybe I can fix it.”
“Crichton.”
“Yah?”
“Do you know what goes in one of those things? To make the happy juice?”
“Totally. Had one in my college dorm.”
“Have you seen anything out here that might match the stuff you used?”
“…damn.”
There are bathrooms and bunk rooms and lavish quarters that they can see suited a captain. Crichton admits he’s a regular visitor – it’s where he got most of his wardrobe.
“And yet you chose to sleep in the cells with us.”
“Well, I’d claimed my room long before I found this place.”
“And you didn’t move why?”
“Hey, you want to sleep in here, Sparky, you go right ahead.”
The officers’ quarters are far more comfortable looking than their own rooms. Not one of them moves their belongings.
The cell tier stretches on, completely untouched by time and Moya’s changes. Crichton claimed one two doors down from the others, Aeryn across from him. Chiana is the only one who’s moved at all since her first night on board, going from her original cell at the end of the tier to a sick bay in the lab and then finally to a one between Crichton and Rygel.
They go to bed far later than usual, all exhausted but no one particularly willing to close their eyes. When the lights finally dim, Crichton lies awake and listens as each one of his shipmates wakes with at the very least a startled breath. At Aeryn’s, he gets up, wraps his blanket around his shoulders, and wanders across the hall to lean in her doorway.
“Go away, Crichton.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
“I believe I made things clear when I told you to go away.”
Instead, he crosses over and sinks down beside her bed. She doesn’t move, or acknowledge him, for a long time. But eventually she rolls onto her side, and they watch each other with half-open eyes. Her hand reaches out, and she touches his hair, softly. After a while, she threads her fingers through the short strands, her thumb sliding over his temple in a rhythmic motion he doubts she’s aware of.
“We’re all changing, aren’t we?”
He blinks once, then again, and then closes his eyes, nestling his head into her mattress. She continues petting him softly, until long after he falls asleep.