Farscape Dark Side of the Sun

Chapter1 Moya lay quietly in space, listening to the starsthe regular beat of the pulsars, the strange whispers of ancient giants, and the awful silence of black holes. She had tried to ignore the problem, hoping that it would just go away. But it hadn't. For some time now, she'd been aware that something wasn't right inside, but now great waves of pain were rolling through herconvulsing her; confusing her. She shuddered and gave in. She was seriously ill. Moya cut her main drive and simply drifted, the light of distant suns reflecting from her skinsteel hull in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of color. She didn't know what was wrong and she was frightened. She had lived a very long timenever established Moya's ageand in all that time nothing had hurt her this badly. She cut even the weak thrust of her station-keeping fields; she couldn't sustain it. Moya hoped that if she just stayed still for a while, everything would settle down and she'd be able to continue. Then pain lanced through her flank, rolled along her nerve endings, and exploded in her brain. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. * * * Inside Moya, John Crichton hummed tunelessly as he flossed. The dentics Zhaan had given him felt and tasted disgusting as they crawled over his palate, but he couldn't deny that they did their job. The toothache he had been suffering from recently was at last beginning to calm down as the little creatures ingested the infected flesh. Inside his mouth the dentic shuddered and ceased moving. Crichton stopped humming, reached into his mouth and peeled the dentic from his lower palate. It was a shame that the dentics had to die. But consuming infection was what they were bred for. He deposited this, his ninth dead dentic this week, into the biomatter recycler in his quarters, took a long gulp of water and gargled. He would have preferred a shot of decent malt whisky, but anything would do. Anything to take away the taste of dead dentic. It was now nearly seven months since Crichton had first set foot aboard Moya. And he found it difficult to believe that it was indeed barely half a year since the wormhole had opened in high Earth orbit and blasted him across time and space to who-knew-what part of the universe. He missed his family and friends. But now he had new friends and, in place of his father, he had Moya. And he liked his new friends, liked them much more than he had once thought possible. Of course, he'd never admit itafter all, that would blow his cool completelybut there were times when he found himself actually having fun on this madcap ride through the galaxy. And he was learning, too. He was a scientist, an astronaut, and he had been presented with a tremendous adventure and a great opportunity. He had left the world of his birth and he had encountered new life. And he was the first human to do it. Crichton closed the zipper on his jumpsuit and pulled on his boots. They were handmade, crafted for durability and guaranteed for a lifetime, but the tread was already half gone. The boots were made for space flight, not walking. And certainly not for adventuring on the number of planets that he had visited over the past months. He knew that if he told his story back home on Earth, he would be ranked alongside Marco Polo and Robert Falcon Scott. Though they were separated by centuries, he felt a deep affinity with such men. For the journeys and perils faced by those great explorersalong the silk road and across the ice of the Antarcticthough bold adventures in their own time, were merely the first nervous steps on the journey he'd undertaken. Polo and Scott had gone to the ends of the Earth. Crichton had stepped beyond it. If he was honest, Crichton had no problemDymond, Andrew is the author of 'Farscape Dark Side of the Sun' with ISBN 9780765340016 and ISBN 0765340011.