Part 37

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With the smell of smoke in the passage, Bursamen and Kastara proceeded the rest of the way in a cautious haste. The passage opened at a plain white metal door, leading into a small laboratory side room, which in turn led to the chambers Bursamen had been to earlier. Kastara fell onto his knees in shock as the door opened. Bursamen's eyes widened in the light of the fires burning around the laboratory.

Moving around Kastara, Bursamen entered the laboratory and looked around himself. The numerous liquid filled tanks were fueling flames, and display cases and chests were burning. Some metal lines running across the floor were sparking and spitting fire. A distance to his left, in an adjoining chamber, Oshana's glow was visible from where she sat, just as she was when Bursamen had left her. Larran was gone.

Bursamen hurried to the adjoining chamber, carefully lifting Oshana from the side, avoiding the unnerving golden glow which seemed to float from the Stakira's head. He carried her to the doorway he'd entered through and set her down near Kastara.

"Why?" Kastara asked, weeping as he reverently placed a hand upon Oshana's head. As if he was prompted by someone, Kastara suddenly looked around and began to stand. "Where is he?"

"Pick her up" Bursamen told Kastara. "Is there anything here we should try to sa-" he was interrupted by a sound. The breaking of glass called Bursamen's attention to the chamber on his right. Running to the doorway, he saw Larran, holding a rod with a burning ball at one end with one hand and an antique data cell holder in his other hand. "You are mad" Bursamen stated, not that he'd ever thought otherwise.

"For one thing, I don't want any competing Sisters" Larran commented, torching another display case. "I suggest you do not delay me. We may want to abandon the premises" Larran cast a crafty leer aside to Bursamen. "Heat transfer from these flaming tanks will soon cause the principal holding fluid tanks under the outer wing to explode. I think I shall watch the explosion from the balcony of the Cordon Wing, it will be substantial."

"You won't make it back to her" Bursamen promised.

"She'll be wanting this" he said, almost amiably, raising the data cell holder in his hand. He put the flaming end of the rod in his other hand nearly underneath the holder. "It's the Drieth Transcription. You, rabble, may not know it's value? Without it, she is lost. Only I know its contents." He smiled while Bursamen glared. "Let me pass."

"We" Bursamen corrected him.

"We?" Larran asked, moving the holder closer to the flames.

Bursamen raised his gun to Larran. "That object is all that keeps you alive" Bursamen warned Larran, his even voice a contrast to the wild cracking fires around them. "I have no belief that you would share what you claim to know of its contents." He smiled while Larran glared. "We will go to this Cordon Wing for safety. Careful while we go" he instructed, drawing back from the doorway to the adjoining room nearer to the doorway he entered in, and gesturing Larran toward the doorway with his gun.

---

"Another corner, Pip" John instructed to Chiana, hurrying alongside him despite being slightly hunched over from persisting blindness and breathing raggedly in her exhaustion. "Any trace of Sinister Minister?"

"Nnoh" Chiana shook her head "don't know, doesn't seem, to be anywhere, mm-might've got away."

"Don't say that....but since I don't feel alot of Nutsy around, I've got a strange inkling to get our marbles out of the joint."

"Crichton!" she half shrieked, exasperated. "O-our answer's gotta be here, o-or we're frelled for good."

"Yeah but, you know, live life for the moment, you know, forget the past, never mind the future, you know...."

"Shut up Crichton" Chiana snapped back, but with a smiling face.

John hopped to a stop as a motley alien lady of uncertain species hurried around an upcoming corner. A statuette tumbled from her hands while she stared in astonishment. A few more assorted aliens piled up behind her, coincidentally carrying items from around the Estate. They also stopped and stared in shock.

"There!" the lady shrieked, lurching for John with her clawed hands grasping the space between them.

"Open, open, open!" John scrambled to reverse and run. Hunched over with her eyes unseeing, Chiana could only hear the lady's yell, but she didn't need any guidance from John to turn and run just as he did.

John heard a choked gasp and a slap of a body hitting the floor. Looking over his shoulder, he could see Chiana convulsing on the floor. The moment he got to her, she stabilized somewhat, but something about her had changed. "Hh-he's m-m back" she mumbled.

"Oh crap, come on, if I gotta carry you I gotta, but we gotta run!" he helped her onto her feet and to a run. She struggled to keep running, but her legs seemed half occupied with the struggle within and only managed to stumble. John picked her up against his side with one arm around her waist and ran. "Sorry Pip, gonna have to tote this case to Dr. Frankenstein's lab."

"N-no, no" Chiana muttered.

"Better make that go, go" John managed to lose the pursuers by taking one of a dozen doorways leading from a short corridor. "And I thought you'd make easy luggage" John huffed, struggling to hurry down the stairs toting Chiana. "Damn, I hope this stairway leads somewhere I wanna go" he grumbled. Finally making the bottom of the stairs, John looked around and only saw an empty corridor. John dropped in a heap, face down onto the floor with Chiana falling bonelessly over him. "Whew. Boy I'm Pipped."

"Wish I could" Chiana raggedly teased "nn-they....n-no time." Listlessly struggling to walk, Chiana rose and began stumbling down a corridor promising no direction.

"Hey wait up!" John lifted his head and waved, but she ignored him and he dropped back down. "Well if I had that jerk in my brain I guess I wouldn't be too keen to take five either" John muttered into the polished floor.

John felt a weariness deeper than flesh and bone. What if they survived all this? Alone in having only a distant, unrelated past, but not able to let go of it to live for their future, not knowing whether they must somehow discover their past or are better not doing so, or even if it amounts to Hollywood Squares. "Who are we?" he asked the polished milky floor.

"We are" Chiana had said. John smiled as a conversation from a forgotten time seeped back into his mind. She wore a strange costume of browns and hair twisted into wild hand sculpted dreads, held by a red muck that her hair seemed to have been smothered in. A fright, and a great tragedy, he felt, for himself as well as her. They had left a frightening place, and sat on their shins, silently watching a vast cemetery that was the picture of black waste pulling away on the view screens like the freshness of the wounds inside only starting to mend.

"So what brings you out here?" he'd asked, breaking a long silence.

"Hm?" she'd asked, having been lost in her turmoil.

"Why did you leave home? Your people?"

"Wasn't home" she'd replied with a desperate smile and shook her head once. He'd nodded, having thought he understood.

He'd meant to run his hand absently over her head, a casual affection, but feeling the strange hair, he'd grabbed a fistful of it and looked at it. She'd almost lost her identity and even her life, though for reasons he couldn't now remember. She'd grimaced, as if he was hurting her, but it wasn't his gentle grip. "It isn't me" she avoided looking at him and smiled, desperately again.

He'd let go and affectionately pinched the tip of her nose between the back of his fingers. Looking out the window at the planet slowly changing to the expanse of space, he'd rhetorically asked, "Who are we?"

"We are" she'd replied with a shrug, still looking away. A wordless sniff and choked moan from Chiana blurred him from the memory to the present. With the thought lingering in his mind of her seemingly futile struggles just to be free, with nothing promised, the absurd idea Larran was threatening to usurp her inside screamed at him.

Exasperated, John sat up and yelled at the ceiling with his hands out. "What?" he asked. But since a deity didn't peel up the building above, peer down and explain what he'd done to deserve all this, John got up and started after Chiana.

---

Orren fired a cover volley, hurrying across an intersecting corridor. Rolling behind the cover of a metal table placed on its side, Orren gasped from the pain caused by the multiple tears in her flesh that the sentinel's net had made and checked the ammunition in her pistol as a couple of shots struck nearby. "Good thing they are lousy shots" she remarked to herself.

Raising her pistol and eyes above the table, Orren just had a fraction of a microt to fall back behind cover before a perfectly aimed shot burst at the table's edge where she'd had her pistol. Rapid fire exploded across the entire entrance way around her. "Frell!" Orren shouted at her frustration, realizing she knew who likely fired that volley. "Tannac!"

Gawking in disbelief, Orren watched as Tannac tumbled behind the table near her. "You know" Tannac widened her eyes at Orren and tapped her own ear "we'd have saved alot of trouble if you'd been equipped with a communicator too."

"I am. They don't work." Orren's hawk-like gawk didn't so much as soften.

"Neutralization field. Good security system, who would've thought," Tannac grumbled.

"Not our organizers" Orren blandly retorted.

"Organizers? Odd" Tannac observed. "Not exactly what I'd call them about now."

"What the frell happened to you?" Orren finally unstuck from her gawk.

"I met the Sister" Tannac explained, taking a random shot over the table. "She shot me."

"The frelling trelk!" Orren's brow somehow knit tighter.

"She wasn't herself" Tannac curtly explained.

"She's not the Sister then?" Orren irritably asked before ducking the debris from an errant shot.

"Not then, but she was the Sister" Tannac further explained. "Who are you fighting?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about!" Orren angrily informed her in a shout, taking aim over the table and firing again.

Tannac looked aside to Orren as if the Sebacean had gone mad. "Yes I can see they're friendly. I'm glad you decided to follow my suggestion and came this way."

"That's very nice then isn't it, because I'm not particularly glad I'm here at the moment" Orren informed her.

"Me neither. So let's go somewhere else" Tannac gestured Orren to a nearby window, plucked a grenade from one of the straps, primed it, and threw it into the corridor. The crossfire immediately ceased and curses sounded in several languages as everyone in the immediate area ran for cover.

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"How could you let him get within range of her!" Bursamen bellowed at Kastara. The Bannik dropped Larran's body onto a planter and moved one step back toward the side wing a distance behind him. Bursamen shoved himself two steps closer to Kastara. "I told you to keep a distance!"

"We have it!" Kastara gripped the data cell holder which Larran had claimed contained the Drieth Transcription and fervently ran around a bush bowing his head to the holder. "It is, we know at last, we know. This is the-" he stopped suddenly while realization scrubbed his launch into joy.

"You let Larran escape back into Oshana!" Bursamen scowled. "He could be in himself, Oshana, John Crichton or Chiana again! Brilliant!"

The Bannik's eyes cut to Bursamen, holding Oshana to his side with one arm and scowling down at Larran's body laying on the ground. When Kastara looked up to Bursamen, he met the Nebari's sharp ebony eyes. "Oops?" Kastara meekly supposed.

Bursamen's lips tightened and he made a step toward Kastara. The Bannik took off running. "Come back! Come back with that! You crawling drannit maggot!" Bursamen hollered, about to run before he realized he couldn't chase Kastara with the need to watch the uninhabited body of the Minister and a dazed Oshana. He whined and stomped his feet. "Incredible" Bursamen muttered when more advanced thought returned. "Incredible!"

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