Good Timing

It's funny the twists and turns my life takes.

After four-plus years of muddling my way through increasingly bad, increasingly weird shit, here I am, finally. Sitting in a peaceful little boat on a beautiful planet with a beautiful woman getting some beautiful news. Yeah, I've saved the Earth, I've got the girl, and the future's lookin' really, really bright for the first time since I can't remember when.

So, y'know, it really doesn't surprise me when the freaky alien flyin' machine shows up from out of nowhere and proceeds to show every sign of wanting to blast me and the future Mrs. John Crichton into our component atoms. Because, hey, that's just the sort of thing that happens to me.

Now, the dragon suddenly showing up, that surprises me.

The critter -- and, damn, but it really does look like an honest-to- St. George Earth fairy-tale dragon -- looks confused for a minute, in a lizardy kind of way, like it's not completely sure what it's doing here, either. Then it suddenly wheels around and smacks the alien ship with one massive claw. The ship tumbles out of control, stops just short of plummeting into the water, then turns tail and makes for the horizon, belching murky blue smoke the entire way.

Then the dragon dives for us.

My pulse pistol is out and pointed before I even think about it, and I can see out of the corner of my eye that Aeryn's is, too. We both draw on the critter as it stretches out its claws towards us, touches the boat, and turns into...

She stands in the bow of the rowboat and gives me that patented Chi smile. "Hi, old man! Surprised to see me?"

I don't lower the gun. Yeah, bad habit, I know, but it's kept me alive this long. "Surprised doesn't begin to cover it. This some new superpower you've developed?"

"It... would be kind of hard to explain. You wanna drop the gun, so we can talk?"

I don't. "Dunno, Pip. How do I know you're not some kind of shapechanging alien or something?" Actually, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable hypothesis, given the fact that we've just seen her change shape, and given the fact that, now that I think about it, she doesn't look quite the same as the Chiana we left behind on Moya an arn ago. A little younger, maybe. A bit less frazzled. A lot less blind.

That little head gesture she does is pure Chi, though. "Your middle name's Robert," she says, "you lost your virginity at 16, and you think dentics taste 'kinda minty'... whatever that means."

"OK," I say. "So you're a shape-changing, mind-reading alien."

But I lower the pulse pistol. Aeryn doesn't. My soldier-girl.

"Chiana" rolls her eyes. "Frell, Crichton, you always were an idiot, but when'd you get so frelling paranoid?"

"If you were Chiana," I say, "You'd know."

1. Meanwhile...

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