Disclaimer: Don't owe them; borrowed some lines from the series though...

Reviews highly appreciated (not necessarily favourable ones, I just like them constructive... Thanks.)

Had she not been an android...

Rommie had seen it all before: the clenched jaws, the mouth twisted downwards, the flaring nostrils, his eyes clouded and barely recognizing his surroundings, the furrowed brows, each single facial muscle as tight as the strings of some ancient musical instrument. Rommie had seen it all before: as he was staring down on Gaheris Rhade's body, on that wretched day when he had said his final farewell to Sarah, for weeks after Tyr's departure; and she had hoped – against all odds – to never have to witness it again. But here it was, this silent, stone-set Caesarean mask of utter hopelessness she so much dreaded.

He was storming down the corridors of the Andromeda Ascendant towards the hangardeck of the Eureka Maru, his shoulders slightly bent forward as if marching against a blowing stormwind, blind and deaf to the crew members crossing his path and saluting.

„Dylan, stop!" Rommie yelled at him for at least the tenth time in a row, again to no avail. The avatar of the Andromeda Ascendant had no trouble keeping up with her captain's enraged pace, she just wanted him to take a break for a minute, to gather his thoughts – well, at least some thoughts – before reaching the Maru. Instead of reacting to her plea, he suddently broke into a slight jog, that was rapidly speeding up the nearer they came to their destination.

„Captain Hunt, please wait!" she tried anew, this time grabbing for his arm. She held it in a firm, iron grip, while he struggled to break free. As she refused to let go, he finally came to a halt, being no match for her.

„What?" he coarsley barked at her, already panting from the short run.

„Just take some deep breaths, Dylan, before going in there. Otherwise they might come to the conclusion that you're out of shape," Rommie lightly teased him in a small, yet futile attempt to ease the tension. He didn't seem to hear her. Or if he did, he clearly couldn't grasp the meaning of her words. The captain simply stared at her without any reaction that could have proved to her that he was indeed paying attention to anything going on outside his turmoiled inner self. He was slightly swaying on his feet, so she grabbed his forearms in an attempt to steady him. He let it happen without further resistance.

Had she not been an android, Rommie would have breathed out in relief.

But then she suddently saw his face breaking up in a grimace of grief and sorrow. Although he didn't break into tears, he certainly looked as if he was going to. It didn't happen though. His eyes remained dry, their pupils dilated and quite blank. Rommie frantically searched for some hopefully comforting words to tell him, but before she could think of the right phrases she saw him double over as if in pain, his hands literally clawing at her shoulders.

„Dylan, Dylan, don't!" she admonished him severely, straightening him up again.

„But it hurts, Rommie... it hurts!" he stammered in a lost, desperate voice. „It hurts!" he then suddently howled into her face, his own features distorted by the rage that shook him. They were bearing almost no resemblance to the normally rather pleasant traits of Dylan Hunt. Instead, Rommie found herself looking into the eyes of a madman, someone – or rather something more like a mortally wounded predatory animal, a beast nearly driven out of its mind by injuries it knows to be deadly, determined to go down taking as many foes with it as possible. And still quite capable to do so. The captain of the Andromeda Ascendant looked positively... dangerous.

Had she not been an android, Rommie would have panicked.

But she was an android, so she just grabbed his shoulders, slowly forcing him to sit down on the floor, his back against a wall, while one of her hands was reaching behind his neck and bending his head towards his knees.

„Dylan," the avatar whispered, „strange as it may sound, your vitals clearly show that you are in a slight state of shock. You need to calm down. Stop hyperventilating!" she ordered him, intensifying her pressure as she sensed him trying to put up a fight."Please, try breathing slowly in and out and just stay put for a couple of minutes. You're going to be fine," she finished in a reassuring tone. He struggled a little more against her, but then seemed to come to his senses and decided to do as told. For some five minutes they remained in silence, the android resting her hand against the man's neck, where her sensors were picking up his vitals.

„There you go," Rommie finally stated, sounding satisfied, „you're better now!"

„Yeah, just peachy," he mumbled, scrambling to his feet. „Come on, Rommie, we've got a party to attend."

-

He had not taken it seriously. Well, he had at the beginning, when he had voiced his suspicions to her for the first time, telling her that he believed to have a mole on board, someone transmitting their position to the Commonwealth bounty hunters. So he suspected treason, the most serious charge on board a warship she could think of. And as she was the warship, she took it as seriously as even possible. They both did, or so she thought. In the captain's office however, Dylan Hunt had started to treat the matter like it was some „who done it"children's game, contending himself to merely supervise the data provided by Andromeda in an arrogant, slightly bored manner, as if there really was nothing to worry about in the whole universe. A defensive move, as she suspected, but irritating nonetheless. As Rommie began to point out that her supervision of their crew indicated nothing to be out of the ordinary aside the higher stress level due to the constant attacks, he even conceded that actually they were getting to him, too. A little softened by his admission, she decided to give him a small break.

„Actually, you're handling it very well," she told him, „or hide it very well."

„I'm an enigma," Dylan replied to that, leaning closer to her.

Had she not been an android, Rommie would have slapped him.

There it was again, that insufferable, overbearing note in his voice, that she so hated. As did everybody else, for that matter. Oh, Dylan, she found herself thinking silently, as she proceeded with the scannings, one of these days this superiority complex you've developped lately will make you - and maybe all of us - stumble, eventually even fall. And when it happens, it will cost you dearly.

When she narrowed her investigation down on the senior crew as the only ones in possession of all access codes necessary for such actions, he even started to laugh.

„Come on, Rommie!" He was simply dismissing these possibilities without giving them a single thought.

Had she not been an android, she would have been outraged.

And she suspected that her expression had betrayed her. In fact, being an android, she had made sure it did. Still smiling with arrogance, Dylan finally accepted to at least bear with her on the subject for more than just a second.

She zoomed in on Lieutenant Commander Telemachus Rhade, once admiral of the Terazed Home Guard, nowadays a fugitive from CW charges and a refugee on board the Andromeda Ascendant. Dylan merely rolled his eyes, indicating that he wanted solid proof before really taking this possibility into account. Until then he opted for Rommie's concern to be nothing more than a display of their both's usual paranoia, when confronted with senior crew members of Nietzschean origin. A paranoia maybe justified to some degree, but paranoia nonetheless.

So Rommie just went on to Trance Gemini.

„Never!" Her captain's determined tone reminded the avatar of the fact that there had been many recent occasions, when Dylan had seemed to get better acquainted with certain aspects of the golden being than any other one of them, including the ever observant Andromeda herself. Therefore she didn't push the matter any further, knowing that as far as the mysterious alien was concerned, she simply still lacked the information.

The ship moved on to Seamus Z. Harper. Being the chief engineer of the Andromeda Ascendant – and a brilliant one at that – he was most likely to know not one, but hundreds of ways to bypass her sensors. And if he didn't know, he could always come up with some ingenious new trick enabling him to do with her exactly as he pleased. In spite of probably trusting Harper more than she trusted anybody else, Rommie couldn't simply ignore these facts just because she happened to like him best. For never to ignore a thing was exactly what she was programmed to do – by Harper. Luckily, she didn't have to bother. Dylan was headed straight into ignoring them for her. Having noticed that his attitude so far had already begun to upset Rommie a bit – and not wanting to further add to this effect –, the captain pretended to be giving this idea some consideration. His real thoughts on the subject were however written all over his face, although he wisely refrained from putting them into words. Nah, not Harper, he's such a good little fellow!

Had she not been an android, Rommie would have gladly mimicked the indulgent, patronizing tone his voice would have adopted, had he spoken up.

Being one however, she just proceeded with Beka Valentine. Now, there was an interesting candidate. She heard a sharp intake of breath, usually Dylan's opening to some sarcastic commentary. As of lately, things hadn't been exactly ‚swell' between Captain Hunt and his First Officer, Captain Rebekkah Valentine of the Eureka Maru. While she had seemed somehow on the edge since coming back from Tyr, Dylan had left them all with the impression of having resented the fact that she wentto him at all, even though by doing so she had risked her life for them, forthe Commonwealth- and saved them all in the process.

„... and lately she seemed a little..."

„Testy?" he finished her sentence for her. Rommie turned around to face him.

„To put it mildly," she replied, refusing to let him have the last word on this matter. He was standing there with his legs spread apart, arms crossed on his chest, a cocky grin on his lips, the very picture of a ladies' man, who knew all about a woman's moods and how to deal with them. I'll handle Beka, she'll come around, don't worry, his expression seemed to tell her, looking so sure of himself it left Rommie wondering.

So there she was, back at square one. She clearly showed her annoyance with his behaviour, so Dylan suddently decided to play along and humour her, asking Andromeda to check all physiological data on his senior officers during the attacks. He grinned with satisfaction as they proved as inconclusive as all the other readings. However, seeing Rommie's frown, hethen asked to check on them before the raids for some hints of precognition with any one of them. And although Rommie could see that he still persevered with his ‚couldn't care less'-attitude, she suddently suspected there to be something more to it than what was apparent on the surface. A look into his eyes confirmed her suspicions. There was a trace, a hint, a minuscule spot of fear she suddently detected. So: 'Captain Terrific' was afraid. Afraid that he yet again might have misplaced his trust in a Nietzschean, that he hadn't figured out as much about the golden alien as he believed. Afraid that the man he had come to see as a younger brother might have played him for a fool, afraid that the only woman he had come to trust with his life and his dreams might have doublecrossed him.

And when she put the evidence on screen and showed him, she knew she had been right.

„I can see it," Dylan said in a small, weak, flat voice, staring wide eyed in utter disbelief at the data in front of him. She saw the facade he had so carefully built up come down crashing in a matter of seconds. And as his face lost all expression, Rommie realized that ‚one of these days' was now.

-

Dylan Hunt couldn't have reported on any details of the scene he had just come to witness. He had spent the past ten minutes in some sort of blurred, weird surreal dream. He remembered Rommie and himself entering the old freighter ship and confronting Beka with their suspicions. He remembered Beka pulling her guns at them, as well as the stunned, skeptical look on Trance's, Harper's, Rhade's faces. He could still hear her voice accusing him of already having convicted her without a hearing. He remembered his XO's vicious attack on him, Rhade and even Harper, and he remembered Rommie stepping in and taking Beka out as easily as one might blow out a candle. However, as he was looking down on his XO's slender figure laying spread with utmost grace on the deck of her very own ship, Dylan Hunt most vividly remembered the infectious grin on her lips as she shook hands with him, agreeing to join him on his ‚crusade', as she used to call it; the joy when she was plunging into slipstream; the smile in her eyes and her soft lips, as she kissed him time and again, shamelessly flirting with him in front of others and thoroughly enjoying both his and the spectators' puzzled and embarrassed looks; he remembered laying in her arms during that first Magog attack they had survived together, and her promise to carry on his quest for him, should he not make it. He remembered the fun they had on Shintaida, the fights they fought – mostly over Harper, the many times she teased him, the many times she saved him and – yes, even the times when she had allowed him to see weakness, to take her hand and help her through some darkness in her soul. Of these memories he could have spoken without so much as stop for breathing. Other than that, there was just one thing on his mind, endlessly going in circle like a Goedel-band. Why?

And then it hit him: flash. She must have taken flash, again. Of course, Beka was doing flash. But then, why had she started now? Perhaps because of Tyr, or because they were on the run. Maybe even because the Restored Systems' CW was so different from what they had imagined it to be, maybe because of Sid. Maybe because of him: yes, maybe he had said or done something stupid, maybe... It didn't really matter, why. As long as it was flash. He was desperately clinging to this thought, holding on to it for dear life. He hadn't been betrayed by Beka; it was the flash, it had to be.

From the silence and the awkward way they all were staring at him, Dylan deduced that they had asked him something. Forcing himself to concentrate, he vaguely heard the echo of a question still lingering in his ear.

„What now?"

„Now we find out why," the captain sighed. As Rhade nodded and stepped closer to Beka, Dylan quickly came nearer and shoved the Nietzschean out of the way.

„Don't touch her," he suddently heard himself growl in a low voice, that seemed to come from somewhere deep in his throat, a voice he could hardly recognize as his own. „No one's to touch her!"

He bent down, picked the unconscious pilot up and turned around without another word, heading for med deck. Following them closely in front of all the others, the avatar sadly contemplated her captain's sagged shoulders, as he carried away her first officer's limp body. And as she saw the tall man delicately cradling the frail looking woman to his chest, she thought this to be one of the most lonely, lost and sorry sights she had ever come across.

Had she not been an android, Rommie would have cried.