"Hey, look who's back on Command!" Harper exclaimed from his position at their usual shared console the moment she stepped through the door. She stopped just inside and battled the urge to turn around and walk right out as a dozen pairs of eyes turned to look, most belonging to crew members she had not met. Instead, she focused on Harper after tossing Doyle a quick smile, sidling in beside him.
"Good morning," she said with a smile.
"Fancy meeting you here." Harper returned her greeting with a lopsided grin and a single raised eyebrow.
"Well, it is Tuesday. Time for weekly diagnostics again."
He tapped a few commands into the console, relinquishing control of half to her. "And I, for one, am glad that you are doing yours this week."
"You shouldn't be too glad, Harper. Trance is also here to help you approve requisition forms from the overhaul before we are past the return period for defective parts." Rommie said as she came into the room, stepping up behind them. "Here Trance, to rest when you need to." She placed a short stool off to the side, then moved off to another station, relieving a young ensign with dark hair and sleepy eyes.
Harper looked betrayed. She shrugged sympathetically. Can't be helped. Busy work had to be done. Requisitions must be approved. She was just happy to have work to do, even Harper's work. But first, she needed to get the first life support systems diagnostic going.
As she tapped in the commands to start, she watched through her peripheral vision as the day shift filtered in and the night shift drifted out, off to breakfast or bed. New faces. She had seen one or two in the halls over the last few weeks, but not interacted with them—not even her small crews of medics and Life Support and Environmental Systems specialists. Those meetings would be left for her official return to duty. Right now, she wasn't CO of anyone. Just the resident mystery woman. Not a role she was unused to, but the sidelong glances bothered her this morning. Made her insides squirm.
It wasn't just the new faces, people curious about the unusual alien woman on Command who the senior staff greeted as one of their own. It was a sense of missing out, of being out of sync. She had blacked out to a ship with seven people on it and woken to over five hundred. The life of the crew had gone on. The Universe had continued its forward march. These crew members had been onboard for almost two months. They were battle tested and acclimated to the environment. They'd formed relationships with their commanding officers and each other. They ate dinner together in the mess, forming cliques and social circles. They played Lancers vs High Guard soccer games in a converted cargo bay and strolled through her gardens on their free time. And she had missed the transition.
Andromeda was her home, her only home, and it had become something different overnight. It was like starting over. It took courage to start over, she had told Dylan what seemed like a lifetime ago as everything they had worked for began to crumble around them. She was an expert on starting over. It never got any easier.
"You okay?" Harper asked, placing a hand, palm open just below her shoulder blade. Warm. Comforting. She blinked and realized she had been staring unfocused for some time, fingers frozen, staged on the controls awaiting the brain's command. The gentle pressure grounded her in reality. A tugging at the back of her mind encouraged her to lean into him. More comfort to be found in his arms. She resisted. Too intimate. Especially for Command.
"Yeah, I'm fine. It's just weird being back. Seems like a lifetime has passed." She gave him a small wink to try to convince him she was telling the truth. Was she? No way to know. Weeks in, and she still hadn't figured it out. But, she was surviving. Even thriving, medically. So forward she plodded, each day a new adventure, a new set of challenges to overcome. Today's menu of obstacles included self-consciousness born from of an identity crisis she barely admitted to herself. The crew surrounding her were trying to figure out who and what she was? Well, so was she.
The pressure lifted and Harper returned to his systems diagnostics, leaving a trace of warmth where his hand had been.
"Can someone please explain to me why 0900 feels so damn early?" Beka's loud grousing carried across the deck, turning heads. Trance looked up as Beka and Dylan slipped in together, moving with purpose, in step with one another. Trance appreciated their friendship and the normalcy represented.
To her relief, the new crew members decided that their first officer's irreverent entrance was more interesting than Trance. A golden haired woman near the entrance wore a scandalized expression. Guess the Academy hadn't prepared her for a CO like Beka. To be fair, not much could prepare anyone for Beka. The woman was a force unto herself. One of the things Trance liked most about her.
"I don't know, Beka. Every day is a good day when my entire crew is together." He shot Trance a wide smile and Beka followed his gaze.
"Trance!" Beka crossed over to Trance's station as Dylan stepped to the center of Command and surveyed his domain the way he did every morning. With the entrance of the captains, the newer crew members turned to their attention back to their workstations, all business now.
"Good Morning, Beka. What's on the schedule today?"
"I apparently have a list of four hundred potential lancers and slip pilots to filter through so I can approve the Commonwealth's picks for my new crew." The curl of Beka's lips said this was the last thing she wanted to do to.
"I am sure there are some wonderful candidates there." Trance didn't voice her concerns. That she understood Beka's reluctance. That there was already more crew onboard Andromeda now than there had been before. That the thought of adding two-thousand souls made her claustrophobic, accustomed as she was to open spaces and secrecy. Dynamics were changing. Must change. Change was the only constant in the Universe, and she had worked hard to foster the Commonwealth's rebirth. Didn't make it more comfortable though.
"You'll have a list soon, too. Yours is held up because Dylan insisted only master gardeners need apply for Hydroponics. He didn't think you would let anyone else near your plants. The Perseids in charge of interviews are running around with their chins in a bunch. Speaking of lists, Harper your approvals needs to be on my desk by tomorrow evening and you cannot pick your engineering staff based on cup size."
Trance wrinkled her nose and glanced at Harper through narrowed eyes. A twinge of… something tugged at her heart. Something beyond the usual, "Why do you just throw yourself at every woman when you are smart enough and funny enough to make the right woman happy." Something that did not need her attention at the moment because it forced her to question what kind of woman she would consider "right" for Harper. As if she had any right to choose.
"Perhaps I should redact all images from Harper's files," Rommie joked.
"Yeah, yeah. Ha ha ha." Harper said, smiling through a feigned put-upon expression. Trance laughed with the others. Latched on to their good moods. Let borrowed happiness fill the empty places inside her heart where darkness now resided full time. Around her friends, she almost felt whole again. Almost.
With the first diagnostic running, she turned her attention to Harper's requisition reports. Andromeda had done most of the work already, comparing what was ordered to what was received and installed, then matching up function reports where systems were performing below average. They just needed a pair of organic eyes on them to make the final call on returns and replacements, and a senior level officer to sign off on them. Harper, using his own language, sucked at finishing paperwork. His genius was his saving grace. He didn't have the patience or attention for running a department, but that didn't matter much when Rommie wouldn't allow anyone else to care for her.
Trance pulled up the stool and got to work.
Time passed, and she didn't notice it the way she did when whiling it away alone— seconds ticking by being a strange sensation for someone unused to being trapped in a cycle of minutes, hours, and days. The senior staff kept up a running dialogue, bantering and joking as they worked through the administrative tasks that filled a typical Tuesday on Command, each doing their part to keep the wheels of bureaucracy well oiled, as Dylan liked to say. Occasionally one of the new staff joined in the conversation. Like Ensign Gayle, a tall dark-skinned man who took twenty-fifth place in the Pan Galactic Surfing Championship on Infinity Atol last year and was looking forward to the Andromeda's upcoming shore leave on Rindra since the Signing festivities fell during the first Championship trials. Harper quivered beside her with excitement at participating after four years of being landlocked—and, Trance guessed, a little at the chance to show up another crew member.
All the while she worked, engaging her mind in tedium. Far from being exhausting, it helped her focus her thoughts. Busy mind. Busy fingers. No chance to dwell on darker things. The meditation of work.
"Rommie, can you set up returns for line items six, thirty-two, and forty-nine in batch two?" she asked.
"Setting up returns. Shall I request replacements as well?"
She accessed the storage database to check stock on parts. "Looks like Harper has replacements already, but it never hurts to have extras just in case."
"Return and replacement requests entered."
"Great. Sign off on batch two, authorization Trance Gemini, Life Support Systems Officer, Three-Beta-Two-Seven-Two."
"Batch approved."
"Trance, have I ever told you how much I adore you?" Harper asked. He too had finished a batch a moment before after a bit of good-natured prodding. Something fluttered in her stomach at his words, and it wasn't hunger, though that was present, too. Best not to ponder on it.
"I think you may have mentioned it once or twice," she replied, careful to keep her tone level and playful. In the back of her mind a voice, louder than it ought to be, told her to quip back, keep it going. Flirt with Harper the way they used to, years ago. It felt… nice. Nice was a rare jewel these days. No one could blame her for treasuring it.
The man in question stretched and yawned. "I think it might be time for a break."
He was on to something. A hollowness had formed in her gut and it would continue to grow until supplanted by lightheadedness, nausea, and a turn in her mood for the worse. Grumpiness and self-pity. Strange bedfellows in a phenomenon Harper called being 'hangry'. Yet, a break meant a loss of momentum, and productivity. Contributing to the cause also felt nice.
"Let's do one more batch each and then take a break." A compromise. She could feel Dylan's gaze on her from across the deck, asking if she shouldn't take her break now. She tossed him a smile she hoped reassured him.
"Sure, why not. This diagnostic has another ten minutes on it anyway." Harper said, as he checked the readouts on his half of the station. He pulled another batch of requisition up and she followed suite. This batch appeared to be a list of upgrades to Harper's machine shops and labs. No surprise that after four years—by his count—of being trapped in a low technology environment he was eager to exercise his intellectual muscles.
Guilt squeezed her heart when she thought of Harper's time alone on Seefra. A snap decision in a moment she never expected to survive. Her hail Mary outside the Worldship. A slim chance to save her friends. But she didn't have enough time to do it properly. In the end, she had saved Harper's body, but damaged his soul. Damaged all their souls. But none suffered so much as he did. And he didn't blame her. She couldn't figure out why.
"Wanna run down to the Mess after this? I forgot to eat breakfast, and could really use some more coffee."
Forgot breakfast? More like he woke up at 0845, threw on some pants and whatever shirt hadn't been picked up by the bots yet, gulped down the coffee from his automatic pot and ran to Command so he wouldn't get chided for tardiness. Again. Harper's typical morning routine. The curse of the insomniac.
"Sure. I think I would like some coffee, too."
Beka snorted from her place at the pilot's station. "All it took was two days, and you have succumbed to the siren's call of caffeine like the rest of us. Welcome to the dark side."
Trance joined in the laughter with the rest of them as she scanned the next line item, able to laugh at herself. After years of wondering what Humans saw in the bitter brew, she finally got it. There were things about being organic that only an organic could understand, so it seemed.
She did a double take, not sure she had processed what she'd read properly. The laughter caught in her throat, replaced by a knot that made it hard to swallow. Her heart plummeted to her stomach, keeping the hollowness company. Blood pounded in her ears, dulling the surrounding sounds.
"Trance? What… Oh crap!" Harper exclaimed. Tones gave a lot away. His was of a man condemned. She scanned the next few line items. Anger flared. Hurt too.
Focus.
She needed to focus.
A glance at Harper showed her wide eyed fear. Not of bodily harm, but of an inevitable emotional falling out.
"Trance…" He started. She shook her head, silencing him with a look and turned towards Dylan.
"Dylan, I would like to speak to you. Alone." Her voice didn't shake. Good.
"Okay. Let's go to the conference room." Confusion. Concern. A hint in the way he carried himself that suggested he had an idea of what she wanted to talk about and didn't want to admit it. All eyes were on her again. Their gazes burned into her back. Especially those of her friends.
She led the way and didn't look back. Inside, turmoil. Almost alive. Trying to eat its way out of her from the area where her heart should be. The door to the conference room slid open, she stepped inside. Took a seat at the table, staring straight ahead. Dylan sat across from her.
"What do you need to talk about?" he asked.
"Andromeda, please bring up Harper's requisition approval report, batch three." She kept her tone neutral, or close to it, though she wanted to scream. Or shout. Or throw a tantrum. None of those would help though they would provide a cathartic release. Beka's tried-and-true method of beating a punching bag until her fists were bruised might have sufficed if there had been a punching bag available.
Dylan didn't say anything, letting her dictate this meeting.
"I don't know much about engineering, but I know enough to recognize the equipment used to manufacture and refine voltarium. I understand that we keep a complement of Nova Bombs despite my feelings about them. But this is not for building Nova Bombs. You are having Harper experiment with small arms using voltarium."
"Yes," Dylan answered. Straight to the point. Eyes hooded. Lips drawn straight. Wrinkles more pronounced, adding a decade to his face. An expression as grave and serious as the implication of bullets manufactured with a material whose only purpose was to kill stars.
Had she expected him to deny it? To argue when the evidence was in front of them both, easy to confirm. Tension built in her forehead. Her lips parted, but only an exhalation like a huff escaped from between them, the words jumbled together and stuck, unable to break free. Her limbs trembled from the effort of holding back an explosion, an emotional supernova.
"Do you know what voltarium does to an Avatar?" she asked after a few shallow breaths. Her lungs were not functioning, not allowing the deep cleansing breaths she needed.
"I don't know exactly, no."
How did he remain so calm talking about creating weapons he did not understand?
"Voltarium is poison. Just being around it disrupts an Avatar's connection with her celestial body. It feels…" She looked to the bulkheads, trying to find the right words. "It is so painful. As the darkness consumes you, it is like… I can't even describe it. Like all that is left inside are your worst fears."
She stopped and cleared her throat. She looked down at the Commonwealth emblem that adorned the glass tabletop, focused on it, because she didn't think she could look at Dylan right now. The logic centers of her mind made a weak attempt to slow her down, to think about this rationally. Did she not expect military behavior and military solutions from a military leader? Her mother's voice spoke to her in a refrain she'd heard many times throughout her long childhood.
You're always looking for that perfect possible future, but reality is never perfect. I love your gentleness, your empathy, but we all must do what must be done. The quest for perfection is never without casualties. You must harden yourself or the universe will leave you heartbroken.
But she was beyond rational thought. Her mother's words weren't enough to stop the waves of emotion from breaking over the levies of her control.
She continued, words clipped and precise. "If voltarium infects an Avatar, it destroys her connection to her celestial body irreparably. It cuts an Avatar off from her lifeforce, the energy that fuels her body. Unconsciousness will conserve energy for a time, but it merely prolongs the pain. The Avatar will die a slow and painful death from what amounts to starvation. Not a pleasant way to go."
She finally looked up at Dylan. The gravity of this pressed on him. She could see that. Appreciate it, even in her anger. When he finally spoke, there was no levity in his words, or his body language.
"As far as I can tell, the only two things that can permanently kill an Avatar is to destroy their body completely so it can't regenerate, or use voltarium. The Lambent Kith can take different forms, which means they can infiltrate us, and even if we can figure out how to detect them, there isn't a thing we can do to keep them off the ship. There will soon be 2500 souls on-board and I will be damned if I don't do everything in my power to protect them."
Logic. She needed to look at this logically. Like Dylan. He didn't plan on a war with the stars, just to protect his crew, herself included. Harper. Beka. Rommie and Doyle. Hadn't she chosen to make the ultimate sacrifice to save them? Allowed her very essence to be taken so her people would leave them alone? But fear blinded her.
"If this knowledge got out, it could destabilize the entire universe. The stars are the very foundation of existence, holding the Universe together, breathing warmth and life into everything. A sun that is cut off suddenly from her Avatar is blinded, deafened, and crippled all at once with no time to prepare. She has no child already bound to her to take her Avatar's place. We are not interchangeable to our celestial bodies. It is a bonding more intimate than a human can ever understand. We are half each other. If not given time to prepare, a sun may choose to never bond again, or she might simply give up and collapse before her time. Both have devastating results for life in their systems." She could not keep her voice from cracking. Tears decided to join the party, building in the corners of her eyes, stinging them.
Dylan took a deep breath and cast his gaze to the tabletop. Pondering. Thinking. His face told an entire story in just a few seconds. Each line a map of his emotions. Each twitch a sign of the conflict within.
"When I ordered Harper to research this, we did not know if you would live or die. You said yourself the other day that if anyone has survived the transition, you've never heard of it. Presumably, they cut you off from your sun with the expectation that you would not survive. The pain you are concerned with these weapons causing, the effect on your celestial body, the Lambent Kith Nebula did not even blink when they inflicted it on you and the Tarn Vedran sun."
All she could manage was a whisper. "Humans say that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." More tears. An unstoppable torrent of them. They fell unchecked down her cheeks. She did not move to wipe them.
"I don't intend to take revenge on your people, Trance. But I will protect us from them." He stared at her for a moment that stretched on, neither one of them bending to the other. Another conflict in his eyes.
Finally, he said, "This is not how I wanted to tell you about this. Andromeda, pull up the projection you showed me this morning."
Across the table the image of a star system appeared, floating characters labeling it as the Tagus system. The hologram cast colorful shadows on Dylan's face, giving him an otherworldly appearance. One sun, seven planets, twelve moons. A Sol-like system with two burnt planets at the front, two beautiful blue balls of glass in the habitable zone, and gas giants, green, blue, and red, one with rings wrapped around it. The comparison to her brother, Trance knew, would rankle the sun, a cantankerous soul. Naeva was her Avatar's most recent name. One of the Nebula.
"Begin simulation," Dylan ordered.
Trance watched in horror as the sun began to move, a diagram at the corner of the projection showing time lapsing. In just under a month, the sun consumed the first planet. She could not blink as she focused on the middle two planets. As the sun moved closer, their atmospheres changed, subtle shifts in color at first, but becoming more pronounced as the sun continued its death march. Characters beneath ticked of statistics like surface temperatures, oxygen levels, ability to support life. Her mouth dropped open when the first planet ticked over from habitable to uninhabitable. It took two months.
Naeva's system was a beautiful one, home to a space faring species known throughout the Triangulum Galaxies for their beautiful architecture and contributions in music and literature. Former members of the Commonwealth who were, last she checked, negotiating re-entrance. Two fully populated worlds. Sixteen orbital habitats in the asteroid field on the outer edge. Four colonized moons.
Unlike humans, the Tagarians had not felt the need to venture far from their system. Almost their entire species existed that cosmically small space. The entire system would be consumed in five months. Unbelievable. Before today, unthinkable. The Lambent Kith did not hurt one another for the reason the Commonwealth had never used Nova Bombs in battle until the Worldship. Because a war in the cosmos meant mutually assured destruction.
"This is not possible."
"Yet it is happening. The Tagarians have asked the Commonwealth to hold out on evacuations while they come up with a plan, but they don't have long. Life will become difficult well before the planets lose their ability to sustain life completely as we saw in Seefra. The Argus Core of Engineers is already working on a way to protect their people from rising radiation levels."
Why do this? Such a brazen and horrifying act, throwing out both the strictures of secrecy and murder. Strictures imposed because the implications of losing either were too horrifying to contemplate. Her stomach roiled, and she swallowed hard. If the Nebula wanted to destroy the known worlds, they only had to continue with the Abyss' plans. This spoke of deliberateness. Perhaps the first attempts to reshape the Universe to their unknowable wills.
"They have become tyrants," she said. The projection disappeared, taking away its light.
"I will protect this crew, Trance. We can't know what your people have planned. I will have Harper make sure the weapons do not cause undue suffering, but if they board this ship and threaten our crew, I want a way to stop them."
And that squeezed the vice around her heart harder, made it impossible to breathe. Made her head spin and the ship tilt around her. Not because she couldn't see the logic, or even because she thought he was wrong. Because it was hard for her to think of the people close to her wielding weapons built specifically to threaten and kill her people. But they weren't her people anymore, were they? And they had made the first move.
She had to go.
"I can't…" she said, standing up, legs shaking. "You should have told me before now."
She turned without looking at Dylan again, desperate to leave before she lost all composure. As she swept out of the room, she almost didn't notice Harper standing there until he reached out and brushed her arm with his hand. She shrugged it off.
"Trance..."
"Harper, no. Don't. I want to be alone right now," she snapped, shooting a narrow eyed glare over her shoulder as she sped away as fast as her legs would allow.
This was in no way his fault. He was doing as he was ordered.
But he had not told her.
Also not his fault.
Dylan would have been upset if he had.
Her anger had an unfair source. He had not turned down the chance to puzzle out something new, to create something never created before, though that something was meant for death. She was angry at his drive to be the first, to create for the sake of creating, ignorant of the ramifications—a trait intrinsic to his nature. She was angry because at the moment, she needed to be angry. Because anger was easy.
"Harper, is everything all right? You've checked the flow of that same circuit four times now." Andromeda asked, appearing beside him, framed by the organized chaos of his favorite machine shop.
"I'm fine," he replied, a little too quickly to be believed. She crossed her arms below her chest, tilted her head to the side, and raised an eyebrow.
"If you are fine, can you tell me what you have been doing the last ten minutes?"
"I… uh…" He looked at the scattering of parts in front of him for clues. He had intended to work on a device to detect the message residue, but nothing in front of him, including the circuit board he had purportedly tested four times in a row, made sense for that project. He must have been on autopilot, tinkering with no purpose just to have something to do while tuning out the world.
"I thought so."
He put his ammeter down beside the offending circuit and moved over to his bed, sinking down, more weary than he thought he should be. Andromeda turned to watch him, eyes calculating. He searched for how to explain his concerns.
"I am worried about Trance," he said, "I grew up surrounded by people who suffered almost every trauma you can think of. You name it, the Magog and Nietzscheans did it. That kinda stuff leaves scars, and not the visible kind, if you know what I mean." He knew she did. Rommie had seen Earth first hand, and Andromeda had those memories. Plus, there was no way the benevolent goddess of the ship had not puzzled out his demons by now. "She puts on a pretty good mask, all smiles and words of encouragement, but I know that haunted look when I see it. I've seen it thousands of times. And there are other things. Like how she's slept on the Maru since leaving Med Deck. How she sticks to public places and doesn't spend much time alone."
And more that he didn't tell Andromeda. Small tells. Frowns she didn't think he saw. Testiness when over the last year she had been the paragon of gentleness. And then her confession, weeks ago, that there were moments she did not want to exist. If he thought for a second she would hurt herself, he would have told someone. But acted on or not, those feelings had a tendency to screw things up. Things like taking care of yourself. And it took a lot longer than a few weeks to banish them. His own dark demons still gnawed on his soul in those rare moments he allowed time for introspection.
"She has been through a lot. So have you."
"But how do I help her? I can hardly keep my own head above the water. And she doesn't talk. I mean, compared to when I first met her, she's a chatty Kathy, but she is still incredibly, annoyingly, reserved. And after today, she might not talk to any of us again." Harper could not stop seeing the look she had given him as she brushed him off this afternoon. All the trust they had built, that foundation they were laying, crumbling in front of him.
"I have been watching Trance carefully. You are not wrong to be concerned, but the only thing you can do until she chooses to confide her feelings is to be there for her without pressuring her. You are already doing that." Andromeda said. He twisted half his mouth into a smile. All he could muster. "And she is doing so for you. I think right now she is suffering from shock, and she will come to you again when it wears off. But if you have anymore concerns, or you want to talk, you know where to find me."
"Thanks Rommie. What did I ever do without you?"
Rommie gave him another raised eyebrow and a smile, saying with the air of someone who often had to remind a grown man to sleep and eat and send bots in to collect his dirty clothes because he never threw them into the laundry chute, "I have no idea."
He allowed a small, amused chuckle and shook his head, then stood up and started gathering parts in a chrome basket cradled in one arm, this time ensuring they actually pertained to communications. He had just lain them out on the countertop when Dylan's boots sounded off on the deck plates. He wasn't looking forward to this conversation. Trance never would have noticed the requisitions had he done his job in the first place. This was the result of another Seamus Harper screw up, and he had never shaken the feeling that Beka or Dylan was going to toss him off their ships, no matter how unrealistic it sounded after all these years. Guess he had never developed a true sense of permanency.
"Hey Boss," he said. Reluctance weighed down his words. He didn't look up. Couldn't stand to see disappointment he knew was painted on Dylan's face. He had it memorized down to the last detail.
"Mr. Harper, how are you?" Not what he expected. Voice calm with no edge. Each word flowed freely, unpunctuated. He looked up to see Dylan—wrinkles etched deeply into the skin around his eyes, adding more shadows. No anger. No disappointment. This should have reassured him, but it put him off balance.
"I've been better. Trance is pissed. Really pissed. I don't know if you've ever pissed her off at this level before, but I would say to expect a major cold front for at least a week. Actually, scratch that, better be prepared for two. Trust me." Once again, the words just spilled out of his mouth in a torrent, unprompted.
Dylan turned and leaned against the counter so they were sort of facing each other. He sighed heavily. "I am sorry if her anger with me has been misplaced onto you. You two have been spending a lot of time together, and I didn't intend to damage your friendship."
More surprises. Dylan apologizing to him? No blame?
"She will get over it, she always does."
Was he really so sure? Truth was, it had crossed his mind that she might be upset he was building voltarium weapons, but it hadn't even slowed him down. He'd buried those concerns in the place he sent moral quandaries to die. But they hadn't died. He had known Trancer was going to confront him about it one day and worried that it would destroy the trust they had built up. What if it had? "If I had done my work in the first place, she never would have seen those requisitions."
"I allowed her to help you and I should have been the one to tell her before she had a chance to find out another way. I never intended to keep it a secret from her. You are following orders," he said.
Harper turned back to the basket of parts. Took each one out one by one. Placed it on the counter before him in no particular order. Mindless work, just like what Andromeda had caught him at moments before.
An awkward silence filled the room.
Theirs was an awkward friendship, always had been. Neither one able to imagine where the other had grown roots, the type of life they had lived.
"We found Jace's home," Dylan said after a moment.
"Oh?" All he could think to say. He hadn't pondered the origins of the boy Beka rescued much. Figured they matched his. Different home world, same bullshit. The Dragons had an MO. A simple recipe:
1. Take over a system, destabilize the economy, allow just enough education to produce a useful workforce.
2. Violently suppress all signs of culture.
3. Add a pinch of suspicion with collaborators and snitches so no one trusts enough to band together.
4. Stir vigorously and harvest ready made slaves as needed.
"He is from the Kepler system. New Burke."
That caught Harper's attention. His head snapped up, parts forgotten. The Kepler system was one of the first colonized by humans, a bustling center for commerce in the age of the Commonwealth. And, like Earth, one of the first targets of the Nietzscheans after the fall.
"You're going to send him back to that hell hole? Should have just left him where he was. Give it a couple months, he'll be dead, in the mines, or back on another Dragon ship." Not a pretty picture, but an accurate one. Parents on Earth used the Kepler system to warn children how much worse it could get. A bogey monster. Eat your hard earned fresh peas or the Dragon's might send you to the Kepler mines.
"Rommie gathered some intel. He has family there. An aunt and uncle still surviving, and two cousins. But no, we aren't going to leave him there. Beka has decided to bring Garuda class fighters from Rhade's pride as escort and demand safe passage on and off the planet with Jace's family. We can take them anywhere they want to go, but if they have nowhere else, there is a place for them on Tarn Vedra." Dylan explained.
"They are never going to trust her." Harper said immediately. A Spacer dressed in nice clothes, allowed to walk free. She'd be lucky if someone didn't lob a Molotov cocktail at her, shouting about collaborators, much less follow her back to her ship.
"No, they won't. They have no reason to trust Beka." Emphasis on Beka. The second part of his comment remained unspoken, but no less clear. Andromeda had a resident expert on Drago Kasov slave planets. Someone who spoke Jace's family's language.
"You want me to go down with Beka and convince them to come with us?"
"And Doyle. If you are willing. I know it is a lot to ask of you, and I would feel better if you stayed here, but it means a lot to Beka."
"I'll do it," his mouth replied before his mind had time to catch up.
He was in Neverland again—the name the Paradine inside had given Trance's secret world. Only it had changed. Grown up around him. Aged with wild grace. The woods, once quiet of the sounds of life, now buzzed, chirped, and chattered in a non-stop symphony. The Paradine Dylan had been back here often. More often than he should have been. But they had drawn him into their world, those children who were not children. He lived a second life, as only a Paradine could, watching them grow into the adults they were meant to be—scheming and planning with their mother and the other Paradine to make sure they reached their destinies unharmed. Small children, still. Immortal and old, yes. But so innocent and playful. Pawns in a giant game of save the Universe because the Universe needed saving. It kept the Paradine Dylan awake at night, the unfairness of asking children to give their lives to their parent's causes.
Today, he stood at the edge of the wood along a clearing of green and yellow grasses with great boulders smattered throughout, moss and lichen clinging to their weathered sides. It was maybe half a soccer field long, and teeming with colorful, pointy-tailed children, shouting and laughing their joy into the crystal blue sky as they fought a war with wooden sticks. A cool breeze, alive with the sounds of branches clacking together, brushed against his skin carrying a hint of peat moss and evergreen along with it, as well as the crispness approaching autumn.
On a boulder, some distance away from the other children, a purple child sat alone, back towards him. He made his way over.
"What are you dreaming about today?" he asked as he sat down beside her on the boulders wide surface. At first it seemed she didn't hear, her eyes fixed in the direction of the other children, but not focused on them. A few seconds passed. A triumphant shout carried over the killing fields. Sol, as he would be known one day, the victor of a successful charge. She turned to him, a hint of cloudiness lingering in her expression. As if a part of her remained in another place and time.
"The future," she said vaguely. A miniature conflict passed over the contours of her young face. She tapped her bare feet on the boulder and twisted a reed he'd just noticed around her fingers. Her features assembled into the most serious look the face of an eight-year-old could muster. An entirely too adult expression. He had grown used to these incongruities in the course of his visits. "Does it tire you? To be out of your time?"
He sighed a deep heaving sigh. Captain Dylan Hunt was still new to these memories, this traveling to another time and living another life. The Paradine inside, a seasoned professional. Tired. An inadequate word for the phenomenon that weighed down his limbs each morning and wrapped him in its tight embrace in moments of rest.
"It does. Why do you ask? Does it tire you to travel through probability waves into the future?" He'd made and assumption and was rewarded with a nod.
"It makes me shaky."
"If it is so exhausting, why do you sit over here dreaming of the future instead of playing with your brother and your friends?"
She shook her head. A pair of earring made of shell dangled from her ears, swishing with the motion. "I am trying to find the perfect one. The one where everything ends up okay, where people are happy," she said, then nodded towards the children. "And, they aren't my friends. They are my brother's. No one wants to be my friend. Not really."
A small blue boy waved across the field at them, a little green girl giggling beside him. Dylan knew them as Ione and Vera, Tarn Vedra and her moon, though they hadn't taken those names yet.
"Pretty sure those two are your friends," he said, trying to offer comfort, to coax out her innocent nature, the smiles and giggles that normally came easily.
A smile did appear, but only on the surface. Only half of one. "They don't count. We are bonded. They have to like me. Everyone has to like me. I am the princess. It is different from having friends."
Another shout. Sol went down with an over dramatic display of side clutching and last words, another purple boy waving the stick-sword destined to vanquish such a fearless leader above him in triumph, red leaves still dangling off it. His teammates danced their victory dance as Sol laughed on the ground.
"Why swords?" Dylan asked, an attempt to change to a happier subject. The Lambent Kith were technologically advanced like the Vedrans and a few other early species. Blasters of varying types were far more common than swords.
"Easier to make from sticks than blasters. More fun. For them. They can hit each other." She wrinkled her nose at the group as a whole. Sol's teammates helped him up and dusted him off, then huddled together in conference, preparing for war game number two. Ione beckoned for Trance to come and join them. She waved him off again and the poor boy's shoulders fell. Trance's lips turned down as she watched him join Vera. Despite her earlier words, they shared more than a small connection, a true fondness for one another. Dylan had watched them play together during previous visits. Necessity did not dictate those feelings on either side.
"You disapprove?"
"I don't like playing at war. I like to think of pretty things."
She was meant to be a warrior, this child searching the future for pretty things and happy endings, frowning at the pretend battles of other children. And Captain Hunt knew the pain the life she was destined for would bring her. It broke his heart. How he wished she could stay here in Neverland, become one of the Lost Boys and never grow up.
"Sometimes, war and death are necessary," Paradine Dylan said. Captain Hunt fought this memory and felt a shift, felt himself becoming a part of the memory instead just an observer. The fractured parts of himself melding into one piece.
The wisdom of a billion years of existence settled on Trance like a mantle. She locked eyes with him. For a moment he saw a flash of her radiant body in them.
"I know. I see it in my dreaming. I can't find the perfect possible future. There is always so much fighting, so many wars. So much darkness and so much loneliness. I am always alone."
These words did not belong on the tongue of a child, no matter her true age. Captain Hunt reached out to her and wrapped an arm around her tiny shoulders, for the first time in possession of his body, as if he were now in this time as well. She curled up against his side, resting her head on his chest. He held her tighter, an instinct to offer comfort taking over. He wondered what his life would have been like if the Commonwealth hadn't been betrayed if he had married Sara. Would they have a daughter? Would she be as small as Trance? As gentle and kind? Would she, too, have such serious eyes?
"You will have friends one day," he said, kissing her hair, flowers tickling his nose. "Good friends who love you, who would do anything for you, not because of your title or your place in this Universe, but because of who you are."
"Did you see this in that other time you live in?" she asked, hopeful. The Paradine inside had taken a backseat, leaving him in charge. He didn't know the rules and there was no one alive to tell him. But he did know she did not remember him in her future, and he did not remember her. So what harm could he do?
"Yes, I did."
She snuggled in closer and asked in a small voice, "Are you my friend in the future?"
He gave her head another kiss. "I will always be your friend."