A/N: Sorry folks: just one chapter this week. Things have been a bit troublesome recently at home and I have a busy time ahead tomorrow too.

To my guest reviewer: Well, that may have something to do with why I bumped the rating up to M for language.


Chapter 28: A Time To Reflect

"There a reason you're hiding in here?" Mick rumbled, his head protruding oddly from the open hatchway in the floor.

"I'm not hiding," shrugged Sara from her supine position, arms crossed behind her head, "I'm thinking."

"I thought you 'thought' better in your training room," retorted a dubious Mick, "or mine."

"It wasn't working for me," shrugged the assassin again. "This is."

"Never took you for the star-gazy type," tried Mick again, casting his eyes up at the clear, in some parts artificially so, dome of the observatory. "Figured that was just Haircut and Silver Top."

"Martin's been in and out a bit," agreed Sara, never taking her eyes off the stars above. "Making some kind of measurements or other."

"Yeah, he's got somethin' brewin'," growled Mick, looking down with a frown. "Can always tell when the nerds hit a big discovery: they get all... twitchy."

"Rex too?" Sara took her turn to frown. "I thought he was..."

"Oh, he's busy on Sleepin' Beauty's case," affirmed Mick, inclining his head. "No, Tin Man's got a twitchiness all his own right now. Rip thinks we might have our baby speedster up and running soon. Surprised you didn't know that..."

"Been thinking..."

"Up here," Mick finished, eyeing her suspiciously. "Right. This the kind of thinking you did in your room when you didn't come out for days and told Gideon not to let anyone near you?"

Sara rolled her eyes and sighed. "No, Mick: you're here aren't you?"

"You never know: I could be a hologram."

"I think you'd know at least," she smiled, letting the corners of her mouth creep up just a little.

"Ah, but you wouldn't," pointed out the erudite arsonist. He cast a glance upwards. "See anything interesting."

"Just makin' pictures," sighed Sara, one side of her mouth curling up in remembrance. "It's a thing Laurel and I used to do when we were kids. The house we lived in back then: it had this big old flat roof just outside our bedroom window. Sometimes we'd sneak out there with our pillows and blankets and watch the star drift by. We didn't know any of the real names or constellations back then, so we just made our own up."

"Isn't that how they all got named in the first place?" Mick wondered aloud, his eyes falling back to the assassin. "Who says some old white-bearded dude somewhere unpronounceable in the dim and distant past has dibs on star names. Have you heard the names they gave their kids back then? Terrible! Who wants to get stuck with a name like a Simpsons character anyway?"

Sara let out a small laugh and sat up, stretching time-stiffened limbs and yawning. "How'd you find me anyway?"

"Find you?" Mick raised an ingenuous pair of brows. "Thought you weren't hiding? Can't find something that isn't hidden now, can we? Or someone."

Sara gave him a wry look.

"I asked the know-it-all," breezed Mick, as if revealing a secret of great mystical importance.

"I told Martin not to tell anyone," Sara sighed, rolling her eyes. "Gideon too."

"She didn't. She told me you told her not to tell anyone. That's how I knew you were hiding," explained Mick. "You don't have to be a genius to spot when Silver Top's hiding something, either. Especially not when his junior partner keeps asking him what he's nervous about. Why are you hiding? Just for the record."

"Is there a law against wanting some alone time on this ship?" Sara snapped, frowning and looking away.

"Alone time is one thing," Mick continued, aware he was pushing his luck now. "You have your quarters, your training room, my training room and the armoury to get some alone time in: that's where you usually go. This is new. New plus threatening nerds means you're hiding. I ain't gonna make you tell me - I know that won't work - but if you want to you can. Whatever's bugging you. Won't go any further, I swear."

"What time is it?" Sara frowned, changing the subject. "I could eat a horse!"

"No horses, I'm afraid," quipped Mick, watching her as carefully as she was avoiding looking at him. "Just tacos. Or leftover tacos anyway. Dinner was two hours ago. We told Gideon."

"She told me," Sara nodded quickly, pushing herself to her feet. "I wasn't hungry then. I am now."

"You're not..."

"Mick, I'm fine!" Sara snapped, meeting his gaze sharply and looming over him at the top of the stairs through the hatch. "I just wanted to spend some time alone, thinking about stuff, and this seemed as good a spot as any. I didn't come and eat with the crew because I didn't feel like talking to the crew and I didn't want to be rude."

Mick held her glare for a moment, his eyes narrowing. "Glad that's settled, then."

"Yes, it is," confirmed Sara, with deadly sincerity. "Now if you don't mind..."

Mick voiced a low, suspicious rumble and backed off down the narrow stairs.

XXXX

The writing was a riddle. It was not a plain announcement of importance and admonishment to those unworthy souls who dared interfere with the secrets of their ancestors, as Leonard recalled reading numerous times in ancient Egypt while teaching himself hieratic: the common cursive script of the day. Instead, laid out in an odd pattern, according to Brother Antoine, was a poem written in the common cursive of another bygone era: Aramaic. Not the right bygone era though. The good Brother had informed Leonard that this message was but a translation inscribed over the original in a more modern hand: a palimpsest engraved upon the remains left following the Babylonian invasion and their destruction of Solomon's temple. The last lines had read "Ezra, of the Kohanim of the tribe of Levi, wrote these words. He writes them faithfully as they were taught him by his father, who learnt them from his father and he from his father before him, who read them with his own eyes before the downfall of the temple and his exile from the land of his fathers."

So the riddle might not even be an accurate riddle, Leonard pondered, allowing his mind to wander as it often did during the long evening hours without any digging to be done. He would have to solve it soon, though, accurate or not: the legitimate diggings were fast approaching the end of their stockpile of timbers and the last thing he needed was clumsy hands helping themselves to his hiding place. He turned the ring over in his fingers, feeling with the deft touch of a thief the cuts and scratches in the metal. The idea of a key had immediately brought the ring to his mind, but that had been a dead end. Nothing on the metal slab remotely resembled the unique rectangular tablet that nestled between the four gems. Nor did anything resemble the gems themselves or even the ring as a whole, side on. There was no keyhole, that Leonard could see, nor any obvious means of disguising one. His gut couldn't let go of the idea that the ring had something to do with it though. He ran his thumb over the timeworn edges of the ring, safely on his finger and hidden beneath the long sleeves of his chemise, and closed his eyes. Perhaps in dreams his mind would have better luck deciphering the enigma of the King's key.

XXXX

"How does our patient, Doctor Tyler?" Rip enquired, striding through the medical bay to Jesse's bed.

Rex looked up from his work at the sudden intrusion, saw who it was, and rose to face the captain. "I think I may be on to something. The data you gave me, on speedsters: it applies to all of them?"

"All those we know of," nodded Rip, resting his hands on his hips and gazing down at the unconscious girl with the shadow of a frown on his face. "Why?"

"According to this information," continued the biochemist, "speedsters use an incredible quantity of energy simply to maintain their accelerated metabolism. Usually this is achieved by consuming an enormous volume of carbohydrates, either in simple or complex form. Complex carbohydrates, such as starch, are broken down by enzymes in the digestive system to form glucose. Glucose is broken down in every cell by enzymes of the aerobic respiratory pathway to form water, carbon dioxide and adenosine triphosphate. Follow me so far?"

"Basic biology," muttered Rip with a nod, still surveying the sleeping speedster in question. "What of it?"

"Do all the speedsters you know of come from this dimension?"

The apparent non-sequitur made Rip look up, meeting Rex's expression of amiable inquiry with an intrigued deepening of his frown. "Yes. Why?"

"It appears there is a dimensional difference in Miss Wells on the intracellular level," said Doctor Tyler, turning to hand Rip the data he had been perusing. On the tablet screen were a series of lines traversing a graph, two tables of ever changing numbers and two large pictures. They looked like multicoloured tangles of spiralling ringlets of ribbons. Rex indicated the ribbon diagram by Rip's left hand. "This is isocitrate dehydrogenase. It's an enzyme your cells use to remove hydrogen from isocitrate: one of the intermediate compounds in the Krebs' Cycle. You might know it as the Citrate, or Citric Acid, Cycle: either way, it's a major chunk of the main respiratory pathway. Even breaking down fats and proteins to use as substrates in alternate pathways, which the body does naturally if glucose is unavailable, all pathways have to go through the Krebs' Cycle at some point. This," and here he pointed at the ribbon diagram on the opposite side, tapping the screen at several points to highlight in rings a number of subtle differences between the two, "is the isocitrate dehydrogenase enzyme found in our Earth Two speedster's cells. I can't tell if there's something different about the isocitrate molecule in her dimension, but going by how her system is handling the glucose and saline drips we've been pumping into her system here, it's here we find our problem. Her system is dangerously low in adenosine triphosphate, the body's chemical form of energy, and no matter how much glucose we pump into her, it's not increasing fast enough to wake her. This is what's stopping it. The enzyme in her body is unable to process the form of the molecule found in this dimension. At least not fast enough to be efficient. It might be common to all from Earth Two dimension, or it might just be a genetic peculiarity limited to Jesse, er, Miss Wells."

"Can you fix it?" Rip frowned down at the young girl again, mentally cataloguing every extra-dimensional person he had come across in his travels.

"I've switched the glucose in her IV bag for alpha ketoglutarate - the next step in the cycle - and I'm working on a gene editing therapy that will hopefully allow Miss Wells to produce and utilise both variants of the enzyme."

"Good work, Doctor," nodded Rip, his eyes still pensively glued to their patient. "I have a feeling we will need Miss Wells up and around quite soon."

"If my theory is correct," smiled Rex, also gazing down at the patient but with a quite different expression playing on his features, "she should be awake and coherent within the next five and a half hours. She'll still need the IV, at least until the gene therapy has taken hold, but she won't need to be connected to it all the time."

"Five and a half," mused Rip, eyes narrowing in mental calculation. "How certain are you of that number?"

"I'll admit: it's more a guess than an estimate, but it's the best I've got," frowned the biochemist, looking up at the captain with sudden curiosity. "Why?"

"Gideon's tracked down our next refugee, or fugitive, of time." The captain's brow became furrowed and his eyes distant. It wasn't exactly accurate to say he felt remorse for his part in destroying the Time Masters, but thoughts of those he had known almost all his days as comrades, brothers in arms, friends - even family - still threatened to draw him into the morass of guilt and regret. Especially when he had thrown himself as far into his researches as he had these last few days. Not that he was trying to distract himself from anything, or avoid anyone, of course. It was simply work that needed to be done; and he, and his team, had done what needed to be done. They had destroyed a corrupt organisation to save the world. Yet it had only been the upper echelons of that organisation that had been truly corrupt, the rest merely under their command and control. Rip knew how deeply they could insinuate themselves into a young man's, a child's, consciousness. He knew how difficult it was to shake off the yoke and harness of their brainwashing. He knew there were few who showed any proclivity for independent thought even when he was at the very start of their training. He knew, personally, of only one other, beyond himself and Miranda, who had broken that greatest of Time Master commandments: thou shalt not fall in love. That was why he had been so eager to recruit Luke. The others were a hit or a miss. Some had evaded him; others told him exactly what they thought of him and where he could go; a few, a precious few, with Eve, Amelia and Luke's help, had joined their cause. Others, it seemed, had simply switched to the other side. Which would this be? Friend or foe? Saint or sinner? "Yet sinned I not but in mistaking."

"Captain Hunter?" Rex verbally prodded the other man out of his reverie.

"Hmm?" Rip looked up, his mask falling back into place. "Yes, our next mission, indeed. We have a destination. There are a few last repairs to finish, but myself and Mister Jefferson can handle them. Trouble is we may need your unique skills on this one and I wouldn't want to take you away from your patient at a critical moment."

"If there was going to be any adverse reaction, it would have kicked in by now," replied Rex with the assurance and confidence of any scientist on their own turf. He tapped the tablet screen and enlarged the flowing line graphs and fluctuating tables. "These are her isocitrate levels, her alpha ketoglutarate levels and her adenosine triphosphate levels. The dotted lines beside and beyond them are the levels Gideon predicted following her simulation runs. You can see they are almost identical."

"Ah yes, there it is," Rip sighed looking up to the ceiling, eyes closed in relief or despair.

"Captain?" Rex looked at the Englishman in confusion.

"That word that scientists use when they think something but are not certain of it," breathed Rip. "That word that presages every other disaster on board this ship simply by allowing itself to be uttered either by Professor Stein or, and most often, by Doctor Palmer. That word, that tiny word, that is the herald of trepidation and terror whenever it is heard on board this vessel. That word 'almost'."