Storms
By: X
X0832001@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: I own nothing, I am getting no money for any of this. Just the way I choose to spend my free time.
Rated: PG-13 (a little bit of cursing)
Summary: Beka, Dylan and Harper spend some time on a planet. As one would expect, things don't stay real peachy keen.
"Hey!" She yelled. "Let go of me, what is going on anyway?" They didn't answer her, only dragged her into the hall. Beka kicked wildly and managed to break free from one when her bare foot connected solidly with the soft back of her captor's knee. But the other alien only held her tighter until his companion regained his hold.
In the hall she found Harper struggling just as she was. He'd instinctively put his tool belt on this morning but two other natives held his hands far away from the possible weapons. "Beka!" He called to her. Seeing his captain, friend, and potential escape assistant the human growled and twisted harder. Beka could only watch as one of his captors released a sigh and clocked the writhing blond in the back of the head with a tool from the engineer's own belt. Dazed, blood dripping from a slight wound, the mudfoot calmed down.
"Pilot to the Flats, Engineer down below" ordered one of the men barely holding on to Beka who now struggled even more furiously since Harper had been pacified so violently. But despite her protests, grunts, and the amount of noise she was making the two Andromeda crewmen were dragged down the hall. At the end was a door to a transport skimmer and a staircase. "Pilot to the Flats, Engineer down below" came back to her and she moved away from the clear glass door as best she could. Grunting with effort she pulled the men who held her towards the wall, away from the door.
To her surprise the aliens helped push her to the stairs. It was Harper who was taken to the door. She felt the forceful hands on her shoulders loosen. Beka lunged forward in an attempt to break free and get enough room to fight. This shift in her center of balance allowed the taller of her two captors to give her a push that sent her stumbling back. Beka found herself at the bottom of the stairs before she could even figure out if this was an advantage or problem. The last she saw of Harper was the young man being pushed into the open topped car.
Harper was dizzy and he felt himself being pulled down the hall. He felt himself fall into a car, his eyes closed. The next thing he felt was cold. When Harper opened his eyes he was alone in a field. It was raining heavily, a cold drenching rain. Wind whipped around him. They'd taken him north. The speeder that had brought him here was gone and that wind had blown away any trace of its path. All signs of civilization were gone. Harper didn't like the looks of his situation. He also didn't like not knowing what was happening to Beka, the woman who had saved his life not too many years ago.
He had seen them push her down the stairs, he had heard, "Pilot to the Flats, Engineer down below" and knew they thought she was the engineer. He just hoped they didn't make her actually try and fix something. It was his personal experience that when you were, for lack of a better term, kidnapped it was not good to disappoint your captors. Beka could muddle through repairs on the Maru, but she wouldn't fool anyone.
Harper started walking. He knew all about hypothermia, he'd had it a few times in his life. Living in a crumbling shack in Boston lent itself well to the condition. He had to think. So he walked and thought. He needed a plan to help Beka and get them out of this mess.
Harper was aware that one of the worst things he could do in his current frosty situation would be to stop moving. He also knew he needed to contact Beka. It was very hard to coordinate an escape if you were miles from your cohort. If they had any hope of getting out of this mess he needed to know what was going on with her. Beka had still been wearing her ear piece headphones when he had seen her being dragged away. He'd made her those earphones. They weren't ordinary earphones. Andromeda had nanobots in their blood so she could trace her crew members. Harper could trace Beka with these headphones.
The mudfoot engineer was thrilled his 6th sense, the danger sense, had kicked in and given him time to strap on his tool belt before he was so rudely dismissed from his room this morning. Without these supplies he would have had no shot at fixing this mess. He dug around in the well worn belt and pulled out a little box dangling on the end of a wire with an orange rod on the other end. His genius mind rapidly weighed the pros and cons of what he was about to do. By using this device and his port to communicate with Beka he was going to make himself an unresponsive pile in the grass. It was going to ensure hypothermia and could easily kill him. The pro of the plan was getting himself, Beka, and therefore Dylan off this planet and back to Andromeda. He plunged the carrot into the cold metal of his data port and tumbled backwards into the stiff wet grass.
Dylan Hunt had been given regal quarters on the top floor of the palace. He felt a little guilty about being treated better than his crewmates, but he was sure Beka and Harper wouldn't mind. Hunt admired the silk wall hangings. The sun was shining through his window and he could hear a speeder launching and heading north towards the plains. Dylan sighed. He actually would have liked to go out and see more of this planet. But he had responsibilities for the new Commonwealth and had quite a bit of negotiating left to do.
He was a little surprised when there was a knock at his door and the leader of the Ichbeins entered before he could respond. The diminutive man was flanked by two large bodyguards. "Captain Hunt"
"Yes?"
"We've decided to alter the power structure of these negotiations. We've temporally disposed of the two crew members you brought. They are safe enough. We've added your engineer to our corps and I'm sure your pilot has enough survival training to survive until we reach an agreement. Hunt immediately realized how miserable Beka and Harper would be. Harper didn't really play well with others and Beka hated planets. But, the Ichbein was right, they would be alright. They would be alright provided he managed to get back to Andromeda with them.
The Ichbeins led him back to the negotiating room and he fumed silently. He kicked himself for not bring Tyr, his resident Neitzchien intimidator. This was not a new trick. The Ichbeins knew they needed the Commonwealth if they would stand a chance of escape the Maggog World Ship. Yet, they were reluctant to give up resources to strangers. They wanted Hunt to be pushed into giving them all milk without buying the cow. It didn't work that way.
Beka found herself in a dimly lit work bay. It smelled like molten metal and the buzzing of a drill of some sort filled the air. This was Harper's kind of place. It was certainly not hers. The men had brought her down here to make her work. They'd led her down a couple levels closed a gate to confine her in the bay they had chosen to imprison her. From a fellow inmate in her little area Beka learned mechanics were in short supply around here. The shortage inspired them to be a little protective of any engineer they got their hands on; no matter how morally reproachable their methods of getting that engineer were. Beka wasn't really surprised; they didn't recognize a tool belt when they saw one. If they had been able to put one and one together they may have realized the human with the tool belt is the engineer. They put her to work on fixing a shuttle pod of some kind. Despite her knowledge of the Maru and her systems Beka knew there was a better chance finding a Nightsider sunbathing on Infinity Atoll than her getting this ship space worthy.
Beka was also getting the feeling the natives who patrolled the work area were getting suspicious of Beka's mechanical strategy. She had seen one of the patrolling guards lay into a fellow inmate pretty savagely for dawdling. Seeing the poor guy kicked around and begging for the guard to stop inspired her to hide her mechanical inadequacy as much as possible. Her strategy could really be summed up as 'wander around the ship, curse loudly and hit it with a tool from time to time'. Truth be told to a layman that's exactly what Harper's tinkering looked like. Of course Harper knew what he was doing and when he hit something with a tool it was the right time, the right tool, or some other combination of skill and luck that Beka simply didn't have. Maybe he used magic curses.
Rubbing her temples Beka became more aware of a buzzing in her ear. She thought her music had started up again, but the display denied it. She found herself focusing on the buzz and it became clearer. It was a tiny voice. It was the tiny voice of Harper. "Great, I'm crazy. Crazy people hear voices." She thought about this for a moment. "I don't even hear my own voice, or the devil, the voice of my insanity is Harper."
Harper was asking if she could hear him. Figuring if she might as well go along with her own insanity she whispered, "Yeah, I hear you Harper".
"Took you long enough Boss, that music blowing out your eardrums?"
"Shut up Harper." She paused a moment before continuing, "Are you really here?"
"Here is a relative term boss. I'm sort of in a middle of nowhere field somewhere in the middle of nowhere, but I'm also sort of wherever you are."
"That's not at all confusing, how did you get in my head?"
"I'm not in your head; I'm in your earphone."
"Good, I'm not cracking up"
"You thought you were cracking up?"
"It's been a rough few hours, give me a break mudfoot." It was then Beka realized some of her fellow tool jockeys were casting perplexed looks in her direction. She realized her whisper had become a normal conversational tone she was sharing with empty air. She slid gracelessly under the ship she was supposed to be fixing and made a great deal of noise to convince the others she was working. Harper was still speaking in her ear.
"What's going on Boss?"
"I'm supposed to make this Junker space worthy. They think I'm the mechanic."
"Well, let's see what we can do about that. What does this thing look like?"
Harper really was an amazing fellow. Not that Beka would swell his head by telling him, but she was impressed right now. Harper directed her on what to do based solely on her admittedly vague descriptions. They had been working for a few hours now and it seemed like the ship might run again soon.
"The banana looking thingy is dangling."
"What's a banana?" Admittedly some cultural differences were slowing up the pace.
"It's a tropical fruit from your planet, mudfoot. It looks like a chubby curved thing."
"Ah, yellow or silver?"
"Yellow, hence the banana description."
"You are looking at the Slip drift block cylinder. It should not be dangling. Jam it back in the little hole and secure it between the thing that looks like a CD and the think that looks like a muffin with eyes."
Beka did as she was told; poking around in the little hole until she found something that to her amazement actually did look like a muffin with eyes. She slid the banana into place and rolled out from under the ship.
"Now, check to see if there is a can of soup looking thing near the muffin. It might be cracked."
"Hold on slave driver, give me a minute to rest."
"Sure Boss"
Beka sat cross legged on the floor and sighed. She was tired and hungry. This being a prisoner thing really sucked. She saw the guard coming towards her. He was scowling. "You done yet?"
"Almost, just have to adjust the flow regulator and realign the Chrome buffer ports" she told him, having no idea what she was talking about or if these were real parts of a ship.
"So you aren't done yet"
"Not quite." Beka did not like the look crossing his face.
"Not good enough"
Harper heard flesh against flesh. The sound of someone being hit was something he was entirely too familiar with. Fury built in him knowing the victim of this situation was Beka. She had saved his life plenty of times so he gave her the best advice he could; advice based on his own miserable experiences.
"Do not cry" he ordered with great conviction. "Eyes down and just be quite, it'll be over faster that way- trust me on this one."
Tears stung Beka's eyes but she listened to Harper's commands. She didn't know much about what Harper had been through in his short life, but she did know enough to believe him. Years ago, not long after Harper joined her crew she had discovered his previous employer had been far from compassionate. She had seen the scars that marred her friend's skin. So Beka shut up, kept her eyes locked on her feet and didn't cry. Unamused and disappointed the guard knocked her to the cold floor with a push and just walked away. "Damn Bully" said Harper in her ear.
"Are you OK?" he asked a few minutes later, after he had given her time to recompose herself.
"Yeah, he just hit me around a bit, nothing broken."
"Good, we going to get back to that engine anytime soon?"
"Uh, sure"
Beka was still a little off because of the guard's attack. She was tough. Her life certainly had never been a picnic. She'd had her share of scrapes with drunks who didn't know no means no and rough customers. But this had been the first time someone had belted her as if she were a lower being. In her life she had been in fights many times, sometimes they came to blows. But, this was not like a bar fight. The guard had hit her because he felt he had the right to. In his opinion she wasn't working hard enough so he hit her to make his point. The injustice made her mad.
Mad was actually an emotion she could harness in her situation. Her bodiless friend laughed. "You are going to make him sorry aren't you?"
"You're supposed to be a super genius and had to ask that?"
"Just making sure the boss I know and love is still there"
"Oh Beka Valentine isn't going anywhere Harper. How do you suggest we get out of this mess?"
"Well, as you mentioned I am a super genius and have put together a few thoughts."