I Know of No Saying with the Number Twelve
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Beka awoke to a great sense of contentment, as if she'd slept for a week and a memory of Tyr's lips soft on hers, a combination that had her sitting up very quickly, flinging back worn sheets to check her state of dress. At the sight of her own clothing fully covering her, she leaned back on a couple of thin pillows and exhaled heavily. That would have been so wrong for so many reasons, and if she hadn't even remembered it. well, that just would have been rubbing salt in the wound.
For a moment, she half-laid, half-sat on the unfamiliar mattress before another memory returned. That pinpoint jab. She brought her left arm into the center of her field of vision, and sure enough, a tiny mark that hadn't been there yesterday stared back at her. Had the man drugged her?! She would find trusting him a lot easier if he would deign to inform her before injecting mind-altering substances into her bloodstream!
A corner of her mind noted the absence of her golden helix, but she was far too angry to worry about a trifling matter like jewelry when her crewmate and, she had believed her friend, had just shot her full of.who knew what. The man knew about her Flash addiction!! How dare he violate her body like that? She would make sure he never made it off this forsaken world if it killed her. The nerve!
She stewed for several minutes, growing more furious with every passing second. The fact that she didn't recognize her surroundings did not help in the least; he might've had the decency to give her some idea of his almighty plan before dumping her off like a tool he no longer had any need for. That soon led to a dark suspicion of betrayal, and slowly, Beka readied the gun she felt at her hip. He had drugged her so casually, and under the guise of kissing her. Bitterly she recriminated herself for every beyond-platonic thought she'd ever had involving him. If he could kiss her like that so easily. Of course, it was possible that he hadn't sold her out to the Dherans or his mercenary pals or whomever, that he was just an incredibly thoughtless ass, but if he had betrayed her and judged Beka Valentine as someone who would give up without a fight. grimly, she drew the weapon out and held it beside her thigh, concealed by the dingy, once- white bedsheets.
It had been months since she'd truly believed him capable of betraying the crew of the Andromeda; even when he had hared off to the dustbin corner of the galaxy on some mission, she had learned, to save his wife, she hadn't really been able to envision him returning with a fleet of Orca ships to avenge the loss of their home at Dylan's hand. She had been a little shocked to learn that he had a wife, though she had since gathered that she had died, yet another victim of the Knights of Genetic Purity. Absolutely sickening, despicable people, the Genites. If the deaths of millions of Nietzscheans weren't enough, they had murdered Tyr's infant son, and for reasons she never quite dared fathom, that had cut her more deeply than the deaths of all those others. She had wondered if he know that she knew about his son.
When the bedroom door creaked open, Beka was in a fine state of fury, hurt, and rage, remembering all their time together and everything they had survived together, and she was ready to loose her wrath on the first person to interrupt her dark reverie. "Were we all wrong, Tyr? Were you just waiting for the perfect opportunity to turn on us??" She swallowed back the quiver that had entered her voice, "or am I just too damn paranoid for my own good?"
Tyr didn't seem to fully comprehend her at first, and then he took in her arm, tense on some object under the sheets. He held his hands away from his sides and approached the slim, sitting figure in as non-threatening a manner as he knew. That she would be angry was a given, but he had truly not expected this.
"Beka, I swear that I have not betrayed Dylan, the Andromeda, or you."
His gentle tone completely unbent Beka, and to her horror, she found her animosity dissolving into tears, and she was crying against his chest as he enfolded her in his powerful arms. "Then how could you do that? You knew," she regained a little control over her voice, though tears continued to stream down her cheeks, "you knew about the Flash. How could you??" And she lost it again.
Tyr berated himself. He had foreseen some emotion, predictable human response for drugging and hauling her here without her consent, but he had forgotten entirely about her previous encounters with mind-altering substances. This was no typical female upset that he had done this without her knowledge, but a rational person terrified that that he had personally delivered her to the heart of her worst nightmare, her greatness weakness. and that which she dreamed of every night and fought each morning.
He stroked her hair, murmuring quiet words and knowing nothing would ever be sufficient apology. The sight of her weapon, stark metal against soft, threadbare sheets made him shiver inside. Her fear of betrayal was very real, and he realized that it might be a long time before she could trust him again as she had just yesterday. He had known of the cruelty of her own past, of her drug addict and runner father who hadn't deserved the title years before he ultimately succumbed to Flash to which he had sacrificed everything, and the con-artist brother who had chosen the altar of greed as the resting place of quite possibly the only person to ever truly care for him. He respected her for not only surviving but for resisting the many easy-outs open to a young woman struggling to live in this universe, but it struck him just in last few moments the brutality of those years. And all he could do now was hold her.
Beka's heart-wrenching sobs quieted after a time, and she shifted herself away from the Nietzschean sitting beside her. Immediately, she missed his warmth and solid support. Her eyes burned and she squeezed them shut as she imagined how she must look at the moment.
"Beka, you were perfectly justified in suspecting my actions. I should have never been so thoughtless, and I apologize." His words came out halting, so unlike his usual mellifluous, assured manner of speaking, that she looked up for the unusual quality of his voice as much as for the words themselves.
She spoke barely above a whisper. "But you were right. I know you, and you wouldn't have done this unless it was the only possibility." This abrupt turn-around startled Tyr until he comprehended how much of it was Beka trying to convince herself that it had been necessary. It was, but Tyr had never used sole necessity as an excuse for doing anything, for it was merely that.
"Do you remember the man I mentioned earlier, the bartender?" Beka nodded, unable to lift her eyes from the weave of the comforter pulled up around her waist. "He knows you're here, and he believes I mean to double cross the mercenary team and ransom you directly to the Andromeda. It was a matter of six hundred crowns and half an hour to convince him that betrayal was my true intent." Beka didn't doubt it; Tyr could be very persuasive at times. She did wonder how much he had stashed away that he could afford to throw around six hundred crowns like Sparky tabs. "He possesses an extremely low frequency transmitter, undetectable by Dheran technology, or so he claims."
So he claims. "Not very reassuring." She discreetly wiped her still slightly soggy eyes with the back of her hand. If he turned out to be mistaken about the powers of his little machine, the Dherans would be ready and waiting for the Andromeda, if they didn't just capture and kill her and Tyr outright. She still wasn't sure why they wished them such bodily harm.
"In any case, it won't matter. When I use it to try and contact the Andromeda, I'm going to implant a virus into the system and report that sadly, I cannot find the ship, that it must be somehow cloaked."
In spite of herself, Beka raised an eyebrow. "Cloaked?" Cloaks were mainly the stuff of questionable science-fiction; {{A/N-I love ST (mostly DS9) as much as anybody, don't hurt me!!}} the Andromeda certainly had nothing of the sort.
Tyr laughed shortly, derisively. "Mehnin Corellidame doesn't know a biplane from a Commonwealth Heavy Cruiser. He wouldn't doubt me if I told him the Andromeda could jump between five dimensions before breakfast."
She snorted at the idea. Between dimensions indeed. She purposely kept her brain from reminding her of Jeger, Satrina and her Technicolor assassin squad, and their Houdini disappearing acts. There were just creepy. "So let me guess. You're going to inform him that the Maru has some.device capable of what? piercing the cloak?"
"Convenient, isn't it?"
Beka grinned wryly and found she could. Then, something hit her. "Your cousin!" At his lack of expression, which she correctly translated to complete and utter confusion and bewilderment, she elaborated. "Shaidyna! She's still on the Maru. She probably thinks something happened to me, to both of us."
Tyr shot her a glance. "She is not my cousin."
"Right. Well, it looks like you got everything under control. So, uh, what do I do?"
Her companion hesitated before answering. "Mehnin saw me bring you in unconscious, so he's going to believe that you will be.upset with me when you wake." Ha. Understatement of the freaking millennium. "I had planned to tranquilize you, with your permission this time, enough that you would remain conscious but clearly unthreatening." Beka was glad to hear the past tense. "However, it should suffice if I bind you convincingly. And," he gave her one of his mysterious half-smiles, "you can take out any.rancor you may have against me. No one will suspect if you prevaricate."
"Prevaricate, my ass," she muttered and thought she heard Tyr chuckle at that. "All right, tie me up. It won't be the first time a good-looking guy has.never mind." Let him chew on that that for a while. Judging by his face, he definitely didn't know what to make of it.
Half an hour later, Tyr left Beka, wrists bound behind her back with strips cut from the bottom of her shirt. The one she'd actually liked, and Tyr just had to go and mangle it all to hell. He returned with a tall man with dark red hair and green eyes, just a few inches shorter than himself, though of a narrower build. Beka glowered at the pair, but it took a little effort not to cast a lustful eye after the stranger. Very little, however, seeing as how she was tied up, and not with smooth silk ties. The filthy leer the man was directing at her helped with that too; lust she could handle as well as she could dish out, but this was a "Tarzan see Jane. Tarzan want to take Jane to back of hut and." Well, do something disgusting, obscene, and generally unpleasant to poor Jane.
Tyr approached her, gun trained at her head, and roughly yanked her to her feet by her wrists after bending to retrieve her faithful grey duffel she just now noticed lying under the bed. Her eyes glittered fiercely at him, but she kept silent. Oh no, she'd save the tongue-lashing for late, when it would be more effective. Or so she told herself; she mostly wanted to perfect opening for the perfect biting comeback, which she hoped might lead to a shouting match. She just felt like shouting.
"She's a rahght preddy gal, Tyr," the green-eyed man said in a slow drawl. "I don' suppose there'll be a tahme for a liddle somethin' before ya ransum her off." Her clothing should have been in tatters from the looks he gave her.
"You listen to me, I swear that I will kill you if so much as lay a finger on me. I don't care if the steroid case here shoots me or if I have to hunt you down across the galaxies on foot." He had to strain to catch her quiet words, but he recoiled sharply when they hit him.
Unfortunately, she was the one tied up here, and the smirk returned all too quickly to the man's face. He opened his mouth to reply when Tyr shot him a dark look. "There will be time for nothing if we do not hurry. If the mercenaries arrive here before we leave, the situation will grow very complicated, very fast." He linked an arm through Beka's, much to the confusion of his bartender friend until he explained that he did so to attract as little attention to their passing as possible; people wouldn't look remember what they saw as a happy couple with a friend nearly as much as two men escorting a captive woman.
"Rahgt good thinkin', Tyr." I'll right good thinkin' you, buddy, Beka thought menacingly.
The three of them left the bedroom through its only door, which led down a corridor and past another doorway to the bar, Tyr dragging her and the third of their party swaggering alongside, craning his neck back to watch Beka's back side as she half-walked, half-stumbled beside Tyr. Once, she managed to stick a foot out at the exact moment Tyr's acquaintance decided to get himself a good, long eyeful of Beka's rear end, and send him sprawling. He fell hard against the wall and buckled to his knees before he regained his footing. His head in particular made a satisfying sound as it met the cheap paneling violently.
Tyr jerked her forward mercilessly with a low mutter of, "Excellent strategy." The tone was angry, as was the wrench that almost pulled her arm out of its socket, which the bartender could hear and see, but he was too far away to understand what exactly that mutter consisted of. She smiled to herself.
They were halfway down the length of the room when a band of five men burst through the entrance. The men noticed the trio immediately, and at the sight of Beka, hands went to guns and daggers at hips. Without turning his head, Tyr shoved Beka into a chair and crossed the room quickly toward the armed group, speaking in low tones as soon as they could hear him. After a moment of indecision, of looking between the men and Beka, now out from under Tyr's eyes, Mehnin joined the other six. Beka wished she could catch the words exchanged, but by Tyr's calming gestures and the many glances at her, she could guess the identities of the men and the subject of conversation. She busied herself shifting her wrists in their binds, taking pressure off the raw patches and wondering how the plan was to change if, as she feared, the mercenaries were about to become a part of the deception. Their recognition of her crewmate and the many weapons she saw about their persons named them as soldiers for hire.
A few minutes later, Tyr returned and, with an uncharacteristic smile that was becoming rather more characteristic recently, pulled her up again. He spun her and retied the strips that held fast her hands, leaving one end in her right palm, so she could tug it when needed. Theoretically.
Their troupe sauntered toward the bar, and she saw a tiny slip of something glint in his hand as he deftly worked the communicator, then disappear into a slot near the top of the thing. The screen went grey, then black, and Tyr cursed and pounded the device. She would bet that he really had been a holodrama star in a past life.
The six men put their heads together and, after more fervent words, Tyr grabbed her elbow and ungently led her toward and out the door. Expressionless so as not to give any hint of his words to those watching, he whispered to he that two would guard her in the Maru. A veritable cloud of mercenaries surrounded them, all laughing about how they'd spend the money they earned from this job and how Tyr would spend his fleeing from the Dherans for the rest of his natural life. Occasionally, he popped off a sarcastic line or two, and the rest would erupt in guffaws. They sounded more than a little drunk to Beka's ears, but any mercenary intoxicated on the job would soon find himself without one. Probably those eight rounds of Tyr's.
To her silent delight, Tyr related off-hand the tripping-of-annoying- bartender incident, and to her surprise, the mercenaries found this extremely hilarious, slapping each other's backs and warning one another to watch their hands around her. Even better, the butt of the story slunk to the back of the coterie, sullenly stalking behind the others.
"It looks like restoring dead empires hasn't taken everything outta her yet!" one laughed. She felt oddly flattered by this, though all she could do was glare and mutter incomprehensible somethings.
"It's a good thing you ran into us, Tyr; the vixen might've taken you hostage. Look at 'er, staring straight ahead. Wheels are turnin' in that pretty head-you just know she's plannin' something."
In her sulkiest tone, she scoffed. "You think I'm going to find anyone who'll lay down a single crown for this Uber?" She was rewarded with more laughter and a severe jerk on her arm. Oh, they were eating this up.
Finally, the hulking pile of scrap metal affectionately called a ship came into view. Whilst the mercenaries made their smart-aleck jokes, much less appreciated now, at the poor Maru's expense, Tyr formed a circle in the air with his left fist, then twisted it and pulled it low. Beka crinkled her forehead at this but affected not to notice-some Kodiak symbol for Shaidyna perhaps, telling her to stay out of sight.
If it was that, it succeeded. The Nietzschean woman was nowhere to be seen when they boarded. He still couldn't crack the ship's codes, so he held his firearm to the small of Beka's back as she entered it into the pad near the main door, after a stern admonition that he look the other way. Bound or not, she could still be uncooperative for as long as she darn well pleased, and he couldn't very well extract the codes from a corpse. or so she hoped the mercenaries gathered when he averted his eyes. More jokes came of his not gaining access, and Beka reflected that now that she thought of it, many of the comedians she'd seen on casino drifts and the like could have been former mercenaries. An image of a Perseid coming at her with one of Tyr's titanic weapons made her giggle under her breath.
"You two with her. And be careful-this is her ship, and she knows it better than any of us." Why Tyr should suggest that to the mercenaries made little sense to Beka, but she supposed it would help convince them of his little ruse. And that's all it is, she told herself with barely a quaver.
The taller of the guards insisted that he didn't need to be reminded of that as he took Beka's wrists. He was gentler around tugging her this way and that than Tyr, quite a welcome relief. The Nietzschean waved them in the vague direction of the crew bunks, exactly as they had planned. It was also the only real option the pair had; they weren't about to risk her in the engine room, where she cause serious damage with very little movement if she positioned herself correctly.
When he let go Beka's arms, the man, who called himself Briyart, indicated that Beka should make herself comfortable on one of the low beds. She plopped down on the former Vexpag's bunk, and it occurred to her that she would regret shooting these men, as they seemed rather pleasant, as killers for hire went. To be fair, they were pleasant enough for anyone, and she had to remind herself firmly that they were mercenaries, pushed the fact that Tyr had been one out of her mind, and that they only reason that hadn't handed her to the Dherans was the prospect of a greater reward this way.
"If you guys have time later, would you mind fatally wounding Mehnin Corellidame for me? I'd pay you, but." She shrugged.
Briyart chuckled. "I'll be sorry to turn you over to the Dherans when this is all over, so yeah, I will. Consider it my apology." The other man snorted, not disagreeing.
She folded her hands under her head as she flopped back and painstakingly unknotted the fabric binding her so that neither appointed guard would notice. "If anyone owes me an apology-I mean, not that the guys who are about to toss me to a bunch of ruthless gangsters don't-it's that anabolic Uber in my cockpit. Do you have any idea how many times Beka Valentine's amazing piloting skills have saved that genetically-engineered butt?" Just as Briyart met his cohort's eye to share the joke, she reached behind the mattress, pulled out the gun wedged against the wall, and fired multiple times. The charge wasn't at its highest, but that many could be deadly. The second man drew his own weapon as Beka pushed herself off the bed and to the side, firing all the way. He dropped like a stone a meter or so from his companion, but this was far from over. More would be arriving in seconds to investigate the shots.
Beka swung herself up on to Harper's bunk and rummaged through the strange odds and frightening ends until she located her quarry, an anti-grav harness. Sotto voce, she ordered the Maru to gradually increase the artificial gravity levels on the corridor leading from Command to the stacked-up bunks laughingly referred to as the crew quarters so the AG field would be at two and a half times its norm. The ship complied, and just as she had anticipated, the two who came to check on the noise found themselves moving extremely sluggishly, as if through thick mud, while she leapt lightly from the bend and kicked guns from hands just now firing. Despite the increased gravity, they moved with surprising speed, though not enough to hamper Beka. Moving in a way that defied normal laws of physics, she clutched the bar just beneath Harper's bed that held the thing up and shot herself forward, knocking one of the two onto his back. The other reached her then, but she took advantage of his increased weight as she kneed him and rolled his mass over one shoulder so he actually flipped before landing square on his head. She winced at the clang it made on the metal floor.
As she restored the AG fields back to normal and removed the harness, she sprinted to Command and heard more shots. Just as expected, she entered into a scene not much
different than the one she had left. Blue eyes met brown, and she nodded, sliding into the familiar shape of the pilot's chair. Without a word, she started up the engine and lifted the Maru straight up into the sky. Not even Tyr could keep his balance against that, and Beka considered it only proper, as she hadn't found an opportunity to deliver that tongue-lashing after all.
Footsteps echoed behind them. "Oh, you have got to be kidding!" Beka yelled, bulldozing through ship traffic around the planet. "Come on, they were down." She counted no less than twenty different ship designs of those she cut off, grazed, and nearly killed. That could very possibly be a record of people she had pissed off in a five-minute span.
"Tyr, were those the kind of people you've associated with since the pride was destroyed?" Surprise and something close to disdain tinged the female voice Beka recognized with a sigh of relief as Shaidyna's. Ooh, family tension. She waited to see how Tyr would respond; she had no idea how Nietzscheans handled these domestic quarrels and was curious.
"I did what I had to do in order to survive. It was that or remain a slave in uranium mines." Beka would have surmised that he'd had many more career opportunities than that, but she kept her mouth shut. The World According to Seamus Harper, page either nine, paragraph two: never mess with Nietzschean family politics. Those were the worst families and the worst politics.
Then she saw the miniature fleet poised kilometers above her, all three hundred odd battler cruisers and combat relief ships. "This really is a lovely Kodiak moment," even she had to groan inwardly as she said it, "but we got some more pressing issues here. Three hundred and fifteen, to be exact. Tyr, you're on fire control and Shaidyna, you're in charge of sensors. Route every little thing you find, every screw those ships that we can exploit, to me and Tyr." She was too far removed from the traffic below to blend in innocently, but that hadn't really been her scheme anyway. "All right, one of the few advantages we have is we're in no danger from friendly fire. Unfriendly fire, yes, but we'll make do with what we have."
"I contacted the Andromeda about seven minutes ago under the pretense of a ransom demand. They should be here within the hour."
Beka took a deep breath. Great. At least there would be some chance of identifying their bodies. "And what ingenious method did you contrive to relay to our valorous captain that you hadn't actually betrayed us for a few thousand crowns?"
Thinking of friendly fire gave her an idea, though not one she particularly liked. "Before you answer that, I'm gonna turn a hard 180 and head right back down into that planet's atmosphere. I don't care what pattern you use, just keep those guys from shooting us in the back while we run!"
"Argosy Special Operations morse code, and.aye." Shrieks of weapons fire from her beloved bucket of bolts filled her ears as she pulled the Maru up and dove into deceptively mild fluffy white-and-blue of the planet below her. She hated to imagine what she was doing to her ship, but the Maru had held his own through worse. She continued down at insane speed until what remained of her sensors told her that the bulk of the small battalion had entered the planet's stratosphere, then veered sixty degrees port, grateful to see nothing but forests and hills-she hadn't wanted to involve civilians in this. Clouds scudded past the Maru, and she had only her natural sense of direction and her view window to keep her a little more than a mile above the surface and from crashing into any sudden mountain ranges.
One moment, snowy feathers brushed by the Maru's hull, and the next, dark grey enveloped everything. "Ah, and the universe deals us the Queen of Spades," Beka announced, anticipation, satisfaction, and a touch of nervousness mingled in her voice.
"Maybe I've been away from civilization too long, but I have no idea what any sort of monarchy has to do with a hurricane, especially when we're flying directly into one!" Shaidyna's shout was barely audible over the gusts and thunderous claps that rocked the Maru.
"It's from a card game, Hearts. They still play it at casino drifts once in a while." Beka explained her metaphor as she danced the vessel between continuous forks of blinding brilliance. "The Queen of Spades is worth the most points, and you don't want points," unless you planned to shoot the moon, but she wasn't about to go into a detailed description at this point. "If you get the Queen, you can pass it at the beginning, and a lot of people do. If you're good, fearless, and not betting too much money, you can hold onto it and lay it on your opponent when he least expects it. And believe me, they're not expecting this!" She pulled back as far as she could without leaving the storm cover, then plummeted the ship into the churning water at a velocity that would've cracked anything smaller like an egg. Hell, it might still crack the Maru.
"Captain Valentine, may I remind you that-"
"I will say this one time and one time only, Tyr. I'm driving this thing through a hurricane, and if you want to pass on those paranoid genes of yours, you're going to shut the f-"
"They're gone." The quiet of the other woman's voice caught Beka's attention as the shock of the words silenced her.
"They're gone? Are you sure you're not just reading the Maru's complete lack of functioning sensors?" If she had, Beka would be highly annoyed. Just when she'd had the chance to give Tyr the what-for.
"I'm sure. No, wait. There are a few left.a dozen or so, I can't tell.and they're hovering around the edge of the storm," as would any sane person. "We, on the other hand, have just entered the eye." Beka rolled her eyes and prepared the scoff to end all scoffs when she truly heard what was going on around them. Or in this case, what wasn't going on-absolute stillness reigned outside the Maru. Klaxons blared and sheets of light flashed around them, but right here.
Slowly, warily, she raised the Maru out of the ocean. She could plainly make out gales of wind flinging rain in every direction and roiling the waves until they seemed to boil by jagged bolts of lightning that illuminated the otherwise black gloom, but in an area not much larger than the Maru itself, a tiny space of calm had opened up. The sensors still online crackled with electricity, but Shaidyna was right. The Dherans were gone.
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Beka awoke to a great sense of contentment, as if she'd slept for a week and a memory of Tyr's lips soft on hers, a combination that had her sitting up very quickly, flinging back worn sheets to check her state of dress. At the sight of her own clothing fully covering her, she leaned back on a couple of thin pillows and exhaled heavily. That would have been so wrong for so many reasons, and if she hadn't even remembered it. well, that just would have been rubbing salt in the wound.
For a moment, she half-laid, half-sat on the unfamiliar mattress before another memory returned. That pinpoint jab. She brought her left arm into the center of her field of vision, and sure enough, a tiny mark that hadn't been there yesterday stared back at her. Had the man drugged her?! She would find trusting him a lot easier if he would deign to inform her before injecting mind-altering substances into her bloodstream!
A corner of her mind noted the absence of her golden helix, but she was far too angry to worry about a trifling matter like jewelry when her crewmate and, she had believed her friend, had just shot her full of.who knew what. The man knew about her Flash addiction!! How dare he violate her body like that? She would make sure he never made it off this forsaken world if it killed her. The nerve!
She stewed for several minutes, growing more furious with every passing second. The fact that she didn't recognize her surroundings did not help in the least; he might've had the decency to give her some idea of his almighty plan before dumping her off like a tool he no longer had any need for. That soon led to a dark suspicion of betrayal, and slowly, Beka readied the gun she felt at her hip. He had drugged her so casually, and under the guise of kissing her. Bitterly she recriminated herself for every beyond-platonic thought she'd ever had involving him. If he could kiss her like that so easily. Of course, it was possible that he hadn't sold her out to the Dherans or his mercenary pals or whomever, that he was just an incredibly thoughtless ass, but if he had betrayed her and judged Beka Valentine as someone who would give up without a fight. grimly, she drew the weapon out and held it beside her thigh, concealed by the dingy, once- white bedsheets.
It had been months since she'd truly believed him capable of betraying the crew of the Andromeda; even when he had hared off to the dustbin corner of the galaxy on some mission, she had learned, to save his wife, she hadn't really been able to envision him returning with a fleet of Orca ships to avenge the loss of their home at Dylan's hand. She had been a little shocked to learn that he had a wife, though she had since gathered that she had died, yet another victim of the Knights of Genetic Purity. Absolutely sickening, despicable people, the Genites. If the deaths of millions of Nietzscheans weren't enough, they had murdered Tyr's infant son, and for reasons she never quite dared fathom, that had cut her more deeply than the deaths of all those others. She had wondered if he know that she knew about his son.
When the bedroom door creaked open, Beka was in a fine state of fury, hurt, and rage, remembering all their time together and everything they had survived together, and she was ready to loose her wrath on the first person to interrupt her dark reverie. "Were we all wrong, Tyr? Were you just waiting for the perfect opportunity to turn on us??" She swallowed back the quiver that had entered her voice, "or am I just too damn paranoid for my own good?"
Tyr didn't seem to fully comprehend her at first, and then he took in her arm, tense on some object under the sheets. He held his hands away from his sides and approached the slim, sitting figure in as non-threatening a manner as he knew. That she would be angry was a given, but he had truly not expected this.
"Beka, I swear that I have not betrayed Dylan, the Andromeda, or you."
His gentle tone completely unbent Beka, and to her horror, she found her animosity dissolving into tears, and she was crying against his chest as he enfolded her in his powerful arms. "Then how could you do that? You knew," she regained a little control over her voice, though tears continued to stream down her cheeks, "you knew about the Flash. How could you??" And she lost it again.
Tyr berated himself. He had foreseen some emotion, predictable human response for drugging and hauling her here without her consent, but he had forgotten entirely about her previous encounters with mind-altering substances. This was no typical female upset that he had done this without her knowledge, but a rational person terrified that that he had personally delivered her to the heart of her worst nightmare, her greatness weakness. and that which she dreamed of every night and fought each morning.
He stroked her hair, murmuring quiet words and knowing nothing would ever be sufficient apology. The sight of her weapon, stark metal against soft, threadbare sheets made him shiver inside. Her fear of betrayal was very real, and he realized that it might be a long time before she could trust him again as she had just yesterday. He had known of the cruelty of her own past, of her drug addict and runner father who hadn't deserved the title years before he ultimately succumbed to Flash to which he had sacrificed everything, and the con-artist brother who had chosen the altar of greed as the resting place of quite possibly the only person to ever truly care for him. He respected her for not only surviving but for resisting the many easy-outs open to a young woman struggling to live in this universe, but it struck him just in last few moments the brutality of those years. And all he could do now was hold her.
Beka's heart-wrenching sobs quieted after a time, and she shifted herself away from the Nietzschean sitting beside her. Immediately, she missed his warmth and solid support. Her eyes burned and she squeezed them shut as she imagined how she must look at the moment.
"Beka, you were perfectly justified in suspecting my actions. I should have never been so thoughtless, and I apologize." His words came out halting, so unlike his usual mellifluous, assured manner of speaking, that she looked up for the unusual quality of his voice as much as for the words themselves.
She spoke barely above a whisper. "But you were right. I know you, and you wouldn't have done this unless it was the only possibility." This abrupt turn-around startled Tyr until he comprehended how much of it was Beka trying to convince herself that it had been necessary. It was, but Tyr had never used sole necessity as an excuse for doing anything, for it was merely that.
"Do you remember the man I mentioned earlier, the bartender?" Beka nodded, unable to lift her eyes from the weave of the comforter pulled up around her waist. "He knows you're here, and he believes I mean to double cross the mercenary team and ransom you directly to the Andromeda. It was a matter of six hundred crowns and half an hour to convince him that betrayal was my true intent." Beka didn't doubt it; Tyr could be very persuasive at times. She did wonder how much he had stashed away that he could afford to throw around six hundred crowns like Sparky tabs. "He possesses an extremely low frequency transmitter, undetectable by Dheran technology, or so he claims."
So he claims. "Not very reassuring." She discreetly wiped her still slightly soggy eyes with the back of her hand. If he turned out to be mistaken about the powers of his little machine, the Dherans would be ready and waiting for the Andromeda, if they didn't just capture and kill her and Tyr outright. She still wasn't sure why they wished them such bodily harm.
"In any case, it won't matter. When I use it to try and contact the Andromeda, I'm going to implant a virus into the system and report that sadly, I cannot find the ship, that it must be somehow cloaked."
In spite of herself, Beka raised an eyebrow. "Cloaked?" Cloaks were mainly the stuff of questionable science-fiction; {{A/N-I love ST (mostly DS9) as much as anybody, don't hurt me!!}} the Andromeda certainly had nothing of the sort.
Tyr laughed shortly, derisively. "Mehnin Corellidame doesn't know a biplane from a Commonwealth Heavy Cruiser. He wouldn't doubt me if I told him the Andromeda could jump between five dimensions before breakfast."
She snorted at the idea. Between dimensions indeed. She purposely kept her brain from reminding her of Jeger, Satrina and her Technicolor assassin squad, and their Houdini disappearing acts. There were just creepy. "So let me guess. You're going to inform him that the Maru has some.device capable of what? piercing the cloak?"
"Convenient, isn't it?"
Beka grinned wryly and found she could. Then, something hit her. "Your cousin!" At his lack of expression, which she correctly translated to complete and utter confusion and bewilderment, she elaborated. "Shaidyna! She's still on the Maru. She probably thinks something happened to me, to both of us."
Tyr shot her a glance. "She is not my cousin."
"Right. Well, it looks like you got everything under control. So, uh, what do I do?"
Her companion hesitated before answering. "Mehnin saw me bring you in unconscious, so he's going to believe that you will be.upset with me when you wake." Ha. Understatement of the freaking millennium. "I had planned to tranquilize you, with your permission this time, enough that you would remain conscious but clearly unthreatening." Beka was glad to hear the past tense. "However, it should suffice if I bind you convincingly. And," he gave her one of his mysterious half-smiles, "you can take out any.rancor you may have against me. No one will suspect if you prevaricate."
"Prevaricate, my ass," she muttered and thought she heard Tyr chuckle at that. "All right, tie me up. It won't be the first time a good-looking guy has.never mind." Let him chew on that that for a while. Judging by his face, he definitely didn't know what to make of it.
Half an hour later, Tyr left Beka, wrists bound behind her back with strips cut from the bottom of her shirt. The one she'd actually liked, and Tyr just had to go and mangle it all to hell. He returned with a tall man with dark red hair and green eyes, just a few inches shorter than himself, though of a narrower build. Beka glowered at the pair, but it took a little effort not to cast a lustful eye after the stranger. Very little, however, seeing as how she was tied up, and not with smooth silk ties. The filthy leer the man was directing at her helped with that too; lust she could handle as well as she could dish out, but this was a "Tarzan see Jane. Tarzan want to take Jane to back of hut and." Well, do something disgusting, obscene, and generally unpleasant to poor Jane.
Tyr approached her, gun trained at her head, and roughly yanked her to her feet by her wrists after bending to retrieve her faithful grey duffel she just now noticed lying under the bed. Her eyes glittered fiercely at him, but she kept silent. Oh no, she'd save the tongue-lashing for late, when it would be more effective. Or so she told herself; she mostly wanted to perfect opening for the perfect biting comeback, which she hoped might lead to a shouting match. She just felt like shouting.
"She's a rahght preddy gal, Tyr," the green-eyed man said in a slow drawl. "I don' suppose there'll be a tahme for a liddle somethin' before ya ransum her off." Her clothing should have been in tatters from the looks he gave her.
"You listen to me, I swear that I will kill you if so much as lay a finger on me. I don't care if the steroid case here shoots me or if I have to hunt you down across the galaxies on foot." He had to strain to catch her quiet words, but he recoiled sharply when they hit him.
Unfortunately, she was the one tied up here, and the smirk returned all too quickly to the man's face. He opened his mouth to reply when Tyr shot him a dark look. "There will be time for nothing if we do not hurry. If the mercenaries arrive here before we leave, the situation will grow very complicated, very fast." He linked an arm through Beka's, much to the confusion of his bartender friend until he explained that he did so to attract as little attention to their passing as possible; people wouldn't look remember what they saw as a happy couple with a friend nearly as much as two men escorting a captive woman.
"Rahgt good thinkin', Tyr." I'll right good thinkin' you, buddy, Beka thought menacingly.
The three of them left the bedroom through its only door, which led down a corridor and past another doorway to the bar, Tyr dragging her and the third of their party swaggering alongside, craning his neck back to watch Beka's back side as she half-walked, half-stumbled beside Tyr. Once, she managed to stick a foot out at the exact moment Tyr's acquaintance decided to get himself a good, long eyeful of Beka's rear end, and send him sprawling. He fell hard against the wall and buckled to his knees before he regained his footing. His head in particular made a satisfying sound as it met the cheap paneling violently.
Tyr jerked her forward mercilessly with a low mutter of, "Excellent strategy." The tone was angry, as was the wrench that almost pulled her arm out of its socket, which the bartender could hear and see, but he was too far away to understand what exactly that mutter consisted of. She smiled to herself.
They were halfway down the length of the room when a band of five men burst through the entrance. The men noticed the trio immediately, and at the sight of Beka, hands went to guns and daggers at hips. Without turning his head, Tyr shoved Beka into a chair and crossed the room quickly toward the armed group, speaking in low tones as soon as they could hear him. After a moment of indecision, of looking between the men and Beka, now out from under Tyr's eyes, Mehnin joined the other six. Beka wished she could catch the words exchanged, but by Tyr's calming gestures and the many glances at her, she could guess the identities of the men and the subject of conversation. She busied herself shifting her wrists in their binds, taking pressure off the raw patches and wondering how the plan was to change if, as she feared, the mercenaries were about to become a part of the deception. Their recognition of her crewmate and the many weapons she saw about their persons named them as soldiers for hire.
A few minutes later, Tyr returned and, with an uncharacteristic smile that was becoming rather more characteristic recently, pulled her up again. He spun her and retied the strips that held fast her hands, leaving one end in her right palm, so she could tug it when needed. Theoretically.
Their troupe sauntered toward the bar, and she saw a tiny slip of something glint in his hand as he deftly worked the communicator, then disappear into a slot near the top of the thing. The screen went grey, then black, and Tyr cursed and pounded the device. She would bet that he really had been a holodrama star in a past life.
The six men put their heads together and, after more fervent words, Tyr grabbed her elbow and ungently led her toward and out the door. Expressionless so as not to give any hint of his words to those watching, he whispered to he that two would guard her in the Maru. A veritable cloud of mercenaries surrounded them, all laughing about how they'd spend the money they earned from this job and how Tyr would spend his fleeing from the Dherans for the rest of his natural life. Occasionally, he popped off a sarcastic line or two, and the rest would erupt in guffaws. They sounded more than a little drunk to Beka's ears, but any mercenary intoxicated on the job would soon find himself without one. Probably those eight rounds of Tyr's.
To her silent delight, Tyr related off-hand the tripping-of-annoying- bartender incident, and to her surprise, the mercenaries found this extremely hilarious, slapping each other's backs and warning one another to watch their hands around her. Even better, the butt of the story slunk to the back of the coterie, sullenly stalking behind the others.
"It looks like restoring dead empires hasn't taken everything outta her yet!" one laughed. She felt oddly flattered by this, though all she could do was glare and mutter incomprehensible somethings.
"It's a good thing you ran into us, Tyr; the vixen might've taken you hostage. Look at 'er, staring straight ahead. Wheels are turnin' in that pretty head-you just know she's plannin' something."
In her sulkiest tone, she scoffed. "You think I'm going to find anyone who'll lay down a single crown for this Uber?" She was rewarded with more laughter and a severe jerk on her arm. Oh, they were eating this up.
Finally, the hulking pile of scrap metal affectionately called a ship came into view. Whilst the mercenaries made their smart-aleck jokes, much less appreciated now, at the poor Maru's expense, Tyr formed a circle in the air with his left fist, then twisted it and pulled it low. Beka crinkled her forehead at this but affected not to notice-some Kodiak symbol for Shaidyna perhaps, telling her to stay out of sight.
If it was that, it succeeded. The Nietzschean woman was nowhere to be seen when they boarded. He still couldn't crack the ship's codes, so he held his firearm to the small of Beka's back as she entered it into the pad near the main door, after a stern admonition that he look the other way. Bound or not, she could still be uncooperative for as long as she darn well pleased, and he couldn't very well extract the codes from a corpse. or so she hoped the mercenaries gathered when he averted his eyes. More jokes came of his not gaining access, and Beka reflected that now that she thought of it, many of the comedians she'd seen on casino drifts and the like could have been former mercenaries. An image of a Perseid coming at her with one of Tyr's titanic weapons made her giggle under her breath.
"You two with her. And be careful-this is her ship, and she knows it better than any of us." Why Tyr should suggest that to the mercenaries made little sense to Beka, but she supposed it would help convince them of his little ruse. And that's all it is, she told herself with barely a quaver.
The taller of the guards insisted that he didn't need to be reminded of that as he took Beka's wrists. He was gentler around tugging her this way and that than Tyr, quite a welcome relief. The Nietzschean waved them in the vague direction of the crew bunks, exactly as they had planned. It was also the only real option the pair had; they weren't about to risk her in the engine room, where she cause serious damage with very little movement if she positioned herself correctly.
When he let go Beka's arms, the man, who called himself Briyart, indicated that Beka should make herself comfortable on one of the low beds. She plopped down on the former Vexpag's bunk, and it occurred to her that she would regret shooting these men, as they seemed rather pleasant, as killers for hire went. To be fair, they were pleasant enough for anyone, and she had to remind herself firmly that they were mercenaries, pushed the fact that Tyr had been one out of her mind, and that they only reason that hadn't handed her to the Dherans was the prospect of a greater reward this way.
"If you guys have time later, would you mind fatally wounding Mehnin Corellidame for me? I'd pay you, but." She shrugged.
Briyart chuckled. "I'll be sorry to turn you over to the Dherans when this is all over, so yeah, I will. Consider it my apology." The other man snorted, not disagreeing.
She folded her hands under her head as she flopped back and painstakingly unknotted the fabric binding her so that neither appointed guard would notice. "If anyone owes me an apology-I mean, not that the guys who are about to toss me to a bunch of ruthless gangsters don't-it's that anabolic Uber in my cockpit. Do you have any idea how many times Beka Valentine's amazing piloting skills have saved that genetically-engineered butt?" Just as Briyart met his cohort's eye to share the joke, she reached behind the mattress, pulled out the gun wedged against the wall, and fired multiple times. The charge wasn't at its highest, but that many could be deadly. The second man drew his own weapon as Beka pushed herself off the bed and to the side, firing all the way. He dropped like a stone a meter or so from his companion, but this was far from over. More would be arriving in seconds to investigate the shots.
Beka swung herself up on to Harper's bunk and rummaged through the strange odds and frightening ends until she located her quarry, an anti-grav harness. Sotto voce, she ordered the Maru to gradually increase the artificial gravity levels on the corridor leading from Command to the stacked-up bunks laughingly referred to as the crew quarters so the AG field would be at two and a half times its norm. The ship complied, and just as she had anticipated, the two who came to check on the noise found themselves moving extremely sluggishly, as if through thick mud, while she leapt lightly from the bend and kicked guns from hands just now firing. Despite the increased gravity, they moved with surprising speed, though not enough to hamper Beka. Moving in a way that defied normal laws of physics, she clutched the bar just beneath Harper's bed that held the thing up and shot herself forward, knocking one of the two onto his back. The other reached her then, but she took advantage of his increased weight as she kneed him and rolled his mass over one shoulder so he actually flipped before landing square on his head. She winced at the clang it made on the metal floor.
As she restored the AG fields back to normal and removed the harness, she sprinted to Command and heard more shots. Just as expected, she entered into a scene not much
different than the one she had left. Blue eyes met brown, and she nodded, sliding into the familiar shape of the pilot's chair. Without a word, she started up the engine and lifted the Maru straight up into the sky. Not even Tyr could keep his balance against that, and Beka considered it only proper, as she hadn't found an opportunity to deliver that tongue-lashing after all.
Footsteps echoed behind them. "Oh, you have got to be kidding!" Beka yelled, bulldozing through ship traffic around the planet. "Come on, they were down." She counted no less than twenty different ship designs of those she cut off, grazed, and nearly killed. That could very possibly be a record of people she had pissed off in a five-minute span.
"Tyr, were those the kind of people you've associated with since the pride was destroyed?" Surprise and something close to disdain tinged the female voice Beka recognized with a sigh of relief as Shaidyna's. Ooh, family tension. She waited to see how Tyr would respond; she had no idea how Nietzscheans handled these domestic quarrels and was curious.
"I did what I had to do in order to survive. It was that or remain a slave in uranium mines." Beka would have surmised that he'd had many more career opportunities than that, but she kept her mouth shut. The World According to Seamus Harper, page either nine, paragraph two: never mess with Nietzschean family politics. Those were the worst families and the worst politics.
Then she saw the miniature fleet poised kilometers above her, all three hundred odd battler cruisers and combat relief ships. "This really is a lovely Kodiak moment," even she had to groan inwardly as she said it, "but we got some more pressing issues here. Three hundred and fifteen, to be exact. Tyr, you're on fire control and Shaidyna, you're in charge of sensors. Route every little thing you find, every screw those ships that we can exploit, to me and Tyr." She was too far removed from the traffic below to blend in innocently, but that hadn't really been her scheme anyway. "All right, one of the few advantages we have is we're in no danger from friendly fire. Unfriendly fire, yes, but we'll make do with what we have."
"I contacted the Andromeda about seven minutes ago under the pretense of a ransom demand. They should be here within the hour."
Beka took a deep breath. Great. At least there would be some chance of identifying their bodies. "And what ingenious method did you contrive to relay to our valorous captain that you hadn't actually betrayed us for a few thousand crowns?"
Thinking of friendly fire gave her an idea, though not one she particularly liked. "Before you answer that, I'm gonna turn a hard 180 and head right back down into that planet's atmosphere. I don't care what pattern you use, just keep those guys from shooting us in the back while we run!"
"Argosy Special Operations morse code, and.aye." Shrieks of weapons fire from her beloved bucket of bolts filled her ears as she pulled the Maru up and dove into deceptively mild fluffy white-and-blue of the planet below her. She hated to imagine what she was doing to her ship, but the Maru had held his own through worse. She continued down at insane speed until what remained of her sensors told her that the bulk of the small battalion had entered the planet's stratosphere, then veered sixty degrees port, grateful to see nothing but forests and hills-she hadn't wanted to involve civilians in this. Clouds scudded past the Maru, and she had only her natural sense of direction and her view window to keep her a little more than a mile above the surface and from crashing into any sudden mountain ranges.
One moment, snowy feathers brushed by the Maru's hull, and the next, dark grey enveloped everything. "Ah, and the universe deals us the Queen of Spades," Beka announced, anticipation, satisfaction, and a touch of nervousness mingled in her voice.
"Maybe I've been away from civilization too long, but I have no idea what any sort of monarchy has to do with a hurricane, especially when we're flying directly into one!" Shaidyna's shout was barely audible over the gusts and thunderous claps that rocked the Maru.
"It's from a card game, Hearts. They still play it at casino drifts once in a while." Beka explained her metaphor as she danced the vessel between continuous forks of blinding brilliance. "The Queen of Spades is worth the most points, and you don't want points," unless you planned to shoot the moon, but she wasn't about to go into a detailed description at this point. "If you get the Queen, you can pass it at the beginning, and a lot of people do. If you're good, fearless, and not betting too much money, you can hold onto it and lay it on your opponent when he least expects it. And believe me, they're not expecting this!" She pulled back as far as she could without leaving the storm cover, then plummeted the ship into the churning water at a velocity that would've cracked anything smaller like an egg. Hell, it might still crack the Maru.
"Captain Valentine, may I remind you that-"
"I will say this one time and one time only, Tyr. I'm driving this thing through a hurricane, and if you want to pass on those paranoid genes of yours, you're going to shut the f-"
"They're gone." The quiet of the other woman's voice caught Beka's attention as the shock of the words silenced her.
"They're gone? Are you sure you're not just reading the Maru's complete lack of functioning sensors?" If she had, Beka would be highly annoyed. Just when she'd had the chance to give Tyr the what-for.
"I'm sure. No, wait. There are a few left.a dozen or so, I can't tell.and they're hovering around the edge of the storm," as would any sane person. "We, on the other hand, have just entered the eye." Beka rolled her eyes and prepared the scoff to end all scoffs when she truly heard what was going on around them. Or in this case, what wasn't going on-absolute stillness reigned outside the Maru. Klaxons blared and sheets of light flashed around them, but right here.
Slowly, warily, she raised the Maru out of the ocean. She could plainly make out gales of wind flinging rain in every direction and roiling the waves until they seemed to boil by jagged bolts of lightning that illuminated the otherwise black gloom, but in an area not much larger than the Maru itself, a tiny space of calm had opened up. The sensors still online crackled with electricity, but Shaidyna was right. The Dherans were gone.