Author's Note—Just to remind you all, this is still Day Four. The next bit I post after this will be Day 5 (and beyond).

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"A Nietzschean? On our ship? For two months? And what, you're expecting us to survive this?"


Beka, Trance, and Harper were hauling their luggage through Tanchico's corridors, arguing and hoping Beka remembered where she'd parked the Maru. "Yes, yes, yes, and I will kill him if we don't." How Beka could kill someone if she herself were dead no one decided to question. If she were determined enough, all three knew she would find a way.


Trance chirped that she was sure everything would turn our for the best.


Harper eyed her askance. "Well, maybe. But come on, boss, you know he's gonna be lording over us all the time, reminding us of our genetic inferiority and generally tryin' to tell us what to do."


Beka sighed and watched carefully for pickpockets in the shadows. "Listen, Harper, you know I'm not going to take anyone trying to out-captain the captain." She gave the short blond a quick smile. "Come on, you know only I'm allowed to yell at you guys." She turned forward again, leading the other two to the dock in which she thought she'd left the Maru. "Besides, Harper, technically, you're the only kludge here." To be perfectly accurate, a kludge wasn't merely a human; in Common slang, the word referred only to those humans without the slightest bit of genetic tinkering in their sytems--somewhere between five and ten percent of the entire human population


"Aw, you got me right here, boss." Harper thumped the area above his heart and winced. "Have I ever told you you're a cruel, cruel mistress?"


"Gee, Harper, do you really mean it? I do try my best." As she was in the lead, she couldn't positively say, but she was sure her male crewmate was currently glaring a hole through her. "Hey, Trance, do you think I stand a chance of getting a third 'cruel' in there anytime soon, or am I going to have to step it up a notch?"


She stopped in front of a plain, grey door and looked down the corridor both ways. An identical view of identical grey doors presented itself either way she turned her head. "Um, I think this is it." With a shrug, she tapped the keypad on one side of the door, and it slid open. An encouraging sign this was.


She jumped and automatically drew her weapon when she became aware of another presence in the room besides their own. As her gauss pistol whistled its distinctive firing-up whine, Tyr stepped silently out of the shadows around the Maru. She exhaled the breath she hadn't known she held, both at seeing her ship and seeing that it wasn't being stolen or looted. "You know, if I fall over dead of a heart attack, you're gonna be out of a job, Tyr." As relief washed over her, she re-sheathed her gun. "Speaking of falling over dead, Tyr, how the hell did you get in here? That docking code I was assured would be kept completely confidential."


Tyr looked taken aback. "The Chichin informed me of the passcode," he explained, puzzlement at her ire evident, "I assumed you'd given it to him, although I did question the wisdom of your doing so."


Beka could almost feel the tension in the air as Harper fought to restrain himself from launching into a fierce cross-examination of the Nietzschean. She imagined if she glanced at him, she'd see his fists tightly curled and jaw clenched in a Herculean effort to keep his silence. "I completely agree with you on that last part, at least. In fact, I would've thought seriously about canceling my part in the job, knowing the astounding idiocy of its leader." A ghost of a smile flitted over Tyr's features, suggesting (to Beka, at least) that he had entertained very similar ideas not so long ago.


She continued to study him for a few moments, then sighed and gave up. "I suppose I could mentally run through the many scenarios in which you're lying through your teeth and then aloud accuse of you of one or all of them, but somehow, I think you'd have an answer ready for whatever I could say." Suddenly, she relented, smiling at the unexpected and frankly uninvited traveling companion thrust upon her just a few hours ago. "All right, I'm not gonna waste your or my time bawling you out, and honestly, I'm not sure I'd dare to." Here she even laughed a little. She strode over the Maru, deactivated the security no one had yet passed without her. Harper always claimed he could if he wanted to but simply chose not to, out of a regard for his captain and especially his own life.


"Toss your stuff on one of the empty bunks and then join the rest of us in Command."


Harper snorted and muttered, "The area laughably known as."


Beka swatted him upside the head. "And under no circumstances let Harper show you what he keeps under his pillow."


Trance said in a rather stage whisper to Tyr that Beka had given her the same warning and that she still didn't know what he had stowed away. He glanced at her and wondered at the familiarity with which she addressed him.


Beka very closely watched for Tyr's reaction to her ship. Harper could occasionally get away with his eternally witty cracks about her Maru only because (and she wouldn't admit this under torture), he probably was the sole reason she was a single piece, let alone flew and managed to limp away from firefights with Nietzschean slavers. Tyr did seem a bit disbelieving at the cramped quarters and patched-up quality of his surroundings, but much to his credit, he didn't comment on either of these.


When all four had gathered in the cockpit, Beka declared the since Tyr looked like the kind of guy who knew his guns almost as well as she knew the slipstream, he could take the weapons console. That had been Vexpeg's old post, and she had to swallow a small lump in her throat at assigning it to someone else. She told herself severely that it would free up Harper, allowing him to focus on repairing and squeezing the last mile out of engines, life support, and firepower. The mudfoot could handle himself on weapons, no doubt about it, but he did tend to become… enthusiastic and lose his objectivity.


Tyr surveyed the panels and buttons he would be expected to operate without hesitation. "I do hope you aren't planning a daring raid into particularly hostile territory tonight."


Beka laughed at his confusion. "Oh, no. Just a little jaunt into Drago-Kazov territory to steal the bones of Drago Museveni, de-pants the Alpha, and sell both bones and pants to the ever-honest and trustworthy Jaguar Pride."


It took a very great effort of will for Tyr not to stare slack-jawed at her. Of course it was purely coincidental that she had mentioned the bones of the Nietzschean progenitor, the greatest treasure of his people, stolen from his own pride by the Dragans, who had gone on to brutally annihilate the Kodiaks. This long after that decimation, the memory of watching Dragan underlings slay his mother didn't rise before his eyes whenever he thought of his Pride or the Drago-Kazov, but the blonde captain's words filled him with an oddly powerful sense of foreboding.


Irritated with himself, he shook off his distress. "So long as you're not ambitious."


Strapped to her pilot's chair, Beka snorted and requested permission to leave the hangar (or more accurately, demanded that the doors open so she could blow this popsicle stand in two nanoseconds before she blasted her way out). When the Maru had returned to open space, Beka set her controls to auto-pilot and released the safety belts holding her in place. "I used to be civil to them, but that only led to hour-long waits for them to decide that maybe I did want to leave after all." She stretched and swiveled in her chair. "Harper, check all systems, primary and secondary, and make sure we're not going to fall apart at the seams anytime too soon. Trance, I want you to go with him. I am making a solemn vow that one day you will be able to fix this ship without blowing out a single lightbulb." Trance looked so worried by this that Beka stood and patted her on the shoulder. "But I'm not in any kind of rush."


This left her alone with Tyr, something she hadn't foreseen and now wished she had. She supposed she couldn't call Trance back up just so she'd have someone else in the room, not after what she'd just told the girl. O-kay. "So, Tyr, uh, how about that weather?"


"Captain Valentine-"


"Beka."


"Beka, you know just as well as I that there is no weather out here." All right, so it was going to be like this.


"Blah, blah, blah, take everything so literally. Tell me, did you really have no idea that the horrible creature was going to assign you to work with me?" Well, she'd never really been one to beat around the bush, anyway.


Tyr finally looked up from his console. "I truly had no suspicion it was you for whom he had hired me until he began speaking about you, which I've already explained."


And of course it was a perfectly reasonable explanation. "All right, all right, I'll stop harassing you." She grinned. "I know we should probably, you know, talk about…stuff now that we're going to be living in awfully close quarters, but those kind of talks have never really been my thing. I remember when Dad tried to have the, uh, birds and bees conversation with me. Not a success." She laughed and winced a little at the memory. "Anyway, how about I give you a tour of your luxury condo for the next two months? It'll take all of, oh, five minutes, but that's five minutes more we don't have to talk about… something else."


Tyr couldn't completely hide a smile at her admission of what would very likely become an awkward situation in the near future. "Very well, Captain Valentine, I await your lead."


She sighed (and realized she was doing quite a bit of that lately). "Will it never end? The Chichin calls me Captain," at least, in her ideal world he did—though in her ideal world, Chichins had never evolved beyond the amoeba stage, "and my crew calls me Beka. Or boss."