A/N Just want to say before you all read this, I do love Harper, adore Harper, and belong to the Harpies (Was there ever a Tyr/Beka couple faction? I know there was a Dylan/Beka faction. If so, why did I not belong to it??!) La la la, and this is a LOOONG chapter, cos it covers more than one day, as most of those following will be—except the last, cackle!
{{erm… for ff.net readers who have no idea what I'm talking about with all this 'faction' business, don't worry. It's just ExIsle madness}}
Ooh, and another thing. See, someone wants to read this fic when I'm finished, but that someone doesn't watch Andromeda. I already have a sort-of outline for a little cover sheet to explain all this… but how the flippity doo-dah do I explain slipstream? Keep in mind this is an astrophysics nut, so he'll probably mock it if it's not good. And is there anything you can think of I'll need to explain that I might not have thought of?
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Five through Twelve
And thence we delve!
"Hey Beka, there's, uh, something I need you to look at down here."
Beka raised an eyebrow at the words she heard through the comm system. "Harper wants me to interfere in his sacred domain?"
Without looking up from the sensors he was busy reading, Tyr replied with the tiniest touch of mirth in his voice. "Obviously, he is employing a subtle, highly-sophisticated code so as not to arouse my suspicions that he's calling you to speak about me."
And that short anecdote could really summarize the first six days of that first week together. Beka taught the ins and the outs of the Maru to Tyr, who really didn't out-captain, lord over, or even remind anybody of their genetic inferiority (except when making the argument to Harper that he stay on weapons, citing his enhanced reflexes and sharper vision). Harper avoided him whenever possible and, save the few times he decided to argue over something rather petty, usually just muttered sarcasm at Nietzschean. He disappeared for hour- and more –long stretches of time with Trance, and Beka noticed after a few days, the Maru seemed to be flying a little better, and the transitions to and from slipstream were noticeably easier. Trance usually accompanied Harper when he fled to the engine room, and Beka half-expected her to emerge an engineer herself by the time Tyr left the ship.
And then there was the tension between her and Tyr. Harper and Trance left them utterly alone nearly half of the average day, after all. She'd grown up on the Maru, but Tyr didn't quite have that luxury, and the days of teaching him her (the Maru's, not Beka's) workings filled the days surprisingly quickly. When Harper or Trance was nearby, Tyr was polite but mostly quiet and impersonal.
The very day after she'd told him her dread of "the conversation", he hardly waited for Trance and Harper to leave earshot before broaching that very subject. She was standing beside him at the weapons console, describing its various functions when he turned from the panel to gaze at her silently. She tried to continue her instruction, but it was impossible to ignore that presence focused so entirely on her. After only a minute or two, she stopped speaking and looked back at him expectantly. Well, she could wait all day for him to start, thank you very much.
"I know you do not wish to speak of… us, Rebecca, and as the captain of this vessel, you have the prerogative to keep silent on the subject. But I-" He paused and seemed to consider his next words. "I would very much like to know if you desire to pursue a…" he trailed off here, uncertain of what exactly they would have together.
"Um, a relationship? Yeah, because you see, among us kludges, a one-night stand definitely does not equal commitment for life." She shuddered at the implications of this notion. "That would mean I'd be stuck with… ugh."
Tyr glanced at the floor, and Beka could've sworn she saw a tiny grin before he looked up at her again. "I am well aware that human romantic relationships do not operate quite in the same manner as those of my people."
Beka rolled her eyes. Ha! Nietzschean romantic relationships, indeed. Hmm, he looks like he has good genes. Strap on the double helix and let's get it on! "I knight thee Sir Understatement of the Millenium. Listen, Tyr, normally I would…" She couldn't help her eyes traveling to his black leather bracers and exposed bone blades. "Well, I don't know what I normally would. But normally it wouldn't matter what I would or would not because your people generally see…relations with mine as little better than," she wrinkled her nose, "bestiality."
For a moment, Tyr refused to let his eyes meet her, and she would've bet the Maru she'd hit something dead-on. "Generally we do."
When he didn't elaborate, tell her how this case was different, she prompted him. "Generally we do, but… Or do you just have a thing for-"
"Rebecca, it's nothing like that." Disgust tinged his voice briefly. "I cannot say it is like. And if you do not desire to attempt a… relationship… I don't suppose it will matter what it is like."
Beka wanted to hit her head on a wall repeatedly. Quite possibly the most attractive, intelligent, (and judging by his affluence during the poker game) and probably richest man she'd ever met wanted a "relationship" with her—not even a one-night stand slut puppy!—and the universe just had to make him an Uber. Rev always claimed the universe possessed a sense of humor, but this was cruel and unusual.
"Hey boss, hop in the pilot's chair and try out your new and highly advanced, super genius improved, runnin' like a classic chrome Caddy engines." Harper's voice announced his arrival before his skinny frame could, and Beka decided it would probably be a good idea to put a little more distance between her newest crew member and his captain before Harper spotted them.
She vaulted into the pilot's chair and buckled herself in. "Hold onto something!" As she kicked the Maru from near zero to its maximum PSL's, Harper staggered into Command.
"I know you're eternally amazed and perpetually delighted by my almost too good to be true genius, but couldn't ya warn a guy?"
Beka whirled the Maru in a tight defensive pattern. She responded beautifully, as smoothly than she'd ever felt, and maybe even more so. "I did. Not too bad, Harper. I guess I'll keep you on board at least another... week or two."
Careful to give Tyr a wide berth, Harper made his way to his captain. "Funny, boss. Come on, this flying hunk of scrap would fall apart an hour after I left." He leaned in close enough for Beka to smell the sickeningly sweet aroma of Sparky Cola, and sure enough, she saw a damp spot on his tropical blob tee shirt. "Hey, Beka," he whispered. She stifled a giggle; clandestine wasn't really Harper's strong suit. "How do we know the Uber wasn't hired by the Chichin to off us when the job's done? Huh? How can we trust him? How do we know he's not-"
"Harper." She flushed as she realized Tyr was almost surely hearing every word they whispered secretively. "First of all, ease up with the racial slurs, all right? He's crew at the moment, and only I am allowed to call anyone a kludge or an Uber or a whatever and only out of purest affection. Secondly…" She bit her lip and very expressively looked down at her console. Quickly, she brought up a local courier and addressed a message to the Wayist colony at Jehennah. Rev, our horrid beyond words employer saddled us with a Nietzschean named Tyr Anasazi, says he's Kodiak Pride. What do you got on him? If you'd been around to growl and inspire terror, I know that Chichin would've thought twice about messing with my crew, but as Harper says, life's a beach, then you dive. Take care of yourself and get back soon, all right?"
~Beka
Harper stole a glance back at Tyr. "Thanks boss." He raised his voice ostentatiously. "Well, I better get back to… stuff before Trance breaks… stuff."
Good one Harper, very witty. No one suspected a thing.
Tyr didn't bring up the subject of a relationship again that day, and Beka worked the rest of the day showing him the endearing quirks and tics of the Maru. Much to her amazement, they worked together quite easily. Very few awkward moments, all told. Or maybe it was just that he learned quickly and didn't insult her baby. When Beka announced quitting time, she decreed that the tomorrow, they would slip to approximately the middle of nowhere and practice firing and defensive maneuvers.
As Trance and Harper stayed in the cockpit the next two days while they all practiced together, Tyr didn't find an opportunity to speak privately with Beka again until their third day in that desolate region of space. That morning, Beka had noticed a strange and very worrisome stickiness when she flew the Maru above seven PSL's.
"Feel that, Harper?" As she sped up and attempted to execute a 180° spin, a sensation like wading through honey washed over the Maru. "Make it go away. Now."
Harper enthusiastically aye-ayed and only took the time to grab Trance's hand before bounding off to check what was malfunctioning in the Maru's innards. The last couple of days had been rather stressful for him, not so much because he was working in close quarters with a Nietzschean but because he really had nothing negative to say about said Nietzschean. Beka guessed her engineer would've found the whole situation much easier if Tyr had called him kludge every half hour predictably and vied with Beka for authority and the final say-so. Tyr was a little taciturn, but Harper could hardly complain about a quiet Nietzschean. Additionally, it couldn't help that Tyr caught on to his post very quickly, so no one had any real excuse to harbor ill feelings or grouse about him. Beka only wondered what Harper confided to Trance while they were secluded in the Maru's loud, hot inner sanctums.
Harper had left now nearly an hour ago, and Beka was beginning to make bets with herself as to when Tyr would continue their conversation from a few days ago. She was starting to lose those wagers when he called her name with a fair note of urgency in his smooth baritone. "Rebecca-" She closed her eyes for a moment and readied herself. "-are you looking at your long-ranger sensor readings? If not, I highly recommend that you do so."
She blinked. "Oh, right." She couldn't help squirming around in her chair to steal a glimpse at him. His head was bent over his console, and his fingers danced on the panel. She shrugged. "Everything's looking peachy… except here." She touched the far bottom left corner of her screen. "Oh, lovely. And what is this?" Hurriedly, she tried to magnify and clarify the readings, but it was at the very edge of her most powerful sensor ranger. She switched on the comm system. "Harper, got another job for you." Ignoring his protests and comparisons of her to a sadistic slave-driver, she spoke right over him. "As soon as you're finished correcting our little flying through molasses problem, I want you to up the power on our long-range sensors. I could've sworn we passed the 'Now Entering Absolute Middle of Nowhere' sign, but we've got company."
Tyr waited until she turned the comm off, then let the good news just keep on coming. "As far as I can tell, no slip points have been opened in the area since we arrived."
"So our friend here…" She did a double-take at her sensors and corrected herself. "uh, make that friends here have been hangin' around a while. If I were Harper, I'd be screaming bloody conspiracy, but we didn't even know we were coming until an hour before we did." She wasn't about to label the ships hostile simply because of an odd coincidence, but she was curious as to what had brought them there.
Suddenly, her console beeped, and a clear picture of the unknown ships jumped into view. Beka groaned. Two large, black ships that looked roughly like two crossed ovals and several more like flat round disks with a wedge cut out glittered in the cold starlight.
Harper's voice echoed through Command. "Oh man, are you guys seein' this? We got a baker's dozen of Nietzscheans here, and they're heading straight towards us. I suggest, uh, strategic withdrawal before we-"
"They're not Nietzschean." Tyr cut Harper off as information flooded his console. He elaborated at Harper's 'huh?'. "They're Nietzschean ships," a hint of impatience crept into his voice, "but they're as Nietzschean as… a Nightsider." Beka didn't quite suppress a snort, and she was very well aware that Tyr paused in his soliloquy to eye her drily. "It's a common ploy, especially in areas sparsely populated by Nietzscheans, where people have less experiences with them. The model is over fifty years old, Altreus Pride, but several parts have been upgraded, and those replacements are consistently current T'dalimar technology."
Disbelief laced Harper's reply. "Talimar? Never heard of 'em."
Tightly-controlled chagrin became more evident as Tyr elucidated the mysterious situation in which the Maru's crew found themselves. "You're neither a Chichin narcotics kingpin nor a Nietzschean who had been blamed for T'dalimar attacks, so I wouldn't expect you to recognize the name. Chichins and Ogami are notorious for their violent… disagreements-"
"Sir Understatment strikes again," Beka muttered. Chichins and Ogami had caused no less than fifty extremely bloody conflicts since the Fall, and many of those had come to involve people with originally not the least interest in the altercation.
Harper broke in, still speaking over the comm. "That much I knew before I left Earth." He continued but reluctantly. "Thanks to my mind-boggling feat of sensor magnification, you can see that he may be on to something. Those ships are Nietzschean, all right, but with the complete lack of background… anything, those energy signature do not come up kosher."
Trance piped up, the first time Beka had heard her voice since she'd descended into the Maru's engine room with Harper. "Tyr's right. The T'dalimar are almost completely unknown right now, but they are very bad people." Almost unknown right now? Beka shifted in her seat and saw Tyr looking at her with the questions she was sure reflected in her own eyes. "I don't know why they're here, but if they are, we definitely should not be."
Tyr leaned over his console and addressed Beka without activating the comm. "The girl is right. The T'dalimar perpetuate nothing but blood and chaos for those near them, whether they are targets or merely unfortunate bystanders. Virtually no one knows of their existence because they've made a great and extremely thorough effort to ensure that ignorance. I know of them through various offenses of theirs laid at the feet of myself and other Nietzscheans. We enjoy receiving the credit for daring missions of unparalleled violence only when we've actually carried out the missions ourselves. I took it upon myself to discover the identity of those mysterious assassins, and it nearly cost me my life."
Beka almost choked. "Assassins?! Gee, you added that like a footnote or something. 'Oh, there are these T'dalimar, right? and no one's ever heard of them, they use Nietzschean ships, really prefer to remain unheard of, oh and by the way, their sole purpose in life is to kill people for money'?!"
Tyr looked a little confused at her tirade. "The T'dalimar are to the Chichins what the Ogami are to the rest of the Known Worlds. Certainly they're assassins."
Something that had been nagging at the back of her mind burst into Beka's conscious at Tyr's words. She grabbed her piloting controls and switched on the comm long enough to announce an immediate jump into slipstream. The Maru responded a little sluggishly, but for the most part, Beka's reflexes compensated sufficiently. She barely felt the thrill she usually did when slipping, driven by suspicions of betrayal by their employer and images of shadowy assassins lurking just beyond sensor range. They emerged near Albuquerque Drift, the farthest place she could think of from those dark stretches of endless nothing. Ships exploded in and out of slipstream all around her, the drift sparkled garishly, and if she turned on her general transmission channel, Beka knew she'd hear voices crackling non-stop over one another.
Harper dashed up to Command as soon as he recognized the drift they approached. "Aww Beka, you remembered my birthday. Now how about a little Christmas bonus so Trance and me can clean out this joint?"
"It's not your birthday, and whatever a Christmas bonus is, you're not getting one. We're here because no one who doesn't want to be seen comes to Albuquerque." That would make a snappy motto. She unstrapped her safety belts and faced her shortest crewmate. "And you're not stepping foot in a casino, bar, or brothel until you've fixed the Maru. If she responds like that the next time we encounter less-than-friendlies, I swear I'll give you to them myself. I'll pay them to take you." She hadn't finished before Harper disappeared into the Maru's dark, dirty central mechanical areas.
"Trance, wait a sec." The purple alien had come up with Harper, and she was just turning to leave when Beka stopped her.
It seemed that she faced Beka hesitantly, not fully meeting Beka's crystal blue eyes and continuing to edge toward the corridor that led out of Command. "W-what is it, Beka?"
No, that wasn't suspicious at all. "How do you know about the T'dalimar?" Her tone wasn't accusatory but curious and a little surprised.
Tyr rested his chin in his palm. "I would very much like to hear this myself."
Beka took her eyes from Trance to raise an eyebrow at Tyr. "It's all right if you don't want to say, Trance. I just think that anything we know about these guys might help tell us why we saw them."
Trance looked from Tyr to Beka, who cursed under her breath at the Nietzschean. He had to turn on the patented Uber Intimidation© face just at that moment. "Well, you know what I used to do before I met you guys?
Beka nodded. "You were a- you found things people wanted and gave them to the people who wanted them."
Trance smiled. "Exactly. Anyway, I was finding things for a Chichin once, but the problem was that the things belonged to a very powerful Diamond Than who didn't want to sell them. One day, the Chichin went off to meet one of the T'dalimar, and I might've accidentally forgot where my room on the drift was, so I went back to the ship just as he was about to leave. He didn't know I was on board, and I heard him talking to a very mean-sounding person, and he said he would pay him to make sure he got the things he wanted."
Tyr looked the most stunned Beka had seen him yet. "I've never believed the universe cared whether any one of us lives or dies, but for you to survive that..." He shook his head. "You're very lucky." He might as well have stated flat-out that he thought her story was a load of... unpleasantness.
Beka grinned. "Yeah, well, she's my lucky charm," as if that explained everything. "You wouldn't believe how she saved Harper's life a couple of months ago." She and Tyr locked gazes for a moment, then he shrugged minutely.
"If I can survive the Drago-Kazov invasion and extermination of my home world and a mine collapsing on my head hundreds of meters underground, perhaps the purple girl can live through something entire colonies have died for witnessing."
Beka stood up from her chair and stalked toward Tyr until they were face-to-face. "Hey. Her name is Trance. Got it?" When he said nothing, she turned her head to glance at her tailed crewmate... but Trance was gone. She temporarily forgot her irritation. "Trance?" She made a mental note to talk to the girl later. "You pull that again, Tyr, and I don't care if the T'dalimar, Ogami, and Drago-Kazov demand otherwise, I iwill/i leave you at the first port I can find. And that's if you catch me on a good day." She started to spin on her heel and return to her chair, but a warm hand closed on her arm.
"Rebecca." She didn't even try to pull away. "I apologize, and I will apologize to her as well if you wish."
Beka massaged her neck with her free hand. "You can apologize all day long, Tyr, and although it wouldn't hurt, that's not what I want. You have to trust to I will deal with my crew the best was I can and that if they weren't the best people I know, they wouldn't be here."
He gave her a tiny smile and released her arm. "Spoken like every worthy captain I have ever known. I can see that my apology isn't what you're looking for, but will you accept it?"
As if she had a choice, with those deep brown eyes staring inside her like that. "Yeah, sure." She smiled back. "You know, a little intimidation might speed Harper up on his repairs something." She slid back into her the pilot's chair and requested a place to land. "So why do the Ogami despise Chichins anyway? I mean, besides the reasons everybody else does."
"I believe it has to do with an ingrained disgust for a species that eats its own young."
Beka grimaced. "Then I bet Nietzschean's aren't too buddy-buddy with them, either?"
"You bet correctly."
Weaving between ships flying hither and thither, Beka's mind wasn't on the conversation, or she might've thought to ask why Tyr had chosen to work for one. The space traffic controller ordered her to wait and circle for three hours, and she was concentrating mostly on how to avoid that. "Tyr, do you really think it's fair to make us wait three hours after we've come all this way?"
"Most assuredly not."
"Right." She sent a transmission to the man who'd just asked her to wait. "Gee, that's great. I need some time to practice the latest photon scattering armament that nice Nightsider sold me—and so cheaply too! Ready for-"
A burst of static interrupted her. "Hey, look at this! A spot just opened up, Captain Valentine. You're clear to land in hanger J, dock A-18."
Beka maneuvered the Maru to the specified location. "Funny how that works? Mention that you want to try out anything sold cheap by Nightsider, and they'll practically pay you to land somewhere."
Tyr left the weapons console to stand next to her. "I believe that sort of… lateral thinking is one area in which your people far exceed mine."
"That and air hockey." He looked at her incredulously. "You don't believe me, huh? Shake on twenty thrones, and I'll prove it to ya."
Tyr uncrossed his arms, leaned on the armrest of Beka's seat, and shook her right hand.
Harper magically appeared at her other side as she and Tyr make their wager. "Bettin' against Beka in air hockey? She's been banned from tournaments cos some people think she's a ringer or somethin'." He paused for dramatic effect. "Nietzscheans ban her from tournaments."
Beka shrugged nonchalantly when Tyr turned his attention back to her, eyebrows raised in question. She grinned a superbly wicked grin. "Maybe I am an air hockey ringer in my free time, but you already shook on it."
To be continued in… The Air Hockey Interlude