First big thank you to Iloveharper-he'smine! That review made my day. My ego is now a bit bigger, it's the size of a pea now ;^) so.... THANK YOU!!

Now onto the story....

Warning: This is a very gruesome and carnage filled chapter. You have been warned.

Chapter 9

The world flew past Harper as he raced down the corridors towards the engine room. Luckily the Pythos felt unthreatened and were taking their sweet time filing into the ship. The corridors were still mostly empty except for the few times Harper had heard voices echoing through the corridors. At each noise he stopped dead in his tracks and quickly changed his route to avoid anyone. Times like this made him extremely happy that he knew the ship like the back of his hand. Finally, gasping for breath, he reached the main doors to the engine room.

The doors slid open to revile a blood covered grated floor. His blood. Quick flashes of Tyr breaking his nose, Dylan cracking a rib, and Trance laughing in his ear consumed Harper's full attention for a second. A rising sense of fear brought him back to the present. The tiny soft hairs on the back of his neck were saluting the waves of paranoia that raged through him. His nervous eyes scanned the empty engine room as his fearful head keep whipping around searching for the unseen enemy - his friends, the Pytho's, the imaginary and real monsters from his childhood nightmares. Soon, reason pushed the paranoia down and his heart slowed to a normal rate. "Calm down, there's no one here," he whispered to himself reassuringly. He gave a last calming glance around the dimly lit room. His eye stopped on the red floor again. More quick flashes. NO! he demanded from his mind. Again, he pushed the living nightmares back, back into the small rusty box in his mind. The box that was getting rather full and restless after today. His mental self was jumping up and down on the lid to get it to close.

With his composure regained, his eyes left the haunting pool of memories and locked onto the engines. He quickly strode over to it and started working. Within a few minutes he had sabotaged both the impulse and slipstream engines by taking one small necessary component from each. He received a nasty little shock and burn to his good hand when he shut down the impulse engines which were running at the time. He sucked his burned figures briefly before he place the small delicate devices in his bag. The Pythos would get nowhere without those two components. Even Harper couldn't build them from scratch and they were some of the more expensive bits to replace. Harper knew his engines.

The second reason he came to the engine room now grabbed his attention. Andromeda's AI. He practically skipped over to one of the computer consoles in the room. While he hated coming off Buzz, he loved being on it. It was like having Sparky flowing through his veins. His right hand danced over the console punching up command after command. Finally the hand stopped dancing but still twitched nervously. He had his answer on how bad the AI program was messed up. Luckily it was reparable but it would take time, time he didn't have right now. His head dropped as a deep breath left his lungs. "Damnit Rommie, I could really use you right now."

The self-pity was rudely interrupted by the sound of the doors hissing open. With all the fear and memories that engulfed him when he entered, he had forgotten to secure the doors. "Shit, great going genius", he hissed to himself before he spun around to see who his visitors were.

It turned out he didn't like his visitors. They were not the twenty hot babes he had wished for, instead they were twenty large, mean Pythos. Mixed expressions crossed their faces. A few were shocked, some had pure rage in their eyes and the rest had that evil grin and blood-lust eyes that Harper had come to know so well.

The shiver of fear that was making it's way up his back meet the ragging anger that was racing down his neck. The anger shoved the fear all the way down to Harper's boots.

"Hiya guys, are you all here for the tour? Well sorry to say, you just missed it, but lucky for you our next one starts in half an hour," he spit out only as Harper could. The words were to occupy the Pythos as he was slowing reaching into his bomb laden bag. "If you would just take a seat, there are some magazines to read, and some brochures to look through." His hand was fingering each bomb, searching for just the right one. He found it. "And our tour guide will be back....shortly?" His speech was cut short by the sound of twenty guns powering up.

"Shut up kludge," the largest, dumbest looking one said. In actuality they all looked the same, big, huge forehead, clouded over eyes.

"What!? But your tour, well I guess I can give you your money back if you're not satisfied," The bomb was now firmly griped in his hand which was still hidden in the bag.

With each word Harper spewed out, you could see the anger rise in the group of Pythos. The head thug stepped forward, his gun never wavering from it's target, Harper's forehead. He activated his communication badge. "Galaver, I think we found what stopped the engines. Did you happen to lose a very talkative and annoying kludge by any chance?"

"What?" came a stoically shocked voice over the comms, if that combinations is at all possible.

If you have ever notice when people talk over communication devices they tend to look up, as if the air is talking to them, well Harper had. "Just what I said Galaver, a kludge, blond, bloody, short, annoying as hel..." At the word "short", Harper had activated the bomb in the bag. By the word "annoying", he had the bomb out of the bag, and by the word "as", the bomb was rolling across the bloody floor. By "hell", the small ball shaped bomb had hit the speaker's boot.

"Sorry you didn't get to see our tour," Harper said as he quickly dived behind one of the larger pieces of equipment. A nano-second later all he heard was "Shi---KA BOOM!!", followed by various gushy organs, flesh, bones and liquid hitting the walls and each other. Soon it was raining. Blood showered onto Harper's smiling face, a spleen bounced off his shoulder, a small bit of gray matter landed in his hair, pushing down some of his spikes. He picked out the slimy tissue and fixed his spikes. He found out that getting hit in the head by part of a femur kinda hurt. Once the storm of body parts ended, he peaked out from behind his hiding place.

The walls, ceiling and floors were coated in Pytho. "Hmm, nice wall paper, I think I like it, but the new floor covering has to go," Harper said to himself while taking in the carnage. His bomb had worked perfectly. It was a Harper special called a Soft Bomb which was made to only obliterate flesh and bones. No damage to machinery or other metal objects would occur. Perfect for an engine room battle.

Harper strolled over to the open doors. His feet sunk into the intestines of one of the Pythos as a small piece of a kidney fell from the organ coated ceiling onto his shoulder. Harper picked it off and flipped the bloody piece of organ over in his hand, examining it.

A small smile crept into is still bruised face. "Oh yeah, this is gonna be fun," he said with glee as he tossed the meaty soft kidney bit over his shoulder.

TBC...