CHAPTER NINETEEN ~ The Good Fight

"All people have it in them change, and often choose to at the strangest moments."

Admiral Trellek Baird

CY 9568

^~*~^"Andromeda?" Harper called cautiously. The urgency of her last message worried him.

"Could they be any more obvious?" Lane said sarcastically. "It's a trick!"

Harper wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of anything anymore. "Rommie? You there?" he called. There was no reply. He stopped the ship and prepared to make a full 180.

"What are you crazy? They're waiting for you back there with a sedative and a straight jacket!" Lane insisted.

Though Harper didn't want to even consider that Lane was telling the truth, a doubt was once again cast upon his mind.

"You don't owe them anything," Lane insisted. Harper was still battling with his own paranoia. "Just walk away."

But he couldn't. Even after everything Lane had told him, he still found himself caring about the people he'd come to call his friends, his family. Lane couldn't be more wrong; he owed them everything, and he wasn't about to abandon them when they needed his help. If he had been honest with them from the beginning, he knew now they would have helped him. How could he have thought otherwise? He swung the Maru around and started back.

^~*~^

"Order your crew to return to their quarters and stay there," Adonai ordered. As he had hoped, the Captain and his friends recognised a highly dangerous weapon when they saw one, and Atrican semi-automatic pulse guns were some of the most dangerous. The guns fired highly charged plasma streams that could burn through skin and bone so quickly the weapons were banned from the Commonwealth because of their cruel nature.

"Who are you?" Dylan demanded. He didn't take too kindly to people who disabled his ship and held him at gunpoint without even introducing themselves.

"Do as he says," Nalan, another of the group, warned.

Dylan decided it was best to co-operate for now. He didn't want those weapons to go off any time soon. "Shipwide, this is Captain Hunt. All crew return to quarters. Hunt out."

"Syla, Elrik, disarm our friends please," Adonai directed.

"I'm guessing you're not crewman Gold," Dylan said sarcastically when Syla took his force lance from him.

"She is Syla. That is Nalan and Elrik. I am Adonai, and you would be a smart man to listen to me and do as I say."

"What do you want?" Beka asked. She was not in the mood to be a hostage right now. She wondered if Harper had left the ship yet, and cursed herself for thinking this could have been something to do with him in the first place.

"All in good time," Adonai replied. "All in good time."

^~*~^

Harper found himself once again onboard Andromeda. The back-up generator lit the room with a dim blue glow.

"Rommie? Beka, Trance, anyone?"

The com was completely dead.

"I'm telling you, it's a trap," Lane enforced.

Harper returned to the Maru, but did not leave. Instead he came out with a portable generator, which he hooked up to the control panel by the door. The doubt in his mind wouldn't allow him to venture outside without checking the corridor first. He went to the nearest control panel and keyed in a few commands to bring the monitors for the corridor deck up. He didn't like what he saw - the images were distorted beyond recognition.

"I told you," Lane said.

Harper had to agree it seemed suspicious. His fingers glided across the panel again to find that all the monitors showed the same scrambled pictures. It was definitely not normal.

"Just get in the ship and leave," Lane urged.

"Why would they scramble the monitors? Why not just turn them off?" Harper challenged. Lane had no retort, which told him everything he needed to know - the others were indeed in serious trouble.

^~*~^

Adonai never took his eyes from Dylan. He knew he would have to keep his guard up at all times. "Elrik, do you have access yet?" he asked.

Elrik was at one of the consoles, keying in commands. "Almost....got it. All personnel quarters and essential work areas are locked down. No-one can get in or out."

"Scan the rest of the ship for anyone not in their rooms."

Adonai saw Tyr eyeing up their expensive weaponry. "We spent a lot of time and money looking for these weapons," he boasted. "I'm glad you're impressed."

"I hope you're impressed when I take it from you and burn a hole through your skull," Tyr replied.

"Ah, a quick temper. I expect nothing less from a Nietzschean."

Dylan's exterior remained composed but his military mind was working overtime trying to figure out every angle of the situation, so he could think of a way out of it.

^~*~^

Coms were down and so were practically all of the systems that could tell Harper what was going on. This was all far too elaborate to be a scheme to keep him here, but he still needed to fight the part of him that just wanted to jump in the Maru and leave.

Command was probably the place it was all going down, but without knowing what 'it' was, he couldn't do anything on his own. He'd need help and the only person who could give it to him was lying unconscious in the machine shop, where he had left her.

Without knowing who was watching, he would need to move through the ship without being detected. After getting his spare sensor mask from his secret stash of gadgets on the Maru, he left the hangar deck and headed to the machine shop.

^~*~^

"There was one sensor reading from someone not locked in, but it just disappeared," Elrik reported.

Dylan suspected the readings were from Trance masking her sensor reading somehow. She'd know something was wrong. During a crisis the last place Dylan would want his crew was in their quarters.

"It's probably a glitch," Dylan covered. "We get those when someone sets off bombs in the engine room. That is what you did, isn't it?"

"An EM bomb, well done Captain," Adonai replied. "Nalan, go and search the last place you saw the reading. Keep your guard up."

Nalan left the room as ordered. Tyr noted that they were now evenly matched.

"And just why exactly did you sabotage my ship?"

"Do you even need to ask? This ship should never have left Ostara!" Adonai shouted angrily, then regained his composure. "Now it's time to rectify that mistake."

^~*~^

Harper walked through the dimly lit corridors with his sidearm at the ready, just in case. All the while Lane tried to get him to return to the Maru and take off. Harper ignored her, and finally reached machine shop, only to find it locked down. Not a problem for the engineer, who knew every command and sub-command that ran the ship. He keyed in a few lengthy code combinations before the door opened.

Dylan and Tyr must have put Rommie on the work table, which is where she lay. The damage to her back was minimal. It was the electric shock that probably did the harm. Cringing at the pain he must have caused her, he set about the repairs.

^~*~^

Trance didn't like the dark one bit. No-one would answer her calls, she couldn't find out what was going on from the monitors and when she tried to leave med-deck she found herself locked in. This was very very bad, especially since she had returned to med-deck to find Harper gone. In all the commotion, both Beka and Dylan had neglected to inform Trance of Harper's decision to leave. She wasn't even sure how he had found the strength to leave the room, but her best guess was that the drugs were still active, and providing him with energy. But when they wore off, it would most definitely be fatal. Was he to blame for locking down the med-deck? She wouldn't put it past him, not after what he did to Rommie.

She desperately wanted to help, but decided rather than panic and speculate, the best thing she could do was wait, and carried on working on the treatment.

^~*~^

The sweat dripped from Harper's forehead as he worked, and it wasn't the environmental controls that were responsible. What if Andromeda was right about the drugs being impure? It would certainly explain why Thorne and his men left him alive. But Harper had more important things to concentrate on than his own possible demise. The others needed his help, and that was all that mattered.

A few more welded relays and a touch of rewiring, and Rommie came to life again.

"Rom, before you try to kill me, or yell at me or do whatever it is you're going to do to me, you should know that Andromeda is dead in the water and the others are in trouble."

Rommie sat up and stared at the engineer, while accumulating all the data she was receiving. The lights were off, she couldn't make contact with her grander self, she remembered Harper shocking her and falling unconscious. At least he hadn't tried to alter her memory again. She decided to run a sweeper just in case. "What happened?"

"I'm not sure," Harper replied, wiping his forehead with the corner of his shirt. I was talking to Andromeda from the Maru and then the com went dead."

"What were you doing on the Maru? No, save it, I don't want to know. Just give me the situation."

"No coms, no sensors, just limited back-up power. I figure we're running on fumes."

Rommie agreed the lengthy talk about betrayal would have to wait for another time. "What about Dylan and the others," she asked.

"In Command as far as I know. Dylan ordered the crew to their quarters, and then locked them all down."

"That doesn't sound like Dylan," Rommie concluded.

"No," Harper agreed.

"Alright. Here's the plan. You head to the slip core and try to bring me back online. I'll head to Command and assess the situation. Keep your com open," she ordered, and headed out.

"Rommie?" Harper called after her.

She turned.

"I'm sorry," he said weakly.

There was no warmth in Rommie's reply. "I know."

^~*~^

End of chapter nineteen

Next chapter: Drive