Chapter Three: Navigating the Labyrinth

Summary: Trance and Beka attempt the fine art of teseract hopping… a little harder than it sounds…

A/N: Chapter Three! Yay! Sorry it took me so long. School inspection. Teachers panicking about not giving us enough homework. Up pile the essays… you do the maths. Anyway, we're done now, and I promise I'll get chapter four up quicker. Please, please, please review!

(Seriously, I need to know someone's reading this stuff.)

Disclaimer: The following song belongs to whichever wonderful person wrote the soundtrack to 'once more with feeling' from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which belongs to mutant enemy. Trance and all other characters are property of Tribune entertainment, etc.

*Much worshipping ensues* 

I think we discussed why suing me is a bad idea earlier…

I touch the fire and it freezes me,

I look into it and it's black,

Why can't I feel?

My skin should crack and peel,

I want the fire back.

Now through the smoke she calls to me,

To make my way across the flame,

To save the day,

Or maybe melt away,

I guess it's all the same.

So I will walk through the fire,

Cause where else can I turn?
I will walk through the fire,

And let it burn.

***********************************************************

The freezing, jolting, shaking sensation left Beka and Trance standing in the doorway of the crew's quarters, a good ten feet away from where logic dictated they should have been when they stepped through the door of the bridge.

"Well, there go the laws of physics." Beka observed, wryly.

Trance shouldered her rifle. "Forget physics. If I'm right, we're somewhere in the past. Now, are you going to say it or am I?"
Beka sighed. "Here's to you Dylan." She muttered, before adding, louder and with a grim smile, "let's bring it."

She marched resolutely forward. Trance took a deep breath (not that she really technically needed to any more, but that was another story), feeling the unmistakable build of another tesseract not far ahead of them.

"That way," she told Beka, pointing.

Beka quirked an eyebrow. "Sure about that?"

"I can feel her." Trance replied.

"And by her you would mean…"

"My younger self."

"Right."

Another fizzing jolt, and they found themselves standing in…

"The machine shop on Andromeda?" Beka blinked as she looked around her. "Okay, now I'm confused."
"Tesseract jumping is not an exact science." Trance told her. "But I'm fairly sure we're getting closer."

"Trance?"

Both women spun round. Trance would have been tempted to bend double and vomit, had she had anything in her stomach, (or a stomach, for that matter).

Harper was blinking at them in confusion. Unshaved and dishevelled looking, with a rash on his neck and sweat in his uncombed hair.

"Harper…" Beka breathed, something close to real emotion in her voice.

"Okay, this is just weird." Harper announced. "What the hell happened to you two?"

"Harper, lift up your shirt." Trance ordered, calmly.

Harper's eyes widened in surprise. "What?"

"Your shirt." Trance repeated. "Lift it up." She could already feel another tesseract building, and needed to be sure…

"Okay…" Harper tugged up his shirt.

Just as she had suspected, what Harper revealed was the steadily reddening patch across his stomach of growing magog larvae. He had a week to live, tops.

"Too late." Trance told Beka. "But not far off the mark. Not bad for a first jump."

Beka only nodded. Seeing Harper again had skinned her already soundly grazed heart, and all the cybernetic metal in the world couldn't shield it from that sort of pain.

"Let me guess." Harper folded his arms, dropping his shirt, "time and space have gotten really screwed up. Again."

"Correct." Trance replied. "Now, you wouldn't happen to have seen any…"

"Small, cute, purple versions of you?" Harper finished for her. "No. But I did see a blond version of Beka. She went that way." He pointed with his nano-welder through the doorway of the machine shop, then stuck his nano-welder behind his ear. "Not that that you aren't cute when you're gold… just a different kind. I don't know… I kinda like the whole 'cosmically terrifying' thing you got going on there."

Trance was tempted to smile at that. It was so hard not to fling her arms around his neck and burst into tears. Seeing him again… alive… kicking and… attempting to flirt… it was almost more than she could bare.

Harper eyed up the slight tugging at his old friend's lips, the sad spark in her eyes, and was hit with a forceful, if unexplained, feeling of déjà vu. "This…" he gestured at the surroundings of what was a very early version of the tesseract machine, "isn't gonna work, is it?"

"No." Trance replied, "but if you keep trying, the tesseracts will keep going, and we may be able to stop it happening in the first place."

"Great." Harper sighed and looked about him. "Well, uh… good luck, I guess. And, oh, hey," he dug in his pocket and offered her a sealed paper envelope, with To Harper scrawled across the top, "give this to me, when you see me next, okay? Just a note to kick some sense into myself."

The corners of Trance's lips twitched, and her eyes sparked. "Sure." She took the letter from him, and tucked it beneath her top, trapped between her skin and her combat clothes.

Harper saluted with his soldering iron as the pair walked away. "You'll be fine, Trancey babes!"

Trance looked back at him. "That's what you told me the last time you died."

With a shuddering, fizzing jolt, they were gone again.

As space and time blurred into one inseparable mix, Trance became sure she could see figures dancing, through the shifting mirriad of colour of the tesseract. Unsure whether it was her own pulse or the beat of a distant drum pounding in her ears, she frowned, uncertain. She caught a glimpse of her sisters, her mothers, her aunts…. Twirling and whirling around a rainbow fire, bells around their ankles, floating scarves drifting round their heads, beating out the rhythm of Life with their feet, spinning Chaos into the universe.

She could almost hear the high, clear, crystal voices calling across the universe. And then she blinked, and it was gone, and they were standing in the underbelly of the Eureka Maru, facing a young woman who looked uncannily like Beka, but shorter, and with green eyes.

"Oh crap." Beka groaned. "Really who I wanted to see."

Trance looked from the astonished looking woman to Beka and back. The resemblance was unmistakable, from the full mouth, to the sharp nose, to the careful arch of the eyebrows, to the red hair.

"Well Trance," Beka looked at her companion, "we picked one hell of a time for a family reunion."

Crash.

A blaster bolt exploded centimetre's from Trance's left elbow. The woman had drawn a pistol and was pointing it at them. "Who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing on my ship?"

"I thought it was your dad who owned the Maru?" Trance ignored the demand and turned a questioning eye to Beka.

Beka shrugged. "He did. After he stole it off my mom. I never really told you why they split, did I?"

"No." Trance shook her head. "Maybe I'll ask you later."

"I repeat," the woman glared at them, "who the hell are you?!"

"Long story short, mom," Beka began, "I'm your daughter, from a far and seriously messed up future, and I'd love to stay and chat but Trance and I have to go save reality, so if you'll excuse us, we'll be hopping onto the next tesseract and going on our way, okay?" She turned to Trance, "which way now?"

Trance ignored the slack-jaw look Beka's mother was giving them and twitched her ears slightly, searching for the tell tail prickle of a building tesseract, and the presence of her younger self.

"Well, we over shot the mark a bit here," she reasoned, "so now we have to go… that way." She pointed to the back of the Maru, behind some crates.

"Right," Beka marched past her mother in the right direction, with Trance hurrying to keep up.

This time Trance was certain that she was catching glimpses of the fire light of the ceremony of Life. She saw the feet pounding out the rhythm, the graceful swaying of the elfin bodies as they twisted and twirled. The soft music made her skin ache, and the urge to go super nova suddenly engulfed her as the pace picked up, building upwards, pitching her back to that fateful night that had spent her spinning, giddy and gleeful, out into the universe.

Then she blinked, and they were gone once again, and she and Beka were back in the bridge of the Maru, just in time for the screech of a Kalderan to reach their ears.

"Crap, Kalderans!" Beka fired up her rifle. "Didn't we already fight these guys?"

"I guess we're back for a second round." Trance shrugged, also jerking her rifle into life, the sound of the Song of Chaos still ringing in her ears, her sister's gleeful giggles of delight still reverberating round her head.

There was a shriek, and a slightly younger version of Trance came tumbling through the entrance to the bridge, a very nasty blaster burn apparent across her midriff. Trance shouldered her sympathy for the girl and gave her a hefty kick in the ribs. "Get up!"

The younger Trance yelped and sat bolt upright in surprise. "What?!"

"Have you seen one of us when we were still purple?" Demanded Trance, as the younger version of herself scrambled to her feet.

"No…" The younger Trance looked at her thoughtfully for a second. "I knew this was going to happen."

"No you didn't." Trance replied, just as evenly. "Now get back in there and help your Beka. You both have to survive if this is going to work."

The younger Trance rolled her eyes. "Well obviously." Dusting herself off, she picked up the rifle she had dropped on her rather unceremonious entrance to the bridge, and disappeared out of the door again.

"Well that was interesting." Beka remarked.

"Not nearly as interesting as this is going to get." Trance replied, grimly, "come on. We're going to have to go through the Kalderans if we want to get to the next tesseract."

She had barely finished her sentence when a Kalderan dropped into view in the doorway of the bridge, hissing at them, gun raised. It opened it's mouth to squeal a warning to it's comrades and was promptly silenced as Beka loosed a trio of rifle blasts into it's chest.

"I'd forgotten how ugly these guys were," she remarked, stepping over the body with her nose wrinkled in disgust.

Trance only followed her. They were very close now, she knew.

Another two Kalderans dropped from above, shrieking and hissing, fangs bared. Trance narrowed her eyes slightly as she dispatched the closer of the two. Yes, she had definitely killed these particular Kalderans before. Which meant she had just changed history. Which was good.

Right?

Trance's vision was cloudy, the possible futures going haywire as they twisted wildly away from her. Odds weren't even applicable any more, let alone calculable. It was unsettling to be so unsure, like being blind all of a sudden. She couldn't see what was coming anymore, and it disturbed her. Especially with Kalderans around.

But it would get better soon, she told herself, determinedly. It would. She would make it better. Because this had to work. There was no if or but about it. It had to. Or watch reality collapse and the universe come crashing down.

Again.

Shaking away the endless clamour of possibilities, good and bad, screaming for her attention, Trance focused her attention on the present.

"That way," she pointed down the corridor, into the back of the Maru.

Beka shrugged. "Lead on, McDuff."

Kicking their way through three more Kalderans, they found themselves...

Flash! Crackle! Jolt!

With a jerk, a tesseract lurched into life out of nowhere, and Trance saw the dancing, twisting bodies of her family darting and flickering in the shadow-light. The Rhythm of Life pounded into the ground, making the earth tremble, the whooping voices singing, singing, singing, wordless, beautiful, terrible, the Song of Chaos rising and soaring, a frenzy, dizzying, intoxicating…

Another jerk and Trance was back in the Maru, in the cargo bay, trembling.

Beka looked at her friend to question the lack of warning at the tesseract and caught an expression of Trance's face that she had never once seen there before:

Surprise.

There was fear, too, unease and pain. But most predominant was complete shock.

"Trance?" Beka questioned. "You okay?"

Trance shook herself. "Fine. Come on, we have to keep moving." I didn't feel that coming. Why didn't I feel it coming? Fates, I'm blind! I can't even feel tesseracts any more!

A wave of something close to panic was threatening to engulf Trance. If she could no longer sense the tesseracts, and with space and time's current state of screwed-up-ness rendering her future-vision all but useless, there was no way of knowing which way to go.

But why? Why couldn't she sense them any more? The prickles along her skin were gone, yet the tesseracts were certainly still there. In fact, yes, she spotted another blue flash only meters away and… crap. Kalderans tumbling through it. Just what they needed. Inter-stella, hitchhiking monsters.

"Duck!" Beka's warning came too late, and Trance found herself suddenly pinned to the deck with a Kalderan on her back.

She did not waist time screaming. Instead she channelled her energy into her arms, shoved herself onto all fours, twisted around and brought her booted feet up into the Kalderan's stomach. The unfortunate creature flew across the room and sprawled three feet away, to be hit with a double whammy of blaster charges from Beka.

Trance was back on her feet as if nothing had happened.

"Are these guys following us?" Beka demanded, bringing her boot up into the face of a second Kalderan.

Trance shrugged, putting her back to Beka's and making a swift perimeter scan for any more impending threats. "It wouldn't surprise me."

Her lips just had time to curl up into a slight, cynical, cat-like smirk at the irony of her statement, before an all too familiar shriek reached Trance's ears.

Beka blinked and twisted round. "Was that… you?"

"Yup."

"Which means…"

"Yes."

"So we're…"

"Oh yeah."

Beka raised her eyebrows. "Great."

"Anything purple and vaguely sparkly… let me know." Trance told her friend. "Now, shall we do this or what?"
"Let's rock and roll." Beka replied, before following her friend into the shadows.