To him that you tell your secret you resign your liberty.
Ancient Earth proverb
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Beka woke up slowly, stirring each of her limbs in turn to make sure that they were all in working order. She instinctively reached for her weapon, but it wasn't in its holster. Someone had stolen it. Her initial indignant feelings were swamped by cold terror. On her back, weaponless, on a strange ship and with no idea where the rest of her crew were, except perhaps one, and even he had changed. Beka Valentine had never been so vulnerable in her life.
'Yeah, we had to take your little toy away. We didn't want you hurting yourself. Actually, we didn't want you hurting us mostly, but we were concerned for your safety as well.'
That voice… so familiar. It sounded amused yet had a trace of relief. She opened her eyes and rolled over. She was lying on a bunk that reminded her of the crew's quarters on the Maru: rough sheets and an uncomfortable mattress. Harper was sitting next to her.
'Nice to see you're alive and well again. We thought we'd lost you for a couple of moments back then. So, if you don't object too much, we'd like to ask you a couple of questions… Harper, is it?'
Beka thought she must have misunderstood him. That or he had gone insane.
'What… but… I'm not Harper!' she said.
Harper looked taken aback. He had obviously been caught off guard. Then his puzzled expression turned a little smug. He turned around and spoke to someone on the other side of the room.
'There you go, I said it wasn't a girl's name! We must have misheard her.' Standing behind him were the two women that had been there when she first woke up and another woman with fine auburn hair tied up loosely in a ponytail. There were also two other men there. To the left of the woman with brown-red hair was a tall, strong-looking young man with dark hair that fell into his eyes. He had his arms folded defensively across his chest, and what looked awfully close to a scowl on his face. The other man was sitting down on another bunk. He was dark skinned, and was looking at her with an openly curious expression. Harper turned back round to face her and, newly inspired, shot at her:
'Well if your name isn't Harper, then what is it? Because when you first woke up and we asked you your name, you said it was Harper.'
'No, no I wasn't saying that my name was Harper,' Beka replied, confused. She didn't understand why Harper was behaving so strangely. 'Your name's Harper, don't you remember? I was talking to you!'
'Huh?' it was Harper's turn to look confused. 'My name isn't Harper, it's Reb, Captain Reb Anderson! This must be some kind of mistake. Why, do you recognise me?'
'Recognise you? But… Harper… it's me, Beka! Come on, you have to remember!' But Harper, or Reb, as he seemed to think his name was, only shook his head, perplexed.
'But, you have to remember! Your name is Seamus Zelazny Harper. You were born on Earth. You call me 'boss'. You're an engineer on board the Andromeda Ascendant. Remember Trance, and… and Dylan, and Tyr and Rev Bem! Remember the Magog and the Nietszcheans, and the Commonwealth? Remember Sparky Cola and Weisbrau?' Beka was nearly screaming at this point, because at everything she said, the man in front of her, she couldn't even think of him as Harper any more, just shook his head helplessly. And Beka began to notice the changes that had happened since she last saw him, not just the hair but other things as well, some big, some just minor details. When he turned round to look at his crewmates for help, she saw that he no longer had a dataport. He was wearing a strange uniform, a blue, long-sleeved shirt with an insignia on the front. Harper never wore a uniform. Also, he was not always cracking jokes and smiling like Harper, he was serious to the point of being surly, and he was acting like he was in charge; he had called himself 'Captain'.
'Look, I'm sorry… Beka, is that your name? But nothing of what you said makes sense. Except, I am an engineer, but this ship is called the Deepwater, not the Andromeda Ascendant. And as for being born on Earth, well… don't you know? That's why we're here, that's our mission, to…'
'That's enough, Reb,' snapped the dark-haired man behind him. 'Be reasonable, we don't even know her. She just forced her way onto our ship and started spouting a load of rubbish.'
'Oh, come on Bren,' the man, Harper or Reb, replied. 'I mean, isn't it strange that she doesn't know anything. About the Pandora virus, about the original Deepwater and its crew? I'm not going to tell her anything that isn't general knowledge.'
'Actually, I agree with Bren,' the auburn-haired woman interjected. 'I think before we start telling her all about us, she should tell us a little bit about herself, and about why she seems to think your name is Seamus Whatever Harper.'
'OK,' the man, Reb, replied, but Beka could see that he wasn't happy about having his authority challenged. He took a deep breath, then let it out. He looked at Beka and said, 'Well then, Beka, I think you'd better tell us a little bit about yourself.'
Beka hesitated for a moment, then gathered her thoughts, took a deep breath and began.
'…And then we hit the portal and the next thing I remembered was waking here on your ship,' Beka concluded. It had taken the best part of three hours to tell the whole tale, and that was leaving large parts of it out. At first the crew of the Deepwater had interrupted her, and when she had told them about the Andromeda's hologram, the dark-skinned man who had been sitting on the bunk, who introduced himself as Zak, had sat up a little straighter. He had asked her lots of questions about the AI and about Rommie, and in return had told her about Gen, their own on-board computer. However, after a while they had all settled down to listen to her. All, that is, except for Reb. He had fidgeted constantly and his forehead creased up every time she talked about Harper, asking lots of questions about Harper's personality, his features, his good and bad points, the things that he had built and where he had got the ideas from. Yuna had looked at Reb quite a lot, also with a worried expression. Several times she had reached over to him and gripped his hand, helplessly offering the only comfort she could.
'So, you see why I thought you were Harper?' Beka explained rather breathlessly. 'I don't know why this has happened, or how I got here, although it seems to have something to do with the portal that we both ran into. Maybe this is some kind of alternate universe, and maybe somewhere out there there's another Beka Valentine and another Dylan Hunt, I really don't know. Mostly I just want to go home to the Andromeda. I think if I can get back then I can figure out what happened, what caused all this. I want to see my friends, my family again.'
There was silence for a few moments, then Lise, the auburn-haired woman spoke.
'You say that where you come from the Earth is still there? There are people on it, alive and well?'
'Well, I wouldn't say that they were well, and a lot of them aren't alive any more. The place is overrun with Magog and Nietszcheans. Like Harper says, their two main hobbies in life are making peoples' lives a misery, or making them non-existent. But if you're asking if there are still humans on there, then the answer's yes, there are. Why?'
Again, silence reigned for a few moments. Then Reb cleared his throat and looked up at her, and Beka was shocked to see his electric blue eyes were bright with tears.
'Because,' he replied in a choked voice, 'here, in this universe, there is no one left on Earth. They were all killed off by a virus - the Pandora virus. That's why we were... that's why we're here,' he corrected himself quickly at a sharp look from Bren, but Beka was sure he had been about to say something else. 'We have the technology to repopulate the Earth.' He gave a wry smile. 'And it's only going to take about another 50 years to get there.'
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Well, I hope you enjoyed this little chapter. Or if not, I'm glad you've endured it thus far. So now comes the time to tell me what you thought. Be kind, please!
