Chapter 9

"It's in our nature to destroy ourselves.

It's in our nature to kill ourselves.

It's in our nature to kill each other.

It's in our nature to kill kill kill!"

From Blood Brothers by Papa Roach

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'Come on baby, do it for daddy, just freakin' well unlock, you stupid Divinedamned thing just… ha!'

Harper grinned in delight as the tiny click that announced his freedom rang in his ears. Rommie, true to her word, had actually locked him in, something that she had never done before and did not have the right to do, which only made him suspect that there was more to this than Dylan meeting with a bunch of chinheads or Niets or whatever. Unfortunately for the Andromeda, Harper had put together and taken apart every atom of the ship personally, so locks presented him with the same difficulty as a picket fence did to a bulldozer, and he was a lot quieter than a bulldozer. He would have at least a few hours before his darling job security noticed he was no longer there.

Checking in both directions first, Harper stepped out into the corridor, knees bent, sneaking along like a spy. Just for fun, he did a couple of commando rolls, pulling his gun out, playing soldier. He didn't really know why; it just made the journey a bit more interesting. To anyone passing, he would only be making himself more conspicuous, but there was no one around. This in itself was strange; usually when there was something-political going on there were freaky people with unnecessary amounts of eyes wandering around in flashy clothes, or Robocop-style guards wandering around trying to protect the freaky-many-eyed-flashy-ambassador-types. But it was deathly quiet all around. So he'd been lied to. Great. Fan-freakin'-tastic. Like that made a difference. It seemed that what was going on was need-to-know, and the rest of the crew were of the opinion that Seamus needed-to-know very little.

Harper knew where he was headed; obs deck. He'd traced the last organic infrared activity to there as soon as Andromeda had disappeared. There was some kind of meeting going on there.

He reached the hatch, tried it. Locked. Harper didn't exactly pass out in shock. Instead he drew out an adapter, plugged one end into his dataport (he had to do this first or sometimes whatever he was plugging himself into sparked him), wincing as it slid gently into his cerebellum, probing the inside of his skull. He didn't think he would ever get used to that; it was like sticking a finger down his throat to make himself puke. Then he plugged the other end into the control at the side of the door. He sank to the floor before he entered, eyelids already flickering and showing the white of his eyeballs. It also paid to do this. The number of times when he first got the dataport that he'd wound up on the floor with a lump on his head were countless. His back arched, he saw the lights without using his eyes; and he saw the columns of code that would seem like garbled nonsense to anyone unfamiliar with the matrix, but were like My First Alphabet to Harper.

Trickling his holographic fingers over the infinite numbers and symbols, Harper frowned as he tried to decipher the code that the Andromeda had written in to keep the door locked. Finally, in disgust at how long the process was taking, Harper impatiently took the easy way out (or in this case in). He tried a manoeuvre that had a 50-50 chance of working, and was essentially using a battering ram to break the lock open. His face screwed up in concentration, he reversed the electromagnetic field on a couple of the threads, strained until finally they snapped together and the hatch shot open. Harper jacked out straight away and burst into the room, triumphant, skin and clothes drenched in sweat.

'Right so what's this big secret, then?' The words were out of his mouth before he could control them, still flushed with the intoxicating taste of his victory. But something was wrong. Trance was alone in the room, standing next to what appeared to be a mirror, or a projection of Harper himself, which was staring back at him with equal parts shock and realisation. Testing it, Harper lifted a hand to his head to wipe the sweat away, and the reflection did not follow suit. Instead, it smiled a little complacently and took a step forward. Harper stepped back in terror.

'Aaaahhhhh! What the…?' a stream of curses flowed from his mouth. His left foot collided with his right and he was sent sprawling to the deck, landed on his ass and started scrambling away whilst trying to stand up again. Clambering to his feet, he skipped forward and wrapped his arms protectively around Trance, trying to drag her at the way but at the same time unmistakably using her as a human body shield.

'Trance babe, get away from it! It's not me; it's a demon! It's a freakin' changeling! It's been sent by the Devil to try and trick you!' he yelped painfully in her ear, panting for breath and staring it the thing with wide eyes.

'Um… Harper, is it? Look, I think I'd better explain…' Reb began, making calming motions with his hands and approaching the pair of them. But Harper dragged his gun from its holster and waved it around threateningly. By the way the barrel was shaking, Harper's aim was so bad he could probably hit himself from where he was standing. The irony made Reb smile, as irony always did, but Harper interpreted the amusement as an evil leer and snapped back the trigger. A bullet exploded in a shower of sparks, an implausibly bad shot that landed about ten metres to Reb's right.

'Harper, stop it! Listen to him,' Trance gasped through Harper's suffocating grip on her. Reb sighed, abandoned all hope of getting a chance to speak and walked briskly towards the pair of them.

'Oh no, you stay away from me, freakazoid!' the engineer gasped, backing away and pulling Trance along with him.

'Freakazoid? That's a new one,' Reb said thoughtfully. Then he reached out, grabbed Harper's arm casually and dragged him off of Trance. Harper struggled, but Reb twisted his arm up behind his back and had floored him in a matter of seconds. 'I'll take this, I think,' he said, kicking the gauss gun away. Then he crouched down pressing his knee into Harper's back, and hissed gently in his ear.

'Right, Mr Harper. I understand you have a lot of questions, but struggling won't do you any good and trying to fight me will result in you being hurt or humiliated - or both. So how about cutting the crap, sitting up and talking about this like a reasonable adult?'

'Kiss my ass, uberfreak,' Harper snarled back. Reb flinched, then dragged Harper up by the scruff of his neck, and shook him, then brought his face close to Harper's defiantly petrified eyes.

'Don't call me that! I don't like being called names! It's neither constructive nor clever, and it's not endearing me to you.' He paused, then went on in soothing, coaxing tones. 'My name is Captain Reb Anderson. I'm not from here; I'm from another universe altogether. I want to be your friend.' Harper relaxed just a little bit, and Reb released him.

For a moment, Harper considered grabbing the gun and turning his doppelganger's head into mush, but decided against it. Harper didn't like killing people.

Reb saw the little disc at the base of Harper's skull and drew in a sharp intake of breath. 'So that's a dataport? Wow… I gotta get me one of those…' he reached out and his delicate fingers grazed the metal. Harper flinched, drew back a tightly curled fist and slammed it into Reb's jaw. The impact sent the stranger flying, clutching his bruised face. He was not still for a single second. All Harper saw was a blur before something hit him hard and he and Reb were wrestling furiously, tearing out each other's hair.

'Stop! Stop it!' Trance cried, doing her level best to drag the pair of them away from each other. Reb stopped lashing out immediately, disentangled himself from Harper's flailing limbs and in a flash was back on his feet, smoothing out his uniform. Assured that there were no more creases, he reached gently inside his mouth, gripped something, twisted it with a breathtakingly painful jerk, and threw a bloody tooth to the ground. Harper too stood up. His nose was streaming with blood and his eyes were fiery with rage. He was about to jump on his opponent again, but the hatch burst open again for the second time in the last ten minutes, and the crew of both the Andromeda and the Deepwater poured in, staring at their engineers in shock. The two of them realised that they both looked like they'd just run into a wall and started shuffling sheepishly.

'Is there something we should know?' Dylan asked airily. No one spoke for a very long time. The Deepwater crew was entirely fixated on Reb's double. The Zak took a step forward, looked closely at Harper, his streaming nose and frightened face, and his face split into a huge grin.

'Cool! It's Reb 2!' He laughed and grabbed Reb and Harper pulling them to his sides. 'This is gonna be fun!'

Harper rolled his eyes and wriggled away. 'I still say it's a demon,' he insisted stubbornly, folding his arms.

'And I still say it's an idiot,' Reb retorted, annoyed.

'For the Divine's sake, boy, must you insist on trying to beat the little professor on points for immaturity?' Tyr snapped irritably, glaring at Reb. He turned away. 'I have work to do, unlike the rest of you, who apparently seem to just be trying to turn this ship into a fight club.' He turned on his heel and left. Reb watched him go, face contorted with unnatural anger, hands making white-knuckled fists.

'I swear if he calls me 'boy' once more I'm going to wrench his intestines out with my bare hands and make him eat them,' he snarled.

'Amen to that,' Harper breathed, happy to have found someone who agreed with him. He looked over at Reb, who had a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. Reb looked back at him, their heads turning towards each other at almost the exact same point in time, and their faces split into identical grins, and they began to accept each other.

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