Chapter 2

"Where does the violet tint end and the orange tint begin?
Distinctly we see the difference of the colors,
but where exactly does the first one blending enter into the other.
So with sanity and insanity."

-Herman Melville


The trip back to the Andromeda had been uneventful, although even hours after entering the chamber Harper could still feel the sensation of something brushing past him. Once everyone had boarded the ship they had all been subjected to various tests, each looking for possible contaminates. When Trance had scanned, poked, and prodded everyone enough to deem them clear, they were free to leave Med Deck and allowed back to their duties.

Harper had thought about returning to his workshop, but every time he took a step forward he envisioned himself walking around the chamber on Dorran. Instead of work, he decided on a shower. A nice, relaxing cascade of hot water to soothe away his troubles. An hour later, it seemed to do the trick.

Feeling like himself once again, Harper stepped from his shower and tied a towel around his waist. He plucked another one from the shelf and ran it a few times over his hair. The human threw the used towel over his shoulder and walked to the mirror. Wiping steam from the reflective surface, the engineer took in his appearance. Same blue eyes; same hair, wet and plastered to his skull; same face. He looked like he did everyday… but something felt different.

"harper."

Harper spun around looking for an interloper but found himself alone in his bathroom.

"Andromeda?" he called. He waited, but then remembered he'd turned the ship's privacy mode on before getting into the shower.

"harper."

He turned again towards the door. Was someone in his room?

"Out in a minute!" he yelled. He scrambled over to where he'd piled his clean clothing and began slipping them on.

Once fully dressed Harper opened the door and stepped out into his quarters looking for company. The room was empty. Frowning Harper grabbed his tool belt from the bed and hit the door controls for the room. He walked out and turned to his left, nearly smacking into Beka.

"Hey, Harper," the Maru's captain greeted, unperturbed by their near collision. "In a hurry?"

Harper looked around the empty corridor and back at his friend. "Were you just calling me?"

"Nope."

"You weren't calling my name a minute ago?" he asked, forehead wrinkling in thought.

Beka shrugged casually. "No, wasn't me. I just came to get you. Andromeda said you were in privacy mode."

"Err, yeah," Harper answered. He wrapped his belt around his waist and clipped it shut. "I just wanted to be alone. Sometimes it's nice not feeling like Big Brother's watching you. Well, I guess in this case it's Big Sister." He laughed weakly at his own joke.

His friend raised an eyebrow. "Riiiiight." She shook her head. "Look, Dylan's having a debriefing on the Limvris. I thought you'd want to come."

"Uh, sure," Harper answered. He turned to go down the opposite corridor but a hand grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him to a stop.

"It's this way, Harper," Beka said, releasing the red material in her hand. "Are you sure you're okay?"

Harper blinked. "Fine, boss. Really."

Beka nodded and watched him slip past her. Not for a nanosecond did she believe he was telling her the truth.


"How did they die?"

Trance looked over at Rommie a moment then back at Dylan. "We're not precisely sure, but we have a theory."

Hunt leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. "Would you care to elaborate?"

Trance nodded. "To start with, there are no external marks of any kind on any of the Nietzscheans. No blast wounds or abrasions. Nothing. Rommie ran some scans on the remains but we didn't find anything unusual."

"What about bio-warfare?" Beka asked. "Poison, disease, that kind of thing?"

"We could do more extensive tests," Rommie chimed in, "but we feel they would be unnecessary. Further investigation into the chamber showed that the control panel was destroyed from within. If they were trapped inside with no way to communicate and no food or water, it more than likely that they died of starvation."

"Wait a minute now." The Maru's captain leaned forward as well, matching Dylan's pose. "If the door was disabled from the inside, how did the perp, or perps, get out?"

"One of the royal family could have betrayed the others, inadvertently imprisoning themselves along with them," Tyr theorized. "It wouldn't be an act atypical for the Lynx. They are a greedy, self-serving pride. Each would not hesitate to consider killing his or her own siblings if a great enough profit was involved."

"Talk about a dysfunctional family," Harper muttered softly.

Moving on to the next topic Dylan turned towards the ship's avatar. "Has Andromeda been able to get anything from the datapad?"

The ship's robotic form shook her head. "I am still running searches on the ciphers but there have been no matches as of yet. Half do appear to be in ancient Dorran script. H'toh is sending his best linguistic scholars to help with the translation. We have also been unsuccessful in changing from the first page of the plan. I was hoping Harper would be able to work on it."

"Keep trying," Dylan commanded gently. "We'll stay to help H'toh and his people with this mystery. If we haven't made any progress in two days, however, I will reconsider our next course of action. Dismissed."

Rommie nodded and stood, handing the pad to Harper who sat directly on her right. "Will you see if you can do anything with it?"

"No prob," Harper replied, taking the offered object. He watched as the others shuffled from the room and tapped the device on his thigh a few times. How hard could fixing one little datapad be anyway?

Harper stared at the plans as he exited the meeting room but paused to look down the corridor. There were two crewmen working on a control panel down about twenty feet from him. One was bending over searching for a tool while the other fiddled with the wiring on the wall. Harper looked down at the pad in his hand and took another step forward… and then stopped.

He turned towards the men again and this time felt his breath catch. The one on the floor was staring at him, but gone was the healthy skin and dark hair of the once youthful crew member. Now one of the dead Nietzscheans stared back at him, eyes black and empty. Harper would have stayed locked in his frozen position if someone hadn't called his name.

"Harper?"

Harper's head snapped around. Tyr.

"Tyr!" the human exclaimed.

Tyr Anassai narrowed his eyes, feeling uncharacteristically concerned. "You were vacantly staring. Are you all right?"

"No I saw--" Harper said, turning back towards the corridor. The dead Nietzschean was gone, replaced by the crewmen again. "I saw… uh… them. They're uh… working… erm… on the ship. Good guys those… guys."

The living Nietzschean shook his head. "Little man, you get stranger by the minute." Tyr stepped around Harper and walked away.

Seamus followed the disappearing form a few seconds before this eyes drifted back to the workers. Still crewmen. Normal, very much alive crewman.

Harper put a palm to his forehead and pushed gently. He'd had a headache when he'd come back on board the ship but now it was back and getting worse by the moment. What he'd seen was just his eyes playing tricks on him. There were no Nietzscheans onboard, save for their resident Kodiak.

Harper put his hand down and stuffed the pad into an empty pocket. First he would go to his quarters and take a quick nap. Once he was feeling okay again he would work on the pad, and with any luck, figure out why it wasn't functioning.

He just needed a little sleep. Yeah, that's what it had to be. Just extreme exhaustion. Once he was fully awake and aware, his fictional Nietzschean friends wouldn't return and he'd forget he'd ever seen them.

He repeated this to himself over and over as he walked back to his quarters. By the time he plopped down in his bed five minutes later, he almost believed it.


Beka stepped through the airlock of the Maru and instinctively inhaled. There it was. The distinct smell of home.

The captain knew others would laugh if they heard her talking like that. For most people a ship was a transport. A thing used to get them from one city to another or a distant planet. They didn't think of a ship as home. Even the crewmembers aboard the Andromeda couldn't fully understand. The halls of the Andromeda were clean, sterile, nearly medical.

Thanks to perfect Highguard venting there were no odors, only pure filtered oxygen. There weren't piles of clothing laying about or leaking pipes in desperate need of tightening. She doubted anyone aboard Andromeda had ever smelt the aroma of burning casserole waft though the corridors. They had never had a clumsy purple newcomer spill Tollan perfume onboard, causing a stench that lasted two weeks. There hadn't ever been fresh coffee to wake them up in the morning or the smell of an engineer who would get to working so hard he'd forget to regularly shower.

She smiled. No one, save for possibly Bobby, deserved to be subjected to that last memory.

Beka passed through the Maru's kitchen and into Trance's personal hideaway on the ship. They all had their quarters back on the Andromeda but there was still something nice about going back to their own beds. Like she had predicted, Trance stood over her plants, clippers in hand. Valentine almost felt sorry for the flora.

"Hey," Beka greeted. "Whatcha up to?"

The golden alien looked up and smiled. "Just trimming. And thinking. I usually go to the Obs Deck to be alone, but it was too crowded today."

"The Maru's always open," Beka replied offhandedly. She leaned over the table and rested her elbows on the smooth surface. "I was kind of hoping you were here actually. I wanted to talk. In private."

"Private?"

Beka made a face. "It's nothing big, I just wanted your opinion on something."

"All right. On what?"

"Well, on Harper actually," Valentine answered. "He's been acting a little… flaky."

"Flaky?" Trance asked, her forehead wrinkling slightly.

Beka shrugged. "A little out of it. When I went to get him earlier he kept asking if I'd been calling him when I wasn't anywhere near his quarters. And he just looked a little spaced out during the debriefing."

"I didn't notice anything," Trance replied. "Well, nothing extremely out of the ordinary for him."

Beka shook her head. "I guess. I also have the feeling he might be getting sick. Three different times during the discussion he closed his eyes like he had a headache. A few minutes later he was acting fine again."

Trance put her sheers down. "Maybe he just had a headache. It's a common infirmity, Beka. Besides, his scans when he returned to the ship were fine. He was in good health."

"I know that," Beka said. "But I also know Harper, and something's wrong. I uh… well, I was wondering if you could sense anything."

"Our perfect future is always changing. What I see now for Harper doesn't mean something's wrong," Trance said.

"Trannnnce," Beka drawled. "You know something and you're not telling me."

The alien woman shook her head. "Right now, I can't explain what I'm seeing in Harper's future. I don't know if it is bad or good. We will just have to wait and see what develops."

Beka stood up and put her hands on her hips. "I don't like the sound of that. Just… do me a favor. If something does change, you tell me. Okay?"

Trance picked up her cutters again. "Of course, Beka."

Valentine threw Trance a quick "You-Had-Better-Tell-Me-Or-Else" look over her shoulder and left the alien alone with her plants.

Trance stared a moment at the tiny bush before her sheers. She had told Beka the truth. Harper's future was unreadable at this point, even for her. All she saw was a white world that was blurred with faint, rapid movement. What she felt she could not be described fully in human terms. Flashes of fear. Insecurity. Loneliness. Utter confusion. Trance brought one of the bush's thin branches between the blades of her tool. Only Time would tell her what she wanted to know. She only hoped Time was on her friend's side as well.


Harper sat at his work bench staring down at the pad in his left hand. In his right was a functioning one with a chopped translation for the other. Four words in the jumbled mess kept drawing his attention. 'To enter by infiltration.' What did that mean? Enter what by infiltration?

He put down the translation and took a drink of his Sparky. To enter by infiltration. To enter by infilt--

"harper."

Seamus paused mid-sip and his eyes darted around his quarters. For a moment everything was silent and he released the breath he'd been holding. Obviously he was just im--

"join with us, harper."

Harper jumped up from his seat and barely managed to keep his chair legs on all fours. A soft whistling noise drew his attention towards his closet. It sounded like air was being released through a broken seal… but in his closet? Unless something had punched through hundreds of feet of the Andromeda's hull to get to him this far in, that was ridiculous.

Knowing it was impossible, but also curious, Harper slowly walked to his closet. The hissing noise was getting louder, so whatever was making it was definitely coming from there. His hand rested over the control panel for only a moment before he slammed it down. The seal on the door released and it slid to the side, revealing the darkness of space. Harper gasped and stumbled backwards, fearful of being sucked out. He landed on the ground and stared into the closet from his back.

The faint twinkling of stars in the background told him he wasn't just staring into a dark wardrobe. He was looking into a hole and right out into the vastness of space. It took him nearly a minute to realize he wasn't being pulled out and he finally stood cautiously. He stepped warily towards the closet but refused to venture past the frame.

"join us."

Harper shook his head. "This isn't real. This can't be real."

He stretched his hand towards the opening and felt a chill run through him as it was fully engulfed by the blackness. Harper twisted his wrist around and flexed his palm. He didn't see the pale hand appear out of the darkness until it had wrapped its bony fingers around his collar and began to pull Harper closer.

"Help!" Seamus screamed, struggling against his assailant's grip. "Somebody help me!"

A head appeared out of the milky darkness, inches from his own, and he realized it was the dead Nietzschean he had stumbled over in the Limvris chamber.

The corpse grinned wickedly at Harper before pulling him forward into the darkness.