Rhade felt like he was being led with a trail of breadcrumbs, the discovery of the two avatars too easy and coincidental.
Rommie would certainly have been capable of blasting a hole in Doyle, as much as Doyle would have been capable of disabling Rommie. But in either case, who had taken the other avatar out of the picture? An idea occurred to him and he abruptly changed direction, heading off to find food after instructing Andromeda to monitor Doyle and to advise him of any changes.
He was just about finished eating when the Core AI informed him that Doyle was no longer in the lab.
With a wry smile to himself, Rhade headed back to the lab. Now perhaps he would find out what was going on. Either the Andromeda aspects were conspiring against him, possibly with Doyle, or there was another element he was missing. The latter was more likely given that Andromeda could have taken him out at any time and besides which, there was no indication of motive.
It seemed as though the corridors were beginning to close in on Rhade as he stalked his way through the ship, the walls radiating a low level fear. It would be so much easier if he knew who or what the enemy was, this uncertainty was unsettling to say the least.
Opening the door to the lab, he paused at the entrance and sniffed the air. He allowed himself a wolfish grin as amidst the oil, grease and plastic was the acrid odour of familiar sweat.
XXXXX
Whilst the force lance had many admirable qualities, somehow during the months on Seefra, he'd come to prefer the two guns; they were equally balanced and enabled him to cover virtually 360 degrees.
Gun in either hand, Rhade stepped slowly around the room, carefully covering every nook and cranny and quite literally following his nose. He passed a piece of wall with shelving and as the scent dissipated slightly turned back towards it. He didn't know Harper's lab well enough to be able to ascertain whether that wall had always been there before or looked like that, but recalled vividly a hologram Harper had employed once in the Maru.
He carefully felt along the wall, and there it was. An absence of wall.
Guns first he walked straight through and, even though he was expecting it, jumped at the startled yell. "No! Keep back! Go away! Don't hurt me!"
The room behind the false wall was gloomy, presumably so that the light did not interfere with the hologram. Doyle was on a bench with Rommie lying by the wall, both looking as lifeless as Rhade had last seen them. Harper was crouched defensively in the corner, his face terrified, although he carried a gun in one hand and a wrench in the other.
Rhade tried to gauge whether Harper was likely to attack him. He was not worried about the wrench, but the gun was another matter. "Do you recognise me?" Rhade asked, not knowing if that might actually be a really stupid question.
"Of course I recognise you, Nietzsche!" Harper cried, "I always knew you would turn on us, just like Tyr and every other Neitzchean in the universe. You always have to take, take, take. I heard Andromeda, you've even got her calling you Captain now! Keep away from me!"
Rather perturbed at this outburst, Rhade took a step back. "I'm not going to come near you," he said, but you need to put the gun down."
"What? You think I'm stupid? You have two, why would I put my one down?"
Rhade grimaced and put one down, sliding it towards the fake wall. "And now I have one."
Harper reciprocated by throwing the wrench on the floor away from him. "Now we're evens," the engineer's grin was wild and feral. "You're the better shot, would make it a nice clean kill, right? Me, I could take out an eye, a kneecap or something else before I got it right. Be interesting to see which is worse don't you think?"
"Harper," Rhade started slowly, "I do not want to have to hurt you, but I do need to know what's going on."
"What's going on?" Harper waved his gun around wildly. "What's going on? How should I know what's going on? First Rommie tries to kill me, then the big hairy bad starts stalking me, and Andromeda goes all freaky so I lock myself up in here and you show up waving a twin set at me, and you're asking me what's going on?"
"Unfortunately I seem to have missed the first part of the story. Want to enlighten me?"
"Oh yeah, I remember, you were out of it." Harper took a few deep and started to lower his gun. And abruptly changed his mind. "But how do I know the big bad didn't get you? You've been walking all over the ship and I know it's been stalking you, when it's not stalking me that is, so how do I know you're not trying to trick me?"
It was a very good question, and one that Rhade was asking himself with regards to Harper. The shorter man definitely was not himself and the Neitzchean considered the possibility that Harper was simply trying to delay him. So he tried changing tack.
"What about the avatars, do you think you can have them working soon?"
"No!" Harper looked shocked by the very idea. "My dolls are staying right where they are! They'll destroy each other if I let them up at the same time!"
"What about just one of them? We could use another… perspective on the matter."
"Doyle's going to need a lot of work, days, weeks, months, maybe. Rom-doll's good, but no way am I finishing on fixing her, she hates me and wants to kill me!"
Rhade grunted, sympathising with Rommie's apparently murderous intentions for the briefest second.
Harper had virtually forgotten about his gun, focussing back on the hole in Doyle's chest.
"Tell me what happened," Rhade said, and Harper nodded distantly.
XXXXX
BeforeA day or so after the Maru crashed into the cargo bay, Harper encountered Rommie scowling as she tried to raise the hologram Andromeda without success. "Whoa, Rom-doll, love the new look. Or is that the old look? No, it's more the look in between, your oh so brief Goth phase, maybe, crossed with a slightly punk psychedelic nuance?"
"I know what you're trying to do, Harper and it's not going work!"
"What I'm trying - ? I was just complementing your taste in dress, it's very revealing. And I must say that I for one wholeheartedly approve. Would that be Doyle's influence?"
"Doyle! She's next on my list!"
"Er, list, Rommie? What list would that be?"
"You're out to deactivate me, I know it!" She drew a gun, pointing it straight at Harper's forehead. "I Am A Warship, and I invoke first strike!"
"Uh, sure, sure, uh," As Rommie pulled the trigger, Harper found himself flying backwards as he tripped over a raised bit of flooring. Fortunately he landed, slightly bruised, near an access panel and crawled inside, sliding down a couple of levels, gunfire following him all the way.
"Uh, Boss?" he tried to contact the captain, and Dylan's face appeared, distinctly annoyed.
"Whatever it is, it can wait, Mr Harper!" he said, and the vid image blinked out. Out of immediate options, Harper decided to retreat to his lab in order to regroup and think of a way to try and get Rommie back to her normal cute self
X
"You can come out now!" He'd been hiding in the lab for a long time when Doyle had come along to assure him that Rommie wasn't trying to kill him any more, but he wasn't entirely convinced that it was wasn't a trick. Rommie could, after all, mimic other people's voices amongst other things.
He waited until he was certain she'd gone and crept out of his lab. The corridor was deserted, and he headed towards his own quarters. But he had the oddest feeling that someone or something was following him. Something with faint skittering feet, someone that was never there when he looked, but raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
"Andromeda? Is something following me? Other than you, I mean?" he asked the ship with his back to the wall.
"I don't know," said Andromeda. "Where are you?"
"I'm outside my quarters. Are your sensors malfunctioning?"
"I am in perfect working order," replied Andromeda. "You are not outside your quarters."
"Then where am I?" Harper asked, taken aback.
"I do not know, I cannot see you. "
"Then you have a fault-"
"I am perfect. Except when organics meddle with my systems."
"Has someone been meddling? Other than me I mean? Because if anyone else has been touching your-"
"Only one person has accessed my systems other than yourself, but I do not have authority to divulge any details."
"Someone on the command staff then," Harper said, mostly to himself. "Was it Rommie? Because she isn't herself right now and I can-"
"It was not my avatar," the Core AI replied. "If there is nothing else?"
When Harper entered his quarters, the first thing he did was go to the bathroom. The second thing he did was notice that he had been burgled. No one else would have noticed, but he knew very well that between the soap and the hair gel there normally lived a yellow rubber duck, which was no longer there.
And the skittering feet were in the bedroom.
Cautiously peeking through the doorway, Harper held his breath as he looked for the owner of the feet, but there was nothing and no one.
His quarters no longer feeling safe, Harper crept out and, his back to the wall at all times, made his way back to the lab where he threw himself into projects that kept him from the scary thoughts that were bouncing around his head.
X
At some point, he could hear Andromeda's power levels abruptly drop, and he tried to access the engineering data files, but access seemed to be denied at every turn, no matter how sneaky he was.
Eventually, hunger made him leave the lab again and with his back to the wall, he made his way to the canteen. But, as he came to a corner, he could hear breathing. Gun first, he inched around and came nuzzle to nuzzle with another gun.
"Harper?" said Beka, wide eyed and pale.
"Beka?" said Harper with no little relief.
"There's something following me," they both said at once.
"Skittering feet?" asked Harper.
"Uh, something like, maybe more of a tapping," nodded Beka, "and I've had little glimpses of it, big and hairy, and smelling like rancid meat."
"Sounds like Rhade," Harper quipped. "Speaking of who, isn't he due out on parole about now? We could do with our own Ripley."
"No, Trance said it wasn't good for him to wake up yet."
"Oh. So, where are you off to?"
"Um. Around. See Dylan, talk about everyone else acting weird. That sort of thing."
"Yeah," Harper nodded. "Dylan's been very distracted lately."
"I noticed that too," Beka agreed. "This stalking beastie that Andromeda apparently can't see is really getting to him. I think it's guilt."
"Guilt?" Harper had a serious problem with Mr Optimism going on a guilt trip.
"Yeah, I think he screwed up Andromeda's sensors when he did whatever he did to holo Rommie."
"What he did what to holo Rommie?" cried Harper indignantly.
"I don't know, don't yell at me!" Beka returned. "He just said that he might have been a bit overenthusiastic in his attempt to stop her from perving him in the shower."
"Eww!" Harper screwed his face up. "Too much information there!"
X
It seemed to Harper that he was entirely on his own. Doyle, Trance and Rommie had completely disappeared and Dylan had given the 'abandon ship' order. Harper would never abandon Andromeda and was determined to get rid of the big bad whatever it was.
Andromeda was becoming increasingly erratic, having blocked every attempt of his to get into engineering and Dylan was so stressed he didn't have time to listen to anyone else, and certainly not his engineer as he'd said on several occasions. Beka was prowling the decks with ever increasingly large weapons in her efforts to track the big bad down, although she'd been stalking him a couple of times, and he was starting to think that she was thinking that he was the big bad. Or something.
And then she took off. Just like that. No offer of taking him along or anything.
And Dylan followed the very next day.
Now he knew for certain that they'd deliberately left him behind as food for the big bad.
At that moment, he hated both Dylan and Beka with a passion. They were worse than the Ubers on earth; at least they never pretended to be his friends. Briefly, he was jealous of Rhade sleeping through it all.
And that gave him an idea. Just in case the big bad took over, there needed to be an ace in the hole. It was a long shot, but at this point, anything was worth a shot.
Sneaking up to the med deck, he made a little addition to the control pad of Rhade's sleeping module, setting it to drain the gel and wake the Neitzchean up at a preset time. He thought it odd that the chronograph was blank, but as he was altering it anyhow, it didn't matter. He could have written a note, but he was in danger of being discovered imminently, so he left a battery-powered clock on the side before leaving med deck.
He spent a long time avoiding the big bad that kept nearly discovering him, skittering feet coming round the corner just as Harper dived into an access panel, or slid down a deck or two. But his quest to install little protective patches throughout Andromeda's systems worked.
The next thing was to hide, and hide where no one would find him. So he divided his lab in two and installed a holographic wall, deftly removing the hidden half from Andromeda's sensors entirely.
He had food and water, lots of Sparky and beer of course, and much entertainment. So he hit the switch and, with the exception of his own little hideaway, Andromeda powered down to minimum life support. That is, minimum for a Neitzchean. He set a program to restore Andromeda's chronology to a point before things started to go wrong; when the Maru crashed in the cargo bay seemed a good idea. And then he switched the Core AI off.
Not many could survive in Andromeda now, and no one could do any further damage to her.
XXXXX
"Hey," Harper said to Rhade, "So you're sure you're not the big bad?"
Rhade's eyebrow went up. "Not this time."
"I still don't trust you though. Nothing personal, it's the Neitzchean thing."
"No change there then," Rhade sighed. "So, how about you come out of this… box, and see about getting us into engineering."
"Is the big bad still out there?"
"I haven't seen or heard anything," Rhade offered, unwilling to let Harper know that he did have the sense there might be something out there.
"What about Andromeda. Is she okay?" Harper's face was hopeful.
"Not quite," Rhade admitted. "She has some blind spots and a little trouble remembering people, but she is cooperating."
Harper considered this, and then agreed to see what he could do about getting into engineering.
Rhade suggested that the engineer use his data port to see about the blind spots, but the mere idea of leaving himself that vulnerable had Harper wide eyed and sweating while he denied his abilities.