With nothing else he could do whilst Harper was working on accessing engineering, Rhade decided to try and put both Harper's and his own mind at rest.
There was definitely something on board Andromeda that shouldn't be and Harper had only confirmed his own suspicions, even if he hadn't found any tangible evidence.
His self-imposed mission was simply to find whatever beast was haunting Andromeda and scout it out. Hairy meant mammalian, so chances were high the guns would be enough to destroy it, but if they weren't, then he needed to work out a strategy for handling it, and that meant information gathering.
According to Harper, Beka had described the smell of rancid meat and whilst he occasionally caught whiffs of carrion throughout the ship, it was always strongest near the cargo bay where the Maru had been, so that was where he was headed. He had already searched the place, but this time he had Andromeda scour the walls and floor for anything out of place.
There was nothing. No trace of any beast, no trace of rotting meat, yet the odour was definitely there. He kept searching until Harper finally contacted him with a whoop of victory.
XXXXX
No one knew what to expect when the door opened, but both Rhade and Harper cringed back in the event that something big and nasty might explode from inside. Nothing happened.
However, there was a very bright light.
It was too bright for Rhade's eyes to make out initially, but Harper could just about see. "Trance?"
That was all it took for the bright light to consolidate, slim down and coalesce into Trance's familiar image. Her eyes blinked open, and she said, "Is it all gone?"
"Is what all gone?" asked Rhade.
Trance looked scared. "Then it's still here!" She tilted her head and eyed him head to toe. "You're looking a lot better, but your clothes are all dirty again. You always undo everything I do! Oh!" She suddenly stopped, wide eyed, her hands covering her mouth. "It's better if I stay here until it's gone."
"Sure," said Harper, "but Trance, Andromeda can't access her full power, and I need to find out why."
"Oh. Oops," said Trance bashfully. "I might have burned out some wiring."
"Can I get to it?" Harper was backing away from Trance as he spoke.
Trance winced, "Um, I might have damaged Doyle too. Sorry."
"Is there anything else you might have done?" Rhade asked darcastically.
Trance thought for a moment. "Um, no, I don't think so."
"Harper needs to fix Andromeda," Rhade reiterated to Trance. "Can he do that?"
"Okay, but it's better if I stay locked in here. Just until everything is as it should be."
"And how should it be?" Rhade asked, as Harper shuffled nervously towards an obviously scorched section of panelling,
Trance went slightly vague, before shaking her head. "I can't tell you that."
Rhade tried to find out more information from her, but Trance resolutely shook her head, and begged to be left alone before she hurt someone else.
XXXXX
After Harper had fixed the core, Andromeda was finally able to move; full power was restored to her systems and, other than the continued surveillance glitches and memory holes, she was fully functional.
Harper continued to jump at every sound and swore blind that the monster in Andromeda's corridors was stalking him. Rhade almost thought he heard the monster a couple of times, but the light brushing of air faded with the faint scent of rotting meat, yet there seemed to be no sense to direction. Harper yelled once in a while, and when Rhade came running, it was odds on whether the engineer was more frightened of the monster or of him. He was certainly becoming convinced that the Neitzchean would get rid of him once his usefulness was up.
Andromeda wasn't that much better, constantly questioning his motives, analysing everything that Harper did to her systems, and giving Rhade updates every few minutes on Trance in case she did something out of the ordinary. As if having a baby sun in the engine room could ever be called ordinary.
As every Neitzchean knew though, survival depended on planning and preparation, so whilst it was frustrating, he wasn't particularly surprised by Harper's occasional sneak attacks or Andromeda's periodic need to play with the gravity plating.
The Core AI was now able to follow her own trail backwards, and while Rhade spent his time patrolling and searching for the monster, she tracked her way back through space until she picked up a signal.
The signal Andromeda received, however, was interesting. It was an automated beacon and came from a slipfighter.
Andromeda sent a reciprocal signal and Rhade decided to go down to the planet. After much negotiation that involved Andromeda forcefully announcing that she wanted him where she could keep an eye on him, Rhade decided that staying on board was the more favourable option after all.
Fortunately the reciprocal signal was quickly responded to, and Dylan's pale face appeared on the screen.
"Telemachus?" he asked his tone oddly cautious.
"Dylan," Rhade responded. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, thank you," Hunt replied guardedly. "Is everything all right with you? Is Andromeda okay?"
"Things are… strange," Rhade replied, uncertain as to what underlying meanings were being implied by Hunt's wary tone.
"In what way?"
"Harper seems afraid of his own shadow, Trance won't come out of the engine room and Andromeda is less than fully functional."
"I am not!" The Core AI interrupted. "I am fully functional, Captain, however I have reason to believe that Harper, Rhade, Trance or an unidentified other party is attempting to corrupt my security systems."
"Ah, thank you Andromeda," said Dylan. "Rhade, what about you? How are you feeling?"
Hunt's stare was penetrating, and Rhade knew then that the older man had a much better idea what was going on than he did. "I'm fine," he said. "Much better than the last time I saw you."
"You look tired." Hunt observed, and the feeling of being nannied grated. Sometimes Dylan needed to assert his non-Neitzchean alpha superiority and he did it by patting his pet Neitzchean on the head.
"Sleeping has not been an option," he told Hunt archly. "However, my superior physiology will not require rest for some time yet."
"I see." Hunt seemed to become more shuttered. "What about this unidentified other person Andromeda is talking about?"
"I have manually searched Andromeda, and I have seen no such person." Rhade took a deep breath, allowing his frustration to show. "I have smelled something rotten that moves and Harper says he hears some monster, but neither Andromeda nor I can actually find anything."
"Uh huh." Dylan appeared to think.
"What about you?" Rhade asked. "What made you abandon ship?" Rhade's tone was slightly more biting than perhaps it should have been, but Dylan talking to him like he had all the answers when he hadn't even been in the same sector for the last few days seemed offensive.
"That's a bit of a story," Dylan replied. And told it.
XXXXX
Before
With Beka ordered off duty for a couple of days, and Rhade out of commission, Dylan felt a little vulnerable in Command. Beka had been his right hand woman for over five years now, and although she was sometimes a little unpredictable, always insubordinate, and never called him Captain, she was nevertheless a strong first officer that complimented his own style of command in many ways. On the other hand, Rhade was mostly predictable and certainly forthright, with an inner calmness and strength that was supportive and secure, especially since Seefra. Between the two of them, they gave him a platform of strength from which to command, a secure knowledge that they were both there to back him up. Now that they were not there, he was certain that Rommie and Doyle, supplemented by the rest of the crew, could fill that gap, but somehow, he couldn't help but feel, well, naked.
They weren't anywhere that was any threat to anyone and the raiders had disappeared with the appearance of Andromeda, so maybe now was a good time to stand down for a while. Everyone had been working hard and a little down time would do them all good.
Having made that announcement, Dylan decided to spoil himself and play a little ball before taking a nap followed by a long hot shower, and then returning to duty.
He was at the napping part of his plan when an overpowering stench of rotten meat woke him up. He called Andromeda to investigate and she replied that she could detect nothing. By that time the smell had dissipated, but it had put him out of sorts. Admittedly a little grumpy, he headed for an early shower, much enjoying the heat pounding against his back and releasing the stress.
With reluctance he switched off the water, and grabbed a towel to dry himself off. Wrapping it around his middle, he stepped out and looked straight into Andromeda's hologram staring at him with startled brown eyes. The hologram, looking abashed, averted her gaze and started with some report, but the fact that he could not seem to get a moment of privacy irked, and Dylan ordered her away.
In fact now that he thought about it, why was there a hologram anyway? Rommie and the Core AI had all bases covered between them and quite frankly it was scary how often the hologram seemed to interrupt him at private moments.
Still wrapped in only a towel, he sat down at the desk in his quarters and proceeded to locate and erase the hologram program. Programming was not his strongest point, however with executive commands ensuring Andromeda's compliance and his own ham fisted attempts, the holo program, if not exactly erased completely, was certainly terminated. He thought he might have damaged one or two other programs but right now he didn't care. Andromeda should not be spying on her Captain.
The idea occurred to him that someone like Beka might think he was acting irrationally and he really didn't want to explain himself to the prickly woman. Therefore it would be better if no one knew what he'd been up to, so he put his actions under an Eyes Only code, securing Andromeda's silence on the subject.
X
It was thanks to Beka's stubbornness that the monster lurking in Andromeda's bowels was identified as existing. Her insistence that she was being stalked had at first been thought a side effect of her concussion, but Trance verified that this was not the case.
Dylan had sent patrols throughout he corridor and made a mental note to tell Harper to fix the security glitches that he might have caused when he erased the hologram. Unfortunately, it seemed that Harper had his own agenda. He'd been working on the Maru, but when Dylan went to find him to explain that some discretion might have to be used in fixing the security glitches, he found the engineer had locked himself in his lab. According to Andromeda, he only came out for food. Suddenly security glitches could wait; they just weren't important anymore.
Could it be that Harper was at the centre of the monster in Andromeda, one of his clandestine experiments perhaps? With that in mind, he ordered Andromeda to restrict information to the engineer, and basically ignored him. Let him blow himself up, but he wasn't going to take the rest of them with him.
The situation became worse with the realisation that neither Rommie nor Doyle had been seen for long time.
He didn't seem to have any kind command structure anymore; his crew were barely keeping themselves in ordered squads, many running screaming as they encountered the monster, Andromeda's power levels dropped for no apparent reason, no one could get into engineering, and Trance had disappeared.
The last straw came when Beka returned from one of her patrols with one arm around an injured crewmember. Someone's blaster had been used to shoot the crewman in the back and Beka said the monster had fired upon them from around the corner.
Later, another patrol reported in, claiming that someone had been shooting at them also, but that they had heard the monster scream when they returned fire. Perhaps the two groups shot each other? Dylan mused, but then thought better of that. There was something haunting that ship that didn't belong there, and with so many people on board, and with Andromeda unable to find, or refusing to divulge the monster's location, no one was safe.
At this point, they weren't too far away from Parazio – a Commonwealth friendly planet that might take his crew in for the duration of this emergency.
X
Having had the crew abandon ship, Dylan felt far more in control. There was only his command staff on board and far less chaos. Andromeda was flying a course away from Parazio and towards empty space with the idea that the monster could perhaps be ejected into space, far away from any shipping lanes.
Harper kept interrupting him with insane ideas, the majority of which involved blowing them all to pieces, and Dylan began harbouring a suspicion that the engineer not so much experimenting, as trying to sabotage them all.
Rhade should have been out of the med deck by now, but Trance had mentioned that he was better off staying in there, that she'd been a bit conservative in her estimate of his recovery time in the interests of getting him to listen to medical advice. Perhaps Dylan should get him out of there anyway, but then he thought about Rhade's trustworthiness, or rather lack of it. He was, after all, a Neitzchean. How did he know that Rhade hadn't brought the monster on board in the Maru? Beka was easy to fool sometimes, especially when it came to Neitzchean bad boy types, and Rhade had certainly gotten that image going in the last year or so. Perhaps this was all a Neitzchean plot. In retrospect, he wouldn't put such a thing past Gaheris or Tyr, so why should Telemachus be any different? He could stay where he was.
And speaking of Trance, she hadn't been seen for a while either.
So, he went searching for Beka, only to find her readying the Maru for take off. She couldn't stay on board with that thing stalking her she said, and he agreed. Privately, he suspected that she was just looking for an excuse to leave. She always had threatened to leave and it was pure luck and stubbornness that had actually had her stay. It was best if she left; at least he wouldn't have to worry about her constantly undermining him.
X
Wandering the corridors by himself, it was clear that the monster was stalking Dylan now. Slithering through the pipes around him or through the maintenance tunnels, he could hear it. He knew when it was around because of the smell that came with it, but he could never find it. It seemed to enter his peripheral vision more than once and he turned and fired, but it was never there any longer, just smoking holes in Andromeda's plating.
Eventually, he was forced to concede that Andromeda herself was trying to kill him alongside the monster with her spontaneous oxygen depletion exercises. His override and shutdown codes no longer worked and he finally had to admit that he could not do this by himself; he needed to get away.
So he took a slipfighter and headed for the nearest habitable planet.
XXXXX
"Rhade, Telemachus, listen to me carefully," Dylan was speaking slowly as if to a retarded child and, suppressing a growl, Rhade found it difficult to resist cutting him off. "Something on Andromeda is making everyone behave strangely. Since I've been here, I've been able to think properly and I can see how irrationally I was behaving, and Beka, and Harper. Andromeda is either as much a victim, or is the cause of it. I'm going to stay right here, because someone needs to keep a clear head."
"Whatever it is, it hasn't affected me," Rhade told him.
"Perhaps," Dylan nodded slightly. "But best be on the safe side. We need to find the cause, and find Beka too."
"We need to repair Andromeda's security glitches," Rhade countered. "Without full monitoring of all areas, we are vulnerable and unable to complete a full analysis or search. Beka has waited this long, a little longer will not make any difference."
Dylan appeared to think for a moment. "You're right," he said eventually, "I can assist with the security repairs since I think I was probably the one that caused some of them. Patch me through to Harper."
Rhade hesitated. Dylan was the glue that held the crew together, especially the old crew of which Andromeda and Harper were a part, and having Dylan in communication with them both was to leave himself vulnerable. Especially as Dylan seemed to think Rhade was either stupid or unstable and both Andromeda and Harper would take any opportunity to see him removed. "Andromeda, open communication to Harper," he said. "And I mean open."
Dylan looked like he was about to object, but changed his mind and nodded his agreement.