Thanks for the reviews guys ((hugs))

Okay; the first trip took him like three hours. He blamed the trees and the darkness because he wouldn't have got lost otherwise. At least that was what he was telling himself. Plus he was carrying a lot of stuff. Basically anything he could rip off with his bare hands. Agio, however seemed to have no problem with the dark or trees and always kept passing him. The infuriating thing was every time Agio did, he did his best to sneak up and scare the… well—something even a Nightsider wouldn't like the smell of—out of him. That guy sure could move fast for a dumb ox.

The second trip, took well…okay; so it took as long as the first, but this time he blamed Agio. The fact that he jumped at every little sound expecting Agio to leap out at him distracted him. So it wasn't really Harper's fault when he got lost for like the eighth time. At least this time he had his nano-welder so it would be easier to cut stuff up and bring it back. He needed to seal that hole in the Maru. He had taken a good look at it after he made it back from the first trip. It didn't look that bad. What actually worried him more was a second hole that he hadn't seen right off. The first hole was probably made when the crashed in to something on the planet. But the second was made from the initial impact of Agio's ship hitting his. Why this was a problem was that it had seemed to actually fuse the two ships together into one. Plus the heat of the impact not only fused the ships but melted a hole right though. So now, when Harper stood in the Galley he could actually see into Agio's cargo hold. And whatever Agio had been carrying was now damaged beyond repair. It looked like coolant or something, as there was green and yellow slime all over the containers that had cracked open.

As Harper trudged through the trees towards the direction he hoped the Maru was in he had to admit something else was slowing him down too. His head was pounding, his knee twitched as if it had a mind of it's own with every step. And he was tired … exhausted really. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath. He had rigged up an old canvas he found on the Maru to work as a sack. But after he had had filled it with 3 foot pieces of struts and a about a dozen pieces of hull plating the size of pizza pans, it was way too heavy to lift. He wished hopelessly for a Maria-bot to fall from the sky but in the end was resigned to lugging it all himself. He wrapped a climber's rope around it all and pulled it behind him has he limped back to the Maru. Between lugging his sack of loot and waiting for Agio to jump out at him at any moment it was no wonder he was exhausted; he was thinking even Rhade would be a sight for sore eyes at this point.

His stomach growled. "I know, I know, I haven't forgotten about you either," Harper bemoaned to himself.

"Talking to yourself Harper? I always knew you earth rats were not quite right in the head."

Harper jumped startled at the sound of Agio's voice. "Agio, you really don't want to mess with me right now or this 'rat' is going to bite your kneecaps off."

"Well I don't want that, you probably have rabies or something!" The Nietzchean chuckled at his own wit. "What are you planning to do with all this stuff?" Agio poked at the bag Harper had been hauling.

"What the hell do you think? I'm going to fix the Maru, One of us has to save our sorry asses"

"Aw, you're just a Kludge. What does a Kludge know about fixing a ship? You wouldn't know a nano-welder from a slipstream manifold."

At that point smoke may have actually come out of his ears, he was so infuriated. He stood up as tall as he could and did his best to get in Agio's face. His voice dropped low and intense as he tried to speak through clenched teeth.

"Listen here; my name is Harper! H-a-r-p-e-r, Harper! Not Kludge or earth rat." Harper pulled out his nano-welder from his belt and held it close to the larger man's face causing him to flinch slightly as Harper ignited it. "This is a nano-welder, I know how to work it and I know it's not a manifold. I'm the best damn engineer this side of the Milky Way and you'll take care to remember that or I'll give you a demonstration of my skills."

Agio stepped back and applauded. "Well said, well said. So if you your as smart as you claim, where is this precious ship of yours?"

Okay so the stupid Nietzchean had a point but there was no way he was going to admit it. "I know where it is!" Harper sneered, "I was just trying to mislead you."

"You were trying to mislead me buy hauling a sack through the woods and making a lot of noise?"

"Well, everyone knows what idiots Nietzcheans are."

Agio growled and shoved Harper to the side hard. Harper's sore knee buckled in protest and he fell to his right, falling in to a clearing. The Maru sat not twenty feet away. "I knew that!" He yelled back in to the trees.

Agio soon lumbered out of the bush beside them. "Well, since you seem to know everything… and since there was no clear winner to the race…"

"There was a clear winner," Harper groused, dragging himself to his feet and dusting his pants off, working hard to ignore the now more intense throbbing in both his knee and his head; "And, you weren't it!"

"Anyways..." Agio didn't miss a beat, "I thought you might like to once again put your money where your mouth is."

"Meaning?" Harper squinted his eyes suspiciously.

"The first one to get their ship in order, without blowing themselves up in to space dust wins. Same wager as before."

"You're on, consider your assed kicked Uber. You don't know who you're dealing with."

"We'll see." Harper's opponent smirked at him smugly as if humoring a precocious five-year-old.

Four hours later, with a ration bar and a sparky cola at his side harper felt no better. He was clearly ahead in repairs but his lack of sleep and injuries were becoming more than distracting. If he took a nap then for sure Agio would cheat or in the very least pass him.

Harper yawned and rubbed at his eyes, it felt like someone had super-glued sandpaper inside of his eyelids.

Agio sneered at him through the hole still connecting the two ships. "Tired?"

"No," he relied sharply, followed by uncontrollable yawn.

Agio chuckled, shaking his head.

"What? What's so damned funny?" Harper snarled.

"Despite your obvious shortcomings, pun intended, your kind continues to amaze me. At every turn you fight the obvious, things like sleep and beings obviously your superior."

"Obviously," Harper snipped not quite under his breath.

"Yet," Agio continued. "You survive, and your kind seems to procreate like rodents. Nietzcheans are more calculated in all things. Our breeding is better and we are therefore stronger. Yet your lack of preciseness, that's obvious by your make up, makes it so there are more of you than there are of us. So does that make you stronger in the long run?" Agio shrugged, "It's just something I think about sometimes."

Harper wanted to bang his head against the piping he was welding just so he could get that conversation from his mind. "So let me get this straight. You think one day we so called non-advanced Humans will one day over take Nietzcheans because we are indiscriminate about who we sleep with?"

Agio shrugged noncommittally. "It's just something I think about."

"Well you really should stop it. You don't have all the facts. And, that right there is what's really wrong with the Nietzchean race. You get information and you exploit it to fit your needs. You make assumptions on what you think is the truth and you treat it as something that is forged in steel, when in reality there is much more information out there; you have based an entire philosophy on half-truths and whispered rumours. For example, you are not nearly so superior as you think you are."

"And what truths do you think you know that I do not?" Agio questioned as he opened a panel on his own ship that had wire smoking and sparking.

Harper talking with is hands pointing the pipe at Agio to make his point. "First of all I can't believe I am having a conversation about sex with you of all people. But you obviously have no experience so I'll fill you in…"

"I have been chosen by four strong woman to be their husband." Agio was indignant.

"That's because they all need some pansy to boss around," smirked Harper. "You should never let a woman boss you around; it's a sign of weakness. That's example one of something you don't know. Example number two, some of the people down on good ol' Earth mate for life. Bet you didn't know that huh?"

"Some of them have never mated at all. First example being you!" Agio chimed in. "I think you are the one spreading half-truths. I think mating for life amongst your kind is a rarity."

"True love always is rare."

Agio sneered then as he matched up two wired incorrectly and Harper wasn't about to correct him on it. "Nietzcheans don't believe in love, only necessity."

"Now who's telling half-truths? You can't tell me there wasn't a girl; the apple of your eye, the whip to your cream." Harper joked as he fitted his pipe into its spot and successfully reconnected the coolant valves.

Agio shook is head. "Why am I even talking to you?"

"It's my sunny personality." Harper flipped a few switches… "And my soon to be winning personality." He grinned openly, then dashed off to the command centre of the Maru to check some reading and start patching the breach out there.

"In your dreams Harper, in your dreams." Agio made sure the human was gone before donning protective gloves and reaching back towards one of his now cracked cargo containers. He reached in and pulled out a green and yellow florescent worm-type creature that wiggled and squeaked in protest. "I've only begun to fight. Those credits are as good as mine"

TBC