Thanks to everyone who's been reading. As always, reviews are appreciated.
Harper twisted to look back in the general direction of his shop, but Tyr was right. There was no way that things ended well for him if he was there when those idiots woke up. Or when someone came looking for them, more likely, given that Tyr had been the one to put them out and he wasn't one for pulling punches. Fortunately Harper didn't have much of any worth for them to destroy, and what he did have was now safely in his duffel slung over his shoulder.
"How did they ambush you?" Tyr asked.
"Stupidity. On my part, unfortunately." Not that they'd been much for brains either, but that he'd expected. "I went in the back way last night," or at least he'd swung through the maintenance corridors, crawled up around the pipes of the water reclamation system, and let himself down in through the space around the electrical panel, which might not actually count as an entrance, but he'd never been picky about that kind of thing, "but then I went and unlocked the door this morning to leave after I put up the days-of-closure sign." His focus had been on viruses and slipstream drives and interesting problems that might actually challenge his intellect, not oversized underbrained Ubers who needed to find better things to do with their time.
Tyr's lip curled in derision. "You deserved to be beaten."
"No, I didn't," Harper snapped, fingers curling in almost instinctively. Had it been stupid of him to open the door? Hell, yes. Had he expected to get beaten as soon as he saw them? Yep to that too. But no one deserved to get beaten, him included, and he was long since out of patience with people who seemed to think otherwise. Not that that ever stopped it from happening.
For an instant Tyr looked surprised at his sudden vehemence, but he closed his mouth rather than press the matter further, and right now Harper would take it. There was a marginal chance that Tyr would understand better than another Nietzschean, but he still wouldn't care to take odds on it. And he sure as hell wasn't going to waste time explaining.
"You got in at least one hit, unless they were brawling among themselves," Tyr said after a minute.
"Yeah," Harper said, making his hands relax again. He didn't like it, but he knew full well how the universe worked. "Yeah, pretty much just that, though." When he'd seen them he'd only had about half a second to brace himself, and while hitting the first one had been damn satisfying, the blows they'd given him in return hadn't been. It was probably just as well that there had been three of them and once he'd curled into a ball he made a reasonably small target because they'd gotten in each other's way more than once. Fewer blows were always a good thing, however it came about, and in this case it meant that he'd gotten off with only bruised ribs rather than bruised and broken ones.
He rolled his shoulders under his jacket and felt the plastiflesh stretch against his skin, but the numbing gel was doing its job and there was no pain from the actual gashes. Good news, for once, even if he only had a couple days' worth of the stuff. They'd tied him on his knees and lashed him half a dozen times to make him scream, but if they'd striped him from neck to knee like they'd been talking about when Tyr had burst in, he'd be in a lot worse shape. Not that that still might not happen when he ended up going back to his shop, but on a drift like this there were always lines being drawn, feuds ongoing…if he kept his head down for a few weeks, there was a chance that things would blow over. Revenge on one kludge wasn't worth much in the grand scheme of things.
Then again, they were Ubers, if not Dragans, and given the state of his shop, it might not be such a bad idea to take a chunk of what Tyr was going to pay him and switch shop locations entirely. It wasn't what he really wanted to spend the money on, but it wasn't as if it would be enough to get him to Infinity Atoll for a much-needed vacation anyway, so he might as well focus on the whole survival thing.
Or…. He looked up at Tyr. Possibly, if Tyr didn't make too many more stupid comments, he could trade some of the other work that needed to be done in that engine room for passage to wherever Tyr was headed next. Assuming that it wasn't a Nietzschean colony, but if it was a typical station or drift there was no reason that he couldn't pick up work there the same way that he had here. Open a new shop. He brightened a little. Options.
Tyr looked down at him again, raising an eyebrow, and he shook his head. It was a good idea assuming that Tyr would agree, but there was no sense in getting into it now.
"Do you need to go to medical?" Tyr asked as they entered the ship. "I may have a few things in stock appropriate for a human, and your wrists don't look good.
"Nah, I'm fine," Harper said, rolling his hands so the cuffs of his jacket slid down to hide those injuries. "Might as well get started." Wrists were a pain to bind at the best of times for someone who used his hands the way Harper did, and since his were among the least of his injuries with more bruises than cuts—and the cuts were mostly his fault since he'd been in a hurry to slip the bindings—he hadn't bothered beyond a quick cleaning. They'd be interesting colors for a while and then fade back to normal.
"Breakfast?" Tyr asked.
"After breakfast," he agreed quickly. He'd swallowed a little blood, but not enough that his stomach was in danger of rebelling.
As yesterday the food was good, even if Harper wasn't entirely sure what it was. Tyr didn't seem to be in the mood to talk, but Harper had gotten quieter in the past few years too, and the silence wasn't uncomfortable. And then there was work to do, and he found himself a spot against one of the consoles that didn't put pressure on fresh bruises and sent his consciousness off through the ship's neural paths to check out the virus. It wasn't anything like interfacing with Andromeda had been, but these days that was a comfort.
The bug was just as nasty as he'd figured after his cursory exam yesterday. The primary coding was centered inside the slipstream navigation system, and there was no way that it was intended to stay entirely passive, but there were tendrils snaking down into regular propulsion, life support, communications, weapons…. He spent some time chasing down specific destinations, some of which made sense and some of which didn't—seriously, of all the life support systems to tap into, secondary carbon filtration would not have been Harper's first thought—but regardless it was going to be a big job. He disconnected himself from the computer and looked around. "Tyr?"
No sign of him, but it had been a couple hours since he'd gone in and it was no surprise that Tyr wouldn't have wanted to sit around and wait. Harper still didn't think he was likely to have gone far enough to let Harper sneak around his ship undetected, though, and he pushed himself to his feet. "Tyr?"
There was no immediate response, but Tyr's ears were good enough that he should have heard if he was in the general vicinity. After a few minutes with no sign of the big guy, Harper pushed himself to his feet and wandered back towards the galley. He wasn't quite insane enough to go snooping where he hadn't yet been, but wandering down a hallway wasn't exactly snooping, and anyway—
"What are you doing?" Tyr asked, stepping out from one of the cross halls.
"Looking for you." Harper shrugged. "I'm going to need some supplies."
"Supplies as in…?"
"Wire. A lot of wire. I've got some back at the shop, but probably not enough." And that assumed that he could get to it. Well, he could definitely get to it, but whether there was some kind of ambush waiting for him was a whole different question. Especially since Tyr had apparently broken his door.
"Why?"
"Short version? This thing has fingers down into half a dozen major systems and I'm going to need to power cycle all of them at once if you want to be sure the bug doesn't get anything out." He paused. "Well, killing communications might be enough to do that, but considering the number of bad things likely to happen if your point-defense lasers suddenly go active while you're on-station I figured better safe than sorry."
"I can undock easily enough."
"Life support is on the list too." He paused. "Admittedly, it's weird life support, but I'm assuming that you don't want me messing around with that while we're hanging out in space if there's another option."
Tyr growled slightly, which Harper took as agreement.
"I can do some basic reconfiguring with the software, but the way this thing is put together I'd feel way better doing it with hardware interlocks. So, wire."
"Come with me. Getting yourself shot going back there doesn't serve either of our purposes."
"So where are we going?"
Tyr ignored the question and signaled for Harper to follow.
"Well, that's enlightening." Still, there was no reason not to follow, and Harper trailed him down a different corridor and then up a ladder and into a half-filled cargo bay. And then up to the ceiling of the cargo bay as Tyr kept climbing to pull open a half-hidden hatch.
"I believe that one of the previous owners of this ship was not opposed to smuggling."
"Who is?" Harper asked curiously.
That got a flicker of a grin. "Apparently the man I bought this ship from, who didn't seem to use the shell bay except as a catch-all. I haven't had the time or inclination to clean it out, but I'm reasonably certain that I saw several spools of wire." He gestured upwards, shifting sideways on the ladder to allow Harper to pass him. "See if there's anything in there of use before you decide to go roaming the station."
Harper scrambled past easily enough and pulled himself into the upper compartment. It wasn't quite tall enough for him to stand upright, never mind Tyr, and filled with enough odds and ends in various stages of decomposition to make him wonder if his shots were up to date. "Well, I always liked treasure hunts."
Tyr paused at the entrance to his engine room. He was very sure that it hadn't looked like a minor explosion had hit when he'd left. He'd figured that it was safe enough to leave Harper alone on his ship to go order supplies when the little professor had been muttering over diagrams and scowling at Tyr when he interrupted—the odds of him putting his nose somewhere it shouldn't be were pretty much nonexistent at that point—but he hadn't expected the results in front of him. "Little man, there had better be a good explanation for this."
Harper pulled his upper body out of the console cabinet and rocked back on his ankles, looking up at Tyr. "I told you, you've got six systems that I have to power down simultaneously after I hit the bug unless you want those watchdog programs screaming bloody murder. Now, I can run around madly and hope that I get to them all in time, or I can reroute everything to one switch." He waved a hand at the massive amounts of cabling running around the engine room. "It's efficient."
That was debatable, but after a moment Tyr shifted to lean against one of the slightly less-mangled consoles. "I didn't get any messages that said that you required more."
"I don't, the spools were enough." He waved a hand towards the corner where two sat denuded and a third was mostly used up as well. "Heavier grade than I really needed, but it'll do the job." He shrugged. "For the record, I think you've got the skeleton of an XR-6 racer up there, too, but I couldn't get close enough to be sure."
Tyr looked around and shook his head. It was probably just as well that Harper hadn't been able to get to whatever this racer was, under the circumstances. He'd probably have brought it down and tied it into the rest of this mess.
"Well, do you have a better suggestion?" Harper asked, clearly still able to read his disbelief. "You can probably do the running around easier than me, but then there's a good chance that you electrocute yourself, and that was never your thing as I recall." He frowned. "I'd really like to know who the hell built this ship because I'm about to bolt a couple ladder rails onto the lower walls so I can actually reach some of the backup access panels without a freaking stepstool."
Tyr grinned.
"Yeah, funny." He reached up to scratch his forehead and made a face has his hand came away with flakes of ash. "Oh, for the record, your AP matrix release is no longer slaved to your proto mixer. And I hope you shot whoever made that call just on principle."
"Why?"
Harper frowned. "Because it's a really good way to reduce yourself to your component atoms."
Whatever slaving those two systems together did, Harper clearly didn't seem to think that further explanation was necessary, but Tyr was not an engineer. "Elaborate," he ordered.
"Well, when you go from redline standard acceleration directly into slipstream, you've got about a one in thirty-ish chance for backflow from proto matrix to hit the AP matrix at full and cause a bright, shiny spark to turn your ship into a bright, shiny fireball. If you don't spend too much time running like mad it isn't a bad way to cut a few seconds off slipstream entry, if you do, it's not a great plan. And seriously, why are you trying to cut a few seconds off slipstream entry if you're not running like mad?"
Tyr ground his teeth. That wasn't a modification that he'd approved, or at least the potential consequences had never been brought up at any point.
"Yeah, that's what I figured. If I wouldn't take the chance, you sure as hell wouldn't."
"Fix it."
"Told you, I already disconnected it." He shrugged. "Made my head hurt just looking at it anyway. Besides, if you blew yourself up in transit because of something that stupid, I'd feel guilty for like…days."
"You're aware that it is comments like that that get you beaten?"
Harper grinned and made a rude gesture in his general direction, and Tyr fought down a quick smile of his own.
"Well, when you're not making unauthorized repairs to starships, apparently you're out assaulting complete strangers."
"What?"
"I got my orders placed for supplies and happened to swing by security while I was in the vicinity," Tyr said. "You're wanted for questioning by station security in a, quote, 'vicious, unprovoked attack.' Apparently you ambushed three completely innocent men when they were out for a run, beat them unconscious, and robbed them."
"Wow. I'm good." He frowned. "Wait, they actually contacted security? I was not expecting that."
"No, I understand that someone saw your broken shop door and found them unconscious," Tyr said. "At which point they had to say something." Not that he thought that 'out for a run' was a good choice since it didn't explain why they'd been found in Harper's shop, but he also didn't see a lot of alternatives.
"And that's what they picked?" Harper shook his head. "You know, I probably should have robbed them now that I think about it. That jackass never did pay me for the repair job."
"You seem surprised."
"Nah, I've gotten pretty used to people living down to my expectations. I am impressed that you could tell me the charges with a straight face, though, especially since you did most of the hitting."
Tyr echoed the headshake. "Frankly, their story is so ridiculous that I'm tempted to suggest that you go stand in front of them, just for the sake of comparison." And his personal amusement.
Harper rolled his eyes and scrubbed his hands against his legs, grimacing at whatever the result was. "Great, thanks, because that wouldn't get me squished like a bug."
"Shot, more likely, which is why I didn't actually suggest it. Apparently they're the nephews of Puma's Alpha." And were coddled to the point of stupidity about it, and never mind that they should have been working all the harder to prove themselves and their worth.
"Ubers."
Tyr's jaw tightened at the slur. "Harper…."
"Sorry. Habit."
Not a habit that Tyr appreciated, but under the circumstances he let it go. Especially since he'd finally identified the sharper metallic undertone of scent beyond the standard metals and electronics and now dust in this room as blood. "Come with me."
Harper's eyes narrowed and he didn't move.
"You're bleeding again," Tyr said. "Come."
"Ah, man." Harper pushed himself to his feet, surveying the room for a minute, and then dug the ragged duffel bag he'd brought back with him earlier out from under one of the piles, nodded, and scrambled over to Tyr. "Which way?"
Medical was just past crew quarters—he needed to see if there was a spare room already made up that Harper could use—and Tyr followed Harper inside. "Do you know what your medical scans should look like?"
"More or less." He boosted himself up onto the far bunk.
Tyr kept his mouth shut as Harper shrugged out of his jacket and shirt and picked up the medical scanner. The bruising across his chest and back looked considerably worse than Tyr had expected, but Harper had light skin and didn't seem particularly concerned.
The nastiest marks—aside from the network of scarring highlighted by the bruising—were the slices across his upper arms and back, and Harper grimaced as he pulled the bandages away to reveal the oozing blood lines. "Must have twisted wrong."
"Considering the mess that you made of my engine room, I'm not sure how you could have avoided it."
"Yeah, funny. Hey, at least the numbing gel is still working."
Tyr turned and dug into the medical cabinet. He tried not to make a habit of needing it himself, but he should have basic supplies available. There was a good chance that any medication he had would be too strong for human usage, but bandages and knitters were universal.
"What happened there," he asked curiously as Harper grimaced and scrubbed the blood away with something he'd pulled out of his pack, readying another plastiflesh bandage.
"Uh, you're going to have to be a little more specific, big guy."
He had a point, Tyr supposed. Unlike the majority of the male members of the Andromeda crew, Harper had never been one for going shirtless or even sleeveless no matter how hot or dirty the work he was doing, and although Tyr had probably seen him without a shirt on a few times, he'd never noticed the latticework of scars across his back and chest before. Then again, if the rest of his skin wasn't turning such spectacular colors, he wouldn't necessarily be noticing them now. The majority were obviously years old and under normal circumstances would fade into pale skin relatively easily.
A couple were more than recognizable as souvenirs of a whip; Tyr had taken lashings from the mine overseer that would have left him with similar marks if his nannites hadn't taken care of them. Others, though…. He indicated the one he'd originally meant, arching up from Harper's waist and curving inwards towards his spine, and was surprised by the ugly snarl that crossed Harper's face. "What?"
"What do you think?" He curled an arm behind him, spacing his fingers out.
Tyr realized abruptly that the scar he'd indicated had been one of three following parallel tracks. The two matching scars that Harper indicated were more faded and far enough inside the first that he hadn't recognized them for what they had to be, and he moved his hand—and the blades lying quiescent along his forearms—away immediately.
"I was smaller then," Harper said quietly and then shook himself a little and went back to dealing with the open cuts.
"Expected," Tyr said after a minute, taking a chance and messing his hair lightly. "Deserved was…not the right word."
Harper paused, looking up at him for a long moment, and then gave him a wry smile. "Yeah, that one I can't really disagree with."
