Thanks to everyone who read and to F. D. Wurth for reviewing.
Tyr's hand locked around Harper's wrist before he could slice open the near-onion, and Harper's head jerked up. "What? I washed my hands." He'd helped Tyr once or twice when Tyr had been in the mood to cook on Andromeda and knew how picky he could be about that kind of thing. As ridiculous as Harper still found the entire concept. It wasn't like engine grease was that poisonous.
"Did you just pull that out of your pocket?" Tyr demanded with a nod to the small knife that Harper held.
"Yeah." He tugged lightly against Tyr's grip. "Come on, you said to slice it, and I'm hungry." Also a little wired, despite having only brought one can of Sparky with him. It was a side effect of having an actual interesting problem to work on, he suspected, and experience said that it wouldn't last more than a few hours, but he'd enjoy the rush while it lasted. Tyr might not, though.
Tyr sighed. "Put that away and use an actual kitchen knife before you infect us both with some horrible disease. Have you even cleaned that thing since you last used it? I'm not even going to ask what you last used it on."
"What? Oh." Harper collapsed the knife when Tyr released his wrist and tucked it back in his pocket, taking the paring knife that Tyr offered instead. "Okay, I guess. But talk about picky. Aren't you the one with the super immune system?"
"That I have no intention of taxing over whatever bacteria you're carrying. It's amazing that you've survived as long as you have."
Harper made a face at him—Tyr had just buried his hands in whatever was in the bowl in front of him which meant that he couldn't even pretend to cuff Harper around right now—and then went to working on the near-onions. He wasn't kidding, he'd been busy this afternoon and had ended up skipping lunch except for that Sparky and a few crackers.
An elbow caught him in the head, and he yelped automatically despite the lack of force behind it. "Not funny."
"I thought it was funny."
"You have a sick sense of humor. And don't tell me about learning to cook so you could poison some guy with strychnine again. That story was creepy enough the first time around." Especially given the pleasure Tyr took in telling it.
"I didn't learn to cook to do that, it was merely a fortunate coincidence. Bring those here when you've finished and start on the curat." A pause. "And put that tongue back in your mouth unless you'd like to lose it."
There was a difference between burning off energy and being suicidal, and Harper did as he said and then went back to chopping.
"Have you finished making a mess of my engineering bay?" Tyr asked as the curat went in. "Or are there a few panels that you haven't destroyed yet?"
"Ha ha. You should thank me, I'm building a ridiculous list of things you let people do to your engine room that you really, really shouldn't have." Actually he suspected that most of it had been done without Tyr's knowledge by people cutting corners and knowing that they had a fair amount of time before issues showed up since Tyr was anything but suicidal, but honestly, there were limits. "The big stuff is done, but I need to finish running through their diagnostics and tracking systems and make sure I've got everything. I'll probably find a few more walls that need to be ripped open." He was solid on both life support, weird as the infiltration vector was, and weapons, but he wanted to spend some more time on the communications systems, and the others he'd only dropped flags into at this point.
"After which you can eradicate that thing?"
"Yep. Figure the rest of the setup happens tonight and tomorrow morning I'll kick the removal process off."
"You can't do it tonight? You seem to have the energy."
"Well, if I thought your ship was going to explode I'd push it, but it'd be smarter to get a night's sleep first. I'll crash sooner than you'd think, and that happening immediately after I've triggered the release sequence would not be good." He trusted his abilities and the surge of adrenaline that was sure to hit as soon as he started, but this particular virus removal wasn't exactly a life-or-death situation and there was no sense in taking pointless risks. "Besides, as of now it's just a tracking program. Hate to break it to you, big guy, but at this point they know you're here."
He could practically hear Tyr's teeth grind. "I'd be happier if I knew who 'they' was."
"You'd be happier if you could shoot 'they' in the head."
Tyr gave him one of his more evil smiles. "Of course. Put that knife in the washer and set the table."
Like the engine room, the cabinets were set high enough that Harper suspected that this ship had come from a species who'd find Tyr's height barely average, and after locating the plates he braced himself and scrambled up onto the counter.
"Boy, get down!"
Harper's feet hit the ground again at a quick yank on the back of his jacket, and if the same grip prevented his head from bouncing off the floor immediately after by holding him mostly upright, that didn't mean that it cancelled the first tug. "Well, how do you want me to get the plates down?" he demanded. "I didn't exactly bring a portable teleporter with me. Besides, don't you remember Walter?" He twisted, looking over his shoulder. "Did you get that goo on me?"
Tyr rolled his eyes and released him, rinsing his hands off quickly before handing two plates to Harper. "That goo is dinner, your jacket will wash, and you ought to know better than to put boots on a kitchen counter. Were you raised eating from the floor?"
Harper pulled his jacket around and scraped at the doughy substance. It tasted good, at least, even uncooked, and it wasn't like one more stain would show up amongst the bits of circuit-fried leather and grease stains. "Eh, not too far off; we burned most of the kitchen when I was nine or ten."
"What?"
He looked up to find Tyr frowning at him and shrugged. "What? It was wood. We were cold."
"There weren't other options?"
"Not really. The Magog raids started that fall, and…." He shrugged again. It wasn't a time that he liked to think about. "If you went too far from the rocks and the coast you were nothing but an easy target, and even when we risked it none of us were big enough to bring back anything really worthwhile anyway."
"Your parents included?"
"What? No, they were long dead by then. But none of the other adults lasted very long after the Magog started coming either. Too big to fit in the bolt-holes along the coast that us kids used—and the Magog are only about my size now, so bigger tunnels were kind of pointless—and it's not like we had any weapons worth mentioning. So, yeah. We burned the kitchen." He scratched at the dough marks on his jacket again, hoping Tyr would let the subject drop.
Tyr looked down at him for a moment. Sometimes—most of the time—it was easy to forget the sheer brutality that Harper had lived through. Especially when he was picking at the dough stuck to his jacket and sucking the bits off his fingers and didn't seem to think that anything he'd said was particularly unusual. Tyr would never claim that his life had been easy, but at the same time he'd been fifteen, nearly an adult, when he'd learned just how cruel the universe could truly be. For Harper, he'd never known anything else. "Stop licking your jacket before you give yourself some form of plague, and get some glasses down without turning my kitchen into a climbing gym," Tyr ordered rather than pursuing the subject, knocking him sideways lightly. "There will be actual food shortly."
Harper rolled his eyes but at least washed his hands again before going for the glasses, and he had the sense to use his knees rather than his feet on the counter this time which Tyr would accept. He wasn't actually sure in which empire this ship had originated, but certainly it involved either nonhumans or genetic engineering because even he couldn't easily reach the upper cabinets. By the time the table was set appropriately, the dumplings were in the oven cooking, and Harper bounced lightly on the balls of his feet. "Is it done yet?"
"How much of that vile drink have you consumed since you came onboard?" Tyr had to ask.
Harper grinned. "Just the one can. I kept forgetting to stop by the commissary and pick up another case."
"Small miracles." He looked at the oven. "We've got some time until it's done. Come show me the worst of what's been done to my engines." A pause. "The worst of what they've done. I can see the mess you've made."
"Hilarious." He didn't actually object, though, heading for the engine room ahead of Tyr and scrambling up to sit on one of the half-open consoles. "So where do you want me to start?"
Tyr crossed his arms and found a reasonably clear bit of wall to lean against. "The things most likely to get me killed. Obviously."
Harper rolled his eyes. "Okay, I fixed the AP mixer proto matrix mess, but really, your whole proto matrix could use an overhaul. See…."
The little professor was still going strong ten minutes later, waving his hands at various things presumably to illustrate his points, but Tyr had already lost the thread of what those points were. He was good enough to manage basic engine repairs and could follow along with the theories behind more complicated ones, but Harper had crossed well beyond that line five minutes ago and was still going strong. He wasn't even trying to show off, it was just something that he understood and never mind that the vast majority of the people that he spoke to didn't.
"Stop," Tyr finally ordered.
"But I'm just getting to the interesting part."
Tyr shook his head at Harper's grin. "How long would it take you to just fix it?"
"If by 'it' you mean everything, you're talking several months. Among other things there's some rerouting and recoding that could stand to be done, and once that's ripped open there's always another thing or two hiding behind it. Especially since I don't even know who built this ship." He frowned and looked around. "Everything that might kill you versus just strand you somewhere uncomfortable…call it a week best case. More likely two or three if I have to machine some stuff, unless you're hiding fab facilities somewhere on this thing."
"I'm not." He tilted his head, considering. "Why don't you come with me? My next stop will be the…source…of this virus," and whoever had dared plant such a thing on his ship, "but I have a job on Abraxis starting in fifteen days. I'll trade passage for whatever work you can get done before I leave there." If Harper could take care of the worst offenders, he'd get that list of the rest and find some competent engineers on the stations he passed through to work down it. Somehow. He hated vetting workers.
"Abraxis." Harper bit his lip lightly. "Monarch Sector, right?"
"Yes. It's a drift similar to this one. Perhaps a quarter again larger." He waited a moment. "This place will not be particularly safe for you when you go back to your shop."
"Yeah, no kidding." He sighed. "Any chance there a fewer Nietzscheans on Abraxis? Or, you know, none? Except you, I guess."
"Don't hold your breath, professor."
"I never do." He nodded. "Yeah, I'll do it. Figured it was probably safer to get out of here anyway, and it's not like I'm particularly attached to the place. Any parts I can't build or machine are your cost, though."
"Done." Tyr nodded and turned, his nose telling him what the timer was about to. "Dinner is ready."
Harper hopped off the console and followed him back to the kitchen, and Tyr waited until he was seated and eating before asking the question he'd been wondering about since Harper's offhand comment.
"You said that you aren't particularly attached to this drift. What happened to make you leave Andromeda and come here in the first place?"
Harper stared at him for a minute and then looked back down at this plate. "Seefra."
"I recall that Seefra sucks," Tyr said slowly. "But since I don't know where—or what—Seefra is, I can't say that I find that information particularly enlightening." He'd expected it to have something to do with the war, short as it had been, or the loss of Earth, but clearly that wasn't the case.
Harper shook his head. "Explaining exactly what Seefa is will take an hour, make next to no sense, and still not really answer your question, so let's just say that it's a hellhole system with nine—well, one, now, but at the time it was nine—hellhole planets that I got to spend three years in. On. Whatever. Mostly alone."
That raised more questions than it answered, but Tyr stuck to the obvious. "Where were the others, and why was it such a hellhole?"
"Insert time travel here. All of us got thrown there, but we ended up in different places at different times. I was the furthest back." A frown. "Sideways? Hell if I know anymore." He waved a hand. "Anyway, when I first woke up all I knew was that I was by myself in a dustbowl feeling like I'd gotten ripped into about a billion pieces and reassembled by some jackass with a hammer and a bad schematic."
Tyr's lips twitched despite himself.
"I got lucky for once, or at least I thought I did, and a family found me before things got too bad. I mean, sunburned, dehydrated, half starved, stage further-along-than-I-like heatstroke, all of that, but still breathing. And they were nice enough; patched me up best they could and shared water which was a big thing over there. I thought it was kind of weird that they totally ignored the burns around my dataport, but I don't much like people messing with that anyway so it wasn't really a big deal."
"I still don't see the hellhole," Tyr said when he went quiet.
"It's coming. They were all out most days, it was a working farm with the parents and two boys, but even if I was still too weak to be of much use I figured I could at least help out around the house. They had this old vidscreen that was in bad shape hung on the wall, the casing was cracked pretty badly and it didn't even turn on, so I went ahead and fixed it for them one day." His fingers curled against the tabletop. "And they stopped being nice."
"What?"
"Turns out Seefra is—was, whatever—a whole system full of technophobes. I mean, it could have been worse. Seefra-5 was run by some serious whackjobs who'd probably have made some kind of public spectacle of my execution. These guys were just close followers of the whackjobs who kept the broken vidscreen hanging on the wall as a symbol of, and I quote, 'the great hoax perpetuated by technology.' I really, really don't like getting hit."
