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"So help me, if you don't get down here and put that sling back on I will beat you within an inch of your life."
Harper hooked an arm around the ladder rail and twisted to make a face at Tyr. The big guy fussed more than Beka ever had sometimes.
Of course, he was also far more likely to carry out his threats, and Harper yelped and swung himself inside the rails as Tyr raised an eyebrow and caught one of the rungs. Not that Tyr had ever beaten him, obviously, but he wouldn't hesitate to cuff at Harper or shove him around until Harper was too busy laughing to keep arguing, either.
Even if he had somewhere to climb to, which he didn't since the ladder just led up to some connections in an overhead panel, Harper couldn't climb faster than Tyr, and he wasn't about to try to jump down on a still-shaky knee. He stayed where he was until a smirking Tyr came on level with him.
"Not your wisest move, little man."
Harper grinned. And let go. He didn't fall far, Tyr had him by the front of his jacket before he'd dropped more than two rungs, but he was surprised by the rough shake that followed.
"Do not do that!"
Harper put both feet back onto a rung, and one hand went to a rail while the other latched onto Tyr's wrist. "What's wrong?" His weight was nothing to Tyr, and they both knew it. And even if Tyr had somehow managed to miss him he was perfectly capable of catching himself. He'd spent practically half his life climbing ladders.
For a minute it looked like Tyr was going to answer, but then he shook his head. "Just get down properly."
"Okay. Sure."
Tyr released him and leaped back to the deck. Harper would have called him a showoff, but he obviously wasn't even thinking about it.
Harper himself swung back around to the other side of the rails and climbed down normally. "I'm fine, Tyr. Really," he said seriously, making no move to pick up the scrap of fabric he'd tossed away earlier. He didn't mind cooperating with Tyr about the getting-down part, especially since he'd finished what he wanted to get done up there anyway, but the sling was just an annoyance at this point.
"I realize that. I…." Tyr trailed off with a shake of his head.
Harper frowned, and then his brain finally kicked in for something besides circuits. Tyr hadn't been in a great mood these past few days, not since Harper had confirmed that one of the intruders had accessed his communications array, but he hadn't been in an unusually bad one either. Just a little growly. But this morning he'd doubled his workout time—at the very least; he'd been at it for a while by the time Harper had woken up—hadn't even made a token insult about Harper's attempt at breakfast, and drank enough caff to drown a normal person. It was practically a bright, blinking 'nightmare' sign, or it would have been if Harper had been paying attention.
Of course, coming right out and asking Tyr about a bad night made about as much sense as trying to have a philosophy discussion with a Ravenous Blugblatter Beast of Trall and would probably be marginally less useful. "Want to help me put some consoles back together?" he asked instead. "They're heavy enough that it's hard for me to move them alone."
Tyr scoffed but didn't object, and Harper moved the ripped up consoles to the top of his list. No systems were at critical so the repair order didn't matter much, and it was an easier place for Tyr to help than if he spent the day crawling around the slipstream core. And as he'd learned during the innumerable repairs back on Andromeda, if he started chattering Tyr would eventually give in and join the conversation.
Tyr settled in beside him and braced the first console up with his back and no apparent effort, and Harper got through two console repairs, a detailed explanation of what he was doing that Tyr probably didn't understand more than one word in three of, and an overly-complicated story involving him, his cousins, and a nuclear reactor they'd once tried to build before he finally spoke again.
"Your parents were dead by then, correct?"
"What? Yeah." Harper rocked back on his heels and looked over at him. He couldn't say that he'd expected the question, but Tyr had already admitted to a bad night. More or less, anyway. And their nightmares weren't always that dissimilar, as weird as that still felt when he thought about the fact that he was talking to someone with blades on his arms.
"You were young when it happened?"
"Yeah," Harper confirmed. "About six." They'd talked about their homes and the loss of their families before, albeit in more general terms, but it wasn't like the details were any secret. "When the Dragans came for me, my parents shoved me out the escape hatch and told me to run. I knew my dad was dead the second he pulled out a blaster—I'm still not sure where he even found one—but I thought my mom…." He shook his head quickly. He'd thought wrong, and there was no point in dwelling on it. "I lived with my cousins' family after that."
Tyr tilted his head. "Why would they come for you? You'd have been of even less use at six than at twelve."
"Gee, thanks." It was a fair question, though, and Harper found himself staring at his hands. There had been a reason to keep what had happened, or at least why it had happened, secret once upon a time, but Tyr knew what he could do as well as anyone. Besides which, he'd already admitted that they'd been after him.
"Professor?"
Harper looked up at him again. "You know when I say I'm a genius it's not actually a joke, right?" He might treat it like one most of the time, but his brain had never worked like anyone else's he'd ever known. Well, aside from that of the occasional Perseid. He tried not to think about that too much.
"I assumed as much."
"Well, when I was a kid we didn't know that. Or I didn't, anyway. I mean, I always knew I was smarter than the other kids, but it was never a big deal. And then a couple Dragans came to the school one day and made us take this test. Galactic Standard Intelligence whatever."
"It is a common enough test on Nietzschean slave worlds." Tyr paused. "Probably in part to identify people like you."
"Yeah, well, it worked. I was pretty terrified of the Dragans themselves, I'd seen them kill kids before, but I didn't even realize that the test was supposed to be hard until I heard the other kids grumbling about it on the way home. Pattern matching is a joke for me and always has been; algorithm development and numerical analysis aren't much harder. It's why I like this stuff," he said with a wave at the current in-progress console. "It's at least real. My parents got quiet when I told them, though, and by the time it was dark there were Dragans at the door ordering them to hand me over."
"That's when they told you to run."
Harper nodded. "Like I said, I don't even know where my dad got a blaster, but he did some damage while my mom shoved me out the back and told me to never tell anyone what I thought about that stupid test."
Tyr looked skeptical. "And that was all that it took for you to escape? Surely it wouldn't have been so difficult to track you down afterwards."
"It shouldn't have been," Harper agreed. "We were living by the cape then, and the town wasn't that big. Even if I told my aunt and uncle that they'd come for my mother—she was pretty; it wouldn't have been a surprise—all it would have taken was them telling anyone that they were looking for me and my uncle would have handed me over without a second thought. It never happened, though. I mean, my parents' bodies were crucified in the square, so they'd done that much, and most people just figured they'd been called back to the garrison for one reason or another and were glad we'd escaped more torment after that little object lesson, but after a few weeks we found out that the whole garrison had been abandoned. And not just the one near us, either. They never pulled out of the cities or the big encampments, but from what we figured out later at least a quarter of the Dragans on Earth took off overnight. After that, at least up until me and Brendan and Isaac went up to Boston, the only Ubers I saw were the ones guarding the tribute loaders. Not one of 'em ever gave me a second look." A pause. "Nietzscheans. Whatever."
Tyr snorted. And then frowned. "How old are you?"
"What?" That wasn't exactly the question that he'd been expecting.
"How old? Without accounting for the time travel incident."
"'Incident,' there's a nice word for it," Harper said with a roll of his eyes. "I don't know, twenty-nine, maybe? Thirty? Something like that, but I've never kept very close track. Why?"
Tyr had always assumed that there were a dozen or so years between them in age, but it wasn't a surprise to learn that it was a bit less than that. Harper's size and demeanor were good camouflage, and he used them well. Harper was still looking at him, and for a moment he wanted to be angry, but the survival of one human had nothing to do with the fall of his pride. "Despite your questionable grasp of the timeline, I suspect that that aligns rather closely with the attack on Kodiak pride." He'd long since come to the conclusion that the lack of warning had been because the Drago-Kazov had gathered their forces on a slave world that no one had been paying any attention to; Earth fit those qualifications as well as any.
"I'm sorry, big guy," Harper said, nudging him lightly.
He meant it, and Tyr shook his head. Harper could be a mean, vicious little monster when he wanted to be. He had no qualms about lying, shooting people in the back, and employing all manner of underhanded attacks up to and including improvised bombs—very Nietzschean qualities; Harper wouldn't appreciate the sentiment but Tyr approved entirely—but he could also be fiercely loyal to a level that Tyr didn't always understand. He did know that it hadn't been so bad having Harper around, though. He was a reasonably good engineer, after all, even if he still couldn't tell Tyr exactly what information had been transmitted from his ship or where it had gone beyond the first dead drop which was making Tyr's nights less than restful. When they weren't less than restful for other reasons. He closed his eyes against the nightmare image of a little boy he saw only in rare vid conversations crying out for him. He wasn't sure what time he'd awakened with those sounds ringing in his ears, but he did know that he hadn't slept a minute longer afterwards.
Harper nudged his shoulder again, and Tyr cuffed at him automatically. Harper's 'block' wouldn't have done anything against a real hit and Tyr made a mental note to force him through some sort of self-defense course before he left to set up his new shop—he wouldn't always have one of those demonic little whistles on him, and not all of his opponents would be Nietzscheans—but he hadn't put any weight behind the blow either and Harper's yelp was entirely exaggerated.
"Hey, no abusing the engineer!"
Tyr raised an eyebrow and straightened slightly, deliberately emphasizing the size difference between them, and Harper stuck out his tongue and scrambled away from his current console and under another that had yet to be repaired. Which, considering that Tyr had been holding up consoles for him for the last couple hours, was exactly as useful as it sounded. Despite the images that he still couldn't quite banish from his mind, Tyr couldn't help a chuckle.
"Well, that sounds better," Harper said, poking his head back out and gesturing at the console around him. "Come on, up."
"There is something very wrong with you." Tyr lowered the one Harper had apparently just finished with and moved to the new one lifting it enough to give him some room.
"Did both of your parents die that night?" Harper asked as he went back to work.
Tyr hesitated. He hadn't intended to speak of his own parents, and if he didn't answer, Harper would find something else to talk about soon enough. The fact that Harper could and frequently did provide all of his own conversation was one of the reasons that he didn't mind working with the little professor. And yet…. "My father had been called to conclave two nights before," he said slowly. At fifteen he'd been too young to be party to why the call had gone out, but he remembered his father leaving them with a smile. Tyr would never know for certain whether the man had seen death coming, but he didn't think so. Barbarossa Anasazi had been a true Nietzschean. He would have found some way to warn his family. "The Prime orbital was hit first, though, and there were no survivors. My mother and I were together when the boarding parties reached our home a few hours later." His fingers curled inwards. "She was slow and chose to turn back and fight in order to give us—me—a better chance at getting away. For all the good it did."
"At least she tried."
"As your parents did."
Harper hesitated for a moment and then nodded. "How many brothers and sisters did you have?"
"Of full siblings, none." Very unusual for a Nietzschean child, and no doubt it had played a large part in his mother's choice. "From what I understand my birth was difficult, and my mother had no more children after myself. Of half-siblings, I had four brothers and a sister, but we were not overly familiar."
"Why not?"
"My mother was my father's first wife despite the fact that she bore him only one child, and his second and third wives did not encourage closeness between us."
Harper's forehead wrinkled, and Tyr waved a hand. The politics within a Nietzschean pride were at least as complicated as those without, and not something that he cared to try explaining to a non-Nietzschean. Given that he hadn't lived it for more than half his life at this point, it was entirely possible that he wouldn't even be able to explain all of the intricacies involved.
"My father would never have tolerated fighting between us," he continued instead, "but given that the oldest of my half-siblings was five years younger than myself we never had a great deal of inclination to interact anyway. Perhaps as we became adults we might have also have become allies, but it's unlikely that we'd ever have been more than that."
"That kind of sucks."
Tyr shrugged. He'd seen Ajax and Jason playing together sometimes and wondered what that might have been like, but he'd had his parents and a few age-mates at school. It had been enough. "Did…?"
"Did what?" Harper asked when he cut himself off.
Tyr hesitated. Harper was tolerable enough company, all things considered, even beyond his engineering abilities. But he'd been brutalized by Nietzscheans far too many times in one short life, and Tyr already knew what his opinion on a united Nietzschean pride was. And the more people who knew about his son the more potential danger it put Tamerlane in even if he didn't reveal all the details. Perhaps phrased in a different context, though, the question was viable. "The people who raised you had a vested interest in your survival, correct?"
"That's a weird way to say it, but I guess so," Harper said after a minute. "My uncle never liked me much, but my aunt and my mom were sisters so they sort of had to take me."
A Nietzschean wouldn't necessarily agree with that statement, at least not without the expectation of some benefit further down the line. That was his greatest fear with the situation he'd had to leave Tamerlane in, and the vid calls that had become steadily rarer since the defeat of the Nietzschean fleet hardly soothed those fears. With Tamerlane getting older he should be seeing his father more, not less, no matter what excuses Olma made. Orca's matriarch had her own reasons for keeping the boy, and Tyr wanted to believe that she loved him as well, but he was not her blood and she was a Nietzschean. If his recordings—recordings that he should never have kept, in retrospect, no matter how much it would have hurt to destroy what little he had of his son—somehow gave away something, if someone came for Tamerlane, he just didn't know what her choice would be. Would she fight as hard for him as his own blood would?
"Did they care for you?" he asked slowly. "Treat you well? As young as you were, you must have relied on them for a great deal." He'd been old enough when the slavers had taken him to stand on his own, just as well given that those he'd been thrown into the mines with had had no love for Nietzscheans of any age, and by the time he'd escaped he'd understood all too well that he was alone in the universe. A far different situation than being a six year old child, however intelligent Harper might have been.
"Sure," Harper said with a frown. "Or they did the best they could, anyway. There wasn't always enough food or supplies to go around, but that wasn't their fault."
"You said that your uncle would have turned you over to the Drago-Kazov."
"He wouldn't have risked his own family for me, that's for sure, but can you blame him?"
He couldn't. It was a very Nietzschean attitude and not exactly a response to settle his mind.
"What's up, Tyr?" Harper asked after a moment. "Why are you asking about my family?"
His eyes narrowed, and Tyr could practically see the calculations running. And he already knew that Harper was far too smart for his own good.
"Shit. Your nightmare wasn't about you. You've got a kid."
