Thanks to everyone who read and to Aeliel and FDWurth for reviewing.
"Hm." Harper was pretty sure that he was right about the smugglers' bay opening to space given the wall panel he'd just found. He was also pretty sure that getting the racer out was going to be a major pain in the rear.
The easiest way would be to open the bay up and snag the racer with grapplers as it floated free, but he hated the idea of letting everything else float away as trash, and Tyr wouldn't like it either. Even if ninety-five percent of it was trash, there might still be something like the wire spools worth salvaging in the other five percent, and they'd both lived on the margins long enough to be unhappy with unnecessary waste.
But the other option was to tie down or move everything out of here before opening the bay, and damn but that was going to be a lot of work. The racer might be the biggest thing in the bay, but there was plenty of other crap in general, and there was no way Tyr had that many nets.
Tyr could probably be badgered into helping, at least for a while, but he'd also probably find work on this Kartik—not a pleasant place for humans from what Harper had gathered from the nets—and it wasn't like Harper hadn't worked on a small crew before. Or couldn't do math. Money to keep the ship running trumped what amounted to house cleaning.
There was no point in wasting time, though, as long as he was up here, especially since he had some tweaks he wanted to make before the fab unit churned out another set of Tyr's new bullets, a command post to finish rewiring, and then he was going to steal Tyr's body armor because he hadn't liked how it had shifted when Tyr was testing those bullets. Tyr was too picky to use standard, off-the-rack stuff, but that didn't mean it couldn't use a little reworking.
He shut the wall panel and went back to the entrance hatch of the bay, picking a crate at random and cracking it open. Junk, junk, dust, dust masquerading as junk... He sighed and began to toss the random objects down through the hatch. The stuff they were transporting was far enough from the ladder that it wouldn't get hit with any shrapnel, and he could sweep up the remains after they hit the deck. Trying to carry it down piece by piece would be a whole other level of frustration that he wasn't dealing with.
Unfortunately rather than hearing a crash as the junk hit the deck, he heard a couple dull thumps and a string of curses. Oh. Oops.
Tyr appeared through the hatch a moment later, upper body coated in a sheen of dust.
"Uh, hey, big guy." Harper gave him his biggest grin. "How's it going?"
Tyr glared.
"So I was just starting to do some cleaning, but I think maybe it would be better if I just...went." He'd been backing up as he was speaking, but a low growl was incentive enough to make him turn and scramble. Unfortunately he was so close to the hatch that Tyr was on him before he could use the height of the bay to his advantage, and a grip he couldn't break closed around his ankle and yanked him backwards before he was even fully upright. His stomach hit the deck, and then the same grip flipped him easily onto his back. "You cheat," he complained.
"Of course."
Smug bastard. Not that Harper didn't cheat too, or at least he would given an opportunity, but right now he had more worrying things to deal with. Like the Nietzschean who made two of him crouched over him. "Um...I give!" he declared, curling in on himself quickly. Tyr wasn't likely to actually haul off and hit him—well, okay, not beyond a swat across the back of the head or something like that, and fair was fair considering that he had just dropped a bunch of crap on the guy—but among other things he was ticklish and Tyr wasn't and this was just not a good situation.
Tyr snorted and cuffed him lightly, rocking back on his heels. "You are a menace, professor."
Harper considered for a moment and then uncurled enough to to look up at Tyr and stick his tongue out.
Tyr rolled his eyes. "Would you care to explain why you are pelting me with refuse?"
"I want to get the racer out of here and down somewhere where I can really open it up."
"I'm sure that's true, but I fail to see why it necessitated an assault on my person."
Harper pushed himself into a sitting position and waved a hand back in the general direction of the upper panel. "The bay hatch opens to space, not the main bay below. If I want to get the racer out without losing everything else in here, it's all got to get dealt with." He shrugged. "Throwing is efficient."
Tyr looked around skeptically. "I think you'd be better off cutting the racer apart and lowering it down in pieces than trying to deal with all of this."
"Except for the part where that would destroy the frame which kind of defeats the purpose."
"Mm."
"You know, it occurs to me, you could toss useless junk out of here a lot faster than I can," Harper pointed out.
"I can certainly toss you through the hatch."
"Ah, but then who would fix your ship?"
"I'd ask what you did to break my ship if I hadn't just come from command."
"I am not breaking, I am rewiring. You'll thank me when I'm done."
Tyr looked skeptical, and Harper decided that he'd put off stealing the body armor for the time being. Tyr would probably be grouchy if it wasn't available when they got to the station anyway. "Are were getting close to our next destination?"
"An hour at most, which is why I was looking for you. I've already been contacted by representatives of the two Prides in question who will be standing by to come onboard and receive their goods."
"Are you planning on giving them a tour?"
"I think not."
Whatever those first representatives had done to piss Tyr off, he clearly wasn't over it, but at least that meant that Harper would be safe enough working in command while they were completing their transaction. "All right, I'll go do more of that rewiring then. Are you going on-station today?"
"Not unless one of them has a lead on a job. I've sent messages to my contacts here, but I don't expect to hear anything so soon. Most likely I'll pick up supplies tomorrow and make a personal visit with each of them at the same time. Is there anything that you need?"
"Well, my Sparky supply is holding strong—"
Tyr made a noise that Harper chose to interpret as encouragement.
"—but I'll put together a list of what I'd like to fix up your firing range. Like I said before, I can hack some generators together, but if you've got more experimental weaponry you'd be safer with the real thing. I'd rather check the stuff out myself, but this doesn't seem to be a great place for me to go out haggling. Can you find a non-creepy-Nietzschean station to visit next time?"
"You will enjoy Rhahat, I think. If you haven't been there before, it's a planetary orbital and I believe the planet in question is one that participates in that ridiculous life-threatening sport that you enjoy."
Harper might have heard of Rhahat in passing, but he'd definitely never been there before. It would be nice to get back in the water again, even for a little bit. "You're just mad because I'm better at it than you are."
Tyr gritted his teeth as another wretch cowered away from him in the narrow corridor and debated giving up on the idea of visiting his last two contacts. At least for today. They were both small time operators who arranged transport for those who couldn't or wouldn't wait for the larger passenger ships to come through, and he wasn't at all sure that he wanted to take on a passenger from this station even if they did want to go in the same general direction as he was travelling. He still had two specific components for the generators that Harper wanted him to locate, though, both of which could be found in the general vicinity of those storefronts, and if Harper did finish with command today he'd promised to get the firing lane fixed up next.
Another human carrying a stack of something brushed against him and then cringed away, down a side corridor where a drug trade was happening in full view of anyone who passed by, and Tyr snarled and swiveled back in the direction of his ship. Harper wanted supplies, yes, but those supplies could be ordered and delivered just as easily by remote and he could not deal with any more of this absurdity today.
Slaves and drugs, two things that a true Nietzschean eschewed without a second thought, and yet they'd somehow become intertwined with the functioning of this station. And not just one or two but five Prides used Kartik as a trading hub and participated in both enterprises. Not large Prides, perhaps, but still, full Prides led by a those who should be respected—and self-respecting—Alphas. The kind of people who should put an immediate stop to anything so degrading the second it manifested. The Drago-Kazov example no doubt had something to do with the disgusting behaviors exhibited here, among other things if he recalled his history correctly Anacon Pride was one of their early offshoots, but even so, having it once again thrown in his face how ignorant so many of his people could be as to their true potential was salt in his wounds. And the idea that his son would have to deal with such things if he was to meet his destiny did not make him feel better.
He shook his head and turned out onto a more traveled thoroughfare, picking up speed as he went. He'd expected it to be simpler to find a short-term job here than on Rhahat since access to a sport planet generally meant an abundant workforce and far fewer people willing to speak to an itinerant mercenary, but so far none of the jobs he'd learned of were of the sort that he was willing to consider. No one had been fool enough to mention drugs outright, at least, but he would no more transport that swill as slaves, nor would he stand as bodyguard for a transaction involving either. He would have no drug runner or slaver on board his ship either.
His expression was apparently enough to encourage even other Nietzscheans to get out of his way, and he reached the hatch of his ship unmolested. A crate of supplies sat outside the door, and he entered his passcode with more force than necessary and heaved it inside.
"This place sucks," Harper informed him as soon as the hatch closed behind him. "Here."
Pitching the crate down the hall might have burned off a little tension, but it was more likely to lead to damaged foodstuffs than accomplishing anything useful, and he slapped on the antigravs Harper handed him and didn't comment on Harper's statement. The truth of the matter was, unfortunately, obvious.
"Want to blow something up?" Harper asked, giving the crate a nudge to start it moving.
"Very much so." Right now this station would be an excellent start, but if he said that out loud Harper was likely to try to find a way to do it. Another reason not to allow a slaver onboard his ship; not only would Tyr have to force himself not to kill the worthless waste of oxygen, he'd have to prevent Harper from doing so. Something likely to take far more effort than the absolute zero that he was willing to expend. "You have another round of new bullets ready?"
"Ready and waiting. Still going to kick like hell, though, and don't miss the firing lane target on pain of a new entrance to the station. Any chance the generator parts are on the way?"
"Find an online source and have them delivered."
"Wow. Who made you that mad?"
"The fool openly selling drugs out of his shop who presumed to look down on me when I declined his offer of employment."
Harper's eyes widened. "Okay, so lots of blowing things up. Can do."
Tyr knocked him sideways lightly and felt his lips twitch as Harper shoved—ineffectually—right back. There was probably something wrong with feeling relief at being in the company of a scrawny little kludge rather than his own kind, but right now he couldn't bring himself to care.
This wasn't the first time that he'd come to Kartik, but he didn't recall things having been this bad before. There had been drugs, yes, and slaves, but never out in the open, and he'd never had trouble finding a job that did not involve anything of the sort before. Nor had people been so openly dismissive. Being without a Pride carried a certain stigma, that had always been true, but it had never before been so blatant. Or perhaps it had been, but the contrast with the way it had felt when he'd finally begun to unite the Nietzschean people...
"Uh, Tyr? You okay?"
He realized abruptly that his blades had started to come up and eased them back down again immediately. Harper might be perfectly happy to roughhouse, as absurd as it sounded and even though he still regularly complained about the self-defense lessons, but he didn't deal well with raised bone spurs, and given what Tyr knew about his history he wouldn't ask him to. Especially since absolutely none of what Tyr had encountered on Kartik had anything to do with him.
"If you want to throw heavy objects, you can help me clean more crap out of the smugglers' bay," Harper suggested. "There's a couple trunks that I can't budge, even empty. That's actually why I was digging out the anti-gravs before you go back."
"Perhaps later. Right now some time on the shooting range sounds very, very good. What was included in the latest round of modifications that you made to the bullets?"
