Thanks to everyone who read and to Ailiel for reviewing.
Irritated Nietzscheans were good for moving heavy objects, anyway.
Tyr had claimed a couple of the heaviest intact trunks for himself once they were emptied; he hadn't been in a mood to chat so Harper had no idea what they were for. Harper had asked him to drop a couple of the more mobile ones in engineering, though, since if Tyr was going to complain about his organizational skills he could help do something about it. Not that Harper planned to say that out loud while Tyr was stomping around glaring. The rest rested mostly in pieces in the bay below. A waste, but no one paid anything for ancient trunks.
As far as the rest of the contents went, both of the bay and the trunks themselves, so far there hadn't been much of interest. There was still a good two thirds of the bay to sort through, but the best finds had been a few more coils of wire and some circuit boards that didn't belong to this ship but could be made usable in one spot or another when they needed spares. The rest of it...between the bits of scrap metal that weren't even worth melting down and a giant pile of mostly-disintegrated bits of what had probably once been blankets or uniforms Harper didn't have a lot of hope for what else might be up here. Space was slowly opening up, though.
Harper shoved another trunk towards the open hatch in the floor and, after a quick check that there was no Tyr below, sent it crashing to the lower deck.
With a quick check of the chronometer, he hooked his ankles around the ladder and began the slide to the floor. The generator parts had arrived just before they'd left, and he'd promised Tyr that he'd get the firing lane fixed up next. The bullets were getting close enough to spec that he wanted it up to real firing range standards before Tyr gave it another go anyway.
He'd done a quick inventory of the parts when they'd arrived and as expected not all of them were what any reasonable person would call acceptable, but between the lot of them were enough working pieces to build what he needed. He hadn't been about to ask Tyr to stay on Kartik any longer, even if Tyr probably would have been willing to terrorize more good parts out of the suppliers just on principle. And part of him kind of hated that they'd been sort-of swindled, but…well, as far as he was concerned, getting the hell off a creepy Nietzschean-controlled station trumped even a good deal. He'd taken the liberty of hiding the fact that he was human from the creeps he'd been haggling with over the net so at least they'd still managed a little less than retail.
He hit the panel outside Tyr's quarters and heard the chime before it opened. "Hey, figure I'll fi—Tyr?" There was no sign of him, but there was also no way that he'd let Harper into his quarters without being there.
"Stand back."
Harper tilted his head back and then did as he said, and Tyr dropped down through the ceiling panels above. "That's new. And I don't think you're allowed to complain any more about me punching holes in your ship."
Tyr ignored him. "There is now a rough entrance to the viewing bay and thus the firing lane from above so you can cease entering through my quarters."
"Oh, nice. You really were in a destructive mood." He'd fix the ceiling later.
Tyr scoffed but didn't deny it. "It is as well to be gone from that place. Degenerates."
Personally Harper thought that they'd seemed like pretty typical Nietzscheans to him, Tyr was the one who was the outlier, but Tyr wouldn't appreciate that opinion.
"Do you need assistance?"
"Sure." Or at least, while he didn't technically need it, he wasn't about to refuse it. "Can you strip the walls bare again? I might want to reuse some of the panels you put up, but definitely not all of them."
Tyr nodded, and Harper started pulling parts out of the crate. There wasn't enough room to assemble all of the generators in the firing lane itself, but Tyr could deal with a few parts spread out across his quarters for an hour or two. Or four.
"My quarters had best not start to resemble yours, professor," Tyr said as he lifted the first panel off the bracers.
Harper tossed one of the bad parts out of the firing lane and in the general direction of Tyr's bed. It was as good a place as any for a discard pile. "Says the guy with an entire wall full of tools for weapons maintenance."
"A neatly organized workbench bears no resemblance to any workspace of yours."
"Hey, I'm organized for efficiency."
"Is that what you call it?"
Harper made a face at him, but since it was just barely possible that he might not win that argument, he moved on to more interesting topics. "Have you got any plans for Rhahat besides looking for work? Any fun in the sun?"
"I don't plan to risk drowning myself for no measurable gain, but I might perhaps spend a few days on the surface."
"You have no sense of adventure. Surfing is an excellent sport." He'd already looked and there were small rentals nicely within his budget—or at least the budget that didn't include immediately needing to rent out shop space—in the floating cities along the tidelines, catering to those who planned to spend their time out on the water. And if he was very lucky, said floating city would have a population of ladies out and about in the evenings also enjoying a nice shore leave. Lack-of-shore leave. Whatever.
"Opinions like that are why you're likely to die young and absurdly."
"Uh, Tyr, I'm from Earth. I'm already a couple years past my expiration date. And that's without recalculating whatever exploding a planet does to the life expectancy of the population. Kind of doubt it makes it go up." The part of his brain that never stopped running started trying to figure out how he'd even do that calculation, and he squashed the idea with a shake of his head. Some things just didn't need to be known.
There was no response from Tyr, and after a moment he lifted his head to find Tyr paused with another wall panel in his hands looking at him strangely.
"What?"
Tyr shook his head and set the panel aside before reaching for the next, only to go rigid at an alarm tone that Harper hadn't heard before ringing through his quarters. "Go."
"Huh?" Harper looked around, hand on his repulsor. No fires, nothing suddenly open to space, no hint of engine trouble—
"Leave."
He twisted back to look at Tyr. "What?"
Tyr took a step towards him. "Out! Now!"
Tyr stared at the frozen image of the little boy on the vidscreen, the child's face half hidden behind a chair. It was the only glimpse he'd gotten of Tamerlane during his conversation with Olma, and it wasn't enough. He was growing so quickly, and yet Tyr saw him so infrequently. When Tyr had first smuggled them to safety and then sent them off on their own, he'd thought that knowing that Tamerlane was alive would be enough. Now…it was certainly better than the alternative, but he'd never considered how painful it would be knowing that his son was growing up without him.
He shook his head and shut the screen off, pushing himself to his feet. He hadn't expected the communication from Olma today, especially since she'd only have just received his dead drop message, but he could understand her reasoning. If there had been anything in those stolen messages to give away Tamerlane's location—and even without knowing what he really was, those who knew of what was now Tyr's genetic makeup meant that they'd happily collect anything Tyr cared about to use against him—the most important thing to do would be to move him elsewhere. And obviously she'd communicate that before rather than after. It would take time to establish themselves and set up new secure channels after their move.
Time. He felt his hands curl into fists. More time without seeing his son; more time without speaking to his son; more time without the chance to be with the boy as he grew.
He shook his head again, harder this time, and then slammed a thumb down against the panel and waited until it indicated that all saved information, both images and audio, had been deleted. As much as he hated doing it, he would not risk a repeat of what had happened on Madras.
He swiveled and headed for the gym. And the punching bags. As much as he wanted to order Harper to get back to work on the firing lane, he was no fit company for anyone right now, and needless paranoia or not, he wasn't comfortable with anyone else in his quarters without being there himself. It probably wouldn't even occur to Harper to do anything but work on the firing lane, but Tyr hadn't survived this long without remaining cautious.
By the time he felt like a person again he was covered in sweat, and one bag lay in pieces while another was going to need to be at minimum recovered. And it was well past the time that they usually ate dinner. Not that he had any inclination to eat, but Harper tended to do horrible things to Tyr's kitchen when left to his own devices, and that was without provocation. Today…Tyr hadn't meant to snarl at him earlier, he'd just wanted him out quickly so he could receive Olma's message before she terminated it, but given the look in Harper's eyes before he'd scrambled up the ladder it hadn't come across that way.
After a quick shower he went looking, but there was no sign of Harper in the kitchen, nor in Command, engineering, or the smugglers' bay. He wasn't in his quarters, either, although Tyr still wasn't sure when Harper did use his quarters. For sleeping was certainly a rare occurrence given that the bed had acquired even more random bits of metal since he'd last been in here.
He sighed and touched his communicator. "Harper?"
"What?" Came back a long moment later, definitely not in the friendliest tone that Tyr had ever heard from him.
"Where are you?"
"Building a door. What did you do, hit the wall with a sledgehammer until it went away?"
It took Tyr a moment to figure out what he was talking about, and then he sighed and returned to the corridor outside his quarters. Where there was a distinct lack of hole in the ceiling. "How do I get to where you are?" He'd done the obvious thing and taken the direct route; clearly Harper had chosen a different method.
"Storage room next to the kitchen. Go up, there's now a normal door. And then a Tyr door through the next bulkhead. You'd have made life a lot easier on yourself if you'd punched through about a foot further down, you know."
Obviously he hadn't known that or he would have done it, but before he could comment Harper continued.
"If you're done yelling and scaring people for no good reason, can you grab me a blowtorch and a couple of fill patches? Everything should be in engineering, and you really did a number on this poor, defenseless bulkhead."
"I—yes." Despite Harper's claims, Tyr found his workspaces anything but organized, but Harper had been correct that there was a blowtorch mixed in with the mixed lot on one of the consoles, and small sheets of metal were stacked haphazardly in one corner. Harper was wiring up a panel when Tyr finally reached him, and Tyr raised an eyebrow at the visible holes around the edges of the roughed in doorframe. "Perhaps I was a bit overly enthusiastic."
Harper shot him a scowl and then returned his eyes to the access panel.
Tyr nudged his arm lightly. "I didn't mean to frighten you."
"Private call' is three whole syllables, you know," Harper muttered.
That was not an unreasonable point. It was no surprise that Harper had figured out what was going on on his own, or at least had determined the base cause of the alarm, but Tyr could have let him know that there was no threat immediately. "I was not expecting that communication today, but it was very much time critical. That particular alarm is only used for that contact."
Harper twisted and stared at him for a long moment. "Your son?"
Tyr set all but one of the loose patches down and thumbed on the blowtorch. "I'll get started closing these holes or that access panel will serve little purpose."
