Thanks to everyone who read and Aileil for reviewing.


"But why would you rescue me from Tyr?" Not that Harper was at all sure why rescue had been on anyone's mind in the first place, but Tyr was Harper's first choice of people to hide behind when things got bad!

"It's okay, you don't have to be afraid anymore."

Harper gritted his teeth. If the doctor kept repeating that, they were going to need to call in a second doctor in a few minutes. "How exactly do you figure I'm afraid?" He was angry to the point he'd be yelling if his throat wasn't so scratchy, and if he had any confidence in his ability to stand he'd be shoving his way to a terminal right now. None of that exactly telegraphed 'fear.'

"We heard him threatening to beat you."

He swiveled to find that one of the Squeegees Tyr had been transporting—at least he was ninety-five percent sure it was one of them; his eyes were still being a little difficult when it came to focusing in the distance—had come in through the door behind him. "Who? Tyr?" He threw up his arms and then dropped them right back to the bunk as his head went light and his upper body wavered. "So what? He threatens to beat me twice a week! He also threatens to space me, chop me into little bits, and haul me around by my ears and ankles! And yet you might notice I'm un-beaten, un-spaced, un-chopped...what is wrong with you people?"

She blinked, and he looked back at the doctor.

"Tell her. How many bruises have I got that aren't the kind of thing that comes from engineering work?"

"I'm not really familiar with engineering..."

"Fine, then," he snapped when the doctor trailed off, clearly not intending to finish the sentence. "How many bruises do I have at all? A rough estimate is fine." He was sure he had a couple, when you spent your life crawling through ducts and fighting wiring in tight spaces and all of that that was just how it went and he mostly didn't pay attention until he was actually losing blood, but whatever he had damn well didn't look anything like what an angry Uber would inflict and anyone who'd ever crossed paths with a Nietzschean would know that.

"You have a number of scars," the doctor temporized.

"Scars, sure. And if any of you had showed up fifteen or twenty years ago when I was collecting them and rescued me from the Dragans I'd have said thank you. But it's not fifteen or twenty years ago, and rescuing me from Tyr was more than a little pointless. I mean, you might as well have rescued me from one of my cousins." Tyr was way bigger and scarier and growlier than Brendan or Isaac had ever been, sure, but if anything he was even more protective as much as he tried to act like he wasn't. Brendan and Isaac had always trusted that Harper would wriggle himself out of whatever mess he'd ended up in; Tyr had gotten in the way of the bad guys more than once when Harper had ended up in an ugly situation. And sure, some of that was because bad guys tended to run away when Tyr looked at them whereas Dragans would have—had, in the end—squashed Isaac and Brendan like bugs, some of it was just how they were. Harper pulled his arms up and crossed them over his chest, doing his best to project strength as he glared at the doctor. "Look, you tried to help. I get it. But you didn't need to, so would you stop fussing around and get me my stuff? I just want to go back to the ship."

The doctor looked past him. "I think it'll be safer if you stay here for the time being."

"Safer for who? All I want to do is un-kidnap myself." Which actually did answer the 'who' part, now that he thought about it because Tyr probably had steam coming out his ears right about now. That would have been true about the invasion of his ship thing if nothing else.

Since the doctor didn't seem inclined to cooperate, Harper gritted his teeth and braced himself, swinging his legs over the side of the bed again. If they'd just give him his damn gear this would be easier, but he was pretty used to the universe being uncooperative.

"I—"

"You, no. I mean, was, 'Hey, do you need help?' too many syllables or something?" he snapped, cutting off whatever the Squeegee who'd been on the ship had been about to say as he twisted to glare at her. The doctor he could kind of understand and accept the whole best-of-intentions thing from, Tyr was Neitzschean after all, but the other one could damn well have just asked him if he needed rescuing. "If you'd bothered to talk to me back on the ship we could have settled this long before we even docked. I'm not afraid, there's no one and nothing I need or want to be rescued from, and all of you should just go on and have a happy life far away from me." He turned back to the doctor. "My things, please."

The doctor pressed back against his shoulder as he started to lean forward, and unfortunately it might as well have been Tyr doing it as weak as Harper felt right now. "I'm sure you'll feel differently in a few days."

"Excuse me? I'm not staying here for a few days." He wasn't going to stay here for a few hours if he had any say in it. "How long ago did you kidnap me, anyway? And please don't anyone repeat the word 'rescue.'"

The Squeegee who'd been on the ship shuffled a little. "The gas usually only lasts for about an hour, but you had a bad reaction."

"Yeah, what else is new? I have bad reactions to lots of stuff. Like being kidnapped. How long, and where—wait, usually? How many people have you kidnapped?"

"The Cobra run several trade routes through this sector. We do what we can, although with the big cruisers it's never very much."

Harper groaned. He didn't recognize the pride offhand, but then again Nietzschean-bad tended to be a pretty all-purpose answer in life. With one screamingly obvious exception. "Look, Tyr's not Cobra, I'm not any more in need of rescue than I was two minutes ago, can I please just have my stuff?"


Tyr turned the obnoxiously inert communicator Harper had made for him in his hand. He didn't know for certain that Harper had the other piece, but he hadn't found it in Harper's quarters, engineering, or the racer so he thought that his odds were acceptable. Unfortunately Harper having it on him did no good if he didn't activate it, and Tyr was loathe to use his first for fear that someone who wasn't Harper would hear it and realize that it was more than a curious bauble. It was times like these when he could see the use for the implanted subvocalizers that the Commonwealth had used, but even if Harper had kept his after he'd left the Andromeda Tyr had never accepted one and certainly didn't have the security codes to allow his ship's systems to tap into Harper's. He didn't even know if Harper had them, although he'd certainly be asking when all of this was said and done.

He rolled the communicator again in his palm as he considered his next course of action. After viewing his security tapes and where the Squirgin delegation had spent their time wandering, he'd identified residue on a few of his security cameras indicating where devices to disable them might have been affixed. Specifically on the ones between the bay and engineering. But the actual devices themselves were gone, along with any information they could have given him. Harper's captors must have grabbed them on their way out. Given the very specific route and the recovery of all devices he couldn't say that he cared for the planning that that implied.

And whatever the security tapes from the bay had shown, he'd had absolutely no success in finding an eyewitness as to the abduction or any further information about where Harper might have been taken. Not even so much as a left or right turn out of the bay. Nor was station security being overly helpful in locating any of the Squirgin he'd been transporting even with clear and direct evidence that they'd manipulated his shipboard sensors.

Their entirely-too-convenient excuse was that it hadn't occurred onboard their station and therefore it was out of their jurisdiction, but he didn't believe that for a second. Or rather he didn't believe that under other circumstances they wouldn't have used it as an excuse to extort a bribe from him before giving him the information that he was looking for. Right now he'd almost be willing to pay that bribe. Unfortunately, the most likely reason for their reticence meant that trying to beat an answer out of them would only make the situation worse.

He growled quietly. There were...optics...involved when a human served a Nietzschean or onboard a Nietzschean ship. He knew that. He'd always known that. Even when he'd been a child living among his pride, the humans—Kodiak had never stooped to the level of slave-owning degenerates, of course but there had still been human servants on the orbitals—had known their place and kept it. And among those slave-owning degenerates making up the vast majority of Nietzscheans in the universe the situation was far worse. Harper's early life was a testament to that.

Tyr's fingers tightened on the communicator. His own perceptions of things had shifted since the loss of his pride, and, as much as he hated to admit it, during his time on Andromeda, but he'd like to say that even without that he'd never have treated Harper as anything other than the fiercely independent being that he was. But there were plenty in this universe who would never believe that and probably wouldn't believe it even if Harper was standing beside Tyr telling them so. Tyr had a more than sneaking suspicion that there were several dockworkers he'd spoken to even today patting themselves on the back for their small part in helping Harper to 'escape,' and never mind that it had been being taken from Tyr's ship that had been against his will and Tyr was only trying to get him back to where he belonged.

Tyr still didn't know why Harper had been taken, either. He had learned, much to his displeasure, that there was an offshoot of Drago-Kazov who sent more trade through this sector than he'd realized previously—a fact that no doubt influenced those dockworers' perceptions of him—and given that the Drago-Kasov had more information about Tyr than most...

He made himself relax his grip and turned the communicator again. His reviews of the bay cameras had confirmed that Harper's captors had been Squirgin, and while there were no doubt as many Squirgin as any other species willing to sell their own grandmothers for a coin no matter what his interviews with the dock workers had implied, there were currently no Nietzschean ships docked at this station. If Harper had been taken to further a Drago-Kazov agenda, he still had some time. Harper still had some time since that gas they'd dosed him with had to have worn off by now, even with his questionable immune system, and Harper wasn't one to be passive when he was displeased. And if the primary function of this communicator didn't seem to be very useful at the moment, he was very certain that it had more capabilities than the offhand list that Harper had given him. If only because the odds of something like locator beacon functionality not occurring to Harper were next to nonexistent.

Unfortunately that led back to his original problem because Tyr wasn't a mad little genius, and Harper certainly hadn't done anything useful like leave a manual behind. Knowing him there was no manual and he'd just put parts together as he went until he had what he wanted. Tyr had already scanned the thing, but thus far he didn't have more than a guess as to what most of the circuitry did.

He tapped it with his thumb lightly. "Where are you, little man?"