A/N: Multiple chapters because y'all more than deserve to be fully caught up with the story.

-o-

"He ruined everything."

Beka entered Andromeda's command center to see two strangers standing over a dead body and watching Tyr warily. The speaker, who she assumed was talking about Tyr though she was staring at the body, was a young woman with short blond hair, short shorts, and a long tail. What was more, she was purple – not choking or bruised, just a lovely shade a little darker than lilac. Her eyes as she looked down at the uniformed corpse were enormous.

In the flickering emergency back-up lights, Beka saw Tyr eyeing the pair suspiciously, cradling his gun and making no attempt at his usual relaxed façade. He seemed to have dismissed the girl as a major threat, keeping his attention instead focused on the young man, short like his companion and blond, but he looked like a plain old human being. A mudfoot, judging from his skinny frame and the creeping rash on his neck. The harsh, pale lights washed out his complexion and emphasized gray smudged of dirt all over him.

He had a protective arm slung around the girl, but the glare he was drilling into Tyr promised retribution. "And what did you guys do to the ship?? One minute she's telling us we're falling into the black hole, and the next, everything goes boom. You killed her too, didn't you?"

Beka glanced at the body on the floor and up at Tyr, mentally promising to extract the full story later, but right now, she had to decide what to do with these two.

"We erased the ship's AI, yes," Beka began, and at the young man's outraged expression and angry cry, continued in a louder voice. "and I'm not going to justify myself to you. We can discuss the matter like reasonable adults, if you want. But first, who are you, and what are you doing here?"

The boy was wearing a defiant expression, face set in that stubborn glare, so it was the girl who answered. "We were with Gerentex, but he got scared when we found… him." She nodded at the body. "Um, I'm Trance Gemini and this is Seamus Harper." Her voice was soft and sad, though she could hardly have made friends with the dead man and his ship in the few minutes she had known them.

The mention of Gerentex redirected the young man's anger, and he spoke up hotly. "That rat-faced bastard tried to feed us to the black hole! First he smuggled mercenaries onto the Tamidan without telling us to kill him, and then he tried to kill us. If I ever see his ugly rodent face again, I'll swear I'll show him what we did to rats back on Earth, I'll-"

A quiet giggle escaped the girl. "I don't think they have stew pots big enough for that, Harper." When he looked at her with an expression of mock outrage, she bit her lip and averted her eyes, still smiling.

The girl's little joke appeared to calm the boy down, so Beka took the opportunity to ask him what had happened. Seamus Harper was a born storyteller, gesticulating wildly at the dramatic moments and sprinkling the tale with slang she barely understood. He recounted how they boarded the Andromeda to find her dark but with functional life support. They wandered around the ship, looking for specs and the command center when suddenly the ship came to life and a High Guard captain straight out of legend came storming in and demanding to know what they were doing with his ship.

A testy Captain Hunt notified Gerentex of his presence, and instead of coming to meet the man and talk, the Nightsider sent in the mercenaries he had smuggled about the Tamidan without her captain's knowledge. But they were no match for Hunt's High Guard training, and he disposed of them efficiently. To Harper's amazement, he gave Gerentex yet another chance to settle this in a civilized manner, to which Gerentex had responded by fleeing the ship with the nearest members of the Tamidan's crew and attempting to shove the Andromeda into the singularity.

"But Captain Hunt didn't just give up. He figured he could launch the ship's nova bombs into the black hole and create… a sorta explosion, a white hole, and we could ride the shock wave outta the system. And that's when you guys showed up. Everything went real dark and quiet, and then Dylan – that was his name – Dylan started calling for Andromeda, and when there was no answer, he just…"

"He lost everything," Trance interjected, no longer smiling. She was gazing at Captain Hunt's body again, mournful and almost dreamy. "She was all he had left, the only surviving piece of his Commonwealth."

Harper glanced at her and continued his story when she fell silent. "Right. Um… Well, he was screaming, and then he showed up," he said with a jerk of his head in Tyr's direction, "and Dylan just lost it. He took out his force lance and started firing in the dark, screaming at the top of his lungs that he wasn't going to take the Andromeda away from him and that he had already killed him once… it freaked us out. He musta thought he was someone else. I pulled Trance behind a console, out of the firefight, and by the time I got the back-up power working, Dylan was dead."

A bare nod from Tyr served to confirm the story. "He was a worthy opponent," he offered. "Good accuracy for an insane human shooting in the dark." It sounded vaguely like a eulogy.

"He was a good man," Trance said. "He could have changed the universe." Harper patted her shoulder.

Beka let a moment pass and then spoke up. "Well, he's gone, and this ship's mine."

"Hey!" Harper cried. "She's open salvage, finders keepers!"

"Is that a challenge?" Tyr inquired lazily.

The boy did not reply but glowered and patted Trance's arm again.

"Good, I'm glad we got that settled. We found it, and we're keeping it. Now, as you can see, I'm gonna need some help getting her back into decent shape. You two can stay if you like, or one of my crew will see you to whatever system you choose."

Trance's head snapped up, and she regarded Beka with unconcealed surprise. Harper took no notice of his friend's reaction; he was too busy glaring at Tyr.

"And work for the uber? Not freakin' likely."

Beka turned her captain voice on full force and crossed her arms. "Actually, you'd be working for me, and as the captain, I'm the only one allowed to make racial slurs. Got it?"

This seemed to mollify Harper a little. He dragged his eyes away from Tyr to focus on Beka. "Yeah? And who are you, exactly?"

Beka held back a grin. Snotty kid. She couldn't help liking him, annoying as he was. "I am Captain Beka Valentine of the Eureka Maru. My employer is Darjella Milein, and if you can't handle that, you should just leave now."

Harper's mouth dropped open. "The gangster? Spiritual heir of Tony Capeone?"

Beka stared.

"Never mind," he muttered. Weird slang must be a mudfoot thing, she thought. "So what, you're not gonna set your goon here on us?" He sounded skeptical, but Beka detected more than a hint of curiosity in his voice.

"Not unless you piss me off, and I promise to give you fair warning."

"Well," Harper said slowly, "the ship's gonna need a lotta work, and you couldn't have picked a better engineer if you searched the Known Worlds top to bottom." He turned his attention to the girl. "Trance, whaddya think?"

She scratched her head and shrugged. "I don't like gangsters very much, but…" She paused and met Harper's eyes with a tiny smile back on her face. "They have a really pretty garden here. I saw a bunch of flowers there that are supposed to be extinct." A note of excitement crept into her voice, and she turned to look at Beka. "And I'm pretty good with people. Fixing them, I mean. They're not so much harder than plants. Except people need anesthesia, and…"

Harper coughed, not subtly, and the girl subsided. Beka called the rest of her crew wandering Andromeda's corridors and told them to meet her in Command. When they came together, Beka took a deep breath and introduced her battle-hardened bodyguards to their new engineer and their new medic.