B.L.A the Mouse – Yay two reviews! The "What kind of people…" quote is as original as far as I can remember. As for the others, I try not to litter my stories with too much pop culture references, but sometimes it's just too tempting. I'm glad you enjoyed them! Many thanks for your heartwarming reviews.

-o-

Trance twisted her tail in her hands and dug her toe into the deck, all the while refusing to meet Tyr's eyes. He stood with his arms crossed, watching her with a mildly curious expression before breaking the silence.

"You may have the others on board fooled, but I know very well that you are not as innocent as all that."

Her tail dropped from her hands and seemed to float in the air with the boneless grace of a hypnotized cobra. Her expression became thoughtful as she tilted her head to regard him. "We-e-e-e-ll," she said slowly, "if I'm really not, maybe I'm not so harmless either?" And maybe, her tone suggested, this entire exercise is pointless and I can go look after my plants?

Tyr laughed, a booming noise that echoed across the gym. Trance's eyes popped in surprise. "Maybe you're not. Still, it never hurts to develop one's capacities. You'll still have eyelashes to flutter at the little professor and anyone who dares cross your path."

The light reflected strangely in Trance's eyes for a moment as she listened to Tyr, but the illusion of stars shining from them dissolved in an instant when she dropped her eyes again. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and sighed. "Well, I guess it might be fun."

"I'm honored you think so," Tyr replied dryly. "First, you must choose a kiya, a noise to focus your energy and intimidate your opponent." He began circling her slowly, taking in her posture, her shape, her stance. Her head turned to watch him until it could turn no further, and then she returned her gaze to the floor.

"Um… okay, I got one."

Tyr came to rest in front of her, arms crossed. His eyebrows were raised in an expression of mild skepticism, and amusement tinged his voice when he spoke. "You're going to focus your energy and intimidate your opponent?"

She rubbed a hand along her arm. "Yeah, I guess."

Tyr uncrossed his arms and held his hands out. "Then intimidate me."

"Hee…" Her voice trailed off and she swallowed. "Hee-haw?"

"It isn't a question."

Trance nodded firmly and squared her shoulders. She raised her head, widened her eyes dramatically, and clenched her fists. "Hee-HAW!" she shouted and, to Tyr's amazement, rushed at him with upraised fists.

He caught her fists easily in his hand and almost tripped as she twisted in his grasp. She looked up at him, panting. "How was that?"

"I was certainly surprised," Tyr said levelly. "And I imagine surprise is a key weapon of yours." Then he fell silent, continuing to study her closely. "Normally I would set you through a series of drills, the most basic motions of self-defense which would eventually become instinctual."

"But…?"

Instead of answering, Tyr let out a brief "Ha!", a sharp exhalation of breath. He lunged to grab Trance's upper arms and grunted as Trance rammed her head hard into his chest. His breath stuttered for a moment, and while he tried to right himself, the girl's tail wrapped insidiously around his knee and sent him crashing to the deck when he attempted to move.

Another bout of laughter burst from him as he lay on the deck. "You'll notice," he said between deep rumbling chuckles, "that I fell in such a way as to minimize damage to myself. Very surprising."

After a moment, he pulled himself up and took a deep breath, testing his lungs. He was smiling when he looked at Trance again, who was staring at him with wide, surprised eyes. "As I suspected, you've developed a rough instinct for self-defense. Well, far be it from me to undo the lessons of the universe."

He attacked her several more times, always from different angles and with different intent, memorizing the movements she favored and the weak spots in her defense. Somehow, the conversation drifted away from mostly one-sided instruction as Trance became comfortable with the exercise and began asking questions.

"Is this good?"

"Oh, what did you do there?"

"Why did you do that?"

"Is hee-haw really okay?"

"How did you know I was going to do that?"

"Did you talk to Beka about what we talked about?"

Tyr paused in the midst of showing Trance a flip she could use on people much larger than her. "If you can correctly perform this maneuver, I'll tell you."

She did not execute the movement quite as Tyr had demonstrated, but he did end up back on the deck. Her tail had flicked between them just as Trance's stance had faltered, and Tyr barely had time to position himself so that he fell heavily without hurting spine.

"You told me I have to be adaptable," she replied innocently to the unspoken question in his raised eyebrow.

He relented. "I did, and you were. Yes, I discussed the matter with her."

Now it was her turn to study him closely. She sighed and said, "It didn't help any, though. You still…" Her voice trailed off. "I guess you can't help it. She's still gonna leave, isn't she?"

Tyr had paused before, but now he froze in place as he readied to correct Trance's stance during the flip. His eyes widened fractionally when they met hers. "Leave?"

Trance leaned forward and grabbed his hand nearest to her. "You can't let her go, Tyr. How can you not see that?" Her voice was rising, sharp with panic during the final few words.

"I cannot and will not hold her here by force or deception." His voice was calm as he spoke, and he did not attempt to escape Trance's grasp. He had shown surprise earlier in the conversation, but now they might have been discussing the merits of lemon versus cherry scones over tea for all the emotion he displayed.

Her grip tightened until her knuckles turned white. "This is bigger than you," she whispered, tears beginning to gather in her brown eyes open to their widest. "Bigger than…" She took a deep breath and jerked Tyr's hand as hard as she could, twisted exactly as he had shown her, and sent him sprawling to the deck. His head bounced on the pads installed on this section of the gym.

He blinked a couple of times and then stared at her. "If you might deign to be a little clearer, perhaps we could discuss this like rational people."

"But it's not clear or rational!" She hiccoughed and suddenly seemed to shrink, wrapped her arms around herself and dropped her chin to her chest. "Thanks, Tyr. Um, for the…" She gestured with her hands, drawing a circle with her fingers. "It was fun." She attempted a wavering smile. "Sorry, I have to go check on Walter."

With that, she bolted from the room. Just as she reached the threshold, Fertrun Nav disappeared down an adjoining corridor, smiling softly to himself.

-o-

Beka slammed the cabinet door closed and whirled around to face her crewman. "I am not going to listen to you tattle on your crewmates. I understand that you've never liked Harper or Trance, and that's fine. I don't give a Nightsider's ass whether you like Trance, but you are not going to cut her down to me behind her back." She paused to draw breath and make a disgusted sound in her throat. "And I can't believe you'd be stupid enough to slander Tyr like that."

She turned back, frustrated on top of all this that she had forgotten what she had wanted from the cupboard. Reaching in at random, she pulled out a packet of stirla fish packed in honey and sighed. Stirla fish were extinct and surviving packets sold for staggering amounts of credit, not because they tasted pleasant or contained any nutritional value. Heat from a moderately hot oven activated a chemical in the fish which made it glitter dark violet. She put it back in the cabinet and made a mental note to try the trick another day.

"Captain," Fertrun protested stiffly, "their conversation sounded distinctly threatening to your person. 'You can't let her go', Trance said. Are you going to ignore this because you are too stupid to see how dangerous she is or because you've grown weak in your fondness for the pair?"

Beka's hands tightened into fists, and her short nails pressed into her palm. She spun again and stalked toward Fertrun, forcing herself to breathe slowly. "You've always been welcome to leave any time you like, but maybe I need to make this clearer for you." In spite of his greater size, she backed him up the hull. When he stopped with a thud, Beka pulled her gauss gun from her belt – she always wore it on her, never expecting to use in on board the Path – and pushed its nose into the man's chest.

"You don't give a damn about any mutiny, and I have yet to see any evidence that anyone on board is plotting one. You think I haven't noticed the turnaround in your attitude since I spoke with Charlemagne? Your loyalties change more often than your underwear, and I am sick of it. Men like you are much more dangerous to a crew than either Tyr or Trance. From now on, I'm going to consider you a threat to crew safety, and I will act accordingly. Get out."

The man's face had grown redder and redder as she spoke, and blood vessels pounded at his temple. His lips pulled back into a snarl, but he did not argue. When Beka had finished speaking, he turned on his heel, knocking her arm with a burly shoulder, and marched out of the mess. She realized that the only means available for his departure at the moment were the Maru and a few slipfighters, and there was no way in hell he was making off with her baby. Slipfighters were hardly designed for long range travel, but he would survive.

It occurred to her that she might be better off shooting him out of the sky instead of allowing him to leave, already formulating vengeful plots as he must be. Or perhaps intercepting him as he climbed into the slipfighter, when he would be the most vulnerable. It would be self-defense, she told herself, pre-emptive self-defense. "Never leave a live enemy behind," the saying went, and she knew from experience as a live enemy left behind, that they could be fatal.

But suddenly she had a vision of meeting Trance while she made her stealthy ways down the Path's corridors. Her mouth dried, and her grip on the gauss gun tightened. She licked her lips and cursed under her breath. Maybe Fertrun was right about one thing. Maybe the girl was making her weak. She could not afford lapses of judgment like these, not during the middle of negotiations with the FTA bureaucrat she was culturing for a double agent.

A chair sat bolted to the deck just a few feet away, and Beka fell into it with a sigh. She absent-mindedly checked the safety on the gun before hurling it to the ground with a loud invective. Arms crossed, she glared at the weapon for a moment, and then she realized she was pouting like a child. The gun returned to her belt, and she remembered that she had been searching for a cup of yogurt, which would not be found anywhere in that particular cabinet.

She would not tell Tyr what had happened, and he would not scold her for letting Fertrun go. But she would remember.