B.L.A the Mouse – Oh, that quote! "Never have mortals…", right? I made that one up too (again, as far as I know). I tried my darndest to make it sound like a real quote, vaguely Milton…ian or Shakespearian.
-o-
It seemed to Beka that the next couple of weeks did not pass in a smooth, linear progression but a jagged heap of moments that glared sun bright in her memory. Of course time passed between those moments at the same pace it had always passed; she ate and slept and stared off into space during her shifts on Command. But she never caught a moment's repose from the worries and endless speculation. Darjella, Tyr, Charlemagne, Harper, Trance, Fertrun… Every time she finished running a lap around the circles in her head, she looked up and something else was happening around her.
-o-
It wasn't hard to lie to Tyr about Fertrun because most of what she said – and all of what she felt – on the subject was true. To work herself up into a fit of seething anger was very easy; Tyr possessed acute Nietzschean senses that could read her body language and chemistry and another sixth sense entirely as to her moods in particular. He had taken a post-workout shower and was lounging on their bed reading when Beka stormed in after her conversation with her mutinous crewman. After less than a minute in her company, he asked her what was wrong.
"Our onboard font of universal good will," she muttered. She scrubbed her hands through her hair, a nervous gesture since childhood, shook her head, and sighed. At Tyr's inquiring look, she forced a tight smile. "Not you. I think Fertrun's defected. Flown the coop, left for higher ground." She went to go lounge by the wide viewscreen, currently set to show the stars around them. There was a wide ledge in front of the screen, atop which she had wrestled narrow cushions into place. She liked to fall on the cushions after a long day and stare out into space.
Behind her, she heard Tyr shift on the bed. "And you were content to let him leave?" A note of menace threaded through the casual question.
"He came to me bitching and moaning about the terrible two, and we talked. I thought we came to an understanding," she said, tossing her hands up in an exaggerated shrug, a gesture of a complete lack of comprehension. "Couple of hours later, I hear that he didn't show up for his shift, and sure enough, one of the slipfighters is missing. I don't know how he got out without tripping any alarms, but he's gone now."
That part was true enough but hardly shocking. Harper was working intensively on rebuilding the Path's artificial intelligence without triggering the old Andromeda Ascendant AI, which meant a lot of delicate work with the computer's innards. Life support and sensors functioned smoothly most of the time, as well as weapons, after Tyr had impressed upon him the necessity of a dependable weapons array. The kid really did a great job of keeping everything running while attempting to rewire it all, but it meant he had to take quite a few of the automated alarms offline. And so Fertrun had probably not worked too hard to slip out unnoticed.
She sighed heavily and leaned against the bulkhead. "To be honest, I'm glad he's gone. I just don't like the idea that he's out there right now, all pissed off in my direction." A tiny grin flicked over her face as she turned to regard Tyr. "I think there is exactly one thing in the universe right now that could make me feel any better."
He set his book aside and raised an eyebrow. "My lady, I am at your service, as always."
Ha ha. If he were serious, she might think of a serious stress-relieving exercise for him, but this was not the time to tease him. "You haven't bestowed upon me one of your famous neck rubs in too long. While you do that, I'll stare out there and see if I spot his slipfighter." The tension in her voice mellowed into dry amusement.
She relaxed under the powerful strokes of his fingers, for more reasons than he knew. He had bought it.
-o-
An hour of relaxation, paid by an evening fraught with unbearable tension a week later. Darjella announced to Beka that she would be paying her a visit aboard her ship. The message was brief, relaying little more than the time and place for their rendezvous. The form of the message did not surprise Beka; Darjella rarely said anything more than necessary over traceable channels. But her mentor had never before expressed a strong interest in seeing the Path, let alone this concrete intention. There was no way to read a tone from the message; it contained simple words on a screen.
In the few days preceding Darjella's arrival, Beka wanted to fret, but she soon found there was no way to expend her nervous energy: no dust lay on the furniture, no clothes hid the carpet in her quarters, none of the computer systems required any maintenance she could perform. With that realization, most of her anxiety slowly drained away, though her stomach continued to flutter nervously nonstop until the day came.
And when it did, Beka discovered to her shock that the woman's visit had little to do with Beka and much to do with her first officer. Beyond a half-hearted reproach on the subject of Fertrun, Darjella had not expressed any desire to criticize or chastise Beka in anyway, conversing with her usual easy grace and warmth as Beka led her on a tour of the ship. When the conversation presented an opening for her to inquire after Darjella's purpose in coming, Beka took it without hesitation.
"If you can spare him, I would love to steal Mr. Anasazi for dinner. Your autochef is one of your fully operational systems, I hope."
Beka laughed automatically at the half-serious joke to cover up her shock. Darjella was here to speak with Tyr? But the answer to her question came swiftly to mind; during the expanse of her time with Tyr, Beka had never known the two of them to differ greatly in opinion on any subject, except one. The Arch Duke. From the moment Darjella had learned of Charlemagne's offer – he had minimized the risk of Beka rejecting him out of hand by sending a brief version of his missive to Darjella that same day – she had quietly encouraged Beka to take it… after mature reflection, of course. Much to the contrary, Tyr could not express his suspicion of the man soon or often enough.
And so her worries over Darjella's motive in coming to see Beka evaporated for an hour or two, until the intended dinner actually came to pass. Then, a whole new set of anxieties descended upon Beka, and she spent the entire evening physically queasy with worry. She took an extra shift in Command as she was recently wont to do, hoping to distract herself from her agonizing curiosity, but nothing could engage her attention for long. Even admonishing Harper for the cold shower in her quarters – one of the few times she had not wanted to take a cold shower – did not provide its usual satisfaction.
Beka was half-asleep when Tyr returned, dozing with the lights glaring. She had been plowing through a mining survey of a promising asteroid belt when she had finally drifted off. He was quiet and made little effort to conceal his pensiveness. After a few minutes in the bathroom, he climbed into bed and ordered the lights off. Beka stared at him in the dark, silently willing something, any sign of life from him. Nothing came, and for once, she stayed awake longer than he did, headachy, slightly nauseous, and very unhappy.
-o-
Incredibly, the person she found herself confiding in turned out to be her scrawny engineer, half concealed inside a conduit and occasionally interrupting her with grunted curses. She had come down to check on his progress, as she had become accustomed to doing more and more in the past several days, perhaps weeks. If she thought about it, she might come to realization that she liked to think of her worries like the computer system Harper was trying to construct: complicated, tricky, but perfectly capable of being resolved. But she didn't think about it; she simply found herself gravitating to the repairs without bothering to wonder at the cause of her newfound fascination.
"Oh hey, boss," he called from his conduit. His voice was muffled by the faceplate he wore, which meant he must have been wielding a torch for some serious welding. "I saw your über-dangerous boss onboard the ship yesterday. Who knew a ruthless puppet master could be so hot, huh?"
Beka leaned forward to thwack his leg. "Just tell me you didn't offer to give her a personal tour of the ship, starting and ending in your quarters." She affected an annoyed tone, but the idea of Harper hitting on Darjella was mostly amusing.
He shifted a little and didn't reply for a moment as the whoosh of a lit torch filled the air. A bluish light filled the conduit, and Beka could feel the heat from where she lounged against the bulkhead. After a few minutes, she heard the torch click off and the buckle of his mask unlock.
"Give me a little credit," he protested. "Anyway, I didn't have the chance. She was with Tyr, and they were in the middle of a pretty intense discussion. Not that I heard anything good." The mask fell to the deck with a loud clunk, and Harper shifted further until he appeared to be lying on his side.
"That's more than I heard," Beka muttered. "Well," she said in brighter tone forced for Harper's sake, "at least they both emerged physically unscathed."
Tools rattled around, echoing in the conduit. Beka couldn't help feeling just a little useless, standing here gossiping while Harper was working. Well, she had been working double shifts in Command just to get her mind off everything else and decided that she deserved this break.
"It's about that guy who was always trying to kill you, isn't it? The Über?"
Beka was surprised at Harper's acuity and then vaguely ashamed at her surprise. She hoped the news of Charlemagne's offer hadn't advanced too far along the grapevine, but it should not have amazed her that her crewmembers should know. In her surprise and subsequent guilt, she forgot to reprimand him for using the slur.
"Charlemagne Bolivar, right. I don't know, probably. It's the first time they've ever disagreed on something this big." She chuckled dryly. "And what does our resident Chief Engineer make of this? Might as well get another opinion, just in case I didn't have enough of 'em."
"Well…" He wiggled and muttered something, presumably in the direction of the panel he was repairing. "I don't know. This guy has tried to kill you, Beka, and you know how I feel about those people in general, Tyr sorta excepted." He paused for a moment longer and continued. "And Trance doesn't like him," he said, as if that were the final word on the subject.
Great. Harper and Trance and Tyr found themselves agreeing on something, and it was something her boss would hate. Divine knew she didn't personally like Charlemagne much, but she was forced to respect him, if not admire him. She could not fathom why he should want to pursue the kind of charade with her that she was pursuing with Tyr, but she thought she had convinced him to put that idea on hold. The alternative, she repeated endlessly in her head, was making him an enemy once and for all. How Tyr, at least, could fail to see the monumental danger that would pose, she had not the least idea.
-o-
Beka was finishing a shift in Command when she heard the news. She had been conducting a little coercive diplomacy with a feisty arms dealer who had agreed to work around Darjella's territory in exchange for a healthy percentage of the profits he would lose due to the arrangement. He refused to see that he would not be able to spend any of the bribe money if he were dead, so Beka had been forced to sniff out some blackmail material. It turned out that his penchant for selling Makra infants to Nightsider swamps for the little rodents to learn to hunt really could lead to a fate worse than death if the Makra discovered it.
He had seen the error of his ways – in holding out against Beka, not in selling young children to a horrific end – and had quickly dropped his thorny attitude in favor of a much friendlier, even ingratiating manner. Mostly he annoyed her, but in hopes of getting in her good graces, he did impart a very interesting bit of gossip.
"Great timing, making nice with Bolivar," he said in an oily, 'we're two worldly people discussing worldly affairs' tone she usually associated with panicky Nightsiders. Perhaps that was where he had picked it up. He flashed a sickly smile and continued when she showed no sign off taking the bait. "His people caught up with the Sabra woman and spirited her away to some hole-in-the-ground prison supposed to be tighter than an FTA auditor's ass."
Smarmy and he mixed his metaphors. Beka was not sure why she was still speaking to him but mentally conceded that he might finally have stumbled upon something interesting to say.
"That right?" she asked lazily, looking away from the screen for a long moment as if she had something more pressing demanding her attention.
"Sabra forces are disintegrating all over the frontlines," he continued with a pathetically hopeful whine. "The generals are divided between wanting to launch a new assault, fall back to the homeworld, and send out search parties to the four corners of the universe."
So that was what he meant by her great timing, that Charlemagne's forces were poised to win this war. She was obscurely relieved that this man was not pretending to threaten her in some indirect manner, implying that Charlemagne would hunt Beka down with the same determination if she did not agree to his offer. But while he might not be thinking along those lines – or if he were, did not dare state aloud something so distasteful – Beka could not help her own pessimism.