A/N: No reviews. Oh noes! Luckily, I retain such guilt from neglecting my stories in the past that I am no longer capable of doing so. I hope.

Also, this chapter's a couple pages longer than usual. Strap in and buckle up!

-o-

Later, she wished she would have known that this was going to be the last time she worked out with Tyr. For one thing, she would have worked harder to impress him, to how him how much he had taught her. That was the only thing she would have done differently, had she known.

Instead, she was distracted, wondering about the Sabra woman's fate and how it might relate to her own, all while trying to keep up with Tyr's demanding regimen: stretching, weights, aerobic sparring. She was aware enough of her distracting to be thankful that he had not chosen this day for aquatic exercises; Beka barely managed to stay afloat on the best of days. He noticed too and caustically remarked on her lack of focus but did not inquire further. She realized that he was not going to make this any easier for her, so when he took her down yet again, much too easily, she spoke bluntly, too preoccupied for subtlety.

"Fine," she panted, "I give." He was sitting lightly on her pelvis, straddling her and wordlessly watching her catch her breath. "Rumor has it that Charlemagne's people caught up with Elsbett Mossadim, and she hasn't been seen since. Supposedly they've locked her in a super top secret dungeon somewhere, but she could just as well be so much organic space debris for all anyone knows."

He continued to look at her impassively, wearing his most inscrutable expression. Unreadable. "If you're trying to excuse your poor performance today," he drawled after a silent beat or two, "it's not going to work."

Beka glared and hit his thigh with a curled-up fist. "Yeah yeah, Tyr Anasazi keeps his cool when tons of rock come crashing down around his head. I'm not excusing anything. I'm… confiding my innermost thoughts."

"While you're supposed to be defending yourself?" A trace of irritation heated his voice. "This is not the time to wax eloquent about your insecurities, Beka." To drive his point him, he flexed his bone blade and in a flash had them pressed against the sides of her throat, a hair away from drawing blood.

"Cut the crap," she hissed, surprised and hurt at his contemptuous dismissal of her anxiety. "Get – ow! – get up!" She landed a clumsy punch on the meat of his arm. He showed no sign of having felt anything and leaned his weight fully atop her.

That was a couple hundred pounds of Nietzschean, much of it bearing down on her torso. She could barely breathe now and felt herself growing furious. He had not secured her arms, so she hooked her fingers into claws and launched them at his face. Had this constituted an actual assault, she would have gone straight for the eyes, but even in her rage she remained controlled enough to realize that she probably did not want a blinded first officer slash head bodyguard.

Tyr pulled his head back to avoid her fingernails – short as they were, he had taught her how to throw the strength of her arms and core muscles behind them. Heart pounding, Beka moved almost instinctively to free her legs by rocking from side to side as hard as she could. She planted one foot firmly on the ground and pushed as hard as she could until Tyr rolled off her. When she was free, she stood, panting and sweating. Her hand hovered over her waist where her gun normally sat.

"And now I shoot you dead," she spat. "Satisfied?" He rose silently, and she was gratified to see that he was breathing a little harder than usual. Not much, but it was there.

"Beka," he finally said, in a weary tone that almost startled her out of her anger, "have you not been listening to me all this time? You must remain constantly vigilant, not only of strangers and your surroundings, but of everything and everyone."

"Right, undying suspicion because I never know when you're going to decide that this is the day to launch your glorious Nietzschean revival." Her anger was back already, full force. Every muscle in her body felt tense, and she gestured wildly, hands slicing through the air. "Is it gonna be today, Tyr? You know, if you do me the favor of warning me, it'll go a lot smoother. You might want to consider it, enlightened self-interest and everything."

The last time they had held this conversation, it had ended in an unreadable kiss. Beka doubted it would end that way again; she, at least, was in no mood to kiss anybody, especially not the man standing near her who had nearly asphyxiated her just a few minutes ago.

"And leave you behind?" Tyr asked incredulously, not bothering to hide his sneer. "I'd sooner sleep with a loaded gun in my mouth."

Beka really didn't like where this was going. If she understood him correctly, he was insinuating that he would actually kill her if (when) the time came for him to take charge of his destiny in a big way. She could not say what she had thought would happen; would he just politely ask her to leave while he assumed command? But killing her had never entered into it. Betrayal was enough to worry about.

"Nice to know you think so highly of my determination to wreak my vengeance upon you and my skill in carrying it out." Her scalp prickled as she imagined what she might like to do to Tyr if he did betray her and then send her off in the Maru. Maybe he was right. Her trigger finger itched, and suddenly, shockingly, she wished she had her gun at her side. She had taken it off for their work-out and left it with her belt and jacket at the far corner of the room.

He did smile briefly at that, but his words were deadly serious. "Fearsome an enemy as I'm certain you are, even less would I enjoy the prospect of Pride Jaguar's resources behind your ire."

So that was the reason for this strangely hostile display of his. She should have known; he had probably heard the news about Elsbett days ago from Darjella and had worked out immediately how it would sway her decision. What she wouldn't give to know how their conversation had gone, she had thought countless times during and since that evening.

She stepped closer to him, more aware than ever of his superior size and strength. Even his scent, which she normally enjoyed to the point of unwanted arousal, was intimidating – very male, surrounding her and bringing on an odd sensation like claustrophobia. Part of her wanted to run away and gulp several lungfuls of fresh air, but she knew that she needed to stay and see this episode out.

"So that's it," she said softly, dropping her voice so anyone but Tyr would have to strain to hear. "This… tantrum. As much as you hate him, you know exactly how much I stand to gain from this… understanding with Charlemagne." She looked up into his eyes, nearly purring as she spoke, but seduction was far from her goal. She was still tense with anger but thought that a tactic other than snark and wild gesturing might advance the discussion in a more reasonable manner.

While she spoke, he reached up with one hand to untie the strap of something that held his hair back. He shook his head, whether denying her words or simply loosing his hair, she could not tell until he replied. "I don't hate him. I have less reason to despise him than you do, but I also have less reason to crave the security he offers you."

A sarcastic quip – right, because I'm going to be so biased in favor of a man who's continually tried to have me killed since I landed this ship – lay tempting on the tip of her tongue, but she managed to restrain herself. She hugged her irritation close to her and let him continue.

He trailed his fingers down her arm, and then she did think of seduction. Even in the midst of homicidal impulses, he made her skin shiver and her stomach clench not unpleasantly. "As an ally, I will readily admit that few can rival the material benefits he can give you. As a friend, I would trust him to act like any Nietzschean possessed of a shred of intelligence."

His voice trailed off, but she was sure he was not yet finished saying whatever he had to say. He lightly curled his fingers around hers and lifted her hand to rest against his chest. Under his shirt, which appeared to be made of black netting, his heart pounded slow and strong.

"But he will not be satisfied with either kind of relationship. I cannot give you a reason, but Bolivar is determined to take you for a lover."

Oh, this was too much. He could not give her a reason, as if the idea of an intimate relationship with her was so inconceivably lunatic.

"Tyr," she sighed, "you're being insulting and you're wrong, but before we go into that… so what if he is? I think I'm capable of resisting his charms, especially when I have such an impressive trophy boyfriend at home." Despite her most conscientious efforts, a note of sarcasm sneaked into her voice near the end.

He drew her a little closer. "You can, but why would you choose do so, if he presented himself as a powerful, eloquent man deeply in love with you who did not care what the universe at large thought?" A small ironic smile tugged at his lips.

Beka's eyes narrowed. "Good point." After a moment's glare, she dropped her eyes and looked calmly back up at him. "All right, it would be tempting. Of course it would; I'd have to be dead not to like that. But come on, I like to think I know a little better than to mix business with pleasure, and I doubt I'll forget how close he's come to killing me. Besides," she added with a grin of her own, "it's not like you'd let me forget."

She expected to elicit a wider smile from him, but instead he squeezed her hand tighter and lowered his head to drop a gentle kiss on it. He wore a mournful expression, and Beka understood in a flash what he was working himself up to say. She smothered her panic in a second and willed herself harder than she ever had to remain calm, not just on the outside but inside as well.

It's going to happen soon, she thought. In spite of his recent declaration, she was fairly sure that he would prefer to keep things as peaceful as possible; if there was a way for her to stay alive, they would both be happy for it. Without moving her head or even sliding her eyes to check her peripheral vision, she could perfectly picture the gym around them. Most importantly, she knew that Tyr's gun was in his belt, draped around a nearby exercise bench.

All this passed through her mind before he looked back at her, face still except for his eyes, always his most expressive feature. She let her grin fade under his solemnity but kept up the bantering tone. "Come on," she said, "you know I can take care of myself. I could do it before I met you, and I can do it even better now. I'm not just going to roll over for him." She gently tried to pull her hand away, and after a moment's resistance, he let her.

"You wouldn't be half so fascinating to any of us if you would," he murmured. Then, apparently missing the contact with her, he cupped her cheek in his hand and looked at her so searchingly that she was afraid he would read her mind. But no, she noted with relief that he was too intent on what she was increasingly certain was his farewell to think about anything else.

She stepped closer and silently laid her head on his chest, with her hands on either side. He had always smelled so good up close like this, she remembered. It felt wonderful, just standing like this; in that moment, she would have given anything to stay there forever, or even for a few more minutes.

"I'll tell you a secret," he whispered into her hair. "I've often wished you were a Nietzschean. Such a life we could have built…"

Beka sniffled. "Yeah," she said softly, "I'm sorry too." And with that, she wrapped her fingers tight around his shirt and pulled his torso down as she jammed her knee up, then shoved him backward as hard as she could. His eyes flew open wide as he gasped and made a noise like a balloon slowly losing its air.

She kept an eye on him as she raced toward the bench and grabbed his belt without bothering to remove the gun right away. He recovered quickly, more quickly than she would have imagined – having kneed men in the groin before, Beka was frankly amazed – but she had the weapon in her hands, powered up, and aimed at him before he could take a step closer.

"You did this," she said flatly. "You just had to have your cake and eat it too." It was kind of noble, actually, getting as close as he ever would to telling her he loved her before taking over her ship.

"No, Beka" he replied with a ghost of a smile, "don't debase yourself. You behaved magnificently, and now you have this situation well under your control."

"Yeah, I do. Now you, stay there. It'll hurt me to pull this trigger, but I'm pretty sure it'll hurt you even more."

He did as he was told as Beka slowly backed up and retrieved her own gun from the corner. "You were really going to do it, weren't you?" she asked as she made her careful way across the gym. "Take over the ship. Go do whatever it is you think you have to do."

"I once told Trance I would not keep you here by deceit," he answered. That very faint smile still touched the corners of his mouth. "Yes, that was my intent. Funny, isn't it," he said thoughtfully, "I was fully prepared to shoot you, yet I could never bear the idea of lying to you."

"Good," she replied shortly, "I really hate it when people lie to me. I take it much more personally than people firing at me. Now, I'm going to back out of the room, and you're going to follow me, nice and slow."

Once she had maneuvered the two of them into the corridor, keeping Tyr at a safe distance – not too close and not too far away – she ordered him to make his way to the brig, where she could keep him until she could call in some reinforcements. All the while, she fought to keep her breath and heart rate low, unwilling to give him a single weakness he could exploit. For now, she was in charge, but she knew him too well to hope her good fortune would last.

She kept her full attention on him while he obligingly slipped into one of the cells. Even contained within a force field, contained within a reinforced titanium cage, he worried her enough that she kept her weapons at the ready while she called orders over the shipwide comm. Loathe to alert her crew to the situation until absolutely necessary, she stated simply that she was looking after a minor malfunction which she would resolve momentarily and that crewmembers should be on the look-out for any anomalous activity.

He just smirked at her, infuriating in his calm and amusement. "Very clever. And what do we do now? As events stand now, you've won, Captain. Are you going to let your victory sour because you cannot dispose of a dangerous rival?"

"Shut up," she snapped. And then it occurred to her. She did not trust any of her crew, including herself, to see Tyr off the ship, singly or together. But if she had a little help from a friend…

Charlemagne had given her the contact information for a trusted associate of his who could relay any important message to the Arch Duke within a day. From V deck, Beka summoned Harper and ordered him to send an encrypted message she had just composed to the destination she gave him. With a heavy heart, she allowed him to take the Maru and told herself that he was not going through dangerous territory and that the Maru was not as vulnerable as it once had been.

She chosen him in particular because his disappearance would elicit the least comment; his shift in Command was over, and he spent most of his off-time in the bowels of the ship where no one else went much. Trance might become curious, but Beka calculated that the message delivery should take no more than a few hours.

While Beka waited, she did her best to ignore Tyr. She had complete confidence in the cell's escape-proof design; the only tool left to Tyr now was his voice. Whoever had built the brig had thought of this, probably having watched too many holodramas where the good (and occasionally bad) guy escaped prison by various means of persuasion. One of the keys on the console would activate very specialized sound dampeners, which allowed the jailer to speak to the jailee without hearing the jailee's pleas or threats for freedom.

She eyed the panel, and Tyr laughed at her. "Do you trust yourself around me so little? You disappoint me."

"Right," she retorted, "I disappoint you 'cause I'm not going to subject myself to unnecessary risk. You're right, I don't trust myself around you." He was good at this, too good. Even as she snapped back at him, she felt a sinking sensation in her stomach on hearing him profess his disappointment in her. Too damn good by half.

The console alerted her that this function was dangerous and could be grounds for Commonwealth court martial or other legal action. She accepted anyway with a snort at the idea of anyone, especially the extinct High Guard, court marshalling her. It was easier to keep an eye on him, she discovered, when she was not also making the effort not to hear him. To occupy her time until Harper returned, she caught up on the bundle of unread news reports that had arrived with the latest mail delivery, glancing up at Tyr every minute or so.

The hours seemed to be stretching into weeks by the time Harper notified her that he had returned. Again, she met him just outside the brig and heard with relief that the messenger had guaranteed receipt within half a day.

"Come on, boss," he pleaded, "lemme in on the big secret. Who'm I gonna tell, anyway. Okay…" he relented, "maybe Trance, but that's all. You know she could squeeze a secret out of a stone."

She snorted. "I know, and that's why I'm not telling you." It wasn't that she cared much whether Trance knew, but the more people knew something, the more likely it was that other people would find out. She doubted that her security contingent would be so foolish as to take Tyr's side over hers if they discovered the situation, but that was another risk she did not need to take.

"If anyone asks you where you went, you can tell them that I had you run an errand concerning the minor malfunction I mentioned earlier," she continued.

Harper's eyes widened. "That's this? Weren't you resolving that momentarily before I left?"

"Yeah well, it'll be a little longer. And I might as well tell you, we're going to have company sometime in the next day or so. Think of them as… the repairmen." She would have to alert the crew of this as well, so they didn't attack Charlemagne's vessel when he approached.

"The next day or so? Geez, are you planning to stay here all by yourself that whole time? Are you sure I can't help you out?" Harper's concern was genuine, as far as she could tell, and she was almost moved to explain everything.

She sighed. "I'll keep your offer in mind. Now, I gotta go make sure everything's still okay. Thanks, Harper."

Her heart was pounding somewhere around her throat as she turned to enter the brig again, but everything looked exactly the same as she had left it. Most importantly, Tyr was still lounging in his cell, following her ceaselessly with his eyes. He was smirking again, no surprise there. Beka started pacing, bulkhead to bulkhead, sick of standing and sitting still. It was hard to watch Tyr while avoiding his gaze, but she managed. When she grew tired of pacing, she returned to the main console to continue her reading.

Something trilled at her, startling her out of the reverie that had settled upon her as she read. The words "Message sent" flashed twice over her reading, without further explanation. She glanced sharply at Tyr, who yawned ostentatiously and then winked. Shit.

A few minutes later, the hatch to the brig slid open to reveal two of her bodyguards, newer people she had not got to know very well. She did recall that they had seemed friendly with Fertrun Nav, and…

Shit. They were pointing force lances at her, the weapons they had discovered in abundance in the Path's weapons locker.

"Sorry, Captain," Mittander y'Astrave said with a leer that did not make him look very sorry at all. "Tyr's offered us an awful lot for… effecting a regime change. Those were his words. Better'n you're paying us by a long shot." The other, Itasi Kinkerra, held her force lance in silence, stony-faced.

Beka wanted to scream. Tyr must have offered them a sizeable chunk of change and maybe more than just cash, for she knew she paid her people very well. She shouldn't have sent Harper away after all; even he would be better than nothing here. Silently promising retribution to her unfaithful crewmembers, she allowed them to take her guns, but there was another weapon they did not know was waiting in the wings. Within the day, Charlemagne Bolivar would be arriving. She was glad that at least she had not told her crewmembers about his forthcoming visit and hoped these two had not recently crossed paths with Harper.

The next several hours would bring some very interesting events. She just hoped she would be alive to witness it all.