SquidgeWorld Archive

Dylan was engaged in the usual diplomatic song and dance almost on autopilot, long past bored with trying to explain to overprivileged government representatives that it was in their peoples' best interests to band together into a Commonwealth against the Magog, when Trance tugged at his arm and said, "Dylan, it's important that I speak to you in private."

Once, he would have dismissed her, but the longer he knew her, the more aware he was of how dangerous it could be to dismiss any of her concerns as trivial. "If you gentlemen will excuse me, I have some ship's business to take care of." If the Tkachenko lacked the necessary sense of self-preservation to see the benefits, all the talking he could do probably wouldn't be enough to convert them from their idiocy and they deserved to get screwed.

It still surprised him when his inner voices channeled Tyr or Harper. His most cynical inner voice often sounded like an unholy melding of the two of them.

Once Trance pulled him into a darker corner, Dylan asked, "What's wrong?"

She idly twirled her wineglass in her hand, a thoughtful look on her face. "This isn't exactly the wine I tested for Harper."

They'd done a reading of the party's refreshments to make sure that nothing would interact badly with the serum that kept the Magog spawn in Harper's body from hatching and ripping him to shreds. Dylan didn't like the sound of where this was going. "It has to be. You took a sample straight from the bottles on the table."

"They used those bottles, yes, but there's an... undertaste that isn't consistent with what came directly out of the bottle. And now I can't find Harper anywhere."

Dylan tried to throttle down the horror that seemed to be rising up in his throat. "Trance, you have a gift for finding things. How can you not find Harper?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's this crowd. They're really happy, kind of weirdly happy. I can't explain what's distracting me."

The wine had a weird taste and texture. He'd noted that himself in the small sips he'd taken. The weirdly happy people.... Dylan used his subdermal communicator. "Harper. Harper, please report."

Nothing.

Dammit. "Trance, keep that glass and wine for analysis. Quietly find Beka and tell her what's going on, then split up to search. Quietly. If Harper just found someone to hook up with, it'd be very embarrassing if we caused a scene looking for him." If Harper's absence turned out to be that simple, Dylan would kick his ass personally. "I'll look for him."

"Dylan--"

But Dylan had already left Trance. He didn't think Harper had simply found a companion and wanted private time alone with her. No, he had visions of Harper crumpled on the floor somewhere, dead from an allergic reaction to something in the wine or convulsing as the spawn started to tear their way free. Yet he refused those images too, because another member of his crew couldn't die. Nothing was over until he said it was over.

Harper would be shorter than most of the crowd, but his distinctive hair should make it easier to make him out. If he were here. Dylan stalked through rooms filled with people who did seem too happy, weirdly happy, as Trance had said.

They seemed high. If they were high and Harper had an attack of something, would they even care?

Dylan used his subdermal communicator again. "Andromeda, can you trace the signature of Harper's nanotech to get a fix on where he is?" He should have thought of this first. Soon after Harper's impregnation, Dylan had ordered Trance to put extra tracers in Harper just in case a medical emergency happened while he was out of the crew's sight.

"Yes," she said back. "I'll direct you to his location."

"Send Trance there too."

Andromeda directed him to a kind of coatroom. He had such an awful feeling about this. Dylan turned on the light. "Harper?" His eyes swept the room, lingering along the racks, then the floor. He noticed a boot and saw that it was attached to a leg, partially hidden under a long, sweeping wrap. Dylan tore the camouflage away and crouched down beside his engineer. Harper didn't seem to be moving at all, and a still Harper seemed wrong beyond imagining.

Dead? No, Harper could not be dead. Not like this. Dylan wouldn't allow it.

And he wasn't. Harper was unconscious, his pulse faster than it should be, skin flushed and hot under Dylan's fingers. His breathing sounded labored, and Dylan was glad that Harper never buttoned any shirt put on him to the top button. This sure as hell looked like anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction.

It didn't seem very likely that Harper had been drinking in the coatroom, then collapsed under something. Someone had dragged him in here when he became inconvenient.

Trance just about knocked Dylan out of the way to get to Harper. Showing surprising strength for a "little purple girl," she manhandled Harper onto his side, arm under his head, into the recovery position, checked his throat, and shot something into his thigh with an injector. Probably epinephrine.

Dylan could just about feel Beka seething behind him as a crowd started to gather, watching this as an entertainment for their benefit. Controlling his unseemly panic and now his rage left Dylan just barely holding onto calm.

Harper just about vaulted back into awareness and trembled, looking panicked. The shot of adrenaline at work. Dylan grabbed his wrist before he could shoot across the room. "Harper, you're fine."

"Yeah." Harper's voice vibrated just as his wrist did. "I'm good. I'm good."

"We're going to take you back to Andromeda for a routine check."

"Okay." That immediate compliance said more for how Harper was feeling than anything else he could have said or done. Dylan gripped his wrist a little tighter for a moment in a show of reassurance.

Perhaps he should go back to the Andromeda with Harper, but if he left Beka as representative, she might tear off some limbs, since the expression she had on was lethal. He'd have to stay and try to be civil to people who'd nearly poisoned Harper and left him to die alone.

Ambassador Zorzs burst in. "This is over. Finished. Take your man back to your ship with you." His voice came out fast and clipped, almost angry.

"Excuse me?" Dylan asked.

"Go."

Beka raised an eyebrow but put her hand on Harper's other arm and helped steer him out, something that seemed to be more necessary for her peace of mind than out of any problems with Harper's motor abilities. Dylan had Harper's other side and noticed with pleasure that Trance had kept her glass. What his crew lacked in military polish, they made up for in smarts and fierceness.

******************

Harper was much less accommodating in med bay, fidgeting as Trance purged the drug from his body, checked him out, and gave him a booster of a few things. The shot of adrenaline seemed to be exacerbating his usual manic tendencies. "We done yet? I really can't sit here. I mean, I really can't sit here."

"Almost," Trance answered.

"Cheating death is becoming a habit of mine. I do it every day. No big." Harper tapped his fingers against the examination table.

"Harper, we want to make sure you're all right," Dylan said. "I found you lying on the floor in a coat room, dying."

"Gauche of me, I know."

"You seem to be well enough now," Trance said.

"Great!" Harper vaulted off the table. "I have things to do. You guys can deal with the nice folks who poisoned me."

"Harper--" Beka started, but the door had already closed behind him. "Dammit."

"He's tough, Beka," Dylan said.

"Yeah, I know he's tough. Tougher than us. He has to live with those... things, and we can't even talk to him about it. Usually I make excuses for myself, like that it would be weird if I brought it up out of nowhere, but here it would not have been out of nowhere. I had a perfect moment there to ask him how he was doing, and I couldn't get my tongue to frigging work."

"It's not that bad."

"Of course you'd say that; you don't ever talk to him about it either." Before Dylan could give a spirited--and lying--rebuttal, Beka said, "He doesn't spend as much time with us or talk to us as much anymore."

Dylan had to laugh at that a little. "Harper hasn't gone quiet."

Beka snorted. "Of course not. I've never met anyone who talks as much as Harper, and that's considering that I was born into a family of con artists. But he always talked a lot and didn't say much, do you know what I mean?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I do."

"Now he talks less and says even less. He doesn't socialize with us as much, and when he does he acts as if he doesn't ever have a serious thought in his head. Like I don't know better. He's family."

Dylan knew that Harper had been socializing less due to the secret nova bomb project he had him working on. But maybe he'd started avoiding everyone else because he couldn't tell them about the new addition to his duties. More weaponry that could be used against the Magog was important, but it didn't excuse Dylan for neglecting to think about how the isolation and inability to confide in anyone about the project might further alienate Harper from the rest of the crew at the worst possible time.

"I'll talk to him," Dylan said.

"No, you won't," Beka answered quietly. "You know you won't."

"Dylan," Trance said, abruptly reminding him that she was still there, "they coated the inside of the glasses with the drug, where it would slowly dissolve into whatever liquid you pour in. That's why testing the wine in the bottles didn't show it."

"I really hate being drugged against my will," Beka said darkly.

She always drank very little, just enough to look sociable at diplomatic events, saving her this time from taking much of the drug and from guilt or greater anger later on once she'd realized she'd gotten high. Her vulnerability to addiction was another thing they usually Didn't Talk About.

"I'm not very fond of it either," Dylan said. "We'd been up front with them about Harper's special problem and the need to test things first, and they still did this."

Andromeda's hologram popped up. "Ambassador Zorzs has put a call through to us." Her expression turned deadly. "I don't like his tone."

"Great. We're on our way up to the bridge. Tell him we'll be right with him."

********************

"Captain Hunt, your man ruined our ritual," Ambassador Zorzs started with.

"Excuse me?" Dylan asked, shocked.

"We share our substance to feel closer as a unit and raise our spirits."

A nice euphemism and excuse for getting high, Dylan thought. He decided that the circumstances allowed him to meet rudeness with rudeness. "How did Harper ruin that? By having an allergic fit after we specifically told you that he had medical concerns and shouldn't be given anything unexpected we couldn't check out first? He didn't ruin your togetherness too badly, since someone, or possibly a small group, dragged him to a place where no one could find him or get him medical attention, then left him there, presumably to die, as they went back to the reception. If I hadn't noticed he was missing and found him myself, I'd be charging you with homicide now."

The representative started to pale but said, "Our cultural--"

"In addition to a crewmember who's vulnerable to unusual substance mixing, I have one who refuses substances for philosophical reasons." There was no reason to air Beka's past with Flash for the ambassador. "Your surprise foray into enforced togetherness and spirit lifting exposed them both to something they would have refused had they known."

"You're not being fair, captain."

"We told you about Harper's medical situation and needs. You watched us test the drinks to keep him safe and neglected to mention that you'd coated the glasses. That's forethought. I have some things to consider, so I'll contact you later. Hunt out." Once the comm cut off, Dylan asked, "Is it wrong of me to want to bomb his compound?"

"You're asking me? No, it's not wrong. I think you should go right ahead," Beka answered. "Sure, we need people against the Magog, but can you trust them to cover our backs after this? They got high and left Harper to die, then tried to blame him for harshing their buzz."

"I don't trust them, but we might need them."

"Will they be there for us when we need them? I have to tell you that I don't think they'd be reliable for a damned thing."

Dylan might have spoken to Rev about this and asked for guidance, but Rev was off somewhere again. Actually, there *was* someone else he could ask, even though he never would have thought of doing this 300 years ago. It wasn't exactly the High Guard procedure. But 300 years ago, he hadn't captained a ship crewed by family. "Andromeda, where's Harper?"

*********

When Dylan walked through the door of machine shop 17, Harper greeted him with a hearty "Hey, bossa-nova" but didn't look at him.

"How's it going?"

"Production on the harbingers of doom is going well."

"How are you feeling?"

"Fine!"

"Really."

"Really!" Harper answered in a far too chipper voice.

Keeping in mind what Beka had told him, Dylan said, "Harper, I don't want you to tell me what you think I want to hear. Tell me the truth."

"What if the truth is what I think you want to hear?"

"Harper."

Harper turned to face him. "My throat and stomach hurt, I feel like somebody beat me all over with sticks, and every time I try to sit I bounce to my feet like I have springs in my ass. Better?"

"Yes."

Harper shrugged. "Go figure."

"Since we're doing a groundbreaking experiment in telling the truth," Dylan felt some relief as Harper grinned at his words, "how about you tell me whether we should continue to court the Tkachenko as allies after what they did to you."

"They suck, but if we need them against the Magog, we need them."

"They poisoned you, then left you to die. I don't know if we can count on them."

"I've learned that nobody can be counted on 100% of the time." The failed revolution on Earth hung between them, huge and irrevocable. Harper paused to let Dylan remember his broken promise, then said, "I've been trying to become more practical lately and trust less. If I let the innate flakiness of people upset me, I'd be stressed full-time, and that's no good for my continued existence as anything other than Magog spawn chow."

"I... see." The truth hurt even more than Dylan had expected. He found himself missing something that until today he hadn't even realized was gone

"Yeah."

"The Tkachenko want us to grovel. They feel that you disrupted their party."

Harper made an obscene gesture. "Then screw 'em. We don't need a bunch of flighty junkies on our side that badly."

"Your advice would be to sign them, unless they want us to apologize for this."

"In a nutshell, yeah."

"Thanks, Harper."

"De nada." Harper turned back to his current bomb, obviously dismissing Dylan from his mind.

It seemed like something in Harper had already died, and Dylan didn't know what he could do to fix things. "I hope you feel better," he said, feeling useless.

As Dylan left the machine shop, he heard Harper softly answer, "Yeah, me too."

*********************

When Dylan returned to the bridge, Rommie said, "Ambassador Zorzs has called twice since you left. Beka told him that you were busy." Beka waved cheerfully.

"Good work," Dylan replied.

"He's calling again," Rommie said.

"Let's put him through this time. Greetings, Ambassador Zorzs."

Ambassador Zorzs looked serene except for some tension in the lines around his eyes. "Captain Hunt. I worry that perhaps you gained the wrong impression from our last talk."

"Perhaps. Please enlighten me."

"We apologize for the misunderstanding at the reception. Is your crewman well?"

"He's better now."

"We're relieved."

"I'm glad to hear it." Let them eat a little crow. After all, they'd shown a callous disregard for his crew.

"Now that all misunderstandings have been cleared away and amity restored, we'd like to continue in this spirit of openness and understanding. We would be interested in signing the Commonwealth charter."

Dylan felt Beka's eyes on him. "Excellent, ambassador. I'll return for the signing immediately, if that's amenable to you."

Ambassador Zorzs smiled. "It is. Thank you, Captain Hunt."

"Hunt out."

Once the connection ended, Beka asked, "What the hell was that? They nearly killed one of us, and all you're going to do is make them squirm for a moment, then pat them on the back as a good friend to the Commonwealth? If Harper had died, would you have pinned them for maybe a minute more, then signed them up?"

"Harper said that the campaign against the Magog is important enough that we should sign the Tkachenko in as long as they didn't expect us to grovel for it."

"He told you all of that?"

"After I demanded the truth from him. He said he's trying to be more practical lately."

She looked worried, so much so that Dylan started to worry about Harper even more. "I should see him," she said.

"You can't."

"I *can't*?"

"He's working on the secret project." Why was captaining six crewmembers turning out to be so much harder and full of pitfalls than captaining a crew of 4,000?

Looking like she had a foul taste in her mouth, Beka answered, "Of course."

"You could talk to him later."

She shook her head. "That's what I always say."