The Engineer, Death, and the Devil

Harper was crawling through a little used conduit when he heard it. As he paused to listen, he heard it again. There, almost at the very edge of his hearing, a small whimper - a female whimper.

Scowling, he brushed his hand by his thigh and verified that his gauss pistol was in its holster. Satisfied that he was armed, he carefully unbuckled his tool belt. Taking only the long knife that he kept hidden amongst the sonic screwdrivers and wrenches, he left the bulky, clanking belt and eased his way down a conduit, following the sound.

Reaching a junction, he eased himself into a ventilation shaft. It was a bit of a tight fit since it wasn't designed for human travel, but Harper had long experience with finding his way into places that he was not supposed to go. As his eyes caught sight of a grating ahead, he slowed his movements even further, shifting his grip on the knife, as he neared the source of the quiet sounds.

Peering through the louvered opening of the ventilation grate, Harper felt a slow snarl form on his lips. The whimpers and small cries of distress were coming from Trance, and the source of her distress was obvious: her form was almost completely obscured by the figure lying beside her in the bed.

Releasing the catches on the grate with a delicate touch, he eased the grate down, trusting the hinges to keep the metal frame from falling. He planned to make his move cautiously - just on the remote chance that he might be misinterpreting the situation - but when he saw the figure place a hand on Trance's back - Trance's *naked* back - and obscure the sun tattoo, he reacted almost without thought.

Pulling himself free of the ventilation shaft, Harper rolled as he hit the carpeted floor and came to a crouch beside the bed, his knife poised at the base of the figure's skull, ready to sever the spinal column with the smallest thrust. With a growl in his voice, he drew his pistol with his free hand and placed the barrel against the temple of the figure lying next to Trance. As he thumbed the activator to life, letting the magnetic charge build with a quiet hum that would be impossible to misidentify, given how close to the figure's ear it was, he growled, "Get the hell away from her, you son of a bitch."

"Well, well, well, isn't this a surprise," the voice coming from the figure in Trance's bed was male, and he spoke common with a cultured, precise air.

"Shut up and move, dirtbag," Harper growled again, increasing the pressure on his knife.

The figure rose to his feet, and as he did, Harper moved back, keeping his pistol trained on his heart and his knife held ready. "Seamus Zelazny Harper... I'm honestly impressed. I wouldn't have expected you to be able to see me. Not this time, anyway."

Harper stared at the somewhat gaunt - thin, but not wasted as from disease or malnutrition, two conditions Harper knew very, very well - man and his brow furrowed in surprise. "Do I know you?"

The man chuckled darkly. "Not yet... not this time around, anyway. But I owned you once, just like I own Trance here, and I will again."

For a moment, it seemed Harper's finger would pull the trigger, but he somehow overcame the urge.

Ignoring the apparent peril in Harper's darkening _expression, the man lifted his aquiline nose into the air and visibly sniffed. "Rage, envy, jealousy, hate, lust, pride... You're a veritable banquet to the senses, Mr. Harper."

"Shut the hell up. Who are you, and what the hell did you mean, you owned me? I already know you don't own Trance."

"I've owned Trance for millennia, and I would have already owned you for a year or more if she hadn't been playing around with the timeline. And I have many names - Legion, in fact. Call me Luc Morningstar if you like."

Harper's _expression clouded, but his aim didn't waver. For this man to know about the changes that had occurred in the course of history thanks to Trance's machinations was disturbing; that he responded to a question in the evasive non-answering manner that Trance usually did was even more so - especially since he looked... human. "I'll ask her about that later," he finally retorted. "But where do you get off claiming that you owned me? Trance says I died in that future."

"Exactly!" The smile was shark-like, but genial.

Risking a look away from the intruder, Harper glanced at Trance, and was surprised to see her still asleep, despite the noise they'd been making.

"Don't worry about her, boy," 'Luc' commented. "She won't wake up."

Harper immediately aimed and fired, the shot streaking past Luc's cheek. The man didn't flinch in the slightest. Instead, his grin only widened. "Touchy, touchy. She's just asleep. 'Ah, to sleep, perchance to dream...'"

Trance's whimper immediately after his comment may have been coincidence, but Harper wasn't betting on it. "Rommie, intruder alert, Trance's quarters." When nothing happened after several dozen tortuously slow heartbeats, Harper repeated the command, more forcefully. "Rommie, disable privacy mode and activate internal defenses, authorization Harper, Seamus victor tango strike strike alpha... You hear me, Rom-doll?"

When the repeated command failed to provide any results, Harper tightened his grip on his gauss pistol and shifted its aim to the center of the intruder's forehead. "Give me one good reason not to blow you away. And it had better be a good one, `cause let me tell you, after you've messed with my two best girls, I'm not in the mood to be reasonable."

"That's the spirit!" the man proclaimed, "I can smell the jealousy from here. It's positively brutal - savage. I like that." He turned briefly to look at the slumbering Trance, then without warning started walking towards Harper.

Harper pulled the trigger - then fired again and again, all seemingly without result. Fearing he was dealing with some major ECM, he aimed the gun directly between the man's eyes as he stopped moving in front of him, and pulled the trigger once more.

The man's grin simply widened. "What the..." Harper began, then stopped. No matter how good the ECM was, a smart bullet simply could *not* miss at a range of three inches - even if it was deflected by the electronic countermeasures, it would still hit something . He fired three more times, the whine of the capacitor charging and discharging rough on his ears, yet the man remained completely unaffected, even as a plant that was behind him was shredded by the barrage of magnetically accelerated slugs.

This is impossible, Harper's mind insisted. Even Satrina's goons had shown *some* result from being shot, even if it was only a flickering along their edges as the tesseract field adjusted to the foreign matter impinging on their existence. This 'man' on the other hand... "What the hell are you?" Harper stammered.

"Let me tell you something, Mr. Harper... I like you. It takes a rare kind of man to make a weapon of mass destruction - let alone two! - that's more powerful than a nova bomb. And it takes an even rarer individual to be willing to *use* them."

Harper continued squeezing the trigger, seriously freaked by the knowledge the stranger continued to show about events that he simply could not have known - until finally a synthesized voice said, "Your weapon is empty." The human dropped the spent firearm and thrust upwards with his knife in a killing move that would have passed between two ribs and pierced both a lung and the heart... had it encountered any resistance. The sharpened blade merely passed through the space the man occupied as though he were not there, yet when Harper reached tentatively forward with his other hand, he could feel him standing there, his fingers registering the slick synthetics of his tunic.

The man, unperturbed by both the display of violence and the exaggeratedly cautious touches and movements, continued. "I only had you for a short time, but I was very impressed by your record. Killing a man for a piece of moldy cheese? Wiping out an entire extra-dimensional species? Such a wide range of sins. Marvelous. Positively inspiring."

"Shut up... I'm hallucinating. That's all... Must be."

"How would you like to play a game, Mr. Harper?"

"Why would I want to play chess with a freaking delusion?"

The chuckle was jovial, if mocking. "Wrong guess. I'm not death. And, the game I was going to suggest is quite different. You like my little pet, don't you?"

Harper froze, and his panic drained away as a cold fury arose. His eyes locked with the intruder's. "You stay the hell away from her," he ordered.

"I'm afraid I can't do that. You see, she's doing a job for me. Part of that 'game' I mentioned. You might call Miss Gemini here a bounty hunter... of sorts."

"Oh, frell," Harper blanched as his head twisted rapidly back and forth, looking for an exit.

"What? You think I'm *him*?" the man laughed at Harper's sudden panic. "Hardly. I owned him, too... once upon a time. In fact, he was a guest of mine for far longer than you, and even longer than my dear Trance, if you can imagine that. I was very displeased when he managed to escape; and since then, he's gotten to be quite the naughty fellow - not that he wasn't before, but then, that's why he was mine in the first place."

"You -" Harper paused to collect himself. "You *owned* old red eyes? The freaking god of the Magog?"

"'God' of the Magog," he chuckled. "My dear boy, there's only one God, and it's certainly not him ."

Harper's eyes slowly widened as half remembered stories from his childhood began to return.

"Oh, yes," the man smirked. "You figured it out pretty quickly the last few times we met, too. Even in this benighted age, finding someone who has been baptized really shortens the adjustment process. Though to be honest, I get a bigger kick out of meeting Nietzscheans for the first time and making them adjust their worldview. They always try to tell me that God is dead and that ethics are irrelevant. Without fail, it always manages to bring a smile to my face when those genetically engineered perfect noses first pick up the scent of the burning flesh of sinners."

"Oh, hell," Harper commented.

"Exactly."

"Where's the horns? Or the pitchfork?" Harper demanded, his voice cracking.

"Please. Those haven't been in fashion in centuries - not even on the auld sod. These days I'd have bone spurs and claws like a Magog... if I bowed to fashion, that is."

"So Trance is...?"

"Dead. Completely. And just as completely damned. In case you were wondering," he smiled as Harper's _expression shifted mutably as he wrestled with his emotions and the revelations.

"And she works for you...?" the engineer finally asked, his countenance ashen.

"Oh, yes. She has for almost a millennia now. And, speaking of Trance, I have an interesting proposition for you."

The knife Harper still held slid from his suddenly boneless grasp as he was forced to reexamine everything he'd ever thought, and everything he'd ever *felt* for Trance. And from the look of delight on the intruder's face, it was clear that he knew everything that was going through Harper's head.

Harper had known that Trance was different - what little he remembered from the All System's University historical archive, the experience with the Bokor, and a thousand lesser incidents that they'd shared while on the Maru and on the Andromeda, added together into a picture of a distinctly alien being in a lovely package. But he'd never cared about any of that - she'd been his best friend, after all.

Well, other than feeling kinda bummed that she didn't trust him enough to reveal any details about herself, that is. But then, she didn't reveal any details about herself to *anyone*, so it didn't *really* bother him. No big deal, right? He could even deal with the fact that she was dead - most of his other friends and all of his family were dead too, just not quite as... active. But to find out that all this time, she was *a freaking demon*... And I thought the tail looked cute...

"As fun as it would be to watch you wallow in the mire of your own despair, I should point out that you haven't heard my offer yet," the devil commented.

"Even if I'm already damned, I'm not dead yet," Harper snarled. "I'm not ready to give up my soul."

Chuckling, the devil waved a hand in dismissal of the point. "Did I ask for it? I just asked if you wanted to play a game. One of the prizes could be quite interesting..." he trailed off teasingly.

"What?"

"804 years ago, there was an incident. And, led by the creature you call, 'old red eyes,' one hundred and thirteen of my guests were released from my custody."

"Damn. He really is a freaking demon..." Harper muttered distractedly.

"If I might continue?" the devil prodded.

"Yeah, yeah," Harper mumbled.

"These 113 souls, including some of the worst of the worst from six galaxies, escaped from Hell, and scattered to the - if you'll pardon the _expression - four corners of the universe. I managed to contain most of them, despite the confusion, to the three local galaxies of the old Commonwealth, but one managed to evade the cordon."

"Mr. Lava Lamp."

"Precisely!"

"Well, hoo-ray for the hometeam. Not that I'm not glad that you caught the rest. The universe is bad enough with Nietzscheans and Magog and Kalderans in it, without tossing more demons like the Magog god into the mix, too."

"Did I say I caught the rest?" the devil smirked. "I could have sworn I only said I contained them."

"Great..."

"And that's where Trance comes in. You see, she was damned long, long, ago. She was bad news even from a people as given to deceit and deception as hers. She had set herself up as a deity on a backward planet, but not even she could escape judgement for her crimes forever," he paused, then as Harper's memories flashed back to the little he retained of the All System's University archive, he continued, "Yes, I see you knew of that. She was eventually condemned for the lives she took, and the sacrifices she demanded, and upon her eventual death, she came into my custody."

Harper shivered, but said nothing, an image of a sculpture of a sneering purple goddess with a sword in one hand and a trio of severed heads dangling by the hair from the other rising before his minds eye, a row of fingers (or possibly more potent appendages) dangling from her belt and entirely encircling her waist. I thought I'd forgotten about that... he thought. I *wish* I'd forgotten about that.

"Following the breakout, which, while not unprecedented, was certainly a rare occurrence, I chose Trance to serve as my 'repo man.'"

"She's hunting demons for you? What the hell? Why can't you just get them yourself?"

The devil's grin revealed nothing, but implied a hell of a lot, even if Harper couldn't quite think of what it *really* meant. "She did fairly well, but there's still 46 lost souls remaining."

"Shit."

"To be fair, she didn't personally send back all 67. What with the state of the universe today, and the way things have been since the fall of the Commonwealth, some were sent back without her intervention. Still, she didn't do that bad, all things considered." He smiled beatifically.

"I'll throw a frickin' party."

"You'll note I spoke in the past tense. She's 'done' well. Unfortunately, she's not 'doing' well any more. It may be my own fault - I left her alone for too long, grew too confident in her willingness to continue. Frankly, at this point I think she's too tied up in Dylan Hunt's crusade to be truly effective at hunting down my wayward souls anymore," he shook his head sadly. "The alterations in the timeline that she's performed are a perfect example. Last time she did it? She actually released five fugitives that had already been sent back to me - not to mention all those like yourself who suddenly were no longer technically mine. At least, not yet."

His smile wasn't quite so beatific anymore.

"Lovely."

"But that's where the game comes in, Mr. Harper!" He was the very model of joviality. "You see, I could take Trance back with me now, since she's not playing by the rules anymore - she seems to be suffering from the delusion that she's still alive and should be free to keep playing the games her people have always played with lesser species, rather than the one she agreed to play with me. I really should just return her to the lake of fire - I've kept her spot warm for her... very warm - but..."

Harper had the sinking suspicion that he was going to regret asking, but as he looked down on the sleeping form of his friend. Damned or not, demon or not, he had to ask. "But...?"

"But," the devil smiled with all the hearty good fellowship of a used spaceship salesman, "I'd be willing to amend the rules. Bring you in as a substitute. Tag her out, so to speak. Bring in the designated hitter." The grin was definitely knowing as he added, "And there's a large number of Nietzscheans in my care who know just how good a 'hitter' you are."

"No frickin' way. I have enough trouble keeping alive around here as is without getting caught up in looking for demons."

"Ah well," the devil sighed. "I suppose I'll have to find some other substitute. I'll just take Trance back, and leave you to..."

"Wait..." Harper began, then fell silent.

"Yes...?" The devil didn't bother to gloat; he knew when someone was hooked - he just had to let the line play out until his prey hanged himself with it.

"How does this work? Exactly?"

"It's quite simple, Seamus. You see, since the escapees from Hell are already dead, they're nearly invulnerable - just like Trance. Except for the eyes. The eyes, you see, are the windows to the soul. And once the soul is released from the shell that it is hiding inside, it will be sent back to me. It's that simple.

"It's also why some of them have come back on their own without the need for Miss Gemini's intervention... Explosive decompression is a rather messy sort of death, and there's any number of types of ordinance or explosives that will do the trick as well. Miss Gemini here used a knife to send the fugitive damned home, but your pistol will work just as well. You just need to destroy the eyes - both of them, or in the case of Ragnarians, all three of them."

"You want me to be a freaking *assassin*? Have you looked at me?" he gestured down the short, unimpressive length of himself with one hand.

"Now, now," the devil chided. "By definition, an assassin is someone who kills. You can't kill someone who is already dead. You, on the other hand, will merely be delivering an eviction notice, as it were; reclaiming a lost bit of my property. So tell me, are you interested in making a deal?"

"So what would the details of this... 'arrangement' between us be?" Harper asked, the words coming slowly, hesitant almost to the point of silence as he stared into the devil's eyes, trying to gauge the sincerity behind the earnest _expression.

"Well," the devil explained, seating himself on the edge of Trance's bed and stretching languidly before continuing, "I've tried various resolutions when situations like this have come up before. The first time, I used one of the escapees, made him turn on his fellows. The second, I used a champion of sorts who used his experience as a detective to corral my fugitives. Both worked, but the process was slow, and not exactly interesting, except for some small twists here and there. The third time, I chose Trance Gemini - who has some fascinating abilities in her own right, and thanks to her time in my care, gained even more."

"Whoa," Harper interjected. "Gained abilities in Hell?" He was less than sanguine about the idea as is, without adding demonic "magic" into the mix.

"Simply put, the longer you're in Hell, the more it becomes a part of you. Now, what *that* means," he continued, anticipating Harper's next interruption, "varies, given the individual in question, and the length of their stay; but, in general, the longer you're in my care, the more you are shaped by your stay. The damned soul grows stronger, faster, and can recover from almost any injury - it saves me a fortune in lost productivity and medical expenses among my employees, as you might imagine. As to the gifts Trance Gemini gained from her stay... Well, let's just say that Trance was in my custody for a very, *very* long time."

Slowly nodding his understanding in theory, if not practice, Harper gestured for him to continue. If ol' red eyes was in Hell even longer than Trance, who seemed to be able to pull miracles out of nothingness at will...

"At first, choosing a hunter based on power seemed to work, but her personality seems to be ill-suited for the job," the devil lamented. "She started off so well," he began, then stopped with a sigh. "But it all fell apart after the Commonwealth disintegrated. I should have chosen a hunter without an agenda of her own. It's so much simpler when my hunter's only concern is to avoid burning in Hell - though admittedly the angst of that grew tiresome to listen to at times. It's probably why I gave Trance so much leeway. For all her faults, she never whined - unlike Ezekiel."

"My heart bleeds," Harper sneered. "Because you're bored, you want to involve me in your little game, too. I get that. Really. But why me ? Why not Captain Fantastic, or Tyr - the mind blowingly über specimen of genetically engineered physical perfection? Dylan's a soldier and was a black ops sort of guy back in the day, and Tyr's a merc... Neither is all that far from an assassin, if you think about it."

"Well, why not you?" the tone of the response seemed eminently reasonable. "We both know that Dylan would have been dead long before now if it weren't for you; from a certain Restorian ambush, or from the fleet at Witchhead, or from any one of a dozen other scenarios. For the sake of argument, suppose I made an agreement with him. The first order he'd give is for you to build him a sensor to find the escaped souls. You'd work yourself half to death while he stood heroically on the bridge, spouting platitudes about the glorious Commonwealth. Then, when you'd succeeded in your impossible task, he'd use your creation and get all the credit."

Harper blinked. I never thought of it quite like that before, but when he puts it like that, it sounds... He shook off the seductive idea of claiming credit for all of Dylan's successes with an effort; Harper knew he had an ego, but there were limits. "Don't knock Dylan - and I mean it. He's a good guy - best thing that ever happened to me."

"As for Tyr," the devil continued, seeming to ignore Harper's half-hearted protests, "Even setting aside the fact that he philosophically refuses to admit the possibility that I exist, do you really think that he'd care? You and even 'Captain Fantastic' would see the knowledge that there are damned souls wandering unchecked through the galaxy and fear what they can do, and who they will hurt. Tyr on the other hand, would view it from the lens of self interest. Do they threaten him? Probably, in some vague way. Do they threaten him enough to make him consider making them a more active threat to himself by hunting them preemptively? Unlikely."

The engineer had to agree with that summation. For all that Tyr had seemingly fallen under Dylan's spell like the Maru's crew, and for all the fact that he kind of liked the last Kodiak, Tyr remained at his core a Nietzschean, with all the character traits that his heritage entailed. And, while Tyr (and, Harper had to admit to himself, facing up to what he had done in creating the fusion catalyst that killed 100,000 at Witchhead) - not to mention living with Rev Bem - had cured Harper of blind hatred for entire species, recognizing that individuals could be different from the rest of their breed didn't exactly inspire him to want to go camping or have a sing-a-long with a hypothetical example of either the Nietzschean or Magog species.

"You, on the other hand," the devil continued, "are a survivor, yet you continue to care - despite your cynicism and determined self-interest. You have neither Dylan's blind faith, nor Tyr's complete self-involvement. And you are - how did you once put it? - a freaking genius. I tried bloodthirst, determination, and even 'magic' as the central guiding trait for my... reclamation agents, but things never quite went as planned for any of them. So why not try intelligence this time around? A certain genius for technology?

"Frankly, I'm curious how well your knack for creating and using machines will do against my wayward charges - I found it fascinating how you were able to stymie Satrina; you really caught my eye there, even if - what did you call him? oh yes, Mr. Lava Lamp - cheated and reclaimed his pawns. The fact that he tried to recruit you is another mark in your favor - of sorts."

"Like my brains will go a long way against fricking demons," Harper shook his head dismissively. "I couldn't even really stop red eyes' *servant* - even if he did have to cheat to keep me from winning."

The devil grinned, sensing an opening. "Naturally, I'd level the playing field for you - a smidgen."

"No way - I'm 100% natural Well, except for my dataport. And this tattoo. And these medical nanobots. Regardless, I'm not interested in any modifications or deals. I like my soul just fine where it is."

"Oh, now what would be the fun in that? There'd be no point in involving you if *I* did the work. Don't you trust me?" At Harper's level look, the devil simply shrugged his shoulders, acknowledging the point. "Right. Tell you what - I'll simply amend the agreement with Trance, adding you to her side. Though to make it sporting, you would have to assume some risk..."

"Such as...?"

"Nothing egregious." He smiled toothily.

"Just a small binding; it would allow both yourself and Miss Gemini to pursue my escapees at the same time," the devil explained.

"Which means...?"

"If you, meaning both yourself and Miss Gemini, succeed and all my wayward charges are sent back to my loving embrace, you'll share in the reward and earn a second chance at life - free and clear. The scales will be balanced, and you'll be free to sin or not as you see fit, and your lives judged on your behavior after the reset. If you fail, you'll be sent back to Hell. Simple enough?"

"Sounds too simple. Let me see it in writing," Harper demanded. "I may be a mudfoot, but I'm not completely ignorant."

"Of course." A negligent wave of one perfectly manicured hand, and a large sheaf of archaic looking 8 1/2 by 14 inch paper appeared on the side table next to a slightly wilted plant.

Harper picked up the document, but found himself unable to read it since it wasn't written in either the Roman or Vedran alphabet. Grabbing a flexi from a side table, he scanned the contract into the memory, taking care to capture the front and back of every page, then ordered the machine to translate it. A few minutes later, it chirped discordantly. Somehow, it was not that big of a surprise to Harper to find that the language was unknown - and untranslatable. "How about a version that's written in a language that I can read?" Harper asked as he tossed the useless flexi back onto the table.

"Well why didn't you say so in the first place? It's hardly my fault you can't read my native tongue."

The sheaf of papers shimmered, and the writing squirmed on the pages, reshaping themselves into the Vedran character set. Harper calmly picked up a flexi, repeated the scanning procedure, then settled in a chair to read, using the version in the flexi, rather than the paper form, using the built-in editing features to jump through the pages to double check previous sections as he read through the text of the contract.

"You don't really have to read it you know," the devil commented, watching the proceedings with an amused air. "I could always just take Trance now."

"But where would be the fun in that?" Harper retorted. "You do want a new playmate, right? Stave off the boredom, and all that."

"You are a clever lad, aren't you?" As Harper continued reading, the devil added, "You'll note that I put in a clause about not altering you beyond the needs of the contest, and guarantee that nothing done directly by me in that regard will be irreversible or unnatural. But if you'd like to make a side deal, I can offer you a great deal of knowledge - knowledge which would make the recovery process much simpler - at a very low cost."

Harper snorted. "Dylan's an opera fan of sorts - I think Jill Pearce warped his mind with all her talk about it - so I know all about Faust. Not to mention I almost got my brain melted by absorbing a single database. I'm not interested in shoving the entire sum of all universal knowledge in there - even if you would find it amusing to watch my head explode like a calimelon in temporal transit."

"Pity." Oddly, the devil looked more pleased than disappointed that Harper was uninterested in the side deal.

Harper continued reading, mentally unravelling the "party of the first part," "damned souls," "enforcement agent," and "party of the third part" clauses and descriptions. At length he looked up and asked, "Tattoos?"

"A scorecard, of sorts, used both as a record, and a source of motivation. A tattoo of the name of each of the damned souls you need to return to me will appear on your body, which will disappear when the soul has been returned. That's one of those 'reversible' changes the game requires, by the way. When a soul is returned, the appropriate tattoo is removed from everyone who bears it." It looked like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth - or he would if he wasn't so smug about it. "If you care to look, Trance has them too, though at her request they're restricted to some rather private places, the better to conceal them. I was feeling generous that day for some reason and agreed to her request."

Having seen some of the outfits Trance had worn while purple, Harper blinked, and said only, "They'd have to be," before turning back to his reading.

While not a lawyer, nor particularly legal minded, after having gone over the Maru's salvage and hauling contracts - and some of the sneaky clauses and attempts to cheat Beka "legally" that had been slipped in from time to time, not to mention spending a fair amount of time in prison on Earth and on a number of drifts for one reason or another, Harper had become a good enough jailhouse lawyer that he could follow the contract reasonably well - especially since it was written to be clear, direct, and appeared to sum up everything exactly as the devil had outlined - even the fine print was reasonable. Which concerned him, more than a little, since he could dimly remember that one of the devil's epithets was "Prince of Lies."

Then he found the loophole, and felt a great deal of relief. "I'd want to clarify this definition of losing," Harper said, pointing to the offending passage on his flexi.

"How so? Seems straightforward enough to me."

"Yeah, but the way it's phrased now, if either of us loses - that is to say *dies*, we'd both lose and get sent immediately to Hell. Not to mention that because of the phrasing, you could add a roach or something as a third 'enforcement agent,' squish it, and that would immediately make us all lose - instantly."

"Now why didn't I think of those things?" the devil said mildly. "Let's make an addendum..." he paused, and the sheaf on the table grew by a few more pages.

Harper took the sheaf, and began scanning it again, but stopped before he had gone more than three pages in, already seeing changes in the text. "How about just adding the addendum, but keeping the rest of it unchanged?"

"Spoilsport." But the text reverted to the original draft, as requested.

Turning back to the first page, Harper re-scanned the contract and ran a text comparison before beginning to read again, nodding in satisfaction at finding the rest had returned to its original form. When he had finished rereading the document, he was unable to find any additional loopholes, and was satisfied the new wording had closed the loopholes he'd already found. He did have some questions, though. "'Compensation'?" he asked mildly.

"We'll have to discuss that after you sign. I can tell you that the wage levels aren't set by me, though." He glanced upwards, and added, "And I can't adjust them. Frankly, keeping Trance and yourself out of Hell should be reward enough for both of you, but I don't make all the rules."

"That's reassuring. Sort of."

"Now, now," the devil chided. "'Faint heart never won purple - or gold - lady.'" He chuckled, "Ready to sign?"

Harper took a deep breath, and had second, third, and fourth thoughts on the subject matter. He was wagering his soul with the devil against his ability to send 46 demons - demons who had eluded *Trance* for hundreds of years - back to Hell. On the other hand, if he *didn't* sign, Trance would *immediately* be sent to Hell. If the contract was clear on all the other particulars of the situation, it was blunt to the point of being as subtle as a club to the head on that one point: sign, or Trance would be immediately returned to Hell, no passing go, and definitely no collecting $200.

As he stared at the words on the small display screen on the flexi, Harper found his mind slipping back to some of the worst moments of his life. Memories of death dealt, scams run, valuables stolen, and friends and acquaintances abandoned to unpleasant fates. Not always willingly, but ultimately he had made those choices and performed those actions, and Harper could readily believe that he was damned for making them.

But Harper wasn't dead yet, despite everything the universe had thrown at him. Do I really want to risk my life like this? he wondered. And my soul?

Turning away from the flexi that spelled out his probable doom, he stared at Trance's sleeping form. Even now that she was gold - as different and warlike as she usually seemed from how she had been - when she was asleep, she still looked... innocent. Like Trance used to... When she had been purple. When she had been his best friend. When they'd shared everything from adventures, to cons, capers, and even a bunk - though not in *that* way, to his more than occasional regret.

The devil held up a quill, the tip of the feather sharpened and dipped in gold to create a working nib. "Need a pen?"

Slowly, and with visible reluctance, Harper took the quill. He looked at it curiously, but couldn't find any mechanism for dispensing ink. Finally, he glanced at the devil and raised an eyebrow.

"'By the pricking of my thumb...'" the devil quoted, then held up his thumb and gestured appropriately with his other hand, making a popping sound with his mouth as an accompaniment. "It's traditional," he shrugged. "It's also hard to claim you didn't realize what you were doing after the fact if you have to sign in your own blood."

Harper glanced through the sheaf of papers one final time, verifying that the writing hadn't changed again while he was reading and wrestling with his decision, then turned to the last page. Gritting his teeth, he stabbed the ball of his thumb with the tip of the quill, coating the gold nub with his blood, then slowly signed his name. He had to refresh the quantity on the tip several times, and the resulting signature looked even more awkward than a person would expect given the archaic writing instrument. It was probably legally binding - if any court that existed would recognize the terms and signatories, anyway - but more, Harper felt the wrench as he signed, giving himself to the devil in exchange for Trance's continued freedom, and putting up his soul as collateral for the duration of the contract. "And I thought I had a tough time figuring out the chain of command when I was just working for Dylan and Beka..." he mumbled, staring at his drying blood.

The devil sighed in satisfaction. "Excellent. It's reassuring that despite all the advancements in technology and the passage of time, people have never really changed. And a good thing, too. If it wasn't for love, I'd be out of business. Saves me a fortune in road repair costs, too."

Scowling, Harper watched the devil blow on the signature, causing the slight glittering of the liquid blood he'd signed in to instantly congeal. Once it was dry, the devil gestured, and the contract vanished in a small jet of flame. The engineer waited, his blood slowly dripping onto Trance's floor as it continued to ooze unnoticed from his punctured thumb.

Smiling in apparent delight as he rubbed his hands together in glee, the devil then turned and faced Harper. "Now that this little matter has been taken care of, and you work for me, it's time to meet my contractual obligations. Don't worry; this won't hurt a bit."

"Good. `Cause let me tell you, when I got this tattoo," Harper touched his left biceps, where the small yin-yang symbol rested, "it got infected and took weeks to heal. Not fun."

With a chuckle, the devil responded, "You misunderstand me, Mister Harper. This won't hurt a bit; it'll hurt a *lot* ."

And then Harper's consciousness left him - and not nearly as soon as he wished - as pain exploded from every nerve cell in his body.

Harper groaned and rolled over, grumbling as the faintly musical wheeze of Trance's snoring disturbed his sleep. Mumbling something that sounded vaguely like "mumble mumble Rev, mutter Trance" and ending with a groan, he reached down to swat the side of her bunk, but found his hand slapping against the textured floor covering of one of Andromeda's crew quarters. The disparity between what was expected and what was found was enough to startle him, and bring him to grudging consciousness.

Finding himself prone on the floor, Harper slowly sat up before rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "What the... ?" he began, only to fall silent as he caught sight of the man sitting in a nearby chair. "What the hell was that?" he demanded, the sight of him bringing his memories rushing back - along with a massive headache.

"That," the devil responded, "was me leveling the playing field."

Harper slowly climbed to his feet, wincing slightly as the change in perspective played havoc on his equilibrium.

"You see," the devil continued, "while someone besides a damned soul *can* return one of the escapees, it's quite difficult. And it would have been far too easy for you to die and lose before I received sufficient return on my investment. So I had to make a few changes."

Trying to remember the terms of the contract he'd signed, Harper winced and asked, "What changes? What the hell are you talking about?"

From nowhere, the devil pulled out a noisemaker and noisily blew a raspberry as the thing uncoiled and fluttered. "Congratulations, Mr. Harper... It's your death day!"

"What?"

"It's not so bad. And you are a damned soul, after all. It's all spelled out in the contract that you signed."

"There was nothing in there about *me* being dead! What the hell happened to 'nothing unnatural'?" Harper demanded. "I'm a freaking zombie!"

"Unnatural? You're dead. What could be more natural than that? Frankly, that you were *alive* was unnatural. I simply undid Trance's manipulations and restored you to how you should have been. A damned soul. One who had been my guest for..." he paused and looked up, his brow furrowed as he appeared to think, "almost two years at this point? Something like that - temporal distortion and chrono manipulation always play havoc with precision. You'll need the resiliency that you should have - and *would* have - gained from your time in Hell if you want to have any hope of completing your contract."

Harper's eyes widened as a thought struck him, and he slowly lifted his shirt. He blanched as he saw the scarring that now covered his stomach from what must have been a massive Magog eruption. "I thought..."

"What? That you'd died painlessly? Trance lied. She's good at that. Though, to be the devil's advocate," his grin was merciless, "you didn't tell anyone when the leukoprene was losing effectiveness. You simply kept working, keeping to yourself, letting them believe that everything was still well, until one day, in an isolated conduit, they burst forth."

Wincing, Harper felt his stomach, feeling the harsh ridges of the scars that were even more pronounced than the older, Nietzschean created ones that lay on the edges of the wound.

"You did get your revenge, though. A neat little loop tied into a power circuit. They ate their way free, landed on the deck, and fried nearly instantly. As I recall, you were laughing as you died, since you got to watch six of the seven precede you in death. The seventh managed to tear out your heart before it was electrocuted. 'Crapface,' I believe you named the little darling."

Harper's hand automatically reached for the spot on his chest where the larva he'd named Crapface had been. He knew the spot intimately well, having stared at the small white creature many times on the medical scanner, and his fingers found the rough keloid that would presumably have formed had he somehow survived the Magog eruption.

"It was almost noble," the devil sighed. "Setting it up so that your friends wouldn't have to kill you, or watch you die. And taking vengeance even in death does have a certain appeal, I must admit."

"Gee, thanks," Harper mumbled. "Can't tell you how good that makes me feel."

"Now, now," the devil chided. "The playing field needed to be leveled, since a damned soul has many advantages over the living: even one that works for me. And lets face it, there are certain advantages to being dead - after all, when you're dead, you don't need to eat or drink, you don't need to sleep, and while admittedly you can feel pain and take damage if another damned soul injures you, you are guaranteed to recover, and you are all but impervious to any other injuries - aside from the eyes, that is. And even damage to your eyes isn't necessarily 'fatal' unless both your eyes are destroyed."

"It didn't do Trance much good when she lost her tail," Harper protested. "Man, I need a Weisbrau - or even a Sparky. I'm getting a headache."

The devil chuckled. "Trance had the misfortune of being shot by one of my wayward charges. Not all of my escapees were human after all - the one that shot her was a Kalderan. Didn't you notice Trance sneaking out of the tavern?"

"Hardly - she was drunk. Passed out behind the bar."

"Silly boy, neither alcohol nor any other drug can affect the dead. She - and now you - could drink a thousand bottles of liquor and not feel a thing. She suckered you. Again. What *really* happened is that while the rest of you were playing at siege tactics, she was taking out the Kalderan commander - a particularly vile individual named Ss'thok. Stabbed him right in the eyes, and sent him back to my warm embrace. Once she took him out, she simply snuck back into the bar and pretended to be asleep.

"Didn't you wonder why the Kalderans were so angry? Why they were so blindly enraged that they charged headlong into an obvious chokepoint when all they had to do was blow up the building from orbit and scan for DNA residues? They wouldn't have survived and prospered in a hostile universe if they were ordinarily that stupid. They were trying to expiate their guilt and frustration from losing their commander, and hoping to capture his killer - and make her death linger."

Harper blinked. That had indeed bothered him, in the vague 'how did we ever survive *that* ?' sort of way that he'd felt in any number of confrontations since joining the crew of the Andromeda. He'd just chalked it up to Dylan's unbelievable luck, but... Somehow, he found himself accepting that it was really Trance's doing. Eventually, he just shrugged, and said, "I'll ask her later."

"Go ahead," the devil chuckled. "Of course, talking to her about any of this will be a breach of contract, and I'll have to reclaim her soul and yours, but the choice is entirely up to you."

"What are you talking about?" Harper demanded. "How the hell can we work together if I can't talk to her about it?"

"Work together? Who said anything about working together?"

"But..." Harper stammered, "You said...?" he trailed off, abruptly realizing that he was less skilled at reading contracts than he'd thought.

"Nowhere in the contract does it say you'll work together. It only says you'll hunt down the souls 'at the same time.' There'd be no test of technology if Trance were working with you, and it would violate the other conditions of the contract if you worked with Trance, so any interaction with her that could be perceived as applying to this contract is a clear violation."

"This just keeps getting better and better..." Harper scowled.

"If you don't like it, I'm willing to tear up the contract. Of course, if I do..." he trailed off.

"...you take Trance to Hell," Harper finished. "I get it." He paused, letting the new revelation sink in, then asked, "So how do I track them down if Trance doesn't help me?"

"That's entirely up to you. However, before you get started on the hunt, I'd recommend some protective camouflage. After all, you *are* dead, and while not everyone will be able to perceive that fact, this ship will certainly be able to - among others - and may raise some awkward questions about your condition. And should Miss Ascendant or someone else bring the fact of your death to Trance's attention..." he let Harper complete his sentence.

"...contract violation, Trance in Hell, blah blah blahbbity blah. I get it." He rolled his eyes. "Believe me, I get it."

"Cheer up, Mr. Harper," the devil smirked. "All you have to do is send all my wayward souls back to me, and both you and Trance will get your second chance at life. Or, you can just tell me that you've changed your mind, and I'll rescind the contract, and you'll be back to normal. Of course, what that will do to your soul's disposition after your eventual death, I'll leave to your own imagination."

As Harper mulled those conditions over in his mind, he realized just how stuck he was. Of course, if he did manage to track down the lost souls, both he and Trance would be free. It's not like I've never killed before... and these guys *are* already dead, he justified to himself.

The devil simply grinned, as he eavesdropped on Harper's mental justifications for killing the escapees. 5,000 years of human history, and man hadn't changed a bit since being thrown out of the Garden of Eden - the spirit that had driven Cain to kill Abel was still alive and well, flourishing in the darkness of the human heart.

Tearing his thoughts away from his future actions, Harper began to think of his more immediate needs. "I don't suppose you'll be any help at all in helping me keep my new... *condition* a secret?"

The devil's look of confusion, as though he didn't understand what Harper was asking, was answer enough. "I didn't think so." Crouching beside Trance's bed, Harper opened an access panel, exposing an illuminated section of conduit containing wiring, circuitry, and most importantly, a connective jack.

The jacks were all but ubiquitous in modern (even Commonwealth-era modern, as the Andromeda was) engineering, and were designed to be forgiving of nonstandard architecture and protocol. This enabled the machinery to communicate with and accept I/O from any number of devices, everything from network sniffers to computer-controlled lightbulbs. The fact that a dataport granted him all but complete access when connected to one had been the main reason why he'd invested in the technology, even given the risks involved - risks made even more dire thanks to his thoroughly compromised immune system.

"Well, I can see you've got a lot to do, so I'll leave you to it," the devil commented as Harper sat beside the jack and drew a loop of wire from one of his pockets. "I'll be watching you, so remember your mission."

"Yeah, yeah," Harper muttered as he plugged the cable into the jack. When he looked up from that task, he wasn't really surprised to see that the devil was gone, vanished in the blink of an eye. Wincing, he inserted the other end of the jack into his dataport.

Harper's eyelids fluttered as his eyes shifted into a state similar to REM sleep as his consciousness flowed into the ship. A dizzying and disorienting blur of light and sound and color, and Harper found his consciousness inside the mind of the Andromeda Ascendant .

Knowing he had to work quickly before his actions drew the attention of the Andromeda's AI, he slipped into a system node that he'd found that was not subject to frequent inspection, and executed a quick series of commands. Almost before he'd finished keying in the final instruction, a small shape sizzled into existence in front of him. "Hey there, bitty buddy," he commented, continuing to issue commands as quickly as his port could upload them.

"Howdy, Harper," the micro artificial intelligence Harper had created while under the influence of the All System's University Archive proclaimed. "How's tricks?"

"Not so good, mini-me. I need your help," Harper commented as he opened up a vidwindow and began scrolling through his creation's programming. "I need you to help me diddle with Rommie's head."

"Oh, baby," the AI breathed, rubbing his hands in glee. "I am so there."

"I think I made you too much like me," Harper muttered to himself.

"Hah, you wish, meat-boy."

Deeply enmeshed in modifying the code, Harper ignored the dig, and set a number of spawned processes to work harvesting data and creating the links to a number of system archives that the AI would need to access for the process to work. "Your mission," he explained, "is no longer to protect the archive from me - since I recovered and got rid of it already."

"Planned obsolescence is a bitch," the AI commented, shrugging off his obsolescence with barely a whisper of concern. "Fortunately, the Harper is good. I'd trust in the Harper, but I know me too well."

"Don't I know it," Harper shared a smirk with his artificial reflection. He set up the final link, tying the AI into his medical records and the Andromeda's sensors, and set up a neat little splice (if he did think so himself) inserting his creation into the operational loop. "Your task is now to make sure that Rommie and Andromeda don't realize that I'm kind of dead at the moment."

"You're... I'm... I'm a freaking *ghost* ?" the AI demanded, rounding on Harper even as he began closing down the programming windows.

The AI looked seriously freaked, and not for the first time did Harper wonder at the complexity of what he'd created. Without the knowledge that had been in the archive, he doubted he'd ever be able to recreate the masterpiece of tightly coded and densely packed algorithms that were every bit as alive as the ship's AI... in a much more compact size. Of course, his creation didn't control a ship, nor was he designed to command battlefleets and manage every bit of minutiae that a crew of thousands could generate, all at the same time, but still...

Shaking off his distraction, Harper watched as his modifications went live, examining the datafeed closely for any sign of malfunction. As the modifications became active, and his AI was able to access the Andromeda's sensors, a virtual image of a medical bay scanner appeared in midair next to the avatar of the engineer, and immediately red lights began flashing on the display. "Heart rate... 0, temperature... 104... Holy moly frijole... You're freaking dead! And hot! And not in a good way! Your brain is baked, and not just half-baked! Even if you weren't dead, you'd be dead!"

"Keep your shorts on," Harper tried to soothe the AI. "It's temporary. And it's for Trance."

"Oh." The AI appeared to freeze for a minute (a small eternity in machine terms) as it processed that information. "Well, that's alright then."

Smiling down at his creation, Harper felt a surge of pride, even though he'd never quite been able to remember how he'd given it life, or replicate his creation - not that he'd really tried; too much of anything wasn't a good thing, and one virtual Harper was more than plenty. "I really am a freaking genius."

"You know it, baby," the AI smirked. "So, given that you're dead... what do you want me to do?"

As he opened another window and began to work on the most delicate part of the modifications, the hook into Andromeda's sensors, Harper off-handedly explained, "Simple... you just need to mask my condition from the Andromeda's sensors."

"Even given the fact that the divine Miss Ascendant's sensors are buggy as hell, prone to going offline, and generally drive both you and me batty trying to keep them reasonably ahead of the latest and greatest stealth and spoofing technology and tactics... Are you freaking nuts?" the tiny figure of the AI's avatar gestured wildly as he stalked around the programming avatar of his creator. "How am I supposed to hide from her if I'm tied into her systems like that?"

"Relax," Harper soothed as he continuing his coding. "We won't be hiding. Well, we will, but hiding in plain sight. I had something like this in mind already to let you be a little more free, but thanks to recent developments, I'm moving up the timetable. Anyway, I hereby christen thee the Heuristic Automated Regulatory Process Enforcement Routine, version 2.0... and you're my latest attempt to keep the scanners working... so far as she can tell. Independent, and not subject to her intervention - or intervention by anyone suborning her systems, which is why it'll fly. And it will actually work; because frankly, you'll be paying a lot closer attention to the feeds than she can usually afford to devote to the process, brain the size of a planet or not. The fact that you'll send an alert when somebody *else* is messing with her sensors is pure gravy."

"HARPER 2.0... I like it, if I do say so myself."

"I thought you might, since I liked it," Harper grinned as he turned and opened another window and began altering the code for the process in another section. "Anyway, with you in place and monitoring her input feeds, you'll be able to replace my abnormal readings with less alarming ones. I've put links into my medical records, so you should have more than enough variability of data to work with."

"I've got you under my skin..." A small simulation of Harper appeared standing beside the engineer's avatar, then was slowly put through a series of permutations as fatigue, illness, and finally a strange condition that caused oozing sores to appear all over the virtual body, followed by a leprous growth sprouting from one cheek as the rest of his flesh rotted away into a vile putrescence, leaving only bones and the quivering... *thing* that had been born out of the decay of his face.

"No more Rigelian Measles... Sheesh. You sell me out, and I'm taking you with me," Harper promised. "And trust me, that 20 feet of cleavage looks *really* impressive, but it's all a con to keep you distracted while she's sending the voltage arcing through you."

The AI shuddered and the simulation regained what passed for normal health for Harper before fading out. A flicker of static and a rain of alphanumeric characters faded into an image of Harper as he lay jacked into the system from Trance's quarters, the image loop ending as he slumped beside the open access panel.

"Much better," Harper nodded in satisfaction. "And I'm sorry to have to threaten you, but believe me, this is important."

"Yeah, yeah... I know you still love me, because I still love me, me. But don't forget that no matter how much I filter from Andromeda's awareness, it won't affect the sensors in Rommie's avatar. And as much as I'd love to get into Rommie's body, it just ain't happening. We were too good when we made her. Not to mention Tyr and his genetically perfect nose and ears."

"One thing at a time, bitty buddy, one thing at a time... Trust me, I've got some ideas for that, too..." Harper breathed, calling up the internal sensors in Trance's room, despite privacy mode being activated and monitored the data feeds of his body's condition. "Putting you active... now."

Without even a hint of a flicker, the body lying (ironically enough) like a corpse suddenly appeared to come to life. It still remained motionless, yet there was a vast difference in the subtleties of the appearance : a small pulse at the throat, a more normal body temperature, small shifts in the torso as the lungs drew in and released breath. "Trust in the HARPER," the AI smirked.

"The HARPER is good," Harper agreed. A few more minutes work to cover his footsteps in her systems, and to shield the micro-AI from all but the most detailed analysis, and he was done. "Once you get in the swing of things, compile a list of all the parameters you have to modify in the data feeds, so I'll know what I have to work on to spoof Rommie and Tyr. And Trance. I already know a couple things," he tapped his chest over his unbeating heart, "but I don't want to miss anything."

"Aye aye, Captain," the AI returned with a jaunty salute that turned into an obscene gesture when Harper wasn't looking.

"I saw that," Harper pointed out as he jacked out of the system, the virtual cityscape fading from his consciousness.

Sitting up with a sudden jerk as he regained control of his body, Harper hurriedly coiled up his cable, and closed the access panel. Gathering the flexi from Trance's table, he paused in his efforts and stared down at the slumbering golden woman that he'd sold his soul for. For a time, he wondered what, if anything he could say if he were free to speak to her that he hadn't already, but at length, he simply shook his head and returned to his cleanup efforts.

Burdened with the flexi and the plant that he'd shot up, Harper stood on a chair and shoved his booty into the ventilation shaft. A final glance towards the slumbering Trance, and a precarious balancing act on the back of the chair later, and he was safely ensconced inside as well. After a quick crawl to a junction to turn around, he backtracked, reaching through the opening to pull up the grate, sealing it with a muted click.

With a small sigh of not-quite relief, he backed out of the narrow passageway and headed into the depths of the metaphorically dusty tunnels, heading for his workshop.

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