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What was going on with him? Alex wondered. Tristan could get angry, he could get violent, but always with a good reason. He shouldn't have snapped at Alex pointing out the obvious. At worse he should have said he didn't care.

Again he wondered if the virus was responsible for his behavior, maybe he hadn't taken the antidote yet. No, his fingers were burnt and blistered. That would have happened when he unlocked the pod, it should have healed.

Alex shook his head and stopped by a terminal at the intersection. When this job was over, he'd have the time to work out what was going on.

He brought up the ship's sensors and Tristan's position came up. He changed it from looking for Samalian life signs to anyone alive. The screen lit up with a handful of barely registering life signs and three strong ones.

He noted the locations of those slowly coming back to life so he could go and kill them again. The virus didn't kid around when it came to healing and Alex didn't want to have to find out if the people brought back to life were themselves of some kind of monsters worthy of a vid show.

His problem was the three life signs. One was him, one Tristan and one Baran. Where had Mary gone to? He took a quick look at the code to make sure no one had come in after him and made themselves undetectable. Mary hadn't given any indication she could coerce, but he couldn't know.

No, the code was all his.

He tapped his fingers on the screen, there was no way she could have just walked off the ship. He hung his head with a chuckle and called up the outside sensor. There she was, close to the hull.

He brought up the image of her location and looked at the mercenaries ship. A small troupe carrier, Alex thought. Tristan would know exactly what it was.

Alex took his time getting there, going to shoot the reviving bodies in the head. He stopped by one which was still dead. Broken neck by the head's position. The rest of the injuries were still there, although they might not be as bad anymore, Alex didn't recall what state this body had been in.

Why was it taking them so long to heal? It had taken him less than an hour to be back to a hundred percent. The only difference he could think of was that he had still been alive at the time.

He shot it in the head to be safe and headed for Katherine's ship. He hoped she stayed dead long enough for him and Tristan to get off this ship.

He couldn't miss the entrance to the ship. They hadn't been content bypassing the airlock controls, they'd cut around the door. Alex felt that was a waste of time. Their coercionist had been good enough to get them in much faster.

The inside wasn't as spacious as he expected. He didn't know how many people Katherine had brought with her but more than twenty would have been a tight fit.

Mary was in the pilot's chair tapping the control hard, the motions of someone getting angry. He leaned against the wall and watched her accomplish nothing.

"She hard locked the ship."

Mary jumped out of the chair with a yelp.

"Unless you're a coercionist or you know your way around the guts of something like this, you're not going to get it to go anywhere."

She caught her breath, casting an angry glare in his direction. "You're a coercionist, right? You can unlock it, take us out of here."

"I could, but I won't."

"Why not? Why would you want to stay here, with...him?"

"Because I have a job to do."

"A job? What are you doing working for that thing? I saw you fight, you could have killed him, why didn't you? You're not his slave you know your a person, you're--"

"Don't." Alex felt his jaw clench and his expression kept her from continuing. "I told you before, this is what I want. Keep your judgment to yourself."

"No one can want to be abused."

"Mary, shut up."

"Or what? You're going to come at me again?"

Alex had a flash of stalking toward a woman and some of his anger left him. "Sorry about that. I was lost in the fight." He then remembered the pain and seeing her before blacking out. "You hit me, right?"

"I wasn't going to risk you going nuts again, yeah. That furry beast forced me to patch you up."

"His name is Tristan, and thanks."

"I don't get you. He screams at you. I'm pretty sure he hits you, but when you attacked him he doesn't even fight back. And then he gets pissed at me for knocking you out."

Her words brought back Tristan's odd behavior when Alex attacked him. Something else he needed to figure out. "We have a complicated relationship," was all he said.

"I've seen bad vids with better build abuser/abused interaction."

Alex smiled. "This is the real world. It isn't as simple as in the vids. Now come on, we need to take care of something." He tapped the side of his head.

"No. Do you have any idea how valuable the virus is? And I have the only cure. It's going to make me rich."

"No it isn't. I'm the best outcome you can hope for. If Tristan is the one who removes the information from you, he's just going to rip your implant out of your head and not care if it kills you."

She became pale. "He wouldn't."

"The virus is a threat to him. He's going to remove it and he isn't going to care who gets hurt in the process."

"It isn't a threat, he took the cure."

"When?" if he had, then why was he still acting like he was?

"As soon as it was done."

"He still wants it eradicated. Now, you can come with me and I can go in, remove it and nothing else, or you can be difficult and I'll let Tristan do it. You're choice."

"I can erase it myself."

"Mary, I don't trust you. Tristan doesn't trust you. You don't get to tell me how it's going to go."

Her shoulders slumped. "Why can't I ever get a break?"

"You're getting one, you get to live. Not many people on this ship get that." He guided her back onto the ship and to the closest room with a computer. He could access her implant with nothing more than a datapad, but he wanted to be careful. A datapad wasn't a great interface for delicate work like this.

He pulled a second chair next to his. "Sit." He brought up the display, wiped it, got it ready to receive a signal. "Connect to it."

When nothing happened he looked at her. She slouched back and data began streaming on the screen. "You did a good job fixing me up. You have a lot of medical training?"

Mary didn't answer immediately. She was looking at the screen, doing her best not to show him where the data was. Unfortunately, by looking she was giving herself away. Her implant wasn't an external part of it, it was meshed with her brain, it enhanced her memory, but it also meant it reacted to her thought. Each time she saw something relating to the virus her knowledge of what it was altered the depiction on the screen. It was a minor change, he doubted she noticed it, but it was enough for him to identify what to erase.

There was still a chance she'd noticed it over time, which was why he wanted her slightly distracted.

"So, did you take courses?"

She sighed. "The basics, I guess. I didn't always plan on biochemistry. I was going to be a doctor, but it didn't work out."

"What happened?"

"I started running out of money in my second year, so I began making drugs on the side. Nothing bad, just stims to help the other students. I got caught, got kicked out."

"And you were able to just transfer into biochemistry?"

"I had to move. It's how I ended up here, well on Bramolian Six. I didn't do anything illegal and then tried to find work, but that didn't pan out, so I helped out Zack on the side."

"You don't have an accent."

She shrugged. "Languages have always been easy for me. I guess I should have gone into linguistic or something, but that never interested me."

"So you kept working with him?"

"Between real jobs, yeah. I thought I'd be making a lot of money, but there's a lot of biochemists there and not that many jobs. I wasn't so good to get hired by one of the big company. And all the permanent positions locally were filled." She sighed.

"Maybe you should brush up your medical skills. There's always criminals looking to get patched up."

She chuckled. "I doubt I could get into a school at this point."

"So? Criminals don't care about your accreditations, just that you can do a good job."

She made a noncommittal sound and Alex continued talking with her as he worked. He knew he was done when she sagged again. She'd been hoping he'd miss something, but that hope had been what had let him find every hidden copy of the virus.

"Look, at least you're going to live." Alex kept the uncertainty out of his voice. He thought she'd live, why else go through removing the virus from her if Tristan was only going to kill her, but his recent behavior wasn't exactly predictable.

"But to do what? I don't even know where I'm going to end up. For all I know that furry beast is going to take me on as his plaything and I'm never going to be free again."

Alex stood and stretched. "That's one thing you don't have to worry about. You're not Tristan's type."

"What does that mean?"

"You're a woman."

"Oh. Wait, are you saying he rapes you?"

Alex stiffened. "It isn't rape."

She was up. "You can't be serious. There's no way you can want--"

Alex had her against the wall, a hand around her throat. "I told you to keep that judgmental crap to yourself. What me and Tristan have is between us."

"But he isn't even human."

"That's exactly why I'm with him. You wouldn't get it so don't even bother trying." He let her go. "Come on, we're done here."

He led her back to the escape pod. The chain was welded to the wall and the other end had a manacle Alex hadn't noticed before. Tristan wasn't there, but before he could go to the closest terminal and look for him, he arrived, pulling along and whimpering Baran. Alex noted he had a few new bruises.

"Good," was all the Samalian said as he walked by them and secured the manacle around Baran's left ankle.

Tristan pointed to Mary. "You, inside." She hesitated and he grabbed her arm and pulled her in. He went to the controls, input the commands then stepped out of the pod.

"Your job is to see to it he heals and survives until you're picked up. The pod doesn't have a cryo system so settle in for a long trip. Don't bother trying to change the pod's course I've removed all access to the navigation system."

"What happens to me after that?" she asked, sounding scared.

"I don't care." Tristan closed the door. Through the opening Mary looked at Alex and said something he couldn't hear. He didn't react to her unheard pleading.

Tristan played inside the panel and the floor vibrated as the pod was launched.

Tristan straightened, clenched his fist and Alex readied himself for whatever was coming.