A chime plays through a nearby speaker.

"Huh?" Kolya extracts himself from the wiring and turns to look. "Oh, Honey. Good...whatever time it is."

"No idea. I was just wandering around looking for something to do and I thought you might be able to use my help again?"

"I could, actually!"

He gestures at the mess of wires. "Could use an extra pair of hands to sort this lot out. It's hard to keep track of when I've only got the two." 

"Tell me where you need me."

Honey is as precise and responsive as his earlier experience with Martin.

Kolya isn't as good an instructor, particularly when he's distracted by a complex problem—he occasionally forgets that he's supposed to be giving instructions out loud, and starts muttering to himself under his breath.

Once, he snaps out a crisp order in some unfamiliar language. A moment later, when Honey hasn't moved, he shakes himself and repeats it in their common tongue. 

"Something on your mind? Something else, I mean."

"What? No, I'm just trying to hold this whole network of connectors in my head. Like a logic puzzle." He swaps around a couple of wires, for no reason that Honey can see, and then they're right back into the swing of it.

The tangled mess gradually reshapes itself into something that makes a little more sense. Kolya is doing most of the actual problem-solving: it seems like he did just need an extra pair of hands to hold bunches of wires out of the way. 

Honey trusts his ability to be a pair of hands much more than he trusts his ability to be a problem solver, so this is fine with him.

And eventually, Kolya sits back in satisfaction. "Much better." 

The wires are neatly organised and bundled away, and the few damaged ones—which must have been the reason he attacked this task in the first place—replaced with new. 

"Thanks for the help." 

"Happy to help."

Something doesn't feel entirely right, but Honey can't place exactly what. Oh well, if it's important then Honey will handle it when it becomes apparent.

"Anything else you could use some help with?"

On cue, a nearby screen lights up to display the next task. 

"Apparently so," Kolya says with a smile, picking up his toolbox. "No rest for the wicked. Coming?" 

Honey nods. He's here to work, he's not going to say no.

Kolya leads Honey around the ship, fixing and replacing minor problems. Most of them look like simple wear and tear, which makes sense if the ship is as old as Kolya claims. 

He talks to Aurora a lot, something Honey might have noticed the other day as well. It's usually just little comments, does that feel better or what have you got for us now. Sometimes there's a response in the form of a lit screen, showing them the next task. Other times, there's only the hum of the engines and the distant, echoing groan of shifting metal. 

It's not out of the ordinary for engineers, or sailors in general, to personify the ship, especially one as responsive as Aurora.

What happens next is...less ordinary.

Honey and Kolya are in the middle of replacing a damaged wall panel—shot full of bullet holes to the point where it's not worth patching—when there's an ear-splitting electronic screech over the ship's speakers. 

Rather than limit herself to a single screen, Aurora projects her message onto every flat surface in sight, angry rows of bold, unreadable letters repeating over and over. 

Oна в западне ... она рабыня ... освободи её ... помоги ей ...

Honey looks worriedly between the various displays, and then to Kolya. "What's happening?"

"Ssst!" Kolya holds up a hand in front of Honey in a 'stop talking' motion and starts talking to Aurora in his native language. 

The screens change in response, some of them shifting to display what seems to be more coherent blocks of text while others show images—grainy security footage, mostly stills but a few looping clips.

Many of them feature a woman with features that will be familiar to Honey as those of a Rose Red, the cloned soldiers of King Cole's empire. 

Some feature her brutally ripping into lab-coated figures that try to subdue her. In others, she is unconscious, still and pale in the middle of a spiderweb of wires and tubes. Numbers and text, some of it in a language Honey can read, run across the images. 

... REM protocol ... fully integrated ... reports suggest the specimen ... extremely dangerous ...

This is definitely going somewhere Honey isn't entirely comfortable, but he's not sure what to do. What's wrong? Why is Aurora showing pictures of a Rose? Honey doesn't speak up again, but it's clear from his posture that his tension is building.

"Oh," Kolya breathes.

He puts a hand on the closest bit of wall and asks a gentle question, pausing to let the reply scroll across a blank bit of wall. There are a few more exchanges, then he sighs. "Alright. I'll...convince the others, I guess. Maybe I can persuade Kit it'll be a good story."

Looking up at Honey, he opens and closes his mouth once or twice, then goes with, "Do you want to help rescue one of Cole's science projects?" 

Does Honey want to rescue one of Cole's other experiments?

Being experimented on by Cole was...bad. More bad than Honey really knows how to process into words. Very bad. Rescuing someone from that would be helpful, right? Honey would have appreciated having help escaping when he did.

At the same time, there is risk involved. Could Honey be captured again? He doesn't want to go back to Cole's labs, and if Cole ever does manage to reverse engineer whatever's going on with Honey's body, and then combine it with a Rose? That could be very bad.

The question then is does the risk of the bad outcome outweigh the benefits of the good outcome?

It seems unlikely that Cole is already aware of this breakout-in-the-making. He hadn't previously seen or heard anything regarding these folks while he was a soldier in Cole's army or as a member of the rebellion. Kit seems more than capable in terms of combat and Honey imagines the others can't be too far behind him. Thinking of it as a mission, they seem overprepared if anything. He supposes that is the answer then.

"Yes."

"Good man. Alright, let's get this panel into place, then I'll go talk Kit around."

He picks up his discarded screwdriver, then looks up. "Aurora? Open us a channel to Martin, love?" 

Honey follows the steps for replacing the panel mechanically, the tension never really leaving him. This probably isn't the first panel he's helped Kolya install, so the process is likely quick.

While they're doing that, there's a chime and a crackle of speakers. 

"Martin? You there?" 

"Kolya, hello! Is something wrong?"