Even though they’d lived on the Attayear for the best part of a month and had barely been off it for three days, it felt very strange to be back on it.  Maybe it was the lack of noise that did it: the lights were all on and the electrics all working, but the machine was barely producing anything above a barely audible hum, and unlike just before they’d been about to set off from Balhae when it had practically been possible to feel the machine’s raw power waiting to be unleashed like a tiger chafing to escape from its cage, the Attayear now felt tranquil.  The power still lurked, but not with the same vigour.

Or maybe it was simply because Jinsu knew that she and Baekhyun were going to be the only people on it.  Even with their numbers down as they’d travelled from Siberia into the future, there’d still been a certain air of liveliness and lived-in when it came to the Attayear’s atmosphere.  Now, it just felt terribly empty.

Regardless, Tao and however many people were on his crew appeared to have done a pretty good job patching it up.  Baekhyun pointed out a few dents and irregularities in the half-open main doors as they went through, and a large scaffolding-with-pulleys system was behind them, as Tao had warned (Baekhyun muttered something about thinking that they’d tried to force the doors open when the Attayear had initially landed and that this had obviously weakened them, and that presumably fixing the doors meant access via the computers that Tao didn’t really have with a virus in the way), but beyond that, the interior of the Attayear looked smarter and neater than it had done before their first trip.  Jinsu resisted the temptation to run her hand over the smooth panels of the walls, wondering if they’d been replaced or just buffed up.

“We probably want to start up in the emergency safe mode, don’t we?” mused Baekhyun as the doorway through to the main computer room came into view.  “We’ll get away much quicker like that.  I don’t particularly still want to be going through the motions of preparing the machine when the wrong people realise we’re jumping ship, particularly if I’ve never done it the full way before.”

“Yeah, we probably do,” Jinsu agreed.

“Okay.  I’ve done it a few times before now, I think, so I’ll get started on that.  Can you go down to the level between this one and the engine rooms?  There’s a window with a guage on the walkways and it should give you a reading on how much fuel we have.  I’m not going to press the launch button without knowing those tanks are full or it could be disastrous.”

Jinsu nodded and slipped away.  Three days of resting her healing fingers appeared to have done them the world of good, because they barely protested as she scrambled down the ladder.

The noise was louder down here, an expectant thrum on the air as though the Attayear was waiting to be told where to go.  Jinsu hurried along the walkway, her footsteps clanking loudly, until she found the window Baekhyun had told her about.  She vaguely remembered Minseok pointing it out to her when he’d initially shown her around the machine, but since the others had been much more involved in the actual fuel levels and surrounding stuff than she had been, it was the first time she’d actually paid attention to it.

A little screen flickered into life beside the window when her shadow fell across the glass and some statistics and diagrams flashed up.  From the info panel and what she could see for herself through the window, the fuel tanks were completely full.  The information panel named the substance, which was some kind of petroleum oil she wasn’t sure she recognised the name of (either it was one from the future or the stress and oddness of the past few months meant that she was beginning to forget some of the more important things of life that she really ought to know).  Repeating the name to herself under her breath, Jinsu took a moment to memorise the numbers as well and then headed back on up.

On her way, she remembered that they hadn’t closed the front doors behind them, and the scaffolding and pulleys meant there was a chance they were now no longer automatic.  Semi-automatic at a pinch.  Jinsu went to check.

As she’d expected, they were still open.  She had to fiddle around a bit before she found the right strings to tug on and the the doors glided shut, the scaffolding and pulleys moving with them.  She took an extra moment to make sure that the doors were properly closed and then started back.  As she passed the sick bay, she was unable to help poking her head in through the door.  The frozen bodies still lay there in the glacial room, just as Jinsu had asked for them to be left.  She swallowed back a lump in .  Explaining what had happened to the families was going to be. . . tough.  Having Minseok back for that would be no bad thing.  Jinsu reckoned he’d be capable of handling something like that.  He was capable of handling most things.

Baekhyun was sitting on one of the office chairs in front of the Doctor, looking up at the screens in front of him with intense concentration as he followed instructions he’d evidently burnt into his memory.  Jinsu paused in the doorway to watch for a bit as he moved a few dials on the motherboard.  Lights flickered on on several of the subsidiary motherboards around the room.  Another slider up and a bunch flicked off.

For a few more moments, Jinsu stood there watching.  Baekhyun at work, especially with his sleeves pushed up by his elbows (his forearms were totally not stealing Jinsu’s attention in any form whatsoever) and concentrating single-mindedly on what was in front of him, was undeniably attractive.  Undeniably.  It was similar to the focus she’d admired in Sehun back when she’d first seen him playing sports during PE lessons: the drive and determination to get a job done and see it right through to the end had singled Sehun out among his peers on the pitch, and while there was nobody to single Baekhyun out against, Jinsu knew that in a room full of other people working on computers and motherboards, Baekhyun would still stand out to her as the alpha male.

Quietly, she pulled out the nearest office chair and started pushing it over so that she could join him.  She wasn’t more than a couple of steps across the room before he leant back, stretching and then putting his hands behind his head, and exhaled loudly with satisfaction.  He swung languidly around in his chair and caught sight of her almost immediately.

Baekhyun’s face lit up and Jinsu’s heart skipped a bit.  Digging his heels in to stop the chair spinning, he spread his arms.

“Ditch the chair and come here!” he told her.

“Where am I going to sit?”

Grinning, Baekhyun tapped at his thigh.  Jinsu gave an exasperated groan.

“Come on,” he protested.  “Kyungsoo’s not here.  It’s just the two of us.  Please?”

He pulled out a pair of puppy eyes Jinsu thought even her father would have had difficulty resisting, and not quite against her will, she found herself crossing the room and sitting on Baekhyun’s lap.  He swivelled the chair back towards the computers and propped his chin up on her shoulder.

It was more comfortable than she’d expected.

“How are we doing for fuel?” he asked, fingers poised over a keyboard to type in instructions to get the engine going.

“Full.”  Jinsu leant forwards, craning her neck towards the screen as she gave him a rundown of the stats she’d memorised.  Completely naturally, and probably on instinct, one of Baekhyun’s arms wrapped around her middle to prevent her from slipping.

“I closed the main doors,” she tacked on at the end.

“Then we’re go.  Tao left a lot of this running for us; he must have anticipated some of this but got a bit stuck with the software and the like.  He’s lowered most of the firewalls for us too.”  Baekhyun pulled her a little further back and typed in the necessary details.  Then he placed his right index finger over the launch button.  “Ready?”

“We’re going to go into Dive,” Jinsu reminded him.

“I know,” he said mildly.  “I’ll keep hold of you.”

“You might fall out of the chair—”

“At least you’ll have a soft landing.”

Jinsu tried not to groan.  “You’re so cheesy.”

Chuckling, Baekhyun pressed the button.

The engines revved down below and almost immediately, bright light filled the deck as the Attayear took off.  Jinsu could feel Baekhyun’s arm wrapped around her again as she was blinded, and it remained until her vision was completely back.  She automatically looked over to the Lintel, but although the display screen appeared to be working from the point of view of not being completely blank anymore, the virus didn’t appear to have penetrated enough for the Lintel to know where it was going.  Either that or the Lintel’s technology, what with the delicate clocks, was on a different operating system of some kind.  Jinsu wouldn’t have been altogether surprised by that.

“We’re going at Temp 3,” Baekhyun announced, looking at the computers.  “Do you reckon this means we’re in for a long one?”

“What do you think your family wanted?” asked Jinsu.

“Justice.  Revenge.  But I don’t know how far back they’d go for that.”

Jinsu threw Baekhyun a funny look, but decided to hold her tongue about the court case and everything being completely legal, even if he felt it was unfair.  They’d been over that one too many times, and she had no intentions of arguing with or upsetting Baekhyun particularly when they had no idea how long this trip was going to take them.

Baekhyun seemed to want not to talk about it too, because he changed the subject.

“Do you reckon we just leave it and let the virus run its course?  It feels like I’m stripping all my clothes off by pulling down the remaining firewalls.”

“Rather you than me.”

“Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“You have to have a erted