"However the Gaia Coalition had done it, they'd hidden the destruction of Earth from the entire universe."

"The Days After" by Pollywantsa

"Nothing is secret which shall not be made manifest."

Luke.

Black, blacker, blackest… in the darkness of the void, a ship danced in the shadows that wreathed its kilometre long form as it dodged red lances fired from the Alliance vessel dogging its heels. The billowing clouds of dark matter which surrounded the Arcadia deflected most of the rays she didn't dodge. The rest… well. They barely scored the dull leathery surface of the phantom ship, and where they did, puffs of dark matter writhed over the surface, the gashes healing almost as soon as they were formed.

Humans have a tendency to prefer to look at the world around them as though they'd never left a planetary surface to venture into the dark between the stars. So the bridge of the Alliance gunship stayed resolutely face-on to the Arcadia in the same plane. A sure-fire sign of a piss-poor rookie of a captain at the helm. Or a machinner.

It was what killed them, in the end, when the Arcadia upended and dove "down" towards their top flank. Fiery red eyes set in the grim skull that formed her prow were the last thing anyone on board would have seen.

Had they bothered to think in more than two dimensions.

The Arcadia broke the back of the other ship with contemptuous ease, the dark matter ramming blade dissolving into smoke as it passed through the wreckage.

It didn't look back. A sudden billowing gust of darkness enveloped what little could have been seen of the ship if anyone had been watching, and scattered into vapour trails as the great pirate battleship entered imaginary number space.

'Did the Prometheus catch up to the transport ships?'

The speaker was a tall young man in his mid-to-late twenties, standing behind the archaic wooden ship's wheel at the front of the battle bridge gantry. His brown hair brushed the top of a high collared maroon jacket zipped up over a pale blue jersey. A white skull and crossbones was emblazoned over the left chest pocket - a symbol not short on other examples sported by the men and women around him. One hazel eye was fixed on his executive officer, the other hidden under a black leather eyepatch which in turn was partly obscured by an untidy fringe.

'One got away, but Dan's got the rest in hand. He says thank you by the way.' Arcadia's XO smiled at her captain. 'At least, I think that's what all that ranting about charging into places we weren't invited and causing a major incident translates to…'

There were laughs from the lower bridge at her comment.

Harlock smirked. 'Two word answer, Kei - just "you're welcome".'

With an answering smile, Kei leaned over her console to send the message. At the left-hand station next to the wheel, the ship's first mate, Yattaran, snorted. 'If his people would do their bloody jobs properly, we wouldn't need to get involved…'

Harlock turned his attention to the fat man. 'In his defence, they're stretched thin right now. There are far too many colonies out here vulnerable to the harvesters. These people were lucky we were close enough to hear their distress call. As it was one transport got away. That's anywhere up to five thousand people forced either into machine bodies, or stripped of their life force to feed the machines.'

Yattaran dropped his gaze, and pulled his glasses off to polish the lenses on the hem of a less-than pristine striped jersey, before pushing them back onto his nose. 'You can't save 'em all…' he muttered.

Harlock didn't reply, but turned back to the wheel and placed his hands at eleven and one, gloved hands gripping the worn balusters firmly. 'Kei - now that's taken care of - do we still have a lock on that other distress signal you picked up?'

'The one that's the reason why we're out here this far?' She called up a hologrammatic starmap of the area, that floated above the heads of the lower bridge crew. 'Still very faint, but stronger than it was - I think we've actually headed in the right direction.' A small blinking red light flickered in the map, towards an area strangely devoid of information. 'According to the charts though, there should be nothing out there - it's a dead zone, between our galaxy and the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and there are no trade routes out here - solar systems are few and far between on our side, and none of the closest have any habitable worlds so even the mining corporations haven't bothered expanding out here. Frankly, I'm not even sure what something could be doing out this far.'

Harlock studied the chart intently. 'Could be a trap…' he mused. 'But not for us… we only caught this by accident - if we hadn't swung around to deal with that Doppler Corp ship, we wouldn't have picked it up.'

Clicking heels on the metal gantry behind him signalled the arrival of the ship's resident faery-like alien chatelaine, Mimay. The tall Nibelung woman stood at Harlock's side, her long fine pale hair fluttering in the soft breeze of the ship's air flow. 'Tochiro says the signal is an old one,' she said quietly. 'It's an old Gaia Fleet distress beacon, dating back to the Homecoming War.'

'A hundred year old S.O.S.?' Yattaran shook his head. 'Gotta be all dead by now - let's just log it and blow this area.'

Harlock shook his head. 'No. The law of the sea still holds - that's not our call to make. We check it out. If it's just an old drifting wreck, then it won't take long to log it and set a buoy.'

Ali, the ship's resident devil's advocate, snorted. From his station on the lower bridge he called up: 'Is that including the best part of a fortnight we'll be travelling to and from that location, cap'n?'

Harlock took his hands off the wheel and strode towards the railing at the edge of the gantry. Peering down at the blond crewman, he folded his arms casually across his chest. 'Lost your sense of adventure, Ali? Even if it turns out to be a bust, it's a chance to explore a little.'

'Huh. You just can't resist a chance to stick yer nose in, can you?' Ali muttered. He shook his head then grinned up at his captain. 'Want me to run the book on how this could go wrong this time?' he quipped.

'Suit yourself,' Harlock replied with a shrug. 'Oh ye of little faith…'

'And yet, so much experience…' Ali shot back as his captain turned his back on him, to the merriment of the rest of the crew.

Harlock stared out of the bridge window, standing behind the ship's wheel, arms folded across his chest. 'There's nothing out there, Yattaran - so where's that signal coming from?'

Kei checked her console again whilst the first mate tugged his bandanna from his almost bald head and began wringing it in his hands. 'According to the sensors, we should be right on top of it - astronomically speaking…' She looked up to meet Harlock's one-eyed gaze. 'But I'm getting some weird readings from dead ahead.'

'Define weird...' her captain muttered. 'Keep on that signal - it's probably a deep space relay buoy. If it was launched during whatever happened to its ship, it might have drifted a fair way from the point of origin.'

'Ah! Got it!' Yattaran called out, pumping one meaty fist into the air. 'Maji's got a line on it. Small distress beacon, Homecoming War vintage, as expected. Very faint, so looks like it was the tail-end of the wave we were picking up.'

A short, stocky youth in that awkward stage between fifteen and twenty wandered over to take a look at the readings. An unruly mop of brown hair fell over his eyes, which he brushed away to reveal a plain but friendly face, with perhaps a few days growth of soft fuzz. 'Tail end?' he asked.

'Ah. This is what you get for skipping astrophysics in favour of biology, Tadashi.' Yattaran gave the lad a bump on the arm with a fist. 'We're travelling in Imaginary Number space, which basically means we drop out of normal space-time, so that we can violate the cosmic constants - you know, like lightspeed?'

'That sounds sooo wrong, but I'm listening,' Tadashi told him.

'So the beacon puts out a distress call on all frequencies - which to be effective includes a trip through IN-SKIP space, otherwise no-one would pick it up until the carrier wave reached an inhabited system. And since that carrier wave travels at the speed of light…'

'...it takes years or centuries to get there?' Tadashi grinned up at the big first mate. 'I did pay some attention, Yattaran!'

'Yeah? See me later, there'll be a test, short stuff…' Yattaran grumped at him, with a broad grin suggesting he wasn't entirely serious. 'So we caught the carrier wave about eighty to ninety years out; it's still transmitting, but it's almost done for.'

His comms pinged on his console and he broke off to answer it. 'Yeah? Maji?' Various affirmative and interrogative grunts followed until he switched off. 'Captain - you might want to take a look at this. Maji says the only signal this thing was putting out was the carrier - someone had surgically removed the warp radio before it was launched!'

In the central computer room, Harlock, Mimay and Kei stared down at the bucket-sized distress beacon. Its innards were strewn across the floor in front of the main computer - mostly to allow the Arcadia's long-dead designer to inspect the workings as Maji and Yattaran had skilfully dissected the device.

Tochiro's hologram now leaned thoughtfully over the casing, peering intently at what was left, despite, Harlock knew, the real "eyes" of the Central Computer being a series of powerful micro-cameras currently orbiting their creator.

'Well?' he asked.

All three turned to look at him, none answering straight away. Yattaran scratched his arse idly before opening his mouth. 'Whoever emasculated this distress beacon, did it before it was installed. Surgical job too - my money would be on at the factory…'

'How can you tell?' Kei leaned over the parts strewn across the floor, oblivious to the fact that her partly unzipped flightsuit left little to the imagination for anyone kneeling on the floor in front of her. Harlock, clued in by the collective sighs from his three technical experts - living and dead - gave her a tap on the arm to get her attention, and once she was standing, ostentatiously pulled the zipper up to her neck, giving an almost imperceptible jerk of his head towards the three in reply to her interrogative raised eyebrow.

'Spoilsport…' Yattaran muttered with a disapproving glance at his captain. 'To answer your question, because they're designed to be tamper-proof once installed. You just don't crack these things once in place - can't be done, for obvious reasons…'

'Begs the question why someone wanted a military ship to stay lost in the first place,' Kei muttered. She leaned against the arm Harlock had placed around her. 'I don't like the feel of this at all.'

'It's been a hundred years,' Harlock replied. He gave her a peck on the cheek. 'How much trouble could we find on a hundred-year-old battleship…' He stared at the three engineers who were all looking at him as though he'd grown two heads. 'Ah. Fine. You've got me there…'

'Do you still intend to investigate?' It was Tochiro who asked. The hologrammatic image of the Central Computer's guiding intelligence looked at once both pleading and excited at the prospect.

'How can I not, when you've got that kid-with-nose-pressed-against-the-sweetshop-window look?' Harlock replied with a grin. When the hologram gave his two partners in crime a questioning look, Maji shrugged.

'He's right, you know… you do, when you really want to see something.' the dapper engineer told him.

'I thought it was Kei's cleavage that had him wagging his tail,' Yattaran muttered.

'Mimay - anything you remember about lost ships out this way from just after the war? Tochiro?' Kei asked, scowling at the rotund first mate along the way.

Both shook their heads. 'It took Harlock a few years to recover from what happened on Earth,' Mimay replied sadly. 'And from what we had become. After that, we stole the oscillators and began the plan to unchain the nodes of time.'

'Anything in the news reports in your databases?' Harlock asked. Tochiro's ghostly image shrugged.

'Nothing. Though as Mimay says, it was a hectic time - it wasn't just Harlock who took time to adjust… took me a couple of years to integrate myself completely into the systems - before then I was winging it from second to second, didn't really have an awful lot of me-time, as it were.'

'I got an ident!' Maji called out suddenly. He looked a little abashed as all eyes turned to him, and rubbed his goatee self-consciously. 'It's from a ship called the Mahoroba… she was a destroyer registered out of Earth Base, built in 2865. Yamato class - the ones with the prototype oscillator cannon…'

'Well that's odd,' Tochiro muttered. When Harlock turned his singular gaze to him, he pantomimed a cough. 'Because she's noted in the Gaia Fleet register as destroyed in action in the asteroid belt just before the cease-fire…'

Kei shared a look with Harlock. 'So how the hell did her supposedly tamper-proof distress beacon end up on the other side of a galaxy a few years later?'

Harlock shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. 'Salvage?'

Yattaran shook his head. 'Nope. These things are a one-time deployment - you can't remove them and put them on another ship - sets 'em off.'

'Yo! Heads up guys!' Ali's head appeared around the doorway, shortly followed by the rest of him. 'Got a hit on the time radar a couple of light years out. Looks like it's the time trace for this baby - and guess what?' He paused, waiting for them to ask.

Harlock folded his arms across his chest and began tapping his fingers on his arm.

'Yeah. Right. Okay. Be like that…'

'Ali…' Harlock warned him.

'Ooh. Tone. Fine. There's a mass reading at the other end of the trace. Way bigger than us, smaller than Pluto.'

'Doesn't narrow it down much,' Kei pointed out.

'Hey - that's as precise as it got - don't shoot the messenger - I was lucky to get any kind of fix - it keeps fluctuating like crazy. And get this - according to the nav charts, there isn't supposed to be anything there at all!' He folded his arms across his chest - today covered by a bright red sweater - and waited expectantly. When no reaction was forthcoming beyond blank looks, he sighed theatrically. 'You guys… call yourselves scientists?'

'I'm a botanist, Kei's a navigational mathematician, Maji and Tochiro are engineers and Yattaran's a lazy bastard,' Harlock drawled. 'Spit it out, Ali…'

'Get out of the wrong side of bed this morning, Cap'n?'

Harlock took a step towards him.

'Fine, fine… Sheesh, you guys are a tough crowd… I said "mass", right? Just mass…'

Mimay cocked her head to one side and stared at him, her large, cat-like eyes wide and curious. 'No other signals?' she asked.

Ali jabbed a finger at her. 'Bingo! The lovely alien gets it! No energy readings at all. No gravity distortion, no light, no radiation - nada, zip, zero, nothing… except...'

'Except?' Kei prompted, a little testily.

Ali grinned. 'You'll love this one - so how the hell is the verbal S.O.S signal I'm hearing on Kei's console reaching us…?'