Thanks to Helen Fayle for the prompt (and the push… and the shove….). And to reflect her words right back at her… be careful what you wish for...

The Aristotle Transposition

(part one)

It was like somebody had a stick and was poking me. Hard. Hard… and all the way through. An incessant digging at my side, piercing the skin and the meat and pushing splinters deep into the wall of my chest.

Poke.

I breathed. It burned. A pain so intense it stopped the air in my lungs. Made me gasp and open my eyes.

That burned too.

I closed my eyes, turned my head away from the lamp that was angled into my face and opened them to the dark that closed down beyond the circle of yellow light. I was on my back, sprawled across a desk with my legs loose over one end and my head resting half on a cracked data pad. I knew it was cracked, because I could hear the screen crunching beneath the back of my head. Being stretched out like this on the desk was unexpected. I didn't remember how I got onto the desk. I didn't remember how I got into the site office. I didn't remember how I got this goddamned stick poked into my side. Last I remembered…

Shit.

Last I remembered was the attack. The mine being overrun by claimjumpers. The explosive burn of an energy weapon point blank into my ribs.

I groped fingers, trembling, toward the hole in my side, groaned as pain blasted through me and felled my hand like a bird mid-flight. The hand dropped heavy, like a dead thing, onto my chest.

'You took a hit,' a voice said, out of the dark.

That made my eyes move, the head following suit until I was blinded again by the light of the lamp.

'Who – ' I ground out, hoping it wasn't one of the claimjumpers back to finish the job they'd started.

'It's bad,' the voice said.

I grunted. An animal sound as sweat bloomed cold across my skin.

'You'll probably die,' the stranger said. Sighed. Shifted in the office chair he had positioned just out of the light. Two long legs stretched momentarily into the circle of yellow, sheathed to the knees in well-worn boots.

I sucked in air, gritted my teeth against the pain and started again. 'Who are you?'

Silence. The sound of slow breathing in the dark.

I raised my head and grimaced down at my chest. My shirt had been torn down the middle, the skin beneath it smeared and crusted with black. A makeshift bandage clung precariously to the wound, dark and heavy with clotted blood. My head dropped back to the desk, back to the shifting glass of the broken data pad. There was no stick in my side. There never had been a stick. It had only felt like a stick, poking and poking and poking…

Poke.

'You fix me up?' I asked.

I could almost hear the shoulders shrug.

'I guess I should thank you,' I said. I moved. I tried to move. Floundered like a dying fish across the rubble of the desk.

'I'd stay put,' he said, making no move to keep me down on the desk, or to help me get up, either.

I floundered again, felt something pop beneath the bandage, grimaced as blood dripped hot onto the desk beneath my back. But still, I was moving.

The chair rolled further back into the dark.

Ten minutes it took, or so it felt, to struggle into sitting under the gaze of that silent audience, the shadow waiting just beyond the light, watching me with the veins popping out in my forehead, the sweat dripping from my face, chest heaving with effort and my skin turning white from the pain. Just as breakfast was making its second appearance I made it upright, panting, my legs over the edge of the desk, a hand clamped hard against the seeping bandage and all my concentration on willing the blood to stop flowing. I gritted my teeth and then moved, darted my free hand to angle the desk-lamp toward the stranger.

Too slow.

He rolled the chair away again, just out of the light.

My fingers fell defeated from the lamp, bloody prints smeared wet across the anodised metal. But it was enough. There was enough light to illuminate the longish hair, the dark flight suit, the weapon holstered at the stranger's hip. Yellow highlighted one side of his face, dim, but enough to see the scar that snaked wickedly down the exposed cheek, the lips curving slowly into a satisfied smile, the faint glimmer of one visible eye.

'Hmm,' he said. He seemed pleased.

'Who are you,' I challenged again, voice thick around the nausea, eyes riveted on the smiling lips.

The eye glinted again in the dark, as though the stranger was thinking. Considering. But there was never going to be an answer.

'Why are you here?' It hurt to talk, but it was my job to ask. Correction: used to be my job to ask. I glanced through the office door, shattered off its hinges. Beyond it the auxiliary lights flickered dimly, outlining the forms that slumped against the walls, sprawled limp across the floor, arms and legs and smears of dark blood littering the passageway beyond.

The stranger followed my gaze, the smile gone, the mouth serious. 'What happened here?'

'You don't know?' I wanted to laugh at the obtuseness of the question when the answer was so blindingly obvious.

He shrugged again in the half-light. 'I arrived late.'

'You're telling me you had nothing to do with – '

'I told you – ' the head shook once in negation, the hair lank and soft and twisting in the half-light, ' – I arrived late.'

'Then why – '

'I was looking for something,' he said.

I moved, grunted, tried hard not to breathe. 'You find it?'

He nodded, the movement subtle in the dark. 'Buried deep.'

'And now what?'

'Now there's you.'

I looked again at the bodies outside the door. 'Anyone else…?' I asked, but I knew it was beyond hope. My eyes dropped to the blood-smeared floor.

'Nobody,' he said, with the indifference creeping back into his voice. 'I looked.'

'Doesn't matter. I'll be dead soon anyway.' I looked up at him. 'You said.'

'I said.' He rose from the chair and moved into the light, tall and rangy with the muscles moving like water under the form-fit of his leathers. 'But you don't have to die. There's something on my ship that can heal you.'

'Your ship?' I blinked up at him. Only the ore ships were capable of making it this far out into the territories. And the Coalition fleet. But the Coalition never bothered patrolling the mining worlds. They left us to our own devices and our own petty squabbles, and if wars were fought over holes in the ground and if people died digging minerals for the prosperity of the almighty Gaia Sanction, so be it. They didn't care. Nobody did.

I looked again at the bodies in the hall, knew it was simply a matter of time before the claimjumpers returned to consolidate their hard-won property, if they weren't out there doing so already. And if I was still alive when they returned, they'd soon make sure I wasn't.

The stranger moved closer and more of the light played on his face, and I could see that aside from the roping scar a black patch covered the place where his right eye had once been.

'Name,' he said, with an unexpected authority behind his voice.

What the hell.

'Ari,' I said. And then I said, because he'd asked me my name and because my mother had given it to me and if I was going to die I wanted to say it out loud this one, last time, 'Aristotle.'

A smile played across his face.

I looked at him, at his one good eye, and saw that despite the smile there was a sadness in him, a chasm that cut through his heart. One thing you learned in the outworlds was to recognise pain. We all had holes in our hearts.

'Aristotle.' He reached out a hand and I clasped it with my own, let him ease me from the desk and into standing, his body strong and firm when I sagged against it. And then he said, as though it were a promise and curse both, 'will you come aboard my ship?'

He carried me to the surface more than helped me, arm hard around my waist as he dragged me stumbling, the strength in that one arm lifting me bodily over the debris and the bodies of the fallen. I was no lightweight, taller than the average and all hard-packed muscle, but he made it seem easy, even when I faltered over faces I knew too well, my legs suddenly become heavy and my feet refusing to move.

In the end I had to stop looking at the faces. Let him guide me through the litter of the dead, through the maze of rock-hewn passages, some lit, some blacker even than night, and back out onto the pocked surface of the planet. By the time we made it I was panting, my breath heaving in gasps and my skin as cold and pale as wax. It was freezing up here, but the stranger didn't seem to feel the cold, didn't notice the wind biting and spitting dust into our mouths and our eyes. He paused only to look at the two tiny suns – one dead and one slowly dying – where they hovered wan upon the horizon.

Maybe I passed out then. I must have passed out. I remembered feeling cold and then hot and then I came to inside his little transport, strapped into the co-pilot's chair and him standing over me with an empty pressure hypo in his hand.

'What –?' I blinked warily up at him.

He turned away, dropped the syringe back into the medpack on the floor, closed the lid and stowed it efficiently into a cubby beneath the console. There was no wasted movement with this guy. And definitely no wasted conversation.

I watched as he engaged the drive and we lifted off from the surface, the view outside the port canting from the horizon to the sky. The blast shields abruptly lowered, cutting off my last view of Muerte's aptly-named surface and the dead and dying suns. I felt sick again, nauseous, the upward thrust of the ship raising havoc in my head, the cold sick feeling exacerbated by the buffeting of the transport in the hard and razing wind.

'What …' I coughed pathetically, cleared my throat and tried to take my mind off the spinning in my head, '…were you looking for?'

Silence. And then – 'A node.'

'A node? What is that? Like…' I coughed again and tasted blood. '…a rock?'

'No.' He looked at me sideways. 'It's... time.'

'A node.' I shifted in the seat. 'Of time.'

'A Time Node,' he corrected, his fingers playing in precise patterns across the console.

The wind pounded harder against the transport as we moved higher into the atmosphere, but the nausea was fading. I wondered what was in the hypodermic. 'What exactly is a Time Node?'

'A locus in Time and Space.' He turned to look fully at me, fixed me with that one good eye. 'The pins that hold the universe together.'

'And you're looking for them.' I was feeling better now, whatever it was he'd given me was doing its work. 'Why? So you can pull the universe apart?'

It was a joke, a lame one, and there was no reply. He turned away, leaving me with the sound of the engines, the faint pinging of the console, the sudden silence on the hull as the wind stopped moving outside and we broke free of atmosphere.

'I need to find them,' he said unexpectedly, his need sounding large in that tiny, confined space.

I shifted in my seat, one hand loosening the restraints as the artificial gravity kicked in. I studied his profile, what I could see of it, the skin of his face clear and smooth but marred irrevocably by the jagged scar that tracked from his nose to his cheek. My head lolled back against the headrest. It was too soon to be talking about needs. All I needed was distraction, something to keep my mind off the fact that, despite how good I was feeling, I was slowly bleeding out. 'And you find these nodes on planets?'

'On planets.' He leaned back in his seat. 'Inside planets. Sometimes they're situated in space, just… floating.' His voice darkened a shade. 'It's why they're so difficult to find. Why it's taking me so long…'

I would have asked him how long, only I could hear the years in his voice.

He glanced sideways at me and crooked the corner of his mouth. His fingers moved on the console and the blast shield fell away and I saw his ship, a great black behemoth filling the forward view, and it took my breath away.

Two men waited for us on the hangar deck, one dark-haired and goateed, the other round-bellied and bespectacled and with his mouth hanging open, staring irritated at the stranger like a mother who's kid has just brought home another stray animal for her to feed.

'Maji,' the stranger said to the dark-haired man. 'Medbay.'

'Aye,' Maji said, coming forward and reaching out a steadying hand. Maji was shorter than the stranger, not as strong, and I felt him sag momentarily as my weight transferred into his arms. I smelled oil on him, saw it greased in streaks along the front of his clothes as he shunted me towards a nearby passageway.

Behind me there was a rumbling from the other man, a grumble that I wasn't sure wasn't about me. And then I heard the stranger's voice cutting the grumbling down. 'Yattaran. Prepare to deploy the oscillator.'

'Wait,' I said, pulling against Maji. He stopped, sighed, then helped me to limp back around. 'You're going back down?' I said to the stranger.

He turned to look at me.

'The claimjumpers,' I continued. 'They'll be back. You'll need more than the two of you. You – '

A smile edged one corner of his mouth. 'They won't be a problem,' he said.

'Eh? What's this about claimjumpers – ' Yattaran started, but the stranger's mouth set in a thin line and he turned a steel-hard eye on him.

'Power up the deployment module,' he said, the words a warning as much as they were a command.

Yattaran shook his head. He ran a hand from the back of his scalp to the front of it. 'Claimjumpers,' he muttered disgustedly before stomping off towards a larger transport.

Maji shunted me into the corridor. The walls were steel-grey, the lighting dim. Pipes and conduits snaked out from random intersections and disappeared just as randomly again. Now and again the passage opened up and levels above and below could be seen, the steel-mesh of gantries sparking dully in the ambient light, and then the walls closed back in around us. The halls were deserted. Quiet except for the gentle pulse of the engines and the atmosphere hissing lazily from vents spaced at intervals along the walls. There was a distinct smell of ozone in the air. The scent of lightning after a storm.

'What's his name?' I asked, and Maji huffed out air in surprise.

'He didn't tell you?' He laughed, a short high laugh, muttered 'nothing surprises me anymore,' then pulled us up in the corridor. He looked at me and said, seriously, 'his name is Harlock. Captain Harlock,' all the while watching my face for any sign of recognition. But I'd been too far out in the territories for far too long and I could only look back at him blankly.

Maji shook his head when I showed no sign of recognition. 'Early days,' he said, his arm shifting around me and tugging me higher into position. 'Come on. You're probably healing already, but a night in the medbay won't hurt.'

Yattaran rolled a stool out from beneath a bench and spun it across the medbay towards the pallet I was propped up in. He sat himself heavily on the cushion, the springs groaning audibly as he made himself comfortable, folded his arms atop his belly and leaned forward over the bed to peer at the blaster hole in my side. 'Ah,' he said. 'You won't even feel that by morning.'

I looked down at the wound. It was healing, though god knows how – Maji had only cleaned it and told me to leave it out where the air could get at it. But the way he'd said 'air' was odd, and when he said it he'd looked superstitiously at the walls the way a man looks at a black cat when it crosses his path. If he'd thrown a pinch of salt over his shoulder I wouldn't have been surprised.

'How…?' I asked, because things were happening that I didn't understand. I could practically feel the flesh healing. A tight, prickling, itching. And there were twinges of movement, as though something was crawling beneath the skin.

Apparently Yattaran didn't understand it either. 'It's the dark matter,' he said. 'It powers the ship. Turns out it has regenerative properties as well. As long as you're aboard Arcadia you'll heal. Thing is,' he leaned slightly forward, 'we don't know how it works. Once you've been contaminated with the dark matter does it stay in you forever? Or does it only affect you when you're on board the ship?' He laughed, a deep throaty rumble. 'The only way to test the theory is for somebody to go dirtside and cut off an arm, or maybe a head, and see if it grows back.' He leaned closer to me and I smelled the sour tang of wine on his breath. 'How about it? Want to give it a try?' He grinned slyly and leaned back on the stool. 'You'll stay here tonight. Tomorrow you can choose a room. Captain says. There are plenty of officers' quarters available.'

I found the way he said that last bit disturbing. 'What happened to the officers?'

He shrugged. 'Gone.'

'Gone. You mean dead?'

'Seems that way.' He shrugged again, his folded arms still resting high on his stomach. 'That's our theory, Maji and me. We still find their stuff now and then. Their personal effects, know what I'm saying?'

'So I'm staying, then?'

'Captain says.' He twisted a little on the stool, the cushion spinning idly and the springs giving a small creak. A finger lifted to his face and he pushed at his glasses, moved them higher up on his face. 'Captain doesn't let you aboard if he doesn't plan for you to stay.'

I shifted on the bed, hoisted myself further upright and settled gingerly back. If I was staying I supposed I needed to find a few things out. 'How many officers are there now?'

He took the hand he was using to push at his glasses and raised it into the air between us. 'Let's see. Besides Captain,' he raised one finger, 'there's Maji,' he raised another finger, 'and me.' He raised a third finger. 'Three.' He kept the fingers in the air. 'And Miimé,' he added as an afterthought. Another finger went into the air. 'Four.'

Was he kidding me? 'And how many crew?'

Three of the fingers disappeared, leaving only one. 'Just you.' He leaned forward and patted me reassuringly on the arm. 'But Captain's currently recruiting.'

His hand was warm against my skin, and faintly clammy. The odour of the wine was strong, as though he must have spilled some of it on his shirt.

'And,' he said, by way of consolation, 'Captain says you can have an officer's berth. That's good, hey? Means you're already in line for promotion.'

Promotion? I felt like this was the butt-end of a joke and I had somehow missed the punchline. 'Are you telling me there are only four of you running this ship?'

'Ah.' The arms returned to their position on his stomach. 'Nobody's running the ship. It runs by itself.'

I looked at him, at the stubble on his chin, at the too-moist lips, at the spectacles so thick they looked like the cut-off ends of a pair of shot-glasses. At this stage in our relationship he wasn't exactly inspiring confidence.

'There's no such thing as a self-guiding ship,' I said. 'Where did it come from? Who made it? How – '

'Exactly!' he said, another of the stubby fingers rising into the air to shut me down. 'Who did make it? Beneath the surface it's Gaia. It's all Gaia.'

I blinked at him.

'Coalition,' he specified. And then he hissed with conspiratorial urgency, 'this was a Coalition ship.'

I looked around me, at the dark walls, the organic feel of the medical stations. The off-kilter organisation of the diagnostic systems, as though they hadn't been made for human hands. And I remembered the exterior of the ship, the gnarled, other-worldly sweep of her lines, the metal-black skin moulded close on a framework of hard bones.

This couldn't be Coalition tech. It didn't even look human.

'You don't have to believe me,' he said, seeing the look on my face, 'but I've spent months inside this ship's mainframe. I don't know who created the interface, but underneath it all it's Coalition. This was a battleship. One of the Deathshadow class from what, ninety, a hundred years ago.'

'But…weren't they all destroyed?'

'The Homecoming War.' He nodded sagely. 'That's what the history books say.'

'Then how…. where, did Harlock get it?'

'That's the thing.' He leaned close and lowered his voice, as if the walls could hear. 'Harlock's always been the captain.'

I stared at him. I'd known him barely half a day and he was spinning me tales like this?

'Couldn't be.' I said. 'It must be the name that's the same. His father was captain, maybe. A grandfather.'

Yattaran's head cocked to one side and he shook his head in a slow, deliberate no. 'I located the service records and the biometrics are the same. Identical. '

'How is that even possible?'

In answer he nodded towards the wound at my side, the knitting edges exposed and pink in the air. 'That's not possible, either. Who says the dark matter couldn't keep a person alive forever, healing them, duplicating their cells over and over and over…' His voice trailed away as he contemplated the possibilities. 'I suppose we'll find out,' he said distractedly, as if just awakening from a dream, 'if we stay aboard long enough.'

That was one almighty 'if.'

I reached for the blanket and pulled it up to my waist, settled it gingerly around the mending wound. 'You said you found the service records.' I was feeling cold, of a sudden. 'What else did you find?'

'Ah.' He sat back in sudden irritation, his voice returning to normal levels. 'Nothing. The deeper I go the more this ship holds me back.' He leaned forward again and whispered, 'it's got a damned mind of its own.'

That night I saw a ghost.

I dozed fitfully on the medbay pallet, waking as the wound moved and pulsed and now and then exploded with a pain that jolted me from my sleep. The bastard hurt. It itched. It tickled. It crawled. There was a lot of ground to cover, a lot of burned flesh for the scar tissue to inch painstakingly across, and it seemed I could feel every unnatural moment of its slow, disturbing creep.

I tasted ozone on the air, my lips tingling with it so that I licked at them constantly and was rubbing forever at my stinging eyes. Whatever it was that was in the air it seemed there was more of it in here, concentrated and prickling and crawling across my skin. In the dim cool of the ship's night I almost expected sparks to fly from my fingertips.

And one time, when the wound moved suddenly and jerked me out of my sleep I awoke to find the ghost, leaning silently over me.

I did nothing. Didn't move, didn't jump, didn't scream, didn't care. I was dead tired and half dead and this ship was full of mystery, and if it came with ghosts as well I wouldn't have been surprised.

So I lay there, unmoving, my eyes slitted open in the half light as I stared into her cool, pale face.

Maybe she was a dream. She was beauty and light and as translucent as the rarest of gems. She was draped in gauze that shimmered and moved and there were fireflies, dancing, in her hair. She settled on the edge of the bed and leaned herself forward, a pale moon rising only inches from my face.

Eyes the lightest of green moved across me, pupils narrowing into slits as she studied my features, looked at my hair where it sprouted from my head, her gaze tracking the line of my nose, my cheek, my mouth. She peered into my eyes, as though they were jewels she had never seen before. She leaned close and closer, inhaled deep, and I felt her testing me, tasting me, knowing me.

I swallowed, licked my lips and tried not to breathe.

And then she was gone, her weight lifted from the bed and the fireflies spinning out into nothing.

I was alone again, in the dark. Around me the diagnostic consoles blinked and pinged, unwelcome interruptions in the otherwise silent room.

I followed Yattaran through the maze of passageways. Left, right, down one level, then down another. Everywhere were the pipes and conduits, sinuous and organic like the arterial network of a live thing, and I fancied I could hear a heartbeat pulsing rhythmically beneath the steady hum of the engines. We crossed one of the inexplicable chasms that opened up at random intersections and I paused on the crosswalk, looked first up and then down into a deep, dark abyss. And then Yattaran was hurrying me along.

'Mess one floor up,' he was saying, 'crew quarters one floor down. Officers' quarters this level. Captain's rooms upper decks rear, in the sterncastle.'

I'd seen the sterncastle on the approach the day before. It had struck me as incongruous, the dark and heavy forepart of Arcadia morphing unexpectedly in her rear-quarters into metal crafted to look as light as wood. I had a sudden memory of Captain Hook's sailing ship from the picture books my mother had carted with her Plato and her Aristotle from one dying world to the next. Although in this case Harlock was less Captain Hook and more the boy who never grew up… the man, if Yattaran was to be believed, who would never grow old.

An intersection loomed ahead at cross-angles, a sudden drifting light floating across it and into our field of view.

The ghost.

I froze, riveted, staring at the apparition, at the long sweep of softly-moving hair, the delicate drifting gauze, the pale green eyes turning slowly and deliberately in my direction. The lips smirked silently, and there was a knowing in that smirk. I felt strangely violated. Ashamed. Embarrassed of my hard and heavy human self. And then the vision was gone.

'Hey.' Yattaran had stopped walking.

'Did you see that?' I stared in the direction the apparition had taken.

'See what?'

'The ghost.'

He erupted into laughter. Maniacal but brief. He glanced in the direction the ghost had taken. 'There are ghosts on this ship,' he said, his eyes back on mine and suddenly all seriousness, 'but Miimé aint one of them.'

'Miimé,' I repeated, remembering the name from the day before.

'She's Captain's…' He closed his mouth. Opened it again. 'I don't know what she is. But she controls the dark matter engine so I suppose she's an engineer. Like Maji.'

He turned and continued on his original trajectory, one hand waving in the air and words still coming out of his mouth, but they were like waves crashing against an unthinking shore. I was still staring down the corridor, waiting, maybe, for another glimpse of that cool, ethereal beauty.

'Hey!' He had stopped walking again. 'You hear me?'

I shook my head no, the admission eliciting an exaggerated sigh as he waited for me to catch up.

'You're free to go anywhere on the ship,' he started again, 'but Captain asks only three places you don't. One,' he raised a familiar stubby finger into the air, 'Captain's quarters. Two,' another finger was raised, 'central computer room. And three,' a third finger went into the air, 'science lab on level sixteen.'

He stopped abruptly and turned to a door set flush in the wall, pressed a sweaty palm against the access panel. The door slid silently aside. 'Ah,' he said, surveying the interior. 'Smells nice. How about this one?'

I leaned forward to look in. Officers' quarters weren't as large as I had expected, but it contained a bed without bedding, a side table, a small bureau, a recessed closet. And according to Yattaran it was mine.

'Looks good,' I said, stepping over the threshold. Really, it was great.

He nudged me further into the room. 'There's bedding in the Supply on the lower decks. Clothing too. Anything you need just help yourself. Captain says.'

I turned to look at him. I wasn't used to accepting charity… not that this was all charity, since it seemed I'd soon be working for it. But I needed to say something.

'Yattaran,' I said. 'I, ah…'

'Ahhh.' He took a short step back, a hand raised to halt my words. 'No no no, not me. Thank Captain. He makes the decisions.'

'Alright,' I said, 'but how do I thank him?'

He looked at me, his eyes glinting behind the smudged lenses of his glasses. 'With loyalty.'

I found the communal bathroom, locked the door, stripped off my blood-crusted clothes and surveyed the damage by standing on my toes to see in the wall-mounted mirror.

In the day I'd been aboard the wound had edged itself completely shut, scar-tissue transforming into skin as thin as paper. I pressed at it gently with my fingers, pulled them hurriedly away. It may have looked good on the surface, but underneath I could feel it had a long way to go. It still stung, still ached, but the stick was no longer poking into me. The cold sweats had vanished completely during the night, and I had the distinct impression of new blood flowing through my veins.

I showered, washed away the last of the blood that had scabbed to my body and stood dripping as I stared at my face in the mirror. Stubble had sprouted blond along my jaw. Faster, I thought, than it usually does. I looked dishevelled but well, and I cast my own superstitious glance at the walls, the same expression on my face as Maji had had the day before. Maybe, whatever it was, it was in the walls.

There was no shaving gear to be seen, nothing beyond the soap and the water and a small heap of unfolded towels. I wrapped one of them around my waist and returned to my quarters. Maybe I would find something useful there. I pulled out the drawers of the bureau. Empty. Swept completely clean. I opened the tiny closet, surprised to find a sweater and two pair of combat trousers piled untidily on the upper shelf. I took the sweater and pulled it over my head and slid into a pair of the trousers. Too tight around the waist, but they were cleaner than my own and they would do until I found myself something else. My eye caught on a shadow heaped in a corner of the closet… a jacket that looked like it had fallen from its hanger.

I reached down and lifted it out, my thumb playing over a brass button. It was a uniform, a relic from a hundred years and a thousand star-systems away, history flowing cool beneath my fingertips. A Gaia insignia was riveted to the breast. A name stamped on the inside collar. Takagi, it said. I returned it to its hanger, smoothed the fabric down with my fingers, stood in my borrowed clothes in front of the open closet with my eye on that uniform. If what Yattaran had said was true, Harlock must have worn a uniform like that. More than a lifetime ago.

I settled on the edge of the bed and opened the drawer of the bedside table – empty – and slid it silently shut. I wrestled my feet back into my boots, an object beneath the bed catching my eye as I leaned down to the fastenings. I scraped it out with a toe. A photograph. A picture of a man, a woman and a baby, framed in sunshine yellow. Takagi, I supposed. I wondered if he minded that I was sleeping in his bed. If he minded that I was wearing his pants.

I slid the drawer open again, placed the photograph face-down inside it.