~oOo~

He slept fitfully that night. No dreams, he hadn't dreamed in all the time since being rescued by these people, but he had an odd, stifled sense of something wrong, and half-woke once or twice to find Blake and Deva, or the big black man - Jak, he had heard Blake call him - somewhere nearby.

Don't you people ever sleep? he remembered thinking, unsure if he spoke it aloud. Deva - intelligent, perpetually worried, eternally fretting - amused him, and he didn't know enough about Jak to make a judgement. As if that ever stopped you before, Kerr.

But if he was to remain here on Blake's ship, a brief period of calm before the inevitable storms would be, well, different.

~oOo~

He was stronger in the morning and able to get out of bed without ending up in Blake's arms for a third time. Deva led him through metal-lined corridors that were shabby, coldly and weakly lit.

"As I said," Deva sounded mildly, ridiculously apologetic, "it isn't your Liberator. It's old, and wasn't much to look at when it was new, but it does for the purpose."

"What speed?"

"Standard by eight in an emergency, but not for long. Blake's been working on the engines since he arrived, bringing them up to modern standards. For an old war horse, it's not too bad."

"But it can be improved."

"Slowly. The work's not easy. Not even he and Jak can keep it up for long."

"Why not?"

"Takes a lot out of them, really. You see -" He stopped, as a heavy clang echoed dully around them. "Damn," he said, oddly peevish rather than startled.

"What is it?"

"We have company." Deva turned his light, placid gaze to Avon, as if considering. "Come on. I suppose it is time you learned what you've got yourself into once and for all."

"I would have thought," Avon said, as deliberately calm as Deva, "given Blake's previous skill at creating havoc, that was something I do not need to relearn."

"Just come on."

The flight deck was nothing like anything he'd ever seen before, a museum piece, with ranks of aged equipment, large, plush, somewhat worn seating, and several incongruously modern, barrenly spartan tables covered with a miscellany of objects. Tools both old and new were scattered among broken games and a startling variety of weapons. Inconsequentially, he saw a teleport bracelet - Blake's - lying discarded and dusty by the command chair.

On the huge viewscreen, the edge of blue-grey Terminal could be seen, as well as a Federation warcruiser and several pursuit ships hovering rather too near for disinterest. Presumably sent to find their President. Or what is left of her.

Blake was leaning over the pilot's seat, seemingly relaxed, talking to the tall, reed-thin man sitting there. He turned as they came in. "It's all right, Avon," he said; Avon mentally added it to the list of impressively stupid things Blake had said to him in the past, and ignored it.

"What is going on?"

"We're being boarded," Blake answered, outrageously mild. "Relax, everything is all right."

"Is it? As usual your definition of the words is rather less than -"

"Avon." Quiet, calm, but it was definitely a command.

"How many?" He heard Deva's fretful query.

"One warship, four pursuits," the pilot said. "The lead pursuit ship's docked and they'll be here in a few minutes."

"Then hadn't you better be ready for them?" Avon retorted, heading for the table where the guns were scattered. "Blake, I assume these antiques do fire."

"If they're needed." Blake still spoke evenly. "Which they won't be. Jak?"

"Six of them, Blake," said the man at the door, "but only three headed this way. Burnel and the Old Woman will see to the others when you're ready."

They were all too calm. Avon began to feel trapped in one of the nightmares he was no longer having, and hated it.

"Blake!" He grabbed one of the guns - the newest looking, icy to the touch - and turned towards the doorway. Blake was in front of him, one hand over his, taking it away. "Damn it, are you all mad? What the hell is going on?"

The troopers came in, guns raised. Blake gripped Avon's arms, holding him still, as the men looked around, straight past them.

"No one," the first said in a hard, accented voice. "Told you, Section Leader. The ship's deserted."

"And has been for years, by the look of it."

The trooper shivered. "An' it's cold, too."

"I'll call the lead ship and tell them." The commander threw the words over his shoulder as he headed towards the darkened controls. When he walked past the girl Broeli, she gave Avon a grin and stepped aside, lifting a hand to the black-clad arm. Avon watched as the hand seemed to slide into the fabric, right through the flesh of the arm and out again. The man went on to bend over the controls, fiddling aimlessly. "Almost like a ghost ship, isn't it?"

Avon felt himself sway and someone pushed him down into the nearest chair. Still weak, he let them, mind blank, gaze fixed on Blake's face. Blake knelt in front of him, hands still grasping Avon's forearms, not letting go, not letting him lose touch. "I'm sorry, Avon."

Understanding came in a rush, a shock like the pain he hadn't felt since Terminal.

"You said that you escaped, Blake... more or less." His voice was harsh in his own ears. "How much less?"

"I told you I was wounded." Blake's eyes were shadowed. "They managed to get me off-planet in this old ship. Six hours out of Jevron, the life-support failed."

"Stop." He didn't want to hear it.

"Jak and Romanel were already," Blake paused, searching for the phrase, "resident."

"From long before it was an ancient wreck," Jak added gruffly. "Part of the original crew, in fact. We spent the best part of a century watching creatures like that Servalan come and go."

Avon stared past Blake in a daze, watching the strangers as they wandered around the flight deck. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"No one can be told," Deva said, oddly gentle.

"Even," Blake added with a twisted smile, "if there were the right words."

"Section Leader to Commander Durkim." The soldier was now using a communicator, voice clipped with boredom. "We've boarded the derelict, sir, there is no sign of life."

"Are you sure?"

"Not a living soul on the whole ship, but no bodies either."

"The Liberator must have escaped, then. All right, get back to your ship. We'll search the planet. The President must be here somewhere."

Avon stopped listening. He looked down at the broken chess-pieces on the edge of the table. Blake followed his gaze, stretched out a hand and picked one up, held it up between them.

"They cannot see or hear us, Avon," he said. "That I also learned the hard way. They can only see -"

"Section Leader," the trooper stuttered, eyes almost starting from his head. "Look!"

"A pawn suspended in mid-air." Blake slid his other hand down Avon's arm, took his hand and closed it tightly over the piece. "Jak, get the communicator."

Jak did so, reaching out and plucking it from the Section Leader's grasp. The soldier stared at it blankly, utterly unaware of the big man standing so close to him.

"They've switched their defence shields off to search, Blake," Romanel said from the pilot's position.

Blake glanced around, nodded to Deva, and spoke coldly. "All right, finish it."

With a shrug, Deva flicked a switch and the controls sputtered into unsteady light around the already stunned soldiers. Broeli glanced at Avon again, and a slow, cold smile lit her sharp face. She turned and walked past Jak, right up to the Section Leader, who was still staring in blank shock at his communicator - hanging in mid-air, for all he can see, Avon thought - and lifted a hand to plunge it into his chest. He suddenly lurched, choking, face contorting.

Broeli's smile widened, a deathshead grin of pure spite.

"Why?" Avon found himself whispering, revolted.

"Her family were murdered on Jevron, Avon," Blake said quietly, holding him still. "And they remain dead."

Jak, with a grunt of disapproval, moved to one of the stunned troopers, wrapped a big hand around his neck and snapped it, then turned and repeated the action with the other. The Section Leader was twisting in agony and would have fallen but for the ghostly hand crushing his heart. Broeli squeezed tighter, watching as he died, then dropped him like a sack of black dust, to lie on the deck.

"Go and get rid of the rest. Jak, help her. Romanel -"

Romanel was back at the controls, flicking over them quickly. "All targets identified and targeted. And -" he fired the weaponry, and the ships on the main screen exploded in an very familiar, deadly blaze of light, "- dealt with."

Avon rose to his feet slowly, deliberately, pulling his hand away and watching the pawn fall straight through Blake's hand. That the sight made him ill was pushed aside, to be dealt with later. If ever.

He needed to get away from them. All of them.

"Very impressive, Blake. Your sense of dramatics is as keen as ever," he said coolly, more distant from his own emotions than ever.

"I am sorry."

"So you've said. Somehow," and he smiled, "that doesn't make very much difference, does it?" Wrenching free from Blake's grasp, he turned and ran.

~oOo~

He found his way back to the medical unit - or mortuary, more like,he thought savagely. Stumbling slightly, he crossed to the sink, leant over it and turned the water on, full force, ice-cold. Let it splash over his hand, icy needles stinging his fingers and palm, watched it strike and splash... and...

And suddenly stream right through the solid flesh. As in a dream worse than any Servalan had thought up for him, he stared at the water as it shot from the tap, down and though his hand, as if the hand were not there. He could still feel it in a strange way - not the cold but a not-quite-cold like the not-quite-pain he recalled from the bunker. When he had been -

"Dying." He said the word aloud, tasted it on his tongue.

"Yes," Blake said behind him.

I always thought his death and mine would be linked. He refused to look around.

"I didn't want you to die, Avon," Blake went on.

"Why not? You seem to have me well and truly trapped now."

That's not fair, and you know it." There was a silence. "Avon."

"All right." The concession hurt. He let it, holding onto the pain as a guard. Somewhere there was anger as well, vague and unfocused as yet. "But it is also true, isn't it?"

"No! Avon, what would you have had? That we left your soul to rot on Terminal - alone? Maybe you would have preferred that."

"Don't assume -"

"If so," Blake swept over his interruption, "I can take you back there, you aren't tied to this ship as Romanel and Jak seem to be."

"And you?"

"No. I came down for you, remember?"

"Noble of you."

"Nobly stupid, perhaps."

"Yes, that as well. But..." He caught the words better here than there, and forced them back down. "I believe that you meant well. You always did, Blake, didn't you?"

"I meant to try and save you, to keep you alive, if there was any way that I could have."

"But you were too late." He closed his hand around the fragile plastic edge of the shower stall, felt it crack under his hand and crushed the shards against his palm.

"Yes."

He stared at the brittle shards, as hard and sharp as glass, in his hand; closed his fingers over them and watched as the edges disappeared into his skin, slid straight though his seemingly firm flesh. No cut, and no feeling. When he opened his hand to let them fall, there was no blood.

"Get out," he said dully.

~oOo~

Being undead did nothing to make Avon less impossible.

Blake watched in silence from the shadows, as Avon worked on Orac, watching as the assured hands trembled a little, the movements faltered. The flesh, as pale and clear as always, seemed to shimmer with an inner light and the probe in his hand slipped through, falling between his fingers. Finally, Blake came forward and took hold of the tool in Avon's hand. Darker than normal eyes, clouded over with a colder weariness than before, glared at him.

"You've been working too long, Avon," he said quietly.

"I am not tired."

"You might not think you are. It doesn't work like that, as I told you. But deny that you do feel... drained, shall we say?"

That seemed to hit a nerve, and the glare deepened. "That is not your -"

"Yes it is. If you want to stay solid - corporeal - for hours on end, you have to rest."

"Why?" Avon said, his voice calm and silky and filled with caged fury.

"I don't know why. I just know."

"All right, then, how?"

Blake sighed. Somehow, he had to defuse Avon's anger, he knew that. The anger was dangerous. Broeli had stayed angry, and the result was those hideous murders he could not stop, that she could not function without any more.

Knowing it is one thing. Doing it seems no easier than before. At least that hasn't changed...

First he had to make Avon rest, because the dangers there were even worse. "You've seen the Old Woman?" he asked quietly.

Avon shuddered, as if it hurt to even think of the greyed, badly-formed emptiness that haunted the lower decks, a sere travesty of a human. And there were others in the lower holds, like half-forgotten memories of people, that had been drifting in limbo since Jevron. Blake tried not to think about them too much and failed far too often.

Avon looked down at the probe, back up with a bitter, mocking smile, and let it again fall through his fingers.

"You're learning," Blake said.

"The dead should not need sleep," Avon snarled, sinking into a seat, his face touched with the slight, barely discernible trace of ethereal pallor that meant he had given up the effort to remain solid. For now. He was still learning to control, if not understand it, but the effort taxed him more than he'd admit. "Then, I imagine most of the dead do nothing else, don't they?"

Blake inclined his head. He was not about to argue. He knew all too well both the anger and the chill, grey despair that could lurk at the edges of it, more cold and silent than the living ever imagined... and he recalled his own 'wakening', far worse than Avon's, in a icy, shattered hold where Jak and Romanel had been stacking the bodies of those who had been with him on Jevron.

But it was less cold with the others nearby. Less cold with Avon here. Maybe Avon would find it less cold because he was here, he didn't know.

"Why us?" Avon spoke bleakly.

"Why -?"

"You said that the girl's family stayed dead, Blake. And others, I assume, since the galaxy is hip-deep in the dead. How is it that you and I... although I do admit, for you," with dulled malice, "it makes some sort of grim sense."

"Thank you - I think."

"So why?"

"I don't know." Blake looked down into Orac's glittering interior. "I mean, what made us alive in the first place? Was Zen any less alive than we were? How can you explain death when you don't actually understand life?

"Jak has this theory," he went on, "that it has to do with souls, even with someone like Broeli. Deva thinks it's more to do with will, that strong wills, strong hatreds or strong loves don't always let you go -" He stopped at Avon's quick, repressed shudder. "Is something wrong?"

"No." Too quick, far too quick to be the truth, but Blake knew that this was not the moment to push.

"Maybe we just have unfinished business."

"Ah yes," and acid was now etched in Avon's tone, "with the Federation, no doubt, your galactic meddling. That doesn't explain," he stopped a little too obviously, "well, them," with a dismissive wave in the vague direction of the flight deck.

"No, it doesn't."

"Then?"

"I don't know. Maybe we'll find out."

"In the next what, century or so? With them?"

"Well," with a small, teasing grin, "it's survival of a kind."

"Not much of a kind, Blake, no."

Avon, lying back against the chair, gazed across at Orac for a long moment. It was hard to guess what he was thinking, but the anger seemed banked for now. Then a sudden, wicked smile touched his pale lips.

"Blake," he said softly.

"Yes?"

"Orac is working now."

Blake started, stared down at the little computer, saw the faint, intermittent sparkle deep inside its circuitry. "So -"

Avon laughed, not his harsh snarl of non-amusement but soft, genuine laughter. "So try to give it an order, Blake. Orac works by voice command, doesn't it?" The laughter deepened. "Talk to it, Blake."

"Oh - damn."

"I just thought of it myself."

"So we can't use it."

"Possibly not. Do the computers on this ship have tarial cells? If not -"

"And I think not -"

"We have totally wasted our time," Avon finished, closing his eyes. "Ironic, isn't it? I can build you a teleport, which you do not need and cannot use: repair Orac, who will remain out of our control since it does not hear the dead: repair your computers, which are so old they are incompatible with the galaxy at large. And you, the saviour of the masses, are now trapped on a ghost ship going nowhere. So tell me, Blake," mockery like a knife-blade in his voice, "how do you intend to meddle in the galaxy's affairs now?"

"That," Blake admitted, "I'm still working on. Be reasonable," though, as he recalled, Avon had never been so even by accident, "I've not been like this for very long myself."

"Your friends have."

"Jak and Romanel, yes, but they've been ship-bound. We are less so."

The dark eyes opened again, warier. "So...?"

Blake smiled and held out his hands; Avon stared at them blankly for a minute, then laid his own over them and was pulled upwards, though Blake held on as he drifted a little.

"You need to rest. Come on." Still keeping a tight hold on one hand, Blake slid easily through the metallic walls, pulling the other man with him. He could almost feel Avon's discomfort as they passed through, but it would get easier with time. "Ever heard the legend of the Angels of Mons, Avon?"

"No. Do I want to?" The wariness was turning into definite unease.

"Probably not. It's an old story, far older than the Federation, from the time they called the Great War. An army besieged, facing annihilation by the far more powerful enemy, were saved by an army of angels or ghosts, who appeared overhead and held off the attack until they could escape." He stopped at the all-too-vivid expression on Avon's face. "I know, I know, pure fantasy."

"And bad fantasy at that."

"But people believed it. Many swore that they saw it."

"Blake, you cannot believe -"

"Oh, of course not, Avon, how could I? Who these days believes in ghosts?"

"Touché." Avon lifted his free hand in mocking surrender.

"But under the late President Servalan," Blake twisted the title as an obscenity in his mouth, "the dead finally came to outnumber the living. Even if only a few in each thousand cheated death as we seem to have done, it could be quite an army, don't you think?"

Avon shrugged. "I think that I am not surprised. You are incorrigible."

"Thank you."

"And still insane."

"Oh no, Avon," echoing the other's mockery, "think about it. Why do you think that such an exquisite political animal as the Supreme Commander became such an ineffectual ruler?"

"She -"

"She was never alone, Avon. She collected for herself a malignant host, that haunted her every step, and meddled in her every scheme. Not with total success - the amount the dead can do is limited - but well enough to destroy her. And her successor has his own retinue of ill-wishers."

Avon's deep gaze flickered at him as they went through the last wall, and reached the medical unit. "How do you know all this?"

"We were on our way to Earth - slowly, this ship is not the Liberator - when I found out about you."

A slight crease between the eyes appeared, Avon's frown of unadmitted curiosity. "How?"

"I told you, a friend called me."

"Cally?"

"No, Avon, she's a telepath, but not a psychic." They were back in the medical unit, dim and quiet and observably long unused, once one knew. From the way Avon looked around with narrowed eyes, he realised it now. "Sometimes we can hear a call, or a cry, from the living, more often than the living know. In any case, we've turned back towards Earth again. It will take a while, so you will have time to learn how to..." He stopped, looking for the words.

"To be dead?" Avon said blandly. "And to think I told Vila it was a talent we all shared."

"That was dying," Blake answered, guiding him towards and up onto the bed, watching as he lay back. "That's easy. It's being dead that's the harder part."

"Yes..." Avon seemed to relax a little, then turned his head sharply, eyes wide open and dark with uncertainty, and even a little fear, defensive fear. "You will stay?" he asked with difficulty.

Blake felt no desire to laugh. He had also been afraid at first of the deep, dreamless sleep. "You won't be left alone, Avon," he said.

"I know, but -"

"So do I," Blake said quietly. "I'll be here."

~oOo~

In the workroom, Orac blinked again, the faint, whine overloud against the deathly silence. Then, with a click oddly like electronic annoyance, it began to transmit.

~oOo~