2.

Yama bent down and picked up one of the fragments of plascrete. Deformed by extreme heat, scorched and pock marked, it weighed less than it should have done for its size, which was just small enough for him to curl his fingers around, but too big to close his hand around it. He sniffed. 'Thermite, huh?' He tossed it to Rei, who hefted it in a gloved hand. 'That's orbital-grade plascrete - you don't get that made ground-side. Feel the weight.'

'About half what it should be.' Rei dropped it to the ground where it made a slight "oof" of a thud when it hit. 'They make space-stations out of that stuff - one of our more legitimate subsidiaries is currently making a killing selling it to the new Galaxy Railways for their inter-planetary stations. It's light, strong, easy to handle and acts as a pretty good defence against energy and kinetic weapons…'

'...so what's it doing all the way out here, being used for a terrestrial facility and in pieces?' Yama finished for him. 'Anyone else using that formula?'

'Not that I know of - we were using it for years for our bases. After the war Selen and Hannibal got their heads together to patent and sell some of our more civilian-friendly tech. It helps fund a lot of our humanitarian projects.'

'And a few rebellions?' Yama frowned. 'You know… I still haven't met that guy in person - do you really trust a man whose face you've never seen?'

Rei shrugged. 'He's proved himself again and again.'

Yama snorted. 'Three reasons a guy goes around hooded, cloaked and masked like that: he's either horribly disfigured, more than one person, or it's someone you'd recognise… Behind that mask and mantle, he could be anyone. Didn't you and Selen pull the second of those back in your day?'

'He's never let us down in almost fifty years,' Rei replied sombrely. 'I trust him.'

'Hmmm.' Yama waved a hand in the direction of the derelict factory building. 'And yet, somehow your plascrete ended up being used all the way out here by an outlaw corporation doing who-knows-what… That stuff has to be manufactured in micro-gravity and shipped down, which implies an orbital factory, and of some size as well. Hard to hide - unless it keeps moving. That sort of thing is expensive, so whoever was bankrolling this was loaded…'

'Then perhaps we'd better quit standing around talking, and take a look inside?' Rei took three strides before he realised Yama wasn't following him. He stopped and turned to look at his younger friend, and frowned when he saw the younger man staring at the building with an unreadable look on his scarred face, his hands thrust into the pockets of his pants. 'Yama?'

'Maybe we could find out if the locals saw or heard anything two nights ago?' Yama asked quietly. 'Like maybe two prostitutes who've set up shop in a ground floor room where the windows were recently broken inwards?'

Rei's eyes narrowed behind his tinted glasses. 'We could… but we should take a look around before the rain that's coming this way - ' he pointed towards a large black cloud heading rapidly in their direction '- washes away any more evidence.'

Noticing that Yama still seemed reluctant, he sighed. 'What is with you? I've seen you charge headfirst into a squad of twenty machinners, armed only with your gravity sabre low on juice, and not so much as bat an eyelid. But walking into an empty building…'

'It's not so much it being empty,' Yama replied dryly, 'as the fact it was bombed to shit two days ago…'

Rei winced. 'Ah. Sorry. I forgot… You still…'

'Have an irrational and totally unfounded dislike of having pieces of buildings fall on me? Let's see: that'd be a big fat yes…'

Rei walked back and slapped a hand on his shoulder. 'I could hold your hand if you like…?'

The withering look that earned him made him laugh. 'Funny,' Yama half-growled. 'That one was pure Ali…' He shook off the hand and started walking towards the facility.

'I've got your back,' Rei called out. 'You know, in case the big scary building tries to sneak up on you…'

'Hilarious. Your compassion is overwhelming.'

'You don't need compassion,' Rei told him as he jogged to catch up. 'It's just everyone's noticed that the best way to keep you focussed is to give you something else to get pissed about. Or distracted by - but since I lack Kei's natural ability in the latter area, I get to be annoying.'

Yama looked him up and down and smiled. 'You lack a couple of things she's got going for her,' he pointed out. 'And I already have an Ali…' He shook his head slightly. 'Tochiro told me a few years back that he used to keep Harlock on track by winding him up like it was going out of fashion - that and just being whatever he needed to get by. I guess since I don't have a Tochiro, the rest of you get to pick up the slack.'

'That might not be a bad thing,' Rei replied softly as he fell into step with Yama. 'After all, invest too much in just one person and losing them will just rip the heart right out of you and tear you apart. Which seems to be the story between Tochiro and your predecessor…' he stumbled slightly over the loose rock and plascrete underfoot, and had to be steadied by Yama. 'Thanks.'

'You're welcome, though you might want to watch your footing. And don't believe the official story too much on that one - I've had a few conversations with Tochiro that suggest it wasn't quite as cut and dried as the story my brother told me, since his sources weren't what you'd call reliable…' he stopped underneath the remnants of a large cargo door, his hand on his pistol grip.

'There's not much left of the first floor or the roof, if you're nervous…'

'Will you shush? I thought I heard something…'

'Rain and wind,' Rei said, pulling his collar up and fastening his coat.

'No… more like rubble shifting as though something large was scrabbling over it,' Yama retorted. He took a deep breath and let it out with a huff. 'It's gone now.'

'Or you're just getting jumpy.'

'When you've got pins holding your leg together and a nice deep scar across your skin grafts where part of your ship pushed your hardsuit re-breather unit into your back, you get to have a go at my phobias. I. Don't. Like. Buildings. Falling. On. Me. Last time it was Ali's home-made explosives bringing the ceiling down. Before that, an already unstable asteroid mine collapsing around my ears. That's not counting the near misses over the years...'

A tiny skittering sound of gravel sliding on plascrete was the only warning they had. Rei looked up and shouted 'look out!', launching himself at his slighter companion in a tackle that would have been applauded on a rugby pitch. Both men landed in a heap on top of a pile of rubble, Yama underneath Rei, as a large lump of rebar wrapped up in plascrete landed where they'd been standing.

'No roof or top floor, he said,' Yama grunted out as he tried to level himself up and out from under Rei. 'Just jumpy, he said…' Rei got to his feet and offered him a hand up, which he stared at for a moment as though being handed a large snake, before sighing theatrically and letting himself be pulled to his feet. He felt his side gingerly and winced when his probing fingers found a sore spot. 'I think that might have found the only rib I haven't broken over the years…' he muttered.

Rei was scanning the upper part of the walls. 'That wasn't an accident,' he said softly. 'That was thrown- or pushed…'

'Thrown?' Yama's voice held more than a hint of disbelief. He strode over to the lump that had almost brained them and knelt down to study it. 'That's part of the reinforced supporting wall - it's plascrete around a titanium alloy rebar - that block is as half as big as I am and must weigh more than you do!' He stared upwards. 'You couldn't balance this on the walls - they're too narrow. How would anyone even get it up there?'

'No human could.' Rei had pulled out his pistol. 'Which leaves…'

'Machinners.' Yama unholstered his own pistol, a long-barreled antique modeled on an ancient, pre-disapora firearm from before the nuclear age. 'Looks like your intel was right after all. Whatever Westwind were making here, the dialheads wanted it pretty badly.'

'Or wanted it destroyed…' Rei was already moving, checking around the perimeter. 'This looks like a loading bay, we need to go further in.' But Yama had already moved ahead of him further into the bay. 'Erm… what happened to not liking unstable buildings?'

'Someone already tried to drop part of a wall onto my head - how much worse could it get?' Yama replied blithely as he strode past.

Rei, behind his glasses, rolled his eyes. 'You had to say it, didn't you…' He stared again at the plascrete. 'You know - that stuff's not got much in the way of hand-holds - it's still quite smooth and over twenty feet high. You'd need to be part monkey to get up that…'

'If you're nimble enough, there are finger tip holds,' Yama replied absently. 'I could do it easily enough.'

'You're an expert free climber,' Rei pointed out, trailing in his wake. 'And a machinner could…'

'They have strength and grip to spare, but most types have a heavy body for their size. Unless it's one of the non-human forms…'

Rei shivered despite his coat. 'That part of the programme still gives me chills, and I thought I'd seen everything Promethium could throw at us. There's something fundamentally wrong with turning people into weapons.'

'There's something fundamentally wrong with that woman's ideology full stop,' Yama replied coldly. 'Personally I never really ranked any single piece of crap she put our way above any other; the entire basis for her brave new world still gives me nightmares.' He looked around and frowned. 'So… hug the wall and risk something dropped on our heads - or head straight across with no cover?'

'We could split the difference - you walk across in plain sight, draw their fire, and I'll hug the wall?' Rei lifted his shoulders and dropped them in an exaggerated shrug. 'What?'

'Nothing…' Yama made another visual sweep of the hangar. No roof, very little internal debris, all evidence suggested the explosion had blown anything up and out. The remains of a large flatbed offered the only real cover between their location and a raised loading bay approximately waist height about fifty feet away, and since all that was left was the chassis, calling it "cover" would have gotten the speaker sacked for providing wildly inaccurate advertising copy. Their footing crossing it would be uneven - the floor was covered in rubble - but unless anyone was planning on shooting at them from the top of the rather unstable walls, it felt like a better option than staying close to the walls themselves.

He was about to take his first step into the hangar when he heard voices, and booted footsteps coming their way from outside the building. Heavy, metallic CLINKs on the plascrete, in complete unison, followed by a lighter step. 'Zero…'

Rei already had his pistol at the ready. 'I heard,' he whispered. 'I count five?'

'Six if you count whoever's with them - the last one isn't a dialhead - either human or more likely a skin job.'

The footsteps were coming closer, and were close to their position, heading for the opening the two men currently stood to the side of.

'Not through there!' they heard a voice call out. 'There's a side door ten yards this way. There are three security doors between the loading bay and the laboratory, and I've no intention of wasting time cutting through them.' The voice was deep, not noticeably mechanical, but had a pinched, unpleasant undertone that reminded Rei of more than a few Lar Metallian nobility. As the steps moved along the wall outside, he glanced at his companion, and winced when he saw the look on Yama's face. He'd gone white - but not with fear. The look in his hazel eyes, normally so tranquil, made him shiver. The younger man's mouth - usually on the verge of curling into a pleasant smile, was thin and hard. The shoulder under his hand when he placed it on top of the brown leather was tense.

'Yama?'

No reply. Instead the young man's hand curled around the butt of his pistol. 'Harlock!'

The use of his nomme de guerre pulled his friend's attention back, although meeting that gaze made him glad his own eyes were hidden behind his glasses. 'You know that voice.' He made it a statement, not a question. Yama - Harlock - nodded once, switching his attention back to the sounds of a blaster being used only a few feet away and mechanical chatter as a metal door clanged against the plascrete.

'You could say that. It's Lazarus - the head of the Counts Mecha crime syndicate.' Harlock took a step forward only to be restrained by Zero.

'Wait.' They were both still speaking in whispers. 'That's six against two - not great odds since you're the only one carrying a cosmo dragoon.'

'You didn't pack…?' Harlock stared at the offending article being held near his left cheek. 'Oh for... ' he reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a holster somewhat smaller than his own. 'Here. My spare. And put that pop gun away.'

'I wasn't expecting to run into machinners out here,' Zero's whispered excuse came close to the speech tag hack adventure writers for centuries would have described as "hissed - without sibilants". But he took the pistol - a variant of the SDF standard issue, he noticed as he stuffed the holster into his pocket, thumbed the safety and checked the charge. Full, but then the pirate did like to be prepared. 'And I thought the SDF had him in custody after you, Ali, an SDF team, my niece and my two eldest tore up a spaceport to capture him and roll up that trafficking ring a few months back?'

'So did I. But that the bastard has more lives than a cat - literally. And friends in both low and high places. Looks like a call to Dan is in order when we get back to my ship. He might want to check his prison roster...'

'Or Lazarus simply dropped the body you caught?'

Harlock shook his head. 'That was the Prime. We checked.'

'So maybe this is a puppet and he's still in holding?'

'Again - special cells preventing teletransfer - the SDF had them built for Promethium's clones during the war. No signal in - and none out.'

An angry voice was heading back in their direction and Harlock tensed, the hand holding his weapon moving to cover the open hangar door as though of its own volition.

'What the hell has your boxers in a bunch about this guy? He's just another idiot with a high-end download and an entitlement complex, surely?' Thinking back, Zero frowned. Harlock and Ali had both been somewhat closed mouthed on the topic after getting back from that operation. Emeraldas had just waved him off with a "none of our business" when he'd asked and his oldest sons had been extraordinarily discreet.

That deep voice became clearer. '... it must be around here somewhere - keep looking until you find it. It can't have gone far. Westwind's files contained the tracking frequency for the damn thing - I want a full sweep of this city, Building to building and room by room if you have to. But find me Project Cipher.'

'But my lord - what if Promethium's people took it?' The new voice was nasally mechanical.

'Bah. There was no trace of it in the laboratory. Those charges were set by Westwind in the event of a raid by the SPG, trying to cover their tracks. Plenty of parts, but not the prototype itself. They must have panicked when it escaped….' The voices and footsteps faded as they moved away. Zero let out a breath he hadn't noticed he'd been holding, and noted Harlock doing the same.

'You want to follow them?' he asked quietly. Harlock shook his head emphatically.

'No. First, I want to see this lab - find out what it is we're dealing with. Hopefully there's some clue as to what it is we're actually looking for…' His expression was thoughtful, and he rubbed his right eye idly, disturbing the concealer which had hidden tiny burn scars spattered under his eye. 'Project Cipher, huh? Sounds more like cryptography software than a weapon.'

'It also means "Zero",' Zero told him with a wry grin. 'What? I know these things. I've been fending off jokes about my nickname for years. Frank thought it was hugely funny to shorten my name to "Rei" and call me "nothing".'

'Your brother's an asshole.'

'No argument there.' Zero put the safety back on his borrowed weapon and slid it into his pocket.

'Something we have in common,' Harlock continued quietly. He took the necessary steps forward to be able to peer around the doorway. 'They've gone.' Overhead, a hovercar was banking towards the broken city, almost lost in the misty drizzle. 'Come on.' He led the way to the door the machinners had trashed, and checked out the architraving before stepping through, gun hand extended.

'Nice of them to save us the trouble of blowing the intervening doors,' Zero quipped as they moved cautiously along a narrow corridor. A few steps into it and he fished a torch out of one of his voluminous pockets. 'Here. I don't fancy either of us falling over in here - I can't see the floor for the ceiling…' He switched it on and the made their way into the circular beam. Periodically a fall of rubble or something scuttling occasioned a sweep of side rooms or cross-corridors, but each time, it was a false alarm.

Harlock paused as they reached a point where the entire corridor was partially blocked. A substantial portion of the floor above had collapsed into the room to their left, and rubble had tumbled out into the corridor, half filling it. 'Tight squeeze,' he called back softly. 'I think we're both skinny enough to get through.' He grinned back at Zero, his face streaked with grey dust looking almost mask-like in the flashlight beam. 'Though you might be regretting all those home-cooked meals Selen keeps serving you…'

Zero checked out the gap, moving the torch to scan for both integrity and width. He grunted. 'Says the pirate who keeps a gourmet cook on board…'

'I have to. The rest of the crew have culinary skills that go no further than opening an MRE…' Harlock turned sideways and slipped into the gap, inching his way along. 'You know - how come Lazarus and his dialhead goons left this so narrow?'

'I rather suspect they were in a hurry to clear it. Some of these rocks out here look as though they were moved recently - they're damp, but not underneath a hole in the ceiling where they're sitting.' Zero stood up from where he'd been squatting and aimed the torch at the gap again. 'You through yet?'

'For fuck's sake, Zero - I'm already blind in one eye!'

Zero aimed the beam a few inches lower. 'Sorry!'

'Just… a little…' a wriggle and a cough as he disturbed a fall of dust. 'Damn it. It opens out again. Only a few feet. You'll be fi-' There was a scrabbling sound, a curse and a loud thump.

'Harlock!' Zero leapt for the gap and split the air with expletives when his more muscular torso didn't slip through as easily as he'd hoped. 'Damn, Yama, you must have the flexibility of an eel…' he muttered as he squeezed himself along the small hole, dislodging several small boulders in the process. He pulled himself out on the other side with an audible sigh of relief. 'Yama?' he called out, flashing the torch around looking for his companion.

He found him kneeling on the ground several feet away, scrabbling around in the rubble at something long and thin sticking out. 'You scared the daylights out of me when you didn't reply!'

'Sorry. Bring that flashlight over here will you? There's only a bit of light from the holes in the roof.'

The sunlight - thin at the best of times, was almost non-existent in the rain that drizzled through the open roof of the complex. But it did highlight the doors hanging off their hinges, twisted and torn, and Zero snorted. 'We came all that way through the tradesman's entrance and the front door was open?'

'Open's a bit of an understatement.' Harlock looked up at him. 'Blown to pieces. Serves us right for being lazy and not walking around to check, I guess…' He looked down at where he'd been digging. 'Torch?'

Zero angled the beam where indicated. 'Right. What have you found?'

'Not sure yet - but those are fingers, attached to what's left of a hand…'

'And you're digging around for an obviously dead body why, exactly?' Zero asked, a tone of exasperated amusement in his deep voice.

Harlock looked up at him through the damp, sandy brown hair that was plastered over his eyes. He reached up and pushed it back off his face with a grimace of distaste. 'Ever seen a corpse dead for several days on a temperate planet, exposed to several days of rain and an infestation of large rats, that didn't show any signs of decay?' He pulled at the arm sticking up out of the rubble and winced as it came free, attached to a shoulder and part of a head. A young man, from the facial features, which were smooth and handsome with an uncanny lack of expression even in death. 'Oh. That's just wrong..' But he placed it down carefully, smoothing away the remnants of the hair to expose a silvery cerametal skull.

'A sexaroid?' Zero knelt next to Harlock and examined the partial "corpse". 'This is a seriously high-end synth… one of the workforce?'

'Not sure,' Harlock replied dryly. 'But if you count the bits and divide by about five, I think there were rather a lot of them - and they were in this corridor when the bomb went off…' He reached out to lay his hand on Zero's - the one holding the torch - guiding it until the beam trailed over the floor of the large corridor they were in.

It was littered with the remains of dozens of bodies, all of them broken and torn, but untouched by decay.

The largest cluster of more intact bodies were near to a large iris door, partly closed, one body still caught in its jaws, the head and shoulders lost in the murky of the room or corridor beyond.

'They were trying to escape…' Harlock whispered, despite an audience of one.

Zero got back to his feet and stared round, taking in the carnage. 'But from what? And why not towards the foyer?' he asked softly. Harlock stood beside him and flexed his fingers around the butt of his cosmo dragoon. 'That one was taken out by a blaster bolt looking at the injury to his head. From behind to boot. The rest of the damage is from the blast - but I think they were running from here…' he pointed to a dark opening in the left hand wall. 'Shall we?'

'Why that one and not the one on the right?' Zero waved the torch in the other direction.

Harlock tapped the floor with his toe, kicking the damp dust around. 'Partly because the bodies are all pointing in the opposite direction, but also because there are machinner bootprints leading this way?' he replied innocently.