The Wheel

part four

There was no pain at first. Just a vague sensation of cold as the blade slid into him, unimpeded by flesh or bone, an ice-cold sharpness that bespoke of negative density steel. Or worse, a gravity blade that was tearing him apart at the molecular level as Ekaterina Komarov dug it hard into his chest.

'Tell me,' she said as they fell to the floor, the rosebud of her lips just millimetres from his own. 'Do you taste blood?' The knife moved as she spoke, twisted, and he felt it push closer to the beating of his heart. She kissed him, pressed her mouth hot against his own, and maybe he did taste blood.

'Jesus H. Fucking Christ!'

The oath came from somewhere above him, simultaneous with the heavy scuff of boots near his ear and the unexpected flash and burn of blaster fire close to his face. He blinked against the flare, yellow-hot and searing as Ekaterina flew bodily from him, Aristotle's well-aimed bolt catching her square in the chest and flinging her sprawling to the floor. The knife went with her, her hand clenched white in a rictus around the hilt as the weapon tore itself from Harlock's chest, a flash of bright metal that arced in a rain of dripping blood. Now Harlock felt pain. The sting of the steel as it left his body and the hot rush of blood that filled the void of its passing. His heart faltered deep inside him and he rolled to his side, grasped the wound with one hand and felt his fingers fill instantly with blood.

'Why won't she stay the fuck dead?!'

The incredulous cry now came from somewhere beside him, and Harlock was dimly aware of another flash of fire. Of the panicked trample around him as the bar emptied of its patrons. Of Ekaterina rising to her feet as Aristotle fired again. And again. And again and again and again, until at last she lay sprawled on her back with her eyes unblinking as they gazed toward the ceiling.

'Damn,' Aristotle said, unbelieving, 'but that bitch was hard to kill.'

'She isn't dead.'

'Damn well looks dead.' Aristotle fired another bolt into her chest just to be sure. He holstered his gun and turned to find the captain crawling to his feet.

'Jeezus. She got you?' The gunner shouldered his way carefully beneath Harlock's arm, his blue eyes clouding with concern and darting from Harlock's face to the hand clenched against his chest. 'Can you walk?'

Harlock nodded, not protesting when he was steered towards the door. A scattering of patrons had stayed to watch the drama unfold, and to gawk unashamedly at the body that now sprawled wide-eyed on the floor. The barkeep eyed them sullenly as they lurched past the bar, a toothpick gripped between his thick white teeth and his grizzled face pinched tight with irritation.

Feydar Zone peeled his tall lean body out of the chair he'd been sitting in, dropped a handful of credits on the pitted surface of the table and strolled the few short steps to the unmoving body of Ekaterina Komarov. She stretched unblinking on the wood-slat floor, one arm entwined in an overturned chair, the table over which she'd crawled tipped wildly to one side, and one booted foot twitching randomly in the congealing pool of Harlock's blood. Zone stared down at her pallid face, glanced briefly at the blaster burns scored black and red across her chest, and looked disgustedly away.

'Get up,' he said, kicking at her with the toe of his boot. 'Move.'

Ekaterina's foot stopped twitching, her head turning slowly by degrees as the pupils in her wide pale eyes constricted. She blinked up at him, dazed, as he stared white-faced down at her.

'You were supposed to seduce him, not stab him.'

'Nnh,' she said, her hands fluttering panicked to her chest as her last waking memory jolted to the surface of her brain. 'Bastard tried to kill me,' she croaked, remembering the hard blue eyes of the blond man with the blaster.

'You deserved it,' Zone said, his expression unreadable behind the purple tint of his glasses. 'Stupid bitch.'

'I love you too.' She reached towards him with a blood-stained hand. 'Help me up.'

His nose wrinkled in disgust. 'We had a plan,' he snarled, not letting it go. He made an impatient noise with his tongue when she didn't answer, clasped his unwilling fingers around her own and lifted her bodily from the floor. 'What possessed you?'

She stood, swaying, as he removed a handkerchief from the pocket of his coat and wiped fiercely at the blood on his fingers. Her blood, Harlock's blood, it didn't matter. It all made him sick.

'You don't really expect an answer,' she said, waiting while Zone dabbed ineffectually at the stains on his hand, and smirking when he finally gave up and dropped the ruined handkerchief to the floor.

'I need a moment.' Harlock's feet dragged on the rough pavement and Aristotle paused to let him lean against a wall, lowered him carefully down until he was sitting with his back against the brickwork.

'Don't die on me,' Aristotle said, glancing up and down the narrow laneway to make sure they hadn't been followed. 'Yattaran will skin my hide and roast my tender arse for lunch if I come back with you in a bag.'

Harlock tugged at the zipper on his jacket. 'I won't die here,' he said, looking up at the yellow smoke-stained sky and wincing as he opened the jacket to reveal his sodden undershirt. 'This isn't the place.'

'I see,' Aristotle replied, the calmness of his voice at odds with the panic that he felt rising in his throat. 'So it's not a matter of when, it's a matter of where.' He brushed the captain's fingers aside and peeled the shirt away from a dark and gaping wound that pulsed blood at the same steady speed as the beating of Harlock's heart.

'Shit,' he said when he saw the gouge Komarov had made when she twisted the knife. Gravity blade, he could tell, and those things weren't designed to heal easy. He had the sudden, unbidden thought that the bourbon he'd just swallowed might be making preparations for a surprise reappearance. It wasn't the blood. It wasn't even the pale edge of bone that the blade had revealed. Aristotle had seen worse things than that – the kinds of unfortunate accidents that occur when heavy machinery meets the tender pulp of human flesh. Once he'd seen a man cut completely in half, sliced cleanly through with his intestines hanging out and his feet twitching in their death throes a three full metres away from his silent screaming mouth. Aristotle had managed to stomach that without so much as a liquid hiccup, but he found himself having trouble with a stab wound for the simple fact of the man that the wound was stabbed into.

'I can't tell you how happy I am to hear you won't be dying on this shithole,' he babbled inanely as he attempted to fill the void of his swelling panic. He tore his sweater off over his head, balled it up tight and pressed it hard against Harlock's wound. 'But do you know where it will be, maybe, because, do you think, it might be an idea to avoid the place altogether?' He glanced up and down the deserted alley again, lifted the sweater and peered intently at the slowly-oozing wound. 'Um…' he said, not sure if he should bring it up or not, 'should you be leaking blue smoke?'

'How deep is it?' Harlock asked, because he'd seen the green rising in Aristotle's face, and if the blood kept coming then soon he wouldn't have enough left to move. 'Can you close the wound?'

'With what? My fingers?'

Harlock's curt nod elicited a melodramatic groan. 'With my fingers, he says.' Aristotle dropped the ruined sweater onto the road and slicked his fingers across Harlock's chest. 'I liked that sweater,' he grumbled petulantly as he pushed the gaping edges of the wound together.

'I didn't,' Harlock said as Aristotle's hands pressed hot against his skin.

'You said you did,' Aristotle retorted, miffed, his eyebrows rising as Harlock's wound began to knit itself together with the same speed as he'd seen Arcadia replace the metal in her hull. Faint tendrils of blue wisped wraith-like around his fingers, tingling slightly against his skin. 'Damn,' he said, squinting down and still not believing it.

Harlock leaned his head back against the wall as Aristotle worked on holding him together. It wouldn't take long, but the pressure on his chest hurt like all hell and he was having trouble trying not to focus on the pain. Not to mention the unsettling sensation of human hands on his body in god knows how long. 'I forgot,' he said, as he stared into the emptiness of the street, 'how warm human hands could be.'

'Don't get any ideas,' Aristotle muttered from the corner of his mouth. 'I've heard about pirates.'

'Mmph,' Harlock said, more groan than laugh, and instantly regretting it.

'Sorry.' Aristotle turned to look back the way they had come. There was the distant sound of running feet, the isolated bark of an alarm that faded abruptly into silence. Figures moved across the junction, but nobody turned their heads to look down the street. Nobody was witness to the man bleeding quietly in the dim coolness of the alley.

Aristotle turned back to the captain, his mouth quirking disparagingly. 'It's amazing how ignorant people can be. How much effort they put into pretending there's nothing beyond the six square feet that surrounds them.'

'It's better that way.' Harlock shifted against the brickwork. 'As soon as men start looking towards the horizon they start thinking about ways to conquer it.'

'Damn straight.' Aristotle lifted his fingers and checked the progress of the wound, shook his head incredulously and covered it up again. 'Space travel is the worst thing that ever happened to us. We should have stayed on the ground, with our feet planted in the earth the way God intended.'

'God?' Harlock repeated softly, with his head still resting against the wall.

The gunner's mouth twisted wryly. 'Well, something had to put us here, because we sure as hell didn't spring up out of nothing.'

Harlock's lips quirked with amusement. 'You're a scientist.'

'True. But the more I see, the less I understand. The universe isn't what we think it is.' Aristotle looked pointedly down at Harlock's nearly-healed chest. 'Did you mean it when you said she wasn't dead?'

A wind blew through the alley, funnelled itself fitfully along the narrow pavement and shifted the hair that framed the captain's face. Harlock looked uncomfortably away from the question in Aristotle's blue eyes.

The gunner laughed cynically, a short sharp burst that made its exit through his nose. 'What you seem reluctant to tell me is that crazy-face is like you. That she's…' he hesitated to say it, '…one of the undead.'

Aristotle's voice had dropped an octave on the last word, and he sounded so perturbed by the thought that Harlock couldn't help but smile. 'I can die,' he reassured him, turning his face to the wind. 'If somebody really wants me dead.'

Aristotle stared at Harlock's unguarded features, at the jagged scar that scored its way across his cheek and over the aquiline nose. The scar trailed away at the periphery of the patch over the captain's dead eye, and Aristotle peered closely at its edge, saw the vaguest hint of tortured skin beneath the leather.

Harlock turned back to Aristotle, unsurprised to find the gunner watching him. 'Time to move.'

'Harlock is in trouble.'

Yattaran jumped and spun on his heels, turning to find Miimé hovering a few paces behind him. She was looking directly at him, which led Yattaran to the inescapable and nerve-wracking conclusion that she must have been talking to him.

'Excuse me?' he said, peering at her through the thick lenses of his glasses. It seemed to him that she was greener than usual. Or was it blue? In some languages there would be a word for the green-white-blue of her, but for now he would have to settle with –

'Harlock is in trouble,' she said again, her glow intensifying and an unmistakable crease of concern forming between her eyes.

A similar crease formed in the fleshy mound of skin between Yattaran's eyes as he turned back to his console. The captain's transport had broken free of atmosphere about thirty seconds ahead of Mime's unexpected pronouncement, visible only as a tiny moving blip on the scanner as it headed back in Arcadia's direction. It was too far away even for visual contact, so how could the Nibelung possibly know if anybody on board was in trouble or not?

'Don't take your eyes off Deathshadow,' Yattaran rumbled in Maji's general direction as he attempted to suppress the goosebumps that crept a shivering trail up his spine. He glanced again at Miimé as the alien beauty stared inscrutably at him, wondering if this was maybe some weird-ass kind of alien prank and he simply wasn't getting the joke. But on the off-chance that this wasn't a joke…

'Captain,' he said, breaking the protocol on comms as he opened a secure channel to the transport. 'Everything alright?'

Dead air followed. Then static, and Yattaran began to feel the faintest stirrings of trepidation. And then Aristotle's reluctant voice came over the comms. 'Kind of not really.'

'Shit.' Yattaran slammed his hand against his console and exploded from his station with surprising speed. 'The bridge is yours,' he barked at Maji as he hastened from the command.

Aristotle surprised everyone with the smoothness of his landing, not least himself, since the transport was unfamiliar and he was in such a hurry to get back to the ship. But then… his cargo was precious, and maybe he hadn't realised that until today. He looked across at Harlock, relaxed in the co-pilot's chair, his one eye closed and his breathing calm and the blood still drying on the front of his jacket.

'C'mon,' he said. 'We're home.'

Harlock nodded, his eye still closed. 'I can feel it.'

It was true, even Aristotle could feel it.

'Need help?' he asked, reaching out a hand to help him from the chair, surprised at the ease with which Harlock rose to his feet. Strike that. Unsurprised, since Aristotle had seen way too many surprising things that day already. His eyes tracked the faint traceries of dark matter that seemed to gather in the air around them, wisps of blue that focussed unerringly on the captain and coalesced around his heart. Aristotle followed one of the wisps with a finger and pulled his hand back as a spark of static shot from the captain. The same kind of spark that Miimé was forever stinging him with.

'Damn,' Aristotle muttered, shaking the sting from his fingers as he heaved himself out of his chair to stand beside the captain. Harlock's gaze drifted out of focus for a moment, his lips creasing in what could have been a smile. Or maybe it was a frown. Aristotle diverted his attention to shutting down the systems, because he had the distinct impression the captain was about to commune with his conscience again and he didn't want it to get awkward.

The external pressure sensors cycled their way to completion as the atmosphere in the hangar deck equalised, and Aristotle leaned forward to peer out of the forward port. Across the vast expanse of deck he could just make out Yattaran's face mashed almost flat against the glass set into the hangar door, his mouth working furiously, and Aristotle fancied he could hear the abuse those fat flappy lips were spewing at him even from here.

'He'll get over it,' Harlock said from close behind him, making him jump inside his skivvies.

'How did you know what I…?' Aristotle turned to find the captain observing Yattaran with almost as much interest as he was. 'Never mind,' Aristotle muttered beneath his breath. The captain was psychic. Miimé was psychic. The whole damn ship was psychic. 'Sure. He'll get over it,' he continued, less than confidently, 'but will I? I'm delicate, you know.'

Harlock clapped a hand on his shoulder, and Aristotle's mouth quirked wryly – as reassuring as the gesture was, it held a simple and unmistakeable message: you're on your own.

'Hmh,' Aristotle said at the same time as the external atmosphere equalised and the indicator on the console chimed green and Yattaran fairly exploded into the hangar, scuttling in at the same time as Harlock opened the hatch of the transport. The mate came to a screeching halt as the captain descended the short ramp that extended to the deck, his eyes darting jerkily from Harlock's bloodied clothes to his face and back again, with a brief detour to glare accusingly at Aristotle where he hovered in the open hatch. Harlock's long legs had taken him all the way down the ramp in the time that Yattaran's eyes had been preoccupied with all that darting around, and the captain was halfway across the hangar before Yattaran had a chance for his mouth to catch up with his brain.

'Captain,' he called out, belatedly registering Harlock's murmured greeting and the captain's one-handed wave of acknowledgement as he strode across the hangar without looking back. Yattaran's mouth closed and opened and closed again as he spun to face Aristotle, his eyes narrowing threateningly behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

Aristotle ducked to avoid the double-barrels of Yattaran's myopic glare as he cautiously descended the ramp towards the glowering mate. Maybe if he didn't look at that face, it would go away. Schrödinger's Face, he smirked to himself with a certain amount of self-amusement and a not-inordinate amount of pride at the boundless breadth of his intellect. If I don't look at it, it isn't really there – nnh!

Yattaran's fist grazed its way across Aristotle's cheek, missing the true target of his infuriatingly smirking mouth by the merest of clean-shaven centimetres.

'Hey!' Aristotle teetered back from the blow, Yattaran's fist carrying all the unadulterated weight of the first mate's ample poundage. 'You hit me!'

'And I hope you enjoyed it 'coz lookout, I'm gonna hit you again!' Yattaran balled his fist up ready for another strike. 'You had one job to do, Rookie. One job! And you fucked it up!'

Aristotle danced two steps backward, the hot sting of the mate's fist still burning across his cheek. 'I'll give you that one,' he said, testing his jaw to make sure it still worked and that everything was still in place. He ran his tongue along his teeth and didn't taste blood. Lucky. 'But one is all you get. You weren't there. You didn't see her.'

'Bah,' Yattaran spat, his disgust growing by the minute. 'A woman!' The pudgy legs lurched him forward and Aristotle was surprised by how fast the first mate's bulk could be when it was shored up by red-faced anger. 'A woman!'

Aristotle took another step back. He hated doing it, hated giving in to the mate, but he'd felt the force behind Yattaran's fist. He wasn't sure he'd be the one still standing if they got into a knock-down fight, and he didn't currently feel like experimenting with his theory. 'You didn't see her.'

The pudgy lips sneered disgustedly 'I've seen women before.'

'Not this one. This one was different. She was like him.'

'Whaddaya mean,' Yattaran said, backing the gunner up against the still-warm skin of transport. 'Like who?'

'Like the captain, you baboon!'

The fist faltered in the air and the mate's thick lips tightened into a hard and disbelieving line of contempt.

'You should have seen her,' Aristotle continued, taking advantage of the lull in the tide of Yattaran's anger. 'She was fast. You've seen how fast the captain is. She was on him before I could even blink. I mean, I was there, I was right there! I had my gun out, I was firing, but she was on him before anybody knew what was happening.'

He was blabbering, he knew it, but it was the first time he'd really thought about it, the first time he'd had a chance to evaluate it in his head, and he realised only now that he hadn't actually seen her move, that he'd only known she was moving when he'd heard the shatter of glass as the table hit the floor and seen her crouched over the captain with the knife buried in his chest.

Yattaran stood glaring at him with the breath coming hard out of his mouth and the blue eyes blinking behind the lenses of his glasses and it wouldn't have surprised Aristotle if the mate had snorted steam out of his flaring nostrils and pawed one foot against the floor in preparation for a charge, but for the life of him Aristotle couldn't stop his mouth from moving because that was what it did when he found himself chin deep in shit and sinking fast.

'I tried,' he was still saying, convincing himself even less than he was convincing Yattaran, 'but she was so fast. And I shot her, I did, and she was dead and on the floor and six times I shot her or maybe it was seven, no, it was definitely eight, but I think…' He trailed off, his eyes following Yattaran's fist as it was lowered slowly by degrees.

'You think what?' the mate asked, looking properly at the rookie as he stood butted up against the transport in his undershirt and the whole of him stained and streaked with the captain's blood.

'I don't know.' Aristotle shook his head and rubbed a hand across his still stinging jaw, regretting that he'd even opened his mouth. 'I don't know what I think.'

Harlock ignored Miimé as she trailed along behind him, swung open the great double doors to his room and left her to close them as he walked to his desk. He poured himself wine from an open bottle, filled the glass to the brim and swallowed it swiftly down, grateful for the familiar, comforting warmth as it tracked its way down his throat.

Another glass was poured and another mouthful swallowed as the bird waddled out from some dark corner and rubbed commiserations against his leg. Harlock passed a hand across its downy head and met Miimé's eyes across the dim expanse of the room. She watched him silently, knowing better than to interrupt when he was licking at his wounds. Her pale eyes flickered to his chest and darted just as quickly away – like all her kind she shied away from blood, and pain, and it was still too fresh in his head for her to venture in and test it, even for a moment. It would be a dreamless sleep tonight. And, Harlock thought, knowing what she was thinking, a fast one. If he could just get enough of this wine into him…

Bottle emptied, he slid the jacket from his shoulders and dropped it carelessly to the floor. The weapons belt followed suit, and the shirt that was ruined and brittle with blood. He knew she was still watching him, the cool eyes following his undressing, and maybe sometimes he liked to let her watch, knowing what inevitably came next. He'd come to appreciate the Nibelung version of foreplay – the unblinking gaze, the slow and languorous penetration of his mind, the union of soul that his body was completely helpless to resist. After all these years Miimé could play him like a harp, her delicate pale fingers adept at plucking the hot, hard strings of him into life.

But not now. Not when he felt like fresh shit peeled from the bottom of a boot. 'Miimé,' he said. 'Engage the dark matter drive. Inskip us the hell out of this space.'

'Destination?' she asked, with her back resting against the timber.

'Anywhere.' He reached for a new bottle and cast his gaze around for a corkscrew as he cursed the ancient inventors of cork. 'Somewhere where there's grass,' he told her. 'I don't care what colour.'

Tochiro fluttered along the edges of his consciousness. ((you're not pursuing, then))

'What for,' Harlock replied, sliding a drawer open and sweeping his fingers through the contents.

((i thought you wanted this… dealt with))

'Yeah. Well. Now I want it to go away.' Harlock slammed the drawer shut.

((you can't keep running)) Tochiro brushed a cool electronic sigh across the surface of Harlock's brain. ((you need to deal with it))

Harlock made another useless survey of the surface of the desk. 'She stabbed me.'

((and yet still not the worst thing a woman has ever done to you))

Harlock's glare was wasted in the dim coolness of the room.

((she has a deathshadow)) Tochiro reminded.

'So have I.'

((yes. but is she afraid to use hers))

Harlock's lip twitched. 'Miimé,' he said, because she was still there, watching him from the safety of the doorway, and she knew where the corkscrew was and wasn't telling. 'Take us out.' He didn't wait to see her go. Returned the bottle back unopened to the desk and took his thwarted thirst wearily to the bathroom.

Another scar, he thought as he stood before the mirror, picking soberly at the blood that scabbed around the fresh-knit wound.

((small, compared to the rest))

'But deep,' he replied, abandoning the task as pointless and sliding his pants from his hips.

((does she hate you that much))

Harlock's gaze clouded over at the memory of Ekaterina's venomous lunge for his throat. 'More,' he replied, remembering the deeper wounds Ekaterina had ripped into him with her words.

((you never listen))

Harlock ran the water in the shower and tested it with his outstretched hand.

((you never want to))

'I don't want to now.' Harlock tugged off his eye-patch and stepped beneath the stream of running water. 'I'm tired, Tochiro…'he sighed as the blood sloughed from his body and swirled crimson and dark in the water at his feet. He watched it spiral down the drain, felt Tochiro slide from his brain and leave him suddenly empty. Another hole he had to fill.

Harlock raised his face to the rushing stream. Tilted his head back to let the shower sluice like needles into him – the dead, empty smell of recirculated water, and the dead, empty taste of it as it ran into his mouth. He thought of a day of cold driving rain. The dark sweet smell of it as it sank into peaty earth. The trees bending with the weight of it. The sound of it as it rode in waves across the land. Harlock had tasted a hundred rains on a hundred planets, but nowhere had he found the cool, sweet rain of Earth. He wanted to go home.

It was dark on the bridge, and quiet, and Aristotle's boots made muted scuffing sounds on the pressed metal of the stairs as he tread lightly towards the upper command. Light glowed green ahead of him, cast flickering shadows in the cavernous wastes of the ceiling and sent his own shadow dancing from the heels of his boots.

'You alone here, darlin'?' he asked as he crested the landing, and Miimé turned from the dark matter drive to acknowledge him with the obliqueness of her all-knowing smile. 'It's late,' she said, as though that would explain everything.

'It is,' he agreed, his eyes on the curving arc of the drive as it turned according to the Nibelung's unknown whims. 'It's late and I'm hungry. Maji is arse-deep in metal shavings and Yattaran is playing hard to get and I was looking for a dinner date and I was wondering if maybe the bird was free… you haven't seen him, have you? Assuming he's a him, that is.'

She didn't turn again to look at him, but he imagined she was still smiling.

'We think he's a he,' she said, 'but not even Captain is brave enough to find out.'

Aristotle laughed at that, wondering if Miimé knew she was funny. Or if they even had 'funny' on whatever planet she came from. He hovered at a safe distance, away from the questing tendrils of dark matter that leaked from the generator, and well out of the reach of the fireflies of light that drifted sporadically from her hair.

'Where we headed?' he asked, since she wasn't taking the bait and he was, apparently, going to be eating alone.

She looked at him from the corner of her eye and returned her attention to the orb beneath her fingertips. 'Captain wants grass.'

'Grass, huh.' Aristotle slid his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. 'Grass,' he said again, as though she couldn't have said anything less likely for a man to hear on the bridge of the biggest baddest battleship in this or any sector. 'Um… any particular kind?'

'Captain prefers it green.'

Aristotle rocked forward onto his toes and then back again on his heels. 'Any ideas where we might find this preferably green grass?'

'The ship's computer has made a suggestion.'

'Ship's computer, hey. I suppose you asked it.'

'I didn't need to.'

'No. I s'pose not. I don't ask it things either, and it still does what I didn't ask.'

That made Miimé laugh, and Aristotle decided he liked the high, lilting sweetness of that laugh. He took a step closer to the questing tendrils of dark matter.

'How does that thing work,' he asked, his eyes on the orb that swirled beneath her fingertips. It looked alive to him, responsive to her fingers, solid and yet intangible all at the same time. He fancied he saw clouds on the swirling surface, and landscapes revealed in glimpses beneath them, as though a tiny planet hovered beneath the shifting palms of her hands.

'The dark matter drive uses my consciousness,' she said, 'to move Arcadia from one point to another.'

'I see,' he replied, not even remotely comprehending what she meant, distracted as he was by the movements of her hands and the shifting of her ass behind the shimmering curtain of her hair. 'Only… how can the drive define a fixed point in space using your mind?'

'Nothing is fixed in space, Aristotle, because there is no space. And there is no time. There is only consciousness.' She looked at him, to see if he understood. 'You, and me, everything around us, Arcadia… even the dark matter drive is born from consciousness.'

He looked back at her, knowing she was sharing something profound yet feeling dumber than he ever had in his whole life. 'You telling me the entire universe exists inside your head?'

She raised a hand in answer and created a tiny galaxy made of light – stars and nebulae made of the same stuff as she was. 'Anywhere I want to go, I can find it here.' She lowered her hand and they watched as the stars dissolved away into nothing. 'Existence is an illusion, and the universe around us is merely a fragment of the reality we experience when we dream. We exist in our dreams with the same certainty as we exist in what you call Time and Space – we see, we feel, we love… In our dreams we become unstuck, drifting free of Time and Space.'

'So all of this,' he said, taking his hand from his pocket and waving it expansively around the bridge, 'including me, and everything I see and feel, is just a dream inside your head?'

'Inside our heads, Aristotle – we are all leaves on the same tree.' She turned to face him properly, the scent of him wafting faintly on the air. He smelt good, and clean. He always did. 'Humans dream even more than Nibelung, but they can't control it. They're so clumsy, always falling into the cracks between realities.' She sighed, gently, and shook loose the long waves of her hair. 'I can't explain it,' she said, truthfully. 'Not in your words.'

'Then tell me in your words,' he said, moving closer, risking the sting of the dark matter as it drifted from her body. Words flowed like water from her mouth, crystal sounds that were ancient and beautiful and mesmerising. He closed his eyes to listen, fancied he saw galaxies birthing and dying in the dark space behind his eyes.

'So that's how,' he said, foolishly, when the words had died into silence and his eyes were opened and fixed again on her own. 'Could I do it?'

'Would you like to try?' she asked him slyly, moving aside to let him join her at the orb.

'I don't know…' he replied, not trusting her. Not completely, anyway. He eyed the dark matter drive warily, far from willing to put his tender pink hide in the reach of all those stinging tendrils.

'I'll show you,' she said, reaching for his hand. He let her take it. Let her place it over the swirling orb of moving light.

There was a bang and a flash, and Aristotle wasn't quite sure if all the noise and fireworks were going on inside his head or outside of it. All he knew was that he was flat on his back and that his hand was burning so hard there should have been smoke drifting from his fingertips. Somewhere he could hear laughter, a high and bell-like tinkle, and Miimé leaned down to hover, smiling, in his field of view.

'I'm sorry,' she said, still laughing, because apparently the sight of him flying through the air was funny. Who knew?

'No you're not.' Aristotle grinned up at her, closed his eyes and surrendered to stupidity – not to mention the distinct possibility that his pants were wet.

And was it wrong of him to be so turned on?

Feydar Zone adjusted his glasses on his nose, grateful for their tint, the purple-haze safety of the lenses that protected him from the cruel and disapproving light of the world. Not that Deathshadow's bridge was lit with the fluoroscopic glare of a standard-issue Coalition ship – Zone had made adjustments to Deathshadow 3's systems as soon as he'd come aboard. From the level of the lighting to the temperature of the air, nothing had escaped his megalomaniacal brand of control as he had slowly and methodically automated every operational system from bow to stern. Only the Nibelung construct of the dark matter drive remained beyond his understanding. And his control – for that he needed the dark matter in Ekaterina Komarov's blood, imperfect as the compromise was. And Zone hated imperfection and compromise. Even more than he hated Ekaterina Komarov.

He sat down at the console he had appropriated as his own and scrolled back through images of Arcadia from his remote surveillance at Neo Triton. Harlock's ship no longer bore any resemblance to Deathshadow 4 – well, except for the warp core signature and the beacon that still broadcast her Coalition ident code, and the dark matter that bled from her in vast, detectable waves.

Zone leaned his elbows on the console and pushed his fingers into the dark waves of his hair, squeezing tight on his skull as if to spark his brain into action. How had Harlock done it? This kind of redesign must have taken years. Thousands of man-hours. Thousands of men. Engineers of a skill that Zone could only dream about.

His eyes traced Arcadia's outlines through the tint of his glasses, lingered on the skull that crowned her prow, traced the spine that stretched along her back beneath the faintly scaly skin. No, he realised with belated clarity. She hadn't been re-engineered. Arcadia was organic, of that there was no doubt. A living construct that fairly pulsed with a dark life of its own. But how…? The fingers squeezed harder into his skull. Self-inflicted pain that made him close his eyes and suck in a small breath. Nibelung technology? Perhaps Harlock had found the lost race. Perhaps they had found him. Whatever Harlock's secret, Zone had to have it. Would risk everything for the power it could offer him…

He stiffened, his ears pricking at the faint scuff of a boot on the deck behind him, skin tingling as the air parted around him in a gentle eddy. Stupid bitch, he thought, whirling abruptly from his chair.

'Always with the knives…' Zone slammed the blade out of Ekaterina's hand and sent it clattering to the floor, shoved her back against the bulkhead and pressed his groin against her. 'On what planet does this count as foreplay?'

Ekaterina grinned as she felt him harden against her stomach. 'I can name at least eight,' she said, pushing him roughly away.

Zone smiled tightly at her, removed his glasses and coat and laid them leisurely across the console he'd been working at. 'No doubt you've fucked your way through all eight of them.' He carefully kicked the knife out of her reach. 'God knows you've had plenty of time to do it.'

'Bastard,' she spat, launching at him, unsurprised when he plucked her fist out of the air and spun her on her toes, twisted her arm behind her back and shoved her face-first against the wall.

'Don't stop,' he murmured, reaching around to cup a breast in one hand. 'You know it turns me on.'

'I hate you,' she said as he spun her back around to face him.

'I hate you too.' He unzipped her flight suit and slid it aggressively from her shoulders, inspected the raw skin on her chest, pink and soft and knit well over the blaster wounds. 'It's ugly,' he said, his hands latching roughly onto her exposed breasts.

She leaned her head back and exposed her throat to his mouth. 'I will kill you one day.'

'No. You won't.' Zone brushed his lips across the offered flesh. 'Without me, you can't destroy Harlock.'

'Without me,' she said as his teeth grazed her skin, 'your plan to rebuild the Deathshadow Fleet will fail.'

'So for now,' he kissed her hard on the mouth, his fingers still clutched tight around her breasts, 'we need each other alive.'

'And when I no longer need you,' she said, breaking free of the kiss, 'I'll kill you.'

He grinned. Kissed her again. Held back a groan as her hand snaked its way beneath his belt.

'What did Harlock taste like?' he asked against her lips, and he felt her smile beneath his teeth.

'History.'