Harlock's small group were pinned down again within a couple of hundred yards from the hangar. The corridor they were in came to an abrupt end at one of the deep abyssal shafts that ran the length of the vessel, and the crossing point was guarded by mazone of varying kinds - the doll-like meliae and epimelids. The more protean hamadryads - the integral parts of the vessel's defence system were thankfully absent in this section, which, as he'd suspected from Cleo's description, was older wood, already "dead". However the lack of choking vines wasn't totally welcome, since they'd been replaced by the human mazone - the "corpse flowers", and they - and some of the meliae - were armed with more conventional weapons as well as their natural defences.

'Not averse to adopting human customs when it suits them,' Kei called out from his right side, in between blasts. 'Can't Cleo get some more of her friends to help out here?'

'Busy elsewhere,' he gasped out in a brief lull. 'It's more important that Cleo gets to Rafflesia.'

'Not to me.'

'To them, love - not us. We're just the distraction.'

'And here I was thinkin' we were the heroes,' Sabu panted out from behind them. 'Shit - how the hell do we get out of here? Across that?'

'Problem with heights, Sabu?' Harlock quipped as he let fly with another blast from his dragoon. The crewman huffed at him.

'Huh. I can still beat you up any rock face you care to mention. You always take risky shortcuts and get caught out wriggling around for a hold with yer arse hanging out in the breeze...' The tide of attackers had finally receded and all three leaned against the walls, desperate for a breather.

'As opposed to pedestrian routes that every man and his dog could stroll up? Where's the fun in that?' Harlock waved his sabre in the direction of the arching walkways ahead. 'Trying to run across those whilst being shot at, though…' He sagged against the nearest wall. 'We should move. Now.' Even in armour, Harlock felt bone tired. He pushed himself away from the wall with an effort. 'Let's g-'

A scream cut into whatever he'd been about to say. A child's voice, from high above them. 'Papa!' They looked up to see a small form tumble from one of the walkways high above.

'Wattaru!' Kei would have sprinted right over the edge if Sabu hadn't grabbed her and hauled her back. The three pirates peered up into the dim light of the massive xylem tube they were in.

According to the readings in his visor display, Harlock judged that Wattaru's fall had been arrested by a tangle of old vines a good hundred feet up, in between two of the walkways, close to the wall but nowhere near any opening. 'Hold on!' he called up, using his comms to amplify his voice. 'Wattaru - I'm coming. Just stay very, very still, like I taught you, okay?' Using the zoom on the scanners he tried to evaluate his chances of finding a way up to the boy, and cursed silently when the only option seemed to be via the walls.

'Papa?' the acoustics in the tube carried Wattaru's tired voice to them, barely. 'There's something up here! I think it's climbing down!'

'That's dead space - there's no way to get any of our kind to him.' A group of mazone materialised out of the walls, hands held out in supplication. 'I'm Naia - Cleo sent us. I'm to tell you we have the other boy safe, but we can't get through the walls in there, the structure is already too far gone. I'm sorry.' The gracile, green-skinned figure in the lead bowed her head and then kneeled, her red hair covering her face. The others followed her lead. Harlock and Kei both dropped their helmets and stared at each other in some bemusement.

'Up,' Harlock told them gently. 'No-one kneels to me - nor I to them.' He held out a hand to the leader, who placed her slender fingers on his palm and allowed him to help her to her feet. 'Are you sure? Some of you can send out tendrils...'

'Not on these walls. The only ones of our kind who move in these areas freely are strange creatures, not wholly sentient. They're scavengers - a relic of old times, from the early years of our experimentation with animal forms, when our cells merged with early hominids.'

'Yama…' Kei's voice held a note of censure.

'On it.' He dropped his sabre and pistol to the floor and began to divest himself of cloak and armour. 'Watch our backs, love.'

'Our?' Belatedly she saw Sabu also shedding his armour, stripping down to pants, boots and a sleeveless t-shirt in record time. Under his armour, Harlock was still wearing his black flightsuit. 'You can't just..'

'Can't climb in armour, Kei. And there's no time to lose.' He slipped the cosmo dragoon into its holster, but left the sabre: there was no way in hell he could climb with that dangling between his damn legs...

'But why Sabu? I can…'

'No miss, you can't.' Sabu was a tall, heavy-set man in his early forties, slab-chested and bulky when out of his shell. 'We're the best free-climbers, and if he slips, I've got a better chance of anchoring him.' He checked a pouch tucked deep into his pants pocket and pulled it out with a grin, then handed several small metal objects to his captain. 'The self-firing crammers. We're supposed to keep 'em on hand for boarding actions if we have to EVA, so... But we've only got the boarding cables on the suits to use for belaying…'

'Should be all we need,' Harlock replied quietly. He was already grabbing the thin cable from the containment on his own armour. 'We can use the safety carabiners from the armour. Our belts should hold. Hell - that's what Maji claims - we'll be putting that to the test far sooner than I'd like.'

'But…' Kei's gaze swung frantically between them. 'I should go with you.'

'Kei - you're good, but you haven't put the time in. Just help these ladies keep Rafflesia's mazone off our backs - this is going to be hard enough without being shot at.' He turned to Sabu. 'No time to evaluate this one - what do you think?'

They both stared at the walls of the tube. 'Can't you use that fancy cloak, cap'n?'

'No. It's great for coming down - not so much for getting up. Gets in the way.' He looked wistfully down at his armour, weapons and cloak. 'Kei - I'm counting on you. Keep watch - once we start up, we'll be so focused on our fingertips we'll have no time to watch for an ambush.'

She nodded, just once, and he smiled at her. 'I love you,' he added softly, just loudly enough for her and her alone to hear. Her answering smile was strained and sad. 'And I you, you idiot. Come back safe with him.'

'Depend on it.' With that, he nodded to Sabu, and the two men slipped out of the corridor and onto the walkway, to study the climb ahead of them.

Sabu shook his head and grunted. 'Whaddya think? E2?'

'Closer to an E3,' Harlock replied thoughtfully. 'It's vertical, the surface could be friable, and there's at least one nasty knot up there that will cause us some problems. And we'll need to slide across at about the seventy foot mark. How many of those explosive clamps do we have?'

'Twelve. Can we use 'em on wood?'

'This stuff?' Harlock gave it a thump. 'It's harder than tectite. My worry is that it's not a consistent matrix. What holds in one section might just splinter in another. And I'm not too keen on losing the sight in my good eye… We'll use them sparingly.'

'I'd normally say that's more than we need, but we're gonna have to climb up past Wattaru to that overhang, and that won't be easy to get him and us back up onto a walkway…'

'And nothing between him and us where we can exit this damn tube,' Harlock finished for him.

'And the long drop below us,' Sabu added, peering briefly down into the depths. 'No watery landing here, but the gravity gradient is in our favour at least. I put it about point seven Earth normal?'

'Dad?' Wattaru's voice floated down to them. 'Can you please hurry?'

'We're on the way,' he assured his son. 'Just hang on.' He clipped the cable - a thinner variant of the ones they used on the boarding clamps and to tether crewmen working EVA - to his belt, and let it pay out, to be collected by Sabu. The clamps he placed in his pockets. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly and placed his hand on the wall. 'I just hope this wood holds out… last thing we need is rotten hand or footholds…'

And from there on, his world reduced itself to the few centimetres in front of his nose. Once he was committed to the climb, there was no going back. He could feel the cable shift as Sabu took up the slack. His fingers searched for the smallest handholds. His toes jammed into whatever holds they could find, which often led to him braced in awkward positions as he transitioned from one hold to another. Twenty feet up he had to use the first clamp - a small pfft as the tiny charge rammed it into position, shooting a custom-designed crimp into the surface. He clipped the cable to it and tested it carefully. With Sabu belaying him, the climb wasn't the worst he'd undertaken, but as he'd suggested, the difference between rock and wood was huge. The surface was smooth in places, making it hard even for Maji's hi-tech gloves and boots to grip. Where it wasn't, the bark-like surface had a tendency to crumble.

Forty feet up, he slipped as his left foot and right hand slipped from their tiny ledges, leaving him dangling awkwardly by his fingertips with only his toes resting on an even tinier outcrop. He swung back to the wall, making contact and finding his fingerhold, but not before his knee twisted and slammed into the side. It took him a few seconds to refocus once the wave of nausea inducing pain passed. 'Son of a bitch…' The cable wobbled as Sabu began his climb behind him.

'You okay, cap'n?'

'Fine.' He ground out from between gritted teeth. 'Watch yourself here. I'll stick another cramp in.'

A blasterbolt whizzed passed a few seconds later, followed by an unearthly shriek. A small figure wreathed in blue flames fell past.

'Sorry!' Kei's voice buzzed in his ear. 'They're starting to swarm up there. Can you hurry it up?'

'Hurry, she says…' Harlock reached for another hold. Grip. Test. Shift. Grip. Reach. Grip. Test. Hold.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

He reached the tangle of roots and lianas Wattaru had landed in without further incident, but once there, the next problem presented itself. 'Wattaru - stay still.' As he'd taught his sons, the boy stilled his instinct to scramble over towards him, and wide eyes stared into his.

'Dad?'

'I can't come in there to get you - there's no way it'll hold my weight.' He used another crimp, holding his breath in anticipation until he was sure the device would hold, and the matrix it was embedded in would not give way. 'Sabu - I'm going to have to go above onto the walkway. Can you get Wattaru on your back?'

'Sure thing, cap'n.'

'Harlock?' Kei's voice was showing signs of her fraying at the seams, wavering in pitch.

'It's fine, Kei. I need to get above them, then Sabu can hand Wattaru off to me.'

'You've got company…'

He didn't look up. He didn't have to. Given how long it had taken them to make the climb the problem was never going to be "will they have a reception party waiting?" but "how many will attend?". He smiled at Wattaru, who assayed a teary, fleeting reply, and then thumbed the commlink on his collar. 'I know some of you can understand me - and I'm betting those who do can relay my intent to the rest: I'm coming up there, now, and when I do I expect to take my son and walk away. You know who I am, you know what I can do - and you should realise by now there isn't much I won't do if you stand in my way.' He didn't raise his voice, but between his natural ability to deliver, and the augmentation, it carried. 'Your leaders have put you on a course for destruction. You don't have to let it happen. But kill me here, now, and nothing will stop that.' Only then, as the last note faded, did he look up, to see dozens of ancient, black pools staring back at him.

Then as one, they melted away, out of his line of sight.

'It could be a trap…' Kei muttered into his earpiece. He didn't have time to answer, as he was already reaching for the next finger-tip wide crevice.

'If it is, someone's in for a world of hurt,' he replied as he hauled himself up and over onto the narrow walkway. The obligatory ungainly wiggle to get his legs over the edge left him panting and staring up into a featureless green crotch. 'Huh.'

Black eyes stared into his, the face they belonged to surprisingly good at emulating a look of bemused curiosity. 'You don't look that fearsome,' the mazone intoned in a bell-like monotone. The half dozen of her clade standing behind her giggled with the same musical tone; high-pitched and bright.

'Give me a moment,' he replied dryly as he got to his feet. 'I'll try and make my next entrance a little more impressive.' He spared a glance down to see Sabu closing in on the little knot where Wattaru waited. 'Sabu?'

'Almost, captain!' Sabu heaved his bulky form closer to the knot where Wataru waited, with more finesse than his slighter captain managed. He had always been far more flexible than his muscular shape suggested - onlookers tended to think of him as a bit of a lumberer, but the man - whilst not the sharpest tool in the box, as Ali often unfairly called him - was a lot fitter and more acrobatic than he looked. A former Gaia Fleet marine wouldn't have lasted long in combat if he wasn't fast and flexible. 'Slowly, Wattie, and careful, okay?'

In hindsight and with the burden of almost ten years of experience, Harlock should have known that "slowly" and "carefully" weren't in the younger twin's vocabulary. Wattaru, in his trademark fashion, flung himself at Sabu with predictable results. His actions shifted the already precarious knot of growth just enough to make it pull away from the wall of the xylem tube, and it crumbled underneath him just before he reached Sabu's outstretched hand…

...which reached out and grabbed him by the waist, hauling him in close as the twisted mass fell into the abyss below, and Sabu hung from the cable, coaxing Wattaru's arms around his neck, before grabbing the cable with both hands and hauling himself and the boy to the safety of the walkway, aided by Harlock, who tried to hide the fact that his son had almost scared another ten years off his life with that stunt. He lifted Wattaru from Sabu's broad shoulders, and let the crewman haul himself onto the platform, letting him find his own handholds, but ready to offer a steadying hand if needed. Then whilst his crewman got to his feet, he gathered his son to him.

'I swear,' Harlock said fervently as he held Wattaru crushed to his chest, 'that you are responsible for more grey hairs than the rest of them put together...' He pushed a tearful Wattaru away gently so he could look into his eyes. 'You always rush into things without thinking first. How many times do I need to tell you that?'

Hiccup.

Harlock ruffled his hair. 'Are you hurt?' Wattaru shook his head emphatically.

'Just bumped a bit. Papa - is Mamoru…?'

'He's fine. Probably just as worried about you and Taro. And Nami's on board as well - she's been kicking up a storm about you.'

'I'm sorry…'

Harlock hugged him close again. 'Don't be. You did nothing wrong. If anyone should be apologising, it's me. I thought you were safe where you were, and I underestimated just how badly someone might want to use you to get to me.' He looked up to Sabu, standing panting over them both. 'Thank you,' he added softly. The big pirate waved it off with a grin.

'Anytime, cap'n.' He ruffled Wattaru's hair and grinned down at him. 'And you… next time I get you on a wall we're gonna have a long talk about doing what yer told, kiddo.'

'Sorry, Sabu.' Wattaru hung his head. A large finger tipped his head back up.

'Oi! None of that now. But yer dad and me won't always be there.' Sabu glanced at the gaggle of mazone nearby and looked down at his captain. 'Are they gonna give us any trouble?' he asked darkly, his hand straying to his pistol. A small dark, spiky-skinned creature that looked like a large baby crawled out from between two of the more human-form mazone, and he took a slight step backwards as its black eyes stared at him. 'Holy…'

One of the mazone urged it back, and another picked it up. 'They're just curious,' the leader said in a stilted accent.

'One of them pushed me!' Wattaru declaimed petulantly. 'That's why I fell!'

'They… thought you were like us. Formless. We are part of the ship… we… would have become part of it again. It's… a … game?' She knelt in front of Harlock. 'The soldiers… they meant harm. But not these. But if you wish to punish…'

'Not needlessly,' Harlock replied. He held out a hand and she accepted the gesture after a hesitation, moving easily to her feet. 'They do have another of my boys though, and I want him back.'

'Here!' Taro appeared in the entrance at the edge of the walkway, and waved. 'Tessius' people found me again. Cleo's on her way to the nemeton, and all hell's breaking loose back there!' He hesitated for a moment then ran full pelt at Harlock, who sank to one knee to field his adopted son, and hugged him tightly. 'Papa!' then 'Is mom here? Uncle Ali? What about Mamoru? Are Nami, Dai and Rei okay? Kanna?'

Harlock laughed. 'Always talking nineteen to the dozen. Yes, yes, and yes to all. Now give me a moment, you two - your mother needs to get up here and then we have a queen to have a long, intense talk with…'

'You want me to get these guys back to the hangar?' Sabu asked. 'Probably safer…'

'If the mazone will guide you?' The leader of the small group nodded. 'Keep them safe, Sabu.'

'With my life, sir.'

'Papa!'

'Daaaad….'

Harlock knelt in front of the pair - Wattaru - himself in miniature, and Taro - a distant descendent of the Arcadia's builder and guiding light. 'I can't keep you safe and finish what has started here. Your mother and I need to stop something as bad as Harlock's attempt to reset the universe, and we can't do that if we're worried about you two.' He smiled down at them. 'Besides, you two need to keep Sabu safe for me, right?'

Both rolled their eyes at him. 'You were doing so well up to then,' Wattaru told him with all the exasperated world-weariness a boy not quite ten could muster in the face of patronising parents. 'What you really mean is you and mom might need to do bad things to bad people and you don't want us to see it.'

'I'd rather they didn't even think it,' Kei muttered in Harlock's earpiece as he watched Sabu guide them away into the mazone vessel interior. He had to fight the urge to run after them; the temptation to just take them and head back for the Arcadia had never been stronger.

'Your brains and my looks - what did you expect?' he quipped, in an attempt to distract them both. It earned him a stern harrumph. 'I'll join up with Ben - about time we finished this, don't you think? Where are you?'

'About two levels down apparently, according to Naia. You need to go down one and head along the long axis. Cleo's people have bottlenecked the hostiles not far from this nemeton they talk about - might be why we've not met with much resistance so far?'

'Darling, they can walk through walls. I don't think blocking corridors works,' he replied dryly. 'Ben?'

'Almost there!' Sounds of blasterfire could be heard in the background, along with what sounded suspiciously like a certain blood-relative of Harlock screaming "take that, bitches!' Harlock could almost hear the pained wince from his bridge officer. 'I should have brought a damn sword to this fight!'

'Kei and I are on our way. Just hold your position for now.'

'Well if that idiot cousin of yours didn't keep advancing every five minutes, that might be easier.' More fire, more cursing, this time from Ben. 'Get. Your. Slimy. Green. Tentacles. Off. My. Ass!'

'Actually they're closer to scandent lianas,' Harlock murmured, forgetting he had the mike still on.

'I don't fucking care about the botantical taxonomy, Harlock - right now it's a fucking tentacle trying to insert itself into places I'd normally need at least a few drinks bought for me to consider. Get your arse down here and bring a bloody weed-whacker!'


In a lull between attacks, Daiba brushed his sweaty hair out his eyes and stared wide-eyed at Ben. The blue-skinned pirate was chopping one of the creeping vines that had erupted from the side walls into kindling. 'Did you just tell your captain to haul ass?'

Ben looked up at him, breathing heavily. Bits of greenery still trailed from his hardsuit, dripping sap onto the floor. He leaned on his battleaxe. 'I might have kind of sorta forgotten the pecking order in the heat of the moment,' he admitted with a self-deprecating laugh. 'But seriously, he does have a tendency to get a bit caught up in the details…'

'Scientist,' Daiba pointed out. 'Runs in the family. He never wanted to be a soldier,' he continued.

Ben laughed. 'Hate to break it to you kid, but he still isn't.' He stuck his head around the nearby entrance to one of the side chambers, where Cleo and a handful of what he'd started to think of as her ladies-in-waiting were gathered. 'How much further?'

'Maybe two, three hundred paces,' Cleo replied softly. 'But there will be more resistance around and inside the nemeton itself.'

'Wonderful,' Ben muttered as he pulled his head back. 'You heard that? Good. Now bloody well pace yourself more - even in powered armour this stuff gets harder as you go on. You will start to feel it if you overdo it.'

Daiba glared at him from under his fringe, but the glare was water off a duck's back to the young gamilan. 'Shouldn't we get moving?'

'Why?'

'Because they know we're here?'

'They know where we're going as well, kiddo. We wait for the captain and Kei. Might as well be here as further on. Won't make any difference.' He looked around at the carnage - bits of plant - mazone - matter that didn't go up in flames littered the floor, and splattered the walls, floor and ceiling. Large gashes and scorch marks from their weapons marred the surfaces, where they'd had to hack at mazone emerging from every surface. The partly humanoid types had given him some pause to start with - he'd never been one to enjoy fighting women, even the ones sent to kill him, but far creepier were the totally inhuman lifeforms that pulled themselves out of the fabric of the ship and tried to wrap themselves around their prey, or to envelop them with grasping, writhing vines whilst trying to strangle them or pull them limb from limb. 'Damn creepy, fighting the ship as well,' he muttered. 'Now I know why that red-head back on the Arcadia was freaking out. Living ships, huh? Must have given her fond memories of home…'

'Legends and myths,' Cleo said from under his left ear. She'd taken the opportunity afforded them by the brief respite to join them. 'Shizuka grew up amongst the humans - our vessels would have been stories to her - but always with a dark edge. We made sure those who lived amongst you were going to be far more afraid of what would happen to them should they fail us.'

Ben snorted. 'Well isn't that nice? And I thought a couple of my nannies were a bit heavy handed on the bed-time stories of what daddy would do if I misbehaved…' He looked around and sighed. 'However… I'm thinking there wasn't a lot of exaggeration in those stories?'

'No.'

'Yeah. Never good when you find that out the hard way…' He leaned against the wall, after checking it carefully, ostensibly relaxing but constantly scanning the corridor. Daiba took his cue from the older man, but with less relaxing.

'Where are you from?' Cleo asked. 'Who are you?'

'Gamilas - in the Greater Magellanic cloud. My people emigrated very early on from Earth, and futzed around with their DNA - one of a group of self declared "elites" that thought way too highly of themselves. Most of them look a little different from the norm - one lot gave themselves pointy ears for crying out loud. Another bunch are green and have serious issues with facial hair.'

Daiba sniggered at that.

'Hey - they're our mortal enemies,' Ben told him. 'Don't ever underestimate a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle. As to the "who" - well, that depends on who you talk to.'

'I rather thought I was talking to you…' she replied tartly.

He looked down at her and smiled fondly. 'Just a drifter, lady. A long, long way from home…'

Daiba, from his position leaning against his own piece of wall, bit back another snigger. 'Oh brother… you two should just get a room,' he muttered. He straightened as he heard footsteps pounding towards them, then relaxed as he remembered the mazone didn't wear heavy mag-boots. Sure enough, Kei and Harlock jogged out of a side-tunnel, a small swarm of diaphanously clad nymphs in their wake who greeted Cleo with delightful squeals that set Daiba's teeth on edge. 'Like a gaggle of schoolgirls,' he muttered as Harlock drew near.

'Giving you horrendous flashbacks to your school days as well?' Harlock twitted him as he greeted Ben with a nod. 'Sabu's back on board the bullet with the boys. Cai's stable so Ali's taking off back to Arcadia - seems the fleet is still keeping its distance - for now.' He turned to Cleo. 'They're waiting for something… would that be you?'

'The group mind is resisting Rafflesia. She has direct control over most of the military, but even they are part of the whole. When she had Tessius executed many of the older mazone - the stronger minds that guide the group mind - began to question her rule. There's an impasse, however. Neither side has an advantage in terms of influence, so the civilian fleet refuses to obey, and the military fleet refuses to compel them. For now, the Arcadia is safe from attack.'

'Which could change at any time?' Kei shot Harlock a worried glance.

He shrugged, although she knew him well enough to know the nonchalant gesture was mostly a front. 'We're not the problem. The other mazone fleets are facing resistance that won't be quite so accommodating. If they fail to defend themselves, Hoshino and Leopard are not likely to hold back. Those two idiots will open fire.'

Cleo trembled, and Ben laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. 'Oki?'

'He won't attack unless fired upon. Same with Hannibal's people heading up the other task force Selen assembled. None of them have engaged yet, so I suggest we sort this out, now - once and for all.'

'I quite agree.'

Daiba's shot went wide of Cassandra's head only because Kei slapped his arm as he turned and fired. 'Mine!' she snarled. More quietly she added 'Good reflexes, though. No-one else heard her coming.' She turned her attention to the mazone commander. Several of the mazone soldiers were still pulling themselves free of the walls in a particularly creepy fashion that made her skin crawl. First the whorls and lines resolved into the basic outline, then more features became visible as the creatures first became 3-d reliefs on the wall, and then pulled free of it like taffy, until they stood naked in front of the small group. 'Why don't you face me without your harem?' Kei called out in her most challenging tone. 'Or do you only attack when the numbers favour you?'

Cassandra shrugged in a surprisingly human manner, although the gesture went no further than her shoulders - the small breasts didn't move at all, as though they were just moulded from her body. Then she waved back her soldiers. 'If you insist.' She made a show of looking Kei up and down. 'It is time, I think, we sent a message to your kind - and to you,' she added, with a pointed sneer in Harlock's direction. 'Or will you simply open fire?'

He stepped back without a word, allowing Kei to take point, and reholstered the pistol he'd drawn. None of them, looking at his face, could read it, but his attention was wholly on Kei as she stepped towards the mazone commander.


Kei faced Cassandra and felt the anger she'd been bottling up for weeks drift away, leaving a cold, calm void in its place. Very carefully, she placed Harlock's gravity cloak on the ground and just as calmly placed her blasters on top of it.

'Kei…' Harlock's voice was soft and low, with just a hint of concern.

'Just let me have your sabre,' she replied, very quietly. 'I have this.'

'Just shoot her and have done with it. Or let me do it.'

She shook her head. 'Not this time, love. I said I'd rip the bitch to pieces, and I meant it.'

Cassandra sneered. 'Brave words.'

'Shut up. I'm not talking to you.' Kei turned to face Harlock. 'Sabre - or I'll just have to tear her apart with my bare hands.' Inside, in that cold, dark void lit only by pale, cool blue flames, she could almost hear a familiar voice. For fuck's sake girl, don't forget what I taught you…

A faint blue spark passed from Harlock to her as she took the weapon he handed her silently. Or maybe it was from the weapon to her hand. Just a faint flicker of blue flame.

Impossible… it's not even the same weapon…

...but it does have some of the same parts

Whilst you're on board my ship you're one of my crew… Words from long ago, and a different life. 'Just don't get in my way,' she whispered. Harlock nodded and took a step back, keeping his good eye on the mazone warrior, and a hand on his cosmo dragoon.

Blue flamesand dark matter...

She smiled, flicked the power switch to "on" and took up an open stance, inviting the mazone to attack.


'Are you just going to stand there and let her do this?' Daiba tugged on Harlock's sleeve to get his attention, which didn't waver from the scene in front of them, as Kei slashed at the tendrils the mazone sent in her direction, and dodged others aimed above her head. In the nibelung armour she sacrificed some of her natural grace and speed for power, but Kei had trained in the Valkyrie suit almost daily for over twenty years, and the trade-off was negligible. There was, Harlock knew, only one person who could equal her skill in the armour - and that was the man who'd trained her.

But not against plant-based lifeforms with abilities no human opponent had ever displayed. No training could compensate for the speed, ferocity and multiplicity of attacks Cassandra launched at Kei, who despite her training, skill and drive, was, it seemed, outmatched.

One sword - no matter how fast the user, could be in seven places at once, and Cassandra was uncoiling her human form and sending wave after wave of green tentacles at her. Kei could barely block half of them in one parry, and dodge maybe two or three at most of the rest. Only her armour saved her from the attacks that landed, her speed and the armour's strength barely enough to prevent the mazone getting a stranglehold on an arm or a leg. And sooner or later, Kei would slow down…

'If she looks like she's going down,' he told Daiba, sub-vocalising over his mike, not the main commlink, 'then shoot the thing. Centre mass.'

'But…'

He ignored the minor protest, and the what-the-fuck look Ben was trying to give him from across the chamber. His attention was on the mazone. Cassandra had abandoned any attempt to keep up the pretense of being "human". The creature now facing Kei still had a nominally humanoid form - although the facial features, once her concentration slipped, actually more closely resembled those of the nibelung race - but her arms and legs were now trunks made up of multiple, entwined vines of varying thickness, all of which she could flick out in the direction of her enemy, uncurling in flight like a time-lapse of a bramble or trailing clematis searching for something to cling to. Likewise her hair, made of thinner, blood-red tendrils which writhed with a life of their own rather like the snake-like locks of Medusa of legend. These even seemed to have small, toothless mouths at the tip, and one, when it landed on Kei's exposed cheek, left a lamprey-like bloodied bruise behind when Kei pulled free.

He took an involuntary step towards her only to stop when she simply raised her left hand to warn him off. The mass moving in front of her now bore no resemblance at all to anything human - it was a nightmarish thicket of thorns and vines, moving of its own volition, a multitude of appendages and tendrils trying to subdue Kei's armoured form.

And before this onslaught, Kei began to retreat. One step at a time, she backed away, keeping the gravity sabre in play, but now only parrying the attacks. Pieces of the amorphous mass flew through the air, crumbling to ash in wisps of blue flame before they hit the deck.

The "edge" of the sabre now trailed a faint blue flame of its own, something Harlock hadn't seen in years, and then only when using it on board the Arcadia or (briefly) her sister-ship, the plague-bearing Apollyon.

Dark matter.

He looked down, and realised where Kei was leading the creature. Slowly, quietly, he began to unholster his cosmo dragoon, as Kei lured it with a careful pretence of finally being worn down and forced to simply defend herself.

One step.

Two steps.

Kei parried, stumbled, and dropped to the floor. With a triumphant shriek the creature moved towards her, a flashing tangle of fleshy green and red tentacles….

Directly over the gravity cloak she'd laid on the floor earlier.

Her bladed flashed out, and then down as she used the powered armour to move back to her feet and stab the mass through the writhing tangle - hitting the still-solid centre mass and pinning it to the cloak. Blue fire ran down the blade, and up from the black and red leather pool on the floor. Harlock grabbed Kei with one outstretched hand and pulled her away from the cold conflagration. With the other hand he jammed the cosmo dragoon into the mass and fired.

The ear-splitting screech the thing that had once been Cassandra emitted caused them all to flinch and drop whatever they held to cover their ears, and they all had to turn away from the bright flash of blue that lit up the tunnel.

Then silence, and the return of the pallid green light of the mazone ship's interior. Cleo was the first to step forwards, over the pile of ash that started to blow away in the gentle swish of air caused by her passing, and past the blade still standing at an angle in the large pile of black leather. Harlock let go of Kei's arm and gave her a reassuring smile before stepping towards the small mazone woman, and stood at her side.

As one, the mazone soldiers who'd waited, on their commander's orders, dropped to one knee in front of them and bowed their heads.

Behind them the green light in the ship grew brighter. A voice called out from inside it, or behind it. Just one short phrase, in a deep contralto.

Let us finish this.