'So you're some hotshot rockhound or something?'

'Or something,' I grunted in reply to Yattaran's question. After Franz had left me to the first mate's tender mercies, I'd found out that the fat slob was actually a first class brain - probably almost as smart as I was, in his own field. Or fields. That overlong belt it seemed buckled up over several PhDs, or so I learned. What had driven him into a life of piracy however I'd not managed to prise out of him. On any other subject though, he had a very real case of verbal diarrhoea… Also - I'd figured him for being a lot older than he really was - he was actually the same age as me. Guess you had to put that down to just not taking care of himself…

But right now his lips were flapping somewhere in the vicinity of my right ear as I tried to navigate the labyrinthine screens of the Arcadia's main sensor console. 'Could you just shut the ever-loving fuck up whilst I'm working?' I growled at him. He just beamed at me with that stupid-ass grin.

'You not interested in the dark matter engine?' he asked.

'Will the ship stop flying if I have no real understanding of how it works?'

'Well… no… but…'

'Then I don't care. It flys. It gets places fast without killing the crew or violating the laws of space-time, in short, it works. For all I care we could be sitting on a dragon for all the difference it would make to my life, right?'

'But…'

'Yattaran - I ain't an engineer. I couldn't give a toss about physics unless it pertains to my own branch of expertise. I'm not a pilot either, except in as much as I like to climb inside a vehicle, switch it on, and get from A to B with a minimum amount of fuss. And as long as all the working parts do what they're supposed to, and folks like you can keep it that way, that's really as much as I ever need to know about it.'

He slunk off then, and if he'd been a trog he'd probably have had his tail between his legs. I got the feeling he loved to show off how much he knew about the workings of the ship to newbies - but I had another one that looked around at the baroque, fantasy artist's wet dream that was the dark matter engine at the rear of the bridge, arcing overhead like some nightmarish bastard hybrid of a water wheel and an ancient cathedral organ, and thought to myself that he probably didn't know half as much about it as he thought he did…

'If you absolutely have to place it in that general area, it's not as bad as it might be, but you need a way to bury it underground,' I told Harlock a few hours later. 'And from the dimensions Yattaran gave me, transporting this thing underground into place isn't an option. You'll need to get it into place fast, because…'

'Vehicles don't last very long in that wind.' He stared out through that leaded window at the dirty yellow planet outside. 'I spent weeks on that ball - under it - as a prisoner a few years before the war kicked off. A Doppler Corp operation using slave labour for mining…'

'Nothing changes,' I replied coldly. He glanced back at me, and nodded, just the once. He got it.

'What do you suggest?'

'The guns on this ship… pretty powerful, right?'

A nod.

'So we need to drill a hole - deep enough to get your doodad out of the wind to avoid being sandblasted. Then you'll need to wait until it cools and fly it down - shields on your workboat will hold for a few minutes, right?'

'Longer,' he told me, staring thoughtfully at the 3-D holo I'd put together to demonstrate, that hovered just above his desk. 'If I fly the Arcadia down to a point where we can just drop it from the back hangar…'

I must have looked at him as though he'd gone crazy. 'You told me you knew how bad those winds are - do you really want sand blown right up your ship's buttcrack?'

That one almost got me a smile. Almost. 'The dark matter shield around the ship will protect it. Nothing gets through that. I can place the ship over the borehole and we'll have plenty of time to place the oscillator and set it.

'Oscillator.' I said it flatly, hoping I'd heard wrong.

'Yes. Did I not say?' Oh… butter would not melt inside that mouth that was anything but innocent.

'Dimensional oscillators?'

'Yes.'

I almost choked on my own spit. 'I thought they were outlawed…' He just looked at me pityingly. Yeah. What the hell did that mean to an outlaw? 'Designed to remove "impediments" to spatial routes, though I heard tales that some munitions raids put them in the hands of some less than savoury types during the War, and "impediments" could mean planets or fleets.'

'You old friend Hechi made good use of them,' he said coldly. His reflection in the window wasn't very clear but I was all of a sudden glad I wasn't looking into his face for real right then. Raised the hairs on the back of my neck, the look on it did. I shivered slightly, although the room was quite comfortable.

'You mean his dad…'

'No.' His voice was so quiet, I had to strain to hear it. And cold. Cold like space. 'It's the same man. Trust me.'

'Well, you've aged a shitload better than he has,' I told him glibly.

He ignored that.

'Is it a bright idea to leave stuff lying around there for Doppler to pick up, then,' I asked. I thought back to his earlier question vis a vis dimensional oscillators. 'Wait… that's not a smart plan…'

'Just like Con,' he replied dryly. 'He never sugar coated it either. I've got ways of cloaking the things. That was never the problem.'

'What size are we talking?'

He turned back to the desk, and showed me the specs on the inlaid screen. I scratched my left sideburn. 'Huh. You can't move that around on a flatbed…'

'There's a workboat, but you're right - we have to set it down in place.'

'How specific?'

'Not too close to that caldera, thankfully. But it does need to be within about 200 miles radius…'

I pulled a face at him. 'You don't do things the easy way, do you.' I stared again at the specs. 'What do you plan to do with it - finish off the damn planet?'

He sighed. 'Tempting. Not exactly. Otherwise I could just drop it from orbit and blow it.'

Fair point… but he was speaking again. 'It needs to stay protected for at least another ten years. That's how long…'

'How long it will take to place the rest of them.' The ghostly Nibelung had entered the room, gliding gracefully up to the desk where she snagged both a silver-chased goblet and a decanter, and filled the glass to the brim.

'Rest of them?' I probably looked suitably baffled. 'What the hell are you up to? Even one of these things in the wrong place…' The scenarios running through my head were numerous and none of them ended happily for me. I suddenly wondered what the hell I'd gotten into this time. What did I even know about this pirate? The Gaia Sanction wanted his head on a platter, for treason and other crimes - the man was considered a terrorist, although I'd never heard anyone explain exactly why, and what he'd done to earn the price on his head…

Mimay stared at me, those big beautiful - if slightly creepy - round eyes - seeming to stare right through me. 'Humanity is scattered across the galaxy,' she said sadly. 'And you're dying, as a species, with no way home….'

'So what,' Harlock broke in, his soft voice sounding a harsh counterpoint to her delicate contralto, 'if we could do something about it? Unshackle the Nodes of Time and give us all a second chance. To undo the damage we've done and start again…'

OK. I'd heard crazier shit in my time, but for some strange reason, I was listening. Maybe it was the way he looked me in the eye as he spoke, and something familiar was reflected in that solitary orb of his. Something I saw when I stared into the mirror after a bad night… 'Go on…'

'We're dying out here, Jones. By inches. Birth rates are down on every planet. Some worlds are looking for means of sustaining life that are worse than the problem they aim to cure - enforced mechanisation, cloning - there are even reports of body-stealing using the same tech. What's left of humanity is cannibalising its own decaying corpse and in a few years - maybe before the end of the century - there won't be anything of us left that's worth saving. This is what we've come to - clinging onto life on the ragged edge, losing what makes us human. In a few years - a couple of decades at most, all that will be left are cyborgs and parasites.

We long for our homeland, all the more when we can't return. Earth can't support us if we go back, it's too late for that. But there is hope, however small…'

'Time travel.' I said it flatly, but sceptical. He lifted and dropped one shoulder.

'Not exactly. The Nibelung know more about this than we do - their legends claim they survived the previous Big Crunch and expansion, after all.'

'Time,' Mimay said in her soft voice, 'Is not truly linear. It just appears that way. And the arrow of time is not one-way. It is consciousness that makes it appear so. Think of Time as a series of rings, linked, but separate. To those on the ring the curve appears straight, and they cannot see the other rings. But the energy required for living beings to move against our perception of the arrow of time on those rings - or between them - is immense. The universe fights it. There are nodes - think of them as those places where the Rings of Time meet - that bind space-time to that stream of consciousness. Where they meet, consciousness ceases to be discrete… the universe pivots around them… so if we unshackle those nodes, and free the universe - just for a moment - from linear time…'

'The wheel could turn in a different way that would give us that second chance …' Harlock finished for her. The look she gave him suggested he hadn't quite grasped it - I knew I sodding well didn't - but she said nothing.

I had the feeling here he didn't just mean humanity as a whole. The look that crossed his face was an unbearable longing… there was an old, deep hurt buried under the reserve in this man, so much sorrow I felt as though I could reach out and touch it. But then… he'd lived through the Homecoming War, hadn't he? What would that be like, to remember? He'd fought in it, so how many deaths were on his hands? What nightmares kept him up at night? By comparison, my regrets were a drop in the ocean of blood he must see every night…

I'd known a lot of vets in my admittedly much shorter life. A lot of them ended up drifting from one lousy, dangerous, badly paid job to the next, burnt out, cast out, nothing left to live for.

They had the same look in their eyes as Harlock.

But… he'd kept going, hadn't he? Survived everything the War had thrown at him (and don't think too hard about this crazy-ass organic ship…) and kept on fighting. Thankless. Hated. Hunted… And yet here he was, still trying to come up with some kind of answer when everyone else - me included, if I was honest - just plodded through their banal, meaningless lives that in the end amounted to nothing more than the little dash between two dates on a block of metamorphic rock.

But… 'What good's a do-over if you just risk making the same mistakes all over again? I mean - would we remember?'

'Maybe. In all honesty, I don't know - although I'd prefer not to, myself. Look at it this way - when you're already at rock bottom, what have you got to lose on a last crazy roll of the dice? The multiverse theory suggests at worst, the infinitesimal decisions we make along one ring of time can never be exactly duplicated, so there's a pretty good chance that next time we'll get it right.'

'There's also a horrible chance it'll be even worse,' I pointed out, not unreasonably. 'Having entrusted yourself to Fortune's dominion, you must conform to your mistress's ways. What, are you trying to halt the motion of her whirling wheel? Dimmest of fools that you are, you must realise that if the wheel stops turning, it ceases to be the course of chance…'

'I know the manifold deceits of that monstrous lady, Fortune; in particular, her fawning friendship with those whom she intends to cheat, until the moment when she unexpectedly abandons them, and leaves them reeling in agony beyond endurance,' he quoted bitterly. 'You aren't the only man who's had a classical education. Better to do something than nothing,' he continued quietly. 'The Gaia Sanction are content to just sit on their well-upholstered arses and do nothing, letting the rest of humanity turn on each other. Every word they spout is a lie, designed to keep humanity complacent and in thrall to an illusion they can never touch. I have to do something…'

The passion in his voice, combined with that blazing eye, the sheer intensity of his body language as he spoke… Oh man, it was compelling. I wanted to believe… 'At least you didn't one-up me by quoting Boethius in latin…'

He let out a self-deprecating little laugh. The tension in the room subsided noticeably. 'Touché. Well, if I'm wrong I've still got plenty of time to figure that out.'

'And if I help you and you are wrong?'

He shrugged. 'Well Dis is one planet that won't be missed…' I couldn't help myself; I laughed. 'What?'

'Dis is one…' I shook my head. 'You know what? Nevermind.'

'Will you help?'

I thought about it. And he just watched me, waiting. Damn me, but he sounded so sincere… the passion in his voice when he spoke about giving us a second chance… When had I last heard anyone care so much about anything? Let alone anything outside where the next paycheck or meal was coming from?

And let's face it. If I refused, he'd drop me off at the next planet we came to anyways, and do it anyway… Time to man up, Jones, and decide if you're part of the problem or part of the solution… And yes, there was a very big part of me that wished I could have a do-over. Reset to saved game, make better choices…

I nodded.

'Good. Get your ass over to the bridge and zap me that borehole. Then I'll meet you in the hangar deck in half an hour - get Maji to sort out an environment suit; the armour will be useless down there.'

'You're going down with me?'

He regarded me solemnly with that dark brown eye. 'Problem?'

'No…' I felt my way carefully through my words. Unusual for me, I know… 'But - you're the captain…'

'I'd never ask a man to do something I wouldn't,' he told me softly. 'And besides, this one's a little personal…'

I remembered what he'd said about being a prisoner there. And what I knew about Doppler Corp practices. Yeah. I understood where he was coming from all right. 'Pity you can't shove one of those bombs into orbit around Shaitan,' I muttered.

He grinned nastily. 'What makes you think I didn't?' My answering grin must have been equally nasty, because he did smile, however briefly, back at me, and my heterosexuality tapped my on the shoulder and asked for a time-out. 'Suit up, Ali. Whilst those ships of Doppler's can't do us any damage, I'd prefer not to have anyone nosing around at what we're doing here.'

I sauntered out as coolly as I could, my hands in my pockets because I couldn't figure out whether I needed to salute, shake hands or just go with a manly, stoic nod. But he didn't call me back to chew me a new one for not being respectful, so I guessed he wasn't a stickler for military regs.

What he was was a fuckin' lunatic behind the controls. I got that flying through the planet-sized shotblaster that was Dis' never-ending sandstorms was tricky even partially shielded by the roiling black cloud that surrounded Arcadia - I'd barely made it down in one piece meself earlier - but dear gods, the man had no sense of self-preservation. Even strapped into the co-pilot's seat I was still clinging to the dash and praying silently to any and all gods that might be listening that we'd get down in one piece. 'Facilis descensus Averno my arse…' I muttered as I clung to the dashboard so tightly I almost lost the feeling in my fingertips.

'Relax,' my insane new captain told me. 'Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est…' I glared at him and was greeted by that winsome, mischievous smirk again. I wondered if that beautiful mouth had ever recited Catullus, and had to conclude that had to be an unqualified "hell yes". He looked the type.

'I haven't crashed a vehicle in over a hundred years…'

'How many before that?' I asked snarkily, because to me that sounded a tad too specific.

'Five spaceships, twelve fighters, 4 motorbikes, two aircars and a nasty fall off a horse when my mount decided I had no right to rope him into a stupid bet as to who could clear a six foot six triple bar…' He said smoothly, as he bounced the little workboat around in the lower atmosphere. Okay… okay… I know, he was fighting the controls, but did he have to do it at that insane speed? Unlike him, I wasn't apparently immortal. 'To be fair,' he continued, as though he'd noticed I didn't find his revelation reassuring, 'I was a test pilot…'

'For motorbikes and unfortunate horses?'

'Oh. Those were purely recreational,' he told me. 'And I got this…' he took a hand off the controls to touch the scar that ran across his face, smiling almost fondly as I squeaked and gesticulated at the controls in wordless panic, 'when I ran into a jamming field and my bike locked into a slide. That one doesn't count…' I snorted, and he did laugh then. 'Funny. My brother had the same reaction…'

There was something bleak in his tone, and I risked a sideways glance at his face. If I thought he'd looked haunted before, something in his face made me shiver slightly. Loss. Sorrow. Those I understood. But anger? I opened my mouth to ask a question, sensing a chink in the quiet armour he seemed to throw up around himself, but something warned me to keep my trap shut for once. Maybe it was the way I could have sworn he murmured the word "nii-san…" so quietly I wasn't even sure I'd heard right, and that one little phrase was spoken with such love, and pain and longing, I felt a bit of a shit for eavesdropping. The way he stared down at where the planet surface should be made me think it was tied up in that "personal" - and then, when I thought it through… if he'd really lived for this long, then everyone he'd ever known was probably dead by now of old age, and here he was, looking in his early thirties at most; young and beautiful forever, and on top of all the other shite, what must that be like?

But we were heading down the tube I'd drilled for him now, and although I'd left plenty of room to manoeuvre, I was still sweating bullets as he eased the workboat - with its explosive payload clutched in its tripod grip underneath - down the two hundred feet of the borehole, threading the needle with a calm, casual ease that made me realise that joking about his flying aside, the man had to be one of the best precision pilots I'd ever seen. The workboat wasn't the easiest craft to handle, it's a turnip-shaped grappler, but he let it drop down gracefully, dead centre and not a single wobble to graze the sides.

Yeah… don't even think about what would happen if we touched the sides…

'The oscillators aren't that delicate,' he said quietly as we bumped to a stop at the bottom. 'They're usually deployed in space, and can take a few knocks. Takes a hell of a knock or a blast to set them off without an instruction.'

'So you say,' I grumped at him, as I followed his lead and freed myself from the seatbelt, and followed him into the rear of the vessel. 'Are you an engineer?'

'Actually, yes,' he replied evenly. The corner of his mouth twitched - a sign of amusement at my expense, or more self-deprecating, it was hard to tell. 'Don't look so shocked. The man who built the Arcadia could run rings around me, but you don't spend your formative years in a family that owned one of the two largest Military engineering companies in the solar System without picking up a few pointers - and the odd PhD.'

'Funny,' I quipped as we descended the ladder down to the Big Bomb. 'Never figured you for Doctor Harlock…'

'Wise-ass,' he shot back. 'You'll not find any record of my academic achievements under that name.'

'Did they keep records back then?' I asked, letting my tongue lead me into potentially life-threatening territory.

'Cuneiform tablets,' was the droll rejoinder.

'You must let me know what moisturiser you use - I'd have put you no older than hieroglyphs myself…'

'You get that smart mouth from Con,' he muttered. 'Sure as hell it isn't from Elizabeth.'

'Shows what you know,' I retorted. Family legends about Grandy Liz abounded. I wanted to ask what he remembered, but if it was tied up with what had gone off down here back in the day, today was obviously not the right time. But hell… I'd taken his coin, so to speak. There'd be time to weasel it out of him.

He'd put the oscillator down as neat as you please on the bottom of my borehole, which stretched up above us by a good two hundred feet. Far enough down to be out of the winds, not so far that covering it over again would cause it problems. I tried not to get distracted by some lovely silicates in the rock I'd turned into quick-setting metamorphic with the Arcadia's optical cannon as he fiddled with the control panel and showed me how to set up the remote sub-space comms unit and activate the thing. Thankfully the damn thing had redundancies on the fail-safes out the ying yang. We were spending more time priming it than anything else. But me being me, I had my bare hand on the still cooling wall when I felt an odd vibration through it. 'Er… Harlock? I mean, captain?'

'Hmm?' Non-committal grunts are a language all guys speak. 'Are we expecting company?'

'The Arcadia would warn us if anything risked the atmosphere,' he pointed out.

'Yeah, yeah. I get that. But the rocks are vibrating…'

I'd expected to have to explain myself a bit. He simply tapped on his collar comm. 'Yattaran? Turn the scanners onto the surface. Scan for a QT field underground.'

'QT? I thought they were banned?' Before his long-suffering captain could tell him to get his arse in gear, his "aye aye, sir" quickly followed.

'Banned yes,' I muttered. 'Unless you're from Shaitan, and think the rules don't apply to you.' I was familiar with Quantum Tunnelling fields. Banned on most civilised planets because of a distressing tendency to cook off if not properly maintained and blast themselves, their crews and a good portion of the surrounding landscape into the atmosphere.

QT fields… Dis… Doppler corps… and the remains of a super volcano that had gone nuclear about a century ago? I can do the math. 'You blew a QT field way back when?'

'Rammed another sand sub. Long story. One it seems I'm never going to hear the end of…'

I grinned. 'Blow up one planet and you never hear the end of it?' I twitted him.

He turned away from me to lay his own gloved hand on the wall, but not before I almost backed over the low railing on the device we were standing on when I caught sight of the look on his face. If looks could kill… said so often in jest. But the fury that boiled in that dark brown eye, just for a moment… I was still shaking a little when he took his hand off the wall and said in a voice so calm I could almost think I'd imagined that glare 'we've got company…'

Right on cue Yattaran's voice came over the comms: 'You've got company.'

Sometimes, I think too much: 'What happens if a QT field interacts with one of these oscillators?' I asked, feeling like a ten-year-old who just stuck his hand up in class to ask if he could go to the toilet. Then my cogs whirred some more and I stared up, to where the dust-sodden wind was currently obscured by the dark matter cloud hovering over us around a kilometre long battleship powered by a dark matter engine, with another couple of dozen of the oscillators still in orbit…

'On the plus side,' my possibly soon to be ex-captain muttered, 'at least this time I won't be around to have to listen to everyone and his dog bitching about it…'

The vibration stopped.