A/N Alpha Romero:- Any footnotes [written as numbers in brackets (or parenthesis, if you're American), following a word, phrase, sentence etc. etc.] should be read posthaste. Missing such notes may result in complete misunderstanding of the fic or, in severe cases, death.

A/N Juliet Papa:- I'm sorry about the rudeness in this story. It's not big, it's not clever, and... well, is it funny? I don't know. If I did I'd probably be published by now and you'd be thumbing through this in paperback, not on a screen. So... if you're under 13 and you don't know about... men and women... kissing an' all that, then don't read this. It's just not right. Really.
You've been warned, I don't want no comebacks. I'm fed up with people's parents emailing me and telling me I should stop... doing what I do. It's not as if I video camera them though. I only... take Polaroid's. That's, that's... well, that's legal.
They were all over 18... Believe me. I'm not lying. No matter what the police say... I'm right. And I know what I did was completely within my rights. That's... what I based this on. The fact that it's art, not... not what they keep calling it. It's art, man. So if I don't update for a while, you'll know where I am...
(Yeah. Brixton Prison -ed)

ENJOY!

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* * * * *

LOCK, STOCK AND THREE SOJA GEMS

"I'm hungry. Let's get a taco."

* * * * *

Galaxy Police Cruiser 1-45-A4 'GREEN EMERALD' ploughed a gentle route through the cosmos.

Contrary to its name, the GREEN EMERALD was not, in fact green. It was also fair to assume that, if this was the case, it was not an emerald. It was, however, a very large, very streamlined and very top-of-the-range piece of apparatus. It gave the impression that if it had a genetic ancestry, dolphins and other aquatic animals with bottle-nosed proboscises had played a large part in it.

Onboard, its crew of eight lazed around with the buoyant authority that came after a job well done. Eight people might have seemed a little understaffed for a cruiser that had enough fire-power to obliterate a small fleet and the planet it had come from, not to mention the fact it was ferrying something a little more special than the usual rubbish accumulated from a drug bust, but there were two reasons for this; The first was that no one in their right mind would think of trying to hijack a police craft. The second reason was that the GP didn't want to tempt fate by attracting too much attention to the first fact.

The Refiu Asteroid Belt bisected the sector in a sort of rocky wall before it, stretching across its path. Slowly, the ship's boosters ignited rotating the craft on its axis and in what would be a gradual arc around the rocky spread before dipping back into its original path towards Precinct 9.

Questions as to whether it would ever get there were hardly on the agenda.

* * * * *

"So, would someone mind telling me the plan?"

Grimm planted his hands on the table in front of him and leant across it, looking at Orifati. "Here," he pointed at the holographic map, "Is the asteroid belt that runs between Altioc and the Outer Plains. Deep Space Precinct 9 is here, about six light-years behind it."
"Therefore GREEN EMERALD is here," finished Kras, pointing at a single grid reference.
"So, what's the plan?" asked Orifati again.

The trio were standing in the Control Room of the KOCORREL, which in turn was standing (or at least, situated) somewhere in the depths of space between the asteroid belt and their quarry. The slap-dash flight from Belatius hadn't been the most restful experience, especially when six civilian transport ships had locked onto their flight beacon in the mistaken belief that it was a landing beacon, which was something else entirely.

"The GREEN EMERALD is a GP Cruiser, so it's got be equipped with ram-shields," said Kras, completely ignoring Orifati's outburst. "It's likely it'll go through the asteroid belt. That'll shave six hours off its arrival time."
Grim shook his head. "No Galaxy Police ship would exchange time for danger." He brought his hand down to the control panel at the hologram's base and plotted in a new course. "The ship will go around."
"Through!" said Kras roughly. He reached for his own controls and replotted the course.
"Around!"
"Through!"

"Ladies!" cried Orifati. The two men stopped bickering. "Why," he asked, "are we using Holographic Battleships, the fun game for ages three and up, to plan the biggest heist since Goddess knows when?"
Krass looked back at him stiffly. "It's the best thing we could find in the allotted time. And it was cheap at twenty credits."

"We get 500 creds each up front and you spend twenty of it on a child's game?" said Orifati. He shook his head in disparaged embarrassment. "Amateurs. I'm with freakin' amateurs."
"At least I bought something useful, rather than spending it on some painted harlot," Kras glowered back.
"We only had an hour and a half to get as much kit as we needed, so I didn't," Orifati said, "I like to get my money's worth, if you catch my drift." He smiled and undid the button on his bomber-jacket's sleeve, rolling the fabric down to his elbow. Strapped around his arm, just below the joint of his arm, was a dark green roll of cloth. He removed it and, holding the corners like a matador baiting a bull, flicked it harshly.
The cloth unravelled to display a collection of hooked, pronged and generally pointy looking instruments.
"Lockpicks," he said, as he wound the cloth back up, "are useful." He nodded at the game on the table, his éclat and blow-dried locks bouncing delicately atop his head. "Children's toys, are not useful."

"Where did you get them from?" asked Grimm.
Orifati finished wrapping the cloth around his arm and sighed. "The simple, basic, normal, everyday way you get lockpicks." He shrugged as if it were so obvious that it didn't even deserve wasting breath on the answer.
"Which is?" asked Grimm.
"A locksmiths."
"You bought them from a locksmiths?"
"Not technically bought them. I borrowed them."
"You stole them from a locksmiths? How?"
Orifati shook his head in despair. "The simple, basic, normal, everyday way you borrow stuff from a locksmiths."
"WHICH IS?" snapped Kras.
"I picked the lock," Orifati answered. He buttoned up the sleeve and looked at the other men.
"You mean to say," said Grimm quietly, "that you picked the lock to the locksmiths, without tools, then sneaked in and stole a set of lockpicks?"

There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

"It sounds really dumb when you say it," stated Orifati. He slid over to the table self-consciously. "So, uh, what's the plan?"

The two men at the Battleships board sighed loudly and went back to the shimmering image between them. "We should be getting into radar range of the GREEN EMERALD within the next hour or so," said Grimm, "but the question is; which way it's going to go.
"If it goes around the asteroid belt," his finger stabbed at a row of very realistic looking little boulders at 1:25 scale, "then we'll be in the open while we run it down, and I don't fancy our chances against a cruiser in open space. Plus, we'll only have an hour, at most, to get whatever it is that Arikaan wants. Then again, I'd rather risk that and actually get a chance at blagging it."

"However," Kras said, turning to look at Orifati, "if the GREEN EMERALD goes through the asteroid field it'll be easier to get the job done because its communications and evasive maneuvers will be cut down. But in turn, we'll have a harder time following it in, due to the fact that our friendly Juraian legislator appears to have forgotten to fit this thing with ram shields. Therefore it's a toss-up between lurking in the asteroids and seeing whether they come through, or hanging around outside the asteroid belt and trying to get the job done before reinforcements arrive."
Orifati nodded slowly, deep in thought. "Right. So what are ram shields?"
Kras and Grimm raised their hands to whatever deity might be watching them at that time. Kras' eyes moved downwards again to take in Orifati's face. "Just for the record: Are you always this stupid or did you take lessons?"
"I'm a safe-cracker, not a pilot," replied the thief, "I blow banks, not spaceships!"
"Wearing clothes like that I'd be surprised if that's all you blow."
Orifati ripped the sunglasses off his face. His finger pointed at the scientist as though as it were about to go off. "Unless you want to be opening whatever safe is on that cruiser yourself, I recommend telling me what ram shields are..." The digit, aimed right at Kras' head, stabbed at air. "Right NOW!"

Kras opened his mouth, then shut it again. He sighed. "Ram shields are a variation of energy shields, designed in the early fifth centenary. It turns kinetic energy into light or sound energy, thereby dispersing its effect. Hitting anything larger than dust at chase speeds will probably punch a hole through the hull. Ram shield allows a craft to travel at higher speeds through dust rings, asteroid belts, debris coronas. The sort of things we'd want to go through. Answered?"
"Yeah. Thanks."
The scientist and the pirate exchanged bemused looks and went back to looking at the holo-board, deep in thought.

"How much range do GP communicators have?" asked Orifati suddenly. The rest of the trio looked up.
"Six light-years, give or take," said Grimm. "Maybe eight if there's something to bounce it off. Why?"
"And how much in an asteroid field?"
Grimm pulled a face and looked at Kras, "About half?"
"Yes. Around three," nodded Kras. He looked up at Orifati and raised his eyebrows. "An idea?"
"And we can go into the asteroid field, right?" asked the thief, his eyes suddenly bright.
"As long as we're not planning on moving too fast, yes. What-"
"So we could, like, hide in the asteroid field and broadcast a message that would lure them in. But then they wouldn't be able to call for help once they're inside?" Orifati asked.
Grimm and Kras looked at each other, then looked back at the thief. "What sort of message would lure a Galaxy Police cruiser into an asteroid belt?"
"A distress signal?" forwarded Orifati.

Kras steepled his hands on the table and breathed a very sorry sigh. Then he began to speak, "It is an idea, yes. However, there are two niggling, but nevertheless rather intrusive, quandaries about that plan:
"Number one; it is the oldest trick in the book. Probably even older than the one where the magician puts the card into the deck backwards.
"And number two; you need a ship that looks like it's in distress."

The other men opened their mouths to say something, but his eyebrows waggled in demonstration that he was only joking.

"Nevertheless," he said, "the reason that Galaxy Police officers are described as being as thick as two short planks is not for unduly erroneous reasons.(1) And even if we gave this ship a quick vacuum and put up new drapes, it would still look it had been involved in a pub brawl and lost. Badly.
"I think we may, therefore, have a suitably apropos stratagem to get this little task over and done with."

A tight-lipped smirk drew itself across Grimm's face. "Marvellous."

* * * * *

Acting-Captain Alvero Masson lounged in his bridge chair and raised the teacup in an imaginary toast to some imaginary official. "Good job," the imaginary official didn't say, while not wearing a grin that showed his complete and total respect and appraisal of Masson's abilities.
"Oh, it's nothing really," Masson failed to reply, as the imaginary official gave him a non-existent pat on the back.
"But it is! But it is!" didn't come the acknowledgement, "to think we've been leaving you out of a command position for so many years, Alvaro... You don't mind if I call you Alvero, do you?"

"Of course not," said Masson, and lowered the teacup back down to its saucer carefully, so that the ship's logo faced outwards toward the rest of the bridge. The helmswoman looked around from her console to stare up at him. "Did you say something, sir?"
"No, no," flustered Masson, realising he'd been caught out on his daydreaming again, "I was just..."
He tried to sit up and give himself a bit of decorum, but managed to knock the cup in the process, and spill tea over his leg of his trousers. He gave a pained yelp and sat the half-full cup on the arm of his chair.

In embarrassment he rubbed at his trousers with his hand, the hot liquid beginning to sear at his skin. Great move. Pure genius! How Captain-like was that? He saw the helmswoman swivel back to her console, and he saw the slight sneer on her feminine features. He moved, his rotund bulk causing the chair to creek in distress, and looked around the bridge. What with all the consoles facing toward the massive viewscreen, which was displaying the Refiu Asteroid Belt, no one else appeared to have noticed his little accident. Well, they'd better not have...

It was quite a beautiful craft. Ship-of-the-line. Not too classy but not too basic. Just the right amount of awe to tell people that the police had arrived, but not enough to make people wonder why their taxes were being spent on gilding and gold. It was Masson's idea of what a good ship should be like, and seeing as how it was his first time in charge of such a behemoth, he was really quite enjoying it.
Whether his superiors would let him have another go at it was another matter entirely.
He'd actually been on the Shunga once, before it got blown up of course. That had been nice too, and he'd have loved to have taken it out for a spin, but with its stealthy theft from the shipyards at Kunhauser (he was grateful it was the dock's blunder rather than a Galaxy Police one) had put paid to that. Thankfully they'd caught the madman who did it. Dr. Mud was it? Professor Adobe?
Whatever his name was, he'd certainly get his comeuppance for stealing Masson's ship.
Oh yes.

"Captain." The communications technician swivelled on his chair to face him.
Masson ignored the man for a moment, just to get across how important he was, then looked down from his raised dais at the crewmember. "Mr. Luchu?"
"Officer Luchu," replied the communications technician. He looked back at his console, "I'm picking up a communication from another ship, sir."
"Really, Mister Luchu." Masson looked at the man a little more sternly, trying to keep the facade of a strong-willed Captain alive. His leg began to throb tenderly. "And what is it?"
"A distress signal from a transport ship, sir, the DISINGENUOUS PRETEXT. It lost engine power and got pulled into the asteroid field. They're losing oxygen and are asking for assistance."

The other five crewmembers looked up from their work at the mention of 'distress' and 'assistance'.
"Cool," said the helmswoman, or rather something that, in her language, was remarkably similar to the Earth based colloquialism.
Masson's face screwed up in concentration. A distress signal was the most important call that any ship could get and anyone within range was meant to give aid. There were even cases of pirates and other criminals helping a stricken ship without plundering it. What you reap is what you sow, as they say, and no one wanted to be trapped in deep space for longer than necessary.

There was however, one problem; Masson's orders were to stop for nobody. NOBODY. If, let us put forward a hypothetical theory here, he had stumbled across the entire Royal Household of Jurai choking to death on a methane leak in their ship, he would have gone right past without the barest whisper of pulling over and lending a helping hand.(2)
"Do not," had been the chief's communiqué, "stop for anything. Whatsoever. At all."

Masson's eye twitched in the way that it always did when he was thinking. "No," he said finally, "tell them we'll send a rescue craft once we're within hailing distance of our rendezvous site."
"Yes, sir." The communications technician returned to his console and spoke into it.
He looked back at Masson. "They say that they're all going to die... And they hope you can live with that."
"Really?"
"Yes sir..." The technician looked around, his face flushed, "and, speaking frankly, sir, I don't think I can have that kind of stain on my conscience."

Masson nodded sagely. "No," he said, "nor on my résumé..." There was another brief flutter of the eyelid. He sighed deeply and then gave another nod, "We're going to need to help them. Damn the orders!"
The bridge crew returned their approval.
Leaning forward, Masson spoke again, his voice strong and commanding. "Hail the ship, Mr. Luchu, and tell them we're on our way." He pressed a button on the arm of his chair, managing to knock his teacup to the floor with a resounding crash and splosh. "All hands, all hands. This is the captain speaking. We are changing course to aid a distressed vessel, under Space-Faring Code 34, Sub-Paragraph, uh, 5... Prepare for the taking on of injured parties." He released the button.
"Helmswoman, plot a route for the... uh, distressed ship."
"Plotted, sir," came the woman's reply.

"Make it so," Massan said, his finger sweeping in a curve to point at the viewscreen.

* * * * *

The boosters that GREEN EMERALD had turned on in its original flight plan shut off leaving a trail of half-burned fuel particles in its wake. Then, with a silent wail that built into an equally silent roar, the boosters on the other side of the craft kicked in. The ship turned quickly, kicking space-dust and atoms of helium behind it as it did so.
There was another deep and extremely silent boom, that would have, if there had been atmosphere, shattered windows like sugar cubes under a sledgehammer.

Galaxy Police Cruiser 1-45-A4 'GREEN EMERALD' ploughed a speedy route through the cosmos.

* * * * *

CHAPTER 3:-
POLICE AND THIEVES

Inside the Refiu field, a relatively large, relatively blue spacecraft sat huddled behind a very large, very asteroid-like asteroid. Sparks flickered as its basic shield-system caught the tiny dust particles and reduced them to light energy. A larger piece, the size of a football, punched through the electromagnetic pulses and dragged itself along the ship's metalwork. Paint chippings floated off into space, white and blue, and left KOCORRLL staring blankly out into the darkness.

It eased itself back gently, its front-end swinging outwards to collide with a cloud of its own dismembered paint. In the silence it hid itself, and below it something huge and shiny and with a long nose swept tentatively through.

When it had passed, the KOCORRLL dropped down and followed...

* * * * *

A cratered and pitted boulder of iron ore and rock loped across the GREEN EMERALD's viewscreen. It span a teetering pirouette before colliding with another asteroid, one that would have been large enough to swallow much of South America beneath its girth, and sending fragments of debris outwards in an explosion of dust.
The ship ducked below the worst of it, lumps of metal flicking off its ram shields and shattering into smaller pieces. A handful of fragnents penetrated and scraped like buckshot across the paintwork.

The deck crew watched their instruments attentively. Every so often one of them would raise their eyes to the main viewscreen and give it a quick scan, trying to pick out any sign.
No sign.
Masson didn't bother picking out signs, but instead picked at the arm of his chair in sullen silence. The ship had been moving through the asteroid field for the last twenty minutes, slowed to the equivalent of a crawl. Communications so badly interfered with that no outside help could be mustered. The sensors haywire from all the untapped metals floating around outside their thin shelled, pressurised, seductress of a ship. And for what?
'In aid of another', had been Masson's rallying cry. And now he where was he?

I'll tell you where you are, ACTING-CAPTAIN Masson... You're lost in an asteroid field... LOST!

His fingernails dragged painfully across the PA-system's control panel. "Any sign of that ship?" he asked loudly. "Or a break in the asteroids?"
There was an uncomfortable hush, which was curious because the room was nearly silent in the first place. The tang of strong black coffee with three sugars and a pinch of lemon hung in the air.
"Well?" he asked.
The uncomfortable hush became an agonising silence.
"Well?"

From somewhere outside the hull there was another clang as a large piece of asteroid went through the ram shield.


Masson pressed ahead, the last vestiges of leadership fleeing him. In his mind's eye he saw the imaginary official rip the rank-badge from him, fling it to the ground, stamp it under-heel.
"Fool! How can you get lost in an asteroid field? And only a half-dozen light-years from a star base?"
"But it wasn't my fault! I was helping another ship-"
"-Against orders! A non-existent ship that you had no right to follow in the first place!"
 "DAMN IT! IT'S NOT MY FAULT!"

The rest of the bridge crew turned in their chairs and looked at him. "Sir?" asked the helmswoman politely, and Masson was sure he saw that same conceited smirk on her face as before.

"Oh BLEEP off, you stupid BLEEP" he snapped.

Then he blinked and went through what he'd just said. Shocked faces of the rest of the crew stared back at him, the helmswoman's face dancing a mix between 'weepy-distress' and 'wait until I write a report on this male-chauvinistic act'.
"Get back to work, please," he said carefully. They turned back slowly, and he got the distinct feeling that they expected him to pull a gun on them. He rubbed his eyes tiredly, illusions of grandeur gone. "What else can go wrong?" he whispered to himself, as he heard the sound of the turbolift open at the back of the room.
He started turning around, then stopped as a voice laced with hate spat from behind him;

"Don't any of you pigs move!" snapped the voice, "I'm holding a Kintari General Issue blaster, which as you should know can fire one-hundred and twenty bolts a second. That means that if you were to try and charge me all at once, you would get no further than three feet from your current sitting position. I will use it if necessary.
"If any of you feel the need to turn around, play with buttons and alarms, or generally BLEEP me off, you will all die. If I am making myself clear, please sit on your hands, shut up, and enjoy the fact that no one will be hurt if no one tries to be a hero."

Kras waited a moment to see if anyone would make a move. The gullibility of these people was mind-boggling, and he smiled as the six crewmen lowered their hands and slid them beneath their buttocks. When his charges had done as they had been told, Kras' hands reached into different pockets in his grubby uniform. The right one removed a pair of red-handled wire cutters. The other brought out the manual on bioelectronics.
Still keeping his eyes locked on the police officers, he reached over his shoulder with the wire cutter clenching hand and deftly opened a near invisible junction box built into the wall. Inside a spaghetti tangle of wires looped and ran from top to bottom. A hundred colours and thickness. There was a dull click as the cutters snipped one of the wires in half, followed by a second click as another was dissected.
The wire cutters disappeared back into the pocket, and he finally let his gaze drop down to the book in his hands. He flicked through to where he had got up to and settled back for a light read.

* * * * *

The sheer elegance of the operation was breathtaking. Six minutes of planning, no rehearsals, and they'd taken control of the ship. It had to be a record, thought Grimm, as he kept the blaster pointed at the head, which was attached to the policeman five or six yards down the corridor. The officer was wearing the pale blue uniform of a ship's crewman, his hands held high above his fez like hat, and he had two belts around his waist. The last part was rather strange, because Grimm had never needed to wear two belts before, even after one of those famous Juraian Thanksgiving meals that even the six-stomached Garysian's swore about.(3) Then he noted the holster. "Take off the utility belt," he called out.
"Whatever you say, sir."
Grimm gave a quick glance at the officer's partner who was lying on the floor by his feet, a bright red lump beginning to swell on his temple where the butt of the blaster had hit. The idiot would listen next-time he was told not to turn around. Grimm prodded the immobile body with a booted foot, just to check he was really unconscious.
He was.

"Hold the belt out at arm's length to the side and then drop it. No quick moves," called out Grimm. He moved closer, gun still aimed.
The policeman complied, the sound of the utility belt hitting the polished corridor floor echoed and roared in the silence like a death-metal band's bass-line. Grimm moved up to the man, pressed the gun a few inches from the small of the man's back. "Kneel on the floor and put your hands behind you. Do not turn around or look behind you."
"Whatever you say, sir," said the officer again, as if it was nothing more frightening than a walk in the park.(6) As cool as a cucumber that had been moulded out of liquid nitrogen and encased in a block of dry ice he knelt.

Grimm picked up the utility belt as the other man sat. Handcuffs. Blaster. Energy packs. Various compartments for evidence bags and police equipment. Keeping the gun held to the back of the officer's head, Grimm removed the handcuffs from their pouch and knelt down, snapping them around the man's wrists. He stood back up and turned around to look at the massive vault door behind which their prize, whatever it was.
It was a large door, but then again it was in a suitably large corridor, so the effect was somehow diminished. It matched the bulkhead's 'ocean-blue' colour scheme, although it didn't have the red stripe running parallel to the floor and ceiling.
"Excuse me?"
The metal on its catches glinted magnificently in its chrome finished splendour. Twenty-three inches thick of burnished and painted titanium-steel alloy, with a Kevlar interior and guard around the edges. The enormous deadbolts that traversed its length, slid into place like gargantuan cylindrical... cylinders.
"Excuse me?"
And attached to it was the access node. A fifty button keypad with palm reader, digital sensor and electronic pheromone tracker. Overlay that with a 32,000,000 cred defence mechanism and you had a very flashy piece of kit. One that Orifati was even now pondering over. He stood thoughtfully, rubbing his nose with his thumb and forefinger as he looked at the system.
"Excuse me?"
He took his sunglasses off and slid them into his top pocket. Then he took out his lockpicks. His fingers danced over them delicately, as though they were something to be cherished. A thin metal pick, hooked and slender, slid out of the cloth and set to work on the keypad.

"EXCUSE ME?"
Grimm and Orifati span around. The lockpick hit the floor with a clatter.
"I'm sorry," said the officer, who was still sitting on the floor with his back to them, "but I was trying to tell you; I can undo these handcuffs." He held the opened pair of handcuffs out behind him, so that Grimm could take them.
"Er, thanks," said Grimm. He gingerly collected the handcuffs out the man's unresisting hand. He looked around at Orifati, and pulled a worried face.
"I learnt how to undo them without the key," said the officer. "I wouldn't be able to do that with my partner's, though."
"That's... very helpful," replied Grimm. He walked backwards to the other, slightly less talkative policeman, and took his handcuffs. He recuffed the kneeling officer.
"Well, I'd rather you did it properly and I don't get shot," said the officer sincerely. "Might I suggest you handcuff my partner with my handcuffs?" Grimm, feeling a bit of a fool, sidled over and did as had been offered.
"You have to excuse Jajeedi," said the officer, "he's a bit headstrong. I always tell him to chill out, but he seems to think he's a super-being or something."

Orifati bent down and picked up the lockpick. "For someone who's got a gun to their head, he's taking this well, in't he?" It was directed at Grimm, but the officer replied.
"I'm trained for this sort of thing," he said, still not bothering to look around. "Do as you're told, don't mess about, give them what they want and you'll walk out alive."
"They have lessons on that at the Galaxy Police?" asked Grimm.
The policeman shook his head. "Oh no. I've only been on the force three months. I was a bank clerk for sixteen years though."
"Oh?" Orifati grunted and got back to work on the vault door.
"Oh yeah. Got held up eight times in four days. It got so bad that management thought about inserting a revolving-door just for the robbers. Eventually I decided to resign. Take up something a little less dangerous."
"Galaxy Police?" said Grimm half to himself.
"Mine clearance," sniffed the officer. "But they wouldn't take me on. Over qualified."
Orifati messed around with the keys for a few more seconds and then looked back at their captive. "What bank was it?"
"Itanian Inter-Galactic Bank, on Kenhauser." The officer continued, "Y'know, the third moon of Oitas."

Orifati's eyes widened. "Really! I broke into that once!"
"Honest?"
"Oh yeah!" Orifati put the lockpick behind his ear and nodded, "There was a skylight which dropped right down into the foyer, covered with trip-lasers. I had to abseil in and go between them-"
Grimm turned and gave him the evil eye. "Yes, Mr. Green, thank you. Why not tell the nice policeman what your name is and where you come from as well?"
"It's Mr. Grey." The safe-breaker ripped the pick from behind his ear and returned to the keypad.
"What?"
Orifati pressed a couple of buttons, which bleeped for no apparent reason. "I'm Mr. Grey. Not Mr. Green."
"Then who's Mr. Green?"
"There isn't one. I'm Mr. Grey. You're Mr. Black. And Kr- ... The one upstairs is Mr. White." He sniffed loudly and took out another lockpick, jiggled it in a card slot under the buttons.
"Are you sure?" asked Grimm. He thought about it. "Wasn't it Red, Blue and Green?"

Orifati's head rotated to face him slowly. "Red, blue and green?" He shook his head in exasperation. "That's the Juraian flag!"
"Erm... excuse me," came a quiet voice from behind them. "Don't you think you should gag or blind me? And I'd recommend stopping me from listening as well."
The space pirate's face became suddenly quite irritated. "That'd be a good idea." He walked toward the kneeling policeman, raising the blaster like a club.

"Well, in my utility belt I've got some plumber's tape," continued the policeman chirpily, "For emergencies and things. If you put a strip of it across my mouth I wouldn't be able to-"

* * * * *

"Note how the cartilage in the bone cavity (fig. 4.d) has been moulded into a new shape by the application of pressure. If this were to be looked at in a biomechanical way considerations should be taken for the physics of the interior and exterior (fig. 5). Due to this morphing of the body, certain interesting changes to gravitational centre and movement have been made, needing the owner's compensation. Take note of the ungainly walk and movement (fig. 6)-"

Kras licked his finger and used it to thumb forward a few more pages. It had started off amusing. However, the comedy value of the book (written by a supposed Academy lecturer no less!) was beginning to wear thin. He had to stifle a laugh as he hit a paragraph that was so completely and patently untrue that he felt like throwing the book away.
"You won't get away with this."
Kras looked up. "Pardon?" And then realising where he was, he said more loudly and gruffly, "What the BLEEP did you just say?"
"I said, 'You won't get away with this," repeated the captain. It was the first time anyone had spoken since the takeover and the man sat forward in his chair, but made no move to turn around.
Kras closed the book. "Shut up!" he growled, surprisingly intimidating, "I'm not the one sitting there with my hands under my arse." The book went back in the pocket.
"What do you think you're going to achieve by doing this?" called the captain with an underlying terrified squeakiness.
"Watching you die, maybe?"
When nothing more was forthcoming Kras shook his head and, grimacing, looked down at the bridge crew. Babysitting wasn't his forte. He looked at his watch, a move that was entirely unnecessary because he knew the current time to the barest fraction of a second. Twenty minutes had passed...
"Come on," he muttered, "how long does it take to crack a safe?"

* * * * *

"Give me another five minutes," said Orifati. He had taken his jacket off, and his undershirt was soaked dark with sweat, brought about by the halcyon lights that were dotted at regular intervals along the corridor's ceiling. The keypad's front had been removed and now it transpired it had been a sort of red-herring. None of the buttons actually did anything, but the pad was on a hinge and behind it was an honest-to-goodness, genuine, old-fashioned, metal key lock. The sort of thing that backwater planets used because they hadn't worked out how to make DNA sensors.
To the common-or-garden criminal, it looked like an impregnable and unconscionably complex thing.
To Orifati it looked like what it was; a little hole with a lot of funny shaped metal blocks inside.
The lockpicks moved like an enhancement of his own limbs. Prodding, touching gently, and then stabbing where necessary to hold back a pin or move a part of the lock's anatomy. There was no safe that he could not break. No lock he could not pick. No door or room he could not enter. He was the opposite of Harry Houdini; whereas that man had been the greatest escapologist, Orifati was the greatest in-scapeologist.

"You said 'give me two minutes' five minutes ago," growled Grimm, who was wrapping thick black tape around the unconscious policemen's eyes, mouths and ears so that they looked like some tar-dipped mummy. He got up and walked over to the vault door.
"This is a tricky lock," replied Orifati. There was a tiny click from the door's innards. "And I haven't done this sort of thing since I got out of jail. So don't annoy me, okay?"
"And how long ago was that? Six months? A year?"
Another click, and Orifati stopped to wipe his forehead with his arm. "Nine months."
"See, I've been out of this game for fourteen years. I come back in and I'm doing what I've always done. You leave for nine months and now you're having trouble with a lock."
Orifati turned, leaving the lockpicks half in the lock. "I sort of notice." He looked at the two unconscious police officers. "But there's a difference between BLEEPING people upside the head with a pistol-whip and playing with tumblers. I plan my breaks four or five months in advance. I case the place. I prepare. You... you pick a nice looking ship, shoot its engines out and then steal everything." He went back to the lockpicks. "I'm not dissing you or anything. It's a different sort of skill, that's all."
He smiled brightly, "Just one more pin to do."

Grimm watched as the other man's hands worked feverishly on the two pieces of thin metal. Sweat stood out on Orifati's forehead, and he licked his lips as somewhere inside the door there was a subtle click. His eyes widened.
A louder click.
"Damn," he said quietly. His fingers left the slivers of metal and rubbed at the droplets of sweat on his neck. "I just broke the pick." He stood up straight and shook his head sadly, grabbing the coat from his feet as he did.

"I guess we'd better go straight to the explosives."

* * * * *

For a while there was silence. Then there was a cataclysmic boom and the ship shook wildly, as if some giant and terrible hand had slapped it with all its strength. In the galley the pots and pans tumbled from their hooks, the plates and glassware falling from the shelves to lay around them in sharp piles. Down in the crew quarters, belongings and personal possessions jumped and lay strewn on the floor. On the bridge, the crew's teeth rattled in their heads as the shockwave passed up through the lower decks' bulkheads, through the floor and up their chairs.
Invisible to the naked eye, but easily felt, the air pressure increased and the blast wave it created pressed forward in a ripple-like fashion from its epicentre. Quickly, in concentric waves, it sped outwards, rebounding off the walls of the corridor and changing the internal pressure of the ship in a roar that sped onwards and outwards.
A handful of the less well made bulkheads bulged lightly under the caress of the wave, bending and then moving in again as it passed along.

Down on the cargo deck the smoke began to clear. A wall of dust and debris, thick and white disappeared into the emergency filters which upon sensing the resulting fire had turned on. Along the corridor minute electronics triggered themselves, sending currents along their wires and triggering the fire-suppressant system. The sprinklers turned on, spraying Flame-B-Gone liquid(7) down into the last vestiges of dust and debris.
Within seconds, the corridor turned a milky white as the newly formed sludge stuck to whatever it touched. Slowly it solidifyed into a porous substance that was actually chemically related (although this was unknown to its intergalactic creators) to Kellogg's Pop-Tarts.

From the end of the corridor, just outside the reach of the sprinklers and dust, Grimm lowered the umbrella he was holding and gave it a quick jiggle to get rid of the paste that was setting to its canvas. Beside him Orifati did the the same, although he proved more desperate to dispel the muck. He beat the umbrella against the wall and showered the floor with even more white. He looked at Grimm and gave a crooked half-smile, more a sympathetic gesture than anything else.
Grimm sighed. "Explosives," he said. He looked at the massive mess in the wall, further down the corridor. The door still stood where it had always been, but now its looked unstable. It sagged in the middle, its hinges visibly loose and the massive bolts were attempting to roll through the fire-retardant foam, although with little luck. The metal doorframe had fused and warped, bent outwards into pronged segments and twisted shapes.
By some quirk of nature, the fake-keypad had ricocheted off the wall opposite and embedded itself into the ceiling, completely intact.

It beeped sadly, for no apparent reason.

Past all that were two outcroppings in the lather. They looked vaguely human and the foam rose and fell gently, as though it were breathing.
"Explosives," Grimm said again and nodded as if it were the most simple thing in the world. "Now why didn't I think of that?"
Orifati sniffed thoughtfully. He gazed at the door, which looked like it would fall over if subjected to a particularly harsh word. Then shook his head, and as if taking in the scene for the first time, his eyes roved over to the two buried police officers. He thought about about what the hell would be making it move and then, very slowly, his face took on the expression of someone who was surprised. He looked at Grimm. "Will they be okay?" he asked.
It took a few moments for Grimm to work out who he was talking about. He too stared at the lumps. "Probably," he said, a pang of guilt hitting him. He pushed that aside.
"Just probably?" Worried.
Grimm looked at the safe-breaker as impassively as possible. "I don't know exactly. I don't usually cover people in fire-foam." The other man's face went slightly paler, no mean feat with the amount of tan, and Grimm got the impression he was going to either going to cry or go and try to dig them out.
"But they are breathing," he said, a little more lightly, "so I'd say there's a good chance they'll live."

They waded their way through the debris and paste to the door which, without the illusions from the last traces of smoke and the distance, looked like a modern art masterpiece. Orifati kept an eye on the mounds of moving white.
They could have simply kicked open the door there and then and taken whatever it was they needed, picked up Kras, run back to the KOCORREL and escaped into the cold depths of space. No fuss. No worries. In and out.
The two men looked at each other. They looked at the door, which was attempting, albeit with the barest success, to hold itself upright. They looked at each other again, and Grimm suddenly realised that they were both scared. Terribly, dangerously, upsettingly scared. In fact, he could only remember two times when he had been as scared as this. The first was when he had started his career. The second was...
"It's all yours, Ringo," said Orifati hollowly. The bravado that had been around originally, and had hung about in little clouds during his vault-breaking exercise, appeared to have dispersed into the ether. His arm flapped at the door, then dropped back to his side.
Grimm put on his 'imperious criminal' voice. "Open it."
Orifati made a move to argue but saw his partner's face. He pressed closer to the door and gingerly reached out...

The door collapsed without him even touching it.

And the glow swam out. It fell about them like liquid gold, bright and shining, and even from behind Orifati, Grimm could feel the light warming his face. He stepped forward to stand next in the doorway, eyes trying to fix on the thing inside.
What is it? What is it?
He stopped next to the safe-breaker, finally getting a clear view. He felt his jaw fall open.
"Is that what I think it is?" asked the Tanma Thief, whose legs were buckling.
Grimm nodded: yes.
"It's beautiful."
Grimm nodded: yes.

They stood there for quite some time, faces bathed in gold.

Finally Grimm ran his fingers through his hair. "That's..." He searched for a phrase to describe the poetic beauty that he was seeing, "... certainly something."
"Well, Arikaan did say he wanted a certain something," replied Orifati, and then as if woken from a stupor his eyes danced with energy. He smiled, the ego returning, "And as the actress said to the priest, 'Goddess, that's huge!'" Face shining, he pointed at Grimm. "You go prep the ship, I'll get something to move that thing with." He handed the umbrellas to the pirate and stood silhouetted against the golden brightness, hands on hips.

It was only after Grimm had sprinted off that Orifati began to wonder where he was going to find anything large enough to move the something with. And more importantly, was it safe to go anywhere near something that glowed like that?

* * * * *

Grimm ran down the corridor from Airlock-6, where the KOCORREL had patiently waited. His shoes slapped loudly against the floor, flakes of foam leaving a second trail to the one he had left when he had last passed through. And he was exhilarated.
Feelings were flooding back to him, feelings that he hadn't felt for a long time. Some of them weren't particularly nice; anger, paranoia, a steady sprinkling of fear. Then there were others... Crime was one of those things that could do that to you, more than anything else.
Complete, bloody-minded, enjoyment. It was the thrill of the chase, the excitement in the catch and, more importantly, the satisfaction in the final.

The GREEN EMERALD's corridors were long and tall and wide, with multi-coloured stripes along the floor and bulkheads, which split off at junctions and led to various parts of the ship. Red for engine. Green for bridge. Gold for medical bay. White paste deposits for the cargo hold. He skidded around another corner, coat flapping behind him.

"What the hells are you doing?"

Grimm span around. Marching toward him, red-hair hanging limp around his ears, was Kras. His eyes smouldered. "What the devils are you doing? I'm trying to keep that lot up there from pressing some alarms, and you're raising hell!"
"What the BLEEP are you doing down here?" cried Grimm, "you're meant to be keeping an eye on them!" He checked over the boy's head, expecting a policeman to be following.
Kras waved his hand irritably. "Bah! They don't even know I'm gone." He looked at the trail of flakes and the pirate's boots, his eyebrows arching precariously. "Have you thought about changing your conditioner?" he asked.
"It's fire-retardant foam, not dandruff."
The eyes widened to fit their brows. "You were starting fires?"
"Explosives."
"Explosives? So that was... What rank amateur uses explosives on a ship?"
"It wasn't me."
"But you didn't exactly stop him, did you?!" The younger man's voice rose an octave, "Don't you think they can trace that stuff? Where did he get it? Is it military grade?"
"I don't know." Grimm looked over his shoulder, checking for a non-existent Orifati. "Anyway, we're getting out. There's no point in hanging around here now we've got it."

Kras' face brightened and he cocked his head. "You mean you've actually got it out?" He smiled. "What is it?"
"It's... well..." Grimm thought about it. "Perhaps you'd better draw your own conclusions."

* * * * *

Orifati was still trying to get it on the anti-gravity trolley when they found him. Using brute force and not very much agility, he was trying to heave the thing onto the trolley's flat-front.
It would probably have helped if he wasn't decked out in a radiation suit, which was radiating the heat and glowing like a sun from the golden rays that hit it.
Kras stopped dead in the what had been the doorway to the hold. "Consign me to the hells," he said gently. Grimm stepped up next to him and nodded. "It's something, isn't it?" He looked down at Kras' face.

The gem that Orifati was attempting to man-handle glittered and shone. It was a sphere, huge in diameter and still half propped in its ring podium. Sitting around it was a row of shelves and evidence lockers, probably filled with expensive equipment, but still the men's eyes were drawn back to the gem. The warmth and light exuded from it lit the room in brilliance. Orifati finally managed to roll it onto the anti-gravity trolley, which bobbed for a second before adjusting to the weight atop it.
Grimm expected the boy's face to be filled with the same wonder he and the thief had when they'd first stumbled upon it.
And that expression was there, somewhere, but there was a brief flicker of something else, something cold, and then Kras looked up and grinned. "I haven't seen anything akin to it," he said sincerely. "It's amazing."

"Now," he said, "we'd better get it out of here!" He pointed at Orifati. "Well done on getting that suit. Good thinking!"
Through the heavy radiation suit's fabric there was a muffled reply.(8)
The gem floated on its bed toward the hole in the wall and out into the corridor, followed by its protectorate.

* * * * *

CHAPTER 4:-
WHY DID YOU DO IT?

Tenchi surveyed his bedroom. It remained the same from when he had last been here, everything as it had been. Apart from the bed. He had materialised above that a while earlier, Ryoko clenching him and Ayeka to herself, and he could remember the look on the face as she had done so.
He shivered uncomfortably.
The three of them had landed in a heap on the covers, entwined in each others arms and after a brief but vigorous struggle he had managed to scramble free before anything else could happen.

Lying on the floor, he had grabbed the pillow that had followed him down and placed it strategically. The girls had watched him from the bed, Ayeka half covering herself with the bedclothes. And they had both been laughing.

Giggling like schoolgirls. Naked. On his bed.

"Out!" he could remember himself saying, and they had left. After he'd said it a few more times.

Head still pounding, he took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. I am fine, he told himself, I am okay, which was true he suspected. First thing to do was to get dressed, he knew, because that was the thing that people did when they were naked. He took some clothes out of his wardrobe, the first thing that came to hand. T-shirt and jogging bottoms. He found a pair of clean-looking socks in the chest of drawers next to his bed. When he was done he sat down on the bed and rubbed at his eyes gently. What day was it? The day after his birthday?
 He looked over at the chest of drawers and the calendar on top of it.
All bar Saturday 31st of July and was crossed off in red pen.

He blinked. The date continued to sit there, unmoving. His birthday was April 24th. It was therefore NOT his birthday yesterday. Casually he got up and checked that the calendar was correct.
"Oh God."
He felt like some great pit had opened in his stomach and he heard his breathing and heartbeat begin to pick up pace. He had slept with Ayeka and Ryoko, both of them together, while drunk.
No. He had been seduced by Ayeka and Ryoko, both of them together, while drunk. You can't trust anyone these days, can you? said the calm little piece of his personality. The rest of him didn't bother replying, as it was trying to keep him from hyperventilating. Then the sudden revelation hit him, with all the force of a hammer blow:

He hadn't slept with Ayeka and Ryoko.
"No," he said carefully, "they slept with me."

How could they do that to him? He was their friend, wasn't he? Had he tried to do anything like that to them?
Well, obviously not because they probably would have enjoyed it, but the facts were still the same: His trust had been abused. A wave of nausea passed over him again, but he wasn't too sure if it was the hang-over or ...
Which one was first?
Tenchi shook his head, tried to clear that out of his head. They were friends not lovers, and he couldn't believe that either one would have done something like what they did. Especially Ayeka. Ryoko maybe, but even with all her flouting, could she...
It was fairly obvious that she could. Both of them.

BLEEP this, he told himself, this never happened. All he had to do was ignore it. Pretend it never happened and he could forgive them.
Easy.

He realised that the bed was still messy and so tidied it up. The cover went back on and he rubbed the creases out, letting the duvet sink down to its normal smoothness. Pillows went back in their places. When he was finished he stared at his handiwork.
The bed stared back mockingly.
Tenchi stepped atop it, right foot first. Then began to jump up and down on it, quite hard.

When he was finished and the bed was reduced to a semi-covered mess, he began to slow down. He kicked the remaining pillow, where it flumped into the wall and collapsed onto the floor in a soft lump.
He decided that he probably needed help. If not just for the bed.

* * * * *

It wasn't that sex was alien to Tenchi, more that it was well and truly out there. It floated somewhere in the vacuum between Alpha Centauri and the third moon of Betelgeuse Prime and more likely than not was circumventing the galaxy while doing so, seeing as how completely unrelated it felt it was to Tenchi's life.

The two of them were mutually exclusive. One was the irresistible force, the other was the immovable object and neither could exist in the same universe.(9) Decisiveness wasn't the issue here, because when it came down to it Tenchi was pretty head-strong. Once he'd set his sights on something, there was very little to sway it.
And this also boiled down to the art of romance, which he had decided on some time ago. What the girls had found, albeit unknowingly, was that they had all the chance of diverting him from his decision as a man armed with two spoons and a loud hooter has in swaying a tank from its course.
That's not to say he wasn't interested, however, because he was. Most certainly. There were just some things that came before that.

He managed to escape from the bedroom with the minimum of hassle, neither Ryoko or Ayeka were waiting outside his door. In fact, much of the house appeared to be empty and his wandering mind came to the certainty that it must be a Sunday. Tthe Saturday on his calendar hadn't been crossed off, as he'd gone out that night hadn't returned to fix it. As quietly as possible he sneaked down the stairs, footfalls padded by the socks he had put on. Halfway down he could hear the sounds of activity in the kitchen and the faint smell of breakfast. His stomach rumbled with a noise that sounded to him like a nuclear explosion.
He couldn't face the idea of seeing any of the girls and so continued down the stairs and into the hall. He found one set of his shoes under the telephone table (although he had no recollection of leaving a pair there) and put them on before slipping out the front door and out of the claustrophobia.

The walk he took was refreshing, to both mind and body. The woods gave a mix of shade and cover, with the feeling of openness that he needed so much at this moment. Coolness tensed his skin, but the sunlight that flickered through the leaf canopy gave him a subtle form of warmth. It rather suited his two states of mind on the matter.
He knew that he needed help and he wasn't sure he could take seeing either Ryoko or Ayeka without it. There was something truly terrifying in having to see them, something which he had never felt before. Stopping to sit off the path and under the bough of a tree, he thought about that. Whenever he tried to conjure them up in his mind now, he simply couldn't see them. He was sure that he used to be able to.
Now he got... images.
Flashes of pictures, or memories, or fantasies...
He couldn't tell anymore.

He'd had them before of course. Normal schoolboy imaginings, which he knew were perfectly normal for who he was. Who wouldn't in his situation? he could tell himself.
But now they felt so hollow.

Yes, he needed help. He felt he was sensible enough to admit that, but the question was who from? Washu was one answer, but even as it came into his mind he ignored it. She wouldn't understand what he was talking about, and even if she did, she would probably give him some form of advice that would hinder rather than help. His father was out of town on business... or at least, Tenchi thought he was. The way things were going he wouldn't be surprised if that was totally wrong as well. He couldn't talk to him either.
He could just imagine his father's back-slapping and 'boy to man' speech. He'd probably phone up the department store and ask if they kept their in-store surveillance CCTV footage on video and whether he could order a copy.
Mihoshi? She'd have her heart in the right place, but he couldn't be too sure that she'd understand what the problem was.

Which simply left one last person. The one person he could rely on in situations like this: Mr. Iwajima, his school tutor.

There was no problem that could not be alleviated by Mr. Iwajima, no situation that could not be defused. Mr. Iwajima had been there when Tenchi had failed his exams after the girls arrival and helped him through it. Mr. Iwajima had helped him learn English to a suitable degree to keep the coveted prize of going to America with the rest of his year during the summer. Mr. Iwajima; counsellor, friend and teacher to all his pupils.
In fact, there was one simple problem.
How was he going to explain to Mr. Iwajima that the problem lay in the fact that he had had sex with his friends who were, not only ravishingly beautiful and something even a celibate wouldn't sniff at, but also aliens and not of the Gaijin variety at that.

Which left one final, final, person upon which to place the burden of aided responsibility. Tenchi got up and continued down the path, the coolness beginning to feel decidedly chilly.

* * * * *

"Tenchi."
Tenchi stood just in from the shrine office's doorway, head bowed slightly. He knew that his grandfather was watching him in silence. "Would you like to sit down?" asked the unseen face.
Nodding. Tenchi licked his lips and head and eyes still pointed earthwards, he moved up to the table to sit down opposite Katsuhito. He crossed his hands in his lap and allowed himself to look up at his grandfather.
"You're awake early," said Katsuhito. He smoothed out the sheet of paper he was writing on with a hand that was only slightly less creased. "Especially after last night."
Tenchi's eyes snapped open. "Last night?" he squeaked. How did he know?

Katsuhito's eyes looked up at him. "The party," the old man said and looked at the surprise that was drawing across his grandson's face. "You don't remember it?"
Tenchi managed to shake his head and Katsuhito leant forward slightly, studying his face. Tenchi realised that his features must look as bad as he felt.
"A nasty hangover," said Katsuhito finally. His eyes creased at the corners. "I'm not surprised with the noise you were all making."
"Loud?" asked Tenchi in a voice that he hoped sounded normal.
"You don't remember." Katsuhito stood up, still staring at him and asked, "Would you like some tea?"
Even before Tenchi's mouth could form the first syllable of 'yes', the other man was over at the kettle and filling it with water. The pair waited in silence until he brought the finished pot of tea and a pair of cups over. He poured two drinks, placed the first in front of Tenchi, the second before himself and the pot on the table to the side. Katsuhito would have suggested they talk on the more comfortable mat which lay further down in the shrine, but he knew that his grandson much preferred the more Western feeling of sitting and talking at a table.
He waited for the first move to be made.

"Thank you," said Tenchi, "for the tea."
"It was very loud," Katsuhito replied, "I could hear it up here. Your choice of music was very..." he left it hanging.
Tenchi waited with his hands around the cup. "Interesting?" he hazarded.
No answer.
"Erm... Grandpa, the party... what was it for?"
"The completion of your exams."
Tenchi allowed himself the comfort of that small pleasure. "I was... celebrating?"
"Very good grades," replied Katsuhito bluntly. He looked solemnly at Tenchi's tea, and Tenchi took a quick sip.

A silence descended upon the room. Whatever it was that was bothering him, Katsuhito decided, wasn't going to be brought up first.
He looked at Tenchi's puffy, red eyes and the sweat that was clinging to his skin. If the boy had any idea what he looked and sounded like, he wouldn't be trying to hide it. But short of giving him a mirror, there was little else to be done.
"Is something bothering you, Tenchi?" he asked finally.
Tenchi let go of his cup and stared at it. "Um," he said.
"Tenchi..." He tried the stern voice.
"I..." the boy started and then paused. "S-s-something happened that shouldn't have."
It had been a long time since Tenchi had stammered, and Katsuhito got the impression that he hadn't realised he had even done so.
"Really."
"I thought of coming to you for advice on it. It's just that I don't know whether you'd be..." Tenchi's brow furrowed as if searching for a word.
"Annoyed?"
Tenchi looked up, brow still creased. "Yes." He shook his head, "No." Then, "Maybe."

From outside there was the sound of footsteps and the shuffling of feet as a visitors passed into the shrine's interior. Tenchi waited until the noise disappeared before allowing himself to speak. "I don't want you thinking any less of me, Grandpa. It's just that I did something that I didn't want to do... really."
"We all do things we don't want to do Tenchi," said the older man. He took off his spectacles and cleaned them with a tissue he found beside a pair of haiku books on the table. "It's simply a case of coming to terms with them." He put the glasses back on and saw that the boy was still despondently staring at the table's veneer finish.

He said, "You can never have help if you don't ask for it." A slight flicker in Tenchi's eyes signalled that he had touched a nerve there. "I have served as a priest for more years than you have been alive and I have heard many stories, many things that people didn't want to do and none have them have amused or angered me, no matter what they were." He looked at his grandson imploringly.

Tenchi looked up and stared into Katsuhito's eyes. "I made love." It was said with cold, almost mechanical precision. The boy took another sip of his tea and let it rest on the table.
"I see." Katshito nodded. To keep his hands from shaking he held his own cup tighter. "Well, the transition from boyhood to man-"
Tenchi gave him a funny look. "Please Grandpa. I... don't want philosophy. I want help."
The eldest of the men nodded. "Of course."
Tenchi smiled sadly. "Should I talk about it?"
"If it helps."
"It was with Ryoko," he said blandly and Katsuhito sighed inwardly. He couldn't say he hadn't seen it coming... but so fast? But there was nothing to say that it shouldn't happen that way. Poor Ayeka would be heartbroken how-
"And with Ayeka," finished Tenchi.

There was a very long pause.

Katsuhito's centuries of highly trained skills and patience, honed to the epitome of perfection kicked in that moment keeping him from saying something foolish or regretful. Then common-sense kicked in the highly trained skills and patience and hijacked the brain in a frenzy of synaptic gunfire. "What?" he asked carefully, just to make sure that what was being said wasn't attributed to one of the younger shrine visitors putting something herbal in his tea box.
"Ayeka and Ryoko," replied Tenchi.
"Last night?"
"Yes."
"During the party?"
"I... don't know."
Katsuhito pushed the glasses back up his nose. "Perhaps it would be best if you told them both that you have... slept... with the opposite party."
"Uh," replied Tenchi gingerly, "I think they might have worked that out."
Katsuhito pushed the rapidly re-sliding glasses back up his nose. Sighed. "It was all together, wasn't it?"
"Er... yes. But I didn't mean for any of it to happen," said Tenchi. His head bobbed between looking at Katsuhito and the tabletop. "I don't remember much of it. They must have done it while I was off-guard."
Katsuhito frowned lightly at that. "What gives you the impression that it was them?"
"Because I wouldn't have."

In the silence that followed, Katsuhito contemplated the problem. It actually didn't seem much of a problem to him. All of them were involved, so there were no worries of wailing depression for the 'loser' (if you could call the entire thing a game).
"What is the problem with this arrangement?" he asked finally.
"Arrangement?"
"The fact that you are all involved in the actions of what happened and are fine with it-"
"But I'm not!" said Tenchi, "That's the whole point, Grandpa, I'm not all right with it." He gave a long, loud exhale. "I... didn't want to. Maybe at some point. Maybe. Maybe not. But they went and did it beforehand. I didn't want to, and I don't want to now.
"They're going to think that this has changed everything, but I don't feel as though it has. I still love them, but I don't... love them. Just as friends."

"You think they will forget it so easily?"
"No. But they're going to have to."
"Are you sure that would be the best idea, Tenchi? Perhaps the better option would be to talk to them about-"
Tenchi rose so fast his knees popped. "Talk to them!" he cried, "they're going to think I want to marry them!" He caught the disapproving look on his grandfather's face, but stood his ground, his face growing red in embarrassment and anger.
"It's better to face your responsibilities than run away from them," said Katsuhito gently. "Otherwise they have a habit of getting far larger and far more dangerous in the meantime." He looked up at his grandson. "If you feel the need to take the day off training and chores in order to correct the situation, I am sure you are grown up enough to ask?"
"Thank you, Grandpa," said Tenchi. He bowed and made for the door, "But I saw a lot of leaves on the steps on the way in."

Katsuhito knelt in his spot long after the sound of Tenchi's feet had gone.

* * * * *

BLUE ONYX and RED SAPPHIRE drifted slightly through the cosmos. If you could image a large crab with chicken-pox, you'd be halfway toward what the BLUE ONYX looked like. It was not blue, but green. The RED SAPPHIRE looked a mile-long, three mile wide strip of celery with a lump on one end. It was red.
The pair stopped just outside the Refiu Asteroid Belt, boosters flaring.

"GREEN EMERALD, do you read, over?" could be heard if you had a police-band radio.
There was no reply.
"GREEN EMERALD, please respond, over."

Once again there was silence.

The two ships moved forward, crawling through a gap between a bundle of asteroids. A few minutes after they had disappeared a third ship appeared, coming the other way.

* * * * *

Masson sat in his seat, hands under his over-large buttocks. His uniform clung to his body in sodden patches. He could hear no sound from the hostage-taker, but he was sure he was there. He had to be... because no one would simply leave them sitting here like this. In front of him, a step down from his podium, the rest of the bridge crew waited in abject silent terror.
Masson was not terrified of the threat of being killed; he was practically relishing that. What he was terrified about was actually being allowed to survive. He'd be busted down to constable within an hour! He'd be handing out tickets in Bumsville, Aldroida!

Then suddenly came the voice from the communications panel, crackly from the rock around them soaking up the signal: "GREEN E...ERALD ... in... over."
He tensed, expecting the hijacker to scream something about turning it off. But it didn't come, just a repeat of the half static broadcast and then a descent back into quiet.
"Um..." he called out, "should we answer that? They'll get suspicious if we don't." He waited for an answer that didn't appear to come. "Hello?"

Carefully he turned in his chair, ready to dive off it at the first sign of danger.

The back of the bridge was completely devoid of anything that could mean danger. The turbolift doors had been propped open with a book, apparently on science, so that it didn't make a noise when the perpetrator left. Masson took a very deep breath.
"BLEEPING BLEEP-faced little BLEEPS!" he trumpeted and then rose, stumbling forward toward the turbolift and electronic systems. He heard the squeaks of the other crewmen's chairs turning to face him, but he was too busy searching behind the consoles to care. The dirty little BLEEPARD couldn't have had the nerve to walk right out again. Which simply left the logical conclusion that he was hiding somewhere on the bridge...
Which he wasn't.

He turned back to the rest of the bridge. "We've been screwed."
The rest of the crew looked at each other and then took a sudden interest in their bootlaces, the ceiling and their consoles. "Hot dang," said the helmswoman finally, or at least a close approximation of it.
"GREEN EMERALD, you are now in our sight, please respond, over."

Mr. Luchu, the communications officer, made a move to press the button but Masson jumped down and grabbed his arm. "No!" he snapped, "What are we meant to tell them? That we got hijacked by a bunch of pirates?"
"I don't know," replied the man, "you're the captain!"
Masson thought about it. "Yes, I am," he said finally. "So, here's what we're going to do..."

TO BE CONTINUED...

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(1) Since their inception, the Galaxy Police has been oft seen as a politically-controlled, dysfunctional, anal-retentive organisation made up of the most wasteful sacks of skin to have had the misfortune to be born. For the most part, that's pretty correct.

(2) And actually quite happily as well.

(3) Juraian Thanksgiving is moderately similar to American Thanksgiving, but with less turkey and more bark. Over time it has become the second largest public holiday in the Galaxy. However, it is the belief of many historians (or, as upstanding Juraians say, 'morally loose historians') that the original Thanksgivings celebrations were more closely related to Earth's pre-Christian Pagan ceremonies, such as May Day. The similarities are more than superficial, as both 'religions' worshipped tree-based deities and shared a common genetic background, which would most likely have created a sort of twisted parallel between the two. These early Juraian ceremonies were, like their counterparts, punctuated with druids, long robes, women without much clothes on and frequent sex, usually with a bit of human sacrifice thrown in if it had been a particularly bad year. This has of course disappeared from the modern Thanksgiving celebrations (although many Juraians secretly wish it hadn't).
No longer do virginal(4) young Juraians get sacrificed to the Tsunami (mainly because half the planet's population would suddenly disappear), rather sacrifices of money are made to the gods of consumerism. Not that anyone's really complaining that much. The central part to the holiday is the Great Feast, in which worship is paid to the Deity of Tsunami for her Bountiful Gift Of Fruits And Eternal Patronage. The eating of huge amounts of food was, originally, a disastrous incident as the nubile, sexy and mostly virginal Juraians often get rather bloated after porking out on the bountiful yields of home-hearth cooking or, in richer families, servant-prepared banquets.
Nowadays such problems are solved by the fact that the holiday only occurs every twenty-three years, letting Juraians stay nubile, sexy and as virginal as they like. Bless 'em.

(4) I apologise. The use of the word 'virginal' should hardly be hinted at, let alone included in a PG-13 story. I honestly hope no offence has been caused and my pre-readers recommend that if you are offended, you should pretend that it is nothing more than a misspelled word meaning : Like Virgil Tracy off Thunderbirds.
i.e. all odd walks and flailing, puppet-like limbs. Much like Ryoko after she's downed ten dozen bottles of sake, but with noticeably less breasts.(5)

(5) Sorry. It just popped out. And I apologise for saying 'popped out', which is far more vulgar. Sorry again.

(6) Probably not Central Park, though. Or Jurassic Park.

(7) Flame-B-Gone is a trademark of the Bacta-Bantha Co., the same fine purveyors of such goods as "Dehydrated Water In A Can" and "Excellent-Ninja-Fish-Robot-Trio-Adventures : The Hentai TV Series". (OVA coming soon to a DVD near you! Completely uncut and with the original seventeen minute scene that was so gratuitous that the MPAA censors vomited in their own shoes! Special Platinum Limited Edition comes with blow-up Love Hina dolls and nude Excel Saga pictures! Only while stocks last! No legal endorsement by owning companies implied! Legal cases in progress! Buy today, don't delay! Many a mickle makes a muckle! Etc. etc.)

(8) Which was: "No, it's a radiation suit."

(9) Feasibly exist, that is. When the Lindictus Conglomerate's Research & Development Department devised a way to do it, the entire thing was put off for the fear that the universe may be destroyed in a force of pure and immovably quick energy. Obviously that would have played havoc with the company's profits, although it would help to eradicate the competition albeit permanently. It was lucky that the Galaxy Academy never worked out how to create such power because scientists haven't got the guile to think about the little people, who would, if it occurred, be very thinly smeared across various trans-dimensional rifts.
All files on the subject are now closed and locked in the same vault as the Zapruder video, which conclusively proves it was a Juraian who pulled the trigger, and the images that were caught using a night-vision camera, pointed through the King's and Queens' bedroom window at the Palace of Jurai.

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AIC & Pioneer own Tenchi Muyo! Star Wars is owned by Lucasarts. Lock, Stock... is owned by Guy Ritchie (probably). Song names, lyrics etc. are copyright of their owner and is in no way an attack on that person or group. All things not owned by a particular company are the intellectual property of the author (Ministry Agent).

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Special Thanks To (In Alphabetical Order) :

All Readers Out there
Bob-R
Ledzepfan
Manic Street Preachers
Metallica_Wedo
Negative-Z

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One of my pre-readers, no names *cough*Ledzepfan*cough*, has reliably informed me that this chapter doesn't suck; it just blows. I agree, though I believe that I should still be allowed to call him a little arse-weasel. There was also a large essay on the basis of originality in fanfiction, but it got lost in an accidental erasure of everything that actually made sense. Thank you for reading.