It wasn't often I had the chance to see my ship from the outside. We rarely landed, it being a major energy drain to get this beast of a ship out of a gravity well (and the fact that on the ground we're a kilometre long sitting duck.) Even docked in Deathshadow Island, we tended to exit via a boarding tube, and the wet dock wasn't exactly set up with a viewing gallery. Inside its kilometre long hull it enveloped me almost the same way the gravity cloak did. Outside, I stood small and insignificant compared to the vast, dark, nacreous hull that steamed wisps of dark matter even at rest.

You might think that at night, these wispy black streamers would be invisible.

You'd be wrong.

Occasionally red lightning flickered across the hull, sometimes leaping the gap between me and the ship, to snap and crackle painlessly around me. I paused at the foot of the hangar ramp and placed a gloved hand on the surface of the hull, to watch the interplay of the blue lightning that tended to gather around me, with the red that sparked off the exterior hull.

Over the sterncastle that housed the captain's quarters in a charming replica of an ancient galleon's wooden backside over the ultra high-tech glow of the ship's manoeuvring engines, a tall flagpole stood proud, the black jolly roger fluttering in the breeze. Up close the flag's enormous - takes at least three men to haul it down if you're so minded. And no, I've no idea how the hell it isn't just whipped off or burned to a crisp when we enter or leave atmosphere, or exceed reasonable speeds. The pole should snap like a dry twig, or the damn flag should be torn free. Somehow, it isn't. Another of the ship's little mysteries - another of which I entered the vessel intent on finding.

At the top of the ramp the black bird swooped down from the girders high above the hangar deck and landed with his usual lack of grace on my shoulder. After sticking his beak right next to my ear and telling me in no uncertain terms what he thought of me leaving him alone for over a week, he settled down to preen, his beak clacking noisily as he tried to coordinate its awkward length.

'Leave it for later,' I told him as I walked, reaching a hand up to clamp my fingers around that massive beak. 'You'll only fall off again.' It just caaarked at me and then launched itself off my shoulder, to land ungracefully on Ali's as he walked towards me.

'Have you been slipping food to him again?' The bird nuzzled Ali's cheek with his beak and gave me a glare out of its visible beady black eye.

'Me?' Ali asked innocently. 'Don't know what you mean…' He slapped an enquiring beak away from his front pocket, as the bird almost over balanced trying to lower its beak down on that impossibly long neck to reach. 'Glad I caught you though.' He fell into step beside me as we walked. 'There's a bit of trouble brewing…'

'When isn't there? Settling it is Yattaran's job.'

'Ah… well…' he scratched at a long sideburn. 'About that… Seems talk of those metanoid reboots being somewhat anti-social made the rounds…'

'On this ship?' Whilst the general mood on the Arcadia was much better than in my predecessor's day, we do seem to attract a lot of people with somewhat "quirky" personalities, most of them don't mix well with others. As long as they want to be here and pull their weight, I don't mind. Most of us carry around a lot of baggage, and not everyone wants to share. All I ask of my crew is that they have each others' backs - and mine. The rest is their own business.

However I don't take on the kind of hard-cases that give pirates a bad name, although as I approached the engine room with Ali scuffling reluctantly just behind me, the sounds coming from inside might make me wonder if I'd done just that.

I could have predicted the personalities at the heart of the argument that was rapidly escalating into a brawl. Maji, Cai, Doscoi and Yattaran, and the latter was building up to a shoving match with a group of brawny but not too smart guys led by Sabu and Yasu. Martinez and Franz, I noticed, were off to one side, leaning against the wall, arms folded watching to see how it played out. Figures. Like Ali and Kei they'd come aboard under the last captain, and tended to be a bit more guarded in their involvement in such scuffles. Unless I ordered them in or things got too bloody, they'd stay out of it.

'Ali.'

I didn't have to say much more than that. These days he can read my mood almost as well as Kei can.

Why else would I put up with the insubordinate, stubborn, obnoxious son of a bitch?

He shrugged his shoulder to dislodge the bird, which flew up into the ceiling girders with a squawk, cracked his neck a couple of times, cracked his knuckles and strode into the middle of the fray bellowing 'Oi! Break it up…' He hauled Sabu back by the collar of his jacket before the beefy paw of my first mate could connect with his face. That paw connected with Ali's chest instead, though for all his bulk and belligerence, Yattaran isn't much of a fighter barehanded. All it got from Ali was an "oof" as he pushed Sabu out of the way.

Doscoi was squaring off to a bloody-nosed Yasu and two of the gunners, but Cai and Maji - two of the more isolated crew - just stood by looking rather miserable. 'Captain on deck!' Ali shouted. 'For fuck's sake - what is with you guys? Yattaran - you're supposed to take care of this sort of shit, not be throwing punches in the middle of it.'

'They started it!' my rather rotund first mate shoved his thick, baroque glasses up his nose and glared at the small crowd. 'Wondering if we were some kind of imposters! Could ask these twats the same. Fucking. Question!' His voice rising as he spoke, he bellowed out the last word so loud I winced.

'Yeah.' Doscoi wasn't the most talkative member of the crew - some days he made Maji look like a chatterbox. 'Accusing us of being spies or saboteurs... ' He stalked towards Yasu until he was face to face with the bulky crewman. 'I was fixing it you thick cu…'

'Enough!'

I don't like to raise my voice. Generally because it worries people far more when you don't… they keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. But this needed nipping in the bud, and hard. 'Doscoi?' I added more quietly. I folded my arms and waited.

'Captain. There was a problem with the water supply. Cai said there was something off in the showers, so I shut it down whilst…'

'He was messing around with the coolant overflow!' Yasu jabbed a finger at the snarling engineer.

'Someone had already opened it, you retard!'

The pair tried to go for each other, but a nod from me brought the slacking pair on the sidelines into the fray to break them up.

'The rest of you back to either your quarters or your duties,' I told them. 'Yattaran - you'd better have a good explanation as to how this got into an us versus them situation when I get round to talking to you. Maji - Doscoi - wait over at the side with Ali - we'll check the water supply. Cai?'

I took the pilot over to one side. 'How the hell did you get rounded up?' I asked, although I could guess.

'Mutterings in the mess,' he said quietly. He's about my age, but somehow always seems younger. He's quiet and a little shy, and never really got over his lover dying in the plague a decade ago. Matt and Cai had been devoted to each other, and to see him alone was a knife to the heart some days, as though he'd had a body part amputated. 'Plus someone opened his big mouth about seeing me "lurking" talking to Doscoi…'

'So the four of you were checking up on the water supply, and with gossip running rampant…?'

'Something like that. Might not have been so bad but both Yattaran and Doscoi took offence, and… well…'

Ali strolled casually over to me, hands in his pockets. 'That's just the start of it, you know,' he opined. 'Tochiro's been going over the records looking for a possible mole, but this lot - they will take matters into their own hands if they think they have to.'

'Goes with the territory,' I replied. 'You need to trust the man next to you in our line of work. The damage even one infiltrator could do to us doesn't bear thinking about. We've got a community built on trust and self-interest. It's a delicate balance. If there is a spy, I want them caught fast, and terminated.'

'No matter who it is?'

'Ali… were you not paying attention? If someone isn't who they say they are, that person is dead, and has been for some time. Now - I need Yattaran in Engineering, so take Franz and Martinez and make sure you keep the rest of them either busy or quiet until I can look into this. Call Kei if you have to, but make sure the crew don't get too much free time to worry at this.'

'I'll have that dozy pair from Heavy Meldar hopping around so fast they won't have time to breathe,' Ali grumbled. 'I know bloody well who shoots their mouths off without thinking around here…' He stomped off calling for Franz, and they vanished in the direction of the bridge.

I knelt beside Doscoi as he pointed out where the intake ducting for the water supply on the port side had been linked by a small tube to the coolant ducts. 'Almost impossible to see unless you go looking. And if Cai here hadn't been taking a shower when he did…'

'How bad is it?'

'Well it's a big tank, and was full, and we caught it pretty quick. The starboard tank's fine, but I can't do anything with this until we can dump the tank… and I'm not doing it into the bay. We need to vent it to upper atmosphere so it disperses and land again so we can refill after we've scrubbed it through. That's just to make it usable - I wouldn't use it as drinking water until I can completely decontaminate it.'

'Fine. We go up and come back down, A couple of hours to scrub?' I reached out and picked up the disconnected tube. 'This is from the fuel intake system for the space wolves…'

He plucked it from my hands and scowled at me. 'Longer. Finding this was easy, but whoever did this didn't just want to make us sick… I had a hunch this was too easy to find, so I went looking…' he pointed to another pipe, further along the wall. 'The bastard fed water back into the coolant system. We've lost the coolant for turrets seven through thirteen, and one of the dimensional oscillator cannon arrays.'

'Can't you just flush it and replace?' Cai asked.

Yattaran shook his head. 'Nope. Water and that stuff are a bad mix… it causes it to polymerise - gunks up the works. We shut down the system - thankfully we weren't using the guns, so it was pooled in the section closest to this- but we need to strip down those ducts and clean them, or we risk the entire port battery exploding. That'll take days...'

'We don't have days. I need to intercept those Phantasma…' I stood up and stared at my three engineers, all of whom looked grim. 'How long to clear the water tank?'

'Won't take long to skip up and vent, but before we refill it, we need to clean it - even the small amount of coolant that leaked in would be nasty. Six hours minimum, then two hours to refill - but we'd need to desalinate as we fill up…' Maji said.

Too long… 'Why not use the seawater to flush through the system?'

They all looked at me. Maji grinned. 'Scour it through at high pressure - we can do that. At that concentration it should be safe to flush through into the sea, right?'

Tentative nods. 'Might work…' Yattaran muttered.

'It's hardly standard procedure, and you'd need to replace the intake and outflow afterwards just for the pressure damage,' Doscoi pointed out. 'But it would save time. We can rig up a desalinator en route… clean up the water as it exits the tanks? We'd need to replace the system in dock when we get the chance though. Saltwater's murder on the pipework and those ain't on the self-repair system.'

'It'll do for now. You can also figure out the coolant problem en route,' I told them. 'Don't get creative - just print up more ducting and swap it out.' I wasn't wearing gloves and a stinging sensation in my fingers made me look at the hand I was holding the pipe in. Already my fingers were red and sore, and I handed the thing quickly back to Maji. 'How are we doing for water overall?'

'Starboard tank's clean, and pretty full. If we switch that over to supply the mess and warn everyone not to drink from the toilets we'll manage,' Yattaran answered. 'Don't worry,' he added with a rough chuckle, slapping me on the back. 'The captain's luxury bathroom is also on a separate tank…'

'Well that's a relief. I'd hate to be the one to tell Kei half hour showers were off the table for the duration…' I drawled. All three engineers chuckled. 'Cai - tell Ali to gather the crew in an hour on the bridge?' He nodded once, and left.

'You think he's on the level?' Yattaran asked, absently scratching his arm. Like myself he had a small red rash forming. 'Dammit, forgot how much that stuff stings…'

'Fetched Doscoi didn't he?' Maji shrugged. 'I don't like this. Second guessing whether people you've known for years have been converted.'

'Maybe he was framing him?' Yattaran suggested. Doscoi looked a little sick at that.

I frowned. 'Or maybe the plan's a lot more subtle - sow distrust and fear at a low level, you disrupt the crew far more than one big event which may or may not work. Was the idea to poison us? Or just make us a little sick so we'd be undermanned? Was the job to contaminate the water or the coolant - the latter's more dangerous to us, it could have been an accidental leakage and the pipe we found was a first attempt? Our infiltrator could be either as cunning as all hell, or a total incompetent.'

'Takes one to know one, eh, captain?' Yattaran asked with a wink. I wasn't sure I wanted to answer that one, and Maji and Doscoi both stared at him in horror. 'First Mate!' Doscoi spluttered eventually.

'What? Whaddid I say?' You could almost see the cogs turning like the pulley systems on our walls. 'Oh. I meant spy, you dopey pair. Er… captain, that came out wrong…'

'No shit…' Maji muttered. He rolled his eyes as he strolled past, but his heart quite obviously wasn't in it, and me… I couldn't even summon up an answering smirk. Not this time.

I left the bandanna squad to it, already arguing over where to start, and made my way to speak to the other brainy swot on the crew.

The ship could be a powder keg some days, given the mix of personalities and the general issues with having between forty and sixty people, most of whom are somewhat lacking in social skills, living in close proximity in a high pressure environment and rubbing up against similarly lacking individuals. But no matter how fraught the rest of the ship got I could usually rely on getting some peace and quiet in the central computer room.

It's not that the crew can't get along - mostly, they do. Or that they can't or won't pull together - mostly, they do.

But when things do cook off, they can get noisy.

And that's on a good day.

The room is massive, holding a circle of data banks linked to a soaring central column by trailing cables and conduits that resembles nothing so much as an ancient tree in a dark shady glade. Or given the man-made construction and the overall gothic feel of the ship, an ancient cathedral, which made a certain kind of sense when I learned my predecessor had been a somewhat lapsed Catholic prep school boy…

As I took my usual seat on the largest of the "roots" trailing across the floor, it occurred to me that I hadn't actually asked to see the Thunderbolt's equivalent. I idly wondered if it was the same design.

Well… maybe a bit less retro, and not quite so obviously weird-ass organic.

'Nice to know you're awake…'

Ooh. Touchy. And for the record, I can't see everything, you know. The automatics take care of the day to day stuff. If I stuck my nose into everything twenty-four seven the power drain would be off the charts… But I'm sorry. I did drop the ball a bit. I was going over the archive footage.

I sighed. It was always hard to take the little guy to task. Something I suspected he relied on a lot when alive. I basked for a moment in the blessed silence and the cool breeze from the air conditioner that kept the databanks cold. 'We've got a problem…'

You think?

'You know, if I was planning this, this is how I'd do it. Sow dissent and distrust, plague us with small but annoying - but not too deadly - acts of sabotage. Set the crew against each other, and make me hurt by whittling away at me piece by piece…'

You think this is personal?

I thought for a moment. 'I think it's a distraction. There'll be more - at least one, and I want to smoke them out. Did you find anything?'

He called up a hologramme with the pictures from several personnel jackets showing. One was Cai. The others… 'Not Doscoi - he's clean. Cranky, but I'd bet good money he's not been replaced.'

Me? Well… I could be a little moody… Yasu. Rick. Kei. Ali. Doc Luna. The latter holding a small tabby cat. 'Luna? Or the cat?' I asked, making a vain attempt at levity. 'You can't seriously…'

Not out loud, Harlock. That's why the speakers aren't on.

I hadn't even noticed he was talking to me directly, I was so used to it.

These are the most likely candidates the algorithm throws up as possibles based on behaviour cues, but it throws up a few false positives. As you might expect.

I stared at the floating headshots. Kei? Not a chance. Me? I was pretty sure I'd know about it... Ali I'd rule out, simply because there was no way in hell anyone could fake being that annoying. And Luna? Tougher call, but she rarely left the ship or Deathshadow Island.

Yasu had been one of the men who'd climbed Mount Gun Frontier ahead of me to try and gain a berth on the Arcadia, and along with Sabu and some skinny guy whose name escaped me, had taken a long drop off the hangar clamps for their pains - thankfully on a low-g moon with the Arcadia's artificial grav field wrapped around the mountain. When I'd gone back there a few weeks later, I'd talked them into joining up. Not the sharpest tool in the box, but he was loyal.

Rick was from Mistral - an agri-world targeted early in the war by the machinners. He'd lost an arm in the battle, and his heavily pregnant wife had been on the same transport as Cai and Matt, albeit rather less than willing. The SDF had wagged a finger at him for wanting to carry on flying, so he'd jumped at the chance when I offered him a customised space wolf. Hell, I'd reasoned if Harlock and myself could fly combat with one eye apiece, why not? He'd had my back so often - like Cai - that I'd lost count. His wife was friends with Kei and Selen and our kids hung out together.

That piping had come from a space wolf…

'Fuck.'

My sentiments exactly…

'Any luck on a test?'

Even using the data Khal's people sent over, I'm nowhere close. I'm an engineer, not a psychologist.

'A gap in that massive brain of yours? I might need to look out for swooping pigs…'

Hardy-har. Good luck head-shrinking this lot anyway. If there's a bell-shaped curve for normal human personality types, most of us are on one end or the other of it.

Oh - before I forget - Mimay was looking for an old weapon from Niflheim… she was rummaging around in our old storage boxes last time I checked. Dunno if she found anything - she headed back to your quarters lickety-spit. Oh - and she was on an encrypted line to Freya as well, but cut that short when that pretty-boy Yngwie showed his face. I didn't know she could turn a whiter shade of pale…

'Another one who's adept at running away from unpleasant encounters?' He didn't answer. 'Where is she hiding?'

If she's not draped over your chaise-longue I'm guessing she'll be soaking in your hot tub.

Even though I'd not taken the eyepatch off all day I'd got the beginnings of a thumping headache. 'Joy. A soggy, naked nibelung drowning her sorrows in my wine cellar…'

Relax. I don't think she's emptied the contents into your hot tub…

Now there was an image I'd like to shake. I strode out of the computer room shaking my head, wondering - and not for the first time - if the last captain had had days like these.

Mimay wasn't, mercifully, floating naked in a hot tub full of full of Schloss Greifenstein's last Riesling vintage, but she was making inroads on a bottle of burgundy. Not her first of the day either, looking at the two bottles already lying on the floor next to the chaise-longue.

'You do know the wine-cellar isn't on the self-repair circuit?'

She looked at me over the rim of a crystal goblet and then hiccuped very quietly. Dozens of tiny green glowing "fireflies" scattered in a cloud around her, then settled back to orbiting their languid, pale sea-green star. 'Okay. That's it. I'm cutting you off,' I told her, suiting action to words and removing the half bottle that was left. I placed it out of reach on my desk and then knelt next to her.

'I do not get intoxicated,' she told me primly, and very deliberately. Another very cute hiccup escaped her and I had a face full of tiny green flames that I had to brush away. I took the goblet out of her fingers and placed it on the table next to us.

'Of course you don't,' I replied soothingly. 'But you're in here, hiding from an old friend, and making inroads into a very expensive and rare Mazoyères-Chambertin 2857, and I'm pretty sure Hannibal will actually cry if I tell him how cavalierly you're treating it… For fuck's sake, Mimay, at least head for the Château Mouton Rothschild 2860… we still have six cases of that.'

The corners of her tiny mouth tilted upwards in the beginnings of a smile. 'We liberated that from a small colony where one of the original Gaia Sanction council fled to avoid the final stages of the war. Harlock said it hadn't travelled well…'

'Which would explain why it's gathering dust?' I patted her delicate long-fingered hand gently. 'Such snobbery from a man who swilled down Andromedan Red Bourbon like it was water…' I took her hand in mine and felt her chilly fingers close around my own. 'Having met Yngwie, I can tell you he's a bit of an arse in my opinion, but you're worth ten of him, so why are you avoiding the twat? If he gives you any trouble, I'll have Mamoru punch him again. Seriously, he can't even fight off a teenage boy…'

She smiled fondly and laid her other hand on my cheek. 'It seems when forced to confront my past decisions, my courage fails me. My kind… can be very judgmental…'

I bit my tongue. 'To throw your own advice back at you, perhaps you need to face this? But it can wait. If you can refrain from burping fireflies for a few minutes, I'd like to know what you might have to fight these "lords of shadow". Anything you and Freya can think of, no matter how stupid, it might be worth a shot. Talk to me whilst I get changed - this planet's a sauna, and I refuse to address the crew feeling sweaty.'

She perched on the steps of the covered hot tub whilst I showered - I'd learned long ago not to expect much in the way of privacy. She'd found my initial blushes endlessly amusing, but the nibelung had been a tactile race, and deprived of the company of her own kind, she happily sought out anyone willing to snuggle given half a chance. How the hell she'd coped during a hundred years with only Harlock for company I'd never know, because she was all over myself and Kei as soon as she realised we were a softer touch, and she and Luna between them would fill the bloody ship with cats if I let them. One of the current crop of three was curled up on her lap purring as she stroked it, when I walked out of the drying field. 'Did you find what you were looking for?' I asked as I grabbed a pair of pants.

She picked up a small object from beside her, and handed it to me, the cat taking a lazy swipe at it on the way past. I turned it over in my hands, puzzled. 'I thought you were looking for a weapon?' The object in question was about six inches square and half an inch thick: a stone tablet with strange markings on all of its surfaces. 'Pictograms?'

'An old form of our language - ideogrammatic, and each symbol carries a multitude of meanings, especially in relation to each other. This… is a sophisticated cypher, and also part of a silicon storage device. My brother sent it to me before…'

Before he'd been sequestrated by one of a rebel group of Nibelung who apparently wanted to bring back the good old days… I noted one of the symbols resembled the spinning-top design of the Phantasma ships. One I knew as the Nibelung symbol for "eternal light", another meant "never-ending darkness". Beyond that my knowledge was pretty limited - and those two I knew only because they appeared on the side of our dimensional oscillator cannon… 'Does it hold any information that might be useful?'

I handed it back, since the bathroom wasn't that warm, and I wanted my sweater. Whilst I pulled that over my head she replied. 'It might, if I can work with Tochiro on translating it. The problem is more that the language tends to be a little… poetic. Translation even into my language isn't easy, as so much of what it describes is metaphorical and couched in terms that make no sense to anyone from a different time. It's hard to explain…'

'Like Hannibal talking about vid shows, films or literature lost forever in the Homecoming War?'

She nodded, and passed over my eyepatch. The cat on her lap saw this as an enticing toy, and batted at the dangling leather thong, snagging it out of her hands and then running off with it, sprinting out of the open door and into the room beyond. I sighed. 'Never mind, I'll grab a spare.'

She followed me out. 'Language relies on a shared experience. Without it… without that spirit of the age, words are devoid of a proper context. You know the symbols cast into the side of the cannon? I saw your fingers linger over those. They have a simple, specific meaning, but they also hold the key to the scientific principles involved in the making of that weapon.'

'So there's a very real possibility that Alberich sent you this specific piece…'

'To prevent Loki's people from using it.' She clutched it to her chest in both hands and bowed her head so that her hair floated over it. 'Freya had access to some of the main databases whilst she was linked to the system. Her knowledge is greater than mine. It mentions the oscillator energy specifically in connection with that pictograph of the Phantasma. I'm not sure we'll have time…'

'Do what you can between you,' I told her. 'If there is something in there, it'll be a bonus, but I won't be counting on it.' I paused. 'Mimay - this Yngwie - do you trust him?'

She looked up, startled. 'Why would you ask?'

I shrugged. 'Not sure. But Loki had people all over key projects in the final days didn't he? Did it ever seem possible that the Deathshadow Project escaped his notice?'

'I…' She shook her head, making her hair ripple and flutter around her, as diaphanous as the veils covering her flightsuit. 'No. But… Yngwie?'

'Maybe he's just an asshole. It's just something about him doesn't sit right. If you do face him before we lift-off, don't go alone.' I settled my gun belts on my hip and grabbed a jacket. 'Get that thing scanned and sent to Freya. We've got a couple of hours to spare - I've got to give a pep talk to my crew and then explain to our hosts that we might need to catch up to them.'

...and before that, a quick warp radio link back to Tabito. I wasn't too worried about Nami, Taro and Wataru - they were surrounded by a cadre of Selen's finest, after all. But they were probably worried about us, and it wouldn't hurt to check in.

That was the easy part. Working out what to say to the crew? Not so much...