Thunderbolt

The ship exited IN-SKIP in a cloud of darkness which trailed over the outer hull, pooling briefly around the conning tower in a vortex that dissipated before it reached the engines. Thin, misty wisps wandered randomly over the sleek surface as the ship drifted to a gentle cruising speed. The red lines on her hull were the only light in this black abyss between the galaxies, a tiny speck in an infinite universe.

Nero leaned back in the captain's chair, chin resting on his hand, and stared at the false-colour image on the main screen. Yanez, at the helm, toyed idly with the ship's wheel, occasionally tapping his fingers on the worn wood. 'Anything?' he asked. Yanez' shoulders lifted up and down in a minimal gesture.

'Nothing yet on long or short range scanners, even using those signature trackers Freya here gave us to upgrade the time radar. You know - there's an awful lot of empty space out here. How do we know they'll be here?'

'They will,' Freya said confidently. The tiny nibelung girl stepped over to the captain's chair and leaned against it, folding her arms against the padded back and resting her chin on them. 'The Miranda's tracking system had them on this course, and if I'd had time to reconfigure it, I could have used the same program to augment Thunderbolt's. They tear their way through subspace - you can't see where they are easily, but you can tell where they've been…' She tilted her head on one side. 'Of course, there is a way to make sure they find us…'

'That'd be the old "send up a flare" routine?' Yanez asked. He shook his finger at Nero before his captain could speak. 'No. Just no, my brother. I know that look. We wait for Harlock.'

'Just how bad can these ships be?' Nero muttered. 'I'm not doubting the boy's integrity, but he's not a fleet commander, now is he? Could be he just got out of his depth the last time - it was by his own admission not long after he took command of the Arcadia…'

Yanez leaned more heavily on the wheel. 'My brother, that "boy" is almost my age, and from what your old friend Hannibal tells me, he's a natural. He also doesn't strike me as someone given to hyperbole, so I'm inclined to follow his advice.' He gave Freya a sly sideways glance. 'Not jumping in there, lovely to defend your adopted father?'

'Harlock doesn't need me to defend him,' she replied. 'I've never personally encountered these ships, but I had access to a lot of ancient records that spoke of them, and my people created a version of them for their own use - Harlock came up against one of those copies, not the original, and they struggled to counter it. These are the real thing, and they're far more deadly, from what I remember.'

'On which note, how are my upgrades coming along?' Nero leaned across to smile at her. 'Harlock mentioned they were working on some tweaks to the shields and weapons systems to try and counter the regenerative abilities of those ships.'

'I've been setting your people to work as the data comes in from the Arcadia. You have some talented people on board.'

'I know. A couple of them worked with Tochiro back in the day.'

'I thought the captains were the only survivors?'

His answering smile was grimmer. 'The Arcadia's crew was decimated by the attacks on her by Three and Two, and then the last handful died in the boarding action - Kodai's XO was on the bridge just after a shot took it out, and said they'd only found Harlock and Mimay. I can't speak for what happened to the crews of those ships afterwards, and I didn't ask Mamoru what happened to his people, but although we were caught up in the chain reaction, I still had forty-one crew - counting Yngwie - when we went down. Several settled elsewhere over the years, and we lost a few in battles, but there are still sixteen of us still standing, and that, thankfully, includes my engineering crew.

'But not you?' Freya smiled at Yanez.

'Hell no. I came aboard about thirty years ago. Nero here pulled me out of a hole on Serumatake whilst he was breaking some of his men out of the same gaol. After two weeks of breathing in rotting fungal spores in a damp cell…'

'...and you really don't want to know where that stuff grows,' Nero added, prompting a ripple of laughter from the crew. He winked at Yanez. 'The crazy bastard took a hit for me on the way out, and once we'd patched him up I offered him a ship.'

'There was rather more to it than that,' Yanez added. 'When you're older, I might even sit down and tell you some of it, lovely.'

'I'm over two hundred years old,' Freya pointed out. Both men spluttered.

'Well hell… keep forgetting your people are so long lived,' Yanez said. He beamed a wicked little smile her way. 'Sooner rather than later then?' She nodded. 'Now brief us, lovely, if you can explain it to us less technical types. What exactly has Harlock cooked up for us?'

'We need to find a way to stop their auto-repair from working. Mimay found some old weapons and an ancient record of weapons the Nibelung used when they last encountered them. We don't know if they'll work but we can try. Doscoi and Yattaran have also suggested using the photon cannon - modulating the frequency, and Harlock's suggestion - which we might not have time to try - involves something they cooked up for fighting the Mazone, involving the torpedoes and monofilament wire… which if we had time to run the wire through a dark matter generator, looks promising, but by the time we've used the onboard printers to create enough filament, we'd be up to our gunwales in metanoids…'

Yanez flashed Nero a toothy grin. 'Put like that, it does sound as though we need a cream for that, yes?'

'Is there nothing in nibelung records about the tactics for fighting these ships?' Nero asked.

Freya shook her head. 'Not that I'm aware of, but we did put in a call to Professor Oedo on Niflheim. He and his team have been working there with some mazone scientists, looking into preserving what's left of the cities. They have your frequency so he knows to contact you, but given the time-frame…'

Nero patted her hand. 'Sadly there hasn't been an enemy engagement yet where you could put your hand up and ask for a time-out.'

'Makes you wonder if it's worth a try?' Yanez laughed out loud at Nero's withering look. 'Left your sense of humour behind in the rush?'

'It's trembling and hiding under this chair at the thought of what awaits us,' Nero drawled. 'I've seen dark mattered powered ships in battle, my friend. You haven't. It took two ships to even come close to crippling the Arcadia a hundred and twenty years ago. And if they hadn't gotten in a lucky hit on the weapons and taken out most of the gun crew in the first salvo, I'm not so sure Kodai and Komarova could have taken Harlock. Might explain what I've heard about his running with such small crews and relying on the automation - an invincible ship is worthless without a crew.' He frowned. 'Something Zone Industries were always keen on trying to replace, but never seemed to understand why AI wasn't a realistic substitute.'

'Why wasn't it?' Freya asked.

'Because this was Zone we're talking about, and he believed in cold hard algorithms… And an equation doesn't think, or feel. His ships were programmed by people who cared more for the bottom line than for anything more lofty - like - oh - human life.' He patted the control panel on the arm of his chair. 'Oyama's AIs were a different breed, based on the personality patterns of several gifted commanders. The old man wanted ships systems that could protect their crews, not just win battles.'

'So the Thunderbolt's is still active?' Freya tilted her head on one side and smiled. 'Who was it based on?'

'The Deathshadows shared a template, but as I recall Harlock, Mamoru, Okita's mother - who was an admiral herself, Admiral Sanada and Admiral Toda were all part of the project.' He smiled grimly. 'In a way the system was primed to accept something as strange as Tochiro's mind merging with it…' His smile grew a little sadder. 'And the Deathshadow Zero was even more experimental - the databanks had an experimental overlay that Mamoru's wife volunteered for. He renamed the ship Miranda for a good reason - it's her voice and her personality profile on file.' His grin became a little more wolfish. 'And if I recall correctly there was a choice - he could have had Harlock as an option, because we all took turns being recorded…'

Freya laughed. 'Oh… I rather think that would have been deleted a long time ago. I wonder if he realised that's based on the same technology that was used by Loki's rebels to download their consciousness into others?'

Yanez choked slightly. 'That sounds as though the copying process might be a little more detailed than you were led to believe,' he said to Nero. 'That Tochiro sounds like a bit of an overachiever…'

Nero laughed. 'Oh my friend… you have no idea what that little guy was capable of. If he'd cared much about their fathers' company beyond using it to facilitate Phantom's numerous follies over the years, and using it as their personal toybox, he'd have been a bigger danger than Hechi and Doppler if he'd been so inclined… thankfully neither he nor Phantom gave a damn about galactic domination.'

'He still doesn't,' Freya told them, smiling at their joint confusion.

'I thought he was dead?' Nero's frown normally made grown men blanch, but Freya weathered it with her cheeky grin and sparkling round eyes.

'It's... complicated… he seems to be entangled with the ship's dark matter on a quantum level. Tends to make an appearance every Earth year on the anniversary of the date he vanished. We're still trying to work out whether it's possible to get him back.'

'My brother… Do you remember a certain mousy-haired whippersnapper complaining about us dribbling out information on a need-to-know basis?' Yanez asked sarcastically.

'In fairness,' Freya replied, 'it's not exactly going to help us - that's at least five months away.'

'Would remorse be high on his intangible to-do list?' Yanez drawled.

Freya snorted delicately. 'Don't be silly. I've met him four times so far and whilst he's probably the most beautiful human male I've ever seen, he's as inflexible and convinced of his own infallibility as any of my own people.'

Nero shrugged. 'Sounds about right. If there's one thing about the commodore everyone agreed on, it's that that angelic body and face occasionally didn't make up for being something of a dick…'

'Commodore?' Freya asked. 'I thought he was just a captain?'

'Of the Yukikaze and the Deathshadow Four, yes. But they had to make him a commodore to command the Deathshadow fleet. And that, my dear, caused gnashing teeth in Admiralty HQ you could have heard clear to Andromeda.' Nero laughed. 'Komarova wasn't too happy either, since she outranked him and wanted that spot for herself. But the nibelung wanted Harlock, so…' he shrugged lightly. 'In hindsight, you have to wonder if things would have gone down a little differently.'

'I doubt it,' Freya replied, dimpling prettily at him. 'From what I've heard and seen, he'd have probably done the same thing - his actions weren't dependent on his command of the fleet, were they? I mean, being in command didn't stop them firing on him.'

Nero nodded his agreement. 'Fair point, little fae. Following orders had never been a strong point.' He grinned as though at a memory. 'But by god, we had some fun back in the day…'

The sensor tech looked up from his station and cleared his throat. 'Captain? That fun might be heading our way sooner than expected. I've got a trace on the long-range sensors, right at the limit of the time-radar.'

'Dark matter?' Freya asked, before either Yanez or Nero could speak,. She pulled a face. 'Sorry. Force of habit…'

'It's the signature you had us scan for, miss. Two of them.'

'Two?' Yanez shot Nero a worried look. 'Where's the third?'

Nero leaned back in his chair and called up his heads-up display. 'Someone else's problem, my brother. Get a lock on those traces and keep pace with them. Open a secure commlink to the Arcadia and tell them to get their arses in gear. Then warn Ventimiglia. Freya…'

'On it!' the little nibelung was already skipping back to her post at the dark matter controller.

Yanez turned away and took a firm hold of the helm, staring ahead at the main viewing window. 'You're enjoying this far too much, little brother,' he accused in a stage whisper. A ripple of laughter ran around the bridge.

'How long has it been since we put our lives on the line with such high stakes?' Nero asked him.

'Not nearly long enough,' Yanez replied with feeling.

'You've gotten soft,' Nero told him, laughter in his voice.

'I've gotten old,' Yanez replied drily. 'I'd like to get older…' He turned his head to catch the eye of the woman at the XO's station. 'Yara - talk to engineering - I want those upgrades online, and that shield modification in place asap. Freya - what can you do with the dark matter to make us a little less visible, lovely?'

'You're not as messy as Arcadia,' she called out. 'I've already started smoothing out your profile to try and make you stand out a little less from the background levels. If we slip in and out of IN-SKIP gently, there's a chance they'll just think we're a local anomaly. I doubt they're looking for you actively, unless they know you're coming.'

Yanez leaned on the wheel and let out a mock sigh. 'Oh. Well, there's no chance of that then, is there?'

'So cynical?' Nero twitted him.

'So much experience,' Yanez replied, his eyes fixed on the dark, sickly green trails on the screen, a frown on his weathered face.

Miranda

Hannibal tapped idly on the face of his tablet as the captains filed out of his war room, Farah trailing in their wake as though making sure they left the ship without taking the silver. He was tempted to call him back to let him know he'd missed one, since Morgan was hovering near the door, looking awkward instead of heading over to the Lightning on his shuttle.

'I thought we'd covered everything we needed to before we shipped,' Hannibal advised him smoothly.

'You did - quite frighteningly so,' Morgan replied. Circumscribed by his neat goatee, his mouth twitched in a slightly self-mocking smile. 'The Captain said you were scarily efficient… I'm starting to see what he meant. You have a way of stripping everything down into manageable chunks that makes an indigestible problem absurdly simple.'

'Hopefully it survives contact with our enemy,' Hannibal replied drily. 'No amount of preparation can make up for encountering an opponent who hasn't read the script.' Morgan let out a barking laugh, and Hannibal smiled at him. 'My brother used that as an excuse to simply face everything flying by the seat of his pants. Me - I prefer to plan for what I can, and hold improvisation in reserve.'

'Is that how you manage to stay so calm in the face of what would send most people into a spiral?'

'Like finding myself face to face with the living image of Miranda?' When the younger man hovered nervously, Hannibal decided to simply cut to the chase. 'If you keep gnawing at what life throws at you, lad, it won't heal. Doppler's actions have picked open a wound I'd thought long healed, I won't deny it, but I've lived long enough to know that sometimes you can only work with what the universe throws at you.' He glanced at the clock on the wall. 'Let me walk you to your shuttle. We're on a schedule.'

Wordlessly, Morgan fell into step beside him as he led the way through the ship. 'You seem like a nice young man, Morgan,' he continued. 'A rarity in a family plagued by its share of assholes - we tend to be great in battle but often make poor husbands and fathers.'

'You were an admiral,' Morgan pointed out. 'But everyone I've spoken to who knows you has nothing but good things to say…'

'A man can still fight to defend what he loves,' Hannibal replied gently. 'But those who love adventure and a battle for its own sake…' he trailed off. 'Let's just say there's a tendency to be a little single-minded and emotionally distant. After his wife died, my father preferred to lose himself in the skies of Earth rather than raise his legitimate son. Harlock's father and brother were both career military and between them made his teenage years a living hell…'

'And Ichimonji Dantetsu?' Morgan asked sharply. 'Strangely, apart from "great pilot", no-one will tell me anything. Harlock clams up looking as though he just bit into something sour. Selen just looks sad and changes the subject and Kei seems to be biting her tongue… Am I really such a "nice" man at heart? How would I know? I hear the man might have opened fire on his own command HQ...'

'I'm not convinced that was of his - or Douglas' own volition, so table that last. For the rest… Harlock regarded Dan as a friend, in some areas, but they clashed rather violently over Dan's treatment of his son,' Hannibal said softly. 'He lost his wife and eldest son to the Deathshadow plague. Afterwards… he went a little overboard trying to "toughen up" his youngest.'

'He was abusive?' Morgan looked a little frazzled at the thought. Hannibal winced inwardly. It wasn't the sort of thing a prospective father really needed to hear. He tried to reassure the younger man.

'Not out of malice. More a desire to make sure nothing could touch the boy. Plus Takuma's a sweet kid, but shy and artistic, not like his older brother, who was much more adventurous - I think also Dantetsu wanted to make him more like Susumu... I get him wanting to share his love of his own pursuits with his son, but the boy was only six…' he shook his head. 'He was pushing the boy far too hard, and Takuma… having lost everyone but his father, was desperate to please him.' He stopped, turned and clapped Morgan on the shoulder. 'Stop trying to second guess our reactions - and your own. You aren't Dantetsu, Morgan. There's a gentleness in you I never saw in Dan.' He continued walking, waiting for the younger man to keep in step. 'It does no-one any good to keep looking at you and the others looking for traces of the people you were cloned from. Have you ever heard of the legend of Orpheus?'

Morgan shook his head, his long curly hair - now stripped of the dark dye and back to its natural reddish-brown - falling over one eye, which he brushed away with a gesture Hannibal had seen repeated by so many of his family over the years. Never occurs to any of us to get a haircut… he thought, pushing his own silvery hair back out of his left eye.

'Bear with me. The story dates back well over three thousand years, but in essence, Orpheus loved a beautiful woman called Eurydice, and married her, only for her to die shortly afterwards - the details vary, but in his grief, he went into the underworld to beg its lord to allow her to return to the world of the living. Orpheus being a persuasive fellow, the lord of death agreed, on the understanding that he could not look back until they both reached the world of the living, and stood in the light of day.

'Orpheus began his long walk back from the underworld, at first sure in the knowledge his beloved followed behind. But after a while, he began to doubt. He heard no footsteps - was she really there? He'd been told she would be a shadow until they returned to the world above, but even so, he began to wonder if he'd been tricked. And as they came closer to the light, he started to fear that worse than a trick had been played on him. What if death had changed her - would she still be the woman he loved? Worse - what if this was not his wife, but a monster in her shape that he was bringing back to the world? If once he stepped into the light it would attack him, escaping into the living world to wreak harm on the living?

'His fear grew too strong, and on the threshold of the two worlds, he turned, to see the shade of the woman he loved hauled back into the underworld, never to return.'

On the threshold of the shuttle hangar, Morgan stopped and turned to stare into his eyes, a gaze Hannibal met calmly. 'I'm not quite sure what the point is?'

'Originally, I think it had more to do with accepting death and not trying to play the gods at their own game. But cloning… Creating new individuals is one thing - but we cannot claim those we've lost back from the land of death, Morgan. To do so is to invite the same fears into our hearts that poisoned Orpheus'. To be forever searching for the flaws, the differences, questioning whether or not what we see is really who we once loved and lost. I meant every word I said when I told you all I would not look for Miranda in Ianthe. I know that trap: every attempt ever made to reproduce an existing person faithfully has failed. I saw it on Lar Metal and saw the damage it did there.'

Morgan nodded slowly. 'And maybe to love only what we see isn't love at all?'

Hannibal smiled sadly. 'I suspect that was also Orpheus' failure. Don't keep second guessing it all, Morgan. You and Ianthe already made a decision to make your lives have their own meaning, and frankly that's more than most natural born people manage, going by the numbers of self-lobotomised morons who willingly signed up to Promethium's mechanisation programme. Love and pain, life and death are part of what it means to be alive. To deny one is to start denying all of them, and the end result is what happened to Lar Metal… it began with assisted reproductive cloning, and ended on the slippery slope that is the quest for immortality. The end result of which is inevitably paved with bodies.'

'You make it sound as though immortality isn't a good thing. Wouldn't conquering death…' he trailed off. 'I mean, you've been around for over a century, like the captain. Aren't you…?'

Hannibal shook his head. 'I hope not, and I didn't seek it out. We're born to die, Morgan. To live past your time is to quickly realise why it's not a good thing. Long lived races like the nibelung have adapted to longer lifespans. We haven't. The machinners have already started to realise what they've given up. That's why you're here, remember? They need our brief candles to replace - even if just for a moment - what they've thrown away. And that's just in a couple of decades. Imagine what their civilisation will be like a hundred years… a thousand years from now. Personally, I hope I'm not around for that…' He sighed. 'Ask Khalsa or one of the other survivors sometime if living through these years was worth it.'

Morgan rubbed his left eyebrow. 'Most of them seem weary, most days. I guess we joke a bit about their age… but when you look it at that way…

'Youth inevitably sees age through a distorted lens, lad. When you're young, immortality goes hand in hand with your own sense of indestructibility. I've been in my fifties for a hundred years, and I can tell you now, it's hard work.'

'So living forever is something only the young would think is a good idea?' Morgan's lips twisted into a wry, self-mocking smile.

Hannibal slapped him on the shoulder. 'Makes sense when you think about it. The only true immortality any of us really need is our children. Anything else is sterile and stagnant. Kind of why evolution seems to favour sexual reproduction - I mean did you ever see a civilisation created by amoeba?'

Morgan laughed. 'Could it do much worse than humanity?' He offered his hand to Hannibal and the two men shook. 'See you down there, Admiral.' He strolled over to his shuttle, long legs eating up the distance.

A click of metal soled boots on decking alerted Hannibal that someone was nearby. Blaze stepped into sight, a tablet in hand. 'A long life isn't all that bad,' he said quietly.

'Eavesdropping?'

'You were being so eloquent I hated to interrupt.' The two men shared a smile.

'Lar Metallians engineered their longevity a long time ago,' Hannibal reminded him. 'The rest of us, not so much. Maybe if your dread aunt had limited her programme to just her own kind, it might have had fewer problems. The rest of us don't have that advantage, Blaze. We're programmed for senescence.'

'I wonder if that's why Loki picked our world?' Blaze watched Morgan's shuttle take off and let out a deep breath. 'Like the nibelung, we have a longer view. Maybe he thought…'

'Blaze, Loki wanted the mechanisation programme for the life force it harvested. It was never about immortality. At least, not humanity's, and maybe not even the nibelung rebels. It was always about that damned gate and what's behind it. Did you read the materials from Daiba? About the metanoids history with the nibelung?'

'It only arrived a couple of hours ago. I tried. It's not my field…' he flushed under the older man's stern gaze. 'Right. I'll go back over it. But what in particular?'

'They hunger not, neither do they thirst.. they're darkness, and not just the absence of light. They are eternal, order in a world of chaos. A paradox in being the personification of entropy, and a remnant of the last universe. They don't evolve, Blaze. They can't. They go through the motions but they aren't alive in any real sense in this universe. We live, grow old and die. We evolve as a life form, and for some reason, they hate - maybe even fear that. I include the nibelung in that "we" by the way. It might explain a lot…' He ran his hands through his silvery hair and grimaced. 'These things have been around for fourteen billion years give or take, and apparently they don't change.' He sighed again. 'Never mind. Time to worry about that when we get back. One problem at a time. Were you lurking with intent?'

'Nero's called in, waiting for Harlock to catch up. One of the Phantasma ships has peeled off along the way. Do you think it might be heading for Ventimiglia?'

Hannibal learned against the wall with a frown. 'I hope not. That would suggest they planned on luring Khal away… which would leave no real defences… Have you spoken to your mother?'

'Better. I also called in a couple of favours. This close to Andromeda, we can call on the local branch of the Thieves - and a couple of others. Reinforcements are already en route.' He grinned. 'Though the reunion could be a little… fraught.'

'If you've spoken to who I think you have, that might be the understatement of all time,' Hannibal drawled. Blaze just grinned.

'Well, you did tell me to take the initiative,' he replied lightly.

'I trust your judgement, Blaze. But it doesn't change the fact that the people we can call upon tend to annoy each other when you put them all in the same room…'

Blaze shrugged nonchalantly. 'So we'll find an excuse to be busy elsewhere and let Mom deal with it,' he replied with a wink.

Hannibal laughed. 'Not Harlock?'

Blaze snorted. 'Hell no. Mom loves me, I'd eventually be forgiven. Harlock would have me out on the piste with a gravity sabre if I didn't run fast enough, and the bastard fights dirty…'

'You could do with a refresher,' Hannibal pointed out. He began to make his way back to the bow, walking slowly to allow Blaze to catch up. 'If you can't take him, I'll obviously have to give you a few pointers…'

Blaze groaned. 'Whose side are you on anyway?'

'The one that refuses to consider passing on this mantle to someone who can't take down that uppity outlaw - much though I love him, I still think he occasionally needs to have a reminder that he's not invincible. And since we've got at least five days travel to get to this Doppler outpost, we've got the perfect opportunity to hone your skills…'

He bit back a smile at the even louder groan beside him, and walked with a light step towards the bridge.