Delays are never welcome, whatever the reason. Having to hand over the body of a comrade - a friend - who you've known for almost twenty years without time for any farewell was particularly unwelcome. Even knowing that a fast cremation was safer given the possibility of Cai's body being taken over by a stray metanoid, it wasn't easy to persuade the crew that we'd have to forego our goodbyes until we returned.

Handing over a pair of trussed reboots still wearing the bodies of our companions was arguably worse, because these would have to be disposed of safely away from the colony.

'Euphemisms,' I told David/Hank rather more bluntly than was perhaps polite, judging by the sharp elbow in the side Kei gave me.

'They're already dead,' Kei said quietly. 'Don't take it out on him.'

'I'll arrange for a memorial when you return,' Selen said, stepping into the awkward silence. 'For all of them. Your friends were murdered, just as surely as Cai was.' She shot a significant glance over to where Mamoru - scuffing his boots in the sand next to the capsule that held Cai's body - and sighed sadly. 'I'll watch over him, Harlock. He took it hard. For all his bravado, he's still a boy, and one who cares deeply.'

As I watched, Mamoru shook off Rei's outstretched hand, and wandered away, down to the cliff edge in front of the Arcadia's bow where he stood facing the headwind, his hair whipped back from his face. He'd switched his white patch for a black one at some point in the last couple of hours, and watching him, one hand resting on the butt of his pistol, he looked so like his great-something grandfather - and not his namesake, for the record - I almost choked. I murmured something to Kei along the lines of dealing with the funeral arrangements and strolled over as casually as I could.

He greeted me with that barely audible grunt that translates in teenspeak to something close to "I know you're there, but I don't really want to talk about it."

I waited. I know my sons, and I didn't raise them as socially inept repressed brooders. I might be fighting fifteen hundred years of selective breeding, but I was trying my best. And eventually, he caved.

'Rick taught me to fly.'

Well, so had I and his mother, but I did my best not to take it personally.

'We didn't start out as friends when we first met,' I told him quietly. 'But we did quickly remedy that once we helped save Mistral. I learned a lot from him as well - even after he lost his arm, he was one of the best pilots I've known - and that includes Dantetsu and Hank. Trust me when I say that those responsible will pay for this.'

'Including me?' He kept staring straight ahead, into the eye-watering salty wind.

'You did what you had to do,' I told him firmly. 'That wasn't Rick, not anymore.' Coddling him at this point would be counter-productive - he - and the rest of the crew - needed to stand firm on this point. Hesitation would get us killed. 'Rick was dead, Mamoru. That's how these creatures work. What was walking around was just a shell, a puppet designed to deceive us.'

'I know that in my head,' he replied softly. 'But still…'

I turned back to where Kei, Selen, David and the heavily pregnant Ianthe were still talking, and raised my hand. When Kei looked over and started towards us I shook my head and pointed to Selen, who joined us with an inquisitorial arch of an auburn eyebrow when she drew near.

'Harlock?'

'We need to get moving. The self-repair's almost finished with the damage to the hull.' Mamoru flinched slightly and slid a sideways guilty glance my way. 'It happens,' I told him. 'Though if the entire tower had collapsed you might have found yourself grounded until you had grey hair.' I turned back to Selen. 'Let him sit in on one of the interrogations,' I told her.

Both of them gave me startled looks - more quickly smoothed over by Selen. 'I want him to understand,' I told her, but including Mamoru in my eye contact. 'You need to see for yourself,' I told him. 'Really see.'

'I do get it,' he started to say.

'Not yet,' I replied, a little forcefully. 'It's eating at you, and I hate to see that. This is what they do… sow doubt, and distrust. Once you see your enemy clearly, you'll understand. Look them in the eye and watch…' I placed a hand on his shoulder - rigid and stiff - and pushed him away from Selen slightly. 'It's a cold hard lesson, and I'm sorry. But you wanted to play with the big boys, Mamoru. Time to decide if you can take everything that comes with that.'

He looked at me, took a deep breath, let it out in a rush and nodded.

'Good man.' I slapped him on the shoulder and regretted it when he winced. That tension wasn't all guilt… 'And get any bruises checked over. I'm the one who has to take a lecture from your mother when she spots so much as a hangnail.'

He grinned - slightly forced, but an improvement at least. 'I'll talk to Hallie - she seems to be the medical expert around here.' He smiled - this time his incandescent natural charm wasn't faked. 'Take care, Dad. I'd hate to explain to Wataru why he won't be able to cover himself with glory taking down Captain Harlock before he makes lieutenant!'

'For that,' I muttered as an aside to Selen as he trotted over to give Kei a bear hug , 'I'm thinking you should drill him extensively in the use of the sabre he's determined to trip over…'

She laughed. 'He'll be fine.' She had to brush a thick lock of her red-gold hair from her face. Soberly she added: 'I hate sometimes that they have to grow up so fast… At least Dai and Kanna were able to have something close to a normal life, but that was never really going to be possible for yours, was it?'

I shook my head. 'We've done what we can. It's up to them now. Nami and Wataru at least have their eyes on a normal life, of sorts. Mamoru and Taro though… it really is as though the Universe wants to repeat itself…' I drew away from that as soon as it was out of my mouth, but Selen knew me too well. She gave my shoulder a squeeze, but said nothing. We walked back to the others side by side in companionable silence, and parted with the usual extortions on both sides to be careful. When the Arcadia lumbered into its escape trajectory in a cloud of dark matter a little later, I was cautiously optimistic about solving this pesky metanoid problem.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Although the long runs between systems (or in this case right out into the inter galactic void) are mind numbingly boring, I'd actually been enjoying this one, after over a week spent on someone else's ship. I'd been relaxing in the captain's lushly upholstered throne, bird balanced on the backrest preening and prrking, listening to Yattaran and Kei catching up on a fortnight's worth of bitching across the gantry at each other whilst young Shiro plied me with a cinnamon latte and one of Anita's fresh pastries. Yes, we were heading into shit up to our proverbials, but what else is new? You take the little luxuries when you can get them.

I was going to have to have words with Blaze though. The sneaky little bastard keeps trying to talk Anita into joining him, and now that Zack was happily settled on Tabito with Niobe, I was beginning to worry about my ability to hold onto the best cook in several systems. I'd have a mutiny on my hands if Yattaran or Kei had to take a turn in the kitchens again.

Nero's message came through about five hours after we'd left Ventimiglia, just as I was feeding the bird with the last flaky piece of danish.

...can't find a trace of it, Yanez said, butting in when his captain paused for breath. But figured your systems might be better at tracking them, since you've had more time to upgrade?

Yattaran was hovering next to me pacing up and down next to the commsuite, muttering under his breath, with Mimay fluttering close by. Once I'd shut down the warp feed and ducked out of the cramped quarters behind the upper gantry's skull decal, I stared at the mis-matched pair. 'Well?'

'I'll get right onto tracking the wreckage of space-time they leave in their wake,' Yattaran grunted. 'But ya gotta figure we know where they're headed, right?'

'Ventimiglia's the best candidate, but it isn't the only one,' I pointed out. 'Yattaran - pull up the local sector would you, on the main viewer? Mimay… overlay the Nodes map.'

The two of them got to work and I - and the crew - stared at the result that replaced the view from the main bridge window.

It wasn't particularly crowded - there were a handful of outlying stars flung out from M31's spiral in this area, widely dispersed but still clinging on by the fingertips to their uncaring parent. Over this Mimay's long fingered hands conjured up the local nodes, of which there were three - one (astronomically) close to Ventimiglia, one in a binary system about a hundred light years away, and another in an area of space that seemed to be completely empty, which I didn't buy for an instant.

'That's about two days back on their current course,' I pointed out, arms folded and frowning. 'Franz - do we have a more in-depth scan of that empty region? Is it on Harlock's list of placements?'

It took him a few seconds to get the data. 'Good call. Mimay - I'm surprised you didn't remember?'

'There were a few locations we disregarded due to the danger involved in placing them. After all, we only needed to pull the plug, as you call it, in a precise pattern - we didn't need to blow all of them,' she replied softly, almost apologetically. She took a step closer to the map, now enhanced by the tiny stylus ring Franz had drawn around an area of space as black as that around it. 'A tiny black hole that's easily avoided as a navigational hazard, since it lies off the direct route between the galaxies.'

'But too strong even for Arcadia to pull free from if you tried to drop one of the oscillators into it?' I added.

'More likely you'd risk the tidal forces pulling it apart early,' Franz added. 'Which is kind of what happened in the Mazone home system, isn't it?'

'Point,' Yattaran grunted. He tugged off his bandanna and scratched at his thinning hair. 'You think they're planning on blowing these three nodes? What good would it do? There's a galaxy between these and the Gate of Yedar…'

'Zoom out,' I told him. 'Take a look at the local cluster.'

We stared at the new map - this one showing the local group. Yattaran highlighted the Hourglass Nebula without being prompted. 'It won't trip the faultline we know about,' I mused. 'But what it could do is seriously interfere with travel between M31, the Milky Way and…' I pointed to a group of wandering lines that indicated the Black Roads of dark energy that the nodes lay on like monuments on Earth's ancient ley lines '...the Magellanic Clouds both Lesser and Greater. Blow these three and most of that energy goes down the existing faultlines...'

'They want to cut us off?' Kei had tiptapped her way down to the lower bridge whilst we'd been talking.

'We need to catch these two before they separate again,' I said. 'We can't be in two places at once.'

'What about the third?' Kei linked her arm in mine and leaned close, staring at the map. 'There's no way in hell we can ignore it now, is there?'

'Mimay?'

She was ahead of me, already at her dark matter controller, feeding information into the system as though it was a part of her. The dark, sickly green contrail of that third ship appeared, on its way to the dark star.

'There's still time to intercept,' she said softly, her voice reaching us all the way from the back of the upper bridge without any need for amplification. 'You need a fast ship and a way of disabling or destroying it…'

'A dimensional oscillator should do the trick.' I ignored the rush of intaken sharp breaths. Deployed properly as intended - or thereabouts - as a way of clearing navigational hazards, they weren't too much of a problem - provided the Phantasma was taken out a sensible distance away from the actual node. 'We're too far out from the Milky Way for help - who's closest in Andromeda?'

You'll need two very specific people to pull it off, Tochiro interjected, his holo appearing in front of me. Pointless though it was, he stared at the starmap. One with the ship, and an engineer for the oscillator. And as luck would have it, Blaze has already contacted them, albeit he'd planned for them to help out with Ventimiglia's defences…

'There's only one ship fast enough to outpace these Phantasma that's not us, the Miranda or Thunderbolt,' Yattaran added sourly. 'Bloody marvelous…'

'Call her,' I told him bluntly. 'I've still no idea where she got that weird-ass ship or who built it, but it's the only one with the speed.'

'But not the armament,' Kei murmured.

Hence the need for something a little less esoteric than the Deathshadow Fleet - or what's left of it.

'And the engineer?' Yattaran asked. 'Who the hell can a: lay his paws on one of those things at short notice, and b: configure it for dispersal in combat?' Then the penny dropped. 'Oh. You know what she'll say to that…'

'Tough.' I unfolded my arms and tried to resist the urge to place a hand on the hilt of my sabre - an instinctive response when talking about one of the most dangerous people in two galaxies who isn't me. 'Tell Emeraldas to get her arse over there as fast as she can, and I don't care what she has to do, say or promise, she's to get Maetel to cough up Nazca.'

Amazing how fast a room full of supposedly tough pirates can suddenly find some pressing work to be done elsewhere. Even Yattaran found a turn of speed that was phenomenal given his bulk and short legs.

I'll talk to her, Tochiro said, before I could catch one of the cowardly wretches. She likes me.

'Everyone likes you,' Kei told him, leaning down to plant a kiss in the vicinity of his non-existent cheek. I managed to refrain from asking why she didn't volunteer to speak to Emeraldas or Maetel. The girls regard her as something of an older sister, after all, but even Kei has her limits, and dealing with that dysfunctional pair could send even a saint over the edge…

I left them to it, because I still had some repair work to check on, and we were really going to need those oscillator cannon back online.

Over a hundred meters of pipework doesn't come off the printers overnight, but we'd got there, and I left Maji and Doscoi directing their crews in the replacement. I was assured we'd have the starboard turrets back up and running before we rendezvoused with the Thunderbolt, and my engineers know better than to make promises they can't keep. I left the cramped quarters of the inner hull's access panels with a lighter step than I'd arrived, and decided that the bridge could spare me for a few hours. The bird joined me on my way to the Central Computer room, alternately nibbling on my ear and chuntering into it, until I twitched my shoulder enough to send the message that I'd like to walk upright without listing under the weight for a while, and it flew ahead of me, swooping up with as much grace as it can muster up into the rafters above the main servers.

'Well my friend? Did you get hold of Emeraldas?'

The barely audible electronic grumble told me all I needed to know. Emeraldas can be a little prickly on a good day. But she would come running for a friend, all guns blazing. The problem was going to be getting her to talk to her twin without the pair of them flying at each other. It's not that they hate each other - they don't. It would be easier if they did. But the fundamental difference of opinion on the right way to deal with their murderous, all-powerful parent can - and has - led to some epic disagreements between the pair. They didn't speak for about five years after Maetel followed her mother to Andromeda, and until the Evil Empress is finally dealt with, I can't see things improving.

The tragedy of it all is they'd die - and kill - for each other, forming ranks against any outsider stupid enough to threaten the other in a heartbeat. Bring their mother into it however, and they'll quickly end up at each other's throats.

So having Em ask May if we could borrow her beau for a dangerous mission? I was going to owe both of them for this one…

Be nice to see Nazca again, Tochiro said eventually. It's been a while.

'Kid's got some major smarts,' I replied. I grinned at the memory. 'Just so long as he follows orders this time…'

Tochiro laughed. Oh hell… yes. I thought you were going to shake your Space Wolf to bits trying catch up to that little ship of his…

'Yeah. Leave it there. I still have nightmares about that mecha-planetoid.' I stood up. 'Keep me posted. I'd like to talk to them before they engage. A little co-ordination might be in order…'

You have a plan?

'The beginnings of one,' I replied thoughtfully. 'Pass on what we have to Selen, she'll know what to do. Blaze has arranged reinforcements…' I almost choked on that word, because the help Blaze had asked for? Wouldn't have been my first choice. But: beggars can't be choosers, the men involved are very good at what they do, and one of them Blaze calls "uncle" so he can get away with asking for favours that I'm not prepared to swallow enough pride to repay. Something the electronic murmur suggested our existentially challenged friend was well aware of, but had decided not to call me out on this time.

I left the bird squawking conversationally at him from an overhanging cable, and made my way back to my quarters for a much-deserved nap.

I didn't get much sleep. I was turning over far too many scenarios in my head as I lay under the light covers, Kei nestled companiably at my side. Juggling so many variables, it's easy to miss one, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I had, in fact, overlooked something important whilst being distracted with metanoids, pissy nibelungs, clones of old friends, and captains from my predecessor's murky past.

And to put the cherry on top of this one I'd left my son, the woman I regarded as an older sister, and her adopted android son back on Ventimiglia with only a handful of elderly ships and a couple of thousand very young clones backed by a small group of veterans. Both I and Blaze had left a few people behind to help, but even with Selen in charge, there was no way those ten ships we'd left behind would be enough, and there was a part of me that seriously considered turning back.

Judging from the little huffs and sighs against my chest, someone else was also over-thinking things, and I could guess what loomed largest. I rested my unsplinted hand on her cheek, and toyed with her hair. 'He asked to stay, Kei. We can't raise them to be independent, smart and adventurous then pull on the leash when things get tough.'

'Are you trying to convince me or yourself?' she muttered near my armpit. 'If Mimay and Freya are right, just one of those ships could destroy that planet…'

''They've been infiltrating this colony of Nero's,' I pointed out. 'So they want something there other than the nearby node. My guess, it's something on one of those transports.'

'Not helping,' She pointed out, a little more waspishly than normal. I pulled her close and hold her for a while before slipping out of bed. She wasn't far behind me, reaching for first her robe, then her tablet, before making herself at home on the chaise longue, curled up with her toes peeking out from under the extravagant expanse of sky blue silk. The multitude of candelabra (fake, but still impressive) that lit the room with a kind of reluctant elegance gave her pale blonde hair highlights of molten gold where it curled over her shoulder, and I watched her silently for several minutes until she looked over, smiled with that slightly embarrassed way she still has when she catches me admiring her and then went back to whatever had her attention.

I pulled on some pants and padded over to the desk - Harlock's massive, battle-scarred relic, which Hannibal had told me once graced their father's study. I wasn't sure how the hell Tochiro had gotten the heavy oak up onto the ship without the Admiralty bean-counters kicking up a stink, but their oversight was my gain. The dark, ancient oak housed a state of the art computer suite that allowed the captain unfettered access to all the ships systems and databases, as well as the interstellar warp feed, making it a hell of a lot more convenient than making my way to the bridge to use the setup located under the main gantry.

It also allowed me to place a quiet request for room service, and the door pinged only a few minutes after I'd sat down, to admit Franz bearing a tray. Kei pounced on her lemon tea and a plate of lemony biscuits before curling back up with it clutched in her hands as she sipped, and Franz deposited a steaming hot coffee pot and a couple of mugs next to me with a grin. 'Can't sleep either, captain?'

At this time of the night he deserved more than the grunt I almost gave him in reply. 'Nero's news was a bit of a game changer, but I'm damned if I know which way to jump on this.' I poured a coffee and sniffed appreciatively. 'Thanks, Franz. How come you picked up the call?'

'Couldn't sleep,' he shrugged. 'You know how it goes before a big one… We can only go as fast as we go, but you know what's waiting for you at the other end. The waiting's the hard part.' He tapped the coffee pot. 'That's not going to help you sleep though.'

There was a delicate snort from the chaise longue that I decided to ignore.

'That the stuff from Niflheim?' he asked, pointing at the screen inset into the scarred oak. 'Ali said something was coming through just before he took off with Blaze and Hannibal.' He peered at it and I raised the screen out of its niche and turned it around so he could get a better look.

'That, and the bits Mimay found in her and Tochiro's old files. Whether it makes any sense or not, I've no idea. If you can wrap your head around a non-localised phenomena that survived the contraction/expansion of the previous universe and seems to have a real hate on for our universe…'

Franz rubbed his moustache. 'Seems to me I'd be a bit resentful if my entire world crashed into a singularity and carried on without me. But doesn't that sound a bit familiar? I mean… The Captain got his info from Mimay, about pulling the plug on the universe and letting out the bathwater. Sounds to me as if maybe the Nibelung weren't talking about a theory. Maybe that's what they did?'

'It occurred to us as well,' Kei murmured.

'Explains a lot,' Franz opined, perching on the edge of the desk. I pushed the spare mug towards him and gestured to the coffee pot. Never one to pass up a freebie, he grinned and poured, topping me up with the remainder. 'You'd have a reason to want to destroy our universe, wouldn't you?'

'But how the hell did they survive it?' I asked. 'That's what's bugging me. From what we know, nothing should have survived.'

'The Captain,' he said after a moment's thought. 'He's kind of in an inbetween stage, right?' I waited. Outsiders might dismiss my crew as a bunch of crude screwups, and true, most of them have some personal issues, but Harlock - and I - had a knack for attracting some very bright people, in their fields, who just can't settle in "normal" societies. Franz had been a pretty hot astrophysicist in an earlier life. 'Incorporeal but everything he is - or was - is still kind of around, when the conditions are right…' He reached for my stylus, paused waiting for permission, and then scooted over when I gave him room to start drawing on the touchscreen. What he drew looked like a couple of hourglasses laid end to end.

'Standard light-cone conformal diagram,' I said as he lifted the stylus off the screen. 'The traditional model for predicting the eternal cycling of one universe into the next.' Rumours that I dozed off through most of my astro-navigation classes are completely unfounded.

'Basic cosmology,' he grinned through his lip ferret. 'A constant cycle of expansion and contraction, the information of one universe forms the basis for the next… but it has to start from scratch when it comes to anything above the quantum scale, or so we thought. The nibelung busted that theory because it turns out they are survivors from the previous universe to ours as well - one of darkness to our light. But we assume that these universes are cut off from each other by the Arrow of Time, right? Because you can never unscramble that cosmic egg?'

Was there ever a spaceship navigator who didn't love to expound on the mathematics they practically think in? If so, I've never found one. Currently I was a captive audience for two of them. I'm actually a botanist by both inclination and training… At this point you could have stuck a cabbage in place of my head and no-one would spot the difference.

'After the inflation in our universe, the background microwave radiation is scrambled egg?' Kei asked. She leaned on the high back of the chaise longue, chin resting on her folded arms, smiling. I wondered if Luna had gone to bed yet. I might be needing something for the headache soon.

'Right. But that's because we're bound by that arrow, and for us it's always moving in one direction, despite the fact that all laws of physics are time symmetrical. But we aren't. Why?'

'Consciousness?' I hazarded, moving officially well outside my comfort zone in an attempt to sound as though I knew what I was talking about. I can navigate through the fuzzier edges of high order physics if I have to but the kind of stuff Kei, Franz and Yattaran can play with for fun is why I love to have a nice, friendly genius-turned-super-computer on my ship...

'That's the theory,' Franz replied, with a sympathetic grin. I should know better than to try and fool any of the old crew, but old habits die hard. 'Going against that arrow isn't impossible, but it does take cosmological orders of energy to do so. Hence the dimensional oscillators and Harlock's plan to unshackle linear time.'

'Except his plan was to simply reboot the universe by pulling the plug early.' I jabbed a finger at the light cone diagram. 'Although I suppose it's possible he thought that if the nibelung could cross that barrier, so could we…'

'Maybe I should ask him next time he pops up…' Franz said, totally serious. 'But the thing is his idea isn't totally without merit. Theoretically you could pull off a reversal in a limited, localised area - The Captain confined his placements of the oscillators to the local clusters, so it's possible he might have originally thought he could "push" just the Sol System and some of the closer colonies backwards against the flow?'

'Time travel?' I tried not to scoff. 'I thought the eggheads had decided you could only observe the past, never actually travel there?'

'Opinions vary,' Kei murmured. 'There was a facility on Herise a couple of hundred years ago, but it was shut down after a serious accident with their particle accelerator.'

Accident? That's putting it mildly. I remember my grandad talking about it when I was a kid. They rendered half of the southern hemisphere uninhabitable for over a hundred years. Maya's brothers were amongst the first new settlers once the dust settled, but that continent is still off-limits.

'Couldn't sleep?' I twitted our resident ghost in the machine. 'Maybe I should just invite everyone in here…'

Too late for the conference, Tochiro said glibly. We're coming out of IN-SKIP.

'I thought we weren't due for another couple of days?' Franz wrinkled his nose as he frowned. Kei patted him on the arm.

'We aren't. But Yattaran wants to test fire the starboard cannon as soon as the coolant pipework is back in place. The last thing we want is to blow the hell out of the hull if it fails when we engage.'

'There's also the matter of a couple of tweaks to the system,' I added. 'Mimay and Tochiro have had their heads together, and I'd rather know now if it isn't going to work.'

'How will you know?' Franz asked. 'If we're fighting a dark matter battleship, what do you test this stuff on?'

Sometimes I wished these guys were as dumb as everyone else thinks they are. 'We can't test it in combat,' I told him. 'The best we can do is proof of concept.'

'But... '

'I know. We can test fire the weapons to make sure they don't go off in our faces, but we won't know if we're just firing blanks until we actually engage,' I explained. Franz looked a little green around the gills, and I didn't blame him.

Don't worry, Tochiro said glibly, his hologramme aiming a pat in the general area of Franz's left arm. It's not like it's mine and Mimay's first rodeo…

I honestly didn't dare look at the other two over his insubstantial head. Instead I made my excuses and headed for my dressing room, leaving Kei to show Franz the door. His voice floated towards my back laden with predictable sarcasm: 'Because what could possibly go wrong with that?'

Tochiro's sniffy reply was equally predictable: I thought we sent Ali off with Hannibal…? Was the last thing I heard before I shut the door.