Thunderbolt

Yanez looked up and across from the navigation console as Nero paced backwards and forwards, his sabre tapping against his boots as he walked restlessly up and down the gantry. 'What is keeping him?'

'Will you just sit down? You're making us all dizzy,' Yanez told him. It earned him a black-browed scowl and a growl. 'We can't do anything until those ships are out of IN-space. Harlock will be here - if anything he's making excellent time. You were right about one thing - that baby may look like something out of the circles of Hell, but she has some moves…'

'With Tochiro working on her for a century, I'm not surprised. But I suspect her IN-space deep immersion and speed are a product of their plan to try and nail as many of those "nodes of time" as possible as quickly as they could. I just hope they paid as much attention to her armaments…'

Yanez leaned on his console. 'My brother, given the stories I've heard from the delightful Princess Selen and her son, during the Machine War they scared the living daylights out of their foes. I don't see that part of this engagement being a problem. However, this man is not your Harlock - I've heard you speak of his ability to haul victory from the jaws of certain defeat often enough over the years, but this one… he talks a good fight, but…' he straightened and gestured towards the main viewer despite the display being rather featureless, 'We've yet to see him in action on this scale. I just hope he's as good as his reputation…'

'If he wasn't I suspect he'd be long dead,' Nero pointed out evenly.

'His record doesn't mention any command before he inherited Arcadia,' Yanez pointed out with studied blandness. 'And his academic record at the Academy is a little... spotty… the man was mostly his brother's gopher…'

'According to Mamoru, that academic record is a little suspect, given that the brother didn't want his pet chew toy to get any ideas of independence. We went after him for help, it's a little late for second guessing that decision now, my brother.' He laid a hand on Yanez' shoulder. 'If I'm wrong, it's not as though we'll be agonising over it for very long.'

Yanez turned his attention back to the controls. 'Well that's encouraging, do you work on these inspirational speeches?'

'No, I get Dione to write them.' Nero jabbed a finger at the screen. 'Time to move, little brother. Our guests are arriving…'

'Time-radar showing both ships exiting IN-space,' Yara called out. 'Arcadia in range, maybe five minutes behind us and closing.'

Nero strode back to his chair and sat down with a flourish of his cape, flicking it and his sabre out of the way with well-practiced grace. 'Freya - three-quarters ahead. All hands to battlestations. Yanez - put us right where we can fly between those nightmares. All cannon crews standby to fire on my mark. Target both vessels, enfilading fire both broadsides as we pass through, then bring us around to target the starboard vessel. Get me Harlock on the comms.'

'Comms aye,' Jacopo, a dark haired, olive-skinned young man called out. 'Arcadia on main holoscreen.'

'Nero?' Harlock's hologramme was faint but the audio was clear.

'Making the first pass now, Harlock, then we'll bring one of them to you - make sure you ram everything you've got down it's throat, my newfound friend.'

'Bring it on, Nero. Then get yourselves out of our line of fire. Let's hope they're dumb enough to take the bait…'

'With what I'm about to unload on their arses? They're going to want some payback,' Nero answered with a toothy, almost feral grin. He cut the connection and sat back in the captain's chair. 'Yanez.'

The fair-haired second in command grinned nastily, and gave the order to leave IN-space.

The Thunderbolt arrived in normal space in a swirling cloud of dark matter, the lights on her flanks and upper elevation glinting through the writhing darkness like flashes of scarlet lightning. Ahead, the two Phantasma vessels were just darkness against the darkness, made visible on the ship's main viewer only by the false-colour software that allowed objects to be seen clearly by the more fragile inhabitants of the kilometre-long ship. Absolute speed is almost impossible to judge in the interstellar void, with little background detail to use as a reference point, but she accelerated swiftly to her maximum cruising speed in seconds, chasing down the black-ribboned ships ahead of her with the implacable grace of the predator she was.

The Phantasma vessels were faster than expected at firing, but ranging their weapons was not so easy. The shots sailed harmlessly around the Thunderbolt's sleek flanks as she closed with the larger ships. This close the sensors were able to measure the displacement of local space, and the Phantasma easily massed more than double the Thunderbolt's considerable draught.

Then she was hurtling into the gap between the two ships. 'Fire!' Nero ordered.

The Thunderbolt's thirty-six dimensional particle oscillator cannon fired in unison, strafing both ships simultaneously in a continuous broadside as she shot through the gap that on screen looked ridiculously close, although in reality it bordered on close to half an AU between the ships

'Sort out your time on target!' Nero called out. 'Turret three, get your firing rate synchronised! Secondary particle cannon - hold back.'

'Return fire incoming!' Yara called out.

'Brace for impact!' Nero shouted. He gripped the arms of his chair tightly, as the real-time display showed the tracks incoming from the Phantasma.

'In three, two…' Five separate bolts hit the Thunderbolt, albeit with mercifully glancing blows. The bridge was rocked by the impacts, at least three crew losing their balance and taking hard falls to the metal floor. Yanez gripped the sides of his console and gritted his teeth. 'Damage?' he called out.

'Port and starboard hull self-repair at work. Nothing got through the inner hull. One shot hit the underbelly, ripped a hole right through and missed life support backups by a couple of feet. Be a bit hot in there for a while, hull's already sealing the breach. Minimal damage to systems. No major casualties but a few minor injuries being called in.' Jacopo replied.

'We have their attention!' Yanez called back to his captain. 'They're following…'

'We only want one of them, Yanez - that was the plan. Bring us back around and cut out that single vessel.'

'I would,' Yanez grunted as his hands danced over the controls, 'But they seem to be a couple… Bloody hellfire, you little bastard, just stand still!'

'Freya!' Nero called back.

Behind the captain's chair the nibelung girl's elegant long fingered hands floated over and around the glowing control ball as though she conducted a symphony only she could hear, and the massive overhead arch rolled around at an ever increasing speed, the ship throbbing as she increased the power to both the engines and the shield.

'Full power to the front shield!' Nero called out. 'Yanez - put us down its throat.'

'I thought we weren't doing that again?' Yanez shouted back over the hum of the dark matter engine.

'When did I promise that?' was Nero's pithy reply, with a manic grin. He leaned forward in his chair, his dark eyes seemingly glittering. 'Secondary particle cannon - fire!'

The forward facing top turrets opened fire, the twelve barrels unleashing their deadly stream as they raced towards the Phantasma. With such a narrow profile head-on they provided the other ship with a difficult target - or would, had the Phantasma not been able to bring its armaments to bear with uncanny speed and precision. Several shots barely missed the bridge, warped out of line only by the dark matter cloud, and several crewmen flinched as the shots cleared the viewscreen by what looked like centimetres. 'They'll have our measure on the next pass,' Yanez told Nero bluntly. 'Are you seriously going to ram them?'

'Hold your course,' Nero told him. 'And your nerve.'

'I'd hold my godsbedamned cock if it'd help,' Yanez muttered under his breath. 'You're a fucking lunatic, my friend.'

The spinning top of darkness that was the Phantasma loomed closer… closer. Yanez wanted to wipe away the cold trickle of sweat that ran down his back, but it was already heading into the crease of his spine where his pants were cinched. 'I thought ramming these things was supposed to be a seriously bad idea?' he muttered.

'Aren't you taking the helm?' Freya asked Nero.

'I rather thought that was the helmsman's job,' Nero drawled, sitting back in his chair, and ignoring the sly, tinkling snigger from behind him. 'I've never quite trusted those wheels, despite Tochiro's assurances,' he explained over his shoulder.

'It's more responsive than people think,' Freya told him, not taking her eyes off her control globe. 'It operates rather like the old reaction wheels for three dimensional attitude adjustment, but much more sophisticated. The gyroscopic sensors are incredibly sensitive…'

'And there's his problem right there,' Yanez added, his own eyes fixed on his display. 'Ham fisted bugger…' He grunted as the ship had to dodge another blast as it nosed forward. 'Sod this. Jacopo - take over here will you. The little girl's right. We need the finer control…' He took the normal three strides to the ship's wheel in two bounds and took hold of the balusters. 'Disengage auto nav and transfer control to the auxiliary helm.' He didn't wait for the acknowledgement, his fingers feeling the slight vibration that signalled the ship's attitude controls coming online. 'Seriously - Harlock uses this as his main helm? The guy is nuts…' Deft hands span the wheel a fraction, avoiding the next wave and correcting their course to keep the ship bearing down on their quarry.

A blast rocked the bridge and several consoles flashed red. 'That was the side!' Jacopo called out. 'That second ship's got our range!'

'Where the bloody hell is Harlock?' Yanez pulled back slightly on the helm and the ship responded by nosing up to aim at the top of the Phantasma.

Thirty six trails of blinding light - had anyone been of a mind - or quick enough - to count them - flashed by the conning tower closely followed by ghostly, glowing red eyes gleaming out from the roiling depths of a black cloud.

'That answer your question?' Jacopo whooped, grinning from ear to ear. 'Hot damn, that ship is fast…'

'Mind on the target!' Nero snapped. 'Why aren't we gaining on that thing?'

'She's running… accelerating to try and spin round on us. Good news - she's moving out of range - bad news, if we don't go now, we'll be on the wrong side of this!' Yanez told him.

'All ahead full!' Nero snapped. 'Yanez - up and over! All turrets to port!'

Freya coaxed the engines into giving her more power, the bridge lit from behind Nero's chair by a pale blue glow that brightened as the drive circuit that orbited the bridge began to spin faster, the ever-present hum deepening to a soft roar.

'Are you mad?' Yanez almost yelped as he began to turn the ship as she accelerated. 'Last time we tried that…'

'There's less dark matter at the poles of that thing!'

'Told…' Freya murmured to herself, smiling cheekily as Yanez muttered and obeyed, bringing the ship into a fast, hard roll as they caught up to and flipped to bring the ship above and parallel to the Phantasma they chased, her main battery ratcheting around her circumference to face the pointed top elevation of the Phantasma before she could roll her ribbons of dark matter into place.

'Fire!' Nero's voice was firm and calm.

The Thunderbolt's thirty six guns spat fire in rapid, precise sequence, each shot landing simultaneously, piercing the thinner dark matter mantle at this point. The Phantasma's dark ribbon wobbled and destabilised, thrown out of alignment by the attack. Brief flashes illuminated the eternal night, as the vessel underneath those wreaths of black smoke briefly wobbled under the assault. A walnut shaped vessel briefly appeared before the dark matter re-established itself.

'Anything on the sensors?' Nero called out, once the cheers on the bridge had subsided, and Yanez brought the ship back around for a second pass.

'No sign of atmosphere leaking, but structural damage looks bad. The dark matter's coalescing…'

'Nero!' Harlock's hologramme appeared in the space between the captain's chair and the wheel. 'Before the auto-repair finishes, target that same spot - Tochiro says if we both hit it, it'll crack like an egg!'

'The second ship…' Nero began.

'Take your shots at this one and peel off on a wide catenary - trust me - I've got this, but you need to get clear. We'll finish this one and follow you. Go!'

'IFF locked in,' Yara told Nero. 'Harlock's making his run. Unless he runs into our fire at least we won't shoot him on purpose.'

'How the hell can he move that ship around so fast at those speeds?' Nero muttered. 'Even with the AI, we've never…'

'Tochiro.' Freya told him. 'But I can get you more speed if you need it…'

'I need it, little girl. Full shields to port flank. All weapons - prepare to fire.'

'Aren't we asking for a surrender?' Jacopo asked, more from habit than any real conviction. When neither Nero nor Yanez bothered to reply he glanced at Yara and shrugged. 'Fair point…' She smiled as she bent her head back over her own console.

For the first time in over a century, ships from the Deathshadow fleet charged into the fray side by side.

Arcadia…

'The second ship…' Nero began.

'Take your shots at this one and peel off on a wide catenary - trust me - I've got this, but you need to get clear. We'll finish this one and follow you. Go!'

The Thunderbolt was already peeling away before I'd cut the connection. On screen the it was already racing towards the damaged Phantasma, dark matter contrails swirling in its wake. We'd come out of IN-space practically on top of them, giving the metanoid vessels scant time to react, but I had no doubt that once the shock wore off, they'd be after us.

The trick would be to keep them off balance. I threw the wheel around hard, taking the ship into a steep dive perpendicular to our long axis. The effect was similar to gaining height in a steep ascent in gravity, with the same intent - to bring us in on the "bottom" elevation of the Phantasma - and that was making one hell of an assumption about the plane they were travelling in - given their shape, only the direction of travel gave us any indication of their orientation. I could make a pretty good guess about front and back - top and bottom? That was pure guesswork. In space, down is the direction your feet are pointing.

Thunderbolt's main battery fired, her gunnery crew only slightly out on time on target - that third turret was a little out, arriving slightly behind the others by 0.3 of a second. Something not lost on Kei, who commented with smug satisfaction.

'Don't gloat,' I told her, 'Make sure our guys know to be spot on…'

She grinned at me across the gantry, and Yattaran barked out a laugh. 'Bet yer wishing you hadn't sent Ali off with the raiding party…'

'Not at all,' I replied smoothly, as I pulled an outer loop and began our dive. 'Gives the rest of the crew an opportunity to show me what they can do.'

'Oh…' someone muttered loudly from below. 'No pressure there then…'

'All guns forward!' I called down. 'Main and secondary batteries fire on my mark.' If I hadn't been holding onto the balusters, I'd have crossed my fingers. The coolant delivery system had been repaired, but not fully tested. However we had no time for half measures on the guns. They'd held up for that first pass. Now I just had to trust in my engineers.

'Thunderbolt clear!' Kei called out.

'Fire!'

On my order the batteries opened fire on the reeling Phantasma. The ever-circling ribbon of dark matter faltered, the precise spirals disintegrating into a misty vapour trail winding its way around the vessel within. I grinned. 'Yattaran.'

'Aye aye, sir!' He grinned back just as nastily, and called up our little surprise. 'Optical cannon - fire!' he shouted. 'All hands brace for ramming attack!'

Our recently-adjusted point defence array fired, even as the bow of the ship responded to the unspoken command I sent to the central computer, and began to pull in the dark matter shield to form the bowie-knife shaped ram. The photonic beams didn't reach the Phantasma- they weren't designed to. Instead they too were pulled into the bow's remodelling, coalescing around the ramming blade, infusing it as well as forming a new, golden, flickering edge of bright light.

'Main battery!' Kei shouted. 'Harpoons away!'

The main guns spat again, dispersed in part by the dark matter shield, which even in its current state was enough to deflect our beams. No matter, that's what it was supposed to do. Whilst their shield struggled to reform, our harpoons fired and smashed into the hull, holding the ship in place for the few critical seconds we needed to do what we did so well.

'All weapons!' I called out, as we closed.

Only an idiot rams another ship head on, without softening up their target first. We can get away with it because of our dark matter infused hull, but against another such vessel, that was always going to be tough. The new tactic we'd been trialling partly against Loki's rebels when we'd come across them. With the frequency modulation Mimay, Freya and Tochiro had worked out based on that old nibelung tablet, I had to hope we'd disrupted their auto-repair enough to make what I was about to do marginally less suicidal.

We struck the Phantasma amidships barely two seconds after our shots hit her, disengaging the harpoons as we hit. Enhanced by the photonic beams of the modified spacebusters, the ramming blade pierced her like a hot knife through butter, her weakened hull no match for the force of our attack. Physics, mostly, was on our side. The ship parted and crumpled as we flew through her wreckage. Two armoured humanoid figures bounced off the windshield, making at least a couple of the crew jump.

The armour was possibly not so surprisingly very similar to our own nibeling inspired suits, only silver rather than brass in finish.

I pulled the Arcadia into a sharp turn and brought her down to bear on the second ship the moment we were clear of the debris. Nero was coming in on a parallel vector, and we fired almost simultaneously on the remaining ship, which lurched and began to spin around, rather like the spinning top it resembled.

'Their drive signature's not looking too great,' Yattaran called out, yelling in my ear. 'The one we just hit's about to go critical…'

'I'm aware of that!' I snapped back. This was the tricky part. We passed the Thunderbolt by inches, cosmologically speaking, the image on the screen looking almost close enough to reach out and touch.

'Warning,' Franz called out. 'Objects in your viewscreen might be closer than they appear…' A ripple of laughter ran around the lower bridge.

'If I had a credit…' I muttered. 'Mimay - dark matter shield - full power!'

In planning this on the way, our two lovely nibelung had devised a plan… We were now about to see if they could pull it off.

The dark matter clouds surrounding our two ships merged. In perfect synchronisation, our overarching dark matter antennae began to unfurl, gathering the dark matter and directing it at a particular region of space close by.

Try maneuvering at these speeds. These ships do not stop on a credit and give change, and I'd been betting on the Phantasma being no better in that regard. The surviving ship was apparently heading straight towards us, at what was possibly close to her top speed.

I do love being right. It had crossed my mind that these creatures were not familiar with the laws of this universe, and sure enough, they were acting accordingly. Our battle, utilising weapons capable of taking out small planets, had subtly warped local space-time, making the instrumentation very, very slightly off.

We're used to it, and our crews - and our onboard computers - can compensate. It isn't much, but over the distances we're looking at, a fraction of a centimetre or a second out can be miles off target by the time you reach where you think you're going…

And both the Deathshadows have very powerful hologramme arrays, that utilise dark matter to simulate mass readings in the projection zone. Don't ask me how it works, I just fly the ship…

So they were flying blindly right for the remains of their sister ship, thinking they were aiming at us…

Synchronised with the Thunderbolt's AI, Tochiro pulled both ships out of harm's way and into an emergency deep IN-SKIP fractions of a second before the second Phantasma hit the remains of the first…

...and the modified photon torpedoes we and Thunderbolt had laid down under cover of our shields and our over-powered main guns.

Quick as we were, the edge of the blast still caught up with us as we winked out of normal space leaving them to briefly suffer our exhaust, rocking the ship slightly. And something gave way on the port flank, because the ship listed violently as an explosion sent Kei flying into me on one side, and Yattaran almost fell over the railing on the other. I gave her a little push upright, and she flashed me a wry smile. Yattaran I left to pick himself up. 'What went?' I asked, once he was back at his station.

He peered at the readouts. 'Main battery - something internal…'

Shit. 'Kei?'

She was already calling Maji up on the internal comms. 'Engineering? What just blew?'

On speaker, just static. I frowned.

Harlock… Tochiro's voice was only audible to myself, Kei and Mimay, judging from the reactions. Mimay limped forward, another casualty I supposed of the shaking a moment ago. Those repairs to the main guns…

'Go,' Kei told be grimly. 'We're out of the fire for now. Franz - take my station! I'll take the helm.'

I left her to it, and took off for the port battery at a run.

Luna's team had beaten me to it by seconds, and my doctor and her two helpers were all gathered around two figures, one slumped against the wall, the other more worryingly lying prone with both Luna and one of her nurses hovering over him. 'Who's hurt?'

Maji, against the wall, tried to wave at me, only to be snapped at by his ministering angel. His hands and arms were already swathed in gel, and through the thick coating even from my position several feet away looked red and sore, as did his face, which Mario was already slathering with burn gel.

The figure on the floor was Doscoi, and as I strode towards him, Luna sighed, reached across and placed his bandanna over his face. I knelt beside her and laid a hand on her arm. 'Doc?' I asked softly. She leaned briefly against me.

'That damned coolant,' she said eventually. 'There was a blockage, and he went in to take that battery offline. Should have waited…' her head sagged against my shoulder.

'He couldn't.' Maji struggled to his feet, helped by Mario. Mio, Luna's other assistant, moved in to steady him, and the engineer leaned gratefully on her. 'There was a section with some residue we missed that started to polymerise and block one of the pipes. Had to vent it manually or the explosion would have been inside… I tried to pull him free, but…'

There was nothing I could do for the dead. The living needed me more. I laid my hand briefly on the top of Doscoi's silvering fair head and called over a couple of the men who seemed shell-shocked but ambulatory. 'Take him to the morgue,' I told them. 'Gently.' I disentangled myself from Doc and made my way over to Maji, who stared up at me numbly.

'I should have gone in there,' he mumbled. A quiet man even at the best of times, he opened and shut his mouth a couple of times before forcing the words out. 'I'm smaller, I wouldn't have got stuck…'

'He was in Engineering,' one of his assistants piped up. Mario was pressing a pad against a nasty cut on his face. 'No way in hell you could have got here in time, Chief, and you know it. Doscoi didn't give any of us time to step forward - just kinda grunted, pulled off the access plate and stuck his head in there. But if he hadn't…'

If he hadn't, Tochiro said on my personal frequency, this whole section would have been open to space, and we'd have lost maybe ten men - that section of the pipework runs past the secondary battery power lines.

He didn't need to continue painting the picture. The power requirements for these weapons is off-the-charts crazy, and whilst the main and secondary batteries have separate systems, there's not that much room to spare that they don't have some overlap with their systems. You can't isolate these things completely, because they ultimately use the same power source and coolant storage.

'Still shoulda tried harder…' Maji mumbled again.

Doc strode past me, grabbed his shoulders and gave him a shake. She's a tall woman - he had to raise his eyes slightly to look her in the eye. 'Bullshit, Chief. It was brave, but once he inhaled that stuff, he was dead. His lungs will be full of it. What's more he knew the risk going in, and he accepted it.'

Accepted maybe, but drowning in that caustic gloop as it solidifies in your lungs? It was a fucking awful way to die, and we all knew it. Maji certainly understood it, and his numb misery would eat at him for a long time.

I could, however, distract him for the short term. 'Chief - if you're fit enough gather some men and assess the damage. We can't replace that array until we land and can set the printers to work, but make sure the ratchets are free of debris so we can use what's left. Bypass whatever systems need taking offline if you can't safely patch the coolant delivery system, and just make safe. The hull can take care of itself. We've got a few days to get back to Ventimiglia, make the most of them.'

Doc gave me a what-the-fuck look, then realised my tactic and sighed. Maji opened and shut his mouth a couple of times like a gasping carp, then nodded, and began rounding up his crew. There were a couple of guys with leg injuries, and I volunteered my services alongside Mario to help them back to sick bay, Luna keeping pace with me easily, muttering to herself under her breath and every so often yanking on her ponytail.

'Do I have to find you something to do?' I asked.

'Never works on me,' she replied, rather more sharply than I think she intended. After taking a deep breath she exhaled sharply then continued: 'Oh fuck, Harlock.' She slammed a small fist into my upper arm. He could be a complete arsehole, but he was good at his job, and the men liked him despite his personality quirks. 'Why couldn't this ship's repair work on the men the way it repairs the damn hull? It's so fucking inconsistent… I'd love to be out of a job.'

'Speaking from the peanut gallery,' Randall - the gunnery tech I was helping to limp into the infirmary - piped up, 'It's not all it's cracked up to be.' He looked up at me as I helped him onto the edge of the gurney. 'Right, captain?'

'True enough. Frankly I'd be worried if it did more than deal with skin-deep injuries. I'd not trust the stuff to put things back in the right place… it's not as though we have the built-in memory the hull has.' I slipped his arm off my shoulder. 'Good to go?' I asked him. He nodded.

'Thanks, captain.'

I just grunted. Truth to tell the issue of the Arcadia's dark matter repairs and how it treated the crew were a long-standing worry I tried hard not to think about too often.

One thing did occur belatedly, before I left Luna looking longingly at the bottle of single malt on her desk in the other room. 'Luna - about the body,' I said quietly, drawing her aside. 'Just to be on the safe side…'

'I'm ahead of you there,' she told me. Bits of her ponytail were already escaping from their bonds and falling around her face. 'My standing orders now are to place bodies straight into the tubes. I know we can't hold them until we get home, not until we understand more about the metanoids and how they sequester corpses.'

'We'll drop out of IN-SKIP within the hour,' I replied. 'The burial detail should meet in the forward torpedo room, and I'll place the main gun crew on the job, since we're a little short of suns out here.' I started for the door, only to be brought up by her hand gripping the fabric of my jacket.

'Harlock…'

I could only shake my head in reply, because really, what was there to say? The Mazone had been a fearsome enemy, the Machinners a continuing thorn in our side, but this time we were currently well out of our depth. The time radar would confirm if we'd trashed the Phantasma, but honestly, it wasn't the ships that really worried me. However, there was still one ship out there, which we were relying on Emeraldas and Nazca to deal with. Hopefully they'd had enough lead time to get to the dark star ahead of it.

I just hoped Hannibal and Selen between them were having a better day than I was.