When the mantis hunts the locust, he forgets the shrike that's hunting him.
Chinese Proverb

Our guards shoved us roughly into a small room on the first floor.

'Is this part of the plan, or is this the bit where you stare into the middle distance, tug at your eyepatch and mutter "bugger" under your breath and hope no-one hears you?' I asked once the door had shut behind us

The captain ignored me and started to examine our new surroundings. One large bed (so not sharing...). The walls were solid stone, close fitting, and probably over a foot thick. The door was over an inch thick made of a solid hardwood. The lock was old-fashioned, thankfully - no fancy electronics, but it had a magnetic pad on it that would set off an alarm when we opened the door, unless we took precautions. There was a small leaded window - barred, so no escape there - that opened onto a wide sweep of lawn, lit by several spotlights. And no damn cover as far as the treeline several hundred yards away.

One light fitting in the ceiling, inset into the stone. Light switch not in sight so presumably outside. No visible cameras. A small cubicle at the back held a toilet and a basin. A couple of towels and two piles of clothing on the bed, the latter of which, when investigated, turned out to be tunic and pants. No boots or shoes. Someone had found the easy way to keep prisoners under control - pulling an escape barefoot is possible, but you'll soon be slowed down, even on the best terrain unless you can obtain footwear that fits.

The captain knelt down to check under the bed, but it was a solid wooden pallet, mortise and tenon construction with a solid foam mattress; no nails, no springs, no ropes, no use.

By the time he stood up and brushed dust out of his hair, I was tapping the walls with a toilet roll holder. Mortar dust trickled onto the floor from where I had pulled the wooden baton from the wall.

'What the hell are you doing?'

'Checking for secret passages,' I replied, feeling like I was explaining the obvious to a small child.

'You watch too many cheap warpvids,' he told me. 'Make yourself useful - help me get some of this stuff off us so we can get dressed and get to work - I'm all slippy.' He realised too late how that sounded 'Just stop right there, Ali. I really don't need to hear it.'

I grinned at him. 'Why captain - after all we've been through together…' I batted my eyelashes and he sighed.

'I'm never going to be allowed to forget this, am I?' he muttered. I picked up a towel and began helping him rub off some of the stuff they'd slicked over us. 'I'm not sure whether this is for presentation, basting us for roasting, or just to make sure we couldn't hold weapons if we did make a break for it…' he said, sniffing at the towel he was using to rub down his arms. 'Plus I smell like a…'

'Tart's boudoir?'

I was all innocence when he shot me his best glare. He looked decidedly unhappy.

'Something got up yer nose? Not much of a fan of perfume meself either. Nothing scarier than a botoxed, satin wrapped cougar bearing down on you, trailing eau de synthetic whale vomit in her wake. I could tell you stories of stuff that went on at faculty dinners… there was this one time, the VC's mistress showed up on the arm of his wife…'

'Just get on with it.' His growl was warning that his patience was wearing thin.

'Touchy, touchy. And me being the soul of helpfulness as well. You know - you don't deserve me. The crap I put up with. Now I have to add verbal abuse and threats of bodily harm to the list. Bad enough I have to put up with unwanted sexual advances… and you know I could sue your arse off for that…'

'Ali.'

'What?'

'The guard listening outside the door left two minutes ago.'

I handed him the towel. 'Well you'd better get me towelled off then, hadn't ya? Or I'll never be able to get a grip.'

We both grabbed the pants first, before we got to work. He turned his back and waited. 'In your own time,' he said.

I placed my hands on his shoulders and ran my fingers along them, until I found the slight change in texture I was looking for. My fingers curled, nails digging slightly into his skin. 'You do know this will hurt,' I said quietly. 'Do you want me to go slow, or just go for it and get it over with?'

'Just do it, Ali,' he ordered me through gritted teeth.

'Don't say I didn't warn you. Brace yourself!' I pulled on the skin of his shoulders as hard as I could, and with a ripping noise the whole of his back peeled off. To his credit, he hardly let out a yelp, although it had to have hurt like hell.

I held the soft, moulded prosthetic fake back in my hands. 'Like pulling off a plaster,' I said with a grin. 'But damn… it's left a couple of strips of skin missing… maybe we shoulda tested the adhesive for longer.' I threw it onto the bed.

'Your turn,' he told me. I dutifully turned my back and he repeated the process, although I swear Luna had used more adhesive on my more muscular deltoids. It took him three tries to pull the damn thing off and most of my skin with it.

Whilst I swore at him, he dropped his pants and got to work on a second area, this time on his right thigh. The narrow strip that had covered and replicated the old surgical scar on his leg came free much more easily. He turned it upside down and pulled out the tiny energy packs hidden in it.

Nothing like surgical pins and plates to confuse basic scanners… He yanked his pants back up and turned his attention back to the task at hand.

The two larger prosthetics lay side by side on one of the pallets, and we hunkered down to get to work on their contents.

There's something really satisfying about have a ship full of geniuses in their respective fields on board the Arcadia - most of them with too much time on their hands. Yattaran, in addition to his engineering skills, is a hobby model maker. Maji likes tinkering with armour, and Luna… well, she used to work on prosthetics back before someone got the idea of doing body-swaps instead of parts. Between them - with a bit of help from Tochiro - they'd come up with a way to smuggle some much needed weaponry and tools past any search - although I'd had a few cold sweats when we'd been stripped, scanned and then showered. Thankfully Luna's handiwork had passed muster, and I made a mental note to drop off a few choice items from Harlock's liquor store when we got back. I'd tell her it was from him. He'd think of it himself eventually anyway.

'Did you catch the exchange in the hall?' he asked as he stripped tiny parts out of their moulded home and laid them out. Yattaran had even created ceramic tools to assist with the assembly. Amazing what the lazy bugger can do when he's interested enough…

''Which bit? I was too busy trying not to throw up.'.

He set to work assembling the two plastic guns, and I screwed the ceramic knives into their hilts and laid them to one side. Their respective holsters and belts were silk - light, strong and highly compressible.

'We'd heard the name Kikai Hakshaku,' he continued. 'It's Japanese…'

'Yeah, I speak it. Who doesn't? "Count Mecha". Your point?'

'We thought it was singular. But it could equally well have been plural. That hooded figure - who was addressed as Count Lazarus… that gave me an idea...'

'A group would make sense,' I nodded. 'You're thinking some kind of what - modern day Hellfire Club?' I paused. 'That's an ancient, famous club for deranged aristos…'

'I do get the reference, Ali. I did have a top class education.' That came out a little more peeved that I'd expected from him. Guess I was getting to him a bit. I decided to dial it down a bit. I'm generous to a fault, me. 'There has to be more to it than this, though. These guys are making a fortune smuggling ex-Gaia Fleet tech, munitions and ships out to anyone who'll pay them. Why risk that - and Promethium's wrath - just to scratch an itch and decorate a few walls? There's another angle, there has to be…' From the soft foam covering he extracted a couple of electrical devices and a nice long length of wire which he neatly attached to two toggles.

'You overthink it sometimes, you know,' I pointed out. 'Some people just get their kicks out of making other people suffer. Some of these high-ranking machinners, they just get their rocks off on being dicks - it's all that's left to 'em - you've said that yourself…'

'Yes,' he broke into my speech. 'But this… it's too well organised. Did you see how many guests there were down there?' he shook his head. 'There's more. I can feel it.'

I turned my attention to the power supplies for the guns, which took some fitting - we'd only field-tested assembling these once, and they were a tight fit. We'd get a maximum of maybe six shots out of each, but hopefully after that we'd be able to pick up some discarded weaponry as we went.

'The guys did us proud,' Harlock said, checking the sights on one of the pistols. They were small - easily palmed - but should, however briefly, pack a punch. 'I thought I'd go mad with the itching though.'

'You can get a powder for that, ya know?' I deadpanned. 'But you really ought to fess up to Kei…'

He swatted my ear for that one, then handed me the second pistol. I'd already palmed two of the knives and a neat knuckleduster made out of the same ceramic compound. 'Is that going to be heavy enough to do any damage?' He looked at it sceptically.

'It's not about the materials - it stops me from scraping my knuckles on someone's jaw, and it's tough stuff - light but strong.'

He just looked at me. 'Seriously - we're going up against machines, Ali - and you're planning on unleashing your uppercut?'

I plucked one of the miniature power sources from where it rested on a blanket, and slid it deftly into a small hole on the side, attaching a couple of fine wires from the coil he'd had secreted in that leg cache. 'There's a small transmitter inside,' I informed him smugly. 'Slam this puppy into the right place and someone will be nursing a headache…'

'Someone already is,' he muttered. I stared at him, seeing for the first time he looked a little pale and sweaty. I picked up a knife, and got to work on one of the sheets. A minute later I handed him a strip of fabric, with a bit of the soft inner lining of our false backs cut to size.

'Try that. Best I can do under the circumstances.'

He tied it on and gave me a nod of thanks. I couldn't resist: 'You know, next time, maybe you should pack a spare.'

He ignored me. 'Check the window - it should be close to dawn by now.' He grabbed the toolkit, rescued from its foam nest. 'I have a lock to pick.'

'Red sky in the morning,' I called out whilst he fiddled with the lockpicks. 'Pirates warning…'

'This planet has a red sun,' he pointed out, poking at the tumblers. To my mind he was seriously out of practice, but in his defence we had been kept rather busy the past few years.

'Your point?'

He counted to ten. He thinks he's being cute. 'Just run down the list of chemicals we need to find - you did tell me you thought we could get everything you need for incendiaries, smoke and some nice explosives from the average household cleaning products, as I recall. Or was that just bullshit?'

'Please. I've forgotten more about improvised explosives than you'll ever know…' I replied a bit sniffily. Honestly, the nerve of the man...

'Don't bet on it. I aced that course,' he muttered through clenched teeth as one of his probes got stuck. 'Ah, gotcha!'

Of course you did. Bloody theorists. 'Then whaddya have to drag me along for, genius?'

'Comic relief,' he deadpanned.

'I have a knife in my hand,' I informed him with casual precision from somewhere near his left shoulder.

'Then don't run with it,' he shot back, as he slipped a neodymium magnetic strip in between the door and the alarm sensor. I stuck my tongue out but the gesture was lost on the back of his head. He pushed the door away from him carefully, and let out a breath when it opened without the alarm going off. 'And Kei thinks I've lost my touch,' he said brightly, sounding rather pleased with himself. 'Now all we need to do is…'

He straightened, raised his hands and backed into the room, the business end of a pistol shoved under his nose. The arm holding the gun came into view, followed by the rest of its owner: a tall, mantled figure with its face hidden deep within the hood of its long cloak.

'Going somewhere?' asked Count Lazarus.