'I wouldn't!'

Harlock's voice rapped out at me as I reached for a loaf left in the middle of the table.

'I'm hungry…' I whined at him. 'My stomach thinks my throat's been cut, and I don't think so well on an empty stomach. Not,' and I waved a bread-filled fist at the chemicals I was assembling on a side table, 'to mention handling explosives…'

'The only humans in this house are prisoners,' he said in his best reasonable voice. The one he uses to explain to Yumi and the twins why whatever havoc they've just caused wasn't a good idea. 'And you'll be even less capable of thinking straight if they've laced the food to keep their captives biddable.' Come to think of it it's the same voice he uses when the unholy duo of Yattaran and Maji have kicked the internal self-repair into overdrive after a crazy all-nighter...

I put down the bread and tried manfully to ignore the rumblings in my midsection whilst I got to work. Meanwhile the captain dropped the bar on the heavy wooden door, and started to rummage in the cupboards. Whilst I tried to avoid spilling several noxious substances, he emptied containers, gave them a rinse and stacked them up ready to fill. Gotta hand it to him - along the way he did decant a few edibles that had been sealed.

'Crackers?' I cast a gloomy but longing eye over the little wafers and sighed 'They'll do I suppose - no cheese though?'

'Beggars and choosers,' he quipped.

'Next time, I'm in charge of the picnic basket,' I told him. He just smiled briefly and got on with screwing lids back onto plastic bottles.

Something had gotten into my one-size-fits-all (hah!) pants however, and it was bugging me. 'You know,' I began, in my lightest, most conversational voice, 'you're awfully calm considering…'

He looked over at me, waiting. When I didn't immediately elaborate, he shook his head slightly. 'The skin-job upstairs?'

See, he's bright sometimes. A bit slow on the uptake at others, but he doesn't do too badly. And hell, at least he talks to - and with - the crew. The last guy, you could have tied a rocket ship to his tongue and still not dragged a full conversation out of him.

'It's not my brother.' Bottletop screwed tight enough to squeak, and bottle plonked on tabletop.

Bold. Flat. Direct. Accepting of no dissent. Huh. Denial, much?

'Yeah, but -' I never can leave well enough alone, even when the red flag is up.

Especially when the red flag is up.

Another bottle filled and screwed. Plonk. 'How am I so sure? I'm sure, Ali. For one very simple, technical reason.' Squeak. Plunk. 'Soul rings do not work at a distance.' Squeeek. Thump.

Oh. Ah. Hadn't thought of that one, had I? He had a point. Lar Metal's download tech stripmines your very self out of your head and stuffs it in a metal body leaving nothing but a rapidly cooling husk - and whilst it exists, you can just carry on regardless. Even transfer to a new body if you need to. But he's right - it requires physical contact, and he'd dragged his brother off the bridge of the dying Oceanos and onto the Arcadia before the government had tried to destroy Earth - and by extension, anything in its way. Like two ginormous battleships impaled on each other… Ergo: no soul ring.

But he wasn't that calm, was he, judging by the thumps. I gently removed one of my improvised devices from his fingers and placed it gently on the table. Without a plonk. Or a thump. Or a thud. 'You're making me nervous. Stop it,' I told him. 'And you ain't that sanguine, are you? What's got your bollocks in a twist? Apart, that is, from these pants…' I had to give mine a good hard tug to straighten up the seam that was trying to cut me in two starting with my balls. Between that, over thirty hours without sleep, my empty tum and cold bare feet, my mood wasn't getting any better.

'Skins pre-date Lar Metal's programme by a few hundred years, he replied, smirking as I squirmed. 'They were used as sex toys, but also as spies - remember the stories from the Kamiyo Plan period - the first diaspora? They used to create personality templates for the AIs…'

'Hell yeah!' I snapped my fingers. 'I saw those movies… "Sexaroid" - that vid with the goofy spy and his sex-bot sex-pot sidekick… always losing her clothes…' I sniggered. '"Sexaroid in the Dinosaur Zone" was my favourite - musta seen that about ten times as a kid… amazed I didn't get hairy palms from that…'

'Ali.'

I knew that tone. 'Too much information?'

'Way too much.'

I gave him a hard stare as I wiped down the last bottle. 'So what - you think maybe the military copied that bastard somehow?'

A shrug. Awww. Bless 'im. Still trying to be all nonchalant. Me, I'd have been climbing the damn walls if someone had stuffed a copy of Phil under my nose…

'Or someone's just trying to yank my chain - although that would suggest we'd been made by someone other than Lazarus, and if that were the case, we wouldn't be enjoying our little baking session down here…'

He had a big point. Machinner security - outside the military - is notoriously slack. 'But still… even if it's just an AI with your brother's memories, it's still…'

'A royal pain in the ass, but nothing I'm going to cry over. We'll do what we came to do and pick up the trash on the way out.' A pause. 'Damn - I should have at least taken its damn boots on the way out - we'd be the same size if they modelled the body on him….'

I beamed at him. 'See - this is why I like you, cap'n. You always think of the important things. Eventually.'

He grabbed two bags from inside a low cupboard. 'Just pack your handiwork carefully,' he told me. 'We passed some storerooms where they'd stuffed the captives' clothing on the way - I'll see if I can locate some footwear and I'll meet you back at the stairs.'

'Size twelve!' I called out after him.

'Dream on,' he called back over his shoulder. 'Luna tells me you're a ten and a half, tops…'

'Oh,' I muttered after his retreating, smug back. 'You will pay for that when we get back… 'Just you wait until I tell your lovely, stuffed-full-of baby-number-four wife what you were doing in a dark alley with your chief gunner…'

I suppose I can't blame him too much for chucking my own, still-mucky-from-the-alleyway boots at my head.

My job in all of this was to create a diversion whilst the captain got to work in another part of the building. I can't say I liked the idea of splitting up - I prefer to know someone's watching my back on these capers - but our chances of slipping more than two people into this setup had been vanishingly small. So I was left to sneak around planting some nasty homemade devices whilst the captain did his thing - which would probably involve snooping through the computers (did dial-heads have warp-porn? If so he'd need brain bleach…) and trying to rescue a bunch of civilians, most of whom would probably be as shit scared of him if they knew who he was, as they'd be of their captors.

Never did understand the bad press we get - I mean - we're the good guys, right? And the captain takes a good wanted poster pic… plastered over more teenage bedroom walls than most pop stars and warp-vid actors, he is.

'Bloody ungrateful, that's what everyone is,' I muttered to myself as I placed a nasty little improvised charge in a doorway. There's a nice two-part explosive you can make with…

Anyway. Don't try that at home. I'm an expert. Which means if I blow my damn cock off when a bottle full of cutlery and a mix of household chemicals goes off a bit premature, it's because I'm a professional and know what I'm doing...

Tie off. Make unsafe. Check the wire's nice and tight. Check the dinky little detonators we'd packed in the strip of padding over Harlock's repeatedly abused thighbone. Back away carefully. Lather, rinse, repeat.

God, I'm good…

The next door I tried led into the main hallway. I peeked around the crack between door and architraving careful not to open it too wide. A glimpse was enough. Two dial-heads on the front door. Not a good time to alert them, although the dumb clucks were leaning on the walls looking for all the world as though they were fast asleep.

Some habits died hard, I thought. I closed the door and backed away. Since it wouldn't do to retrace my steps exactly, for obvious reasons, I headed for the east wing, and the captain.

'Miss me?' I said, staring down the barrel of the pistol he'd nicked off the copy of his brother. He lowered the gun and just glared at me.

'Didn't we have the conversation about sneaking up on me?' he growled.

'Ooh. someone's got his boxers in a bunch,' I chirped at him. 'And yes daddy, you did. Round about the same time we had the one about not running at dial-heads whilst armed only with a knife, and one about unwanted sexual advances towards female crewmembers, which was totally misaimed, coz Luna jumped me, not the other way-'

'Ali.'

'Oooh. Tone.'

'Oooh - I'm not sure anyone will ask too many questions if I accidentally leave you behind.'

God. He can be such a sarky bugger sometimes… Makes me long for the old captain sometimes…. 'Find what you were looking for?'

'I found my way through the firewall, but someone had cleaned out the files ahead of us. I'm not liking this.'

Huh. Me neither. I was getting a nasty little itch between the shoulder blades and this time it wasn't fleas. 'Well you'll have your diversion - I've got the route covered. So when do we make a move.'

He pointed to a printout he'd pinned to the table with a couple of gorgeous flourite vases - real antiques, must have come from someone's stasis stash, coz you just don't see that blue-and-offwhite-banded stuff anymore. The stuff came from one small hilly valley in the north of a small northern island, nowhere else in the world, and the mines ran out back in the twenty second century, and they'd stopped making this kind of ornament back in the early twentieth. Plus the stuff's not only fragile, it loses its colour when heated. For it to survive over a thousand years… I ran a hand over one of them, my fingers feeling the fine cracks in the surface. I wanted to weep at the idea of leaving them in the hands of a bunch of mechanical philistines who'd never appreciate either the workmanship or the geology that made them so unique.

'Ali.'

I pulled myself away from the pretty rocks. Yeah. Focus.

'We can't save everything.'

'Yeah, I know - people first. But with Earth turned into the nine circles of hell and covered by the waters of the Phlegethon…' I sighed theatrically.

'Ali - what did we say about Bronze Age Classical allusion in the workplace?' he asked with that look that pretty much tells me I've over-egged it a bit.

'That I shouldn't mix it with fourteenth-century Italian literary allusion?' I deadpanned. 'Hey - don't blame me because you had a substandard education!'

'When you can recite Dante in the original Italian, we'll talk. Try to focus,' he growled at me, clearly having lost the argument and not wanting to admit it. 'This is a plan of the building and grounds - the prisoners will be here-' he pointed. 'A holding area ready for transport.'

'Off world?'

'Some - the ones sold for "decoration". One thing I did find was the sales invoices. Someone in this organisation was an accountant in their past life.'

I shuddered. 'Poor bastard. What a fate. You think you can start again and immortality means you just end up exactly where you were before...' I thought for a minute. 'So the others - staying here - like our greybeard back there?'

'The most dangerous game of all,' he said softly. 'The other invoices were for hunting permits, energy capsules and accommodation and transport. For the right price - and it is pretty hefty - you can select your prey and set them loose in the ground to hunt and bring down.'

I did think for a minute I was going to throw up in my mouth. Not a good idea. Dry crackers taste vile on the way back up. 'So it's official.'

'I have copies. Enough to start bringing down some of those involved.' But he didn't look as happy as I thought he would.

'So what gives?'

'This place - the dial-head in the coat running it is just an employee. This whole setup is being run from off-world, and guess which files were conveniently missing?'

'Bummer.' I watched him as he went over our plan of attack, outlining how we'd move the prisoners out, and when I should let rip with our diversion. He'd thought of something. I just knew it. And whatever it was he really, really didn't like it.

Conveniently missing, huh? I could read between the lines of what he wasn't saying. 'Just out of interest, Cunt Lazarus' name wouldn't be on any of those bills for services rendered, would it?'

'Shouldn't there be an "o" in that?' he retorted a little listlessly.

I made a pretence of thinking about that. 'Nope… don't think so.' I jabbed a finger at him. 'And since you're avoiding the damn question, I'll take it that he's not being billed, is he? And if someone that supposedly connected ain't on the guest list…' I let the thought trail off, and waited.

He ignored me, just picked up his pistol and let the map roll up again.

Bingo.

'You think that the ersatz Isora's actually on staff, don't you?' Or - worst case - actually in charge… I ran it through my head. Synth bodies are expensive to maintain - and a black-market op like this must be rolling in it, from the stories we'd tracked down. It did make a sick kind of sense.

That shoulder-itch was back, now with big claws picking at it. The captain's mouth was a grim line, and I didn't need to be a mind-reader to see he'd already gotten ahead of me.

Who better to get a line on some military grade hardware and transports the like of which had been moving through the same group, than a former Gaia Fleet Admiral? Than the Gaia Fleet Admiral… 'Crap.' I said out loud. Because it was falling into place. 'You know - we could go back up there and get him…'

'No.'

'But…'

'No, Ali - if he's half the strategist my brother was, then he's already left that body. And we've been on a rapidly running down clock ever since he made us.' He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

'Then why ain't they breaking down the door and raising seven hells tracking us down?'

'Who says they aren't?' he asked bluntly. 'Isora was brilliant - if you can admire a treacherous, back-stabbing, manipulative, machiavellian, selfish, murdering, cold-blooded bastard who specialised in getting his opponents to lose all hope when they realise they've been played, and sacrificed everything and anyone on the altar of his climb to the top and never let even his closest subordinates know what cards he held if he could avoid it…'

Oh yeah… I thought, watching the emotions playing over his usually pleasant features. Of course you're over it. Totally. No hard feelings there at all…

'Then,' I started reasonably. 'We get the hell out. Now. Call Emmy, and blow this crappy pile from orbit.' I did eye up those flourite vases sadly though…

'If there's even a chance of saving those people, I have to try.' He shook his head in that way that usually means his mind's made up and there ain't no shifting him when he's in that state.

'If there's a chance of saving us, I'm even more in favour of trying,' I retorted. 'I like my ass just fine I'm in no mood to put it on the line for strangers who won't even thank us - for a bunch of people we don't even know…'

'Ali.'

I hate it when he puts that particular emphasis on my name. 'That's my name, and you're wearing it out, captain.'

'You want to leave, you're free to go any time you want to. The door's not locked, and I'm not ordering you to stay.' He stared at me, all amiable on the damned surface. Like butter wouldn't melt in his butt-crack.

'You bastard,' I told him eventually. And yes, I followed him out of the damn room and into certain bloody death. What the fuck else was I supposed to do?