'The resemblance is astonishing.' Dan was staring at the discarded shell that Lazarus had left in our cell with interest. 'This level of detail is expensive - someone clearly wanted to make sure there was doubt as to the identity of the copy.'

I peered at the body myself, and had to agree. I'd only met the bastard once - twice if you count Kei making me pick the bugger up off the deck where he'd died and move him to our morgue so we could stick him in a torpedo tube. A cold-blooded bastard had been my assessment back then. He'd only had eyes for Harlock - the old captain, that is. The rest of us hadn't been worth more than a sneer.

The captain was standing near the door, not bothering to get a closer look. Me, I gave the limp body a kick, just to make sure. It was the least I could do - my shoulder had stopped bleeding thanks to a pretty medic, but it hurt like a sonofabitch. 'He's gone, right?' I asked the tech who was examining it. She looked up and nodded. 'Good,' I said viciously. 'Captain - are you sure you're not adopted? Or he wasn't? Coz… how the hell you came to be related to a prick like that…'

'Positive,' he drawled back. 'Something I think Kei worries about from time to time everytime the boys get into some hair-pulling.' He turned back to our allies. 'I think we have an answer to who's in charge of this operation.'

'It also explains how this group were able to bypass the security at the storage depots they raided,' Marin piped up. 'Hoshino's been tearing his hair out over this for two years - we just couldn't find out who they not only knew where to go for the good stuff, but how they could bypass the codes.'

'Maybe they should have cancelled his access then,' Harlock drawled, as usual having no sympathy for Admiral Hoshino's problems. Mostly because when it was obvious that the purloined ships and weaponry were heading in our - that is, colonial territory - direction - he'd shrugged, washed his hands of the matter and went back to toadying up to the new regime.

'Procedure,' Dan replied shortly. 'Your brother was listed as missing in action, not dead. Which placed him on an inactive list, not a "remove access" list. His own codes would have been cancelled, but as Fleet Admiral, he had an executive over-ride.'

'And it never occurred to anyone than a missing admiral could also be a compromised admiral?' Harlock asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. 'I told Hoshino he was dead. I wouldn't make a mistake like that - given that I was holding Isora at the time…'

'Hoshino wouldn't believe you'd cut his head off if you held it up in front of him,' I reminded the captain. We shared a wry look. True, dat. Putting the captain and Admiral Hoshino in a room together is a recipe for disaster, and even on a good day they wouldn't piss on each other if they were on fire… 'You got a signal yet?' I looked back down at the shell and wished I hadn't. Synths… well, technically they're classed as machine men, machinners, cyborgs.. Whatever the word of the day is. But their bodies are mostly organic. The skeleton and brain are artificial but the flesh is lab grown. So to see the tech opening up the skull and sticking wires into the exposed brain - which was a translucent pinkish-green, looked like a jellyfish - made my recent dinner of sludged caffeine and a couple of ready meals make a half-hearted bid for freedom.

A quick look over at the captain showed me that he looked a bit pale as well. Can't have been easy, watching that - I mean, for all his protesting (and the hippy haircut and the beard of stoopid) this did look like his brother.

'I have a trace on the carrier signal.' The tech looked up. She was a plain thing - mousy hair, glasses - but she did have a nice smile, and filled out her uniform nicely in the right places. I smiled back but that seemed to make her a bit nervous. 'Faint, but not too far. About five miles south-south-west.'

Hank called up a holo-map before he could be asked. 'He's heading for the civilian spaceport.' He pointed. 'Which isn't good for containment.'

'It just means you can't go in after him,' the captain said smoothly. 'You still have the blockade in place?'

Hank nodded. 'Unless he wants to get shot down before he leaves orbit, he's going nowhere. But picking him up in a crowded concourse…'

The captain pushed himself off the wall he'd been leaning against, and walked over to the body. He stood over it for what felt like ages, just staring down at the face (or maybe at that flap of scalp flapping off to one side… personally that was the bit I couldn't take my eyes off.) 'You can't - you have rules,' he told Dan, looking up and looking the older guy right in the eye. You could almost see the understanding flash between 'em. Like one of the Arcadia's flashes of blue lightning, in those dark corridors late at night. 'Me, on the other hand - I don't have your scruples.'

No, I thought. You have more - coz the military will accept collateral damage as a cost of doing business. You don't, which is one reason why you're with us, and not still wearing that shiny blue uniform and taking orders from assholes like Hoshino. However Dan can't afford the bad press if he goes off the reservation… I kept my trap shut. What was coming was as inevitable as a solar wind, and about as deadly. 'So we'd better get a bloody move on then, hadn't we?' I said breezily. I handed Blaze my satchel. 'Hold onto that for me, would ya? Don't drop it.'

'Some explosives left?' he asked, peering into the opening. He gave me a puzzled look when he resurfaced.

'Couldn't resist, could you?' the captain asked with a sigh. 'I ought to make you carry those things as a punishment.'

'How did you guess?' I honestly had thought he hadn't noticed that I'd picked up those two nice flourite vases.

He just looked at me. 'Really?'

I shrugged. 'Nothing on Earth will ever be the same even when it does recover. Figured a little bit of home deserved a better fate than being fondled by people who don't value anything but their own miserable existence.'

'That, I can't really argue with,' he said quietly.

See - despite his constant bitching, he does get it. The little things that the rest of us hold onto. The things that ultimately stop us from thinking about a hundred very big bombs everytime our world gets tipped upside down. Luna's cats; Yattaran's plastic models; Kei's constant organising; Maji's fiddling with anything that ain't nailed down...

Just one of a hundred little things about him that are part of the reason why I almost always end up with more holes in me on these gigs than he does.

'I don't see why we can't just storm the place.' Emeraldas glared through the glass doors at the concourse beyond, as though the milling throng visible through the reinforced plexi were somehow responsible for her current bad temper.

They probably were just by the simple act of breathing. She's not a people person, our Em. I guess having your father murdered in front of you and having your mother turn into an evil cyborg entity who wants you dead because she loves your twin sister best will kind of do that to you. Though Kei had it much worse as a kid and came out of it okay. So long as she doesn't have to read you the riot act if you screw up. Or you hurt her beloved Harlock. Or threaten their kids…

'Because,' Harlock answered patiently, checking the energy cap in his borrowed pistol, 'if we start a shoot out, innocent people will get hurt.' He snapped the chamber closed with a flick of his finger.

Emeraldas didn't look convinced. 'Half of them are machine men. Why do we care?'

'Because people have the freedom to make dumb choices, and those are civilians. We don't target non-combatants.'

I don't know how he does it. It's all I can do not to strangle the cold-blooded little vixen some days.

'They still prey on humans for their life force. That puts them into the combatant box as far as I'm concerned.'

I couldn't fault her logic, and I know the captain feels the same way sometimes. He sighed. 'Because I said so, then. Does that work for you?'

She sniffed. 'Well you could have just said that in the first place…' She pushed through the doors and strode into the concourse, the milling crowd of stranded travellers somehow sensing a predator in their midst and putting their frustration at the delays on hold long enough to get out of her way.

'Do you think she'd kill me for pointing out that she's actually much more like her mother than Maetel is?' I asked.

'I think I wouldn't want to be wearing my best flightsuit if I'm in the room when you do,' the captain replied pithily. 'I think she'd much rather kill 'em all and sort them out afterwards.'

'Better to ask for forgiveness than permission?' I quipped.

His answering smile - a twitch at the corner of his mouth - was brief. 'Have you ever known her to ask forgiveness?' It was a rhetorical question. I just grunted and checked my own gun. He holstered his pistol and placed his left hand on the hilt of the sabre on his hip. 'Ichimonji - are your people in place?'

The answer came back over our commlinks, embedded in our ears. 'If you flush him out of the building, we'll be ready. For all our sakes - do try to take this outside, Harlock.'

'It's like talking to my damned father,' Harlock muttered as he cut off the connection without a reply. 'What am I? Fifteen?'

'It's your boyish charm,' I told him. He just rolled his eye at me, the right one being covered up by a white surgical patch rather than his trademark leather.

There were three staging areas. So. Emeraldas took arrivals, I got check-in and Harlock got departures. If that sounds like a lot of work for three people, searching for one face in a forest of humanity (and inhumanity) then, yeah, it might be - except for two things. We had scanners to check for the carrier frequency Lazarus was using, and Ichimonji and Hank were currently stationed in security monitoring the cameras with facial recognition.

'What if he just dumps this body as well?' I'd asked on the way here, lounging in the comfortable seats of Ichimonji's flyer.

'He won't,' the captain had replied rather tetchily. 'If he's left that signal on, it's because he wants a confrontation. He's playing with us.'

'So what happened to "don't play along"?' I'd asked.

'I said don't play his game,' he'd replied, a cold little smile on his face. 'We're not. We're playing mine… He still thinks I'm Yama. He has no idea who I've become.'

So here we were, beating the game, me and Em - if he was in our sections, our job was to flush him to Harlock. And if he was in Harlock's section, we'd be there to cut off his line of retreat. That, at least, was the plan we'd discussed.

Did we really think it would be that easy?

Step one was play spot-the-asshole. When the announcement about "unprecedented solar activity" was broadcast, there was the predictable ripple of reaction through the concourse. Annoyance, resignation, frustration, anger, tearful pleading for special circumstances… But what we were waiting for was that one single reaction from someone who'd know it was total bollocks - since anything that would scramble flight systems would certainly cut off the thin thread that connected the body Lazarus was using with his remote location. And when you combine a bollocks story you know will be seen right through, with a narcissistic cunt who won't be able to resist rubbing your nose in your thin-as-paper cover story, then you aren't going to be surprised to see his smug, smirking face staring into one of the cameras.

'He's in your section, Emeraldas.' Dan's baritone boomed over the coms. 'You know the drill.'

I waited, my eyes on the doors between the two sections. This was the hardest part sometimes. The waiting. I don't do patient. The high collar of my borrowed jacket was rubbing my neck raw, and I just had to scratch it, drawing a warning throat clearing from the tall, dark haired figure sporting an eyepatch on the other side of the concourse.

'What? We're supposed to be conspicuous, remember?' I muttered into the mike.

'Yeah - well, we're up, Jones.'

Sure enough, the quarry was strolling through the doors as they opened for him, as though he owned the damn place. A few paces behind, Emeraldas was shadowing him. Lazarus moved with that easy, overconfident stride of a man who thinks he's in total control, and had that way of moving through a crowd that made them part like a shoal of herring darting away from a shark. The captain had once mentioned in passing that he resembled his mother, and Isora his father, and I wondered what the hell it could have been like growing up with two cold-blooded bastards in the household. I shivered. Kind of explained a lot about the captain when he first came on board, the poor kid.

All musings were put on hold though as I took a step forward, out of the crowd, and let Lazarus see me. Predictably, he barely broke stride, but his smirk grew even bigger. I'd heard of smiles never reaching someone's eyes, but his seemed to be refusing to even approach his mouth. Something damned unhuman moved behind those grey-blue peepers, and my own mouth was as dry as dust. He didn't even swerve, just kept heading straight for me.

Then he spotted the figure lounging against the wall, giving him just a glimpse of a tall dark haired man with an eyepatch. Just for an instant.

And he looked behind him, puzzlement suddenly replacing the smug certainty.

A couple of yards behind Emeraldas, the same figure. Collar length dark hair falling over his face, a glimpse of an eyepatch, vanishing into the crowd.

He changed direction, then, looking around with a furrow in his brow you could have planted potatoes in. But all he would have seen was little ole me - and some chick in a red flightsuit.

At least until Marin did his thing and popped out of cover near the check-in desk. To give them all due credit, the brothers were having a ball with this, and they're very good at it. Rumour has it they'd been on covert ops since before most of us were getting hairy palms. So when Blaze made his move just as Marin made himself scarce, the look on Lazarus' face was priceless. From a distance, in the subdued emergency lighting we'd arranged, the resemblance was just good enough to make him sweat. Any closer or in better lighting, of course, it wouldn't take. Not with someone who knew the captain so well.

My worry about all of this, however, was that Lazarus would start shooting in the public areas. Hence our plan to try and steer him towards a less populated area - one which Dan's men, and the captain, should have cleared of civilians by now.

You know: the bits of the plan we didn't talk about in the same room as an active, open comms channel buried in the jellyfish brain of Lazarus' abandoned synth body… Not that it was the only worry - if he just cut his losses and dropped this body, we'd be stuffed. Both Dantetsu and Harlock wanted him "alive", as we all wanted this arms smuggling ring rounded up and put out of business - and that went double for their vile sideline. So the captain and Blaze (coz he's almost as sneaky as his dad, Zero…) had put their heads together.

'He always over-plans,' Harlock had said in the flyer. 'Never comes up with one strategy when three will do. You saw that during the battle for Earth.' This last directed at me, as though I'd been paying attention to anything other than my own hide at the time… 'But he doesn't think out of the box. Never has. As a kid he was the one who did what he was told. Never got into trouble. It's a weakness - he thinks of conflict only in terms of confrontation, of weapons, ships, troop and fleet movements. He didn't spot Harlock's trick weaponising the holoprojector, even though we did it twice. No imagination, really. He's brilliant within those limitations. At heart he's a bully - mean and spiteful, and whilst he can dish it out, he can't take it.' His eye had a flinty glare in it as he stared past my left shoulder, his mouth set into a harsh, pained line. 'We'll use that to level the playing field.'

'Ali?'

I tapped my comm earbud. 'No need to shout. He's here - and you were right. This isn't the missing synth chassis from the manor - it's unmarked. You really think this is the original?'

'Might be - or else he's really playing it safe. But that flyer on the runway is registered to the consortium fronting this bunch - it has to be his way offworld.' The captain's voice sounded satisfied. 'What's he doing?'

'Got that mean, narrow-eyed, bad-smell-under-nose, am-I-being-fucked-with look on his face. Gawd… he really knows how to scowl, doesn't he? Don't he know if the wind changes he'll stay like that, as Ma Jones used to tell me?'

A laugh. 'Good. Now send him towards me.'

And this was where it got tricky. I'd much rather have got out there and tackled the bastard, but not with all these civilians around. As the captain said - we take it outside. Lazarus was trying to stalk Marin, only to keep losing him and finding Blaze popping up in places his prey couldn't possibly be getting to in the time. You could see the frustration, but like the captain said - he hadn't figured it out yet, and we kept him moving. The boys knew what they were doing, giving him exactly what he wanted to see, so when I gave them the signal, it was Marin who took point, stepped out of the shadows in just the right place to "spot" his pursuer, do a double take and quicken his pace in the direction of a side door that led to the departure area.

Lazarus took the bait, with a nasty smirk, and a hand on his pistol butt. Wearing a fleet uniform, the security had obviously let him through anyway - but they'd had their orders, and were standing down. Hell - they had enough trouble on their hands with the annoyed passengers.

I gave Marin a couple of minutes once he'd led Lazarus out of the concourse, then followed. Emeraldas followed a few yards behind. Blaze, I assumed, was nipping on ahead.

'P.A.R.T.Y. T.I.M.E.' I whispered to myself, loosening my pistol in its holster. I stepped confidently out into the now cleared departure lounge.

And stopped dead in my tracks - no pun intended - with the cold sharp edge of a knife against my throat.