The Aristotle Transposition

(part three)

Ships are like women, or so the saying goes. Treat them nice, stroke them in the right places, bolster their egos with kind and gentle words and they'll do just about anything for you.

Like I said, it's a saying, and it isn't mine. But it's an idea that seems to work for Harlock, since more than one member of the crew has caught him talking to Arcadia over the years. Moments of quiet when he thought no-one was looking, or listening, and spending whole nights alone in the central computer room, talking to nobody. And not a few of us pausing as we passed by the door, to listen, and to look at each other with questions in our eyes.

Harlock wasn't talking now. His mouth was set in a line of grim determination as he sent the deployment module screaming towards breakaway velocity. The module hadn't been designed for this kind of treatment, but she offered barely a squeak of protest at the affront – the rattling of the console the only indication she was being pushed beyond her normal parameters. But that was nothing compared to the rattling of my teeth as we pushed through seventeen kilometres of atmosphere. It was a relief when the air thinned and gravity loosed its grip and we shot from the pale sky of Turas and out into the comforting black weightlessness of space.

And into the welcoming arms of the Coalition.

'What the fuck?' I strained against the harness so I could peer out through the viewport. 'Where the hell did they come from?'

A squadron of Coalition short-range fighters dispersed at high-speed across our forward view and scattered around us like dogs circling around a rabbit. I squinted against the glare of the sun – a K-class that shouldn't even have a viable planet around it – and turned my head, my eyes following their trajectory as they shot around and then behind us.

Harlock dipped the module sharply and rolled her over one-eighty so that we turned abruptly away from the sun and Turas completely filled the forward view with her big brown glare.

'Readings,' he snapped as he spun us back around to see the stars.

My fingers pounded against the scanners. The cruiser was parked thirteen thousand away, but the fighter contingent was reforming right on top of us.

This was not how today was meant to go.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

'Count five,' I said. 'Standard contingent.' As I spoke the fighters passed over us in delta formation, split up decoratively and doubled back again in our direction. 'What game are they playing,' I grunted as Harlock jerked the module down and left, snapping my head sideways with the momentum. 'Why don't they start shooting already?'

'It's not the module they're after,' he said, his eye on the fighters reforming ahead of us. 'They know we're not out here alone.'

'What's their plan? They cat-and-mouse us 'til Arcadia arrives?'

Harlock pulled back on the stick and sent us hurtling upwards, away from our pursuers and away from the planet. My head smacked against the back of the seat and I left it there, gritting my teeth as we spun completely around on our axis. He looked across at me as the module briefly righted.

'You're not going to throw up, are you?'

'Not yet,' I grunted through lips tight against a clenched jaw. An expression of doubt crossed his face, and I shook my head no – a short, sharp shake designed not to upset my equilibrium any more than it already was. He turned back to his flying, pointedly shifting his feet out of the splatter zone. I glanced back at Eddie, white-faced in the jump seat. He looked a lot closer to throwing up than I did.

A torpedo hit our rear flank, not enough to hole us, but enough to knock us sideways. It was a love tap. An unsubtle warning.

'Not so cat and mouse,' Harlock muttered as a second shot landed on our nose and the impact spread in blue lightning across our shields.

'Shit. They're using damned torpedoes. We won't last five minutes if they decide to get serious. Where the hell's Arcadia?' I fanned the sensors out but couldn't get a signal. She was still cloaked in dark matter, in-skipping through from the other side of the planet. 'This wouldn't be happening if – '

'Aristotle,' Harlock warned.

I closed my mouth. Shut my eyes against another explosion of light across our forward shields. Arcadia didn't have her own fighter contingent, though some of the men had been arguing for one – Baptiste in particular. He was a pilot, an ex-Targan Ranger who'd fought the Coalition at the Battle of Carina and somehow survived the rout. He was always angling for fighter cover, and said he knew where the Coalition stored a fleet of Cosmowings that were sitting around gathering dust. But Harlock never seemed enthused. Self-repairing and with cannon that out-classed and out-distanced anything the Coalition had, Arcadia was as un-killable as her captain.

But I wasn't un-killable. At least not yet. And the deployment module was hideously vulnerable. A red light blinked on the console – the forward shields were down forty-five percent. Another burst on our nose and we would find ourselves eating vacuum.

'Shields are dropping,' I told him. 'We need to land this bucket.'

As I spoke the fighters split up again, dived around the module and vanished into the void behind us. I strained forward to look out the viewport, almost breaking my neck as I tried to see where they had disappeared to.

'Arcadia,' Harlock announced.

'What?'

I was still leaning forward, straining against the seat harness as I scanned space for a visual on the fighters. And then I saw it – a roiling cloud that formed itself at the thinnest edge of the planet's atmosphere. A billow of black that expanded and contracted, boiling in upon itself as it disgorged Arcadia in flashes of blood-red lightning. A kilometre of bristling battleship appeared out of darkness, her prow a grinning death's head with eyes burning like the glowing pits of hell.

I stared at the apparition – because that's what she was – wondering how the hell Harlock had known she was here. I glanced across at him, watched a grin crook the corner of his mouth as Arcadia passed at speed across our bow, dark matter trailing in plumes from her hull as her gun turrets turned in their mounts and tracked the Coalition squadron.

A fighter passed between us and I didn't need my scanners to know he had a lock on us – the cat had arrived, so the mouse had to go.

'Brace,' I managed to get out, when without warning Arcadia's guns erupted in our direction, burning my retinas with blinding streamers of red.

'What gives?' I said as the fighter disintegrated in front of us and peppered the module with high-speed debris. 'Those morons nearly fried us!'

Harlock said nothing, his attention focussed on righting the module and realigning us on course towards Arcadia. We were buffeted in the debris field for about three seconds, but it was enough for second fighter to get a lock on us. A torpedo slammed point-blank into the rear quarter, ripped a hole through our shields and knocked off us course.

'Engine one is down.' I scrambled to divert power to the rear shields and cut the engine before it had a chance to flame out.

Harlock cursed as he struggled to bring us level and power out of range as the fighter surfaced from beneath us, came around and locked his guns on the cockpit.

Another round of fire exploded from Arcadia and sliced right across our nose, hot and bright and blinding and impacting the Coalition fighter with pinpoint accuracy – and almost taking a layer of our hull with it.

'Arcadia,' I barked into the comms. 'Who's on that gun?' Because no matter how good they were, when I found the bastard I was going to kill him.

There was dead air, and then Maji responded. 'Nobody.'

Now it was my turn to give dead air. I looked at the captain, said more to myself than to anybody within hearing distance 'what the fuck does he mean 'nobody'?' and was immediately hurled straining into the seat harness as Harlock sent the module into another spin. Another burst of fire exploded from Arcadia, passed metres from our port and lit the cockpit up with orange. I turned my head to follow its tangent through the viewport, watched as the beam sliced a third fighter neatly in two, the pilot spinning flailing out into space. I leaned back in to the comms.

'Arcadia, repeat. Who the hell is on those guns?'

'Nobody!' Maji's voice again. In the background I could hear Yattaran screaming orders, probably as horrified as I was at Arcadia's inexplicable turn of independence.

'Then get a body on those weapons and stop aiming them at us!'

'Leave it,' Harlock countermanded.

'What?'

'I said leave it!' He sent the ship into another dive as another fighter shot across our bow.

'In case you hadn't noticed,' I ground out as I was slammed back into my seat, 'your ship is shooting at you.'

He pulled the module back, ducked around a pepper of Coalition fire. 'Arcadia knows what she's doing.'

'You know how crazy that sounds?'

He ignored me. I opened the comms again. 'Captain says belay that order.'

'What?' This was Yattaran. 'But Captain – '

'He says leave it!' And then I repeated Harlock's words, but much less convincingly. 'Arcadia knows what she's doing.'

'What? Do you know – '

I cut the comms before Yattaran could hurl a stream of ear-burning invectives at me. Last thing I wanted was to die with him screaming in my ear. 'I hope to hell you know what you're doing,' I muttered at the captain.

'Me too,' he murmured, making me do a double-take to look at him.

'Hold on,' he said, sending the module into a power dive back towards the planet.

I didn't know how Eddie was handling it and I couldn't turn around to look. It was all I could do to keep my intestines where they belonged and not up in my throat where they kept trying to crawl. The Gs were extreme, the hard turns playing havoc with my equilibrium and curdling the hooch in my stomach. I was a landlubber through and through, and this was the worst kind of flying for a man born with both feet on the ground. If I got out of this without vomiting I would count it as a good day. Getting out of it alive would just be the bonus.

The module skimmed through the pale edge of the atmosphere, flames igniting across its skin and flaring on the shielding of the viewport. The shields crackled randomly, lightning sparking at the points where it had been breached.

The two remaining fighters followed, forcing Harlock to swerve the module left, and then right, all the while taking us down to where the drag of the atmosphere would make the fighters turn back. He was evening the odds, but the further down we went the further we moved from the safety of Arcadia's guns. At this point I no longer cared who was – or wasn't – manning them. I just wanted those fighters off our tail.

As if on cue a multiple burst of orange arced through the thin layer of air, targeted the trailing fighter with unerring accuracy and exploded it into spinning arcs of flame. Caught by atmosphere the debris spiralled planetward, a shower of fire that burned bright for a moment before sputtering into flowers of drifting black smoke.

There was only one fighter left, and at this point the pilot was taking matters into his own hands. Vengeance is a potent force, and seeing four of your comrades go up in flames is a mighty powerful motivator. And this pilot was stubborn – he knew the risks of atmosphere, but he had a bead on our tail and he just wasn't letting go.

'Captain,' Maji hailed – Yattaran was probably still too busy cussing. 'The cruiser has mobilised and will be in firing range in under ten. Requesting orders.'

'Cripple it,' Harlock replied tonelessly.

'What about you?'

'Under control.'

'What?' I squeaked. The console was blinking like a christmas tree as more and more power drained from the shields. They could collapse at any moment, and then it would be us out there, spinning flailing out into space and with the planet rushing up to meet us.

The air was thicker now and manoeuvring on the remaining engines was getting steadily harder. I could feel the drag against the hull, could see Harlock straining as he fought against the increasingly dense atmosphere. Only a couple more kilometres and the excess oxygen in the air would flood the fighter's engines and ignite whatever fuel he had left. By the time the pilot realised what was happening it would be too late – he'd be on an irreversible countdown to total ignition. All Harlock had to do was keep the module in one piece until – there. It was over in an instant. A blinding flash filled the sky as the fighter's load of fuel ignited all at once.

There was silence in the module, a brief respite as Harlock braked the engines back to more sedate operating levels and set course back to Arcadia. Behind us I could hear Eddie breathing, loudly, through his mouth.

'A hundred years,' Harlock said, breaking the silence, 'and they still make the same stupid mistakes.'

We waited in the module as Harlock shut down the systems and the atmosphere cycled back into Arcadia's hangar. I swallowed against the lingering nausea and said, 'the Ranger might be right. Maybe we do need some fighters.'

'Mm,' Harlock said, the sound so non-committal I couldn't tell if he was agreeing with me or disagreeing with me. 'You're still alive, aren't you?'

Okay. Disagreeing with me.

'Thanks to you,' I said. 'And Arcadia. And whoever it was that was doing all the shooting.'

He turned to look at me, opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it and settled his lips into a straight, implacable line. But his gaze remained locked on mine, his expression hesitant. Uncertain. His lips tightened and he abruptly turned away.

I exhaled loudly, unaware I'd been holding my breath. 'What if it was somebody else at that console,' I continued from where I'd left off. 'Me, for example.'

His fingers slowed in their movement, finally came to a stop as the systems closed down. 'Alright,' he said without looking up. 'Talk to Baptiste. Find out where the Coalition is keeping those Cosmowings.'

'Aye, sir.' I struggled to keep the satisfaction from my face. Harlock might not be looking at me, but he had an uncanny knack for knowing what a person was thinking, and when a stupid expression was passing across that person's face.

Movement outside the cockpit caught my eye and I looked up to see the hangar door sliding open, the pressure seal disengaging in a silent puff of dust. 'Here's the homecoming party,' I said as Yattaran and Maji entered the hangar. Yattaran sauntered across the deck nonchalantly, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day, but Maji stopped midstride and stared aghast at the module. I could only imagine the dents and burns she must have sported – repairs for Maji and his crew to do, not to mention the injury to Maji's pride, and to the equipment that the engineer so lovingly tended.

I stood and moved across to Eddie on shaky legs. I was still queasy, and still having trouble not throwing up. 'You okay, kid?' I said, trying to sound as nonchalant as I could. As though this kind of shit happened every day.

He was still breathing through his mouth, lips slack, his face pale as he looked up at me with watering eyes. One hand fumbled blindly at the harness restraints.

'Here,' I said, moving in and releasing the catch with a thumb.

'Thanks,' he mumbled as he leaned free of the seat restraints and vomited quietly onto my feet.

'Ah, crap. You're cleaning that up,' I snarled, a little meaner than I needed to as I goosestepped back from the gelatinous chunks that cascaded onto my boots. What the hell had this kid been eating?

And then the smell hit, the acid tang overriding any semblance of control I might have had over my own stomach. Shit. I clamped my jaw down tight and rushed towards the hatch, slid awkwardly down the ladder to where Yattaran waited on the deck, collapsed to my knees and promptly threw up.

'Ahhh…' Yattaran said, eyeing me with disgust. 'You're cleaning that up.'

I wiped the spittle from my lips and surveyed the puddle of regurgitated liquor as it spread across the floor and crept slowly towards my knees. 'Ergh,' I said to nobody in particular, my stomach tightening and threatening to expel whatever else might have been left.

Yattaran stepped back from the spreading puddle. 'What the hell did you get up to down there?' he continued in his fish-wife drawl, happy now he had something new to complain about. 'Captain,' he called towards the module. 'What upset the philosopher's stomach this time?'

Harlock's feet sounded on the deck behind me. He skirted around the vomit, placing a comforting hand on the top of my head as he passed. 'Same old problem,' he said as his hand fell away.

'Ah,' Yattaran said, nodding sagely. 'The drink.'

'No,' I croaked towards Harlock's retreating back. 'The flying.'

Harlock stopped mid-stride. I watched his boots turn on the deck with military precision, walk back in my direction and come to a stop on the opposite side of the puddle.

'Yattaran,' he said over the top of my head. 'There's a new recruit on the module. Find somebody…patient…to look after him. He's…' I watched as his feet shifted on the deck, '… had a bad day.'

'Are you saying I'm not patient?' Yattaran exploded, and if I wasn't digging my lunch out of my teeth with my tongue I might have laughed. But also I had the captain looming over me, probably pissed that I'd just shit all over his driving.

Harlock's gloved hand appeared before my eyes, palm up, fingers twitching with impatience.

I sat back on my heels, reached down the front of my pants and extracted the bottle of Twelve Worlds. Slapped it into the palm of his hand.

My boots were wet. Damp with water and the faded stains of Eddie's puke. They creaked as I walked, the noise loud in the dark and quiet corridors.

I'd left Eddie in the care of Yattaran, who'd left him in the care of Vincent, who'd left him in the care of Carlos, who would probably leave him in the care of the next dumb sucker that came along. I snorted to myself in the dim silence. The kid didn't have a hope in hell.

Pale light spilled from an opening ahead of me, along with the tang of dark matter and the indistinct murmur of voices. The door to the central computer room was open – something that had been happening more and more often of late.

I tread gently, tried to muffle the damp squeak of leather on leather as I neared the open door. Harlock's voice flowed out with the light, his words soft and disjointed, as though I was hearing only one half of a conversation. I turned my head, listening, slowed my steps and tried to peer in.

'Aristotle.'

Shit.

Miimé. She'd come out of nowhere, crept up on me in that noiseless way she had, as though she walked with her feet floating an inch above the ground. She stepped in front of me and moved in close, the scent of her skin overlaid with the tang of hard liquor.

'Thank you,' she said. She lifted a pale arm, fingers clamped tight around the neck of the Twelve Worlds. A third of the contents were gone already. 'Harlock told me where…' Her free hand gestured towards my groin and she smiled. It might even have been a laugh.

'Uh...' I stared into her eyes, mesmerised by the cat-green of the irises, the pupils widening as she moved closer to me. Her breath was cool and electric on my face, and I felt exposed beneath her gaze, defenceless as her hand hovered close. So, so close.

I swallowed, my adam's apple scraping hard against the neck of my sweater. ''It was, ah… Captain's idea,' I managed to rasp out, the breath bleeding out of me as I stepped reluctantly away from her approaching hand. Watched it fall languidly back to her side.

She smiled, a secret smile, and I felt the blood rush to my face.

We slipped out of in-skip on the outer edge of Mira, the yellow of the planet flooding the bridge with golden light and the baleful eye of the Vortex swirling dead centre of our field of view. The crew stopped and stared for a moment, because the universe was infinite and we hadn't seen everything yet, and even pirates stopped to look at beauty now and then. And the Vortex was beautiful. A gaping maw that spewed hydrogen fitfully into space – a failed sun in an endless search for ignition.

It was routine now, since our run-in with Argus, to scan subspace for Coalition chatter, or for anything that might betray a Coalition presence. We'd got used to the deserted wastes of the outworlds, but since Turas even the smallest of outposts were a potential threat as we moved deeper into the colonies.

'Gaia!' Eddie shouted suddenly from the lower deck, a little louder than he needed to. He was still getting used to life on Arcadia and the demands of the bridge. He was still getting used to his body, too, I reckoned, his voice breaking at times like a teenager's. 'System-wide broadcast,' he added, at a more acceptable level.

I routed the feed to my console. 'Transmission from Gaia Command,' I announced. 'All sector alert.'

Harlock had returned to the bridge during in-skip, had been sitting in his chair for an hour or more while we monitored the transit, so silent and unmoving I think we'd all forgotten he was there. When he didn't respond I had to turn my head to make sure I hadn't been imagining his presence all along.

'Captain?'

He shifted in the chair. Lifted his head from where it had been leaning on his upraised hand. 'On speakers,' he said.

'Aye sir.'

The officious drone of a Gaia functionary filled the bridge. An impersonal robotic intonation with a hint of authoritative threat – a voice carefully designed to instil fear and obedience in the subjugated masses. Yattaran taught me about that. He was always going on about the subjugated masses.

'…all sector alert…' the drone was saying, the subspace signal cracked and warped by distance and the gravity of Mira. 'Reward offered for information leading to the arrest of intergalactic fugitive S-00999 Captain Harlock…'

This was new. My attention was fixed on my console, but I was vaguely aware of movement on the lower command, the exchange of glances and low murmurs of surprise.

The transmission was on a loop, the voice loud and hard as it broke apart in the quiet of Arcadia's bridge. But with it, over it, came a dancing light on the screen – a vidfeed had been layered over the top of the audio transmission. A separate packet, which meant it was for Coalition eyes only. Aimed at those with the need, and the means, to see. My fingers froze on the console, my eyes sliding across to Yattaran at the auxiliary. He looked at me, what?, then routed the feed to his console and stared down at the image displayed there.

'Subversive activities…' the drone continued, the words scattered by static as the image I was looking at simultaneously ghosted over with snow. '…fugitive considered dangerous…'

The words were garble now, unimportant noise as I refined the signal and stabilised what I was looking at.

'Captain.' I turned uncertainly to face the chair. 'There's a visual.'

Harlock shifted in his chair, glancing sideways at Miimé as she came to stand beside him. He stood, paused for a moment and looked at me, an expression of irritation – or was it apprehension? – tightening his lips.

I stepped away from the console. The droning voice continued with its litany of Harlock's crimes, but I couldn't hear a thing as Harlock moved in to look down at the screen.

The image was old, broken by distance and fragmented by time. An ident from his original service records. Fuller face. Shorter hair. The high collar of a Coalition uniform sitting stiff beneath his chin. The scar still tracked over his cheek, but the most jarring part of the image was his eye. Rather, his eyes. Two clear brown eyes that looked gravely out at us between bursts of white and random static.

Harlock leaned in abruptly and cut the feed.

He stalked back to his chair. Sat down in brooding silence.

Twelve hours later found me standing in the hall outside the washroom. The door was locked but that didn't hold me back. I cracked it with the override code and stepped inside.

'I'm busy,' Yattaran sang out from where he sat chest-deep in the wide bath. A model of an archaic battleship – the Midway, I knew, because I'd watched him make it – floated in the milky water between his knees.

'So I see.' I walked across to the row of basins and leant over them, looked at myself in the mirror. I'd been growing my hair out of its buzzcut, and a recent bout of laziness had resulted in the beginnings of an impressive set of blond muttonchops. I angled my face to look at them better in the light. 'I'm thinking of keeping these,' I said, scratching my fingernails through them and glancing at Yattaran's reflection in the mirror behind me.

His glare shifted from the back of my head to meet my eyes in the silvered glass. I turned to face him, leaned back against the basin and folded my arms across my chest. 'What the hell do you think that was about?'

His grip shifted on the boat and I watched as his enthusiasm for the game drifted away.

'Yeah,' he said, thinking.

'Yeah,' I echoed. 'What just happened?'

'Seems to me,' he said, his eyes on the boat, 'like Captain's past just caught up with him.'

'Yeah,' I said again, because that much was clear. 'But how did Gaia Command know?'

He looked up at me. Without his glasses his eyes were big and blue and rimmed faintly in red. 'Seems like they always knew.'

'I don't buy it. Arcadia looks nothing like Deathshadow. Not anymore.' I stared unblinking into his eyes. 'So how did they know?'

'Energy signature.' He shrugged, the movement making a little plinking sound in the water. 'Dark matter leaves a trail. Every time Arcadia drops out of in-skip she leaves a piece of herself. Like a fingerprint.'

'You think it's possible the Coalition has been following Arcadia's fingerprints? For a hundred years?'

'It's possible,' he shrugged. 'I would say probable.'

'The ident packet,' I said, remembering the image of Harlock from a hundred years ago. 'How could they know it was Harlock? After all this time… how could they know he was even still alive?'

He shifted in the milky water. 'Seems like they've known about Harlock from the start. Captain's fooling himself if he thought he was invisible all this time. They might have lost him when he was out in the territories. Or any time he was away from the colonies. But every time Arcadia moved in and out of in-skip they'd know where he'd been. They've probably been one step behind him the whole time.'

He fumbled a hand to where his glasses rested on the edge of the bath and slid them onto his nose. 'Maybe they even know his plan.'

'Come on.' I unlocked my arms, dropped my hands to my sides and folded my fingers around the cool edge of the basin. 'How?'

'The oscillators. He stole them from Gaia Command, and Gaia Command are not as stupid as we like to think. It wouldn't have taken them long to put two and two together.'

I adjusted my ass against the metal of the sink. So Harlock had been in their sights the whole time and the Coalition had been reading him like a book. They'd been playing the long game – the longest game of them all.

'Now what?' I asked. 'How does Harlock… how do we stay one step ahead?'

Yattaran snorted lightly. 'Captain's not stupid either. He hasn't been doing this for all this time and learnt nothing.'

'Maybe…' I stared down at the first mate, '…maybe Harlock wants them to know.'

Yattaran shifted in the tub, sent ripples sliding across the surface of the water.

'Maybe,' I continued, 'he wants to look the Coalition in the eye when he sets the oscillators off.'

Yattaran raised the boat into the air, watched as water ran from it in a steadily diminishing stream. It was uncomfortable to think about things this way. To think that maybe we were pawns in Harlock's hundred-year end-game.

'Now what?' I asked again, my eyes on the steady drip-drip-drip of water into the tub. There had to be more to it than this. Harlock had saved us. All of us. We owed him in blood. And whatever game he was playing, we were all of us in it to the end. 'Now they've stepped up the chase, what will Harlock do?'

'If I know Captain,' Yattaran said, placing the boat carefully on the edge of the tub, 'he'll give them something to really worry about.'