The Aristotle Transposition

(part five)

I watched critically as Kei leaned over the weapons command, her thighs flush against the console as she studied the calibration readouts. I might have wished she hadn't chosen such a tight … yes, tight is definitely the word … flightsuit. The rounded peach of her ass was drawing way too much attention on the lower command. I glanced around at the day crew, scowling at Bob staring open-mouthed as Kei shifted a little in place, bending one knee and pushing one ass-check further up into the air as a result. C'mon, man, I said to him with my eyes, hoping he'd get the message and look away, but he continued his slack-jawed staring. I could almost see the drool quivering on the edge of his lip.

'So,' I said to her, turning away from Bob and his drool, 'recalibration is only required when Arcadia has taken a direct hit on the batteries during engagement, or, more often, after we've rammed another vessel.'

She straightened at the console and turned her big blue eyes on me. Damn, those lashes were long. 'Rammed another vessel?' she repeated with some surprise.

'Captain's favourite strategy,' Santo said from further down the command. He took a few steps away from his station, pumping a fist into the air as he did so. 'Captain likes to ram them right up the – '

'Hey,' I snapped.

Santo stopped midstroke, the grin still on his face and his arm still lifted into the air, the bicep flexing nicely and he knew it. The grin widened as he brought the bicep to his lips and kissed it, the action drawing a round of laughter from the rest of the crew.

'Give me a break,' Kei sighed wearily.

'You and me both. I'm about ready to throw up.' I turned my back on Santo's nauseating display of self-love and gave my attention back to Kei, my eyes roving helplessly across her hair, her skin, the moist pink bud of her mouth...

I coughed. 'Now, as I was saying – '

'Incoming transmission,' Roy cut in, saving me from having to suck back a bit of drool myself.

I didn't bother to look up. 'Source?'

'Sol sector.'

I rolled my eyes. 'Not another wanted broadcast.'

'Not this time. It's an open channel. Ship to ship.'

I turned to look at him.

'For the captain,' he added, surprise tinging the edge of his voice.

Silence descended on the deck. My eyes flickered towards the command. 'Patch it through upstairs.'

'Aye.'

I turned to face the upper command. I couldn't see Harlock from down here, but I could see Yattaran's head over the top of his console. I watched as he acknowledged receipt of the transfer, his face carefully schooling itself towards neutral before he turned to the captain.

'Incoming comms, Captain,' Yattaran said, his voice loud enough that I didn't need to strain to hear. 'Ship to ship.'

Harlock's response was inaudible, but I could imagine what it might have been. As disinterested as I'd anticipated, because Yattaran's next words were, 'Sol sector. They want to talk to you.' Yattaran's back remained turned to us so I couldn't see his face, but I could well imagine the expression that was creasing his brow as he waited for orders.

I continued staring at the upper deck. I was conscious of Kei close by my side, the outline of her breasts just making it into my peripheral vision. It had been a long time since we'd had anything as lovely to look at as Kei, and I was having as much trouble as the rest of the men keeping my eyes from drifting off-target. And right now they were drifting off target. A waft of air from the recirculators stirred the hair that rested on her shoulders, and I caught the faint scent of her. Fortunately for my libido she smelled as non-descript as the rest of us, being scrubbed with the same soap. Oh well. I had no doubt that would change the next time we made landfall.

I slid my eyes as nonchalantly as I could back to the upper deck, hoping I hadn't been caught looking at the things I was trying so hard not to look at. I was supposed to be setting an example, an order tasked to me by the captain. 'The men must treat her as an equal,' he'd said, in a tone that brooked no argument. 'It might help if you tell them think of her as a sister. Or,' his voice softened, 'like Miimé.' At the mention of Miimé my face had flushed and I'd coughed into my hand and looked away. He did not want to know what kinds of things I thought about Miimé. When I turned back to him there was a half-smile playing across his lips. I think he already knew.

By now the entire crew had stopped what they were doing and were milling around silently, glancing at each other with curiosity in their eyes. Santo scratched absently at the side of his face, his eyes catching mine as my gaze wandered along the row of solemn faces. A direct comm from Sol sector could only mean one thing, since Gaia had effectively sanctioned the entire system and guarded it as rabidly as a dog guarded a bone.

Kei glanced around the suddenly silent bridge and turned her head to look at me, her mouth forming into a perfect pink 'O' as the inevitable question prepared to launch itself from her lips. I shook my head to keep her lovely mouth shut and directed her attention to the upper command with a flick of my eyes. Harlock had left his chair by now and had measuredly paced the gantry to stand at the wheel. He stared down at us, an indefinable expression passing across his face as he met our curious stares, the cloak billowing around his ankles as he surveyed his domain. 'First mate,' he said, lifting his head as Yattaran activated the overhead screen and flooded the deck with light.

There was a moment of static as the image buffered and Yattaran filtered out the interference from the thousand star systems between us and Sol. And then a man's face filled the screen, a pale, angry man bearing all the hallmarks of the Coalition officer class – collar too tight around his throat, hair too short on his head and skin too tight over a too-narrow skull. They all had that look – when they were young, that is. When they got old they got yellow and fat from living high on all the life they stole from the colonies. This particular specimen was still young, with a face drawn tight and pale from a distinct lack of blood. Or maybe that was the white of his skull bleeding through.

He stared down from the viewscreen at Harlock, eyes narrow behind a pair of wire-frame spectacles that looked like they never left their perch on the high, thin nose. Beneath that sat a hard, contemptuous mouth that gave the impression its owner existed in a constant state of barely controlled rage. I felt my own mouth hardening as I looked at him and hoped we'd never have the misfortune of meeting this one in person. Men like that, they weren't human. They'd had all the humanity sucked out of them by the merciless machine of the Coalition. And then that cold, hard mouth moved and he began to speak, calm and methodical as though he were reading from a well-rehearsed script.

'Captain Harlock,' he said officiously, so officiously he made me want to spit. 'I am Isora, Commander of the Coalition Armada.'

My eyes moved to the epaulettes bolted to the blue shoulders of his uniform – three gold bars. He was nowhere near fat enough or old enough for the rank, and I wondered fleetingly who he'd had to part cheek for to get that position. I turned my attention back to the uncompromising face and realised with sudden clarity that this man would part cheek for nobody. He looked like he'd sell out his mother if it would get him what he wanted – he was a giver of pain, not a taker.

The Commander continued, his eyes two hard blue balls behind his glasses. 'This communication is to be considered a declaration of intent from Gaia Command. Any lack of cooperation in your surrender will be considered an indictable offense, punishable under section seventy-six of Sanction Criminal Code.'

He stopped talking. Stared down at Harlock and waited.

Harlock stared back. Measured the man with his single good eye, an expression of faint contempt passing fleetingly across his face. 'What do you want, Commander?'

The Commander's lips settled in a thin, white line. 'I require acknowledgement that you understand this declaration, and I am authorised to negotiate the terms and conditions of your surrender.'

Harlock moved. Shifted inside his cloak. Cocked his head as if he was truly interested. 'And what are my crimes?'

The Commander lifted a white-gloved hand to adjust the spectacles on his nose, thought twice about it and lowered his hand again. 'Apart from a series of more recent criminal activities that include destruction of Coalition properties, felony and murder, there remains a warrant outstanding for your arrest.' The thin mouth curled into a smile. 'The warrant has been outstanding for a number of years.'

Harlock smiled back. 'Then I acknowledge your declaration. However, there will be no surrender.'

The Commander's face whitened a shade. 'You are ordered hereby to present yourself for surrender immediately, along with all members of your crew. You will also surrender your ship for decommission.' And then he added, cryptically, 'it is far too dangerous to be left in the hands of a man who has demonstrated his unfitness for command of such a weapon… to such devastating effect.'

Harlock lowered his head, placed a hand on the wheel, ran a thumb carefully along the grain. 'Old history,' he murmured, just loud enough for Isora to hear. He looked up again, carefully met the Commander's eyes. 'I am currently in the business of making new history.'

Isora's mouth twisted, the rigid lips parting to display a row of even, white teeth. He was having trouble concealing his anger, and I had the distinct impression that this one wouldn't live long enough to get fat.

'New history,' he mocked, contempt dripping from his words. 'We know about your plan to return to Earth, Harlock. We know why you stole the oscillators. Did you think that a hundred years would be long enough to conceal your true intent? A hundred years or a thousand, no amount of years could hide you from us.'

Oh yeah, this dude was definitely not going to live long enough to get fat.

'You are all traitors to Gaia,' he said, his voice rising in anger, 'and traitors and scum like yourselves are not welcome on Earth. If you – '

'As I recall,' Harlock interrupted, 'nobody is welcome on Earth.'

Isora straightened his shoulders, eyes glinting behind the wire-frames of his glasses. 'And who is responsible for that?'

Harlock's eye narrowed. He stared whitely at Isora, the change in him palpable. I found myself unconsciously stepping back, my elbow bumping blind into the soft parts of Kei where she stood beside me at the console. She slid out from under me, her profile smooth and clear as she gazed up at the captain.

'If you do not cease all activities and voluntarily surrender yourself,' the Commander was continuing, his voice as tight with anger as his face, 'our orders are to destroy you and your crew and your ship. If you attempt to enter the Sol system, we will take you down.'

Contempt crooked Harlock's lips. 'You can try.'

He raised a hand for Yattaran to cut the transmission, the first mate obliging with a speed I wouldn't have ordinarily thought possible. Our last view of Isora was one of impotence personified as the tight mouth opened in blind retort just before the image dissolved into a mash of pixels and static.

There was silence on the bridge. It felt like even the ship was holding its breath, and I was conscious of us floating, isolated and alone in the cold wastes of space. Harlock remained where he was, one hand clamped tight on the wheel and the great arc of the dark matter generator glinting in the dim light as it rotated slowly behind him. A look passed across his face, a fleeting shadow of doubt that creased the corner of his eye and tightened the edges of his lips.

'We have eleven oscillators still to deploy,' he said, breaking the silence at last. 'Eleven more systems until we can return to Earth and reset the universe.' He stared down at the lower command, looked at our faces upturned towards him, met each of our gazes one by one. Turned to Miimé as she came to stand beside him.

'This is our chance to do it over,' he said, hitting us all in the place where we hurt the most. We all had our pain and our grief and our loss, and we all had our reasons to see the universe start over. To give ourselves the chance to live our lives again.

I shifted on my feet, glanced sideways at Kei beside to me. She stared up at the captain, eyes bright with trust and a longing that I recognised with a pang of understanding. She moistened her lips, her tongue darting briefly out as she caught her bottom lip with her teeth.

'You heard the Commander of the fleet,' Harlock was saying. 'The Coalition plans to keep us from Earth. To keep us from completing our mission. To keep us from our one true home.'

He paused as a murmur of voices rose from the deck, raised a hand palm-down and curled it into a decisive fist.

'We will target any ship that identifies itself as Coalition,' he said over the rising chorus of agreement. 'Anything from Gaia Command.'

His voice grew hard, his face cold. 'We will take away their support systems, their supply chains, their munitions. Anything destined for Coalition outposts, we will take it or we will destroy it.'

He looked down at the crew on the lower deck, his gaze roving from one upturned face to another.

'We will cripple them.'

Arcadia's mess hall was enormous, a relic from the time when Arcadia wasn't Arcadia and, according to the data still stored in the underlayers of the mainframe, sported a crew of four hundred. It was hard to imagine the now-empty corridors crawling with men and activity. Harder still to imagine Harlock commanding that many subordinates. We were now a slim forty, and the Captain's command style must have been a far cry from his days in the Coalition. These days he was hardly hands-on – mostly he left us to our own devices, endowing us with a trust that none of us would ever break. Although, maybe, some of us had finally hit breaking point – it was one thing to be dicking around with local forces, quite another to know that your captain had just officially declared war and that the combined artilleries of the entire Coalition were now aimed directly at your head.

The day-crew had commandeered a corner of the mess, hunching together around a table and chewing morosely on the day's offerings. Forty crew and not a single one of us could cook. In the interests of fair play we were working on a roster system – a task that some of the men attacked with as much gusto as they gave to washing their armpits. Until we found somebody who could actually use a frypan we were doomed to an endless stream of 'delicacies' from as many worlds as we had crewmen. Varro and Dan were on shift tonight, and while Dan's pan de Arcadia was still stuck to my back teeth, Varro had proved once again that he knew how to stew meat. I poked at the puddle of gravy on my plate and lifted a forkful of something gelatinously solid to the light… if that was meat we'd been eating, that is. I slid whatever it was into my mouth and found my eyes wandering to Kei sitting beside me, wondering when would be an appropriate time to ask her the burning question, can you cook?, and wondering how hard she could slap. Oh yeah, that's right. Carlos had sported Kei's hand-shaped bruise on his chops for a couple of days, and I found myself sniggering unexpectedly at the memory.

'What's so funny?'

I looked up as Baptiste slid into the chair opposite and delicately separated a bone out of the mess on his plate. It was definitely meat, but exactly what kind and where the hell it had come from was anybody's guess.

'Nuthin',' I shrugged, spearing at another chunk on the plate.

'Something seems funny,' he said in that indefinable accent that was by degrees pleasant and annoying in turns.

'I said it was nothing.' I sat back in my chair and looked up to find a half-dozen pair of eyes solemnly staring at me, the other half-dozen solemnly staring at their plates. The confrontation with Isora had rattled them. Hell, it had rattled me – the cold threat in the Commander's voice, matched by the equal threat in Harlock's own. And while in the heat of the moment the men on deck had supported Harlock's declaration of war, it seemed that now, under the cold light of the cavernous mess, some of us were having second thoughts.

I put the fork down and pushed the plate away, turned to look at Yattaran at the far end of the table.

'First mate,' I said, waiting 'til his eyes slid up to meet my own. 'Time to tell us what you know.'

'What,' he said, his eyes wide and his lips slack with surprise. 'What do I know about what?'

Dan took up the argument from behind the servery, saving me from having to do it. 'Don't play dumb,' he said, wiping his hands on a towel. 'Tell us what you know about Captain's plan.'

Yattaran turned to look at Dan, looked back at me, looked with his watering eyes at the other faces now turned expectantly towards him, sighed and leaned back in his chair. 'Nothing,' he said resignedly. 'Nothing more than any of the rest of you know.'

'I don't believe you,' Dan said, coming out from behind the counter and plopping down in the closest chair. 'You're second-in-command. Captain must have told you something.'

Yattaran glared at Dan and chewed on the inside of his lip. He turned his head abruptly and fixed the glare on me. 'Why don't you ask Ari,' he said, his pale blue gaze fixed angrily on my own. 'He's spent more time with Captain than the rest of us.'

It was true, I'd spent more time with Harlock than anyone, bar Miimé. But that was just drinking – Harlock didn't offer information, and I never asked. Besides, Harlock held his liquor better than me, which meant I was usually the first one mopping the floor with my face.

I gave Yattaran the death-stare and was surprised when his face didn't melt off. For some reason that always surprised me. 'That's pleasure, not business.'

'Bullshit,' Yattaran grumbled. 'If anybody knows anything, it's you.'

I leaned calmly forward in my chair and said, quietly, 'well, I don't. You wanna take this outside, Sunshine?'

'Bah,' he said, batting a hand disgustedly in the air.

I sat back in my chair. I'd save it for later – I knew when Yattaran took his baths, and I sent him an evil smirk to put him on the alert.

'What about the oscillators?' Baptiste said, his accent lending a peculiar emphasis to the word 'oscillators.' 'When they're detonated, what will they do?'

Yattaran ignored the threat in my smile and nodded once more in my direction. 'Ask the Professor here.' Jesus H, but the little shit was determined to put me in it.

Baptiste turned to look at me. He was getting the run-around and it was clearly pissing him off. 'How do the oscillators work? How do they reset the universe?'

'How the hell would I know?' I replied defensively. 'My doctorate didn't cover temporal physics.'

'Oh yeah, that's right,' Yattaran said disparagingly. 'It was about rocks.'

'The only thing harder than his head,' Bob added, his big goofy voice eliciting a laugh from around the table.

'Yeah yeah,' I groused. 'You're all so fuckin' funny.' I glanced sideways at Kei, who sat looking at me curiously. Lord knows what she was thinking about Arcadia's scary pirate crew now. 'My mother insisted I get an education,' I stated archly. I shot another death-stare at Yattaran, waited a beat for his face to melt, and when it didn't I added, pointedly, 'and it wasn't just about rocks.'

'For fuck's sake,' Baptiste said, slamming a hand down on the table and making half of us jump. 'Will you two get over yourselves? This is serious. We're at war with the Coalition and we don't even know why or what for.' He raised his right hand, the missing fingers deforming the shape of it, and we all knew what other scars he sported without having to be shown. 'I've already survived one war with those bastards, barely, and I don't know if I want to fight in another one. Not if I don't even know what I'm fighting for.' His grey eyes roved angrily across the faces at the table. 'If anybody knows anything they'd better speak up. Now.'

That shut us up. Baptiste was right – this was serious. We were either going to end up alive or dead. But if we ended up alive… Harlock was going to give us paradise. The promise of starting the universe over was the only thing keeping all of us going, and I, for one, was counting on going back to before all this began. Before I made the mistakes that I did. Before I ended up on that chunk of rock with all my insides on the outside. And there were other things, best not mentioned, that I needed those oscillators to erase.

Yattaran shook his head. 'I know as much as the rest of you. I've run some calculations for Captain, but it was only spatial mechanics. I don't know what the oscillators do, not exactly. They're spatial disruptors, but how that affects the temporality of the universe is anybody's guess.' He shrugged. 'Plant them on the nodes and detonate them all at once and bang, Captain says we disrupt the flow of time and reset the universe.'

'But us?' Baptiste said, giving voice to what had been keeping all of us awake at night. 'What happens to us?'

'We start again.'

We all turned to look at Kei in surprise. Until now she'd sat silently, toying with her food and studying the men's faces with her huge, watchful eyes. 'I believe the captain,' she said, turning those beautiful blue eyes to meet my own. 'I trust him.'

'Kei…' How to explain to her that sometimes trust wasn't enough? I closed my mouth when I saw the hope in her eyes and bit down on my words. Maybe it was better to let her find out about life the hard way, the way the rest of us had had to.

'The girl's right,' Roy said, stirring from his contemplation of Varro's stew. He looked around the table. 'We have to trust the captain. He's brought us this far, hasn't he?'

'Aye,' said Bob.

'Aye,' said Santo.

I looked at the faces of the crew as the chorus of 'ayes' mounted around me and turned to meet Yattaran's gaze. 'Then we're agreed?'

Yattaran looked at me, all traces of animosity gone from the chubby, unshaven face. We were friends again – at least until bath-time. 'Aye,' he said, with a decisive nod.

I looked across the table at Baptiste. 'Ranger?'

He studied me with his cool, grey eyes. 'Aye,' he said at last.

'Then we're agreed – we follow through with Captain's plan.' I rose from my chair and looked hard at everybody. 'And nobody says nothing.'

The lights flickered, failed completely for a moment, and then bathed us again in sudden neon brightness.

'That's funny,' Bob said, balancing his bulk on two chair legs and leaning back to stare up at the ceiling. 'Must be a glitch in the circuits.'

'There's nothing wrong with the circuits.' Yattaran picked up his plate and moved to the servery. 'It's this damn ship, letting us know it's listening.'