The Aristotle Transposition

(part six)

In-between planting oscillators we attended to Harlock's latest hobby – the raping and pillaging of the Coalition.

Well, technically there wasn't any raping – unless you counted reaming Coalition ships with Arcadia's bony prow as rape. Which, depending on which end you were at during the process, it may have been. Harlock always took the helm when we encountered a Coalition ship. He seemed to enjoy being the one who was personally doing the reaming. He'd thrown down the gauntlet, but maybe he hadn't reckoned on Isora so quickly taking up the challenge.

The Coalition had upped their game and improved their networks in the outworlds – if we stayed too long in a sector a Coalition cruiser seemed to never be far behind. If Yattaran was right, they were tracking us by Arcadia's dark matter signature. But it was also clear they'd thrown a net over the inhabited planets, which made landfall a hell of a lot less fun. When you found yourself glaring at old-timers who squinted at you for just a beat too long, or you were rejecting the advances of a pretty lady because she might have been paid to stick a shiv in you the minute you got your pants down, landfall suddenly became a lot less interesting.

Even Harlock stopped going planetside. I studied him in the quiet times, trying to fathom if he was unwell, but that was ridiculous. Nobody got sick on Arcadia. Whatever malaise had hold of him, it wasn't physical.

Maybe it was the toll of the years. Maybe he was afraid the Coalition might catch up with him on one of those dead-end backwaters. Or maybe he was tired, after all this time, of planting oscillators.

Deploying the oscillators became a volunteer job. Not that any of us shirked the responsibility, but the closer we came to Sol, and the closer we came to Gaia, the more dangerous it became. I never put my hand up anymore – I'd deployed about forty of the things over the years and I figured I'd done my share. And besides, I reckoned the junior crew needed to earn their chops. But when we settled into orbit around Vanda and Kei stuck her hand up, I found my own hand snaking into the air and a wilful grin struggling to plaster itself stupidly across my face as I followed her to the hangar deck.

Vanda hung like an emerald around a star so hot we'd had to lower the blast shields for transit, opening them only when we had enough atmosphere between us and the white-hot sun that burned down on the planet. From a dozen kilometres above the surface Vanda was as monotonous as all shit – it had no seas, no lakes, no deserts, not a scrap of bare land and not a rock in sight. The planet was covered completely with jungle, broken only by the meandering of narrow streams that glinted silver in the sun as Kei wheeled the module above them. The girl had taken to piloting the same way she'd taken to everything else – fast and well. She was too smart for her own good. Too smart, too beautiful, and too hung up on the captain.

I pressed my fingers to the console and brought up the outside readings. 'Surface temp thirty-eight cee,' I announced, 'humidity ninety-six percent.' I glanced out the forward port. 'No wonder the planet is covered in goddamn weeds – perfect environment for it. Problem is, not such a perfect environment for yours truly. I can't stand the heat.'

'You'll have to take that ugly sweater off, then,' Kei smirked.

'S'not ugly. I bought it from a little old lady on Chardon. She was all alone in the middle of that shithole, scraping a living the best way she knew how. Knitted it with her own two hands, she did. With her poor, old, gnarled, arthritic hands.'

Kei's eyes swept guiltily across the sweater. 'Ari, I – '

'S'alright. Clothes have sad stories too, you know.' I leaned back in the seat and ran my hands along my thighs. 'But not these babies. These are my happy pants – I got 'em from a munitions dealer on Phaeton. He was starting a new line in combat gear.' I pinched at the fabric. 'They're made of the only material strong enough to keep this fine body contained and under control. Practically blaster-proof and guaranteed not to split when bending over.'

She laughed, her gaze travelling with amusement across my thighs, the muscles nicely defined beneath the taught stretch of the pants. Oh yes, these were very happy pants.

'And,' I said, watching the movements of those beautiful blue eyes, 'they got me into the sack with the old lady's daughter.'

Her eyes locked on mine and narrowed with suspicion. 'I thought you said the old lady was all alone?'

'Did I?' I grinned.

'Lying bastard.' She sounded quite disgusted with me.

'Charming. And here I was, thinking you were a lady.' I turned my attention back to the scanner, not giving her a chance to protest her lack of gentility. 'Node at 13 98 12, mark, and thanks to the ridiculous O₂ levels there are no lifeforms other than the plants. We'll need the rebreathers when we disembark.' Oxygen was great for the skin, but not so good for the lungs. A mouthful of that and our mucous membranes would die, frying. Which is probably what happened to the exploration crew that discovered Vanda way back in the first diaspora. They charted it, they named it, and they never came back from it.

'Vegetation sits on a lithosphere of igneous rock,' I continued, 'and the planetary core is geologically inert. Probably has been for millennia.' I looked out of the viewport again, my eyes blinded by that endless sea of green. 'No volcanoes no earthquakes no nothin' – no wonder this place so damn boring.'

'Huh,' she said. 'Geology really is your thing.'

'No secret there, darlin'. Rocks are predictable, formed from defined and measurable processes. Plants are like people – once you have life, you have unpredictability. I don't like unpredictability.'

'Then you're not going to like this,' she said, indicating a circle of bare earth looming ahead of us.

I squinted through the glare. 'What the hell…?' On a world where every spare scrap of land was crawling with plants, a perfectly round circle of nothing was more than a little odd.

'It's the node,' she said.

'You're kidding, right?' In all these years I'd never seen a node affect vegetation adversely, or any kind of life for that matter. Usually the nodes attracted life, the magnetic resonance of their fields proving irresistible to plants and animals alike. Who knows – maybe they formed life. Maybe they were the creator spark, seeding life throughout the universe. I put the question on my list of things to ask Miimé the next time we rubbed ankles beneath the table.

I settled back in my seat as Kei prepared the module for descent, surreptitiously testing the tightness of the restraints. One thing to be said for Kei's piloting, she was a lot more sedate than the captain. I'd barely felt a niggle of nausea the entire flight. Now all we had to get through was the landing.

She must have read my mind. Either that, or she saw my hands clenching whitely into fists. 'You're looking a little pale there. Nervous?'

'What? Me? Nervous? Noooo. Maybe.'

'Then you'd better close your eyes so you don't see it coming.'

'Good try, but I'm supposed to be watching what you're doing. You're still on probation, remember. Besides,' I said, pointedly ignoring what she was doing and staring up at what sky I could see through the viewport, 'when Death comes calling I plan to meet him with both eyes open.'

She snorted at me, a bad habit she was picking up from the men. 'Where the hell did that come from?'

'Dunno,' I shrugged. 'Was just a thought. Last time I met Death I blinked. I won't be doing that again.'

Her eyes slid sideways to look at me, but I didn't turn to meet them. Didn't feel like looking into those perfect blue jewels and losing my way in thoughts best left unexplored. So I stared instead at the sky and said 'Kei,' after the module touched gently down on solid ground, 'look at that.'

'At what?'

'The sky.'

She paused halfway through the shutdown and stared up at the high arch of the atmosphere. It was flawless. Smooth and cloudless and infinite. Skies like that… you could imagine there was nothing else in the universe but you and sky.

'Would you say that was blue?' I asked.

'Not quite.' She didn't even have to think about it.

I exhaled my disappointment out through my nose and turned away from the traitorous sky, wiped my sweaty hands on my lucky pants before putting my gloves on. One day, maybe.

We unbuckled ourselves and Kei moved to retrieve the deployment case from the rear of the cockpit. I pulled a pair of rebreathers out from the stores and handed her one, waited till she had it secured over her head and tested the seals before I secured my own and keyed open the hatch, grimacing as a blast of hot air rushed into the module, thick with humidity and making the sweat prick out beneath my sweater. Maybe I should've taken it off, but I wasn't sure Kei would survive the sight of my bulging biceps. I could feel my muttonchops wilting beneath the rebreather as I clambered down the ladder to the oscillator proper, Kei following close behind me and oblivious to the sacrifice I was making for her. She was awkward with the case in one hand and the other gripped tight on the ladder, but I wasn't going to help her – she would be doing this a lot and she had to get used to it. I didn't even turn to check as her feet hit the deck. I was already at the rail, staring curiously out at the dark tangle of jungle that ringed the node. It seemed nothing would grow in this patch of dirt – not even a weed had dared to tendril its way into the wide circle of nothing.

Too much oxygen meant no life other than the trees – there were no animal sounds, no insect sounds, just the faint whispering rustle of leaf against leaf and the occasional crack of a branch breaking beneath an overgrowth of vine. We were surrounded by it, by that eerie almost-silence, by that dark impenetrable jungle, by the ring of deep green trees that circled the clearing. The heat was stifling as I stared out, the humidity as thick and soft as soup, and I had the inexplicable feeling that the plants were alive with some kind of malignant energy and were, somehow and for some unfathomable reason, consciously avoiding the node. In the deadening silence I had the sudden feeling we were being watched, and I found myself squinting intently into the leaves and vines.

'Captain should have come,' Kei said suddenly from beside me and making me jump. 'He likes plants.'

'You think?' I replied with my eyes still glued to the jungle. 'He has a beaker half-full of dirt in his quarters but I never once saw anything green growing out of it. Maybe you should take him back a flower.' Maybe I sneered that last bit, because when I turned to look at her she was gaping at me a little taken aback.

'Look,' I said, 'what I meant was – '

'I know what you meant,' she huffed, stalking back across the deck to the oscillator console.

See? Unpredictable.

'C'mon...' I followed in the wake of her huff, came up close behind her and hovered a placatory hand over her shoulder, not knowing if I should try to touch her or not.

'Piss off,' she said, solving that little dilemma.

My hand fell to my side, then crawled back up to my belt and the pistol sitting snug in its holster. I flicked the safety off and stared over the top of Kei's head and back into the jungle. 'There's something out there,' I said, 'watching us.'

She glanced out into the overgrowth. 'There's nothing out there but trees. You scanned for life from the module, remember.'

'Nothin' wrong with my memory.' I stepped out from behind her and moved to the rail. 'But if there's nothing out there but plants, how come every hair on my body is standing up on end?'

'Poor hygiene, probably. Or space madness. Been out on the rim too long.' She came to stand beside me, a smirk on her lovely lips and her eyes looking up at me with guileless amusement. She often looked at me like that, but there were times I wished she'd look at me the way she looked at the captain. Hell, I bet half the crew wished she'd look at them the way she looked at the captain.

'I'm serious,' I said, my eyes back on the trees. It seemed to me something was moving out there, separating itself from the jungle vines and peering intently at us with large, dark eyes.

'Look,' I hissed, the pistol suddenly out of its holster and aimed into the undergrowth. 'There. Just there!'

'What?' she said, turning. 'Where?'

'There!' I ran sideways across the deck to get a better look, but whatever it was, it was gone. 'Did you see it?'

She shook her head at me, no.

'There was a woman.' I paced back in Kei's direction, still peering into the impenetrable tangle of green. 'There was a woman out there, in the trees.'

She turned back to the jungle. 'There's nothing out there, Ari. Nothing but the trees. You said yourself – '

'I saw a woman, I tell you. She came out of the trees… hell, for a moment I thought she was a tree. She had green hair and black eyes – '

'A woman with green hair…' Kei repeated disbelievingly. 'You sure it wasn't a vine you saw? Or leaves moving in the wind?'

I didn't bother glaring at her – I was too busy glaring at the jungle. 'I know what I saw, Kei.' And I didn't like it. My pistol was still aimed into the trees, waiting for that malevolent face to launch itself at us at any moment. I suddenly wondered if there might have been another reason the exploration crew never came back from Vanda. 'Are we done here?'

'We're done,' she said, 'but Ari – '

I grabbed hold of her arm and aimed her towards the ladder. 'Then let's get the hell out of here.'

'Gunner command,' Yattaran bellowed down at the lower bridge. 'Prepare for engagement!'

'Aye aye,' I bellowed back.

The first mate's voice echoed down again. 'Target acquired in MX system at 384-97. No ident signal, but size parameter indicates mid-range cargo runner.'

'Aye aye,' I said again, because I liked saying it. I glanced at Dan beside me and shot him a grin. We'd been concentrating our efforts on taking out Coalition targets, but in the interest of raining hell down on the inner systems we occasionally targeted freighters and runners, just to keep the galaxy on its toes. It also kept us on our toes and provided us with some much-appreciated target practice.

Kei's voice floated down from the upper command. 'Prepare for in-skip!' she hollered. She was an angel to look at and a pushover at poker, but when she put her boots on she became, quite literally, hell on wheels.

I braced both hands on the console and leaned into it. It would be a small jump to bring us within firing range of the cargo runner, but the small jumps were the worst. Long jumps gave you time to breathe into it. Small jumps were a jolt to the system – you were out of it the minute you were into it, your body still tingling with the rush of the dark matter before you had a moment to realise it was gone.

'Captain at the helm!' Yattaran announcedthe moment Arcadia exploded out of in-skip.

That put us on our toes. I had the target readings already on the scopes before the dark matter cloud dispersed, and the second it cleared I glanced out the forward screens to get a visual. The runner was as non-descript as expected, small, just one defensive gun turret poking out forward of the bridge and the entire hull noticeably unmarked. Illegals of some kind – no markings, no idents, no signatures, no nothing. Smugglers no doubt, and I found myself getting interested – no telling what booty they might have had stowed on board.

The runner wheeled broadside to us, the turret spinning its guns in our direction.

'Oops,' I said to Dan beside me. I hovered my hand over the firing command. 'Spotted us. The question is… are they going to be stupid enough to fire first?'

'Target powering up for in-skip,' Yattaran boomed.

Shit. They weren't fighting, they were running. But they were still out of ramming range, so if Captain wanted to keep the runner where it was we needed to act now.

'Orders, Captain!' I shouted over my shoulder.

Harlock spun the wheel violently with one hand, brought Arcadia hard about and gave the runner's captain a good look at all our batteries. 'Take out the engines,' he said.

'Aye, sir!' One thing I'd discovered during my time on Arcadia was that I really enjoyed blowing things up. Ah, hell, who was I fooling – I'd always enjoyed blowing things up. Explosives had been a big part of my life even before Arcadia, back when I was working with rocks and ores and blowing up planets to plunder them of their treasures. A smile crooked my lips and I hoped nobody was watching me, finger on the trigger and grinning maniacally to myself. Right now I had a ship to disable, and given the tiny target and the speed at which Arcadia was moving, it had to be done with finesse. We didn't want a replay of the Argus incident.

'Ari!' Yattaran bellowed from the upper command. 'Move your arse, they're skipping out!'

'Yeah yeah,' I murmured into the sighting scope, 'hold your horses.'

The powering-up of the runner's in-skip generator registered nicely on the infra-red, and it was the work of seconds to lock the guns on that beautiful white-hot target. I was cutting it close, but I wanted the captain of that tug to think he'd got away with it, to have escape in his grasp just before I yanked it out of his fingers.

I fired the guns, looked up from the scopes to watch in real-time as Arcadia's forward turret sent a stream of fire lancing across the distance between us to slice through the engine ports of the target. The runner shuddered under the impact, listing sideways as debris erupted explosively from her rear-quarters. I leaned into the scope again and fired a short burst to take out the gun turret, just in case anybody on board got the ridiculous idea into their head to try and fight back.

'Target disabled, Captain,' I said, turning a satisfied grin on the upper command. Harlock nodded his approval and relinquished the wheel.

I turned to Yattaran and smirked. Smart arse, he mouthed, then said out loud, 'Captain wants you to lead the boarding party.'

That wiped the smirk from my face. I turned to Dan beside me. 'Take over here, will you.' I glanced out at the listing runner, flames bursting fitfully from the wounds I'd cut into her. 'They won't be giving any trouble, but keep your eyes peeled just in case.'

He nodded, clapping a hand against my shoulder as I turned to leave. 'Nice shooting, Ari. But…'

I turned to look at him, one eyebrow raised. 'But what?'

He grinned stupidly at me, scratching with one hand at the back of his head. 'What's a horse?'

Ten of us were lined up at the board, fully armoured and waiting for Arcadia to come alongside the runner so we could deploy the boarding tubes. We didn't expect much resistance from the runner's crew – they would be armed no doubt, and given the location the runner was working those weapons could be anything from black-market Coalition issue to contraband experimentals from the factories on Janja and Crixus. And some of those were nasty – I'd once seen a hand-held melt a man nearly in half. And then there were the rumours that regularly worked their way around the rim, about frequency weapons that scrambled your insides so bad that you literally shit yourself out.

Thanks to our armour we wouldn't have to worry about that – the body-suits were impervious to ultrasonics, subsonics and microsonics, and to most configurations of assault weapons physical or otherwise. The suits weren't a hundred-percent foolproof, nothing was, but they were so close to perfect it was difficult for the crew to not get cocky and take stupid risks in the heat of engagement. Or maybe that was just their personalities – most of them were risk-takers by nature, and yes, sometimes that included me.

Kei positioned herself beside me as we waited, her armour clean and shiny and undented since it was still relatively new. We'd had to get a suit manufactured specifically for her since she was too, errr, curvaceous for any of the standard suits we had in store, and of course it had to be different, some idiot feminising it in all the obvious places. I didn't agree with the final design since I felt it made her a soft target in combat and I'd told the captain so, but he'd just shrugged at me using the universal language that all men understand and which clearly meant he was as helpless as the rest of us when it came to the fairer sex. In that way, at least, he was still reassuringly human.

I watched as Kei checked her weapon, her confidence apparent in every smooth move she made.

'Listen,' I said to her, 'stick with the pack and don't take any chances. We have no idea what might be waiting for us over there.'

We'd pinged them with a scan but the runner was tight – we couldn't get a single reading. That was par for the course for illegals these days – they didn't want anybody looking in, for all the obvious reasons, and had their hulls sealed tight with EM shields and signal scramblers. Nobody ever bothered to crack the shielding anymore – the minute somebody did, the technology was improved and you had to crack it all over again. Arcadia was fitted with much the same thing. We didn't want the Coalition knowing how many – or, more to the point, how few – crew we were carrying.

'Yes sir,' Kei said. 'You don't have to worry about me.'

I do worry about you, I wanted to say, but the console sounded to let us know we were in boarding range of the runner.

'One minute,' I called through the comms. 'Stand by for tube deployment.'

'Hey, Ari,' Santo said as he took up his position and disengaged the safety on his weapon. 'Let me know if you see any women with green hair when we get on board this shitheap.'

'Oh yeah, Ari likes 'em with green hair,' Roy chimed in.

'Green, blue, so long as they got hair,' Bob added.

'That's right,' Carlos laughed, a ridiculous high-pitched giggle that sent feedback whistling into my ear. 'Our boy here takes strange to a whole other level. Remember the time he – '

'Can it,' I growled through the comms. 'Thirty seconds.'

'Whassamadda Professor? Can't you remember either?'

Truth was, I couldn't remember. I'd had to take their word for it, but that didn't mean I had to keep on hearing about it. I turned a glare on Kei, which, given we were fully suited, she couldn't see. Hopefully the glare extended to my voice. 'Did you have to?'

The words that came back through the comms were hardly full of remorse and, if I wasn't reading too much into them, were tinged with amusement. She might have even been laughing. 'Sorry, Ari, but Yattaran wanted a report.'

'So you gave him one. Thanks.'

'I said I was sorry – '

'Save it.' It was an open comm, with everybody listening in, and I wasn't going to give any of them the satisfaction of listening to me whining about what had happened down on Vanda. I'd seen what I'd seen and that was the end of it. Besides, Vanda was a thousand light years behind us and I'd never have to set foot on that steaming pea-soup planet ever again. Better yet, I'd never have to see those big black eyes staring at me through the trees…even if sometimes they still stared at me in my dreams.

'Five seconds.' I cast an eye along the line then slammed my hand on the panel. There was a muted thud through our feet as the boarding tubes exploded out of their housings and buried themselves into the side of the runner. I waited at the panel, watching for the seals to activate and the pressure readings to green-light. The split-second they did… 'Go!' I shouted. 'Go go go!'

Bob whooped with glee as he vaulted into the nearest tube. He was always first pick for boarding parties – he was gifted with a gun and his enormous bulk intimidated the enemy, but it was his sheer childish enthusiasm that made him so useful. Nothing fazed him – he was literally unstoppable once he got going.

I waited as the crew disappeared one by one down the tubes, my ears on the chatter piping through the comms as they emerged into the runner. The increase in chatter was to be expected, along with the grunts of exertion as the men engaged in close-quarters combat. What wasn't expected was Bob's whooping turning to bellowing. I couldn't understand a word he was saying, but he sounded angry. Right royally fucked off, in fact.

'Bob,' I shouted over the comms, trying to be heard over the babble of voices that filled my ears. 'Bob!' I shouted again, 'report!'

'Ari!' Roy's voice singled itself out from the noise. 'It's the goddamned Coalition. Get some backup over here, now!'

I stared into the nearest tube, blood turning to ice in my veins. 'First mate,' I said calmly into the comms. Maybe too calmly. 'You get that?'

'Roger,' Yattaran replied, a lot less calmly. 'Backup team on their way.'

I didn't reply. I was already in the tube and sprinting towards the sound of combat that came from the far end. Ahead I could see the sparking of blaster fire, a confusion of shadow and light that resolved itself into explosive sound as I barrelled out of the tube and right into the middle of it, weapons fire slamming into my armour and sending me staggering before I could bring the repeater to bear. On my left was the Arcadia team – still standing, thankfully – and on my right, a troop of Coalition Special Ops. I didn't have time to wonder what Ops were doing on an unmarked illegal runner, or what they were doing in the MX sector in the first place. I only had time to register that three of them were down and that the rest of them seemed to be very good at what they were doing.

'Ari! Get the hell in line!' Carlos aimed some covering fire in my direction, giving me a chance to inch my way back, weapon blazing, towards the crew.

'Backup's on its way,' I said as the ranks closed in around me. 'What the hell are Ops doing here?'

'Who the hell knows,' Roy's voice panted through the internal comms. He was firing his repeater in rapid succession and keeping the Ops on their toes. 'Suggest we retreat to Arcadia and blow the fuckers into chunks.'

'Not until we know what they're doing out here.' I was firing my repeater as rapidly as Roy was in my attempt to score a fatal hit. The Ops were armoured but there were chinks we could take advantage of. The joints were particularly vulnerable – the neck, the shoulders, the groin – but the problem was getting a targeted blast into those chinks. The Ops were in constant motion, as were we. And there was another problem we were having – when you were as pissed off as we were you didn't always shoot straight.

'And you said this was gonna be easy,' Bob groused, his voice thick with exertion. He took a hit mid-chest, grunting as he staggered back a step.

'It was supposed to be easy,' I growled back at him. We'd been expecting a quivering surrender, and instead we'd found ourselves fighting for our lives. I turned my gun on Bob's assailant, caught him square on the faceplate of his helmet and knocked him back off his feet. I edged my way forward as the Op hauled himself dazedly to his knees, aimed the repeater at his neck and smiled grimly to myself as the blaster fire arced hot into the soft spot and put him out for the count. That, at least, had been easy.

'C'mon,' I puffed into the comms, 'you all know how this works. Aim for the joints in their armour and don't let up. Backup will be here any minute and then we'll put these bastards down like the dogs they are.'

Grunts of enthusiasm filled the comms, accompanied by a renewed round of fire that drove the Ops back on their heels, some of them diving for cover against the wall or on the deck, some of them falling to the floor and staying there. I merged back into the line as we pushed our way forward, glancing around for Kei's gold armour. 'Kei,' I barked into the comms.

'Here,' she replied. 'Watching your backs.'

I glanced back to see Kei positioned in the rear. Good. She could stay there.

'Never mind our backs, girl. Stay on your toes and don't give them a chance to – '

Shit.

A blast of enemy fire slammed into the side of my neck while my head was turned, a magnetic round that sent a spark worming its way into the armour and shorting out the data connection between the helmet and the suit's CPU. It was a lucky shot, a goddamned fucking unbelievably lucky shot that caught me when my back was turned, knocked me off balance and sent me crashing to my knees as the suit's systems cascaded into irretrievable failure right before my unbelieving eyes.

First law of combat: never turn your back on the enemy. And here I was, with my back turned and my pants down. Literally. The armour's emergency relays kicked in as it sparked out around me, but all that did was disengage the seals and retract the helmet so I wouldn't suffocate. Unfortunately this left my handsome face exposed to the air and blinking stupidly at the blaster fire that was exploding way too close to my head.

'Shit,' I squeaked out, hurling myself sideways as a blast winged past me in a blaze of yellow flame. I felt fire against my cheek, heard a muttonchop sizzle with an audible hiss, grimaced as the smell of burning hair filled my nostrils. 'Goddamn fuck,' I growled, crawling to my knees and attempting sluggishly to stand.

'Ari!' Carlos activated his external speakers and bellowed at me. 'Keep your stupid head down and get behind us.'

Easier said than done. With the systems offline the armour moved like lead-weight and I couldn't duck and run forever. I was barely on my feet when a round hit me in the back and sent me crashing face-down to the floor. 'Fuck,' I spat again, hauling myself laboriously to my knees. I was breaking out in sweat by the time I made it back to my feet, but managed to somehow turn around and bring the repeater to bear.

'Down,' I grinned maliciously as two of the Ops fell heavily to their backs, 'but not out.' I fired another round, staggered off-balance as a burst of return fire slammed into my chest and felled me once more to the floor.

'You moron,' Santo said. 'Get up and get the fuck behind us!'

I lifted hand in defeat and let it fall with a clunk to the floor. Without power the suit was an unresponsive dead-weight of metal and circuits and servos.

'Get up, dickhead,' Bob said, kicking at me with one foot and then heaving me to my feet with one hand.

'Thanks,' I grunted as he steadied me on the deck and positioned himself between me and the enemy. 'Remind me never to – '

'Ari!'

There was an explosion of yellow, a hail of fire that slammed into the front of Bob's suit and arced off it, around it, stinging my eyes with sparks that made me blink and squint blindly. The bursts impacted hard against Bob's armour, a metallic thunking that staggered him backward, his legs tensing as he braced himself against it. But even Bob's great tree-trunk of a body couldn't sustain an onslaught like that – he pitched backward, his body catching me and spinning me sideways. Over the falling of his shoulder I glimpsed one of the Coalition Ops, separated from the pack and with the barrel of his weapon aimed straight at my face.

'Ari!'

The cry came again, but I couldn't register what it was over the roaring of the blood in my ears and the sound of blaster fire bursting around me. I couldn't move, couldn't duck, could only watch helpless as Bob dragged me down in slow-motion and the finger of the Op in front of him squeezed down slowly on the trigger.

Ah…shit.

I crashed to the floor beneath Bob's weight, throwing up a futile hand as he rolled grunting off me and a flame of yellow coiled in slow-motion from the barrel of the Op's weapon and exploded in my direction. I heard my name again, what sounded like a chorus of voices that were muffled and far away, shouts that were stretched out the same way that Time had stretched itself out. I narrowed my eyes out as the tongue of flame curled inexorably towards me, braced myself, held my breath against the inevitable and wondered if the dark matter would be able to reconstruct a head that had been exploded by a pulse weapon… assuming there was enough head left to be scraped up off the deck.

'Ari!' Another voice, a clear ringing bell like the singing of an angel. 'Get up, old man,' the angel said as she manifested out of thin air, shining like liquid gold in the glare of the overhead lights and eclipsing the blaster fire in a bright halo of yellow.

'Kei.' I squinted at the vision, half-blinded by the afterburn of my near miss. 'Thank Christ.' Beyond the armoured gold of her legs I watched the Op crash hard to the floor, weapon clattering from his hand and spinning across the floor. My head fell back against the hard metal of the deck. 'I owe you.'

'Get up,' she said, her back turned to me as she concentrated fire on the enemy.

I stared at the ceiling, grateful that my head was still intact.

'I said get up,' she barked. And then she added, pithily, 'stick with the pack, you said.'

I raised my head and squinted at her. Was she giving me a serve? Now?

'Don't take any chances, you said.'

I rolled agonisingly to my knees. 'Damn, girl, I know what I said. Where the hell's the backup?'

'We're here,' the Ranger said, before Kei could tell me not to call her 'girl.' 'We arrived when you and Bob were getting cosy on the floor.'

'Funny.' I staggered to my feet, stood swaying as the line formed around me and the crew concentrated fire on the Ops. 'Do me a favour,' I said, licking my lips and tasting sweat, 'and put these fuckers out of their misery.'

'Jesus,' Yattaran said, surveying the scorch-marks on the side of my face. I waited a beat for a follow-up remark, something along the lines of his usual snideness, but his mouth stayed closed as he hiked his glasses higher up on his face and turned to look at the captain. 'We'll need to sort out the bugs in the suits.' He seemed genuinely concerned, but I doubted his concern was a result of my near-death experience. Yattaran wore one of those suits, too, and he had a lot more face to target.

'Aristotle,' Harlock said from the shadowed depths of his throne, his eye gathering the dim illumination of the bridge and reflecting it back at me as a single point of light. 'Report.'

'All hands returned safely,' I said. 'No casualties. Well, except for this.' I raised a hand to my ruined muttonchop, the burn beneath it stinging like buggery and making me suck in a breath. It hurt like hell, and I still had the retina burn throwing spots before my eyes. 'Fortunately the backup crew arrived in time to save us from having our arses well and truly whupped.' I probed my face again, the skin hot to the touch and the hair scorched to stubble. I hoped the dark matter would kick in soon, because I couldn't seem to keep my hands off it.

'The Ops were good,' I continued, wincing as the wound twitched beneath my fingers. 'Too good. Better than the usual run-of-the-mill combat troop. We'll need to lift our game if this is the sort of scenario we're going to start finding ourselves in.'

Harlock's lips tightened in the dim light.

'The question is,' Yattaran said, 'why was a ship full of Coalition troops this far out in the sector, disguised as a cargo runner?'

I shook my head. 'That I don't know. They weren't expecting us and we weren't expecting them. But I know one thing for sure – we weren't meant to find them.' I looked hard at the captain. 'Nobody was meant to find them.'

He studied me silently, with a deep, unnatural stillness. 'What was their last recorded port of call?' he asked finally.

'Heavy Meldar,' I said.

'Heavy Meldar?' Yattaran looked from me to Harlock and back again. 'What the hell would they be doing on Heavy Meldar?'

'Beats me. They had no cargo, no goods or chattel of any kind. Just an unmarked ship loaded to the gills with Ops.'

'What the hell,' Yattaran said again, shaking his head as if he were trying to unravel the biggest mystery of the universe.

Truth be told I was just as disturbed – Heavy Meldar was the scum-hole of the universe. The waiting room of death, Maji had opined the last time we docked in the high pale space of its upper atmosphere. The place men went when they'd had enough of life and of the vast dead and dying galaxy, where they could sit and drink and wait sullenly for their fate. More importantly for us, Heavy Meldar was one of the few free worlds left in the sector. If the Coalition had established a presence there…

'Aristotle.' Harlock's head tilted back against his chair, his hair falling away and revealing the whole of his face. He looked pale in the dim light, the scar livid where it tracked along his cheek. 'Were you able to access the logs?'

'Yes, sir.' I retrieved the chip from my pocket and fingered it slowly. 'Recommend we steer clear of Heavy Meldar for a while. Until we find out what the Coalition were doing there.'

Harlock held out a hand for the chip, made me haul my tired body across the deck to give it to him. He sat for a moment, looking at it as if it might burn a hole through his fingers. Then he stood and left the bridge.