Avon had slept he supposed, at least he had lost all awareness of the room around him and the pains that dogged him for a while. He wasn’t sure if he had been dreaming or remembering but matters in his mind seemed to have moved on, and the feeling of wrongness had grown and hardened. The strength of his determination to understand what had happened surprised him, but then he had never liked a mystery.

Cally! That thought brought Cally back to him and it hurt, so deeply and bitterly that for a moment it drove all other thoughts from his mind. That stupid dash to Terminal had destroyed Liberator and killed Cally, all for an illusion, Servalan’s game. The fact that Cally wouldn’t have blamed him didn’t make it any easier.

A new pain shot through him, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from, only that his stomach turned over and adrenaline rushed into his blood. For moment despair advanced on him. Cally, Cally, he raged silently, why did you forgive me so much? You even forgave me the killing of Shrinker in the end, and I knew how much you hated that. You were a fool, but I was so glad that you were. You knew how alone I was, because you were too. If I could have forgotten Anna maybe neither of us would have needed to be. He suppressed a sigh, there was nothing he could do that would change it now, any more than he could undo Blake’s death.

Shifting against the restraints he stared at the flat white ceiling above his head as if it were a viewer, forcing himself back again to those last moment in the tracking gallery. Thinking about what had happened, and how it had happened, was like watching a third rate melodrama, one where the writer suddenly finds that they have run out of time or ideas. He had struggled with Blake for more than three years and he had forgotten it all, let it fall apart, in as many seconds. It shouldn’t have happened that way, and it was ridiculous that it had. He wasn’t a fool, so how had he gone from seeing Blake to shooting him in such a short period of time? There was no half way rational reason why he should have done so.

He could hear Tarrant's voice again, the uncertain 'I think he’s here' becoming the confident statement that Blake had betrayed them. But why had he been so willing to take it on trust that Tarrant was right? Or to act on his words so precipitously? He’d seen enough of Blake’s games in the past not be too surprised by this one; and he had the gun while Blake was unarmed. Maybe it would have been more understandable if he hadn’t known about Blake's bounty hunter angle before they left Xenon, but he had known, and it hadn't apparently worried him until those last minutes.

That was something else that didn’t make sense, unless he had known more about the situation than he could remember now. He knew only too well how unstable Blake had become in the time before Star One so why had he accepted the situation on Gauda Prime so casually; at least until those last disastrous and inexplicable moments? What had happened to turn the situation around so totally? Even insanity, temporary or otherwise, couldn’t explain his casual acceptance of Blake’s role, nor his sudden suspicion of it.

But then he had to accept he hadn’t been himself for some time, at least not if he remembered correctly. Recalling his actions in these last months was like watching someone else; unless there had been some subtext he could no longer read or understand. Every attitude, every action seemed to be exaggerated to a degree that turned him into a caricature of himself. Not just him either, the others too seemed changed, coarsened in some way, as if they were only charcoal sketches of the oils they had once been.

The sense of unreality was heightened by the fact that nothing, no word or action, seemed to be in keeping with what had gone before, or even what had come afterwards. Nothing seemed to be connected, even his planned alliance seemed to have arrived from nowhere, as if it were formed on a momentary whim. This oddly random air had echoed around all of their actions in those last hours.

Yet he seemed to know what he was doing when they arrived at Gauda Prime, his behaviour during and after the crash was hardly that of a man out of control of events. Not even the behaviour of a man surprised, something else he couldn’t explain. Only when they reached the base had those same events overtaken him. The man who sat beside Orac in the gathering dusk, the man who followed Blake’s flyer to the base, were men he half recognised; but they were not the same man who pulled the trigger on an unarmed comrade. Then, in those last moments, the man he remembered himself to be slipped out of focus again. But why? What was it that tipped the situation so disastrously?

Avon struggled to concentrate, every detail would be important.

Blake had been unarmed, and at that point he had appeared to have only that single guard, so why had he assumed that Tarrant was right about Blake’s betrayal? It had been an irrational conclusion to come to, and he had shown no sign of irrationality until then. In fact he hadn't come to that conclusion immediately had he? He thought he could remember saying to Blake 'I don’t understand either' and Blake replying that he had 'set all this up'. But set what up? Why hadn’t he demanded that Blake explain himself?

Maybe Blake hadn’t seen anything to explain. After all there had been nothing there to suggest anything was really wrong; nothing to indicate that Blake had meant anything more than what could be clearly seen, the base and its' personnel. They weren’t a surprise were they? No, he had never imagined that Blake was camping in the forests, or that he had given up his pursuit of the Federation. If had he assumed anything from what was said it should have been that Blake had been playing games again; believing that everyone around him would understand, and agree with, his actions. Just as Blake always had.

So why hadn’t he assumed that? Why had he been so quick to suspect a betrayal, and even quicker to act on it?

Avon could recall every detail of that scene but he couldn’t see any reason why he had decided that Blake was lying, or that Blake was admitting to treachery. There hadn't been a trooper in sight when he had shot Blake. All that had stood before him was an unarmed man and a single young guard with a small side arm. What was her name again? Arlen. At that point there was no indication that Arlen was Federation. Her gun hadn't even been levelled at him. Blake hadn’t asked them to surrender their weapons at any point, and even if she had tried to target any one of them she wouldn’t have got far. Not with Soolin there.

Avon frowned as he thought about Soolin, another illogical and out of character event. Soolin should have been able to take Arlen before the other woman could aim her gun, even if her own had been holstered. Avon had seen her take down two men in less time than that would have required. On the basis of previous evidence the chances of Soolin being out shot by Blake's companion was so small as to be irrelevant. She aimed by intuition and never missed, and she was very, very fast; she could get off a shot in the time it took him to change his grip on a gun and he didn’t consider himself to be slow. That was what she was good at; it was why she was a professional gun fighter. Professional gun fighters do not surrender their weapons just because some one with a side arm tells them to do so, certainly not when surrendering their weapon may have serious consequences for their continued survival.

Soolin dropping her gun without a fight made no sense. When the others shielded her too. No, the situation when Arlen declared herself should have been no more than routine target practice for Soolin. Yet she had surrendered her gun without protest. Then, when the threat came, she had then waited for Dayna to go for a gun, and one that was on the floor no less. No it was all wrong, it ran counter to everything he knew of her. Whatever had happened in the interim the Soolin that had faced Arlen wasn’t the same one who had stood beside him on Betafarl not so long before. That woman had thought, and shot, her way out of a seemingly impossible situation; she would never have surrendered so tamely.

So what was it he had forgotten, what had altered Soolin’s responses so radically at that crucial moment?

The frown deepened. It wasn’t just Soolin either, there was Vila's strange behaviour. He hadn't said a word to Blake when he had arrived, yet he had known that it was Blake and said so. Vila hadn't seen the other man for more than three years but he had just stood and stared, hadn't said anything to him, not even ‘where the hell have you been.’ Normally you couldn’t shut Vila up, certainly not where he saw an opportunity to get at Avon, and the situation had offered plenty of that. Vila liked Blake, he always had, and never denied it. It was why he had stayed on Liberator in those early, dangerous, days when Travis had hunted them like a man possessed and the Federation's resources had seemed endless, and all too often directed against them. No, Vila should have greeted Blake, approached him and made some sly remark about the reasons for bringing them there, particularly given the strained relationship between himself and Vila at that time. Vila still hadn’t forgiven him for that shuttle, and why should he have done?

Avon shut off that train of thought quickly, it still caused him unease and it served no purpose now. He pulled his mind back to the events in the tracking gallery. Vila should have tried to resolve the misunderstanding developing between himself and Blake in those last moments, if only out of curiosity. Yet he had said nothing, not even to demand a drink to celebrate the reunion. But more than that, he had let Tarrant's charge of betrayal go unchallenged, even uncommented upon. Vila had liked and trusted Blake and only tolerated Tarrant, so why hadn't he at least demanded proof from one of them?

But the biggest mystery was those troopers.

How the hell had they approached the base, let alone breached its perimeter, without the alarm being sounded? Without Blake or his people knowing? God knows in their situation they would have been looking for any sign of attack, Blake couldn’t have lost his senses to such a degree that he would ignore federation troop carriers overhead.

How had they got in anyway? Through the silo doors? No, he and the others would have seen them and their transports as their ‘inherited’ flyer approached the base if that had been the case. But there had been no sign of an attack, no sign of any Federation forces, nothing to give cause for concern at all. He wouldn’t have entered the base if there had been.

Even if Arlen had found a way to let the Federation in after he and the others had arrived, how could they have got past the silo door without being seen? Or across the perimeter even? There must have been others on the base, and even if Blake’s people had been ordered to ignore him and the others that wouldn’t have extended to a Federation attack force. Would they not have recognised the differences? Could they have thought that Blake was telling them to allow a federation force in? No of course not, it made no sense, no one would have let armed Federation troopers past without a fight. Yet the time interval between his entering the base and the troopers making it to where he and Blake had faced each other didn’t allow for any opposition at all.

So they couldn’t have come that way.

But the same problems applied if they had come in from above. How could they have got far enough past the base defences to have reached that gallery without anyone challenging them? One or two maybe, if they had been disguised as locals, but not that number in full uniform. Yet if they had been challenged the whole base would have gone to alert before he had met Blake, and the rebel would have been too occupied elsewhere to face him.

Avon narrowed his eyes in concentration, he was sure that the alarm had sounded only after they arrived and just before Blake appeared, and there had been no other warning of any kind. But that was so unlikely as to be bizarre. Had Blake been alone on the base? Even Blake wouldn’t have been that stupid would he, to surround himself with enemies would he? If so where had that guard fitted in? Surely Blake would only have brought someone he trusted to meet them? The man Arlen had shot had known who Blake was, had called him by name, so he did have other rebels on the base. That brought him full circle, back to how those troopers had got in so quickley and apparently unopposed.

And, more importantly perhaps, why hadn’t Orac known they were in the vicinity?

Orac should have known what was being planned here even before they left Xenon, or had they been so foolish as to ignore the obvious question of Federation proximity? He couldn’t remember either way. Questioned or not Orac should have been aware of any Federation presence close enough to Gauda Prime to mount such an attack, and would have warned them. Orac was not like Slave, waiting to be spoken to before offering information, quite the opposite. Not when Orac was coming to Gauda Prime too. Orac had sufficient impulse for self preservation to have avoided a situation which might have resulted in his destruction. It seemed equally unlikely that the Federation would have sent a specialist force using non-Tarrial systems, assuming they had any, unless they had advance warning that he and the others intended to be there. But to equip the attack force in that way the Federation would have needed to known about Orac’s unique abilities and to have been aware of his intention to bring Orac here before he had known himself.

Was that what the Zukon business had been about? To force them out of Xenon and to Guada Prime? No that made no sense either. They might possibly know he had found Blake, they might suspect that he would join him, but they couldn’t have been sure about it until Scorpio arrived in orbit. Equipping the attack force with non Tarrial systems would have been too expensive and difficult for so speculative a situation. Even assuming that they could have come up with something that Orac couldn’t get access to by other means, and he hadn’t heard of any such developments. He had long made it a point to look for just such a threat.

So, Orac should have detected the Federations presence even if they hadn’t seen them.

Yet Orac hadn’t. Nor had he or the others heard or seen any sight of them, or Tarrant apparently. Tarrant had been on the base longer and he had given no indication that he suspected the troopers presence either.

He frowned as he thought the situation through.

For those troopers to have reached that control centre when they did they must have been fighting a running battle with Blake’s people as he and the others had arrived. In fact they must have been flooding the base even as Blake had come down to meet him. Yet they hadn’t seen or heard them, nor apparently had Blake. That made no sense either. The tracking gallery had not been shielded in any visible way and it had been open to other corridors, so any weapons fire or explosions would have been heard, and there must have been both of those. Even total surprise won’t get you so far in silence when you are in a rebel base dressed in full Federation assault uniform. Avon still remembered the carnage on Albian, the last base assault he had seen, very well; storming a base was both a messy and a noisy business, there wasn’t any way he or the others, or Blake, could have avoided hearing the fighting.

The Federation; something else to be explained. What were they doing chasing rebels on this out of the way world? Too many of the old colonies were still resisting for them to have the time or manpower to spare for such an exercise, even with the pacification program. As he had told the rebel warlords only weeks before the Federation had no armies of any size anymore, so why would they be wasting troops on this out of the way world? Frontier planets were still well outside the Federations sphere of influence, even with the use of drug based conquest.

Avon stiffened, his eyebrows rising into his hair, come to that if they could get access to the base why not simply flood it with Pylene50? No need for a large attack force at all. Unless they thought the rebels were immune in some way, and why should they think that? Maybe that explained the lack of fighting! But those troopers were carrying conventional weapons, why shoot those you have just gone to the trouble of pacifying? And if they had been using Pylene50 on the base it would have been through the ventilation systems so why hadn’t Blake, his guard or the other man been affected by it? Why hadn’t they even tried to used it on him and the others? Passing up a propaganda coup like that was not a mistake the Federation was likely to make.

But they had not been using it. They had definitely been using conventional weapons, noisy weapons, so they must have been heard. Unless they had only used the conventional weapons on him and the others, but that made no logical sense either. Though the Federation may have known they were immune after Heliotrix, such a distinction would have required them to know who was in the tracking gallery at that moment in time. No, the whole business was becoming far too elaborate; it had to be what it had seemed, a straightforward strike by a conventional assault force. But that brought him back to where he had started, and it still made no sense.

Of course the real surprise was that Servalan wasn’t here, hadn’t been there. Because if she wasn’t here, hadn’t been involved, then why hadn’t the troopers just shot him like the others, shot him down as soon as they entered the tracking gallery, as they had shot Vila and then Soolin and Tarrant. Why had they waited, surrounding him as they had, risking death, given that they hadn’t disarmed him? Who else might have known whom he was, who else would have cared?

Yet they had waited, had taken a lot of risks, and losses, in keeping him alive when they had simply shot the others as quickly as possible. Why would they bother to do that? She might, in the hope of getting Orac, but why would anyone else? Obviously for some particular purpose. Simply taking him to Earth for trial wasn’t reason enough any more, not with Blake dead and the Federation engaged on expansion.

So whoever was behind this wanted something else from him, and sooner or later someone would come and tell him what. He rather feared that it would be something he was not prepared to give them.

The picture of the tracking gallery was so firmly fixed in his mind that when he heard a door open it seemed to be a part of his memories and he didn’t react. Then the image of Blake dissolved as he felt a hand grip his wrist and he opened his eyes to see the face of the grey-haired man who had visited him before. This time the man didn’t speak and seemed to avoid looking at him as he slowly checked the displays and then turned away. As he moved out of Avon's field of vision someone else entered it, a man clad in pre-war Federation black, and it didn’t take a genius to guess what he was. Not that Avon needed guesses, he had met men like this before. He felt something deep inside himself freeze, even as the adrenaline surged and his body urged him to run, sending his heart racing and his stomach knotting.

Well he had known they would arrive sooner or later. No Liberator this time, no Tarrant or Dayna to swoop down and take him away. No Cally to chide him. No one any more. Only him alone, and the memory of the others.

As the man in black moved closer another memory appeared suddenly, and unbidden, as vivid as the memory of Blake. It was the picture of an old place, the air heavy with the breath of time. A cellar on Earth, the only light reflected from the pale haze of hair spread against the dark trodden floor. A wall too, dark and rough; an ancient wall in an old cellar. What was it Servalan had said that day about the wall? 'I hope you don’t die before you reach it'. Well it seems that she had her wish, he had lived and he had reached it.

A recollection of Servalan's bruised face as she stood in chains against that wall surfaced in his mind, he remembered her control and her defiance. 'I have had worse offers' her only response to his threat of a quick death. For that alone he had respected her, even as he had hated her and what she had seen of him there in that relict of a long gone age. He took a deep breath and realised with resignation that another decision was taken, that again he had made himself a promise. Now he faced his wall he must do at least as well as she had, he owed himself that much.

For a second he and the black clad newcomer made eye contact, each making a rapid assessment of the other. Then Avon smiled slightly and closed his eyes. Now he would find out just how much he didn’t want to co-operate. No doubt it would be painful and not the end he would have chosen. No, he would rather it had finished in the tracking gallery with Blake and the others, mystery or not. It hadn't, but he had little doubt it would end soon, because he rather feared that he didn’t want to co-operate at all.