Debatable Space
Philip Palmer
Book 1
Lena
I lose myself in the long soaring arc of the plunging bucking near-light-speed stellar-wind-battered flight, my eyes drinking in the spectral glows and searing sunlight while my sensors calibrate velocity, acceleration, heat and cosmic radiation, I surf from visuals to instruments and back and forth until I feel the bucking of stellar wind, no, that’s repetitious, delete the words “stellar” and “wind”, it’s now “the bucking of pulsing photons” on my fins and sail and feel the burning of the hot yellow dwarf sun on my cheeks Lena, we have company. and bare acceleration- pinned arms. Ah!!!! Gorgeous yellow-red glow gash of lit matter and quantum frenzy! D43X is a giant yellow sun approximately 4,000 light-years away from the galactic centre with eleven orbital planets together with asteroidal debris, the gravitational pull is 4.11 millidysons, it’s a big yellow fucker and, like the planet Saturn in the original Earth system, it has a ring, it’s a sun with a ring, a fully formed cluster of trapped asteroids that sparkle in the relentless yellow glare and I’m on my way there Time to come out Lena. into the asteroid ring, risking my vessel, my own life, for that indescribable rush of asteroid rafting at high velocity while sucked in the grip of a voracious gravitational I’m cutting the connection. pull, you are fucking not doing anything of the fucking Hey, I’m kidding, I’m not allowed or indeed able to cut the connection, that’s entirely your prerogative, lighten up, Lena I need you.
Deal with it, I want no company, you’re interrupting the flow of my thought diary. I’ll edit it.
It’s not the same, this is me, my vision, my poetry, my ineluctable Lena, I think this ship is unregistered, it may be a rogue, we’re in trouble, Lena, please help me I can’t cope on my own, Lena, please, I’m begging you, cut the connection, return to the bridge, Lena I’m scared.
Just fucking deal with it, tinbrain, okay?
Flanagan
“Watch her go.”
“Rimming the sun.”
“Yobaby, lickety, lickety.”
“She’s ours.”
“Fire a plasma pulse,” I say.
“Too far.”
“Oh go on,” says Jamie. “Take out a rock. Light the sky, man.”
“Okay. Take out a rock,” I order.
“I got it. Baboom.” That’s Harry.
The black void shines, as the asteroid blows. I steer the ship straight through the flames, pure sleight of flight. I come through the other side and the stellar yacht is still tacking gently, curving its way through iridescent sunrocks.
“She’s not running?”
“She’s not running,” says Brandon.
“Then, let’s play it safe. Stealth,” I say.
“We got no stealth capacity, Cap’n.”
“I know, I know, just… look, just try to be discreet. Don’t talk so loud.”
“Aye aye Cap’n.”
“Don’t blow up any more rocks.”
“The rock was blown up on your order, Cap’n.”
My eyes are fixed firmly on the star monitor, I know my crew from their voices. Brandon, baritone, fast- syllabled, Rob with his East Galaxy patois, Alliea with a hint of a Celtic lilt, Jamie with his childlike babble. Kalen in the engine room, communicating by voicelink. And Alby.
“She’ssss daydreaming Cap’n,” says Alby.
“I know,” I say.
“If we get closssse…”
“Incoming missiles!”
She’s shooting at us. Baboom, baboom. Hands fly on joysticks, antimissile photon pulses strike, the missiles flare around us as we kink and weave out of the way. Pish, pish, pish, pish, pish, pish, pish, each light marks the explosive demise of a death bomb. She can’t beat us in a straight fight, she’s a sleek yacht, with enough firepower to take out a battleship, but we’re bigger than a battleship. We’re a Mark IV megawarship, we’re a bulldozer, she’s a rapier, no contest. We keep dodging and throwing out chaff and her bombs keep exploding harmlessly. But the space yacht keeps hurling missiles at us, my guess is we’re fighting against an autopilot. And autopilots can’t fight.
“Why don’t she flee?”
We might just catch her, maybe, if our fuel holds out and if we throw out fusion bombs to augment our space drive. But that yacht is state of the art. Its sails are as vast as a small planet but virtually weightless, no more than a few nanometres thick. It has an ion-drive engine, it’s bound to have a computer navigator brain that dwarfs ours, all it needs is a human being to give the order: “Flee!” But it doesn’t. Fleeing does not occur.
“Maybe she’s died. Maybe it’s a ghost ship,” I say.
“I like that idea,” says Brandon.
“Doomed to sail the empyrean, forevermore.”
“What’s an empyrean?” asks Rob.
“You in one, mf,” says Jamie.
“Space. Space is the empyrean,” I explain.
“Say space then,” snaps Rob. “Don’t waste brain cells, using words you don’t fucking need!”
The yacht slowly arcs, it is turning into the stellar wind. Finally, it’s fleeing. Jets flare, its sails shimmer. Photons from the star are caught up in the fine mesh of the sail, each one gives a little push. Particles of light shove like infinitesimal gusts of wind. But at the same time the particles are trapped by the sail’s dark-state technology, compressed into one of the sail’s curled-up dimensions. Then, as the sail buckles and wobbles under the pressure, the particles are spat out again into our familiar three uncurled dimensions with a pinpoint ejaculation of energy that hurls the ship even faster, to. 99 of light speed for a few brief seconds. And, of course, because of quantum uncertainty effects, there is a moment when the yacht is moving at two speeds – slower and faster – both at the same time.
Under the intense pressure of two simultaneous speeds, the solar yacht starts to hop. To the naked eye, it seems to dematerialise, then rematerialise, covering kilometres of space in what is only marginally more than no time at all.
“Firing chaff, one two three.”
“Four five six.”
“Seven eight nine.”
“Ten eleven twelve.”
We shower the space ahead of her with cluster bombs, all with a finely calibrated time-delay explosion. The yacht shimmers, hops, rematerialises. Then a bomb explodes ahead of it, rocking its sails, jostling the fine balance of its nanotechnology.
Shimmer, vanish, hop, boom.
