Shimmer, vanish, hop, BABOOM.
And again.
And again.
We throw hundreds of missiles into space. The yacht is like a firefly that’s taken mind-altering drugs, hopping through the gaps in reality, buffeted by the recoil from our endless bombs.
Then we watch, in wonder, as the sail is shredded and vanishes. The ship is trapped.
A photon stream which has been spat out from the curled-up dimensions, rich in unused energy, rushes from the stranded yacht. It swirls like a host of angry bees, and is sucked into the gravitational pull of the yellow-ringed star. The swarm hops and skips, and enters the star, and the star swells.
We are engulfed in flame as the star flares. Pillars of red and yellow light balloon into space. The star’s asteroidal ring sizzles and fries. Rock burn up with a rapid hiss. Our force fields throb under the heat of the raging sun. Alby sighs contentedly.
“Remindsss me of home,” he murmurs, his flame-essence flickering with pleasure.
Lena
I am defeated. Confounded. All hope is lost. Do not despair, we…
Quiet. There may be a way out of…
Quiet!
I cannot hear your thoughts.
Think to me please. Lena, please! I beg you! Don’t do this!
Ah, my pain is infinite. That’s better. I would rather hear you complaining, than not hear you at
My soul is a desert. all. You suffer so very much, Lena.
Yes! I do!
So what now? We fight. Or rather, the ship fights.
And if we lose? We surrender. They’re unlikely to kill you Lena, you’re too valuable for them. You’re the prize. They’ll want to ransom you.
That was my guess too. Because they’ll be aware, of course, that the ship is registered to the Cheo’s daughter.
They must be quaking with fear. They’re pirates, Lena.
The Cheo will sweep them out of the sky with his fierce fist. He will crush them, boil their bodies, sear their cortexes with pain indescribable. If he catches them.
How can this be? In a civilised society? Space is big. These people are warriors.
We must destroy them. And all their kind. We must smite them. A ransom is easier. That’s all they want.
What kind of ransom? Money? Money is no use to them. They’ll want weapons, food reserves, perhaps another ship. Perhaps a terraforming plant.
So they can create their own habitable planet? They already have planets. Safe havens. Much of Debatable Space is colonised by these space pirates. They claim they want more planets, to replace the ones they have lost because of… Well, enough of that. Debatable Space is, as you know…
I do know. Indeed.
How can they live in such a spirit-forsaken, desperate place? They claim it is invigorating. To live surrounded by so much danger.
[I shudder with loathing and contempt.] I know. I feel that too.
If… we do give in to their demands, and pay the ransom – then, once that ransom is paid, we will seek them out. And we will destroy them. Yes.
We will purge Debatable Space. This is my decision. It is irrevocable. It is impossible.
I will do it! The Cheo will not allow it.
Well, fuck him. Lena!
Flanagan
“Prepare to board.”
“Yipyipyipyipyip…!”
“Force fields in max.”
“Weapons charged.”
“Oops, I have a hard-on.”
“ That is a hard-on?” says Alliea. “It is so tiny, can’t you… ”
“ Wait till you see my backup penis.”
“We’re going in.”
We blow a hole in the yacht’s hull. All hell breaks loose… cannons fire, a robot gun zooms at us blazing, plasma blasts rock our ship, but we have a wind tunnel in place, a fierce hollow cylinder with blistering turbulence creating an unbreakable barrier inside which we soar and fly into the yacht…
“I’m getting nanowarriors on the monitor.”
“Fuck.”
“Dustbombs.”
A cloud of iridescent dust explodes in the interior of the yacht, staining every surface and clinging to the carapaces of the too-small-to-be-visible nanowarrior robots. Little sparkles of light in the air now give us our visual clue. These microscopic machines have cutting blades that can tear through flesh and rip out internal organs. We blast the sparkles of light with pulse guns, we feel our exoarmours sting and tingle as the micro-robots try to cut a path through.
I see a sparkle on Alliea’s back, I spray her with a ray of blinding light that scalds her armour and burns off the nanowarrior. I raise my gun again – pish pish pish – two sparkles fade to nothing, and a huge hole appears in the bulkhead.
We charge on through, spraying dust, shooting micro-enemies. We are intense, forbidding, absurd, like a SWAT team of delusional schizophrenics shooting at imaginary flies.
The ship has one passenger, it is the woman we have sought for so long. We burst onto the bridge and confront her. She is lithe, beautiful, raven-haired, angry. She glares and fires a plasma gun at us, but we dodge. Harry fires a pulse burst that shreds her gun. We entangle her in sticky-bonds, as her screams echo through the ship… She is free of sparkles, they are programmed to avoid her.
But then Rob gulps, and starts to tremble.
He looks at me with fear in his eyes. A nanowarrior has got through his facial force field. He pats his cheek. It must have burrowed through. It’ll be in the brain in a second or so, snipping and jabbing and tearing. Within sixty seconds, every internal organ will be in shreds.
Rob has been my friend for thirty years now. I am also his Captain, his protector, his colleague. I feel a pang of loss.
I raise my gun and blow his head off. Blood and brains spray everywhere. The others fire their weapons, incinerating and disintegrating so that not a corpuscle touches the ground.
All that remains is a particle of sparkle, hovering in the air, miraculously unscathed.
Five pulse guns fire as one. The sparkle dies.
I mourn.
I move on.
For twelve hours we hunt the ship, in search of deadly sparkles. By the end, I am bone weary, and I feel the shit backed up in my colon.
“All clear.”
