good to know that I am indispensable, a warrior among warriors.
Flanagan, now recovered, though rather wan, shows me his plans. He wants to take over a Quantum Beacon in the sector Omega 54, near the planet of Arachne. He has nano spy reports on the security drones, he has maps of the security lattices, he has guns and bombs and a proven track record.
But his approach lacks boldness. I order a full-frontal assault of the Beacon.
“How’s your back, Captain?”
“Good as new,” he brags.
“Let’s do it,” I tell him, and he nods.
We launch our invasion.
We sail through space for some months until we are a few sectors from the ship that houses the Quantum Beacon near Arachne. The security system flashes a warning on our vidscreens. We ignore it. We arc gently around the enemy vessel.
I feel a shiver of fear in the pit of my stomach. Lena, are you sure this is a good…
Shut up!
But mixed with the fear is a surge of adrenalin. I feel, calm, confident, assured, I feel…
BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Shit!” I say.
They’re bombing us. Our pirate ship fires its blasters and its bombs, and the recoil shakes us in our seats. Seconds later, a thousand nanobots come flying out of the Beacon to take us down. All the lights on the bridge flash and alarms sound and I am bewildered, but I am confident that other people know what they are doing, so I
BANG!!!!! Explosive charges punch holes through the hull of our ship. The engines burn. Lights on the bridge consoles flash red and amber, sirens wail.
“Sitrep, please,” I say calmly.
“We’re” says Brandon,
“Oh shit,” says Jamie,
“fucked,” continues Brandon.
“Backup systems are failing,” says Alliea,
“Engines are, oh shit,” says Jamie,
“So we’re, um,” I say, “how bad is it?”
“The hull has been penetrated, the engines have been hit, the ship’s a wreck, Captain,” says Flanagan.
“So, um,” I say. And I pause, and search for words. “What do I do?” I eventually conclude.
“Abandon,” says Jamie,
“ship” adds Brandon.
I mentally assess the state of play. Our ship is destroyed. It’s a hull with holes.
“Oh shit,” I say.
We abandon ship. There’s a flurry and a hurry and a panic and the fear in the pit of my stomach has been converted into a desperate urge to void myself into my body armour, I am paralysed with indecision about whether to breathe and vomit, but my body moves almost without conscious control. We suit up, we plunge down tubes into the centre of the ship, where I resume command of my stellar yacht, while Flanagan and his crew take the lifeboat. I scream a command, and the hull doors shoot open and we are catapulted into space. As we leave, more missiles hit our megawarship, and our two small vessels are plunged into the haze and blaze of the massive bombardment.
We fly through space, me in my yacht, the others in the ion-drive liferaft. And Alby flares his way along with us, tugging a lattice net woven with nanobombs. The sun is behind us, and the wrecked hull of our ship suddenly erupts, filling the air with flame and burning plasma. In the confusion, the yacht, lifeboat and Alby creep past the enemy craft towards the vast spaceship where the Beacon is housed.
There is, I realise, belatedly, a plan, though I was not made privy to it. Flanagan starts suggesting orders over his suit radio, which I meekly repeat to the others as if they are my ideas. And so, with the enemy behind us, Alby drapes his net over the Quantum Beacon ship’s holding bay. The lattice sticks, the bombs explode inwards, a vast hole appears in the side of the Beacon ship’s vast hull. The lifeboat punches its way through, while Kalen and Harry and Flanagan parachute down on light carbon chutes, riding the blast of the explosion and zooming through into the inside of the vessel.
Meanwhile, heeding Flanagan’s barked instructions in my ear-radio, I head in the other direction, arcing the stellar yacht away at exhilarating speed. Then I pull hard on the ship’s joystick and turn my vessel around and bring it to a momentary halt. I aim my lasers at the sun. I fire.
The lasers penetrate and shatter the sun’s energy equilibrium. And the sun then flares, engulfing us all in a vast shimmering photosphere, too diffuse to burn, but bright enough to blind the ’bots and the remote operators, and scrambling all the communication channels.
My ship is hurled around the flaring sun, at a speed no faster than light but more intense than mere movement. I feel like a cloud caught in a typhoon, a droplet of water in a waterfall, a photon at the heart of a nuclear blast.
My heart in hiding stirs for a bird, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.
Flanagan
“Good plan,” says Brandon, snidely.
“It worked,” I snarl.
“We lost our ship!”
“We’ll get another.”
“All our possessions! Our archives, your guitars, my collection of collectable animated superhero bendy toys!”
“It worked! We’re in, aren’t we?”
“In where?”
Brandon has a point. This is a seriously weird place. The Quantum Beacon ship is hollow on the inside. A vast cavernous space. The crew inhabited a thin space that constituted the shell of a huge empty egg. We have defeated the Beacon’s crew, disabled their ’bots, but what have we actually captured? A big shitload of nothing…
“Lena will know,” I say confidently.
“Aye aye Cap’n.”
Lena’s stellar yacht is nowhere to be seen. The flaring of the sun has kickstarted her yacht and sent it out into space armed with so much potential energy it can reach the nearest planetary system in less than fifteen years. She has, in short, escaped. Thanks to me.
“Where,” I ask despairingly, “is the fucking thing that does whatever the fuck this fucking thing does?”
Lena
The Quantum Beacon inhabits No Space. It exists at a fold in reality, in a no-place curled within the three unfurled and seven furled dimensions of our eleven-dimensional (counting time as the eleventh dimension of course) universe. It is undetectable by human perception or human-built sensors. It can, however, be liberated and revealed by a simple proton-positron interaction that yields the Beacon’s potential. All you need to do is to enter a two hundred digit code via the ship’s hard drive.
And my remote computer knows the code.
I wonder, idly, about going back. There is something appealing about their mad quixotic vision. And they need me. They really do need me. Oxygen supplies: 4 hours 40 minutes.
What? Oxygen transmuter has been destroyed by a corroder virus. Remaining oxygen supplies 4 hours 39 minutes.
