Debatable Space Read online

  The hologram vanishes.

  Tears are streaming down Alliea’s cheeks.

  I’m feeling horny. I want her. I want that woman so bad, and now that Rob is dead Oh shit, what did I just think? Stop it, stop it!

  Alliea comes to me, I hug her. I shuffle her body round so she can’t feel my erection. I imagine taking her. But I keep my face deadpan, I cage my heart.

  The crew sing another song. It is a heartbreaking lament about a space warrior who turns on his masters and leads an army to liberate his home planet. He fails and dies horribly, but the chorus has a nice melody and a great deal of oomph.

  I’ll miss you Rob.

  Lena

  I am released from semi-coma. Captain Flanagan sits opposite me. His crewmen are near, ready to immobilise me again if necessary.

  “How’s the nose?”

  Flanagan winces at my words. “Broken in eleven places, jaw was shattered,” he says, carefully. “And I’m taking shots twice a day till the bone heals.”

  I reach out and slap him in the face. I’m so fast, no one ever registers what has happened until “Jesus fucking Christ!” screams Flanagan.

  I beam.

  Flanagan is red in the face.

  “I have some questions to ask you,” he snarls.

  “I’ll give you some painkillers, Cap’n,” says the scrawny big-nosed woman.

  “I’m fine. Lena, this is our profession. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re just going to ransom you.”

  I flicker, as if about to strike again, and he flinches.

  “Do you know who I am?” I say.

  “Yes I think we do.”

  “And do you know who you are?”

  “We’re a freelance capitalist group.”

  “You are the dregs of humanity. You are less than human.”

  “That’s rich, coming from you.”

  “You are less than animal. You are a viral infection. I’m glad we killed one of your men. I laugh myself to sleep thinking of that.”

  “We’re asking for a trillion galactic credits, plus a fleet of warships, and our own sector of inhabitable space.”

  I pause, stunned.

  “You won’t get it,” I say coolly.

  “The Cheo is a rich man.”

  “He won’t pay.”

  “If he doesn’t pay, you’ll die.”

  “Then I’ll die, because he won’t pay. The Cheo doesn’t negotiate with kidnappers. That’s one of his rules.”

  “He’ll make an exception in your case.”

  “You’d be surprised.” I smile, taunting them. Shut up, Lena, you’re just giving them reasons to kill you.

  “Do you know how old the Cheo is?” I ask, tauntingly.

  “He’s about… a hundred?”

  “Two hundred and ten. He’s had eighteen wives. Dozens of mistresses. Countless lovers. Do you know how many children he has?”

  Flanagan is silent, sizing me up, apparently confused.

  “You could populate a country with his children,” I explain. “He is concupiscent, fruitful, and very old. Why should he jeopardise everything for the sake of me? One daughter among thousands?”

  “You’re saying we should kill you then?”

  “I’m saying you should release me. He won’t pay the ransom. I’ll get my own people to pay you, I’m good for a million credits.”

  “We want the Cheo to pay.”

  “My money not good enough?”

  “It’s a… political statement.”

  I roar with laughter.

  Then I ask, baffled: “What do you mean, ‘political’?”

  “We are democrats. We stand against everything the Cheo represents.”

  “This is droll.”

  “But we know he has a soft spot for you. We know he’ll pay our ransom. He would pay ten times what we ask, to get you back. We know what we have, Lena, we know your value.” Oh fuck Lena.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Flanagan looks at me. I can see him involuntarily stirring at the sight of my strong young body, my firm breasts, my luxuriant black hair, my unblemished features.

  “You’re good, Lena. Very good. You carry it well.”

  “I don’t want to talk any more about this.”

  “You’re right, the Cheo would never pay a ransom for a daughter. We’ve tried it before, and failed. He rebuffed us. We killed eleven daughters, he didn’t flinch.”

  “You killed eleven?”

  “We are pirates, Lena. We rob, we kill, it’s what we do. We may have ideals, we may hate the Cheo and his empire of evil, but let’s fucking face it, we are not the good guys.” I warned you Lena.

  “But you would not kill me? Me? Kill? Me?” I feel a wave of panic coming upon me. “You would not?”

  He stares at me, cold, unflinching.

  I leap. But he’s too fast. The spray hits me in mid-air, he rolls away and I land with a crunch. Hands pick me up and put me back in my seat.

  “Y, o, u, w, o, u, l, d, n, o,…” I despair of completing the sentence. My tongue is like lead. My limbs hang heavy on me, each breath is like a plane crash.

  “We will kill you if we have to. If necessary, we will cut off a limb at a time until the Cheo meets our demands. We will torture you. We will place your body in oil and boil it until your skin peels away and your sinews and muscles shine through. We will leave nothing but the brain, and if he doesn’t pay, we will destroy the brain too.”

  “I………………………………………………………

  …….”

  “He will pay, Lena. He will do anything to keep you safe. We know this man, we have studied him for many years. He has had many lovers and he regards them all with contempt. He has had four thousand sons and they mean nothing to him. Five thousand daughters, and he wouldn’t cross a street to stop them being raped or maimed. He has no friends, there is no one he cares about. Except you Lena. You are special to him.” They know of course.

  “Because you’re not his daughter, are you Lena? Nor are you as young, and silly, and naive as you look. You’re older than I am. You’re older than the Cheo is. We estimate you’re at least a thousand years old. You are something else, Lena, the last relic of the old times, the oldest human in existence. You are the one they call Xabar, the founder of the Cheo dynasty.”

  “Y… e… s,” I tell him.

  “Xabar, the Cheo will pay to have you back, but not because you’re his daughter. Because you are his mother. ”

  I no longer struggle for words, I merely allow my eyes to blaze with triumph.

  “Jeezu, she looks f good for her f age,” says the child called Jamie.

  Yes I do!

  Flanagan

  “gn, bn, call it, b, r, o,” Jamie says to me. This is his “good news/bad news” spiel.

  “Lay it on me mf dude, w, a, n, k, e, r,” I reply, brushing my nose with my thumb, galactic bodylanguage for “Someone get this geek out of my face!”

  Jamie giggles. To him this is banter. “gn is, we have achieved max shittiest scenario, thing can not get worse.”

  “And the bn?”

  “Ah think ah’m in luurrrve.”

  “Leave the fucking hostage alone,” I snarl at him.

  “Cap’n you may want to, um,” murmurs Alby.

  “Put it on the screen.”

  The screen is sensurround, 3D, and wraps around the entire front half of the bridge. My theory is that the bridge of our ship is a converted cinema, it’s way too much visuals.

  But it works for this. Across my entire field of vision, warship after warship after warship. The Corporation Battle Fleet. They sent the fucking fleet.

  “ I call that overreaction,” says Alliea.

  “We knew this would happen.”

  Kalen has abandoned the engine room with its computers, and joined us on the bridge. She circles around with that eerie catlike composure. I find myself wondering; have I missed something? Have I called this wrong?

  “
They sent the fucking fleet, Kalen,” I say, and I can hear the I’m-about-to-cry tremor in my voice. Damn, how does she do that to me? Up until a few seconds ago, I had that ineffable confident Captain’s boom. Now, I’m a six-year-old.

  “Don’t worry Cap’n,” Jamie says, “we won’t let them hurt you.”

  “No, ’cause…”

  “we’ll…”

  “… fucking kill you first!” Brandon says, finishing the thought. These two are masters of banterflow.

  “It was a good plan,” I say.

  “While it was a plan.”

  “Yikes, brown trouser time, Cap’n.”

  “Feel that crap”

  “oozing”

  “slithering”

  “sliding”

  “Captain’s crapped his pa-ants!” Brandon and Jamie chorus.

  “How close are they?” I’ve got my Captain’s boom back in my voice.

  “Close.”

  “Four sectors.”

  “Here, I’ll swap the screen,” says Alliea, and clicks the button. The image jostles around a bit, but remains essentially the same.

  Thousands of Corporation warships, armed to the teeth, blazing at full speed towards us. The vidscreen has a 180° curve, and the ships cover the whole sweep of it.

  “This is… the other perspective?” I say shakily.

  Alliea flicks the switch again.

  “This is what’s in front of us,”

  Thousands of fucking warships.

  “And this is what’s behind us.”

  Virtually the same; thousands of fucking warships. They have us totally encircled.

  There’s one of us, and incredibly many of them. They have state-of-the-art space cannons, lasers, micronets. We have a ragbag of weaponry assembled over decades of wheeler-dealering and drifting through space. And they have us surrounded.

  “Ask them if they want to surrender,” I say, breezily.

  Alliea switches a button. “ Satisfaction to Fleet, Satisfaction to Fleet, go fuck yourselves you turd-eating motherfuckers.”

  “Fire the nanobots,” I say.

  Alliea hits the button. Thousands of nanobots are fired from the torpedo tubes.

  Then she uses a joystick to scroll around space, capturing images from the spaceborne cameras which are our constant companion. We see a long shot of the Corporation Fleet, forming a rough circle around our ramshackle space megawarship. Their ships gleam, their mirrored surfaces dazzling even in the part light of interstellar space. Our ship has an indefinably dingy hue. Their ships are built out of needles and curves and ripple patterns, flying works of modern art. Our ship has a conventional hull, amplified by huge ramjets and with cannons mounted on the exterior of the hull. It looks like a tin can, with guns.

  Our ship gradually comes to a halt. The Corporation ships sail inwards, with us at their centre – forming a sphere in space that shrinks, slowly, like a flower at dusk. We remain still. Their sphere shrinks still more. But when Alliea changes the camera angle, we see the nanobots – millions of tiny sparkles flickering away from our ship towards them, like waves on a clear ocean. Each sparkle is a tiny robot ship, no more than the size of a man’s finger.

  One sparkle is faster than the rest. It is bigger too, the size of a football, and the extra bulk is made up of fusion engines that drive it forwards with terrific speed. The bulky nanobot hurtles towards the arc of ships. Missiles are fired at it, but it weaves and dodges. It reaches its target and cuts through the hull of a warship.

  A terrible hush descends on our bridge. We imagine what is happening now. Once it has penetrated the hull, the nanobot will burst open its shell and thousands of infinitesimal nanowarriors will pour out. They are programmed to eat through metal and wiring, they will dig deep into the hull of the ship. They will corrode the engines, corrupt the fusion pile, drill holes in the microcircuits.

  It usually takes about ten minutes. We count it out in our heads.

  At the end of ten minutes, the warship explodes. The sky flares. Men and women die.

  Our weapon has succeeded.

  At this point, the enemy fleet notices that the space around them is drenched in more of these tiny little sparkles. Millions of them. They are moving slowly outwards with terrifying inexorability, at all points of the compass, like an inflating balloon.

  The fleet’s sphere contracts and contracts… and as it does, the balloon of nanobots grows and grows. Missiles are fired, lasers sear through space. But these luminescent nanobots are too small and nimble to be eliminated in that way. Thousands are destroyed, but millions more remain.

  The circle of ships contracts.

  The balloon of nanobots expands.

  “Start up the engines,” I say.

  We brace ourselves.

  The sphere contracts.

  The balloon expands.

  The sphere contracts.

  The balloon expands.

  The sphere wavers.

  Two warships break ranks and fly off in the opposite direction. But still the sphere shrinks, and the tiny sparkles are getting closer and closer to the Corporation vessels.

  Another two warships break ranks.

  Suddenly the sphere is crumbling. The Fleet is in panic, in five of their sectors the warships are scattering.

  The remaining warships are firing their cannons at us. Plasma bursts rock our force fields. But more of them are panicking, and speeding away from the scene of the conflict. After a while, only a handful of Corporation warships are left out of the initial awe-inspiringly vast fleet.

  “Go,” I say.

  Alliea hits the space drive. We’re not the fastest ship in space, but our acceleration is formidable. We go from static to one-third light speed in less than thirty minutes. We fire no missiles, all our power goes on the force field. And we plunge straight outwards towards the scattering sphere of enemy ships.

  Meanwhile, the balloon of nanobots has now almost touched the warships of the fleet. Pandemonium ensues, as ship after ship goes into rapid reverse drive. They see us accelerating forwards, but the wiser of them skip back a little way, then wait. They realise that to escape, we have to drive through the cloud of nanobots. We have, so to speak, shat on our own doorstep.

  Alliea is at the controls, riding the ship like a fighter plane from another era, bucking and weaving in space as plasma bursts crash towards us. Every time the plasma burst misses us, it shoots past and strikes the force field of a warship on the other side of the sphere. Space is ripped with plasma pulses, and the Corporation warships are rocked and battered. They are doing our job for us; they are shooting each other…

  And the Corporation Fleet is still in disarray. We can see open space before us. But to get there, we have to fly through the cloud of nanobots.

  So, we fly through them. They squelch against our hull. Each nanobot is made of hardened plastic, with bath-oil inside. They’re cheap to make – really, there’s nothing to them but an empty engine shell. And that’s how we can afford to shoot millions of them at the enemy.

  The first nanobot was real. That was crammed full of highly expensive nanowarriors. But we only had one actual bomb; the rest was bluff.

  We go soaring through the gap in the enemy ranks and surge out into open space.

  By now the fleet has realised our deception. The warships turn and reform. They form a scary pattern in space: a vast D, for Death. Ours.

  And they come after us.

  “Full speed ahead!” I roar.

  “This is,” Jamie says kindly, “full speed.”

  “Ah.” I read my controls. The Corporation warships are gaining on us. As always, we are limited by the relatively low maximum speed of our engines. We are a galloping horse, being pursued by fighter jets.

  “We’re doomed, Cap’n!” roars Brandon, which is his idea of an entertaining running gag.

  “Fire the antimatter bomb,” I say.

  A huge bomb is discharged from our rear end. It’s the size of a house, and it bobs around in
our wake as the enemy warships come racing up at us. A circuit is triggered, and a column of carbon particles drifts above the bomb, forming a letter in the airless waste of space. The letter says:

  Then another carbon discharge is jetted into space, hovering close below the first as the magnetised particles achieve a repulsion-attraction stasis that holds them securely in their position. And once the letters are formed, they float in space in perfect clarity, unstirred by winds for all of time.

  The next letter is followed by

  Naturally, the captains of the Corporation warships regard this as a puerile empty-headed joke. They ignore our floating bomb, and come right after us. We have no chance of getting away.

  “Hoist the mainsail,” I say.

  “Aye aye, Cap’n,” says Alliea. She presses a button.

  Our sail isn’t as hitech as the stellar sail on Lena’s yacht. It’s a tough durable micromesh that’s square-cut and the size of a hundred playing fields. The spars shoot out of their casing, the sail falls into place around them, and hangs lifelessly in the airless void.

  The bomb explodes.

  It’s a bomb made up of 50 per cent matter, 50 per cent antimatter, separated by an impermeable plasma barrier. When the power goes off, the barrier vanishes, matter hits antimatter, and a detonation ensues.

  It is, like we said it was, an antimatter bomb.

  Fuck, we weren’t going to bluff them twice.

  The explosion is huge and awe-inspiring. It’s as though a small sun has appeared from nowhere and gone nova. Several warships flying close to our bomb are ripped into fragments. Other more distant ships are battered and shaken and badly damaged by the blast.

  But then the shock waves kick in. Ripples of shock roll out from the epicentre of the explosion, sonic booms mingle with energy waves that shake the fabric of space itself.

  The second wave of ships, which had survived the explosion, now find themselves being picked up by an invisible hand and hurled aside. Warship after warship is shaken and smashed. Some crash into other warships, maiming their force fields and sending thunderous impacts through the interiors.

  It’s a game of cosmic skittles. One minute, the fleet of many thousand vessels is forging its deadstraight inexorable pursuit. The next, they are scattered and chaotic, as shock waves turn the space around them into a whirlpool.