Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

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!

“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.”

I am asleep on my feet. I stumble. Alliea props me up.

She falls asleep too. We support each other, swaying, sleeping, blinking into wakefulness.

And we hug, and we cry. Rob was her husband, she loved him more than anything.

“My darling, my precious, don’t do this, don’t leave me,” Alliea weeps.

I bawl like a baby, and hold her close.

“Welcome.”

I fix him with a cold, forbidding stare. His name is Captain Flanagan. "Captain" is a courtesy title, he has no pilot’s training or licence. He’s a fifth-generation settler from the planet Cambria, ninety-seven years of age.

He looks much older. The hair, the wrinkles… It’s his choice. His eyes and organs are new, but the hair is untreated, it does naturally go that grey colour you know.

I know! Do you think I’m stupid? I know!

“Let me introduce you to my crew,” says Captain Flanagan.

I scream. The bridge is on fire! I step back… I’m amplifying your force field.

Stop this! But there’s no need to be afraid. It’s a flame beast, from the solar system C40333. It’s sentient.

“This is Alby.”

“Pleasssed to meet you.”

A pillar of flame stands before me, shimmering, crackling, speaking. It’s alive.

“Hello Alby,” I say. I hold out my hand, imperiously. The flames whorl and a tendril of fire extends towards me. I feel the heat of the fire through my exoarmour. I am unflapped.

“Brandon.” Brandon Bisby, forty-five years of age, astrophysicist by training, his parents were killed by the Cheo’s shock troops, on suspicion of being Terrorist. They were later exonerated.

He is lean, skinny really, he is smiling at me, my God, his eyes are flickering up and down, inspecting my breasts, my thighs, he wants sex with me. I shake his hand, then grip it painfully tight, and flick my other hand on his groin, and freeze him with a look. He’s caught out in guilt and shame.

The Captain smiles. He’s amused by my powerplay.

“Alliea.” She’s an escaped slave, from penal settlement XIY. Her parents were career criminals, she was born in prison and fled after a power failure in '82.

She’s strong, her shockingly purple exoarmour sculpted around sharply defined muscles. She doesn’t have the defeated and haunted look I would have expected of a slave. She’s scowling at me, she hates me. I smile a kindly smile at her, offering her my grace and benediction, ironically of course. She is, I concede, beautiful, a fine example of femslave.

“Harry.” He’s a Loper, bioengineered at the Stanstead Laboratories on the planet Shame.

He is half man, half beast, with rich silver fur and sharp pointy teeth. He has three eyes which are bright green. He wears no clothing, I wonder idly about his genitalia. Eleven inches, retractable, here’s an image of the Loper erect.

I burst out laughing, no one knows why.

“And Jamie.”

Jamie is a child, ten at most. He baffles me. Arrested development. He’s 120 years old, a computer gamesplayer, he paid a lab to keep him in a prepubertal state a few weeks before his tenth birthday. His parents didn’t know until afterwards. The procedure is irreversible.