Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

“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!

“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.