Debatable Space

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.

Then the shock waves continue outwards. They are attenuating now, but still each has terrific power, enough to shatter an old and worse-for-wear ship like ours if the impact hit us full-on.

But instead the shock waves hit our vast sails, which buckle and ripple, but absorb the huge power of the spatial vibration. And as the shock hits the sail, so the sail is forced forwards at terrific speed, dragging our vessel with it.

The surviving warships are regrouping. Within minutes they are back on course, weaving and tacking to mitigate the damage of the remaining shock waves, but still firmly on our tail. Their engines surge, they resume their previous astonishing speeds. They fly after us like birds in a thunderstorm.

But they can’t catch us. We have the power of our engines, coupled with the power of the shock waves on our sail. Each hammer blow shoves our ship forward faster and faster, until we are scarily close to light speed. When the shock waves ebb, the sails hang loose but our speed doesn’t slow.

We are experiencing relativity effects now. The interior of the ship is like a carnival for habitual drug users. Our perceptions are fogging, our sense of time becoming erratic. But Alliea keeps us firmly on course, riding the wave of energy that had slapped us through the galaxy.

Every bone in my body has been shaken and ground. I am having difficulty remembering who I am. But still onwards we sail, faster and faster. We veer past asteroids and planets like a flashlight blinking. At these speeds, a collision with a large enough rock would destroy us totally, but we pull in our sails, keep up our speed, and shoot through space.

Lena

I watch the battle unfold on the vidscreen in my cabin. I marvel.

Bloody hell, I think to myself. Indeed.