Debatable Space

Lena

“What’s wrong?” I ask him gently.

The wake is over. All are sober. I am in the bar with a deeply melancholic Captain Flanagan. My previous mood of perverse elation has melted away. I am now bathed in Flanagan’s despair.

“So many have died,” he says softly.

“You knew that would happen.”

“For no reason.” He looks at me blankly. “We can’t succeed.”

“We’ve destroyed a Beacon before.”

“And now they know our methods. They’ll be prepared. It’s a suicide mission.”

“Then so be it.”

“You’re prepared to die?”

“Hell no. But I’m prepared to let you all die.”

“Thank you Lena.” He smiles a wry smile. He cannot find a way around the time-lag factor.

“It’s the time-lag factor, isn’t it?” I say to him.

He is silent for a long long time.

“I knew you’d figure it out eventually,” he tells me.

I pour myself a drink. We sip. We bathe in our own misery. Every time the pirates invent a new military strategy, it may be ten or twenty years in subjective time before they can travel far enough to implement it again. But in Earth Time, those twenty years are in fact forty or even fifty years.

“Time dilation is against you. And the vast distances of space. By the time you fly from one star to another, they’ve had half a century or more to plot and counteract your next move.”

“You got it.” Every battle is recorded on every ship’s cctv and transmitted instantaneously back to Earth via the Beacons. Flanagan used an antimatter bomb once; the second time, the Earth DRs had built a net to catch it. He used the child Jamie’s computer skills to capture the Doppelganger minds on Cambria; but by now, every Doppelganger in the Universe will be Earth-Mind Read Only.

“You can’t use the Big Bang Bomb again,” I say. “They’ll have a way around it.”

“I wouldn’t risk it anyway. This is our Universe. What the hell are we doing with it?”

“Fair point. So, what’s your plan to destroy the Beacon on Kornbluth?”

Flanagan takes his glass and throws it at the wall. It doesn’t break, it bounces. The effect is laughable, rather than dramatic. Flanagan looks duly chagrined.

“We try, we fail. That’s the plan,” he tells me.

“ That’s a plan?”

“That’s Plan A,” Flanagan tells me. There’s a shade more confidence in his voice now. But I can tell he is still beset by terrible doubts.

“So what’s Plan B?”

He stares at me.

The air in front of him seems to shimmer and flicker. For a moment, I assume I have a migraine of a kind I haven’t endured for centuries. Then I wonder if Alby the flame beast is back inside the ship.

Then the air solidifies into a black floating particle. More particles swarm, to form a shape, a letter. The letter grows. It is the shape and size of a standing human being without limbs. It is an I . A free-floating I which is almost as big as I am. Then the I flickers and changes, and I realise what is happening. The air is talking to me. The air is talking to me.

And it says:

I stare at Flanagan.

“You’re insane,” I tell him.

“I have no choice,” he says flatly.

The letters shimmer a little more and turn into a humanoid shape. The humanoid black shape sits in an armchair, and crosses one humanoid leg over another.

The humanoid shape is, I know, made of billions upon billions of microscopic entities, swarming under the control of a focused group intelligence. It is an alien being that is alien beyond imagining.

Flanagan has forged a treaty with the Bugs.

I am in the same room as Bugs.

Every pore and follicle on my body shivers in horror. I feel as if my skin is being ripped off. I cannot breathe.

The Bug entity shimmers and changes its shape again. It is, I realise, trying to find a succinct way of indicating friendly and non-aggressive intentions towards me. But the shape it chooses is surreally inappropriate. It heightens my panic attack. It makes me almost insane, torn between a desire to hoot with laughter and an overwhelming urge to defecate then die.

This is what the Bug becomes:

“Oh no,” I say. “Oh merciful heaven, no!”