Debatable Space
Authors: Philip Palmer
Copyright © 2008 by Philip Palmer
Excerpt from
Version 43
copyright © 2010 by Philip Palmer
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: January 2008
‘What’s the Matter with the Mill’ by Minnie McCoy copyright 1931 by Northern Music Company. All rights administered by Universal
Music Corp. / ASCAP. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07528-2
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.
For my mother
Contents
Book 2: Excerpts from the Thought Diary of Lena Smith, 2004–
Book 4: Excerpts from the Thought Diary of Lena Smith, 2004–
Book 9: Excerpt from the Thought Diary of Lena Smith, 2004–
Lena
I lose myself in the long soaring arc of the plunging bucking near-light-speed stellar-wind-battered flight, my eyes drinking
in the spectral glows and searing sunlight while my sensors calibrate velocity, acceleration, heat and cosmic radiation, I
surf from visuals to instruments and back and forth until I feel the bucking of stellar wind, no, that’s repetitious, delete
the words “stellar” and “wind”, it’s now “the bucking of pulsing photons” on my fins and sail and feel the burning of the
hot yellow dwarf sun on my cheeks
Lena, we have company.
and bare acceleration-pinned arms. Ah!!!! Gorgeous yellow-red glow gash of lit matter and quantum frenzy! D43X is a giant
yellow sun approximately 4,000 light-years away from the galactic centre with eleven orbital planets together with asteroidal
debris, the gravitational pull is 4.11 millidysons, it’s a big yellow fucker and, like the planet Saturn in the original Earth
system,
it has a ring,
it’s a sun with a ring, a fully formed cluster of trapped asteroids that sparkle in the relentless yellow glare and I’m on
my way there
Time to come out Lena.
into the asteroid ring, risking my vessel, my own life, for that indescribable rush of asteroid rafting at high velocity while
sucked in the grip of a voracious gravitational
I’m cutting the connection.
pull, you are fucking not doing anything of the fucking
Hey, I’m kidding, I’m not allowed or indeed able to cut the connection, that’s entirely your prerogative, lighten up, Lena
I need you.
Deal with it, I want no company, you’re interrupting the flow of my thought diary.
I’ll edit it.
It’s not the same, this is me, my vision, my poetry, my ineluctable
Lena, I think this ship is unregistered, it may be a rogue, we’re in trouble, Lena, please help me I can’t cope on my own,
Lena, please, I’m begging you, cut the connection, return to the bridge, Lena I’m scared.
Just fucking deal with it, tinbrain, okay?
“Watch her go.”
“Rimming the sun.”
“Yobaby, lickety, lickety.”
“She’s ours.”
“Fire a plasma pulse,” I say.
“Too far.”
“Oh go on,” says Jamie. “Take out a rock. Light the sky, man.”
“Okay. Take out a rock,” I order.
“I got it. Baboom.” That’s Harry.
The black void shines, as the asteroid blows. I steer the ship straight through the flames, pure sleight of flight. I come
through the other side and the stellar yacht is still tacking gently, curving its way through iridescent sunrocks.
“She’s not running?”
“She’s not running,” says Brandon.
“Then, let’s play it safe. Stealth,” I say.
“We got no stealth capacity, Cap’n.”
“I know, I know, just… look, just try to be discreet. Don’t talk so loud.”
“Aye aye Cap’n.”
“Don’t blow up any more rocks.”
“The rock was blown up on your order, Cap’n.”
My eyes are fixed firmly on the star monitor, I know my crew from their voices. Brandon, baritone, fast-syllabled, Rob with
his East Galaxy patois, Alliea with a hint of a Celtic lilt, Jamie with his childlike babble. Kalen in the engine room, communicating
by voicelink. And Alby.
“She’ssss daydreaming Cap’n,” says Alby.
“I know,” I say.
“If we get closssse…”
“Incoming missiles!”
She’s shooting at us. Baboom, baboom. Hands fly on joysticks, antimissile photon pulses strike, the missiles flare around
us as we kink and weave out of the way. Pish, pish, pish, pish, pish, pish, pish, each light marks the explosive demise of
a death bomb. She can’t beat us in a straight fight, she’s a sleek yacht, with enough firepower to take out a battleship,
but we’re bigger than a battleship. We’re a Mark IV megawarship, we’re a bulldozer, she’s a rapier, no contest. We keep dodging
and throwing out chaff and her bombs keep exploding harmlessly. But the space yacht keeps hurling missiles at us, my guess
is we’re fighting against an autopilot. And autopilots can’t fight.
“Why don’t she flee?”
We might just catch her, maybe, if our fuel holds out and if we throw out fusion bombs to augment our space drive. But that
yacht is state of the art. Its sails are as vast as a small planet but virtually weightless, no more than a few nanometres
thick. It has an ion-drive engine, it’s bound to have a computer navigator brain that dwarfs ours, all it needs is a human
being to give the order: “Flee!” But it doesn’t. Fleeing does not occur.
“Maybe she’s died. Maybe it’s a ghost ship,” I say.
“I like that idea,” says Brandon.
“Doomed to sail the empyrean, forevermore.”
“What’s an empyrean?” asks Rob.
“You in one, mf,” says Jamie.
“Space. Space is the empyrean,” I explain.
“Say space then,” snaps Rob. “Don’t waste brain cells, using words you don’t fucking need!”
The yacht slowly arcs, it is turning into the stellar wind. Finally, it’s fleeing. Jets flare, its sails shimmer. Photons
from the star are caught up in the fine mesh of the sail, each one gives a little push. Particles of light shove like infinitesimal
gusts of wind. But at the same time the particles are trapped by the sail’s dark-state technology, compressed into one of
the sail’s curled-up dimensions. Then, as the sail buckles and wobbles under the pressure, the particles are spat out again
into our familiar three uncurled dimensions with a pinpoint ejaculation of energy that hurls the ship even faster, to .99
of light speed for a few brief seconds. And, of course, because of quantum uncertainty effects, there is a moment when the
yacht is moving at two speeds – slower and faster –
both at the same time.
Under the intense pressure of two simultaneous speeds, the solar yacht starts to hop. To the naked eye, it seems to dematerialise,
then rematerialise, covering kilometres of space in what is only marginally more than no time at all.
“Firing chaff, one two three.”
“Four five six.”
“Seven eight nine.”
“Ten eleven twelve.”
We shower the space ahead of her with cluster bombs, all with a finely calibrated time-delay explosion. The yacht shimmers,
hops, rematerialises. Then a bomb explodes ahead of it, rocking its sails, jostling the fine balance of its nanotechnology.
Shimmer, vanish, hop, boom.
Shimmer, vanish, hop, BABOOM.
And again.
And again.
We throw hundreds of missiles into space. The yacht is like a firefly that’s taken mind-altering drugs, hopping through the
gaps in reality, buffeted by the recoil from our endless bombs.
Then we watch, in wonder, as the sail is shredded and vanishes. The ship is trapped.
A photon stream which has been spat out from the curled-up dimensions, rich in unused energy, rushes from the stranded yacht.
It swirls like a host of angry bees, and is sucked into the gravitational pull of the yellow-ringed star. The swarm hops and
skips, and enters the star, and the star swells.
We are engulfed in flame as the star flares. Pillars of red and yellow light balloon into space. The star’s asteroidal ring
sizzles and fries. Rock burn up with a rapid hiss. Our force fields throb under the heat of the raging sun. Alby sighs contentedly.
“Remindsss me of home,” he murmurs, his flame-essence flickering with pleasure.
I am defeated. Confounded. All hope is lost.
Do not despair, we…
Quiet.
There may be a way out of…
Quiet!
I cannot hear your thoughts.
Think to me please.
Lena, please! I beg you! Don’t do this!
Ah, my pain is infinite.
That’s better. I would rather hear you complaining, than not hear you at
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.