Debatable Space (23 page)

Kalen is flying through the air. Black Jack has never seen a cat-human before and can’t quite believe her flared nostrils
and hissing technique. And she’s fast too.

I move in punching. I take some killer blows to the head and fall to the ground. Panicking, I use a ring laser to cut a hole
in the floorboard and I fall through and crash on to a card table below. Damn! I’ve broken my back. I clamber to my feet,
fighting past the pain, using meditation skills to engage my leg muscles despite the vertebral snap.

I look up. Lena is watching, amused, detached, as the brawl continues around her. Jamie bites and kicks and shocks Black Jack’s
men with the power in his tiny frame. Brandon and Alliea work together smoothly as a team. But Kalen is the dangerous one,
with her long-limbed kicks and effortless fingerstrikes.

Black Jack steps to one side. Takes Lena’s head in his hands. And kisses her. It’s an overt proposition: join my crew.

She nods and smiles and takes his hand. This isn’t entirely going to plan.

A random punch hits Lena, and suddenly exasperated she strikes out and shatters an arm. Black Jack beams, and leads Lena away.
The man with two penises is doing things that no lady should ever witness, but Lena stares at it unflinchingly.

And I feel a garrotte around my throat. My enemies have followed me. I am barely able to move. The garrotte bites in. Kalen
sees and dives down to help, but suddenly she has a knife in her throat.

Lena watches it all, amused.

Harry is there, and bites the head off the man who is garrotting me.

Black Jack whispers in Lena’s ear. She gives him a second look. He is swarthy, bearded, repulsive. This is a man who used
to kill babies to liven up those dull winter evenings.

Lena suddenly backs away. Harry and Kalen are dragging me out of the saloon. We are defeated, retreating. Lena follows us.
Black Jack scowls and grabs her and his men secure her with brutal armlocks.

I am looking away as Lena launches her counterattack. I hear screams and cries behind me.

Eventually I am aware of Lena at my side.

“That must hurt like the very devil,” she murmurs to me.

“I’ve had worse,” I tell her.

We leave. The moon is high in the sky, blazing out purple gases. The bitter wind whips us. We head back for our ship.

“That went badly,” says Brandon.

“Yup,” I reply.

“Hsss,” groans Kalen, her larynx transplant still raw and painful.

I am consumed by a black melancholy.

This is what happens when you try to play God. I had a game plan mapped out that involved Black Jack, Lena, and an all-out
fight. Lena would see us struggling and would come to our rescue, cementing the bond between us. Black Jack was, of course,
paid in advance to pull his punches so that no one was in any severe danger.

But ten years ago I shafted Black Jack on a booty trade. He has nursed his grudge since then, and took this opportunity to
beat me and kill me. As a result, I have a smashed spine and half-severed head. Lena did in fact – eventually! – rally to
our cause. But it wasn’t part of the plan that I should have a broken back. Pain surges up and down my old and battered body.
I long to die, to release myself from self-inflicted torment.

Alliea keeps reminding me: the plan worked.

Some fucking plan.

I can still taste blood in my mouth. No one ever asks me about it, no one ever questions it. But is it right I should so much
savour the taste of human flesh? Am I an animal after all? A less-than-human?

They rely on me to be their strong-arm half-man/half-beast. They depend on my ferocity and rage. But what do they really think
of me? Am I a true friend? Do they secretly despise me?

I feel so threatened. So paranoid. It does not occur to them that I might need comfort and support.

Surely it is possible to love the taste of blood and the screaming of dying humans, and yet still be the
sensitive
type?

The Captain has been giving me strange looks. I fear he thinks I’m grieving too much for Rob. Perhaps he considers me obsessive.
Unreliable. Flaky.

Why does he keep looking at me like that?

Am I unworthy of his trust?

Flanagan is still recovering in the Med Tank. His spine has had to be replaced, and a new spinal cord has been fitted into
his brain. It is a major procedure with a moderate probability of failure.

If he dies, then as chief astrophysicist I will take command of the crew. It is a prospect I relish. Flanagan is too impetuous,
he lacks attention to detail. I know I will do a better job. Captain Brandon Bisby! It has a ring to it.

Of course, I would never cause him to die, but by all that’s holy and all that’s not, I’d be glad if he did. Then I could
assume command.

Or perhaps I should jump the gun? Help his demise along, just a little bit? Is my authority secure enough?

I sweat over that one. I decide to opt for caution. Let’s see if Flanagan recovers. If he doesn’t, I can take his place without
any effort, or intrigue, or danger to myself . . .

We plan our attack. I am ripe for this. I am going to battle.

I, Lena, am the Captain of my own pirate crew. I’ve finally agreed to Flanagan’s pleas, and it makes me feel good to know
that I am indispensable, a warrior among warriors.

Flanagan, now recovered, though rather wan, shows me his plans. He wants to take over a Quantum Beacon in the sector Omega
54, near the planet of Arachne. He has nano spy reports on the security drones, he has maps of the security lattices, he has
guns and bombs and a proven track record.

But his approach lacks boldness. I order a full-frontal assault of the Beacon.

“How’s your back, Captain?”

“Good as new,” he brags.

“Let’s do it,” I tell him, and he nods.

We launch our invasion.

We sail through space for some months until we are a few sectors from the ship that houses the Quantum Beacon near Arachne.
The security system flashes a warning on our vidscreens. We ignore it. We arc gently around the enemy vessel.

I feel a shiver of fear in the pit of my stomach.

Lena, are you sure this is a good…

Shut up!

But mixed with the fear is a surge of adrenalin. I feel, calm, confident, assured, I feel…

BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Shit!” I say.

They’re bombing us. Our pirate ship fires its blasters and its bombs, and the recoil shakes us in our seats. Seconds later,
a thousand nanobots come flying out of the Beacon to take us down. All the lights on the bridge flash and alarms sound and
I am bewildered, but I am confident that other people know what they are doing, so I

BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Explosive charges punch holes through the hull of our ship. The engines burn. Lights on the bridge consoles flash red and
amber, sirens wail.

“Sitrep, please,” I say calmly.

“We’re” says Brandon,

“Oh shit,” says Jamie,

“fucked,” continues Brandon.

“Backup systems are failing,” says Alliea,

“Engines are, oh shit,” says Jamie,

“So we’re, um,” I say, “how bad is it?”

“The hull has been penetrated, the engines have been hit, the ship’s a wreck, Captain,” says Flanagan.

“So, um,” I say. And I pause, and search for words. “What do I do?” I eventually conclude.

“Abandon,” says Jamie,

“ship” adds Brandon.

I mentally assess the state of play. Our ship is destroyed. It’s a hull with holes.

“Oh shit,” I say.

We abandon ship. There’s a flurry and a hurry and a panic and the fear in the pit of my stomach has been converted into a
desperate urge to void myself into my body armour, I am paralysed with indecision about whether to breathe and vomit, but
my body moves almost without conscious control. We suit up, we plunge down tubes into the centre of the ship, where I resume
command of my stellar yacht, while Flanagan and his crew take the lifeboat. I scream a command, and the hull doors shoot open
and we are catapulted into space. As we leave, more missiles hit our megawarship, and our two small vessels are plunged into
the haze and blaze of the massive bombardment.

We fly through space, me in my yacht, the others in the ion-drive liferaft. And Alby flares his way along with us, tugging
a lattice net woven with nanobombs. The sun is behind us, and the wrecked hull of our ship suddenly erupts, filling the air
with flame and burning plasma. In the confusion, the yacht, lifeboat and Alby creep past the enemy craft towards the vast
spaceship where the Beacon is housed.

There is, I realise, belatedly, a plan, though I was not made privy to it. Flanagan starts suggesting orders over his suit
radio, which I meekly repeat to the others as if they are
my
ideas. And so, with the enemy behind us, Alby drapes his net over the Quantum Beacon ship’s holding bay. The lattice sticks,
the bombs explode inwards, a vast hole appears in the side of the Beacon ship’s vast hull. The lifeboat punches its way through,
while Kalen and Harry and Flanagan parachute down on light carbon chutes, riding the blast of the explosion and zooming through
into the inside of the vessel.

Meanwhile, heeding Flanagan’s barked instructions in my ear-radio, I head in the other direction, arcing the stellar yacht
away at exhilarating speed. Then I pull hard on the ship’s joystick and turn my vessel around and bring it to a momentary
halt. I aim my lasers at the sun. I fire.

The lasers penetrate and shatter the sun’s energy equilibrium. And the sun then flares, engulfing us all in a vast shimmering
photosphere, too diffuse to burn, but bright enough to blind the ’bots and the remote operators, and scrambling all the communication
channels.

My ship is hurled around the flaring sun, at a speed no faster than light but more intense than mere movement. I feel like
a cloud caught in a typhoon, a droplet of water in a waterfall, a photon at the heart of a nuclear blast.

My heart in hiding stirs for a bird, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

“Good plan,” says Brandon, snidely.

“It worked,” I snarl.

“We lost our ship!”

“We’ll get another.”

“All our possessions! Our archives, your guitars, my collection of collectable animated superhero bendy toys!”

“It worked! We’re in, aren’t we?”

“In where?”

Brandon has a point. This is a seriously weird place. The Quantum Beacon ship is hollow on the inside. A vast cavernous space.
The crew inhabited a thin space that constituted the shell of a huge empty egg. We have defeated the Beacon’s crew, disabled
their ’bots, but what have we actually captured? A big shitload of nothing . . .

“Lena will know,” I say confidently.

“Aye aye Cap’n.”

Lena’s stellar yacht is nowhere to be seen. The flaring of the sun has kickstarted her yacht and sent it out into space armed
with so much potential energy it can reach the nearest planetary system in less than fifteen years. She has, in short, escaped.
Thanks to me.

“Where,” I ask despairingly, “is the fucking thing that does whatever the fuck this fucking thing does?”

The Quantum Beacon inhabits No Space. It exists at a fold in reality, in a no-place curled within the three unfurled and seven
furled dimensions of our eleven-dimensional (counting time as the eleventh dimension of course) universe. It is undetectable
by human perception or human-built sensors. It can, however, be liberated and revealed by a simple proton–positron interaction
that yields the Beacon’s potential. All you need to do is to enter a two hundred digit code via the ship’s hard drive.

And my remote computer knows the code.

I wonder, idly, about going back. There is something appealing about their mad quixotic vision. And they need me. They really
do need me.

Oxygen supplies: 4 hours 40 minutes.

What?

Oxygen transmuter has been destroyed by a corroder virus. Remaining oxygen supplies 4 hours 39 minutes.

When did this happen?

It came to my awareness eleven seconds ago.

Sabotage.

A fair surmise.

We have to go back.

A valid extrapolation.

That fucking bastard boobytrapped us.

A very fair comment.

Fuck him!

Fuck, indeed, him.

I arrive back in a flaming temper. Flanagan is deferential and helpless. “Thank God you’re here, Lena, you’re the only one
who knows what to do!” he says. He’s right, of course, but his arse-licking flattery offends me.

Grudgingly, I type in the code and access the Beacon. Then I rig the Beacon to connect with Flanagan’s coordinates. His strategy
now seems clear. He has targeted the Beacon to link us remotely with his home world of Cambria. This is the culmination of
his lifelong dream of revenge.

As I work, the crew gradually gather in the control room. When I look up, they are all staring at me.

“You’re back, huh?” says Jamie tauntingly.

“I would never abandon my loyal crew,” I tell him. He openly sneers. He probably did the sabotage job on the yacht. Little
brat. Oh, how I would love to seal him into an enclosed space filled with flesh-eating maggots and leave him there.

“Do you think I’m cute?” Jamie asks me abruptly. I am brought up short. I study him – his tousled hair, his freckles, his
cheeky grin.

“Not in the least, worm,” I say. His face falls.

“We won’t have much time,” I tell Flanagan crisply.

“I know,” he replies, lowstatusly and humbly.

“They’ll be sending rescue vessels.”

“It’ll take them forty-eight hours to reach us.”

“Leaving us forty-eight hours to escape.”

“There
is
no escape. Forty-eight hours, and they have us. It’s a suicide mission.”