Debatable Space

by Philip Palmer

  “We’ve come to trade,” I say, and the work begins. These Dolph pirates rarely steal their own booty. They prefer to cruise the galaxy dealing and trading with marauders such as ourselves. We are offering the cargo from the last merchant ship we pillaged. In return, they can give us computer wealth – energy capsules and computer programs that will allow us to generate food, wine, TV shows, and interactive sex and tourist games. We are always hungry for something new, different sensations, fresh ways to occupy our rest time. So we are addicts for virtual tours, which allow us to mind-explore all the sights and pleasures of the vast galaxy, through a headset and a virtual enabler.

  “Let’s swim,” says Lena. And the Dolphs swell with pride and anticipation. They shoot off like rockets through gaseous atmosphere. We follow, slowly and awkwardly, kicking with our flippers to build up speed.

  A huge white shark drifts past us. There are coral reefs, I see barnacles. A strange shimmery shape before me turns out to be a jellyfish. We swim through, marvelling at the fanatical dedication that causes the Dolphs to stock their spaceship with exotic flora and fauna. It’s the equivalent of us creating tropical jungles in our own ships, then populating them with snakes, elephants, dogs and birds.

  But at this moment it’s easy to see why. The Dolphs are supremely content in their habitat, but without the sharks, the fish, the fronds, the coral reefs, without that rich diversity, they would be merely sailing through space in a tank of tepid water. This way, their world travels with them, everywhere.

  Boy, Lena is fast. She has mastered the knack of swimming with flippers, and she’s now racing face to snout with one of the male Dolphs. Then he ducks down and rises up between her legs. She grabs hold of his shoulders and he’s swimming with her now, spiralling and corkscrewing through the water like a bucking horse, with Lena holding on. She loses her grip for a moment, and instead seizes him by his thick long black hair. Carl almost shudders with pleasure at that, since his hair of course is a sense organ. She might as well, I mused bitterly, be holding him by the cock.

  I feel detached, almost resentful. I wish Rob were here.

  Flanagan swims up behind me. He watches Lena swim, her exhilaration visible even through her transparent face glass. I realise: this is why we liaised with the Dolph ship. We’re heading for a Border planet, we can do our trading there, at better rates, and get less wet. But Flanagan wanted Lena to have this experience. Swimming with a Dolph. She’s like a child, running in a park on a sunny day, face smeared with ice cream. Pure joy.

  Lena

  I can read Flanagan like a book. I know he’s manipulating me, I know he’s playing his psych games on me. I know all that!

  But the trouble is, that mf cs bastard, he can read me like a book too.

  That night, I dream of sex with the Dolph. I see his penis flick out of his streamlined body, like a knife blade. I dream of water orgasm. I wake feeling soiled at my own banality.

  And I am covered in sweat, a soft silvery sheen of sweat that coats my entire body. Like a film of water. Like ocean on my pores.

  Flanagan

  Campbell World. Notorious as the most free-living Border Planet in the human galaxy. Prostitutes, drugs, murder games, suicide sects. This is the place to go if you want to go to extremes.

  It’s also an unterraformable planet cursed with high winds, summer storms, and hailstones that can kill a soldier in full body armour. Campbell World is famous for its night life. But in daytime it is bleak, hot, stormy, dangerous, and terrifying.

  The atmosphere is of course unbreathable, but the core is molten, and an energy pump enables the inhabitants to easily service and fuel a vast planetwide conservatory that houses an entire civilisation. Hard glass domes look upwards to Campbell World’s stunning double star system. But underfloor heating and triply backed up oxygenated air make the interior world habitable and comfortable.

  The bars are underground, artificially lit, artificially stimulated, and loud. Campbell World has walls that throb with bass rhythms. Its inhabitants regard strobe lighting as normal, and comforting. Hallucinogenic drugs are regularly fed into the air conditioning, to lighten the ennui and despair of the long-term resident. And drunkenness is seen as a virtue.

  We land in the secure landing bays used by galactic outlaws as a matter of course. We are guaranteed a departure slot, and immunity from prosecution with respect to any illegal cargos.

  And then we hit the saloon.

  Lena has to be coaxed of course. She’s playing hard to get, but she loves the fact that I’m chasing her. It’s a combination of seduction and hunt. She is my prey, and my Desired. I need her support to be unequivocal, passionate, wholehearted. And I know I can’t appeal to her idealism, her sense of duty, or her conscience. At Lena’s age, such abstract notions hold little appeal. No, I’m appealing to Lena’s boredom. At the time we captured her she had spent a hundred years in free space without seeing another living soul. I want to give her a mission, a sense of purpose, a way to fill her days.

  Waging war against her only son fits, in my own humble opinion, that bill perfectly.

  “We don’t serve dogs,” the barman sneers at us.

  “I’m a Loper,” Harry says stiffly. “I’m as human as you are, just hairier. Tequila, make it a large one.”

  “Beer with a vodka chaser,” I say.

  “Large vodka with a tequila chaser,” says Alliea.

  “Just put lots of alcohol in one big glass and I’d like a bucket for the puke please,” says Jamie. I give him a hostile glare. He drinks like a ten-year-old eating sweets. Because, I guess, he is a ten-year-old.

  The bar is based on a design by Escher. It curves round in a Moebius strip with an antigrav field so you can drift up or drift down at will. The tables themselves are secured to bulkheads or hung from wires, but the overall effect is like being trapped in a cave of bats most of which are hooting and howling and swapping obscenity-laden anecdotes.

  I take a freshly squeezed papaya juice, stiffened with old-fashioned Earth rum. Lena sips purified water, visibly horrified to notice there is a floor show featuring a snake, two naked women and a man with two penises.

  Alliea tells a story about a boxing contest which Rob fought in a mining ship. His opponent had gone to the trouble of having metal knuckles surgically inserted under his skin. His gloves went over the steel knuckles, but every time Rob took a punch on the jaw there was an audible clank. Rob protested and asked for a metal-detector check of his opponent’s knuckleware. But the referee was entirely corrupt and allowed the contest to continue. Rob’s jaw was broken in four places but he ducked and weaved and kept landing body punches. Eventually the referee was blinded when the miner vomited blood in his face. Rob seized this moment and with twenty consecutive powerful punches he beat the referee to death then nodded to Alliea to throw in the white towel and concede defeat to the miner.

  Alliea had, of course, bet against Rob. It was a triumphant payday. But not, Alliea explained with a sly grin, not, on account of Rob’s shattered jaw, a night for cunnilingus. We laugh at the vulgar punchline of her story, which she tells with a glorious economy of phrase. Damn, I think I’m in love with this woman. I always have been, in fact. I fear that on occasion, at some deep and warped subconscious level, I’ve allowed Rob to be in greater danger than was strictly necessary, in the hope he’d die and leave me his woman.

  Now he’s dead and his woman isn’t available after all. Alliea is in mourning. I’d forgotten she came from one of the Community of Christianity planets, and belongs to a sect that ritually celebrates the mutilation and execution of the Christ Prophet. I’m an Anti-Secter myself and I’d always assumed that religion had been discredited after the horrors of the Church of the New Millennium all those years ago. But Alliea’s people colonised their planet with zeal and Baptist and Methodist ideals, and Alliea still has some of their juice in her blood.

  But how can you remember and love the man you loved, when he’s dead and gone? Isn’t it time she moved
on and forgot the bastard?

  I swill another papaya and rum, struck with a sudden melancholy. Harry’s telling one of his stories now. It’s the story of an epic run he made across the surface of his home planet during one of their interminable wars. Harry was a national hero then, though now he’s a pariah, blacklisted and under sentence of death.

  Brandon is listening intently, chipping in with witty asides that bolster Harry’s story. Kalen is slightly detached, in her ethereal way. I wonder why I have never desired Kalen. Is it because of her cat genes? That slight air of aloofness she carries?

  I realise I am drunker than I ought to be and I pop a stim pill.

  Jamie attempts a story. He quickly flounders. He has no adventures to tell, he is a child-man who lives in his own head. He starts getting resentful and angry as he realises no one is interested in his inane rambling, but nonetheless we keep up a show of attention and responsiveness. Because he may be a brat – but he’s our brat, and we love him.

  Lena is soaking it all up. I can tell she likes the camaraderie, the storytelling, the easy assumption that we are a gang, and we go everywhere together.

  Kalen turns to Lena. “What’s your story?”

  “I’m not a great raconteuse,” Lena says easily.

  “Neither is Jamie. Boy that story sucked.”

  “Fuck off, I was just getting warmed up.”

  “Tell us about the Bug Wars. Tell us about how you led humanity.”

  “Nothing to tell. It’s in the history books.”

  “Your role is traditionally underplayed.”

  “That’s because I didn’t do too much.”

  “You’ve always been a heroine for me. For one woman to have done so much.”

  “You’re fannykissing me, please don’t.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I once went to a planet,” says Brandon, “where sex was…”

  “Hostiles, two o’clock.”

  Lena looks blank. I shift and see Black Jack’s men moving in on us.

  “You got a problem?” I call out.

  “We have unfinished business.”

  “A trade’s a trade,” I say, reasonable. “ Caveat emptor.”

  Black Jack throws a knife at my throat. I catch it and throw it back. He catches it by the blade.

  “We can settle this in the tournament hall,” Alliea suggests reasonably. Two of Black Jack’s crew swing at her. She ducks and comes up punching.

  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.

  Flanagan

  “That went badly,” says Brandon.

  “Yup,” I reply.

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

  Flanagan

  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.

  Harry

  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?

  Alliea

  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?

  Brandon

  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…

  Lena

  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 A
rachne. 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.