“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.
I see a sparkle on Alliea’s back, I spray her with a ray of blinding light that scalds her armour and burns off the nanowarrior. I raise my gun again – pish pish pish – two sparkles fade to nothing, and a huge hole appears in the bulkhead.
We charge on through, spraying dust, shooting micro-enemies. We are intense, forbidding, absurd, like a SWAT team of delusional schizophrenics shooting at imaginary flies.
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. Blood and brains spray everywhere. The others fire their weapons, incinerating and disintegrating so that not a corpuscle touches the ground.
All that remains is a particle of sparkle, hovering in the air, miraculously unscathed.
Five pulse guns fire as one. The sparkle dies.
I mourn.
I move on.
For twelve hours we hunt the ship, in search of deadly sparkles. By the end, I am bone weary, and I feel the shit backed up in my colon.
“All clear.”
I am asleep on my feet. I stumble. Alliea props me up.
She falls asleep too. We support each other, swaying, sleeping, blinking into wakefulness.
And we hug, and we cry. Rob was her husband, she loved him more than anything.
“My darling, my precious, don’t do this, don’t leave me,” Alliea weeps.
I bawl like a baby, and hold her close.