by Liz Heldmann

read by Pamela Quevillion

This story has not been published previously.

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For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our sortable Wikipedia page

about the author…

Credits: The Australian science fiction magazine Cosmos: The Science of Everything published my hard sci fi story “Echoes” and “Inspiration” was printed in the first Antipodean SF Anthology. Other credits include the comparative mythology fantasy “Realms of Gold” and Jupiter mining sci fi “Bright Cloud of Music,” both at Neverworlds The Unique Fiction Webzine.  I was short-listed for the Random House/Transworld Australia George Turner Prize for my manuscript “Hashakana”.

about the narrator…

Pamela Quevillon is a writer and narrator who lives in the St Louis area and gives voice to everything from planetarium shows to documentary movies from her not necessarily well heated attic. You can find more of her narration  as part of the Space Stories series on 365 Days of Astronomy and on past episodes of Escape Pod.

 

Inseparable

by Liz Heldmann

The disruptor net hit the ocean with an eruption of steam. Obscuring billows gouted up in columns of gray and white and the target was close enough that the aft hull immediately registered a thermic spike. The temperature shot from swampy greenhouse to hot-as-fucking-Hades. Technically speaking.

Around the quadrant, warships were deploying nets as weaponry. Best not to think about that. Science was the new war, according to Delia.

The weave generated out of the arse end of the ship was coarse, each node tuned two-dimensionally to its neighbors in a honeycomb lattice that formed a curved plane. A great big seine made of plasma, dragging a world ocean underneath a sun that filled the forward viewscreen as if trying to muscle out of the frame.

Both density and chemistry dials had been spun and today’s net split the surly bonds between hydrogen and oxygen wherever it encountered them in a medium of approximately one gram per cubic centimeter. Which meant that the net sliced through alien waters like gamma rays through goose shit and didn’t so much as muss the hair of any entities it scooped up in the process.

Forget ‘Take me to your leader’. We quit asking nicely a few planetary systems in.

Just about the day we got our first sentient ‘Thanks, but no thanks, and by the way, eat plasma’.

Hence the warships.

The thought of slammin’ and jammin’ in the spaces between worlds raised a bit of nostalgia in a girl.

“All right, Shar, bring her up!” Delia’s shout interrupted before I got all weepy.

The science vehicle, romantically named ScV-341, burped inertial brakes out of its titanium skin and gimbaled 45°. The net raveled in. A telltale with the image of a stepped-on snail floating above it went green, the deck vibrated and the ship pinged a saccharine little public service announcement. “Aft hold, secure.”

“Thank you, ship.” We’d been excessively polite to each other ever since Delia had told me it was beneath me to argue with a ship over operational procedure. What she’d told it, I don’t know.

Ping. “Inertial sink projecting.”

“Thank you, ship.”

Ping. “Would you like auto nav? It’s a difficult—”

“Shut up, ship.” I hit the switch, screwed the bitch and let the shuttle scratch my itch. To fly. An itch I shared with legions of mostly younger up-and-comers. One of whom had up and come right into my zero-g couch on Gossamer while I was in-system indulging a different itch.

The shuttle zipped. The Nav Hag at Pilot Bay had a quip for wannabe aether jocks. What’s the shortest line between two points? Folding them together. When you figure out how to do that, let me know. Until then, zip it.

The contrail we left behind showed on scope as a straight line connecting the surface to the darkly purpling curvature of sky. As the water planet fell away, the contrail began to feather out and bend, bowing to trajectory and King Coriolis.

***

Delia was elbow deep[...]