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.