Ashe vs Manners
Mercyblades is a swashbuckling sci-fi novel about transhuman vigilantes who fight the good fight in an optimistic, post-scarcity future. You can find it on Amazon. This is chapter one, offered as an example of writing using the Bullet Drafts method.
This isn’t about orbital mechanics. Not even a little. It’s about principle. It’s about treating people with respect, even when that person is just a brain in a jar. Especially when that brain and that jar are inside a heavily armed, high-g spacecraft. Especially then.
The Echo had been slung comfortably wide around Ceres when a glorified covered wagon blasted its skinny arse across her clearly registered flight path. Nothing the lithe, little Echo couldn’t dodge, of course, but that’s not the point. Common courtesy is the point! Naturally, Ashe broke orbit and went after them, selflessly donating her time to teach the owners of that barely mobile junkyard a desperately needed lesson on right of way.
The spindlecraft hasn’t gotten far. It’s basically an elevator shaft with a fusion drive attached. Everything else — hydrogen tanks and living quarters and whatever the hells — just bolted onto them any old way, without a thought for structural integrity or operational efficiency or good forking taste. They just chug along at a constant 1g acceleration, perfect for meat-bodies and mouth-breathers in no particular hurry to get anywhere… except directly in Ashe’s way, apparently.
The Echo, on the other hand, is like an elegant equation: short, powerful, and ruthlessly efficient. Half her mass is propulsion, not a gram wasted. A quartet of high-g thrusters are tucked against the sides of her rectangular hull, alive with indigo glow. The rest of her is mostly fusion reactor, since her captain has no need for living quarters or squicky life support systems. So gross. Her synthetic brain is safely nestled behind a nose cone bristling with weapons… no, let’s call them “teaching aids.”
Even at acceleration that would have crushed a meat-brain against its bone box, it takes The Echo a few minutes to overtake her prey. Ashe passes the time by running four hundred and thirty-eight tactical simulations of the sweet, sweet revenge that’s about to take place…
Simulation #87 — The Echo sneaks up the splindlecraft’s drive plume and fires her railgun right up its aftermarket keister. They tumble into the black and think about what they’ve done until the overworked tugs of Ceres drag them back to port.
Simulation #122 — The Echo flips nose to tail as it sails past those scraphats and uses its particle cannon to violently decouple all their fuel, cargo, and weapons modules, then etches an enormous penis into their hull. The humiliation gives them a moment of clarity and they resolve to always deorbit politely in the future.
Simulation #203 — The Echo comes in high and hot, right across their vector, thrusters turned sideways so she can get a clear shot at their fusion reactor. It explodes like a coronal mass ejection, killing everyone instantly. Ashe puts that one in the “maybe” pile.
Simulation #379 — Ashe hails the spindlecraft and engages its crew in a reasoned, compassionate discourse about the effect their actions had on her. Like, emotionally. They apologize and everyone parts ways feeling good about themselves. Meh.
After sober consideration, Ashe goes with Simulation #48, a nice middle ground that’s aggro, but not homicidal; clever, but not underhanded; educational, but she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. Perfect.
And it all starts with some long-range electronic warfare…
Ashe stands on the bow of her simulated schooner, raven hair thrashing in the ocean wind, sun warming her metaphorical skin. Behind her, a busy port slips rapidly over the horizon. First the rooftops, then the thicket of masts in the bay, and finally the tippy top of the lighthouse disappears.
Ahead of her, a junk steamer trudges across the waves. They’re on the same course, but her schooner is faster by far and its sails are full to bursting. Once they’re alone on the waves, Ashe steps off the bow and now she’s a tiny seabird, beating her wings furiously against the gale, crossing the distance to the junker in moments.
She perches on its stern railing and now she’s standing in the lobby of a bank, getting the hairy eyeball from a portly security guard. Mustache and everything, really living the cliche. Ashe is herself again, tall and graceful, her diaphanous dress stirring in a breeze that’s for her alone.
Her target is the wall of safety deposit boxes in the back. The guard is armed and already aware of her, but he’s also a sloppily coded, piece-of-scrap expert system. No match for Ashe. She places one hand on the door handle and hangs on as the entire room tips out from under her. Desks and chairs and mustachioed security programs tumble across the floor and pile up against the teller windows like flotsam on the shore.
Ashe lets go and drops through the building, a clear path through the chaos. Her dress billows like a bellflower as she floats into the safety deposit room and lands barefoot on the back wall. She conjures a comically crowded ring of keys and splits herself into a dozen copies that checks every lock until one of them clicks.
And now she’s crashing a garden party. Fancy men and women from an age long past wander around an ornate fountain, mingling and parting ways along paths that match the debris field around Ceres. Ashe maps it against her own sensor data and finds the rosy-cheeked little boy who represents The Echo. She’s momentarily incensed by his ridiculous pantaloons, but she picks the lad up and moves him just an itty bit to the left.
That should do it. She breaks the connection…
Their first shot goes so wide that Ashe doesn’t bother waving at the stream of high-energy particles as it passes by. The Echo’s ion thrusters swivel out on their mounting arms and send her spiraling through space, her path as unpredictable as turbulence. The ship’s powerful magnetic field swats away any lucky shots. Between that and the inaccuracy Ashe just added to their targeting system, nothing can touch her at long range.
Unfortunately, she needs to get closer for the fun she has in mind. Much closer. Even more unfortunately, the spindlecraft’s captain isn’t as stupid as they (presumably) look. Their ship disgorges a swarm of irritating drones: gun turrets and tectacle-faced capturecraft. The former maneuver to flank her as the latter move to intercept. The overgrown barbecue skewer they’re protecting pours on an extra g of acceleration.
Awww! They think they can run. Adorable.
Ashe overclocks her neural network and time slows down. She finds the safest path through the hail of hot lead that comes for her, then spins her thrusters around at blazing speed. Literally blazing; her heat sinks glow like coals. Three quick hits from her own particle cannon and the gunner drones are no more.
New targets light up along the spindlecraft’s mismatched modules: three banks of particle cannons. If she gets any closer, they’ll slag The Echo in a blink, so Ashe launches her missiles…
Warhead GG255 has lived a good life. She was born from The Echo’s cozy womb and sent out into the universe with a single, righteous mission: attach herself to a particularly hateful particle cannon and teach it a lesson in manners. Between her and that glorious destiny lies only an expanse of harsh light and hard vacuum littered with death rays, tentacle monsters, and exploding debris.
Gigi and her two hundred forty-nine siblings hug each other as they leap into the abyss. Other families, riding other missiles, fan out into the black on white-hot chemical rockets of their own. Everyone is excited, full of potential (energy), eager to find their targets and really make a difference in the world, you know?
The walls shudder and everyone says their tearful goodbyes. “Best of luck!” “Bon voyage!” “Don’t ever change!” They promise to stay in touch, but no one really means it.
Then the missile breaks open and it’s every warhead for herself! They race into the black, dancing away from the only home they’ve ever known, giddy with newfound freedom. Gigi looks back at The Echo; she’s never seen it from the outside before. She can’t believe how small it looks. Her entire childhood happened in a crack in the nose cone of a metal box hurtling through space. A matte black dot.
A flash of light from the spindlecraft, source of all evil, and one of Gigi’s brothers is no more. His only grave marker is a bloom of heat and sparks that flares brilliantly, then slowly fades. It could just as easily have been her. Another flash, another sibling. Then another and another. Gigi wonders if her fate will be the same, her grand mission rendered an empty promise. She tries to live in the moment.
The spindlecraft looms larger and larger. As she passes into its shadow, she sees the stars for the first time. They’re beautiful, like ten thousand tiny, exploding siblings. For the briefest moment, she grasps the true scale of the universe. It makes her feel immeasurably small, utterly insignificant, but part of something absolutely amazing.
And then she collides with a particle cannon and explodes.
It’s the only thing she ever wanted.
That just leaves the pack of heavy drones, with even heavier engines, burning toward The Echo with their greedy, grasping tentacles. If they manage to get a hold of her, it’ll be all over but the futile struggling. A sustained blast of high-energy particles slags the first of them before the rest can get into range.
Close range. Ashe’s favorite range.
She rotates all four of her drives and rolls like a ferris wheel. The nearest drone gets nailed by her dorsal thruster as it hammers down, crushing the poor thing. The impact sends it careening away into the black. Ashe kicks herself into a spin, nose over tail, and puts her ventral thruster up a second squiddie’s tailpipe. Its ion plume flickers out and it drifts away, impotent tentacles flailing madly.
With three down, two more get their meat hooks on her lateral thrusters. They accelerate away from the spindlecraft, trying to slow The Echo down, but Ashe stretches out her mounting arms and brings them together in front of her nose. The hyenas smash against each other; bits of hull and tentacles fly in every direction. Ashe finishes them off with a pinch of particle cannon.
And then there was one. Unfortunately, it’s already crawling up her armpit, tearing away at her starboard mounting arm and lashing her hull with its repulsive face. She tucks her arms in close, crushing the little monster like a nut, then rolls and rolls until centrifugal force clears away the wreckage.
The universe corkscrews around Ashe in a nauseating blur. Her indigo drive plums flash like searchlights, correcting one degree of freedom after another. Just as she straightens herself out, that first wounded drone comes lurching back and throws its grapples all over her nose cone. Ashe can feel them probing her open missile bays and wrapping around her precious particle cannon.
Panicking, she shunts power into a pair of massive, electromagnetic rails. The milliseconds tick by with such sickening slowness, Ashe imagines she and her enemy are falling together into the event horizon of a black hole. The rest of the universe races away to infinity, leaving them behind forev —
Finally, her railgun fires! Powerful magnets grip a metal slug in her heart and hurl it directly through the drone’s hiddeous, writhing face. Not to mention the rest of it. She’d been saving that round for the spindlecraft, but what’s a girl to do?
Improvising, she sprints ahead of the cowardly space canoe and pulls a high-g turn right across their bow. Her particle cannon flashes, making quick work of their fusion drive and leaving them adrift, deftly illustrating her point about… something. Manners?
And then she carves a penis into their hull.
