PROSE FICTION

Jeremy Levett Starbreakers

The process is not, in truth, all that complicated. The rock is surveyed, its mass and density ascertained. Stays are drilled into its core and motors attached; sometimes, an abort mechanism is added, though usually not. The most sophisticated aspect is navigation. The calculations are logical enough, but the raw data must be perfect. Once the course has been determined and the relative positions of the rock and the target ascertained – once the planets have aligned, if you will - the motors fire, and the rock accelerates. It passes for a time through the depthless vacuum; once its fuel has burnt away, it is acted on only by the gravitic tug of distant stars and the faint drift of the galaxy a-whirl all about it. Then, if the aiming solution is good, it makes contact with the target and, through a brief but intense series of interactions that can be explained to you by any schoolboy caught doodling explosions in his Physics class, introduces that target to all the pent-up hate and frustration of the rock’s engineers.

I can see the rock now, through the Blantyre’s one real window. I’ve been seeing images of it almost constantly for a year, from mission-briefing models six months and three systems away to crass, blurred “action footage” from a few hours ago as the Longstreet’s gunners shot off the booster engines at unnecessarily close range. As it lies before me now it’s a tiny glint, only visible by the reflected sunlight. But say what you like, there’s something special about seeing things with your own eyes.

Starbreakers, Inc., say the patches on my suit and the livery on the hull of the Blantyre. It’s an ugly, stupid name thought up by people who believe in brand management, men and women in suits I’m glad I’ll never meet. We are not the biggest or the oldest of the rock-stopping operations around – both of those titles are for Spiros & Harker – but our oh-so-understated ads, placed in the pages of people who pray they’ll never need us, say we’re the best. Response times matter in this business, and we’re faster than S&H; less institutional inertia, less of the stultifying regulation that comes from trying to standardise something too big over too wide a space. S&H have fossilised as a corporation; we might overtake them in a few years, and have our own turn at the top of the slippery pole, underdogs snapping at our vulnerable nethers. The only other serious contender on the interstellar stage are Weltabwehr, who kicked off fif-