GIRLS IN BIKINIS ON ROLLER SKATES IN OUTER 
SPACE VERSUS BIKINI GIRLS WITH MACHINE GUNS

Inspired by the work of Rachel Lilim and MIKA. 

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.  

Strike team on deck booting up. This is it, ladies. Time for the floor show; a new ankle sheath for her vintage K-bar, a plated leather harness, a microdrone capable of injecting a chemical compound directly into the bloodstream. Victims become walking time bombs. No way to control the detonation, but it’s become a new game to infect someone with the clearance to walk straight into the strategy room. 

Because it’s a competition, people get ridiculous. Shuriken and katanas get special pouches on the ammo belt. Individual pockets for each caltrop. Sarge is wearing sunglasses in space, for fuck’s sake, but she’s in good company with the girls wearing metal halos or nails driven through gauntlets on their wrists. They’ve made death not just a sport but an art form. Ornamentation doesn’t determine their kill count but it does boost their optics. The tallest girl wears pauldrons with a three foot wingspan to cut off her own squad in tight quarters. Bright, artificial colors make for easy identification in a firefight. There are no chest-high walls to crouch behind on the streamlined deck of an interstellar vehicle. Even if there were, scanners and cameras make hiding impossible. Armor reverts back to the spectacle of a jousting match. Someone once made it a point to bear her belly for every battle, and now the trend is a tradition. New recruits are laughed at for being insecure about their soft middrifts. Nothing is practical in warfare. 

Every hull is silent when first breached, but there’s a taste of danger in the thick, artificial air. Something has them on the alert. Sarge says instinct is thought without words. The team is trained to obey whims, so without clear reasons they all get collectively anxious. 

A new recruit notices it before the veterans; “Gravity’s low.” 

Crestfallen grumbles. She’s right. It wasn’t obvious because of the closed, dusty, static-cling smell in the air, but even though their breath weighs on their lungs their step is light. Too light. Off regulation. 

This must be how fish feel in a tank, deaf to the monotonous buzz of the motor and dumb to the absence of eddies in their dinky little tanks. They don’t know anything but their cultivated environment and they’re too stupid to learn. A human being should know the difference between a domestic and natural biome. 

Sarge shushes the platoon. Self-pity is for downtime. The mission needs full attention, or you could have the last thought in your head tonight. 

Night and day is meaningless in a vessel with its own orbit around a star. Soldiers find themselves assigning new meaning to the words. For example, night is traditionally for sleeping and so designations like ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ define periods of alertness. Night is also when our ancestors first saw the cosmic abyss, so black ops are nocturnal activities. Whether they sync with the traditional 24 hour cycle of day and night doesn’t matter, because even the clock is simply a metronome by which the crew conduct themselves. 

It is 01:06. The boarded ship is quiet except for the barely perceptible sizzle of static. Dyed manes release satellites, standing upright like quills. Like deep sea fish lures. Adrenaline enters the bloodstream. Amphetamines direct the brain. Death has entered the ship, like a wave on an ancient boat, but a soldier’s grip steadies the flow. One by one the platoon fans out. One girl disappears behind a door. Through shadow on the wall and the subtle crack of armor they see her pounce. A dull impact and the rustle of dead weight falling tells of her success. 

Emboldened, another soldier enters a different room. The game is started, the scores are rolling in. Padded footfalls come quicker. The wave rolls down the hall and breaks across a forked path, overtaking multiple pathways at once. The rhythmic clicking of doorways rolling open and shut becomes louder and more frequent. Blood pounds like a drum against the skin. Underneath the quiet, building cacophony comes a new sound, just as subtle, just as smooth. Unbreaking. The low scraping noise continues on and on. There is a sound like an egg cracking and then a short rattle of machine gun fire. By the time the platoon discovers the noise, the new recruit is long dead. Her face is caved in and her blood is hanging in a streak in midair. 

Sarge signals for attention, counts five soldiers and leads them down the trail of blood. In the next chamber they discover that the rounded hallways are not an aesthetic choice but designed to maximize their artificial gravity. Hallways lead above and around them, like a hive. The whole ship could rotate completely and function undisturbed. 

A girl appears above them in a flash, leaps off the wall and crushes the Sergeant’s skull with a metal pipe. A fitting screw catches on a pocket of skin and tears silently, like latex. Thick latex glued to fat. The last pumps of her heart sprays blood everywhere, where it hangs in the low gravity like ink on water. The skater tries to escape but is nailed by the gunner, filling her exposed back with lead. Chunks of meat atomize under heavy fire. The hallway takes a few bullets but a hull needs more than bullets to unleash the vacuum. When they examine the body they find nothing but dyed hair, an iridescent swim suit and a scuffed pair of roller skates. When they look up they find matching scuff marks on the walls around them. 

A veteran laughs and hefts her own gun. “Easy victory!” 

The rest cheer and brandish their barrels. Now that they know what they’re up against the battle is as good as over. What can roller skates and blunt weapons do against heavy artillery? 

Soldiers prowl bloodthirsty through rounded corridors with their teeth bared, waiting, watching. Even with all their advantages this is still unfamiliar territory, and death is not a controllable force. They relay intelligence over comms but even with knowledge and ammunition they can hear comrades fall in stereo through the headpiece. Collapse and destruction courses through the ship like a riptide. The wave is retreating and the metaphor is starting to fall under its own weight. The girls revert back to a black ops team. 

The rattle of wheels and a swing of an improvised weapon and another good soldier goes down. Galaxy-printed swimwear disappears behind a smoothed corner. Some make it, some don’t. It’s hard to tell if the scores are equal. Better to narrow your focus to living and dying and count the dead in the morning. Things are not going according to plan, but when does any battle? Girls in bikinis on roller skates in outer space versus bikini girls with machine guns, and yet the trained op team with heavier machinery is still taking damage. And yet they don’t expect differently, because no system is invincible. Better to know they have some edge on the enemy. The gun is still mightier than scrap metal, and so through perseverance and a hail of bullets the boarding team might outlast them. 

Death and battle don’t end gloriously. No cinematic moment signals the end. The last girl lays alone in the belly of the ship, firing into a far wall. Her bullets ricochet off the rounded walls like return fire. The flare from her gun causes a strobe-like effect. The bodies across the ship are animated by flickering lights like a nineteenth century film. She is firing into nothing, but it is safer than coming out of shelter. Blood hangs in midair like smoke. The ship, now unmanned, slowly tilts on its axis and begins to roll. She feels it in her stomach, but in the flickering strobe of her gun everything is static, everything is still.