Space Web.

“’ow are you feeling, mate?" asked Cor Blimey.

He continued rubbing the tired feet of the first mate. Michael Bubble was playing softly in the background, and it wasn’t a recording—it was the real McCoy, complete with banjo and xylophone accompaniment.

Rapudah Thebewdah sighed in pure bliss, the hiss of the aromatherapy program a silent reminder to get her credit limit raised.

“Fine, thank you, captain,” she practically shivered in a sober and objective analysis of the facts.

“Oi! Don’t wet nuffink spoyo wet,” said Cor.

“All right, all right,” she said, putting her teacup back on the rim of the samovar and seven-headed hookah combo, a fake family heirloom from the 1950’s in Grand Rapids, as she always said.

There was a companionable silence as Cor prattled on silently, lips moving in fretful counterpoint to the lonely thoughts rattling inside of his brain-bucket right there beside the door.

“Sensual,” she said.

“Come a gyne?” he said.

“Sensual,” she clarified. “I feel sensual.”

“Buggah me dingo,” said Cor. “So do Oi.”

***

As Cor inserted the dental-floss needle to administer a cooling, mint-flavoured douche to the spleen, the ship lurched, once, but once was enough and zero would have gone unnoticed.

“Two and two togethah and Oi think we’s just hit something! Buggah!” said Cor, all his efforts rendered nugatory by the unexpected come-uppance of the good ship Bonnie Dune.

“We had better have a look,” sighed Rapudah, noting that the pitch and yaw readouts were way up in the red.

So that was okay, then.

“Wot is that?” said Cor with unusual clarity.

The rueful pair stared at the display. It looked like something cylindrical or tubular was stuck to the hull plating up near the nose.

Swinging the external camera head around, Cor showed Rapudah the thing, or stuff.

“Why, that goes on for parsecs!” she gasped. “What the heck is it?”

“That’s not the word Oi would have used,” noted Cor lugubriously, there was another word, and it was one which he probably couldn’t even spell.

As the ship rotated and spun around, Cor was struck by inspiration.

“What should Oi do?” he asked.

“Throttle down!” she suggested languidly. “It’s just a waste of fuel at this point.”

***

“Wot the bluddy heow is thet?” blurted Cor.

An abstractly patterned grid or net appeared to be strung in space.

“It looks like a net!” Rapudah gasped, womanly bosom heaving with sternly expressed emotions.

"Aw wuss,” noted Cor. “A bluddy spoidah wib! Buggah!”

Briefly, for a short period of time, their eyes met in inscrutably silent query…

“Whudduhyah think, muthah?” Cor said to her in an interrogative fashion.

“Let’s have a look,” she ventured.

And nothing ventured, nothing wasted.

***

The slightly transparent filament was indeed stuck to the forward port nichrotrowettlicker, er; assembly.

“So woddah wy goonna do neow?” solicited Cor in an eclectic comment on the state of the Cosmos as a hole.

“Torch it off, maybe,” suggested Rapudah. “Before it rains, or something.”

“Rhynes? Rhynes? Aw yew mad, wooman?”

As Cor engorged his fanciful gaze upon the lovely mien of the chick he was banging, her jaw dropped and she pointed o’er his shoulder.

“Ah!” she screamed, and then she was saying stuff like, ‘Eaugh, yuck!” and clinging to poor old Cor like a bluddy limpet.

Gracelessly swinging around on the maneuvering jets as was his custom, Cor saw the biggest bluddy space spider the erstwhile pair had ever encountered, before or since.

“Buggah me dingo,” said Cor in awe, as the thing reeled them in from the vicinity of a big gas giant with a ring system that made his hemorrhoids look sick.

“We’d better get out of here,” noted Rapudah in a kind of pissed-off objectivity.

Still, it wouldn’t do to be eaten by the thing when they could so easily get away…maybe.

***

Rapudah had a plan.

“We’ll suit up,” she explained. “You go out there and kill it with the spear-gun, and I’ll keep the airlock open.”

“Roight!” said Cor. “And then wot?”

“Then we can cut the thing off,” she patiently and angrily explained.

“Oh! Roight!” he said. “Woy do you need a suit?”

“In case you forget to close the door again,” she noted sweetly. “Remember last time?”

“Buggah me dingo,” noted Cor in acknowledgement of this deep and fundamental truth.

***

So that’s what they did. Not only that, Rapudah figured the skin would fetch a Kazillion space-pence at the auction house on Earwig Nine.

“Well, you’ve earned your reward,” she said, chucking her clothes in the general direction of the galley where Cor was boiling lots of water and tearing up sheets for bandages.

Cor came into the room with a cheerful, expectant look on his homely visage.

“We could have some oice cream, muthah,” he said. “That woo’on be so bad roight about now.”

***

Photo: NASA/ESA