Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

Explorer and I no longer speak. We are lost in the moment, the to and fro of missiles and energy beams, the switching of shield patterns, the ceaseless rifting to safety just in the nick of time.

  We use our drone ships and robot missiles to create a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth front to the battle. The power of our weapons is awesome, even to me-accustomed as I am to the vast battle fleets of the Olara. For we have spent all this time building up an armoury that dwarfs anything known before in any of the universes. The ship too has grown; it is five hundred thousand times the size it was when Galamea was her commander. And much of the bulk consists of weapons and energy sources and shield generators and layers of armoured hull within more layers of armoured hull.

  But despite our vast bulk we are swift. Swifter than the Death Ship. And powerful. More powerful than the Death Ship. And adept at rifting. More adept than they are.

  Yet why are we not triumphing? Again and again the Death Ship suffers damage that ought to be fatal, but again and again it survives.

  Then the Death Ship starts to waver. It has switched on its disreality drive in order to escape to another universe.

  We attack on all fronts. We charge the Death Ship. This time it cannot endure.

  Sai-ias

  “What kind of catastrophe?” I asked.

  “Can you feel that?” said Quipu One.

  And I could; the tingle down the spine again, coupled with a sense of oddness.

  “We’re passing through a strange place,” said Quipu Two.

  “Experiencing some kind of reality dilation,” said Quipu Three.

  “It is time,” said Quipu Four. “Every seventy-two of my years, with some degree of variation, this sensation occurs. But we do not know why. We suspect dimensional or rift travel of some extraordinary kind is occurring.”

  The oddness intensified. I braced myself; this was a familiar sensation to me also, after all these years on the ship. Yet it was still deeply eerie and unsettling. I felt as if I existed in a million places all at once. I felt sick. Bile rose up in my mouth

  And finally,

  NO!

  The strangeness ended.

  We were back to normal.

  And I was baffled.

  This shouldn’t have happened! Normally the strangeness lasted an hour or more. Had something gone wrong with the Ka’un’s technology? Would they be unable, this time, to flee from their pursuers?

  Jak/Explorer

  The Death Ship is trapped by our disjunctive energy lattices which wrap around the black-sailed ship like webbing around a flailing insect. And we fire another fusillade of missiles from all our vessels, for Explorer and I now exist in sixty different ships at the same time.

  The odds are overwhelming! We surely must prevail!

  Sai-ias

  Quipu and I looked at each other; puzzled and alarmed. The strangeness had passed, but now a terrible foreboding filled us.

  Then the ground beneath us shook.

  “We’ve been hit!” Quipu One exulted. “Someone is actually firing missiles at the ship!”

  “That is,” screamed Quipu Two, “a fair surmise.”

  The ground shook again. The aerials in the sky were dashed out of their flight patterns, thrown around like pebbles tossed in the air. And the sky-the sky!-actually flickered. And then the earth rocked violently to one side and I was rolled across the grass.

  Nearby Fray fell too, then fumbled up to her feet, and bellowed at me.

  Quipu was hissing with fear, clinging to a tree with his strong feet. Lirilla screamed, with rapid shrill shrieks like nothing I had ever heard before.

  And then the world turned upside down.

  And the waters from the lakes and rivers were now pouring down upon us like rain. And creatures were tumbling through air, clutching at trees and rocks, and the air, the air itself was whirling in thick clouds and we were all choking, unable to breath.

  “What’s happening?” someone screamed.

  “Is something attacking us?” another voice yelled.

  “I believe so!” screamed Quipu One.

  “I’ve never felt it like this-”

  “The gravity!” screamed Quipu Two, “has failed!”

  Jak/Explorer

  The hull is ruptured. The Death Ship is dying.

  We’ve won. We’ve won!

  Haven’t we?

  Sai-ias

  “Someone or something is destroying us!” I said exultantly, but no one could hear my words, because of the falling of water and the screaming of aerials tumbling out of the sky and land creatures falling up into the air.

  The sky flickered again. Once again the ship changed course violently, and we were thrown around wildly.

  Gravity mercifully returned, and we crashed back down to the ground.

  Then the earth beneath us trembled even more wildly.

  Lirilla hovered by my head, bruised and shrieking with pain. I caught her in my tentacle, and tucked her in my mouth to keep her safe.

  There was a long silence.

  The ground beneath us shuddered and shook again.

  “I’m certain now that we’re being struck by missiles, or energy blasts, or both,” Quipu One finally concluded. “We’re under constant enemy attack.”

  “Can they actually defeat the Hell Ship though?” I asked.

  “I doubt that,” said Quipu One sadly. “We sent our own fleet against this vessel and they pounded it with weapons; nothing could break though its force shield. The Hell Ship is invulnerable to all-”

  But a final shudder threw us off our feet again. There was a roaring sound. I could tell that something terrible was occurring.

  “However, we might very well be wrong about that!” said Quipu Five brightly.

  And then the shuddering reached its frenzied peak; and the Hell Ship, shockingly, e x p l o d e d.

  Jak/Explorer

  We watch, in awe and marvelment, as the hull of the Death Ship rips open and bodies begin pouring out. We realise that many of these bodies are captives of the Death Ship because they come in such varied shapes and sizes and none are wearing body armour. The bodies explode when they enter a state of vacuum, and the carnage appals us. But all on board the ship must die. There is no other way.

  We harden our heart.

  Sai-ias

  After the explosion, the ground below me opened up. And I found myself tumbling into the hole and then falling and flailing wildly through the layers of the hull itself, until I was floating freely in black space.

  And all was calm and silence, though all about me bodies were erupting into blood and gore. I alone had survived the rupture of the ship’s hull.

  When I looked more carefully around, I could see the many unfamiliar stars that were the hazy backdrop to the myriad corpses of creatures I had known and liked, now ripped into pieces. And, stretching out beneath me like a continent seen from the air, was a huge and eerily beautiful black-sailed space vessel with a silver, glowing hull.

  But though magnificent, the ship was rent and broken. The sails were slack. And bodies continued to pour out of the several huge cracks in the hull and, for reasons I didn’t fathom, they continued to explode and die. Small pieces of flesh and slicks of blood hung messily in space in seeming orbit around my body; and would remain out here as undecayed fragments, I supposed, for all eternity.

  I prayed that my friends were safe, as I sucked up breath from my lungs into my mouth (for Lirilla was trapped there and would need to breathe) and spread my cape and soared through space, propelling myself with gusts of air from my gills, away from the damaged Hell Ship.

  Joy! I was free!

  And instead of breathing air, I was now breathing energy, captured from the undertow of all space that only my kind seem able to perceive and access. And instead of drinking water, I was supping the light from the stars and making it into me.

  And instead of being trapped in a globular cage that mockingly pretended to be a planet, I was swooping through a small and pr
ecious portion of the infinity of space; and I exulted at the end of my captivity!

  I noted however that the main part of the Ka’un’s ship was still intact, even though the rear area had been holed; and I knew that the battle was far from over.

  Then I looked further, using eyes that were as powerful as telescopes, and saw the Hell Ship’s enemy vessel-a huge and ugly spaceship that looked as if it had been constructed by a blind creature with more energy and materials than talent. And at the heart of the asymmetric more-planet-than-spaceship was a striped hub that looked as if it had once been the entire original craft.

  And from this monstrous murder machine pillars of missiles were pouring forth then vanishing then crashing against the shields of the Hell Ship; these corporeal bomb-blasts followed instants later by vision-bending stems of light that also thrashed the Hell Ship’s beautiful lines. Smaller vessels scattered in space were also playing a vicious harrying role in this anarchic battle of light and energy; spitting missiles then darting elsewhere before reprisal could strike. The pace and blur and bright and splash of it all made my perceptions swim; I felt as if I were on the inside a star watching a deadly duel between sunlight and plasma.

  And suddenly, I could hear voices, in my head:

  After all these years…

  We’ll kill the parent fuckers! Kill them!

  Don’t miss.

  I shall not miss.

  As the voices spoke, more missiles were launched from the Ka’un ship and travelled instantaneously through space and exploded on the hull of its enemy vessel. Light splashed on the vast and ugly hull of our potential saviours, but no damage was done; and then the saviour craft retaliated, and haloes of light now appeared above the Hell Ship and crashed down upon it, striking sparks like burning fronds spat from the mouth of a Padiux.

  The blackness of deep space was lit up by missiles exploding and light-haloes writhing and burning, and the invisible walls of protective energy around both ships glowed brightly, oh so brightly, to my eyes which saw energy as if it were light.

  The space between the ships shimmered as deadly beams of energy were unleashed and repelled and reflected back.

  I could hear atoms fusing and sundering and interacting to form massive eruptions of raw power that seared my sight. And I could sense the universe itself being bruised as the two ships dived in and out of tunnels in space, to emerge once more vomiting forth fire and metal and nuclear holocaust.

  The attacking ship vanished; reappeared; vanished; reappeared; and for one astonishing moment it appeared beneath me and my claws were scratching at its hull; and then it was gone again.

  And a moment later, a jagged spike of coloured energy shot through the glow of the Ka’un ship’s shields, and struck the Ka’un ship itself, and my vision blurred again as the massive impact shook the very soul of my perception.

  And, as I watched, more bodies billowed out of the hole in the rear of the Ka’un vessel.

  I glided closer to see them and I recognised arboreals and aerials and sessiles who had been sucked out of the ship, and I saw too I saw too a body in a space suit, with a face as black as a starless sky, and its voice spoke to me. Rescue me, I am your master, said the voice, and I knew it was a Ka’un. It was small, a biped, protected by its space suit but cast adrift into space in the midst of this dazzling space war.

  I wrapped my tentacle around the Ka’un’s body. You can fly in space? You crazy Saviour-shagger! cackled the Ka’un.

  I wanted to break the evil bastard’s body in half with my tentacle and eat him; just as Djamrock would have done.

  And I imagined how that would feel: I imagined the Ka’un’s howls of pain, slowly fading as he died. And I felt a rush of exhilaration. It was in my power to kill a Ka’un! And the power felt good.

  But-I couldn’t do it.

  For some reason, my limbs would not obey me. And so I relaxed the tightness of grip on the Ka’un; I still held him in my tentacle, but gently now.

  I raged at myself; I did not lack the will or desire to kill this creature, but suddenly my body was not my own.

  That’s better. You always do as we tell you, don’t you, sea monster? Now, take me back to the sh -said the Ka’un, then a stray energy beam caught him and his head vanished.

  He was dead. But not through my doing.

  The energy beam also raked my body in passing; I absorbed it, and grew.

  Then out of the front part of the ship, a new vessel appeared, in a twisting turning shape which I knew was called a Helix. And the Helix darted towards the enemy ship, raining missiles as it flew.

  But the enemy ship ignored it, and continued firing its missiles upon the Hell Ship itself. The Helix faded into nothing; it was a mirage, a trick.

  And then another missile struck the Hell Ship’s hull; and time itself seemed to stand still as the Hell Ship erupted in a massive explosion, a single dazzling flash! The ship lit up like a Biollai seed exploding and igniting in mid-air.

  And then the light faded and there was nothing left. No Hell Ship, just debris.

  The corona of light had dazzled my eyes, though I felt no heat on my carapace. I floated in space with my cape outspread and the memory of the dead Ka’un in the spacesuit haunting my mind.

  And I realised that it was all over. All my friends were dead; but so were all the Ka’un.

  Fragments of the hull of the Hell Ship drifted closer to me. Corpses and coils of blood and limbs and torsos and heads and ruptured internal organs cluttered the once-empty blackness of space.

  The attacking ship was badly damaged, but intact. I began to glide towards it, hoping they would realise I was a friend and not Ka’un. But something held me, and tugged at me; I felt as if I was in a dream and had no power over my own body. I was being pulled, pulled, pulled And then the pulling stopped. But when I tried once more to glide through space, I found I could not. I could no longer swirl and swoop, and I could not go beyond a certain point here. Or a certain point there.

  These obstacles to my movements were corporeal. Not like a force shield, such as that which surrounded the Tower; more like walls.

  I was surrounded by walls!

  I summoned my inner eyes and saw the truth; and the truth was that I was no longer in space surrounded by stars; I was in a hangar bay shaped like a huge globe within a space vessel. And the walls of my confining space were silver, just like my cabin; the light was pale and yellow, just like the light from our sun.

  I was back inside the Hell Ship.

  And the strangeness was upon me again. We were travelling somewhere far away; escaping the enemy’s wrath.

  I spat, and Lirilla emerged from my mouth.

  “Safe?” she asked, plaintively.

  “Not safe,” I told her, sombrely.

  My cape retreated back into my body. And I realised that the destruction of the Hell Ship had, like the appearance of the smaller Helix vessel, been just an illusion.

  The Hell Ship had been damaged, I was sure of that, but not destroyed. And then it had fled; and it was now, once again, swimming in what Quipu called the rivers of chaotic flux until, at some point, it would re-enter the Real.

  And then it would all, the terror and the horror, begin again.

  Jak/Explorer

  What joy! What release! After all this time, they’re dead! Those cruel parent-fuckers are dead! We’ve won!

  You know, I can’t believe it! To see that black-sailed vessel engulfed in the flames of a space-burning missile. To know that, finally, we have managed to take revenge for what they did to Olara! And to my family on Olara. And to all my people. The ghosts of all these Olarans will Say something Explorer?

  We’ve won. Haven’t we? Tell me we have won? Why aren’t you speaking to me?

  I’m not sure exactly what happened there.

  What the fornication are you on about? You saw it. We both saw it. Sensors, visuals, all confirm. The Hell Ship blew up and is no more.

  Wait.

  Tell me what you dete
ct.

  I detect many things.

  Then tell me what you conclude.

  The data is inconclusive.

  And what does the inconclusive data suggest to your wreck of a mind?

  It suggest there is no debris consistent with the explosion of such an exceptionally large rift-drive space vessel. It’s chaff, bits of matter scattered in a pattern that superficially resembles a blown-up spaceship.

  What are you saying? And please don’t say it, even if it’s true. No, tell me-what?

  It was a trick. We did not destroy the Death Ship.

  An illusion?

  A corporeal holographic projection, that disintegrated in front of our eyes and registered on all my sensors. Like the Helix ship we fought, which they expected us to treat as the “real” vessel but which turned out to be nothing but a chimera. These creatures have technology that allows them to mimic reality with remarkable verisimilitude to all our electromagnetic, visual and mass sensors. They duped us twice in other words, and the second time we fell for it; and the Death Ship used the moment of the deceptive distraction to evade our restraining lattices and enter another universe.

  Bastards.

  As you say, bastards. And now we are giving chase.

  We can do that?

  We are doing it.

  How can we do that? We have no way of knowing which universe they are in, surely? You swore to me that I don’t know how we can do it. I am just attempting to do it, out of complete fucking desperation.

  I understand, calm yourself.

  It is folly. We can never find them. But we shall try. Instead of waiting here, we will pursue avidly. But not by travelling through a single universe at a time. No, we shall stay here at the Source and dip in and out of a million different universes with dazzling speed until we smell our prey. Because I believe we can detect them from afar now; I know the trail they leave. Death, destruction, and messages from lost civilisations trapped in the ripples of reality.