Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  Sai-ias

  My world was chaos.

  I had returned to the interior world from the hull bay to find the lake emptied of water, bodies strewn all around; and a vast fissure stretching across the Great Plain. But gravity had been restored; and now the shattered bodies of the dead and injured in the attack lay on the grass and savannah and in the muddy lake bed, rather than hovering in mid-air as before.

  “Sai-ias.” A flutter of wings by my head; Lirilla was still with me.

  “Save me,” Lirilla said, in acknowledgement of the fact I had saved her. Though she did not know why; for she had no notion we had been friends for hundreds of years.

  “Quipu? Fray? Doro? Are they safe?” I asked.

  She knew the names of these beasts of course. And obediently, Lirilla vanished, and returned.

  “Quipu, safe,” she said.

  “Fray? Doro?”

  “No Fray. No Doro.”

  She had been around the ship and back in the blink of an eye; I knew she could not be wrong.

  Quipu was safe; but Doro and Fray were missing; fallen, or so I feared, through the crack in our world.

  “Sai-ias?” said Lirilla anxiously.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  “Lirilla, fear, full,” said Lirilla.

  “You’re safe, you’re safe. I’m here now.”

  “Lirilla, wish, dead.”

  “What are you saying sweet bird?”

  “Lirilla, wish, dead-ship.”

  “Me too. Me too.”

  But the attack had failed; the Ka’un were still alive.

  We spoke of it that night, Quipu and Lirilla and I, in the hours after the disaster; in a series of rambling and repetitive dialogues.

  “No need to ask who,” said Quipu One. “We know who.”

  “Some lost civilisation,” added Quipu Two.

  “Seeking revenge,” added Quipu Three.

  “From this universe or from some other universe?” asked Quipu Four.

  The Quipus together intoned: “We will never know.”

  “It must have pursued us,” said Quipu Three, “for-who knows how long.”

  “And yet it failed,” Quipu One pointed out.

  “It tried, at least,” said Quipu Three. “There’s grandeur in that. My own people-well. We were so powerful and yet-we-”

  “Gone,” said Quipu One, “like a light being switched off; all our people, gone.”

  “Ground, healed?” said Lirilla. For earlier that day the crevasse that had opened up in the grasslands slowly, over the space of several hours, had closed.

  “I do not know how that could have happened,” admitted Quipu Four.

  “Magic,” I said.

  “Not magic,” contradicted Quipu Two. “Some kind of force-field effect.”

  “?” said Quipu Five, who was struggling to keep up with the discussion.

  “A structural skeleton made of invisible force,” agreed Quipu Three. “When the hull is breached, the force field rejoins; the metal is forced back into place.”

  “I touched it,” I reminded Quipu, as I kept doing every few minutes. “I touched the ship.”

  And so we sat there, stunned, survivors of a disaster, huddled and muttering the same things over and over: “It was terrible.” “We almost died.” “I can’t believe it!” and so on, endlessly.

  “I touched it,” I muttered again. My claws had scraped the hull of their vessel, before I had been scooped up by invisible beams of force and made captive once again.

  I remembered the vast and awkward shape of the attacking ship; and its squat central hub, with its colourful stripes faded by time; and the inscription on the top of the vessel, blazoning a name which, even in the absence of the translating air, I had somehow been able to read, which said:

  Explorer 410: Property of the Olara Trading Fleet.

  “Explorer 410,” said Quipu Two, “Property of the Olara Trading Fleet.”

  “Yes,” I confirmed.

  “Not even a warship,” said Quipu Three. “A reconnaissance vessel, for a merchant fleet. And it was nearly our salvation.”

  “Nearly,” I said.

  “But why did the Ka’un save you, Sai-ias?” asked Quipu One. “They plucked you out of space; why you, and not any of the others?”

  “I do not know,” I said.

  Over the next few days and nights, Quipu interrogated me at length; and pieced together the progress and nature of the space battle.

  One or more of the missiles fired by the attacking spaceship had struck its target; that much could not be denied. And that missile had ripped several holes in our hull, through which I, and Doro and Fray and so many others, had tumbled out. But the ship that I had seen that looked like a Helix was but an illusion. And thus, Quipu concluded, the Hell Ship that was destroyed before my eyes must have been illusion too.

  “The cheapest of tricks,” said Quipu One.

  “A distortion of space-time,” added Quipu Two, “that allowed an image to linger here when the reality had moved there.”

  It was clear to all of us that Explorer 410: Property of the Olaran Trading Fleet had been duped by a conjurer’s stunt. If only it had fought on, and fired more missiles, it might have succeeded in once again striking the invisible but real Hell Ship; and the result of the battle would have been quite different.

  This thought haunted me. These aliens who attacked us had been so very close to victory. A single miscalculation had cost them everything.

  A few weeks later Fray returned; though Doro did not.

  Once again, Fray’s memories were gone; and once again she was convinced her world had only just been destroyed.

  It was agonising to see the rawness of her pain. And painful too to witness her bewilderment when she was told of a great space battle in which she had “died,” though she remembered nothing of it.

  Other fatalities of the battle were in the same plight; their bodies were intact, but they knew nothing of what had just happened. It was a whole army of new ones, all at the same time; and there was no way for me to ease them gently into their new world.

  As Cuzco would have said: they had to fly or die.

  Why did Doro not return?

  And was he actually dead? Perhaps that strange creature could actually survive in the depths of space? Perhaps he shifted his shape one final time, to be a star among stars?

  In the cycles that followed the failed attack on the Hell Ship, our world was in turmoil. Many angry creatures stalked the interior world; duels and vicious assaults were commonplace.

  But I did not care; not any more. For my entire personality had changed.

  I was no longer calm, reassuring, and accepting. Instead, I was engulfed in a constant edgy rage.

  The smallest things infuriated me. I found that I could no longer tolerate the company of others. Even Quipu, even Lirilla, enraged me by their very presence.

  After a while I stopped spending the nights in my cabin with my so-called friends and their wretched fucking stories. Instead, I slept outside, in the pitch black night, atop mountain crags or in the depths of the lake.

  And each dawn I re-entered the world after a night’s dark reverie of regrets.

  I thought about Sharrock a lot. I was convinced that if he and I had had acted sooner, our rebellion might have prevailed. With my strength, and his knowledge of warfare, we would have been an unstoppable team.

  Another missed opportunity. First Sharrock; then Explorer 410: Property of the Olaran Trading Fleet.

  Though these two failures did, I realised, prove the Ka’un were not invulnerable.

  Indeed, as I had seen while floating in space, they were slight creatures, bipeds, with no natural armour. I could kill one easily! I could snap its body in half and swallow it, and crunch its bones in the ridges of my gut which is robust enough, if the mood takes me, to consume raw rock.

  These pathetic puny easily-killed creatures-how could I ever have been afraid of such as they?

 
Many cycles passed. The new ones were becoming acclimatised. The daily violence began to lessen. The Rhythm of Days was resumed, though I took no part in it.

  A thousand more cycles passed.

  The ship was now restored. The lake was re-filled. Our numbers were fewer, for not all the lost had been resurrected; but we were still many. And I resumed my role in the Rhythm of Days. I explored. I listened to poetry and tales. I struggled to comprehend science. I raced against my fellow sentients. I meditated. I refreshed old friendships, with friends who had forgotten all our years together. And I made new friends as a trickle of new ones began to join us.

  I realised, with horror, that life had returned to normal.

  And then one night I slept a dreamless sleep.

  And when I woke I was no longer in the interior world.

  I was inside a spherical cargo hold of some kind. Grey metal walls surrounded me. And all around me, their bodies bare-armed and sweating, were twenty or more of the Kindred. They wore golden tunics of a kind I had never seen, and were testing pipe-shaped weapons I did not recognise. A small cheer rose up when I awoke, and I could tell it was intended mockingly.

  “Where am I?” I said; but no words emerged.

  I took a step forward; but I did not move.

  “Show arms,” my voice said, and the Kindred warriors stood upright and held their weapons at an angle to their bodies.

  “We are,” my voice added, “facing an imposing enemy. These creatures have disreal technology and remote weaponry. We have rarely fought an enemy of such sophistication. Do not be complacent.”

  “Yes, Captain,” roared the Kindred, almost as one.

  My body was the commander of this army; and yet I had no control of it!

  I remembered what had happened when I killed Sharrock. It was just like this; this same experience. I had lost the power over my own body.

  There was a Ka’un in my head.

  The hull gates opened and I flew out of the ship, escorted by ten Kindred soldiers in space-suit body armour.

  I was gliding through the blackness of space above a small green and blue planet, which blazed with artificial lights. I was encased in some kind of protective shield, and wore a transportation device around my neck which made it possible for me to travel large distances in an instant. So one moment I was far from the planet, seeing it as a distant balloon; and the next I was close up to the orb, gripped by its gravitational forces.

  We were, I knew, without knowing how I knew, too small to register on the enemy’s detection devices. They were geared to spot enemy spaceships, not individual soldiers and a caped sea creature able to breathe in vacuum.

  This is why the Ka’un had saved me, I realised. They had discovered I could survive in space, during the battle with Explorer 410, and as a consequence they decided they would keep my skills for a day like today.

  I landed on the blue and green planet’s moon in a gentle glide, and began digging into the ground with my claws. Then from the pack on my back I removed a small cylindrical object. I buried it there, and glided through the thin atmosphere on to another part of the same moon.

  I was joined soon by seven members of the Kindred, wearing their space armour and tanks of air; and they too had cylindrical objects to bury. We planted nearly three hundred of them in widely spaced holes across the moon’s surface.

  Then I vanished/reappeared and found myself back in the hull of the Hell Ship itself.

  But I could still see-through the eyes of the Ka’un who possessed me and who was now seeing through the cameras the Kindred had left behind, in an insane loop of perception-the remote war that was taking place in this stellar system.

  First, the moon on which I had stood abruptly exploded, raining debris into the clouds of its parent planet below. I could only imagine the destruction that was being wrought on this fertile world.

  After a delay of some minutes, swarms of spaceships emerged from bases orbiting the planet to protect it from attack; but they flew into some kind of invisible shield in space and were torn into pieces. This was another trap, laid by the Kindred.

  And then a huge finned missile appeared from nowhere-presumably fired by the Hell Ship via a rift in space-and reappeared in the atmosphere of this blue and green planet. It soared through the atmosphere, like a bird on a downglide.

  Then there was a vast billowing explosion in the planet’s atmosphere, as vivid as a solar flare. And I realised the missile had been detonated in mid-air.

  The enemy were, I realised, fighting back.

  After the Hell Ship’s missile had been blown out of the sky, the aliens of the blue and green planet continued their spirited defence. Thin metal tubes flew out of the planet’s atmosphere and expanded into flimsy winged spacecraft possessed of amazing velocity. There were hundreds of them-no, thousands-and they danced and kinked with eerie speed. I was awed at the scale and the beauty of this retaliation; rockets turned into Cagashflies in front of my eyes and were now swarming out of the clouds.

  And then these dazzlingly fast craft broached the atmosphere and rushed-rifting in huge jumps-towards the Hell Ship itself. And for a few exhilarating tens of minutes I savoured my panoramic space camera view of the Cagashfly-spaceships sweeping towards us.

  Then the Hell Ship counter-attacked. Missiles appeared in space, rifted out of the Hell Ship’s belly; Cagashfly-spaceships exploded; and the battle escalated with a swiftness that made me nauseous. I could not perceive any details of the space war; just ceaseless and immense flashes of light as the explosions built upon explosions in a frenzy of light and spewed energy.

  And then, after what seemed an eternity of light-war, the flow of Hell Ship missiles came to a halt. And the dazzling glare slowly faded, and the stars began to reappear.

  But a few moments later still I could see that the swarm was still coming towards us. And there were now more of them than there had been before; the Cagashfly-spaceships were mysteriously multiplying as they were destroyed. I marvelled at this, briefly. And wondered how these creatures could manage such a trick.

  And then I realised: these Cagashfly-ships were now rifting through space like stones bouncing upon a lake, spitting energy beams at us, getting closer and closer with each The Hell Ship lurched. And I looked around, and I realised that the stars in the space around me had changed, and the hazy after-glare left by those countless explosions had vanished entirely. The Hell Ship had fled the scene of battle.

  I realised that the Ka’un had been thwarted, and had given up.

  It was a shock to discover that the Ka’un did not always win. I had thought them invulnerable in battle, as they had been in the war with my people.

  On the next occasion however I was able to witness the destruction of an entire planet, as the Ka’un ship fired the same large finned missile which this time broke through the enemy’s defensive weapons and struck the planet’s crust.

  Once again I saw everything that happened through the mind that possessed my eyes, and which saw through remote cameras all that took place.

  And I not only saw; I understood, through my intimate bond with my possessing mind. I grasped everything; how the weapon was constructed, how it worked, what it did. I knew that this missile was designed to drill a path to the planet’s core, where “un-matter” was then released which collided with the hot liquid matter of the planet’s core to create a series of huge blasts that, before my Ka’un-inhabited eyes, ripped the planet apart.

  The Ka’un who dwelled in my head had a name for this weapon: the planet-buster.

  This was the same weapon that had killed my world. But, I now knew, if we had possessed the right technology, we could have stopped it.

  That was, for me, a bitter moment of insight.

  The wars continued. And the Ka’un continued to ride me like his beast of burden. And I continued to watch, and watch, as planet after planet fell.

  The Ka’un were remorseless, but they lost as often as they won. But when they did win, their wrath a
nd their cruelty knew no bounds.

  And all too often, I-or rather my body-was the leader of the giant sentients who took part in their massive ground offensives against bipeds and smaller polypods. These poor creatures were justly awed at our “ferocious” aspect; and we slew them in their thousands.

  And for the first time, I truly understood the reality underlying the rhythm of our lives. For whilst we on the interior world were spending our days in tedious repetition, the Ka’un were laying plans and setting up war weaponry. They seeded energy beacons in hundreds of stars to fuel their war machine. They created machines in space that generated robot warriors and robot spaceships to comprise their battle fleet. They reconnoitred carefully all the systems they were going to attack. And only then, did they fight.

  The wars were brief; but the preparation for those wars was intense and prolonged.

  As for me-I had become one of the Vanished. For months, then years, I did not return to the interior world. I spent all my days with the Ka’un’s other warriors. The Kindred were the Ka’un’s regular army, alternating soldiers on a regular basis to keep the troops fresh. And these Kindred were masters of warfare, and shockingly brutal.

  And, meanwhile, we giant sentients were there to shock and appal and to engage in the most bloodthirsty of the combats. The wars could have been won without us; but we were there to add glory and magnificence to the combats.

  We were unlike the Kindred of course. They chose to fight. Whereas we giant sentients were without volition, controlled like puppets by the Ka’un. Thus, oblivious to the desperate protests of our minds and souls, our bodies murdered and massacred like evil savages.

  And, every now and then, we were joined by familiar faces.

  My troops awaited my instructions; I scanned them carefully, looking for traces of fear or of independent thought. A hundred Kindred warriors stood with me in the hull, together with eleven giant sentients. Balach, Morio, Tamal, Sheenam, Goay, Leirak, Tarrroth, Shseil, Dokdrr, Ma.

  And Cuzco.

  I wanted to scream with joy when I saw him; but I could not. I also wanted to savagely wrap a tentacle around his throat and strangle him, in revenge for what he did to Sharrock and the other rebels. But I could not. I was a prisoner in my own mind; able to see but not to act.