Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  “You may,” said Sharrock, “endeavour so to do.”

  “The way to survive is this: do not fight. Do not rage. Do not yearn for vengeance.”

  Sharrock smiled; and I recoiled at the power of his hate.

  “How can you say that?” Sharrock said scornfully, his skin glowing scarlet, his eyes glittering, his muscles bunched. “You slack-cunted bitch! You coward-who-would-comfort-his-mother’s-rapist! Vengeance is all there fucking is!”

  “No! You must surrender your hate,” I said, and my normally gentle tones were strident now. “Thoughts of revenge will gain you nothing; they will merely poison your soul.” I knew this well; so very many of my friends had been consumed by hate and implacable rage.

  Sharrock thought about what I had said, sifting it like evidence in a murder trial. “How can I give up my dreams of revenge?” he said, more baffled than angry now.

  “You have to.”

  “No!” he roared.

  “Remember this,” I said, “life is worth-”

  “I don’t want to hear your fucking platitudes, you black-hided monster!”

  “Then I shall cut to the gist of it. To live here,” I explained firmly, “there are several simple rules that you must follow.”

  “Whose rules?”

  “Rules we live by.”

  “No one tells me,” said Sharrock, “how to fucking live!”

  “Rules you have to live by,” I insisted. “For know this: you must from this moment on abandon all abstract ideals like ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ and ‘happiness.’ These concepts belong to the past; our only future is one of shared regret. “And embrace, too,” I said, with a wisdom acquired over aeons, “ joy: joy in our world; joy at being alive, and at being together. Each day is precious, to me, and to all of us, for the moments of joy that it harbours.”

  And I paused, anxious to hear if my logic had prevailed with this arrogant, war-mongering fool.

  And, for a moment, Sharrock did in fact look pensive; he nodded slowly, as if considering my words, and met my gaze calmly.

  But then Sharrock spoke:

  “You,” said Sharrock, in rage-filled tones, “are nothing but a fucked-up-the-arsehole drinking-piss-and-thinking-it-tastes-like-wine conniving-with-the-enemy and sucking-the-cock-of-the-creature-who-kill ed-your-mother-and-your-father piece of shit!”

  And I sighed, once more, from my tentacle tips, regretfully.

  Clearly, my work with Sharrock was far from over.

  Jak

  And so, as I have already narrated to you, I left Mohun. And soon afterwards my ship the Explorer 410 slowly accelerated past the planet of Varth, leaving behind Kawak and his herd of savage predators.

  I was Master-of-the-Ship, serving under Commander Galamea, and the ship’s officers included the two Space Explorers I had met at the banquet, Morval and Phylas.

  The ship was a small, squat working vessel with a hull streaked with stripes and pock-marked with small asteroid scars. The quarters were basic; I had a cabin smaller than my wardrobe on the Vassal Ship. There was no banqueting dome; we ate in the canteen, with food malignly designed by the ship’s computer brain to be nutritious, but not appealing. It was, all in all, a place of horror.

  It took a week for Explorer to reach the outer limits of the solar system. Averil would soon depart with the main Trading Fleet, with her new lover Master Trader Mohun.

  I thought of her often.

  In fact, incessantly.

  Indeed, for every moment of every day, I was haunted with memories of her achingly intellectual features, her lusciously perceptive smiles, and her casually neglectful glances when I performed for her some great service or other.

  But I had made my choice: I would lose himself in my work. And I was no more a Trader. My job now was to lead the Explorer craft into the depths of uncharted space; where, in time-hallowed fashion, we would search out new and alien civilisations, in order to get the better of them in sly negotiations.

  “Welcome to my ship,” I said to Morval.

  His old, withered, bald head scrunched up in a scowl more ugly than-well, I had never seen anything more ugly.

  “I have been on this vessel,” he pointed out, “for two hundred years.”

  “It’s my vessel now,” I reminded him, courteously.

  “I’m aware of that.” The scowl became a sneer; hardly an improvement.

  “We should be friends,” I told the old Trader generously.

  “I have, as a point of policy,” said Morval, “no friends. My friends all abandoned me when I was banished by the Chief Artificer.”

  “I always admire an Olaran,” I said, “who can harbour a grudge the way a father raises a child; with love, care, and the passage of decades.”

  “Ah, Master-of-the-Ship your wit is so… entirely adequate,” said Morval, bitterly.

  “Let me make a wild surmise; you were passed over for promotion?”

  “I was.”

  “Because of your sullen attitude and melancholic disposition,” I suggested.

  “And my abundant lack of youth and beauty.”

  “Then clearly,” I suggested, “I am better qualified; for young I am, barely forty years, and many consider me beautiful. But you shouldn’t in any way feel-”

  “This is a godsforsaken Explorer ship! We don’t need a pretty boy Master! We need someone who knows what in fuck’s name he’s doing!”

  “And you would be that someone, I take it?”

  “I would be, and I am.” And Morval stared at me with his dark haunting deep-set eyes. “The previous Master-of-the-Ship,” he pointed out, “died of shock when his simulacrum was eaten alive by sentient slugs, after he and I had spent two years trapped in an alien forest.”

  “I’m used to danger.”

  “You have no idea,” Morval told me, with evident glee, “what danger really is.”

  I stood in the bleak, spartan Command Hub of my new ship, with grey walls all around, no porthole, and four brushed-Kar-goat-leather (I mean the common variety of Kar goat, not the rare beasts with skin like a baby’s arse) seats for the ship’s officers and our Commander. One of these seats was currently occupied by Star-Seeker Albinia, who was linked by a cable which stretched from her shaved head to the ship’s brain; and hence existed dreamily in a world of her own.

  “You’re used to better,” sneered Morval.

  “My Vassal Ship,” I said politely, “had wooden furniture, shaped and whittled intricately by a Master Carver, and a ship’s wheel made of gold and titanium.”

  “Frippery!” said Morval. “Explorer steers the ship, Albinia sees through its eyes; what’s a ship’s wheel supposed to do?”

  “It made me feel,” I pointed out, “important.”

  Phylas grinned at me as if I’d made a great joke; he was, I realised, a shameless ingrate.

  “Any chance of a view?” I asked, and Morval grunted again, with even greater disapproval. But I glared: Pardon me, direct order? And he yielded.

  “Albinia,” Morval said, “give us your eyes.” Albinia responded without speaking, and the blank grey wall ahead of me became a panoramic view of the space outside our ship.

  “Background music?”

  A dark dense thrilling chord pitched at almost subliminally low levels filled the small cabin; that, and the stars, gave the spiritless space at least some sense of atmosphere.

  Morval grunted and scowled, clearly caught up in a crescendo of disapproval, but I ignored him.

  “My bunk,” I said to Phylas, who stood shyly beside me, “is it considered acceptable on such vessels?”

  “It is the largest bunk on the ship.”

  “Except for the female quarters.”

  Phylas snorted with amusement. “Except, obviously, for the female quarters.”

  “What is the Commander like?” I said. “Give me fair warning. Is she firm? Fair? Disciplined?”

  “She is fierce.”

  “Ah. Fierce.”

  “She is a former
Admiral in the Olaran Navy; she was discharged for excessive, um, brutality.”

  “Against who?”

  “Against the Stuxi.”

  “The Stuxi,” I pointed out, “tried to destroy our home world; they were flesh-eating savages who murdered millions before we forced them into a truce.”

  “Even so, a military tribunal found her too brutal.”

  “Ah.”

  “I believe also that she considers me an idiot,” Phylas admitted.

  “And does she have grounds for that?”

  “Occasional comments of mine have not always, um, accorded with common sense.”

  “You really are,” I said kindly, “a child, aren’t you?”

  “Aye Master.”

  “Morval. Tell me about the ship. What weapons do we have?”

  “Six gen-guns; twelve light-cannons, three negative matter transporters, and a disruptor ray,” Morval said.

  “Engine capacity?”

  “Four point two kais. With booster engines, and stay-still wraparounds. In a crisis, we flee to the nearest rift and escape.” Morval’s tone was brisk now; when it came to the business of the ship, he clearly knew his stuff.

  “Show me how the stay-still does its job.”

  Phylas conjured up his phantom controls, and pressed an oval; and our three bodies shimmered as the inertial haze surrounded us.

  Then Phylas pressed another oval and the ship suddenly flipped over. Albinia of course was strapped to her seat; but Phylas, Morval and myself remained hovering in air, in the same position, though we were now upside down in relation to the Hub floor and control rigs.

  Phylas pressed a third oval and we were right way up. “An alternative,” he said, “to seat harnesses.”

  “Seat harnesses have always worked for me,” I said testily.

  “I find,” said Morval, “they chafe.”

  Phylas pressed the oval again. The ship flipped again. I was upside down, again.

  “Oh, boy,” I said, delighted.

  “Initiate the space drive,” said Commander Galamea.

  We were ready to rift, and Commander Galamea had joined us in the Command Hub. She had made no comment about the wrap-around space panorama that now dominated this small room, but had quietly asked Albinia to cut the background music.

  Galamea was a lean, strongly muscled female; her eyes burned with a blue light that betrayed many years in rift space; she did not look as if she knew how to smile, nor did it seem likely she would welcome instruction in that art.

  “I am proud to serve, o exalted mistress,” I said.

  “Just ‘Yes Commander’ will do,” Galamea said tersely, and I recalled how the military hate any display of courtesy and eloquence.

  “Yes, exalted Commander,” I replied.

  “Disreality is achieved, Commander,” said Morval.

  “The slippery-sands-of-chaos envelop us,” said Phylas.

  “Explorer is content,” said Albinia, dreamily. The cable that connected her to Explorer hung loosely out of her shaved head; her eyes were closed; her mind entirely in tune with the ship’s computational brain. She was, I noted in passing, the most ravishingly clever-looking Star-Seeker I had ever seen.

  On my phantom controls, I could see that we were getting random readings across all vectors, as a consequence of the flux of chaos being generated.

  A certain amount of time elapsed, but no one knew how much, or whether it was a longer or shorter passage of time than usual.

  “A rift has emerged,” said Phylas eventually.

  “I see it,” I said authoritatively, though in fact I saw nothing; just a jumble of incomprehensible graphs and equations on my phantom control screen.

  “Can we predict the destination?”

  Albinia moaned, as she tried to analyse the data flux and find some notion of what lay beyond the rift in time and space.

  “No,” Albinia eventually concluded.

  “Morval?” asked Commander Galamea.

  “I see no trace of disruptive nothingness,” Morval said, slowly reading the data on his phantom control screen as if was a novel of which he was savouring the sentence structure.

  (In passing, I marvelled at the nerve of the man; pretending he understood the data!)

  “Phylas?”

  “The ship’s engines are showing no potential signs of imminent spontaneous detonation,” said Phylas, comfortingly.

  I looked at Commander Galamea as she made her decision. She was pensive, almost absent-minded.

  Finally, she nodded her assent. Travel through rifts via disreal projection was a hazardous business; we all needed a few moments to prepare for the possibility of never becoming our actual selves again.

  I took her nod as my instruction. “Proceed with space leap,” I instructed.

  Phylas moved the sliders on his phantom controls; the ship’s drive was restarted; the disreality beams were dimmed. And the Explorer flew-instantly, so fast that it arrived before it left, almostthrough a rift in space.

  As we flew, the Command Hub tilted violently, first this way, then that, until we all were all upside down relative to the harnessed Albinia and the Hub itself. But the stay-still fields kept our bodies immune to the effects of violent oscillation, and the phantom control displays patiently followed us to our new positions.

  Albinia moaned with joy as she entered the rift; and I knew that she could sense, with every part of her skin and body, what it was to be not-real. And even we, who did not have her direct access to Explorer’s sensors, could feel the strangeness of the moment.

  We emerged from the rift.

  Morval assessed the data on his screen.

  “We are-nowhere,” he said.

  “No traces of organic life,” Phylas confirmed.

  “No habitable planets,” Morval added.

  Albinia’s eyes snapped open. “Explorer,” she said, “hates this place.”

  “Try again,” said Galamea.

  “Reduce our probability once more,” I said tensely.

  “Yes, Master,” said Albinia, and closed her eyes again.

  A few moments of idle nothing passed; I yearned to have my ship’s wheel back. There was no romance in pressing ovals on an illusory screen.

  Then I felt the strangeness come upon me again.

  “Probability is reducing, Master-of-the Ship,” said Phylas, reading the data off his screen. “And reducing more. And more. And more,” Phylas added.

  I knew, though I did not fully comprehend, that the universe is a rocky reality built upon slippery sands of disreality; this was the heart and truth of Olaran science. And only the Olara-or strictly speaking, the Olara women- knew how to control this process.

  And so, whilst remaining motionless, Explorer began the long process of reducing its own likelihood, until the new rift appeared, and had been, and was, and will be again. (Though all this made much more sense in mathematical form, so I am reliably informed.)

  And thus Explorer vanished, and reappeared elsewhere; and the ship’s computational mind swiftly calibrated where it was this time.

  Again we detected no traces of life; the process recommenced; Explorer vanished, and reappeared, a million light years further on; and then did so again.

  We were taking our ship out, far out, into regions of space never yet charted.

  “We have a possible trace of organics, Master-of-the-Ship,” said Morval, eventually, and the ship halted and its probability rose.

  All of us on the Hub forced vomit back down our throats; the stay-still wraparounds weren’t that good.

  “Let us proceed,” I said calmly, and the ship’s true engines fired up, and Explorer began its slow journey towards its destination.

  Albinia was communing deeply with Explorer. Her eyes were closed; her expression rapt. She was lost in a whirl of data from sensors that could perceive the mass and chemical constitution of stars a million baraks from here, and could feel like a touch of skin on skin the crash of microparticles against her ship�
�s hull.

  It felt wrong to stare at her; a violation, like watching a lover asleep. But yet I continue to gaze; I could not stop myself.

  For whenever Albinia was in her trance, she had a beauty of mind and spirit that haunted me. Her eyes twitched under closed lids, her lips moved involuntarily. Her face flickered constantly with emotion-fear, regret, anticipation, joy.

  She was, in a word: sublime.

  “We’re here,” said Phylas.

  “Ease her out,” I said.

  “We have readings from six separate planets,” said Morval. “This culture has colonised its entire planetary system, but their main focus is on Planet Five, the gas giant. No traces of shifting sands scars. Their Fields of Force signature is sixty-three point four. A nuclear haze, they’re a messy bunch.”

  “Albinia,” I said. Her eyes flickered and then opened. She took a gasp.

  “Am I done?” Albinia asked.

  “You’re done,” I said softly.

  “Good,” said Albinia briskly, and her face was a neutral mask again. I retreated at the touch of her inner authority.

  “We think they’re pre-interstellar, recovering from a relatively recent nuclear war,” said Phylas.

  “What will we call them?” asked Albinia.

  “Morval?”

  He clicked an oval. “The next name on the list,” he said, “is Prisma.”

  “Then Prisma it is.”

  “Explorer doesn’t like them,” Albinia said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “She didn’t say. I just felt it. She fears this place, and these people.”

  “They’re primitives,” teased Phylas. “What is there to fear?”

  “Primitives,” Morval reminded him, “once obliterated all of Caal, and all eleven Trader ships in the area.”

  “We would never be,” said Phylas arrogantly, “so easily duped.”

  Explorer glided through space, propelled by sub-atomic interactions in seventh dimensional geometry, or some such thing; the truth is, I can never recollect the detail of these tedious technical matters. The light from the system sun made the ship’s hull glow; I admired the image of our ship haloed with radiance on my panoramic wall-screen.

  Explorer passed a pock-marked asteroid.

  This solar system was, I noted, quite beautiful. There were brightly coloured gas giants with multiple rings, comets with tails, and from our angle of approach we could see all seven planets of the system in a single gaze, clustered like a family of unruly children of every different size and age.