Hell Ship

by Philip Palmer

  Then Explorer slowed down, and the stay-still fields were released, and we dropped to the ground like stones off a bridge.

  The Commander and I staggered to our feet, bruised by each other’s bodies. Then, carefully avoiding eye contact, we studied the panoramic image around us of the stellar system of the Prismas.

  “Show the barrier in false colour,” I said, and Explorer changed the screens so that they revealed the shape of the invisible barrier in space that now encaged the Prismas; a shifting-sands-wall that would trap the Prismas, irrevocably and for all eternity, in this little bubble of space.

  Galamea whispered to me: “You were wrong, of course, to take Albinia.”

  I nodded, to acknowledge that I knew she was right.

  “Nevertheless,” Galamea said, “that was a good first mission. You were fair, but decisive.”

  “They were a bunch of evil bastards!” I said angrily.

  “No,” said Galamea, kindly. “Not evil, not bastards; these are aliens. We can’t judge them by our own ethical and cultural standards.”

  “Even the Stuxi?”

  Galamea thought about that. “Actually, they really were evil bastards,” she admitted.

  Later, I recorded the summary in my log for the mission: No potential for trade. Danger Rating 4. Alien hostiles Quarantined, in perpetuity.

  Later still, I went to visit Albinia in the sick room. Her flesh had peeled off, she looked like a corpse. But she was awake. She fixed me with a scornful glance; there was no trace of the absent, dreaming Albinia. This was a cold hard woman, looking at me as if I was a nobody.

  “I apologise,” I said, “for your pain.”

  Her raw skin twitched, which I took to be a sneer. “It was my decision; it is my pain; do not presume to pity me,” Albinia told me coldly.

  “Yes Star-Seeker,” I said, and my dawning love for her received a brutal jolt.

  And thus the months passed, and then the years. I remember that period fondly now, as a kind of golden age. Though at the time it seemed to be mostly drudgery and terror, alternating with moments of love-sick anxiety.

  So many missions. So many evil aliens! So many unscrupulously bargained contracts of trade!

  That was my life, the all of my life, before it changed. Before the events that But no. I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “Are you sure there’s life down there?” I said sceptically, looking at the panoramic wall-screen image of the slime-covered festering oozing planetary surface that was beneath us.

  “Explorer says yes,” said Albinia.

  “All right then,” I said. “Phylas, suit up; and let’s get going.”

  Our shadow-selves materialised in a field of green grass. The sun beat down upon us.

  “Nice weather,” said Phylas, cheerily, and I shot him a filthy look. Phylas, I had learned during our many missions together, was possessed of the boundless optimism of the utterly stupid; his naivety was almost as vexing to me as was Morval’s bleak melancholy.

  “ There are storms,” Albinia/Explorer informed us.

  A six-legged faun sauntered up to us, and nuzzled me with its snout. I patted it; and it was soft and warm to the touch.

  And my mood mellowed. Phylas was grinning still, yet it no longer irked me. Indeed, I ventured a grin of my own, which he easily outmatched.

  “I like this place,” I told Phylas.

  Phylas laughed out loud. “Indeed so! It reminds me,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of when I was a boy. My father used to take me hunting. We’d shoot our native grazing animals with a home-made bow and arrow. It was a rite of passage; I was born on the planet of Darox, you know. We had our own-”

  I realised that Phylas was now holding a wooden bow, and a quiver full of feathered arrows; a highly unexpected shadow-self conjuration on his part, or so I mused.

  “This is meant to be,” I pointed out, “a serious mission.”

  “Live a little!” said Phylas. I envied him his youth and his foolishness. And I wondered, where had each of mine of those gone?

  “ You need to move out of that swamp, ” said Albinia. “ There’s a strong probability that the sentients are located in the hills above you.”

  Swamp?

  Phylas drew back the arrow, as the faun skittered away. His aim was true; the arrow took the beast through the neck and it fell.

  I stumbled backwards, towards the river. A narrowboat drifted past me, with my beloved Shonia on board, in a beauteous white robe. I blinked.

  “Dream of me!” my first true love cried.

  I tried to speak, in order to summon Albinia’s help; but my vocal cords were frozen. I blinked again.

  “It’s exquisite,” said Phylas, as we walked through the palace, admiring the gem-studded walls and the rich hangings and the seductive beauty of the incense fumes in the air.

  “It reminds me,” I said, searching for the memory.

  “Ah glory,” said Phylas, for a harem of radiantly intelligent Olaran females were now approaching us. They were clad in robes as rich as-as I took out my knife and I severed Phylas’s throat. Then I thrust the blade through my own forehead, so it impaled my brain and severed my [I awoke on the couch, with a blinding headache. Explorer began recalibrating my connection with my shadow self but-]

  I bit my finger and screamed with pain, and lunged off the couch. I ripped the contacts off my skull and body. And I stood there panting.

  Then I looked to Phylas. He had sunk back into his shadow-self; so I brutally ripped the contacts off him and he screamed and looked at me.

  “Bliss!” he roared.

  “Illusion,” I pointed out.

  We staggered up to the Command Hub.

  Albinia had already surmised that this was a planet inhabited by telepathic slime; Explorer’s instruments informed us that this continent-wide intelligence was able to manipulate the thoughts, emotions and sensations of all who walked through its muddy oozing bogs.

  “Why didn’t you rescue us?” I accused.

  “You looked as if you were having,” said Albinia, “fun.”

  I wrote up the experience in my log, and concluded: No potential for trade: Danger Rating 3: System Quarantined; review in 100 years.

  Commander Galamea was curt, and clearly angry with me, I did not know why.

  “Set course,” she said, and Albinia sank into a trance-like state.

  Phylas and Morval attended to their phantom control displays.

  I realised that the Commander’s skin was pinking; and it dawned on me that she was in heat.

  “Commander,” I said softly.

  She glared at me.

  “If you need any-” I hinted.

  “What?”

  “Help?”

  She glared even more.

  “Help with what?”

  “If your mood is… I realise that when a female is…”

  Her glaring intensified.

  “You want to fuck me?” she asked, savagely.

  “If you need me to,” I said helpfully,

  “I will never,” Galamea said, “need a male ever again!”

  Her body was trembling with repressed passion; I was awed at the strength of will she was displaying in refusing my offer.

  And baffled, too; for all she had to do was indicate her sexual state, and all of us males would do our duty. Grudgingly, perhaps; but even so!

  So what, I wondered, made her so bizarrely reluctant to ask?

  We shadow-suited up, Galamea and I.

  I had a bad feeling about this. But it was the Commander’s idea; she wanted to experience a mission with me.

  I lay down on the shadow couch. I closed my eyes.

  And then I opened my eyes and found myself standing on a planet full of dark gloom. I could hardly see my way to walk.

  Galamea switched on her helmet-torch and we made our way through a dense mass of pointed stakes. This was, I realised, a field of sorts.

  “ The nest is to your left, si
x thousand baraks, ” said Albinia/Explorer.

  “Why the darkness? I thought it was daytime,” Galamea asked.

  “ I have no data on that.”

  “Are there thick clouds?”

  “ I have no data on that.”

  My shadow feet left no tread; but my motion must have triggered a trap. A stake impaled my body, from my arse to my scalp. I tried to wriggle free.

  “Split yourself,” said Galamea bluntly.

  “I can’t.”

  “Split yourself!”

  I split my body in half and Galamea picked up the pieces and stuck them back together. My shadow self reformed.

  “ Here, ” said Albinia/Explorer, and I switched on my own helmet-torch and the field was illumined. We saw around us leafless trees haunted by shadows. The shadows were the nocturnals who were the primary sentient species on this planet. The secondary sentients were trees and our chances of trading with them were approximately low to zero.

  “Do you have any concept,” Galamea said to me, in quiet tones, as we were waiting for the shadows to approach.

  “Of what, Commander?”

  “Of how it feels. To have no power over your body.”

  “I do not follow.”

  “Last week. When I was in heat. You so courteously offered to… fornicate with me. When I was, as you were aware, in heat.”

  “I would have been privileged to assist you, Commander,” I said, cautiously. I had never been spoken to so candidly by a female before about this delicate matter. Even my lovers had never referred to the monthly imperative of their biology, except in terms of their needing it, and needing it now.

  “I did not want you to do so,” Galamea said bluntly. “I mean-what I’m trying to say here Master-of-the-Ship Jak-is that I didn’t want you to fuck me, at such a time, and in such a way.”

  I was piqued at that.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because I don’t want to be,” she pointed out, with anger modulating her normally calm tones, “just an animal. Unable to control my brute lust. Nor frankly do I savour your selfless pathetic obedience. We need to be more than prisoners of our own biology, Jak! We have-don’t we see-the potential to be so much more!”

  “Whatever you say, Commander,” I said, my casual tone belying the fact I was affronted at her words.

  Pathetic? Obedient? Was that really how she saw me?

  “Do you have the faintest idea what I’m saying?” she asked me, sadly.

  “Not really,” I admitted

  “Then forget we had this conversation.”

  “It’s forgotten.”

  The shadows lifted from the trees and hovered above us. A slow hissing sound surrounded us.

  “Can you translate?” Galamea asked Albinia.

  “ Not yet. ”

  We waited patiently for Explorer to decode the linguistic patterns in these creature’s malign hissing.

  “Are these shadowy bastards a hive intelligence?” I asked.

  “ I have no data on that,” said Albinia/Explorer.

  The shadows hovered high, and when I looked up at them, at the black clouds that blocked the sun, I realised that the clouds were moving.

  “These creatures block their own sun,” I told Albinia/Explorer.

  We stood in that field for fourteen hours, but Explorer never managed to decode the aliens’ strange hissing language.

  And so the system was abandoned, but not quarantined. The mission was a failure.

  But Galamea’s words stayed with me.

  And many years later, after she was dead, it occurred to me what she had really been saying that day in the field of trees and shadows.

  She had been asking me to change. To stop serving her blindly; to cease treating her with craven adoration; to treat her, in short, as an equal. All this, I eventually realised.

  Too late.

  BOOK 4

  Sai-ias

  “Where are you talking me?”

  “Not far. My cabin is here. Down the corridor,” I said.

  Sharrock stepped anxiously along the circular corridor, struggling to keep his balance because of the steepness of the slope. The corridor was large enough to accommodate my bulk and that of Cuzco and the other “giant” sentients, as we are called. Sharrock was dwarfed by it, like an insect clambering across the hide of a huge and grossly fat land animal; or, indeed, like Lirilla dancing upon the backside of Fray.

  He slipped, and fell, and scrambled back to his feet.

  “Take care,” I advised him.

  “I tripped,” he said angrily, “on that fucking slime trail you leave wherever you’ve fucking been.”

  “It is an outpouring of my essence, not a ‘fucking slime trail,’ ” I told him stiffly.

  “You fucking corpse-fucking slime-leaving freak,” Sharrock sneered.

  I slithered on.

  The circular tunnel expanded into a large circular atrium, and I spoke the code and a door opened in the wall. I slid inside and Sharrock scrambled behind me, and we arrived in my cabin, the largest on the ship, which also was a perfect sphere.

  Sharrock stood and looked around and his breathing became irregular, and I guessed this was a visceral response to what he saw before him.

  “These are my cabin friends,” I explained.

  His face was calm, his demeanour relaxed, as befits a warrior; but I could tell that, beneath the mask, Sharrock was filled with fear.

  “Hello there,” said Cuzco.

  “Hi,” added Fray.

  “You look like shit,” said one of Quipu’s heads-the leftmost one, Quipu One-unhelpfully.

  “Welcome,” said Doro.

  “Hello,” said Lirilla.

  “I am privileged,” said Sharrock, with nary a tremor in his voice, “to encounter such noble creatures.”

  Cuzco snorted with contempt; and Sharrock flinched, as smoke seared the air and Cuzco’s eyes radiated hate.

  “In my world,” Cuzco said softly, “you would be carrion.”

  Sharrock stared up at Cuzco, fearlessly. “You really are one ugly son-of-an-arsehole fuck, aren’t you,” he said marvelling. And Cuzco’s eyes blazed scarlet with rage and his back-body thrashed and his body-horns grew into long spikes, and his scales rattled, and all at once the huge circular room seemed too small to contain us all.

  Sharrock continued to stare, with no trace of fear; ready to fight or to die; his body a veritable masterpiece of composure.

  And finally, Cuzco gave ground: his body shrank, his back-body stilled, his scales became silent, his horns sank back beneath his armour, his eyes turned green again. And his tongue lapped the air, and we could see the jagged tongue-spikes which Cuzco, in the old days, would have used to suck the blood and the life out of any errant or impertinent biped.

  But those days, as even Cuzco now acknowledged, were gone.

  “Sit,” I said to Sharrock, gently.

  That night, Fray told us a tale we had not heard from her before.

  “This is the story,” she told us, in her booming low voice that always for me evoked the thudding of hooves on a lonely savannah, “of how my world was born. It is a story told to me by my mother, and her mother before her. It is our origin story.”

  I curled myself up comfortably, and breathed air scorched by Cuzco’s breath, and kept an eye on Sharrock, who, I noted, was rapt and exhilarated as Fray eloquently spoke.

  “We were born of the wind, so my mother said,” Fray told us. “The wind that blew from the north and crashed in great tumult against the mountains of the south. And then the wind’s angry tongue licked the rock, and the rock roared with pleasure, and split, and a grey wet mess of flesh was birthed. And that was us. The Frayskind.

  “We were born of the union of the wind and the mountains; and our father the wind is still our friend. That is how we learned to hunt. We were slow and heavy and all the other creatures could hear us thundering after them, for we were never the fastest of beasts. But we begged the wind to howl and r
oar, and the grasses were whipped wildly by its gusts. And the animals we stalked could not smell us, for the wind conveyed our stench swiftly away, and they could not hear us, because the sounds caused by the wind were so deafening. So we thundered towards them and caught them unawares and ate them in our great jaws, and when we had digested them we farted loudly and long, to return the favour to the wind.

  “And the mountains are our mother, and when the great Majai hunted us and killed us by the thousands, we took refuge in the womb of the mountains. Rents appeared in sheer cliff faces and we clambered inside the caves and we made our homes there for many hundreds of years. And while we were gone our father the wind roared and ripped the planet apart and all the land animals died, including the Majai, and when we returned we were the only large land animals left alive and we were able to eat the thick grasses and the rich vines without any competition or threat from other predators. Thus were we saved by our mother the mountain.

  “And to this day, I worship the wind, and revere the mountains. And I fart loudly, and long, when I eat. This is our origin myth. And,” Fray continued, crisply, “it is based to some degree on historical truth. For the archaeological records show that in the ancient eras our planet was racked with terrible storms that destroyed all the major life forms apart from us, the largest land animal, and the clumsiest. But we survived because we cowered in caves and scrambled among rocks and when we emerged the wind was stilled and the land was fertile again.

  “I am an atheist; I do not believe in the god of wind, and the goddess of mountain. But I love this story. It has poetry and beauty.”

  “It’s a fine story,” agreed Cuzco.

  “Aside,” said Quipu One, “from the farting.”

  The sun rose; I watched with delight. And I felt a surge of anticipation. For today was Day the First; the day on which I explore the rich and varied habitats of our world.

  Ours is, it cannot be denied, a small planet, easily traversed in a matter of hours if you can swim the seas, which I can. Or if you can plunge through the murky suppurating swamplands, which I can. Or if you are nimble enough to traverse the thick forestlands, which I am. The mountains are steep, and few land creatures can clamber up their sheer cliffs, but I am one such. And the valleys are dark and gloomy and raging torrents fill them, but I am easily able to ride the stormy waters and descend the waterfalls.