Hell Ship

BOOK 9
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 and 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.

Cuzco looked magnificent. His orange scales gleamed, his eyes were full of an angry vitality. He was no longer the sad and defeated creature I had loved; he was a warrior lost in battle-lust.

“Cuzco,” my voice said, “these creatures have primitive projectile weapons and use spears and mechanical spear-throwers. You will enjoy today.”

“Can they fly?” Cuzco asked.

“They command,” my voice said, “regiments of aerial creatures who routinely massacre beasts larger than yourself. These people, let us call them the Shasoon, which in my language means Prey We Taunt Before We Eat, will give you a battle royal.”

Cuzco roared with joy, as did Balach, Morio, Tamal, Sheenam, Goay, Leirak, Tarrroth, Shseil, Dokdrr, Ma, and myself.

The Ka’un strategy, I now knew, was to engage in direct combat only when the enemy was technologically primitive. And in these cases, we were the Ka’un’s favoured warriors; the giant sentients who could be relied upon to stage a battle both bloody and magnificent.

Ah, and what a battle it was!

The Shasoon were octopod creatures who could gallop on four legs while firing spear-weapons with their dextrous four arms. Their torsos stood upright atop their cylindrical bodies and they howled when they fought, an ululating cry that allowed them to control the animals and the plants in their vicinity.

They were brave and bloodthirsty creatures, with a rich history of combat, as I learned from the thoughts in the mind of my equally bloodthirsty Ka’un master. The Shasoon had slaughtered all the other major land animals on this planet indiscriminately, and fought constant wars amongst themselves. They were gifted astronomers and had spotted our space ship arriving in their stellar system. And they had prepared carefully for an alien invasion, by laying traps, training armies, and concealing missiles capable of throwing vast balls full of explosive powder, albeit for a relatively short distance.

They stood, of course, not a chance.

First Cuzco appeared in the skies above them and fusillades of burning spears were loosed at him from machines built of wood. But the spears splashed harmlessly over his armoured body, and he swept down low and ripped apart Shasoon warriors. Flames were fired at him and engulfed his body but that merely entertained him and he spat back fire from his neck and skull vents. Nets were thrown upon him and he burned them off with acid from his body.

And then I swooped down, my cape fully unfurled, and I landed in the midst of a regiment of Shasoon who fired primitive projectile guns at me and stabbed me with their spears. And I batted them down with my lengthy tentacles, and impaled them with my quills, and ripped their bodies apart with my claws.

Then Goay and Leirak joined the fray; they were carried down in the claws of the giant aerial Tarrroth, and dropped on the earth, where they used their claws to rip open the soil in search of the Shasoon’s buried encampments. And when the network of tunnels were revealed, Dokdrr and Ma were conveyed to the planet’s surface and they slithered their vast serpent bodies inside the tunnels and I know they would not stop until they had paralysed or chewed to pieces each and every Shasoon warrior in this sprawling underground labyrinth.

Once we had destroyed all of the warriors in this army, we travelled onwards to the country’s major city where we were confronted with a fortified building with high walls that towered up to the clouds. But Tarnal swiftly smashed a path through the walls and Cuzco flew inside billowing flame while I clambered over the wrecked walls with my tentacles and we resumed the perpetration of carnage.

These valiant warriors fought fearlessly, and in turn were dealt terrible blows, and sustained appalling injuries. Tarnal had his eyes gouged out and ran off howling, lashing with his claws at air. A mob of Shasoon forced an explosive ball down the throat of Dokdrr, and when it detonated the serpentine’s body was rent into pieces and she screamed in agony and could no longer move. But then Tarrroth swept down from above and carried clawfulls of struggling Shasoon warriors high up in the air and dropped them to their deaths.

Shsiel and Ma had been my friends on the Hell Ship; I remembered them fondly. Ma was a herbivore with a long and (proportionate to her body) slender neck that allowed her to eat leaves from the tops of trees in the giant forests of her world. Her people had developed a rich philosophy, and her stories of the fantastical had always been a joy to hear. And Shsiel was a scaled two-headed beast whose people had befriended the sentient bipeds on their planet, and formed a multi-species civilisation with a single government.

These were the gentlest of beasts, despite their size. But today they were wrathful warriors. And when we smashed down the inner walls of the fortified building we found there the old and the young Shasoon cowering, and the babes in cots, the crippled and the ailing, the venerable leaders, and the terrified toddlers; all protected by ranks of archers fighting fiercely to the last. And Ma roared with joy at the sight and lashed at bodies with her hooves and ate young and old and crippled Shasoon whole, and Shseil used his horns to stab and his teeth to rip the octopods into shreds. Then I joined them on the ground and I I cannot speak of it.

Suffice to say, we slew them all! We butchered, chewed, maimed, ripped, burned and impaled these angry Shasoon by the tens of thousand. The hot blood of battle was upon me; I was fighting side by side with giant sentients of magnificent valour, and blood flowed freely that day!

All this I saw, and all these emotions I felt, as I inhabited the Ka’un mind that was inhabiting me. It was a day of bloody murder, and my Ka’un revelled in it. And so did the Ka’un who controlled Cuzco, and so did all the other Ka’uns who controlled this army of giant sentients. This was not a day for the Kindred; this was a day for monsters to kill small eight-limbed angry and aggressive intelligent beings who stood not a chance. They could hurt us, but they could not kill us; all they could do was die screaming with rage.

Yet in my own soul, I raged with frustration, and with contempt for my inhabiting mind. For what glory was this? How could any sentient creature take pleasure in such cruel, futile atrocities?

The Shasoon were flawed creatures, without doubt; they were a young species, and primitive and bloodthirsty. They had not yet learned the joys of civilisation, collaboration, and societal love. But they had potential; their cities were beautiful, they loyalty to each other was noteworthy, and they had, I do not doubt, great love for their children and for each other.

But we slaughtered them that day as if they were insects who had built their nest in our child’s bedroom; and when the Ka’un were weary we departed and a planet-buster missile was sent to burrow into the planet’s core.

One solitary Shasoon was captured; and we made him watch, through the glass wall of the hull, as his planet was exploded into many pieces. He screamed and wailed, as they all did on these occasions.

And then he was taken away to the interior world.

When we did not fight, we slept. We woke, we fought again.

“Cuzco,” I whispered.

The great beast was asleep.

“Cuzco.”

Still, he slept, not moving, not even a trace of breath from his lips.

“Cuzco!”

Still, he did not stir. No one stirred; for all we giant sentients, sleep was absolute and involuntary.

But for some unknown reason, I had woken, and remained awake. And I could speak. But Cuzco could not hear me; his trance-like state could not be penetrated. I called and whispered and blew air upon his face, but he did not respond in any way.

Eventually I was silent. I lay awake, incapable of movement, unable to speak to anyone else; never have I felt more trapped.

“They are giants also,” roared Cuzco, as he hovered in mid-air at the head of his army. “It is a worthy encounter. Let battle commence!”

And Cuzco plunged and dived upon the basking reptilian creatures, each twice his size, and I loped along on my tentacles to join him.

We were on a swamp planet; double suns made the air a painful glare. These creatures were non-sentient but vicious, and Cuzco was enjoying the battle. Blood spattered and heads were severed and after several minutes Cuzco was maimed and weak and I came roaring in to help him.

“Cuzco,” I whispered, my face close to his bleeding head. “Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” he whispered back, then his eyes went blank again and he fell asleep.

The reptile tried to rip his body apart; and I stood and fought, to protect Cuzco’s sleeping body. I realised that Cuzco’s Ka’un body-rider had absented himself; and indeed so had mine. For I had at that moment, for the first time in a year or more, the use of my limbs back; I was free!

But Cuzco was in deadly peril. So I fought for my friend like a crazed thing, spitting rage and stabbing with my quills and slashing with my claws. I pounded the enemy beasts with my tentacles; and I defeated them all.

And when it was over, I was weary and bloodied, and Cuzco still slept, and I wondered what I would do now. Well done, Sai-ias, said a voice in my head, and I realised it was my Ka’un.

He was talking to me.

Cuzco’s wrecked body was carried up in a landing craft and taken to the Hell Ship. He would be restored to health, I knew, but it would be some time before I saw him again.

I recognised one of the Kindred landing party; it was Zala. Once she had been Sharrock’s enemy, and had fought him on his world. And now once again she was serving the Ka’un.

“Zala,” I whispered to her, “It’s me, Sai-ias.” But she did not respond. She is a beautiful creature, said the voice in my head. Or at least, I find her so. Larger, physically, than the females of my kind. And three eyes at the front, whereas our third eye is on the back of our neck. But beautifully proportioned. I have often, in the body of a Kindred male, fornicated with this beast.

Who are you? I thought at the voice in my head. But there was no response.

It was, once again, a slaughter most bloody and glorious.

On this day, I fought side by side with the Kindred, against tusked bipeds who had built huge metal machines to fight their battles for them. The Kindred were armed with their cylinder guns that spat fire, and I and a dozen other giant sentients fought beside them with our claws and teeth and, in my case, tentacles.

First, we had destroyed the tuskers’ cities with bombs from the air; we had smashed their missiles in their silos; we had slain them in their hordes. This was a semi-technological society which used steam to power its machinery; and their projectile weapons fired only one bullet before requiring a reload. But even so, the tuskers had large and well disciplined armies and catapults that could hurl burning fire, and there were millions of them. So we slew millions of them, remotely, with missiles and forest fires.

And now we had descended to the planet for hand to hand combat with the last stragglers on the planet; no more than two or three thousand of them, we estimated.

And we were losing. The tusked bipeds used ambush and deceit against us; they built pits and covered them with grass; they put bombs in their own people so when a Kindred warrior struck an enemy warrior with his sword, the resulting blast was deadly to both.

And their metal machines were unbeatable. I stabbed them with my quills, I smashed them with my tentacles, but they could not be hurt. And every time they burned me with fire, my inner shell got weaker.

And then another landing craft descended from the sky, and twelve warriors stepped out. They were bipeds, roughly the same height as Sharrock, and dressed in long red robes; dignified and graceful but with blackened old faces that looked like skulls; their beauty turned to eerie age.

One of them fired a projectile gun without aiming; and a hundred or more tiny missiles flew through the air and unerringly targeted the metal monsters we had been fighting.

The missiles cut through metal effortlessly; moments later nearly a hundred blinding flashes dazzled us; and when our vision returned, the monsters were ash.

One of the robed bipeds laughed; a sound of joy that chilled me. See me, Sai-ias, said the voice in my head, and the laughing biped turned to look at me, and I looked back. And I realised that it was him; my Ka’un; the one who lived in my mind.

“Come, and fight!” shouted another robed Ka’un, to the tusker army. “If you can defeat us, you may have your planet.” And he drew a sword and held it aloft; the universal sign for a challenge to combat.

By now only a handful of the tusked bipeds were left; five hundred or so was my guess. And most of them were not in plain sight; they were hidden in the alleys and houses of this city, from where they had launched their skilful ambushes. But one by one they all emerged, to face this new enemy. For they clearly knew this was something different.

Now they were fighting their real enemy: the Ka’un.

I realised that I was paralysed; only my eyes could move, not my limbs or head. My Ka’un was focusing on his own body, and had immobilised me.

The five hundred or so tuskers formed a disciplined semicircle, facing the twelve Ka’un. They wore tunics of hide and metal, and they carried projectile guns in their hands and swords and axes in their scabbards. They were clearly seasoned fighters.

One of the tuskers screamed an insult at the Ka’un; it was evidently an invitation to fight and die. And even though I could not comprehend it, there was a musicality to the creature’s sounds that made me think the words were beautifully expressed.

And my Ka’un responded to the challenge by stepping forward; and then he bowed his head, in a gesture of respect.

Five hundred or more guns were raised and all shot of them at my Ka’un.

The speed of it all was bewildering; the bullets fired, my Ka’un leaped to one side, and the other Ka’un dodged and ducked as the hail of bullets flew at them. Then my Ka’un got back to his feet.

There was blood upon his chest; a hole in his skull. He had dodged most of the bullets, but not all. Yet he had survived. And my Ka’un laughed again.

Half the tuskers reloaded their guns; the other half charged with swords and axes raised. My Ka’un was undaunted, and did not deign to draw his sword; his eleven comrades stood in readiness, but also did not attempt to draw their weapons.

And then a spark of fire shot from my Ka’un’s arm and hit the front rank of charging tuskers. They fell, screaming and ablaze. The other Ka’un ran towards the tuskers, flames leaping from their arms like lightning that streaks across the sky, and more tuskers burned.

Then a second fusillade of bullets was fired, and some of the Ka’un fell. My Ka’un had lost the use of one arm; but still he spat flame from the fingers of the other arm; the air was acrid with fumes. The burning tuskers did not scream as they died, and no one had time to attempt to extinguish the flames of their stricken comrades. All were focused on killing the Ka’un.

One tusker got far enough to lop the head off a Ka’un’s shoulders; and then my Ka’un struck him with a powerful fist, splintering a tusk. But the tusker absorbed the blow and swung his sword again but my Ka’un leaped high in the air, dodging the blade, and landed with feet kicking brutally and the tusker’s skull was crushed, and he fell down dead.

My Ka’un roared with joy; and for one moment I could see through his eyes. Two more tuskers were rushing at him/me with swords, enveloped with flame but fearless; and I/my Ka’un seized a tusker sword from the ground and engaged them in savage swordplay. Steel clashed against steel; my Ka’un was deft and fast and graceful, but the tuskers were numerous and highly skilled. I felt, as my Ka’un felt, a surge of panic at the thought that I would now die, irrevocably.

But a moment later I/my Ka’un had recovered my/our poise and my/his sword bit flesh and the scores of attacking tuskers were dead-hacked apart then eviscerated. How does that feel, Sai-ias? my Ka’un asked in my head.

The battle was over; the ground was damp with blood. The Ka’un retreated to their ship, dragging their dead and wounded, but my Ka’un remained; staring at my body; thinking his thoughts in my head. This was a joyful battle; too often we hide in our ship and miss the true glory of war.

Are your dead warriors… truly dead? I thought at him. Oh yes. There is no resurrection for us; only for you, our children. But the difference is: we welcome death.

Why do you do this? What pleasure can you take in all this carnage? I thought. Do not pretend, Sai-ias; for you enjoyed it too.

With a creeping sensation of horror, I realised he was right; I had savoured the glory of this day! And I hated myself for it.

Who are you? I thought.

I am Minos, I am both artist and warrior; and I am captain of the vessel we call the Blessed Farol; which you know as the Hell Ship.

From that moment on, Minos was constantly in my thoughts. Do not judge us harshly, he said to me that first night. For we were wronged. Our universe was destroyed, by brutal creatures who cared nothing about the goodness of our kind; and thus we were forced to become wanderers through the dimensions. We are victims; and you should pity us.

Stop this now! I thought at him. Let us all be free; and stop the killing. You are deranged. What pleasure can you take in massacring so many?

We do not do it to take pleasure.

Then why do it? I thought. We only fight when we are provoked! Oh how could you think so badly of us, Sai-ias?

I was shaken by his words; the evident sincerity of his tone. Yet I knew that some creatures could lie as easily as they breathed; and I suspected that Minos was one such.

For we have only one goal, Minos continued: to spread the word of peace and love through all the realities. But each and every time we attempt to seed friendship and concord, we are confronted by belligerence and rage and contempt. And so-in self-defence-we have killed very many species of sentient alien species. But only for the noblest of reasons! And only, as I say, in self defence.

You can’t believe those lies! I raged mentally.

I do believe them.

You have killed millions of innocent creatures, you evil one!

Only because they proved unworthy.

I realised that he truly wanted me to believe him; and I marvelled at the pettiness of this creature, in thus trying to win the affection and respect of his own slave.

The following day I remembered the words of Minos when I woke.

All around me, my fellow giant sentients were lost in dreamless sleep. I alone was awake. But something was different. I felt-I felt And then I rose up and walked.

I walked! And slithered; then I expanded my cape; and I spoke:

“My name is Sai-ias,” I said. And no one could hear me, so I said it again:

“My name is Sai-ias, and I am free.”

My tentacles were mine to command; I could speak freely. And I could fly, if I so desired, wherever the winds might take me.

The next day was the same.

And the next day.

And the next. Free!

When my fellow sentients woke, I acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. I acted as they did; I spoke as though possessed by a Ka’un. I ate like a savage. I did not converse. During exercises, I was as brutal as I had always been.

Later, I journeyed from one end of the hangar bay to the other where the Kindred dwelled, just to see what it was like. It was not in fact so very different; except that the Kindred slept on wooden benches, and the stench of their unwashed bodies was ripe and disgusting.

When challenged by a Kindred warrior about my presence there, I said I was carrying a message to a particular Kindred chief who I knew had died during our last combat. I was told he had died in combat, so I snorted rudely, and made my way back to my end of the hangar bay, where the giant sentients were lodged.

At the end of that long day I lay down and slept with them; or rather, pretended to sleep.

It was, I knew, imperative that no one should know of my state of freedom. For there was no-one here who could be trusted. The Kindred were pure evil; the giant sentients mere puppets.

And I wondered how this had happened. Was it a mere accident? Or was Minos playing with me? Or perhaps trying to win my confidence and trust? But if so-why?

And I wondered too what I would do when the time for battle came again. Would I reveal myself as the true Sai-ias by refusing to fight, and be entrapped once more? Or would I fight, and slay, and hence keep my freedom for a little while longer?

And hearing that thought in my mind, Minos spoke:

You must fight, Minos said. For my crew know nothing of my gift to you, and they must never learn. But this will not be for ever. This terrible state of affairs will not last for ever. Trust me, Sai-ias; I implore you, trust me!

I did not know whether to believe him, or to trust him; but at least I knew part of the truth. This, my state of freedom, was Minos’s doing.

And I realised too that Minos had come to rely upon me, and perhaps even to like me, for reasons both strange and mystifying. For he spoke to me, and to no other. He gave me the freedom of my limbs, as a gift with no prior or subsequent conditions. He was the captain, the master of this vessel-the king in effect of all the Ka’un. And I was his favourite!

And over the weeks that followed, with Minos’s voice in my head, I learned so much about this ship and our captors. Minos confided in me as if we were long-established friends; as if we were equals! He told me that his ship had the power to travel between different universes, not just between stars, though I did not comprehend his explanation of this. He told me also of the sad history of his people, and their war with the evil Parakka. And he told me how he and his crew had yearned to make a fresh start, in some new universe or other. But they were never, because of the folly of others, able to do so.

There were only a handful of Ka’un still surviving, Minos admitted. Once the ship had held thousands of their kind but war and natural disasters had thinned their numbers. But only the extremest acts of violence could kill their self-regenerating bodies; they could not die of old age. That salvation, he said bitterly, was denied them.

Many times, he also admitted, the Hell Ship had come close to destruction. It had been blown up, hurled into a sun, beset with metal-eating viruses, bombed with un-matter, and in a myriad other ways savaged and brutalised. Each time the ship-which is organic and living, in some way I cannot fathom-has reformed itself. And the Tower itself has always remained intact. The Tower, he told me, was the replica of a sacred building upon his own home world; The Tower of the Living Saviour, which for some reason he reverenced.

For many years, I had believed the Ka’un to be immortal. But no. They can be killed. And many have been, over the aeons.

And those that survive are few. They are tired. Their hopes and dreams have all died. Their loves and desires have decayed into distant memories.

And Minos, I believe, after all these aeons, is beginning to regret the many terrible things he has done.

Sai-ias?

I am here.

Tell me of your art.

Art? Why do you ask? My people have no art!

None? No poetry? No paintings? No sculpture?

Our life is our art.

Minos laughed; a sound that made my head throb.

Good reply.

We believe each child born is a work of art; thus, we raise it to be pure and true and beautiful of spirit.

Even better.

I did not know what painting was until I came to the Hell Ship.

You have gained something then, in your time here. A ray of hope to be found in your otherwise dismal plight!

You taunt me.

Forgive me-I was merely teasing you. I am allowed to tease, am I not? I was an artist you see. I painted with-flame, I suppose you would say. With my own body. I was considered to be a genius.

And then you became a warrior.

I had no choice. I often dream, you know, of giving it all up. Going back to my art.

Giving “it” all up?

You disapprove.

You destroy worlds!

I can’t bear you to disapprove of me Sai-ias.

You are a murderer.

I care about you. You are my friend. I sometimes think you are my only friend.

You are a monster!

Perhaps I was. But I can change. You can help me change.

Can I?

I would like you to.

Then-you must surrender the ship to its captives. And if you do, we will be merciful to you. This I pledge; you have the word of Sai-ias!

You know I can’t do that, you sweet-souled beast. I wouldn’t be allowed to do such a thing! Lyraii and Darol would not permit it. You don’t understand what leadership is. You cannot be a leader if others do not follow.

Even so, you must do what you can, Minos. The killing and the destroying of worlds must come to an end.

I agree.

You agree?

You have persuaded me. We can change. I can change. We can wage peace instead of war! If you help me, Sai-ias. Only if you help me!

How do I know I can believe you?

You have to trust me. As I trust you. Do you trust me Sai-ias?

Yes, I thought at him; yes, I do!

Minos’s pledge was extraordinary; but for me, it came as no surprise.

For I have always believed in certain fundamental truths: that love is more powerful than evil. And that even the worst and cruellest sinners can be redeemed, and brought to virtue. That is my faith and my philosophy.

For a sentient soul is not a fixed and immutable thing; it can grow, evolve, become better and wiser, as truth and love are absorbed by it. And my kind pride ourselves on our ability to turn dark souls into bright souls; to leach out evil and encourage good. I was telling the truth when I advised Minos that for us, life is art; we have raised up many species into noble sentience, and of this we are proud.

And as for Minos-the new, kinder, peace-loving, spiritually redeemed Minos-perhaps his transformation may be considered my own and greatest “work of art?”

Minos’s voice was in my head every time I woke from dreamless sleep. Wake Sai-ias, it’s me!

And it was there when I trained in the arts of war with my fellow giant sentients: Well fought, Sai-ias, I am proud of you!-Bravo Sai-ias!-Deftly done, Sai-ias, you are a marvel! And it was there too for long portions of the day, all day long.

Here’s a thought, Sai-ias… Have you ever wondered, Sai-ias, if… Won’t it be marvellous, Sai-ias, when…

I wondered how he had time to run his ship, so many hours did he spend with me!

It was clear that Minos relished my company. He depended on me. He loved to tease me and joke with me, and he savoured my mockery in return. He came to regard me-yes, I’m not afraid to say it-as his friend.

I suspected that Minos had experienced precious little companionship and no love since the Hell Ship began its long terrible journey through the universes. His fellow Ka’un were desiccated-literally withered with age, hence the black skins-and empty of soul. They rarely spoke to him. They had no fondness for him, or for each other. Friendship was an emotion most of them had forgotten.

And so, for many aeons, Minos’s life had been barren and entirely empty of joy.

Perhaps, then, my role was to fill that void?

I learned too that Minos hated with all his being the pursuing alien ship that so nearly destroyed us. He called it the Nemesis; and, he told me, it nearly wrecked the Hell Ship once before, in a battle that took place in Nemesis’s own universe.

But the Nemesis was gone now; the Hell Ship had successfully eluded it for the second time. And Minos was resolved never to fall into the same trap again. He will if necessary, he has told me, remain in this current universe for ever, once we have formed an alliance with and befriended the native sentients.

I could be happy in this universe, I have decided. Space was not black here-it shone with a rainbow coloured radiance from the light of trillions of closely packed suns. The planets were plentiful and many were wondrous beautiful, for most had rings that shimmered in the sunslight. And the entire universe was straddled by an asteroid trail that stretched between a hundred thousand stellar systems, like a river between the stars.

Are you ready for this?

I am ready.

I am so proud of you, Sai-ias. Today, everything will change!

This was indeed a major turning point in my relationship with Minos; and indeed, in the history of the Hell Ship. For my role on this next mission was to be not a warrior, but an ambassador on behalf of the Ka’un!

As Minos had explained to me, instead of waging war, this time he and his fellow Ka’un were going to negotiate a fair and lasting peace with the peoples of this universe. Here, they will make their home. And in time, so he pledged, the captives on the ship would be liberated. All this Minos had promised me.

My joy knew no bounds!

Our first port of call was a planet populated by one of the three most successful spacefaring sentients in this sector of the universe we were inhabiting. These creatures were airborne flat-creatures-sessiles who had discovered the power of flight, and had then become sentient. And now their entire civilisation hovered above the ground, in the clouds and above mountain peaks.

The Ka’un’s miniature cameras flew down to the planet and showed me images of floating towers of a soft soapy substance moulded into flying palaces-a sublime creation from these rare and strange beings.

I called the creatures ShiBo, because they reminded me of the flying plants of my own home planets. I yearned to befriend them. I have faith in you, Minos said, inspiringly. Go and speak to these creatures, and tell them we want to be their friends.

I shall do so, Minos; and I shall make you proud of me. I could hardly believe how much had changed in the last few months! For the first time in many centuries, I was no longer sad. I felt my life had a purpose.

And that purpose was to make peace with the ShiBo.

The Hell Ship itself was rendered invisible, by means I did not fathom; and I arrived in the ShiBo stellar system in an illusory vessel at the forefront of an imaginary fleet.

It was important, Minos told me, to create the illusion of massive force, in order to pre-empt aggression. Imagine, Minos had whispered softly, that you are visited by a single alien spaceship from a place of which you knew nothing. Wouldn’t you be tempted to lash out with a pre-emptive strike?

No, I had replied.

Perhaps not, Minos had conceded. But many would be so tempted. Fear of the unknown is the commonest emotion among all the sentient species we have encountered. And a single ship-that’s both to be feared, and easily defeated. Too great a temptation. So our mock fleet will help us in our road to peace.

The mock fleet was flanked with battle cruisers the size of gas giants. It would indeed be a crazed species that launched an attack on forces so entirely overwhelming.

We arrived and broadcast a message of peace in the language of the ShiBo, which our advance party robot spies had already recorded, and the Ka’un had somehow translated.

The response was immediate. All the lights on the planet of ShiBo went out, for ten seconds; this was their signal for “Let us negotiate.”

It was a phenomenal accomplishment; there was no artificial light on the ShiBo planet, but the plants were bioluminescent. The ShiBo had the power to switch their planet’s vegetation off at will.

In the game of power, that was a point to them.

I was accompanied by an escort of myself-a dozen illusory versions of me, subtly distinguished to make us seem like different beings. This one had a blacker hide; that version was larger; another version had blue eyes not scarlet, and so forth. We also wore body armour partially covering our segments, and a breathing apparatus was attached to our bodies.

I was alone on this mission, with no Kindred, and no other giant sentients in the landing party. And I was-still-free. I could move my own limbs, I could speak; I was not subject to any coercion. I was doing all this of my own free will.

Our landing craft departed from the mother ship, and we slowly cruised down out of orbit. As we-I and the other Sai-iases-entered their atmosphere in our landing craft, ShiBo jet planes provided us with an escort; these were robot controlled, ovoid in shape, with no visible weaponry. However, apparently-according to Minos’s research, which was thorough-each plane could dispatch a thousand bombs, each of which was powerful enough to make a sun spit and flare.

I looked at my screens and saw the ShiBo world below and I marvelled. It was so very beautiful. The land was scarlet and blue-rich in red-leaved plant life and criss-crossed with rivers and patched with lakes and seas. It reminded me of my own world.

We landed in a field of red, and my sensors recorded the death screams of a million living vegetal beings, and I regretted the need to kill so many. But they were, after all, merely blades of grass, and we had nowhere else to land: there were no rocky plains or deserts on this fertile planet. But each patch of ground was alive with plants which sang at night.

The doors of my landing craft opened and I slid out on my lower segment. My illusory escorts accompanied me, and we made our way down to the plain of grass. And above the grass hovered the representatives of the ShiBo leadership.

Be persuasive, Sai-ias.

I shall.

The ShiBo flapped like sails in the air, but I fancied I could read expression in the contours and ridges of their flat bodies.

“Do not be afraid,” I trilled, because my translator was turning my natural tones into a high pitched treble trill.

And the trills of the ShiBo that greeted me in return were rich and beauteous and I felt as if I had fallen into a lake of music. My translator failed miserably to render any of it into intelligible speech, and I deduced that for the ShiBos language was, first and foremost, an act of beauty. Meaning to them was secondary.

And so I trilled back, as beautifully as I was able; I sang the low rumbling song of the Day Dawning, and heard it transformed into bird song so delicate and sweet it felt as if my heart would burst from joy.

My song was greeted by a profound silence.

What just happened? I asked with my thoughts.

You have just committed a gross error of etiquette, it seems, Minos’s voice said in my head. Or perhaps, pray do not take offence, they just hate your singing?

“I come in peace,” I said grumpily, and waited for my meaning to register among their flat floating brains.

“We welcome you in peace,” one of the sails replied.

“Your planet is very beautiful,” I told the sail.

“You are a vile and an ugly beast, you disgust us, and you cannot sing,” the sail replied.

That answered one question; this species knew nothing of flattery, diplomacy or, indeed, good manners.

“I am considered beautiful on my own world. You, by contrast, look utterly ridiculous to my eyes,” I retorted, in the same spirit of offensive candour, and the trilling swelled in what the translator told me was approbation. These creatures appreciated plain talking.

“Are you the masters and conquerors of this universe?” I asked, “Or do you live in peace and accord with your fellow sentients?”

“We live in peace and accord,” said one of the sails.

“Then you do not incur my contempt,” I said.

“We accept your lack of contempt without any trace of contempt,” the sail replied.

“My name is Sai-ias,” I told this particular sail.

“My name is [what came out was gibberish-so I decided to call him Sail],” said Sail.

“We wish,” I said eloquently, slipping into my role of ambassador with remarkable ease, “to find a place in this universe where we can dwell and be happy. We do not wish to take territory from any other sentient creature. We will not threaten this planet or any of your kind. We merely wish to dwell here, in the universe of Many Suns, for all eternity.”

“That cannot be,” said Sail.

“This is an entire universe, there is room for all,” I explained, somewhat irked by the brevity and rudeness of the creature’s response.

“You must return from where you came,” said Sail, “or we will destroy you.”

Stay calm, they’re just trying to provoke you.

“I cannot be threatened,” I explained, in my calmest tones.

“We have travelled to every planet in this universe,” Sail explained. “We know who belongs here, and we treasure them all. You do not belong. Who are you and where do you come from?” Oh come on! What an arrogant thing to say! These people are starting to annoy me, Minos thought.

Hush! I thought back at him. Leave this to me!

Theirs was a small universe after all, I mused; and it was no wonder these people were insular to the point of bigotry.

“We come from elsewhere,” I said to the ShiBo. “Another universe. But we have travelled here, and we wish to leave in peace.”

A trilling came in response; they were shocked at my words.

“Another universe?” said the ShiBo, sceptically.

“Yours is not the only universe,” I clarified. “There are countless other universes,” I explained.

“Then go to them. There is no space for you here,” said Sail.

“There is,” I said testily, “plenty of space-many planets are-”

And then my spaceship exploded.

The blast threw me off my feet, but the Sails merely rippled in the hurricane-force gale.

When I rolled back on to my segments and stood up on my twelve feet, I realised my breathing apparatus had been ripped off in the explosion. And my landing craft was a wreck that burned brightly at the bottom of a deep crater.

What happened? I asked Minos with my thoughts.

They must have ambushed you! Minos replied with outrage. We cannot tolerate this!

I agree, I thought, full of anger at this slight to our dignity.

And then the Sails slowly retreated, and they were joined by hundreds more floating creatures, except these ones were encased in armour and had what looked like guns mounted on their sides and heads.

I was alone except for my illusory selves on a planet full of creatures that aimed to kill me.

I braced myself.

And the Sails fired their weapons; and energy beams struck us-all the Sai-iases-and we were engulfed in flame, and my illusory selves dissolved in the blinding heat, leaving behind nothing.

I shook the flames off myself and ripped away the last remnants of the breathing apparatus. I didn’t need it. Fire couldn’t hurt me. And I was, by now, good and mad.

Fear not, Sai-ias, said Minos. For help is on its way.

And then all hell broke loose.

The ground beneath us shook, then hundreds of missiles from the Hell Ship materialised out of the sky. Most exploded in mid-air, sending clouds of flame downwards which engulfed the floating Sails. And some exploded on the ground, ripping apart the grass and hurling soil high into the air; the wail of dying vegetation deafened me.

Then multiple pillars of cloud wove through the sky towards us; a second fusillade of missiles had been teleported from the Hell Ship into the planet’s upper atmosphere and was now hurtling downwards.

I was in a field encircled by pillars of flames, beneath a sky of fire and ash, as the surviving Sails confronted me in panic and mayhem.

And I roared my rage at the Sails: “You betrayed me, you lied to me, you tried to kill me!”

“What is happening?” said Sail, bewilderedly.

“Guess!” I crowed.

And my body sacs engorged and I grew, and I grew, until I was larger than the landing craft had been before its destruction. I was a black giant with wings that did not flap and who in this gravity could float in mid-air. And so I floated up, and seized the Sails in my tentacles; and I crushed them and I smashed them!

And as I fought, Ka’un missiles picked off the other Sail warriors one by one, until the ground was littered with sundered Sails.

There was no blood; the Sails died uncomplainingly; it was a rout.

And for the first time I understood what Minos had said to me; we had sought only peace, and in return we had received betrayal and violence.

Who could blame us, then, for striking out and smiting our enemies?

We captured one Sail; and forced it to watch the planet-buster missile do its work on its planet. The creature said nothing; its trills were silenced.

That night I raged at the duplicity of the Sails! How could they have deceived me like that! Minos was right, I thought to myself. Such creatures do not deserve to live!

And I slipped into a dreamless sleep, still angry; but soothed by the kindness of Minos towards me. For I had come to admire him so much. Despite all his faults, there was something magnificent about this valiant yet spiritually tormented being.

And then in the middle of the night I woke from my dreamless sleep and marvelled at my own utter stupidity.

For it was obvious now that the Sails had not attacked us; we attacked them. If a missile had been fired by them at my spaceship, I would have seen it; no, the landing craft must have been detonated from within, on Minos’s orders.

Such was Minos’s trickery.

The next day, that thought was with me still.

And I realised that Minos had for many weeks been seducing me, with his gentle and deceptive words murmured directly into my brain. That was Minos’s gift; to make you believe in his own skewed and utterly false version of the world.

All his promises were, when I considered them for even a moment, preposterous. His lies were blatant. His corruption was total. But I had believed him-why? Because I wanted to? Or because Minos had a power of persuasion that no mind could resist?

Perhaps both.

But I could not deny that I had been fooled utterly. Like the Kindred, I had become a willing pawn, rather than a mere unwilling puppet.

And I was ashamed of myself, beyond all measure.

These were a beautiful people.

Their hide was the colour of a rainbow; their heads were fanged with tongues that spat as they spoke; and they could walk, but also crawl, and also fly and swim. And I suppose that’s why I found them so attractive. All of us, every species, have our own ideal of beauty, do we not? And I love creatures that can adapt, and metamorphose.

And so I was mightily fond of the Krakzios, as Minos had named them. They were large horned creatures made of soft purple flesh that could harden and expand and double them in size at a thought. They had no eyes, but could see with every part of their domed heads. They had many limbs-fifty or more-that could sink into their bodies, then emerge in an instant. And the had remarkable powers. They could turn earth into a building material of remarkable strength by swallowing it, digesting it, then vomiting it forth; and by this means they became space travellers in tiny boats of transmuted soil that somehow, Minos didn’t know how, defied gravity.

I had hoped that the Krakzios could be our allies; but at our very first meeting, the Krakzios ambassador had admitted they were close friends and allies of the ShiBo, who we had so recently exterminated.

And in consequence, Minos patiently explained to me, they had to go. For all it took was one sentient species spreading sedition and hate and our survival in this universe would be in jeopardy.

You promised we would seek peace, I implored him.

We have no choice, my dearest Sai-ias, said Minos’s voice in my head.

And I knew I could not defy him on this. For if I dared to do so, he would revoke my freedom, and control my limbs again; and the outcome would be the same.

So I descended to the planet; and the Krakzios greeted me warmly. They talked about their world; we discussed the wonderful variety of nature here. And I explained that my people had the power to fly through space without need of a spaceship, and they were impressed at that.

And after two days’ discussion, they agreed to all my terms. They did not at any point try to ambush me or intimidate me or double-cross me.

But, once I was back on board the Hell Ship, Minos told me we would still have to destroy these creatures, despite their seeming acquiescence. His voice was full of regret; and I told him that I fully sympathised with his dilemma.

Trust me, his voice in my head whispered. They have to die.

Of course I trust you! I said fervently. Minos, you are an inspiration to me!

The rest was familiar: hails of fire; interstellar war; the planet-buster missile.

But when Minos was gone from my head I raged at his infernal treachery towards these blessed and harmless creatures.

“ Minos you are an inspiration” I had thought at him, with one part of my mind.

But with the other part of my mind I had thought: “ Minos, I hate you, and I shall kill you, you destroyer-of worlds! ”

For I can do this: I can think two thoughts at once. Few species can, but my kind are masters of this kind of inner deceit.

Minos thought I was just a foolish dupe; but now it was I who was deceiving him.

I have a fresh mission for you, said Minos.

Where? Which planet? I thought at him.

I need you to return to the interior world.

I slept, and when I woke I was in the Great Plain, looking up at the interior sky. I could see aerials flying above.

I felt a pang of terrible homesickness for this world, which for so long had been my world.

I loped across the fields until I arrived at the amphitheatre of grass. There I was to greet a new arrival, a slave Krakzios. It was, Minos had informed me, out of control and in an appalling rage.

The Krakzios was being contained by invisible beams in a pit dug in the ground. I walked towards it, past the grazers and the sessiles. And I saw Quipu and Fray and Lirilla, and felt a surge of delight; but I ignored them. For I had work to do.

Release the prisoner please, I said to Minos.

Are you able to do this?

I am.

Do you want time to talk to your friends? The grey beast died, did it not, after our ship was attacked? And now it is returned, and does not know you?

I have nothing to say to Fray; you are my friend now, I told Minos.

Ah Sai-ias, you gladden my heart.

The Krakzios in the pit was suddenly free of its invisible bonds. It paced around, eying the height of the hole at the bottom of which it resided.

“What the fuck,” said Fray, “do you want?”

“Sai-ias, missed, you,” said Lirilla.

“You will be quiet,” I informed them all. “I am here in the service of the Ka’un.”

Quipu’s five heads were all ashen.

A snarling, howling sound filled the air, as the Krakzios sensed my presence.

“Sai-ias, what are you doing?” I heard someone mutter.

The Krakzios leaped and was out of the pit in a single bound. Its head bobbed around as it stared up at the bright light of our artificial sun. Its soft purple flesh had lost its lustre and its colour. And it seemed to me to be amazed at the sheer size of the interior planet in which it now stood.

Then the Krakzios moved. It was fast. So fast, I did not even see it. Its arms emerged from its body and claws slashed at my hide, and its horns gouged my flesh, and its tail looped around and jabbed my eyes like a spear.

I was bowled over and came up without seven of my eyes, and with a bloody hole in my black hide. I was astonished. My body was virtually impregnable. And my eyes are made of a thick gelatine that can withstand not just Cuzco’s fire but also projectile bullets and energy beams fired at point blank range.

This creature, I realised, was made of some kind of substance unknown in my universe.

“You betrayed us!” the Krakzios said, as its remarkable metamorphosis began.

Its soft flesh now turned into hard ridged armour; it grew in size, until it was as large as I am; and vicious spikes shot out of every part of its hide, transforming it into a weapon with legs. Strangely, the mouth of the Krakzios in this new form was invisible until it spoke, then it appeared as a snarl across the front of its domed head; the effect was scarily disconcerting.

“Yes I did,” I said calmly, remembering the promises I had made, on which I had utterly reneged.

“You promised us peace.”

“We feared you, so we destroyed you,” I explained.

“Die!” And the creature lunged again in its new and vaster and even more terrible form; and I lashed it with my tentacles.

A savage struggle ensued-I shall not describe it-and at the end of it, the Krakzios was ripped apart. Its body lay in two pieces. It whined and groaned.

“Your body will heal,” I explained to the Krakzios. “The pieces will rejoin. You will be as good as new. And then you will surrender your will to the Ka’un. Resistance is futile. You are defeated. We are all defeated. Our role is to endure our failure.”

“The Ka’un?” gasped the Krakzios.

“They are my masters, I am their willing servant,” I explained.

“If you had any pride,” gasped the Krakzios, lying in a pool of its own blood, watching the shit pour out of its sundered guts, “you would refuse to thus serve.”

“You speak well; she is a traitor to us all,” said a voice, and I recognised it as the voice of Fray, and I realised she was referring to me.

“Resistance,” I explained again to the bleeding beast, “merely prolongs the agony.”

I could remember vividly, oh so vividly, the day my beloved friend Fray first arrived on the Hell Ship.

She hated me of course. She tried to gore me with her tusks, but was trapped behind force fields that could barely contain her powerful bulk. So instead, she vented her rage upon me with bitter angry words. Words I had heard before so many times from other new ones; and which I readily forgave.

Fray already knew that she was the last of her kind. And although she was a brutal predator, whose people loved to eat their own young, her kind were also sophisticated and clever, and had developed a beautiful philosophy that treasured the harmony of the natural world.

The Frayskind had sent colony ships to the stars, at sub-luminal speeds; and there were two hundred billion of Fray’s people alive when the Hell Ship had come to their universe. A long war had taken place between the Ka’un and an aggressive species of sentients called the Mala. Fray’s kind had taken no part in this war.

The Mala had been exterminated by means of a virus seeded by the Ka’un on all their planets. The Mala had died, and yet all the other life on these planets had survived. It had then come down to a space battle to the death between the Mala fleet and the Hell Ship.

The Hell Ship had triumphed.

And after the extermination of the Mala, Fray’s kind had opened negotiations with the Hell Ship. A long contract of peace had been drafted. And Fray, who was a leader to a large section of the Frayskind, had been involved in writing it. (Frayskind were meticulous about legal matters, and although they had no hands they could use their tongues with great dexterity.)

When the final document had been drafted, the Hell Ship spewed out yet another planet-buster missile and fled, taking the stunned Fray as captive and slave. She blamed herself for her people’s demise of course; and came to believe they should have fought, and not sought peace.

And, in all honesty, she was correct in her belief.

Thus Fray had not been an easy creature to pacify, back then. She had tried to kill me; then she had tried to manipulate me with her subtle logic, and charismatic personality. Then she discovered she could dominate some of the smaller sentients on the ship, and used her power over them to foment a mutiny which, thankfully, I was able to thwart.

I explained to her, again and again, that resistance was futile. But Fray did not believe me.

So I had told her tales of my home world. I painted a picture in words of the great waterspout of Jragnall, and the joy of swimming in the depths of the ocean with the Kasdif and the Qauy.

And Fray told me her stories too. She talked of her homeland, a planet orbiting a double sun. It was a wild and windy and mountainous desert world and many of the animals were, like the Frayskind, huge, because they carried huge stores of water in their bodies which they replenished every two years when the rains came. They were in effect living oases.

And thus, over the space of a year, we became friends. She was in many ways my dearest and closest friend. I bathed her body with moisture squirted from my tentacles on a monthly basis; which for her kind, betokens the closest fondness possible outside of a sexual relationship.

Fray was my friend; and now my friend had called me traitor.

You did well, Sai-ias.

Thank you.

I am proud of you. But I fear What do you fear Minos?

That you are not so very proud of me.

Of course I am.

You lie, Sai-ias.

No!

Of course you do. You’d be a fool not to. I’m your evil oppressor, remember?

I don’t think of it that way, I protested with my thoughts.

I hope you don’t. For what I have told you is true. My kind are not the aggressors, we are the victims. Our only sin is hope; hope that one day we will find a species worthy of our respect.

We were such a species. We did not seek war with you.

For a moment Minos was silent; and I wondered if I had been too frank with him. But then he spoke, in gentle and humble tones:

Perhaps then we were wrong about your kind. Forgive me Sai-ias-no, of course you can’t forgive me. What we did was unforgivable!

Understand me then Sai-ias. If I could travel back in time I would save your entire planet and all your peoples. For now that I have met you I understand how wise and kind you are. You are truly worthy of our respect; the finest and the most honourable sentient creature we have ever encountered.

Sai-ias, will you not answer me? I have bared my soul after all.

I hear your apology, Minos. And I accept that things that are done cannot be undone.

A staggering cliche, my child; but true. Do you hate me?

No.

You’re lying again. Tell the truth. Do you hate me?

No.

Try one more time.

No. I did, once, I hated you with all my soul. But no longer.

That gladdens my heart, dear creature.

Minos Yes Sai-ias? What did you want to say?

Just this-if I may-forgive my candour Whatever is on your mind, Sai-ias, merely expectorate it forth.

Minos, thank you. From the depths of my heart, thank you! For I have at times been close to Despair. I have been lonely and desperate, in danger of losing my will to live.

But now, my dearest Minos, I have achieved contentment! I have realised that my destiny is to be, as my ancestors once were, the protector of creatures greater than ourselves; and that destiny has finally been fulfilled!

I am, in short, proud to serve you, Captain Minos.

Sai-ias, I am so deeply touched; your friendship exalts me; you are the only creature in all the universes that I can trust.

Ah Minos! You are my master! And, I hope, also my friend.

Minos believed my every thought.

That stupid gullible turds-for-brains fucking fool!

He did not realise that my kind were accustomed to existing in a state of mental duplicity. For centuries we were the symbiotes of the great coral-beasts who bred us, and controlled our very thoughts. And so we learned to hide our real feelings; it is a gift we possess.

“Ah Minos you are my master!” I said with my mind; but my thoughts said: “ Monster-who-deserves-to-die-with-agonising-pain, I will deceive you and defeat you, somehow! ”

“And, I hope, also my friend,” I said with the thoughts of my mind; but at the same time, my mind was saying: “Die a terrible and painful death, you evil fucking murderer! ”

I had learned, from Sharrock, three key principles of warfare: Know your enemy, cheat your enemy, and always fight to win.

And though Sharrock’s rebellion had failed, mine I was sure would succeed. For I planned to make myself trusted by the Ka’un, indispensable to the Ka’un; and then to betray them, as they had betrayed the Sails.

My treachery was total; for I knew how to lie with my mind.

And thus, I began plotting how to overthrow Minos and all his Ka’un kind.

It proved difficult, however-even more difficult than I had expected-to get Minos and his people into a situation where I could slay them.

First, I tried to lure Minos and his people down on to a planet to help the giant sentients in a battle, as they had done against the tuskers. They were vulnerable once they were off the ship and on an alien planet; and I was confident I could destroy them with my quills and tentacles, despite their power of bodily-fire.

But Minos and his crew were growing more cautious. They would not, despite my best deceptions, be lured out into the open. And I still could find no way to access their own and secret part of the ship.

So next I tried to find a way to destroy the ship from within. I explored each and every room that I could access from my cargo bay home. There were ballrooms, bedrooms, banquet rooms; this was a ship equipped for a huge crew who expected to live in luxury.

But I found no bombs, no missiles, nothing I could use to explode the vessel. The Kindred were armed with guns and rifles; but those were no use to me. The Kindred’s fighter craft were equipped with missiles; but I was too large to sit inside their cockpits, and if I picked a missile up in my tentacles I had no way of detonating it.

But I did however manage to locate a box that was used by the Kindred to send messages during their planetary wars. It was a communications device that could transmit signals between planets over vast distances, via “rifts” in space. Quipu had told me of such devices.

So I took this communications device to a private place, an empty ballroom where crystal lights hung from the ceiling and the walls were covered in wood that was black with decay.

Then I studied the device and its controls, for quite some time. I experimented by pressing several switches in various permutations; and when a light turned green I knew I had switched it on. And then I spoke.

“This is Sai-ias, can you hear me? Is anyone there?” I said.

And then I waited.

And, after a little while, a voice replied.