Hell Ship

BOOK 11
Sharrock

For nearly a hundred years I have endured pain beyond anything I would have believed possible. And I have not faltered, or faded, or succumbed to the fatal state that is known as Despair.

And I have always clung to this small consolation; they have not crushed my spirit. They have defeated me, humiliated me, tortured me, and left me with no prospect of hope. But my spirit remains intact.

It is, indeed, a very small consolation.

It would, I know, be so much easier to yield to utter desolation; and let the toxins steal over my body, and turn my flesh into stone. The Ka’un have spread the myth that death is not possible, even when the body is petrified; but I do not believe this. I believe that when I die I will be dead and I will achieve merciful oblivion.

However, I do not wish to give those forsaken-by-the-gods fucking bastards the satisfaction.

So every day they hose salt water upon my flayed skin; and plunge knives into my body; and lash me with a knotted rope. After a few hours the pain is so bad that I become blind, through some kind of hysterical reaction, but the torment does not cease. They use members of the Kindred to torture me; it is clearly one of their tiresome but necessary allotted duties. There are few things worse for me than seeing the look of boredom on the face of my torturer before the first knife is thrust into my gut.

Then every night the ceiling rains healing water upon my body and the wounds seal and my organs reform and my vision is restored and by the morning I am whole again, and the rhythm can begin anew.

To distract myself I write poems in my head. I have never had much flair for poetry; and in all honesty, I suspect I still do not. But I have written 10,000,000 cantos or more of an epic poem about my adventures, and there is no one here who can tell me that it is less than a work of genius.

Ha!

You see, even in the midst of utter agony, I have not lost my sense of humour.

Sharrock defeated?

Never!

Oh I am so weary.

I awoke, and felt that something was different.

My agony was no less; my torturers were as bored as always. But the magnetic bonds that hold me aloft felt soft, and spongy.

Once my torturers had completed their daily chores and departed, I realised I could now bounce upon my invisible bonds, to get some movement going. And furthermore, I could manipulate my hands inside their metal shackles, which were looser than before. And so I wriggled and struggled, and used my teeth to grip the shackles while I moved my wrists; until finally I was free.

It was an far easier job to slip free of my ankle shackles. I was still trapped in a cell the size of a desert tent, but I was no longer restrained.

There was an electronic lock on the door; and I began to manipulate it with my body-energy; touching it with fingers and licking with my tongue to move the inner parts with the power of my own electricity. This is the trick I used in Sabol, the capital city of the Southern Tribes, to steal their precious alien artefact, the Jewel of the Seventh Sun (a jewel that is now possessed by a black-hided sea monster who I am proud to call my friend).

Finally the lock opened, and I was through the door. I was naked-nay, flayed, my muscles were visible and knotted, the slightest touch or brush against a wall was agony for me. But I did not allow this to distract me.

I found myself in a silver corridor, and I placed my ear to the metal and I listened.

It took a long time for the sounds to make themselves manifest; but eventually I was able to hear the murmur of conversation between the Ka’un and their Kindred slaves. I started to distinguish voices. I could identify twenty-five distinct individuals. But the words they uttered were gibberish, for I no longer had a pakla-translator in my brain.

I also heard the faintest noise, the merest hint of a vibration, that sounded to me like water flowing; I deduced it was the twin rivers that ran through the interior world. Four layers of hull separated me from my friends; but at least I could hear the sounds of their world.

And I was unbound, and had a vivid mental map of my location and where my enemies were.

I continued down the corridor until I heard footsteps and the whisper of blood through veins, which betokened enemies approaching. And I clambered up the wall and clung to the ceiling with my fingertips, which though fleshless still retained some magnetic-electric adhesive power. And I waited. Twenty long minutes passed and eventually two burly bipeds strode down the corridor; giants with square heads carrying energy guns in their hands. These were two of my Kindred captors, on their way to torture me. It must be dawn, I realised, though the lighting in the corridor had not changed.

The Kindred were big and muscular beasts, used to hand to hand combat; and I was weary and flayed and I knew I stood no chance against them in a fair fight.

However, the moment they had walked past I dropped down behind them and seized first one head, then the other, and snapped the necks of both. I was not as strong as once I was, but I was still exceedingly fast.

The two Kindred fell and rolled and immediately got up again, their necks twisted out of shape but rage leering in their features. And I realised that a broken neck was no obstacle to these creatures.

And they reached for their energy guns, only to find I had ripped them from their belts. I had a gun in each hand; I did not hesitate; I fired flame; they died before they were able to scream.

I found I was shivering and shuddering; my flayed skin was causing me pain, and it was reacting badly with the air. Underneath the jets of healing water I was strong; but in cold air, I was a walking cripple.

I stripped the clothes off one of the Kindred, recoiling at his ugly body hair, and carried the garments back to my cell. The healing waters still flowed; so I soaked the clothes, then put them on my body. The sleeves of the shirt were ridiculously long so I rolled them up; I tucked the trousers in the boots. I was now dressed all in black, wearing clothes far too large for me, and I looked absurd. But the healing dampness of the water from the well of life was now pressed up against my raw skinless flesh.

I stepped back out into the corridor, and sprinted as fast as I could away from my confining cell. Once the alarm was sounded they would send all their troops against me.

I emerged out of the silver corridor into a maze of metal; walkways and flyboards hovered in the air, and the low hum of machinery and computing machines created a music in my ear.

I listened again to a wall, until I could identify where the Ka’un dwelled. It was far from me; I was safe for now. But all around me the sounds of machinery told me that I was in the nerve centre of their outer-hull universe.

I went through four doors by opening their electronic locks with the energy from my body’s cells, until I found myself in a room with a large dome floating inside. I recognised this as a Machine Mind.

I had no idea what to do; and I wondered if the Machine Mind was designed to function in response to the thought patterns of a member of the Ka’un. I thought about destroying it, but I worried that would simply wreck the ship, and thus kill my friends in the interior world.

I returned, back down the corridors through which I had fled, towards the place where I’d killed the two Kindred. I was three corridors away when I heard the murmur of voices; reinforcements had arrived. The alarm had been sounded. The Kindred were hunting for me.

Once more I climbed the walls then slid along the ceiling the length of two corridors until I was above the Kindred sent to kill me. There were six of them, and they gathered around the two corpses I had left, barking gibberish to themselves; I guessed they were connected to others of the Kindred by brain-paklas.

I fell from the ceiling and began firing energy beams from my stolen guns. The Kindred were slow, and all of them burned and died before they managed to assimilate what was happening.

I was now in a corridor surrounded by Kindred corpses. I frisked one of the bodies until I found a dagger; then I dug the blade into the corpse’s skull. I opened up the brain until I found the crystal pakla. Then I cut it out.

And I returned back down the corridors, up the stairs, into the metal maze, until I was back in the room with the Machine Mind.

The pakla in my hand began to glow; and as it did so, a display lit up in the air around the Machine Mind. I touched it with my hand, and I felt the flow of data energy swirling within the Machine Mind. This, I was confident, was the part of the Mind that controlled the brain paklas.

I raised my energy gun and reduced the beam to its narrowest; and burned away that part of the Machine Mind. When the pakla stopped glowing, I stopped firing. I prayed that I had not caused any ancillary damage.

I left the room. I could hear, from two corridors away, the voice of one of the Ka’un leading a gang of Kindred, presumably to find and kill me. I thought about lingering to destroy my enemy but decided the risk was too great.

I used the energy gun to cut a hole in the ceiling above me. Then I leaped up in the air and clambered through the gap.

I did this eleven times until I could scent the air of the interior world.

I clambered through burned metal and found myself in the open air. I pulled myself through.

I was in a green field; I had cut my way through into the interior world.

I lay there on the ground for a while, gasping, entirely exhausted.

And then, to my astonishment, I saw the hole that I had carved in the hull begin to seal itself. The severed ends yearned towards each other; then touched; and eventually bare metal fully enclosed the gap.

I absorbed the implications of this phenomenon; this must be one of the reasons the Ka’un ship had survived so many battles, since the metal hull could heal itself. But the process had, however, been rather slow. My thoughts began to stir.

I knew that my enemies would be pursuing me; so I dragged myself to my feet, and began to limp slowly across the grass, towards the lake, where I knew my fellow slaves would be congregated.

I knew-for I have always kept a constant mental tally-that this was Day the Eighth, and all would be gathered there to tell their tales.

I was tired, and parched, and desperate; my vision swam; I was shivering and shuddering and my clothes were no longer damp, so I stripped them off and staggered onwards naked.

Finally I glimpsed the waters of the lake; and on the further shore, I saw my friends gathered. But I was nowhere near them; I had misjudged the route. This had never happened to me before-my mental mapping is usually infallible-and this was when I realised my brain was shutting down.

I dragged myself along the grass to the waters of the lake, leaving a trail of red behind me. And I tried to call out across the waters of the lake to my fellow captives; but it was too far away, and no sounds emerged from my throat.

My strength was failing me. I fell to my knees. I dragged myself along the grass, trying to reach the soft blue water. I was dying, I realised, and I needed a drink before I died. A drink. A Sai-ias

After the death of Explorer and Jak-in what I guessed would have been a massive explosion in space caused by Minos-I had returned to the interior world. Minos no longer spoke to me in my head.

I understood by now that from the moment he intercepted my first “radio” signal, Minos had deceived me utterly and flawlessly. I had lured Explorer onwards; and Minos allowed me to do so; time and again letting me roam “free” in the rooms of the exterior hull in order to make my radio calls. Then he destroyed the ship he called Nemesis, and Jak with it. It had been a plan carefully nurtured; Minos had allowed me to befriend Jak, so he could slay him.

I no longer had any hope left. My former friends hated me; and many of them like Fray had no memory of our good times together. They only ever knew me when I was masquerading as the evil bitch who freely served the Ka’un.

I knew that by this stage no one would ever believe that my actions had all been a pretence, in pursuit of my plan to overthrow the Ka’un. For that plan of course had now failed. The pretence had turned out to be the reality; I had simply been deceiving myself.

Thus I was left with nothing.

Then one day I felt a flutter of wings near my head, and saw Lirilla.

“Sai-ias,” she said.

“Yes?” I said. Lirilla no longer considered herself my friend, after witnessing me vanquish and humiliate the Krakzios; but she was at least speaking to me.

“Sharrock back, dead,” she said, and flew away.

I was consumed with fear at her words.

I began to lope with my tentacles; I saw crowds near the lake, and hurried towards them.

And I saw a muscular body lying there. It took me a moment, but then I recognised it as Sharrock. He was damp, possibly drowned, and had been flayed. His eyes stared blankly from his fleshless face.

Fray saw me and growled in her throat. But I ignored her, and pushed my way through. And I touched Sharrock with a tentacle tip and felt his pulse, and there was none.

So I thrust my tentacle tip down his throat until it was nearly in his gut, and then wrenched it out. He vomited water and he began to breathe once again.

I lifted him up, and carried him swiftly on my back to the well of the water of life and laid him down there. He slept there for an hour, and emerged spluttering.

The new-born Fray and my former friend Quipu gathered with me, as I looked down upon Sharrock.

“Will you take him back?” said Quipu One.

I stared at him blankly, not comprehending.

“He has escaped,” Quipu Two clarified. “Surely it is your job to betray us once more.”

I shuddered with shame at his words; though I did not blame him for uttering them.

“Who is he?” asked Fray, staring with puzzlement at the naked, flayed Maxolun.

“Oh Fray,” said Quipu One. “If only you knew! Your previous self followed this one to glorious defeat and death. Sharrock is-he was-”

“He tried to destroy the Ka’un; he failed,” I said.

“He’s awake,” said Quipu Four.

Sharrock was indeed awake; and looked up at us. And he spoke.

But his words were a babble; we could not understand him.

“How?” I cried. “Surely we should still understand him?”

“My guess is that the Ka’un have deleted his language from our paklas,” said Quipu One.

“Paklas?” asked Fray, baffled.

Sharrock whimpered with frustration at our inability to understand him. He pointed, to his head; then he stood up and touched the heads of Quipu.

We stared at him blankly.

Sharrock roared with rage. Never had I seen him so helpless, so frustrated; nor so wretchedly vulnerable, stripped as he was of all skin.

But then Sharrock paused, and was clearly lost in thought.

Then he stood up tall. And he no longer looked defeated; he looked like a warrior about to go into battle.

And what then followed was theatre, as Quipu later called it, of the magnificently absurd; a mime show that spoke louder than words.

We saw Sharrock, bound and tortured; we saw Sharrock fighting with his bonds; then Sharrock free; Sharrock running down a corridor; and finally, Sharrock destroying something, we knew not what.

At the end of it all, Sharrock took up a tree branch and he thrust it into my middle segment. Hard. And again. And again. I did not move or recoil, I was trying to fathom his meaning.

Finally my body spasmed and a deadly quill emerged from my middle segment; Sharrock had seen me do this in the battle against Cuzco.

Sharrock then touched my quill with his flayed hands and pointed to the heavens; then mimed a penetrating thrust.

Eventually, I understood.

Later that day I told my tale to Quipu and Fray; the story of my long and ultimately futile deception of Minos. I talked of Star-Seeker Jak and his failed attempt to destroy the Hell Ship.

“He tried for so many thousands of years to take revenge-and then died in just a moment,” I said.

“This story-” said Quipu One.

“-could just be another lie,” said Quipu Two.

“Trust me or not, I don’t care,” I said. “There is about to be a war; prepare yourself for it.”

And then I told them what Sharrock wanted me to do.

“Is it possible?” said Quipu One after I had finished my account.

“Sharrock knows my powers,” I said. “He knows the powers of all of you. He has studied us all and he has planned; and it is the best plan any of us have yet conceived.

“In short, we have a chance,” I said. “Minos is no longer in my head; and I know from this that the pakla-link has been broken, for that evil bastard loves to haunt me and to spy on me. He thinks I do not know he is there; but I can always tell.

“But now Minos has gone; my mind is truly my own again; and this Sharrock has achieved.

“Now, the rest is up to us.”

I made my way down to the cargo bay, where the hull-hatch was located. Many times we had toppled stone corpses out through this gateway to the stars. But today we had another purpose in mind.

I squeezed myself into the hatchway, and Quipu manipulated the controls. An outer door opened, and I squeezed through; an inner door then closed, protecting the air in the cargo hold from the emptiness of space.

Then the outer door opened too and I fell out and was among stars.

Below me the Hell Ship floated, huge and beautiful and black-sailed. It was a cylinder of a vessel, elegantly curved, culminating in a triangle tip, and dazzlingly illuminated with lights buried in the metal. But the hull looked old now, and was coated with strange growths, like living beasts; save for a large patch of clear metal which I recognised as the spot where Explorer 410: Property of the Olaran Trader Fleet had sent a missile into the hull.

I unfurled my cape to its fullest extent, and hurled an ear frond at the ship until it touched metal and connected; and so I was now being pulled along with the Hell Ship on its effortlessly swift course through space.

I thought about Minos, and all that he had told me of himself. How much of it was true? I wondered. I knew of course that he had lied to me about many things. But had there been any honesty at all in his words? Did he ever actually have qualms about what he and his evil crew had done?

I doubted it. Whatever he had once been, Minos was now simply malign: beyond remorse and compassion, hate incarnate. I longed to kill him.

And so I would.

I fired air from my gills, and flew closer to the Hell Ship.

Then I clung to the hull with my body, gripping with my claws, embracing it like a bird smothering its prey.

And with a powerful jolt, I buried my centre quill in the hull.

It dug in deep-I felt pain rip through my body-then I pulled myself off, leaving a broad circular hole in the hull. The strange creatures that dwelled on the hull were clinging to my body now, gnawing me painfully, but I ignored them. My quill had become torn in the penetration; and blood dripped from my stomach.

I crawled, in pain, further along the hull.

Behind me, I knew, a small slow leak would have sprung up in the hull of the Hell Ship. Air from the outer world where the Ka’un dwelled was billowing out into space. I had ruptured the hull, and the inner seal, and the secondary inner seal; and, or so I hoped, it would take time for the hull’s self-heal mechanisms to repair the breach.

I did the same thing on another patch of hull. And again, and again. I performed the act one hundred times or more; and all the holes in the hill hissed out air silently.

Eventually the effort of it ripped my quill from my body, and blood gushed from my middle segment; but I thrust another quill into the hull. I had twenty in all.

After all twenty quills had ruptured, I was done.

I crawled back along the hull towards the hatch, as blood slowly spilled from my body to form a long scarlet slick in the midst of empty space.

I lay on the green plain; the rate of flow had slowed, but the blood that was emerging from my body now was mixed with black bile and entrails. The sheer power needed to thrust organic quill through hard metal had torn my insides apart.

Lirilla flew above my head, fanning me with her wings, whispering words of comfort wrapped within a song of tender beauty:

“Brave

Sai-ias

Joy

Pleasure

Hope

Do

Not

Die.”

I blacked out and woke; and when I woke I realised I was surrounded by an army of my fellow captives. Thousands of them had gathered, in silence, to comfort me in my pain, and perhaps to see me die.

Fray ceaselessly poured healing water of the well of life from a bucket over my bloodied stomach segment-sparing me her healing piss, for which I was grateful. A long chain of my fellow captives on this interior world brought fresh supplies of well-water ceaselessly.

And for a while I wondered if these healing waters were going to work upon me; might I survive this ordeal, and enjoy future days with Sharrock and the others as my friends once more?

But the pain was getting worse not better. My guts and womb and heart and other internal organs had been crushed and ripped in my huge effort; I was little more than a carcass of flesh surrounding a mess of damaged organs.

It was becoming undeniable to me that my injures were too serious to be healed; the only salvation for me was resurrection.

And that, I desperately hoped, would never happen; not if Sharrock and the others triumphed in this last terrible battle. For to be reborn as my twelve-year-old self, thrust back into this appalling world again! I could think of no greater horror.

Sharrock was kneeling by my head, stroking me with his hand. He looked worse than I felt; but I was pleased to see the look in his eyes. It was a look of rage, and a yearning for vengeance.

I whispered to him, but he could not comprehend.

So I opened my mouth; baring my huge jaws, and my sharp teeth. He reached inside with his hand, seeing the spark of ruby light there. And when his hand emerged, he was holding the Jewel of the Seventh Sun. His gift to me, returned.

“I kept it safe,” I said, but he did not comprehend.

“How goes the war?” I asked of Quipu.

“Soon they will come,” said Quipu One. “Soon.”

“Then you must kill,” I said, “those evil souls.”

“We shall,” said the Quipus.

“We shall,” said Fray.

“Don’t go,” said Lirilla.