Hell Ship

BOOK 3
Sai-ias

I felt so very sorry for him.

He was, like all the new ones, angry; and savagely so. And bitter; unreachably so. Possessed by a wild desire to take revenge for what had happened to him and his people; and deranged, too, by grief and sorrow, at the loss of everything he had ever known.

And, as was always the case, he vented these feelings upon me.

“You murdering daughter-of-a-pustulent-rapist-who-fucks-whores bitch!” he roared, and then he spat at me, a rich mouthful of acidic spit that stung the soft skin of my face and left a sticky residue on my cheeks.

“You malice-tainted shit-eating-sloshy-farting father-fucker, how could you do it? How could you do it?” he roared, accusingly.

I yearned to touch him, and to soothe his rage; but I knew that my-from his perspective-monstrous appearance made my very presence an ordeal to him.

“Monster! You’re uglier-than-a-two-headed-mutant-baby monster!” he angrily told me, as he paced around his confining cabin.

“If you say so,” I replied, in the mildest of tones, but that just enraged him all the more.

All in all, my heart burst with sympathy; I knew just how this poor, sad creature felt.

For I had once felt that way myself, many years ago. And I remembered my rage then, and marvelled at its absence now.

“Let me explain to you,” I began gently.

“I’m going to fuck you with a spear in your throat and your eyes and arsehole!” he screamed.

“I wouldn’t like that,” I informed him, “very much.”

“Evil-bitch-that-even-a-fat-arsed-Southerner-wouldn’t screw! Festering cock-meat!” he screamed, spittle falling from his mouth. He was quite hysterical now, and entirely oblivious to the gentle irony of my last comment.

“Later,” I said, kindly. “I will explain it all, later.”

“I don’t know how you can tolerate that foul-mouthed creature,” Fray said to me.

“At least,” I said, as tactfully as I could, since Fray was legendary for her indolent refusal to help her fellow captives, “I’m doing something to help the poor unfortunate soul.”

“You think so?” sneered Fray, with that tone of hers which implied only a fool would say such a stupid thing.

“I do,” I said softly. For it is my self-appointed role: I greet the new ones, teach them the ways of our world; and thus I ease the pain of their transition.

“You sad pathetic arse-sucking beast,” Fray said to me, shaking her head bewilderedly. And then she roared, a powerful rising roar that deafened me, a raw hoarse trumpet sound that embodied all her rage, and pain, and grief.

I took a moment to let my hearing return to normal.

“He’ll come to terms with it,” I said, quietly and sensibly, “the same way we have.”

Fray roared again, implying she had by no means come to terms with “it,” and the sound made my skin prickle with fear and regret.

I watched the sun go down. It was a beautiful sight. The yellow orb became a red staring eye; its gaze swept slowly across the landscape, shedding a scarlet radiance on the white snow-capped mountains and the calm blue lake. As I watched, ivory clouds were metamorphosing to become daubs of orange upon an orange-black sky.

The richness and beauty of this setting sun effect was, as it was every night, awe-inspiring.

Then the sun was switched off, and pitch-darkness swathed my world. I lit a torch, and its faint beams cut a tiny slice out of the night. It was time to retire to my cabin.

That night I told my cabin friends a long and, in my opinion, delightful story about my mother. She was-or rather had been-a wonderful creature, full of warmth and love, and I had never seen her flustered or angry. (Except of course, at the end, as she embraced me, her only surviving child, in those soul-wrenching minutes before she died.)

And this was the hilarious story of my mother’s journey to the seabed to fetch pearls from the jaws of the vast and fearsome kar-fish. It was the day of the tenth anniversary of my birth, and when she arrived at my party, bloodied but triumphant, she was able to shower me with the richest of gifts: black pearls that sang and were warm to the touch; shards of coral-fish-fragments that caught the light like a rainbow; and live seabites that I could hold beneath my tongue, and which made me feel as if I were (as my distant ancestors had been) a lazy seabeast swimming through the oceans, allowing food to drift effortlessly into my mouth.

That was my mother! She’d risked her life to make me happy that day. And such kindness, in my opinion, is a rare and a special thing.

There was gentle applause when I finished my story.

“You loved your mother?” asked Fray.

“I did,” I told her.

Fray snorted.

Her species, I knew, had no concept of maternal love. One time Fray had told us, with relish, a story about how Frayskind mothers loved to eat their young; and she’d gone into considerable detail about how enjoyable it was to crunch upon the bones of newborn Frayspawn, and to munch the skulls of toddlers who had, in some unspecified way, been errant. Our response to her tale had been unamused, and indeed hostile.

Fray had, I recalled, been extremely offended at our narrow-mindedness and lack of empathy for her culture’s moral values.

I watched the dawn. The sun was a rich and glorious ball of fire, as it always was. And its red rays lit the waters of the lake and made them ripple like flames furiously flickering, as they always did.

I looked at the Tower, standing bleak and eerie on its craggy summit that loomed upon the island at the centre of our world’s only lake. And I felt a breeze on my face as the wind was turned on, and the fields of purple grass began to sway.

I drank from the well of life, and it was rich and refreshing, and cold. I tipped the dregs from my cup over my face and felt my black hide moisten.

“You must eat,” I told the prisoner softly, for the hundredth time. It is one of the most important things the new ones have to learn; the necessity of eating both regularly and well.

“Eat,” I said, but he ignored me.

“Please, I beg you, eat,” I implored, but his eyes were blank and he did not move.

Then he turned to me, and his face became a sneer, and once again he spat at me (clearly a gesture of disdain in his culture), and he screamed, with spectacular fury: “Fuck your puckered-arsehole, you soul-stealing fucking bitch!”

And I could tell he yearned to be able to attack me, and mutilate my body, and perhaps even kill me; but he dared not, for my every tentacle was larger than his single torso.

He was, to my eyes, a quaint and tiny creature; very prone to rages, and gifted with an extraordinary breadth of eloquent invective. Most of his insults cast aspersions on aspects of my femininity-for my voice to his ears was unmistakably female-or my inability to practise monogamy, or the size and condition of my sexual organs. Often, he ascribed to me a fondness for eating my own excreta, which in fact I do, so I wasn’t too offended by that one. And, on other occasions, he indulged himself in vivid fantasies about my demise.

One of his favoured insults, as I recall, was: “May your small-brained children eat your mouldering-fucking-flesh so they can shit it out and feed it to the fucking Baagaa [rodent-like creatures who were indigenous to his planet]!”

Another classic taunt was: “You’re just an ugly mother-raper-whose -children-ought-to-turn-into-mutant-freaks-so-they-can-fuck-your-arsethen-eat-you-alive!” Or rather, this is how it came out in translation; in his language, he later told me, all this could be expressed by a single one-syllable word; a miracle of linguistic economy, in my opinion.

He also, and often, encouraged me to “swallow the cock of a Sjaja [a large furry animal indigenous to his planet] and choke to death on it.”

His language was, all in all, deplorable, even after being toned down by the translating-air. But I had no linguistic taboos, so his words did not hurt me.

“If you don’t eat,” I explained to him eventually, “you will be in pain. You will suffer intestinal disorders. Your body will start to consume its own fat reserves. You will not die, but you will wither away.” At this point he began screaming and weeping, but I continued:

“Your skin will be like parchment,” I told him. “Your heart will be hard as a stone. Your blood vessels will scar your body like blue streams in a rocky desert. And this process cannot be reversed. Eat, or the flesh will fall off you and it will never grow back.”

“I don’t plan to live that fucking long!” he said savagely.

“Show me your arms.”

“Fuck away, you bitch-with-a-withered-arsehole-that-stinks-of-death!” he sneered.

“Show me.”

He hugged his arms tightly to his body. I gently but firmly pulled one arm away and looked at the wrist. It was gouged and ugly and full of pus. The teeth marks were still visible. But the artery had resealed and there was no trace of infection in the wound.

“You must understand,” I pointed out to him, “that you cannot die.”

“What have you turd-fucking monsters-from-Hell done to me?” he asked, with desperation in his tone.

I had, I must confess, become fond of the poor wretched creature by this point. Though his ranting did annoy me somewhat; and I found him, to be candid, rather ugly, although these things are of course highly subjective.

He was a thin biped-a morphology I used to loathe, though I was becoming used to it-with two eyes in the front and one mouth; and, at this very moment, his face was wet, which I knew from considerable experience of this species-type indicated a show of emotion.

Then, as his face dampened still further, he lay down and curled his body up in an unnatural posture which I presumed to be defensive and defeated. So I waved my arms and blew soft air on him through my tentacle-tips, and was appalled when he began to scream.

I withdrew a few paces and, still in my gentlest tones, explained the truth about our lives, the thing that we all of us have to face.

“Your body has been improved,” I said. “Your rejuvenation powers have been enhanced. A bullet cannot kill you. A knife cannot kill you. A broken neck cannot kill you. Age cannot kill you. Disease cannot kill you. But if you do not eat, you will become a living skeleton and the pain will drive you to the brink of insanity.”

“This is evil beyond evil, you creature-who-should-never-have-been-born!” he roared.

Then he began to writhe and spasm, and he howled in horror, fists tight-clenched, tortured by the fact that his formidable (by small biped standards) physical strength could not be used against an enemy such as this: his own body.

“You must,” I told him sternly, “eat, or you will regret it, bitterly and self-reproachfully, for all eternity.”

That night, Quipu recited to us a poem; it took six hours to perform, using a complex system of calls and responses between his five garrulous heads. His poem was extremely good but a little repetitive. It was the story of a god who played tricks with all his creatures by disguising himself as various exotic animals indigenous to Quipu’s home planet. The final trick was when the god arrived on Quipu’s world disguised as an alien invader.

We all roared with laughter at that.

I watched the dawn. It seemed to me that the dawn was a slightly different colour every day, though Quipu told me I was deluded.

I felt a breeze on my cheek.

“Enjoy your day,” I said to Lirilla, as she hovered next to my head, also savouring the dawn, and cooling me with the rapid beating of her multi-coloured wings.

“I shall,” Lirilla replied, in a voice so soft it was like a memory distantly recalled.

After five hours of cutting and biting with my claws and teeth, I fabricated a perfect stone, and then I carried it on my back from the quarry to the Temple.

The path was long, and winding; I passed herds of grazing creatures dawdling in the fields, savouring the sun on their variously coloured hides; I skirted the swamplands, where drowsy mud-beasts were wallowing, occasionally splashing each other with shit and mud; and finally I reached the Great Plain, where stood the Temple of the Interior World.

It reached, by now, almost to the clouds; a double-cylinder 8 shape with oval windows built, brick by brick, out of carved rock, modelled on a constellation visible from the night skies of my own home planet. The rays of the sun shone down upon the polished surfaces of the stone; it gleamed white in the soft light, a squat beast with its head striving to angrily butt the sky.

I placed my perfectly-shaped stone down on the grass for just one moment, and admired the beauty of the magnificent edifice we had conceived and built: a doubly circular obelisk set amidst rich grassland, with the snow-capped mountains in the distance peering down at the child of their rocky loins.

And I felt proud; just for a moment; the very briefest of moments.

And then I clambered up the side of the Temple until I reached the top and levered the stone into position. And I spat the fast-mortar I had been carrying in my mouth into the thick join between stone and stone, to secure the block in place.

This trick of mine always annoyed Fray. There were cranes and ramps that were specifically designed to allow workers to raise up the stone blocks, and hordes of skilful builders of various highly dextrous species standing by to mortar the stones into position. I was, Fray argued, spoiling it for everyone else by “showing off.”

I did not care; this was one of my rare moments of purely selfish joy.

From the top of the Temple I had a perfect high view of my entire world. I savoured it for a while, till Fray screamed at me to come down and stop being such a forsaken-by-good-manners turd-mountain braggart.

I visited the prisoner again. He had not eaten, nor had he drunk his water of life. His skin was paler than it had been when he first joined us. He looked terrible. He wasn’t pleased to see me.

I watched as Fray ran across the savannah. Her hooves thundered, her vast bulk blurred; she could run faster than any land animal I knew of on this world.

Fray’s savannah however was small, and not very plausible. When she reached the forest, she stopped abruptly, and tossed her head, and staggered around in half-circles to come to terms with the fact she was no longer running like the wind; and then she roared to the skies.

Lirilla laughed. She hovered next to my cheek, a whirlwind of colour and grace, lit by the sun.

Above us, Cuzco was flying loops in the air, with extraordinary grace. Fray snorted, getting ready for another run.

“Tell that fat fuck,” I said to Lirilla, of Fray, “that she’s a useless lumbering fat fuck.” This was a phrase I had learned from Fray; among her kind it is considered a term of endearment. (Or so I have been led to believe; for it is what she so very often calls me.)

Lirilla vanished, and was back in the beat of a wing.

“She says that she has seen great steaming mounds of shit more active than you,” Lirilla told me.

“Cruel,” I observed.

“I think she meant it kindly,” said Lirilla, anxiously.

“Tell her,” I said, “that she’s an awkward dim-witted loose-bowelled cart-carrier.” And Lirilla vanished; and flew across the savannah so fast it was as if she were rifting through space; and whispered in Fray’s ear. From my vantage point, I could see Fray snort and roar and crash her hooves on the ground.

I looked up; Cuzco, the orange-bellied giant, was flying on updrafts of warm air, not moving his six wings at all; like a cloud made of golden armour held up by hope and poetry.

And Lirilla was back, whispering in my ear. “Watch this,” she said, quoting Fray.

I saw Fray begin another run across the savannah; hooves pounding; dust rising up in clouds; her ugly ungainly body turned into pure graceful motion as she traversed the savannah with extraordinary speed. Finally, she came to a halt, steam billowing off her hide, and pounded her hooves on the ground and stood up on her three back feet and roared.

“Tell Fray,” I said to Lirilla, “that for someone who is so-clumsy-she-falls-over-her-own-huge-tits-all-the-time, that was not at all bad.”

“Tell me your name.”

The prisoner shook his head, stubbornly. Three days had passed, and I was making little progress with him. But I was still patient. It takes time.

It always takes time.

“Tell me your name.” My voice was gentle; I was using my sweetest tones to make it clear that I was on his side, and that I cared.

“Why are you doing this to me, you bitch from Hell?” he said, in calm fearless tones that betrayed his underlying panic.

“Because I want to be your friend,” I said.

He blinked. “How could that be possible?” he said accusingly. “You destroyed my entire world!”

“Not I. They. I am like you. A captive. A slave.”

He considered this assertion; clearly considering it to be an outrageous lie.

“You are an evil ugly loathsome vomit-inducing monster,” he pointed out. “Are you telling me my enemies are even worse than you?”

“I am not,” I suggested, “so very bad.”

He stared at me, his angry features trembling. His skin was soft, reddish in hue, marked with diagonal ridges, and it undulated slightly when he spoke.

“You’re really not my gaoler?” he asked, eventually.

“No.” I replied.

“You were captured as I was?” he said.

“Indeed.”

He considered this. “If that is so, perhaps I have wronged you,” he conceded.

“It was an easy mistake to make; I just want you to know I am here to help you.”

“Then I thank you for that,” he said courteously.

“So, what is your name?” I asked him.

“They call me,” he said proudly, then paused and uttered, as if bestowing a precious gift, his name: “Sharrock.”

And he stared at me, clearly expecting a reaction.

“In my world,” he added proudly, “I am-” But then he broke off, and did not conclude his train of thought.

For there no longer was, of course, a “his world”; and no one would ever again sing songs about him and his heroic exploits, whatever they might have been.

“My name is Sai-ias,” I told him gravely.

“What language are we speaking?” he asked, quietly; his spirits clearly dashed.

“It is not a language. We are not speaking. Or rather, we speak, but the ship transforms the sounds, via invisible translators in the air, into patterns of meaning in our minds.”

“The air does that?”

“It does.”

“How is such a thing possible?”

“I do not know,” I admitted.

“And who is in charge? Who controls this ship? Who are our masters?”

“I do not know.”

“How can you not know?”

I sighed, through my tentacle tips, and patiently explained:

“I was captured, as you were, by a spaceship. I have never seen my captors. Other slaves explained to me what I had to do, and how.”

“So you don’t know who these creatures are? The ones who destroyed my planet?”

“My people called them Ka’un. In my language, that means ‘Feared Ones.’ ”

“What do they call themselves?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do they come from?”

“I don’t-”

“I get it. You don’t know. Have you asked? Did you try to find out? Do you know where on the ship they dwell? Do they look like you, or like me? What are their intentions? Do they have weaknesses? What is their purpose in attacking worlds like mine? Can we negotiate with them in any way?”

“They dwell in a Tower which no creature can approach. That’s all I know about the Ka’un,” I said.

Sharrock stared at me, intensity building in him like molten rock in a volcano approaching eruption.

“Then Sharrock,” he said, in the tones of a person making a vow that will change his life, “will find all the answers to all these questions, and more. And then he shall study the flaws and weaknesses of these accursed creatures. And then-”

“Then you shall wreak your wrathful vengeance upon the Ka’un?” I intercepted.

“Yes,” he admitted. And with some chagrin, he said: “You’ve heard that said before, I take it?”

I sighed, through my tentacle tips.

“Many times,” I told him.

A little while later Sharrock, with heart-broken eloquence, told me his tale. The dark and terrible story of the End Of All Days for his species.

He was a brave and proud warrior, he told me, and he came from a brave and proud and noble family. His people were exceptionally gifted at science and engineering, as well as being courageous fighters. He was, I learned, at some length, incredibly proud of his people and their status among the other tribes on his planet.

He also told me that on his planet there were two biped species living as one family unit: his kind, comprised of warriors of either gender and their spouses, guided by a Chieftain such as himself, but all equal in law and status; and the three-gendered Philosophers, who were small, tiny-tailed creatures of remarkable kindness.

The Maxolu warriors, he explained, were as clever as they were brave; and when they weren’t in combat, or stealing from other tribes, they were hunters, and farmers, and masters of mathematics and science.

The Philosophers, by contrast, knew little of science, and less still of war; but they had the gift of dreaming great things. And out of these dreams, Sharrock’s people had created skyships and spaceships and satellites and devices that make it possible to fly without experiencing the effects of acceleration.

I understood very little of all this but I knew it made Sharrock calmer to talk, so I let him talk.

Philosophers on his world, he continued, were treated like honoured guests, or small children; they weren’t expected to work, or to fend for themselves. All they had to do was dream; and those dreams were inspired, and had yielded an endless succession of extraordinary inventions and discoveries and concepts. In consequence, his own people were the masters of their solar system, and also of all the habitable planets within two hundred light-years of their sun.

I marvelled at the power of their Philosophers’ dreaming; and it gave me a strong sense of kinship with these now-extinct creatures. For my people too once knew how to dream.

Although their technology was advanced, he explained, Sharrock’s people were nomads. They lived in tents in the desert for large parts of the year, and loved to feel the desert sandstorms on their flesh. But even so, their cities were magnificent; and they could build machines of great complexity that could walk and talk and think, and kill at a distance; or could convey objects from here to there in less time than the blink of an eye. And they had become, through the manipulation of their own biology, extremely long lived.

Sharrock talked too about the historic rivalry between his people of the North, and the Southern Tribes who had occupied the equatorial zones and who, after a long battle the details of which held little interest to me, were banished into space, where they had created an empire of many planets. Shortly before the End of All Days, Sharrock had been on a mission in Sabol, the capital planet of this empire, a place steeped in luxury and decadence where (as he explained it) fat and effete Southerners lived inside machines, oblivious to the joys of the natural world.

He then explained to me how-after acquiring without purchasing some priceless artefact or other, which now of course was worthless-he had returned home to find his village laid waste, and his people dead.

He had then, he told me, taken to the sky in some kind of vessel and after various adventures had fought with a large alien female with red hair streaked with silver.

My heart sank when he told me this; I was confident I knew who it was he had fought, and I hoped I would be able to keep the two of them apart.

Sharrock had then been engulfed in lava as the planet began to fall apart; and had lost consciousness, only to wake up inside the bowels of the Hell Ship, his burned limbs and body miraculously healed.

He had subsequently witnessed his planet’s destruction through the glass walls of the prisoner-hold of the Hell Ship; a place I knew only too well. Trapped and alone, he had seen his sun flaring, like a wounded beast spitting bile and entrails from its shredded guts; he had seen comets and asteroids crashing into his planet’s atmosphere; he had seen earthquakes and volcanoes devastate his world with their hot burning horror; and then he had seen the planet itself break into a million parts like carved and coloured glass shattered by a blow.

The image haunted him, and I understood how he felt. For I, too had seen my world explode into many parts, and the memory of it has never left me.

“Let me tell my tale,” I said to Sharrock.

“My kind,” I told him, “are not warriors. We do not-or rather we did not-have weapons. And nor did we believe these creatures from space would hurt us. By the time we realised our error, our planet itself was in the process of being destroyed; racked with earthquakes and terrible storms.”

He listened carefully, but with a certain detachment. It was clear that in his mind what happened to me could not in any way compare to what had happened to him.

“And I was captured, and held in a spaceship, just as you were, and saw my planet fall into pieces, just as you did.”

“How do they do that?” Sharrock asked. “The earthquakes? To do that requires a radical sundering of the planet’s structural integrity.” His features were alert; he was thinking hard now, and it made him look like a hunter eyeing his about-to-be-captured prey. “Bombs fired into the planet’s core? Missiles made of un-matter?”

“I do not know.”

He nodded, absorbing the sheer depths of my ignorance. “I think so,” he said. “Un-matter would do it. You know what un-matter is?”

“No.”

“The opposite of matter; when the two collide, Poof!” He clapped his hands, to demonstrate the explosion resulting from the happening of whatever he was talking about. “Or maybe a collapsor sun. You know what that is? A sun so massive it collapses in on itself?”

“We have no such concept; I have heard talk of such things though, from my friends on this ship,” I said.

“The physics is formidable,” said Sharrock, grinning with relish, “but the engineering is simple. Put your un-matter or your mini-collapsor in a big missile, fire it into the planet’s crust; set it to detonate when it reaches the liquid outer core. Bang!” He clapped his hands; so skilful was his storytelling that I could see the very same image that he was seeing. “The planet is gone. Brutal. Our Philosophers have dreamed of such a weapon; but even the Southern Tribes would not be so entirely fucking evil as to do that.”

“The Ka’un,” I said, “are undeniably that entirely fucking evil.”

He nodded. “Continue,” he said, as if I were his servant, and he my king; and I did.

“My planet was lost to me,” I told him, “and no more can be said of that. And then I came to the Ka’un ship, and I was shocked at what I encountered.”

I had his attention fully grasped by now; and I needed him to heed these words. For those who do not comprehend how it was then, cannot exist now.

“It was,” I said, “back then, so many years ago, a bleak and barren world. The lake was stagnant, the grasses were knotted with weeds that stank like corpses. My fellow captives slept outdoors, and every night when the sun was switched off, the blacker-than-black night was filled with screaming.”

For a brief moment, I allowed myself to touch the memory of those days; and it seared my soul.

“And so I learned,” I said, “in those early years, the way to survive. And this I must now teach you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have to.”

“No!” he roared.

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

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

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

“Whose rules?”

“Rules we live by.”

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

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

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

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

But then Sharrock spoke:

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

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

Clearly, my work with Sharrock was far from over.

Jak

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

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

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

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

I thought of her often.

In fact, incessantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was.”

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

“And my abundant lack of youth and beauty.”

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

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

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

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

“I’m used to danger.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Background music?”

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

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

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

“It is the largest bunk on the ship.”

“Except for the female quarters.”

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

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

“She is fierce.”

“Ah. Fierce.”

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

“Against who?”

“Against the Stuxi.”

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

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

“Ah.”

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

“And does she have grounds for that?”

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

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

“Aye Master.”

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

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

“Engine capacity?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I find,” said Morval, “they chafe.”

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

“Oh, boy,” I said, delighted.

“Initiate the space drive,” said Commander Galamea.

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

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

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

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

“Yes, exalted Commander,” I replied.

“Disreality is achieved, Commander,” said Morval.

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

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

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

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

“A rift has emerged,” said Phylas eventually.

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

“Can we predict the destination?”

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

“No,” Albinia eventually concluded.

“Morval?” asked Commander Galamea.

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

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

“Phylas?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We emerged from the rift.

Morval assessed the data on his screen.

“We are-nowhere,” he said.

“No traces of organic life,” Phylas confirmed.

“No habitable planets,” Morval added.

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

“Try again,” said Galamea.

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

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

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

Then I felt the strangeness come upon me again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was, in a word: sublime.

“We’re here,” said Phylas.

“Ease her out,” I said.

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

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

“Am I done?” Albinia asked.

“You’re done,” I said softly.

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

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

“What will we call them?” asked Albinia.

“Morval?”

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

“Then Prisma it is.”

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

“Why not?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Explorer passed a pock-marked asteroid.

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

There is nothing finer, or so I thought then, than the moment of initial approach; that first glimpse of an alien stellar system, with no hint as to what might lie within.

“Our gen-guns are being charged,” said Phylas matter-of-factly.

For a moment I didn’t take in his words. Then:

“What?” I said, startled.

“The ship is taking evasive action,” Phylas explained.

“Oh by all that’s joyous,” Morval muttered to himself, “this Master-of-the-Ship has no idea.”

“Cease,” I barked at the old man, “sarcasming.”

I could see, on the panoramic wall-screen, that Explorer was now weaving and zagging through space, in bewildering randomised patterns.

I was uncomfortable. It was proper protocol for the Ship’s Master to be informed in advance of all decisions made by the vessel’s computational mind; but on this occasion I was being ignored.

For a moment, I felt a surge of annoyance; for in truth, I hated being sidelined like this. I understood of course that my role as Master was largely ceremonial; and that all major decisions were made by the Mistress Commander and the Star-Seeker and the ship’s computational brain. But this was an ugly reminder of a truth I generally preferred to, well, ignore.

However, I hid my irritation between a mask of bonhomie, charm, and self-deprecating wit; as I always do.

“Why?” I asked courteously, with my favourite irresistible smile, “are we doing all this?”

“Missiles have been launched by Explorer; power beams are being fired by Explorer; the intended target is the asteroid,” said Phylas, ignoring my question.

“Yes but why?”

“You’ll find out,” said Morval with grim pleasure, “soon enough.”

I followed the progress of the attack on the wall-screen: our ship in space, the orb of the planetary moon looming before us; the flaring colours of the gen-gun missiles, and the pillars of energy from the light-cannons arcing a slow progress towards the asteroid. It was a stately dance of colour and light set against a black cloth of night.

I assumed that the enemy were attempting to attack us; but Albinia had still told me nothing. Her lips moved silently as she and Explorer waged space war. I was tense; for the truth was, I had never been quite so close to combat before. In all the battles in which I had played a role, I had been part of the rapidly fleeing Trader fleet, protected by Navy and Explorer vessels.

Now, I was in the front line and I could die.

I saw, on the screen, our missiles flying closer and closer to the asteroid. While, on my phantom control display, a bewildering series of graphs and equations flashed before my eyes, though I had no idea what meanings they conveyed.

“Now,” said Morval, somehow managing to guess what was about to occur.

And at just that moment, the asteroid erupted. And a flock of black triple-horned warcraft emerged from it, hurtling towards us.

“Two hundred and forty-two enemy drone missiles,” said Phylas.

“The radiation trail indicates dirty nuclear bombs,” added Morval.

“They’re attacking us!” I summarised, in a cheery fashion; playing the fool with my usual panache.

“Forgive me,” said Albinia, dreamily. “I thought it better to act first, and inform you of my decisions later.”

“Very wise, beloved Mistress,” I said generously, concealing my anger.

“Sarcasming is not a word,” Morval reminded me, with his usual long memory.

“It has a ring to it,” I said defensively.

Commander Galamea arrived on the Hub, in a blaze of implicitly-rebuking-the-rest-of-us-for-being-so-lazy energy.

“Master-of-the-Ship, report!” she barked.

“Morval, brief the Commander please,” I said, sneakily.

“Explorer seems to have detected an imminent attack, we have no more data,” said Morval, which irked me, because I could have said that much.

Albinia groaned, lost in communion with Explorer.

And, just as the last of the enemy drones emerged from the artificial asteroid, Explorer’s missiles began to silently detonate. It was like a birthday sky-fire display against the blackness of space.

Moments later, a haze appeared on the screen; and the enemy drones began to slowly fall apart, like dancers breaking away from a tableau into separated solos. There were no subsequent explosions as these craft broke up; these were merely objects sundering into their myriad pieces as if changing their minds about existing.

I realised that our gen-gun missiles were not just kinetic, they also harboured atom-disruptor particles. The snarling swarm of enemy drone bombs were being destabilised at sub-atomic level.

“What information do we have about this civilisation?” asked the Commander.

“Hostile?” guessed Morval.

“Type 3, post-nuclear, pre-shiftingsands, the home planet is the gas giant fifth from the sun but they also inhabit five other planets and twelve satellites and those comets are in fact space stations with tails,” said Albinia, with her usual calm dreamy certainty.

“Explorer is preparing to fire again,” said Morval.

And thin rays of energy erupted once more from the gen-gun tubes.

And before long, the panoramic wall-screen showed nothing but empty space, and the faint wisps of former menace that was all that remained of the enemy fusillade.

“See this,” said Morval, somehow once again miraculously anticipating the action.

A juggernaut of a spaceship was emerging from the hollow asteroid. It was clearly expecting an easy passage behind its escort of killer drone bombs. Instead, it was met with a withering hail of destructive energy from Explorer. The juggernaut shimmered, like a firebird on a midsummer night about to explode; then abruptly dematerialised.

And I looked at Morval, puzzled. How did he manage, time and again, to predict so accurately what was going to happen?

Explorer glided deeper into the stellar system, until it reached planet Five, the home of these unpleasant sentients.

It was a gas giant, with six natural rings and a larger artificial ring which Explorer identified as a space defence system.

And there we waited. We had already demonstrated that we (or rather Albinia in communion with Explorer) had powers beyond the imagining of these beings. The rational response would be for them to surrender unconditionally, in the hope of averting further fatalities.

That seemed, however, unlikely.

I reclined in my Master’s chair, watching it all on the wall-screen. “How many times,” I asked Phylas, “do the wretched aliens try to kill you when you appear?”

“Always.”

“Not always,” corrected Morval.

“There was that time-”

“That was a feint. They greeted us in peace, and ambushed the Traders a century later.”

“How did you know-”

“I always know what you will say,” said Morval.

Phylas glowered; hurt at being shut out from his own conversation.

Commander Galamea prowled the deck.

“Explorer, progress report,” said Galamea.

“Wait and see,” said Albinia dreamily.

We waited.

And then an image appeared on our panoramic wall-screen; Albinia had made contact with the aliens’ leader. He was a squat, asymmetrical, slimy and undeniably ugly creature, with no visible eyes and a mouth that went up instead of across.

“Greetings,” I said. Explorer had of course been intercepting all the radio traffic from these creatures since we arrived in their system, and had gathered enough information about their language to run a translation facility.

“You speak language our,” growled the alien.

“Apparently not that well,” I conceded. “We come in peace, and so forth; and we wish to trade.”

“You kill have of hundreds our people,” said the alien.

“Albinia,” I snapped.

“Give us time; their language has a weird syntax,” Albinia said defensively.

“We did not destroy your warriors and their spaceship,” I explained carefully. “We have merely concealed them in another dimension, from which we can retrieve them easily if you prove you are peaceful. And now we wish to negotiate.”

“You hold people our hostage!” roared the alien.

“Indeed we do.”

“Smart is thinking,” said the alien, evidently reassured. “Down welcome planet ours.”

“I would be delighted,” I said.

Our landing craft emerged like a child being birthed from the hull of Explorer, and rocket-propelled across the expanse of open space. The shadow-selves of Albinia and I sat side by side in the cockpit and watched the view. I was close enough to smell her skin, and hear her breath, if she had been possessed of skin and breath.

It occurred to me that I had certain clandestine personal reasons for wanting Albinia on this mission with me; and I was delighted at my own unsuspected subterfuge.

Our craft reached the outer atmosphere of the bright purple gas giant; and we looked down at the swirling winds below.

“Are you still inhabiting Explorer?” I asked Albinia.

“Yes.”

“Whilst operating the simulacrum.”

“Yes.”

“And do you have, perhaps, enough reserves of consciousness remaining to engage in idle chat?”

“No.”

“As I feared.”

The landing craft descended; we were held in position by our stay-still fields, as the vessel rocked and shook. The hull was being buffeted by powerful gales and seared with toxic gases, but the craft’s force-mantle protected it entirely. The electronic eyes on the craft’s hull looked deep into the wild screaming madness of the atmosphere, and Albinia saw it all too.

“ How do they endure this place?” I marvelled, using a murmur-link to connect directly to Albinia.

“ It is, strangely, magnificent, ” Albinia said and smiled. And then the smile faded and she was, once more, off in a world of her own, barely aware of me.

I looked at the view from my tiny porthole, a maelstrom of heat and burning gases, and I felt nauseous. Outside the craft, the pressure was so great it would crush a space suit and condense an Olaran body to the size of a crumb, if we had been so foolish as to go for a walk.

Thus, through air as thick as ice, we fell downwards, until, finally, we were in the midst of the alien flock.

These creatures-the Prismas-were spawned of gas and plasma, yet somehow (the physics entirely eluded me) nevertheless existed in squat asymmetrical solid and eyeless form that could survive without a spacesuit in the atmosphere of a gas giant.

According to Phylas, these strange beings could act like suns-creating metals out of their own substance, and then weaving them into spaceships. Thus, their drone ships were spawned like eggs; and their “missiles” were not mere artefacts, they were in effect, cells discharged from the Prisma host bodies.

“Can understand us you?” said a voice over our radio net. I looked outside the porthole; and I could see a hundred Prismas hovering in the air like fat turds with mouths all around us. This was as near as our species could get to each other; the Prismas could not survive in our atmosphere; and we would not be able to see or hear a thing in their atmosphere. So we would have to talk to them from within the landing craft.

“Yes we can,” I said, peering out and wondering which Prisma I was talking to.

“Living are creatures you?”

“We are living creatures.”

“You travelled space have? Through.”

“We have travelled through space.”

“Whole tendrils of a are you?”

“We are not tendrils of a whole; we are the whole. We are creatures of flesh and blood. We do not exist as you do, as creatures of gas and, er, stuff.”

“Impossible.”

“It is possible. There are many varied kinds of life.”

“Rocks are you. Excreta are you. Are worthy not to talk with us.”

“We have to talk with you. We owe you this.”

“Where is the planet from which you come?” said the Prisma. Our translator was, I noticed with some relief, finally getting the hang of the creature’s syntax.

“Far far away. You cannot reach it.”

“Can it be inhabited by our kind?”

“You cannot reach it.”

“It can be inhabited by our kind?”

“No, and you cannot reach it.”

“You have no idea who we are. We are the most powerful and fearsome creatures in all the universe.”

You are, I thought to myself, a bunch of arrogant fucks; and then I realised my murmur-talk device had translated this into speech.

I switched off my communicator and turned to Albinia.

“What do you think?”

“Something is happening.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

I turned on my communicator and spoke again to the Prisma:

“We are here to trade; do you understand that concept?”

“You have come from far away; how? What ships do you possess? Are you long-lived?”

“We give you a thing; you give us a thing. It’s called trade. Do you understand this concept?”

“We have sent spaceships into farthest space; they have never returned. Can you explain this?”

“Well, it’s a dangerous universe out there.”

“We are the most fearsome species in existence; no harm could come to creatures such as us. Our voyagers were told to conquer and destroy and then return to fetch us. That was ten thousand years ago; and they are late. And we are full of wrath.”

Albinia and I exchanged glances; this wasn’t looking too promising.

“Be that as it may,” I continued to the Prisma, “let’s talk a bit more about this concept of ‘trade.’

“You see,” I continued, getting into the swing of it now, “you have the ability to create metal artefacts with the power of your thoughts, and we could maybe sell stuff like that. Whereas we-”

“Perhaps the journey was too long, and they died. We long to travel swiftly among the stars, rather than being trapped at sub-light speeds. Can you do that? Journey faster than light?”

“We can.”

“Can you teach us how?”

“We could certainly give you some hints,” I temporised.

“Then we can ‘trade,’ ” said the Prisma.

Albinia patted my arm. I switched off my communicator. “Yes?”

“Firstly, these creatures are a bunch of dangerous fucking lunatics,” she pointed out, quite accurately. “Secondly, I’m detecting some kind of weapon. Don’t know what. It involves the planet, and the sun, and a fleet of-something nasty. I think they’re aiming to attack Explorer again.”

“What should I do?” I asked her, for though I was Master-of-the-Ship, I trusted her judgement totally.

She thought, for a brief moment, with her merged-with-Explorer face, then a cold look came upon her.

“They’re bastards; let’s fuck ’em,” she said.

And so we fucked ’em.

I triggered the self destruct switch.

And our landing craft exploded; and obliterated into particles so small they could not be assimilated by the Prismas.

And then a searing wave of heat from the explosion ripped through the alien creatures, sundering them into a billion wave-lets.

And then-as I was later told-in orbit above the planet, the Prisma battle fleet emerged from the shadow of their moon and launched a massive attack upon Explorer.

At the same time, Prisma drone ships leaped from hiding places amidst the gas giant’s rings and rained missiles and heat-energy upon Explorer, drenching its forcefields.

However, Explorer’s shields deflected the enemy’s beams and missiles with ease; and it then counter-attacked, using its disruptor ray at full capacity; and the entire Prisma fleet was obliterated in an instant.

And all that was left was a swirl of random atoms in space.

For such is the power of Olara; we do not seek war, but when we fight, we always win.

At about this time, I woke up on my simulacrum bench. And I staggered to my feet and saw that Albinia’s skin was close to burning point; steam was rising from it. The simulated experience of being burned alive on the planet was manifesting as actuality on her real body.

I doused her with cooling spray, just as she woke up, and screamed with agony. Then I cradled her, as Phylas entered.

He turned ashen at the sight of Albinia.

“She’ll be fine,” I snapped. It had been my idea to take Albinia with me on this mission; but to risk the life of a Star-Seeker was, in retrospect, a reckless and a foolish thing. I knew it myself, and I desperately hoped no one would be vulgar enough to tell me so.

I carried Albinia to the sick room and placed her in healing stasis. Then I returned to the Hub.

“What’s happening?” asked Commander Galamea. “Explorer isn’t moving.”

I am not-well, said Explorer, forlornly, via our murmur-links.

“Manual operation,” I said, and spoke directly to Explorer: “Your human half is unconscious. She has been injured. Seal the system.” Injured, how? said Explorer’s voice.

“Psychosomatic sympathetic burns. We died, down there, and we felt it here.”

“Your fault,” said Morval, cruelly. “You jeopardised the life of our Star-Seeker. You-”

I should have known it would be him.

“Explorer: these are my instructions,” I snapped. “Bomb the gas giant, kill as many of those ugly big parent-fuckers as you can. Then seal the system. Get us out of here.”

“I need to-” Commander Galamea said.

“DO IT NOW,” I screamed, and Explorer heard my voice of command, and on the wall-screen I saw plumes of cloud start to emerge from the gas giant. Teleported bombs were exploding on the planet’s surface.

Explorer accelerated; but the stay-still fields were not in place so we were scattered like ritsos, and I flew across the room and crashed into Commander Galamea. We gripped each other, just as the stay-still came on; and for a few awkward moments we were held aloft in each other’s arms, as if swept up by an imaginary wind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Even the Stuxi?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Explorer says yes,” said Albinia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like this place,” I told Phylas.

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

“Of what?”

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

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

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

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

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

Swamp?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bliss!” he roared.

“Illusion,” I pointed out.

We staggered up to the Command Hub.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phylas and Morval attended to their phantom control displays.

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

“Commander,” I said softly.

She glared at me.

“If you need any-” I hinted.

“What?”

“Help?”

She glared even more.

“Help with what?”

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

Her glaring intensified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We shadow-suited up, Galamea and I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ I have no data on that.”

“Are there thick clouds?”

“ I have no data on that.”

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

“Split yourself,” said Galamea bluntly.

“I can’t.”

“Split yourself!”

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

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

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

“Of what, Commander?”

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

“I do not follow.”

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

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

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

I was piqued at that.

“Why not?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

“Not really,” I admitted

“Then forget we had this conversation.”

“It’s forgotten.”

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

“Can you translate?” Galamea asked Albinia.

“ Not yet. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Galamea’s words stayed with me.

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

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

Too late.