Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

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.