Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

“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.