Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

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.