Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

But then Tara’s tail whipped up and caught Sharrock by the neck and lifted him in the air.

“Stop,” I said, but Tara ignored me so I spat at her; the spit congealed and wrapped her body in a tight web. Tara choked and fell to the ground, unable to move, snarled in white congealed spit that was stronger than metal. And Sharrock broke free of the tail and fell to the ground.

“Nice one, bitch,” he said, when he’d got his breath back.

“Climb on my back,” I told him.

I ran out of the forest with Sharrock clinging on to me, ramming through undergrowth and trees, hoping that I was not hurting any sentient plantlife in my clumsy progress. And then we emerged into the light, and I crashed down upon my lower segment on the purple grass of the savannah.

“I was defending myself,” Sharrock said, angrily.

“You picked a fight,” I informed him, accusingly.

“They were treating me like a slave.”

“You are a slave, and you should learn to be more polite.”

“You fucking betrayed me!” he roared, spittle rolling down his jaw again. “You put me with a bunch of fucking apes. Why didn’t you let me go and live with creatures who actually look like Maxoluns? The hairless bipeds. I know they exist. I saw them, the tree-huggers saw them too. They are creatures much like me!”

“The hairless bipeds,” I said, calmly, “have swords of metal. You would have fared far worse.”

Sharrock was silenced by my words.

“You mean, you knew,” he said, in calmer tones, “that I was going to get the fuckhood beaten out of me by those fucking apes?”

“Yes.”

“And you still let me go there?”

“For your own sake,” I explained to him, “For you have to learn to hold your tongue, and be more respectful of your fellow captives.”

“No fucking way, not ever! I’m a warrior!” he ranted.

“You’ve made four bitter enemies now. They will hate you for all eternity.”

“I killed at least two of them,” he bragged.

By this point I was tempted to give way to anger at his naivety. But I restrained myself. Sharrock was so new; he had so much to learn.

“No you didn’t,” I explained in my calmest tones.

“Don’t utter such fuckery! No one could-” he began to say, but I interrupted:

“Their injuries are survivable. Mangan will grow his arm back, and his brain cells will very likely heal after such a minor fang-stabbing, as will Shiiaa’s broken neck and snapped spines. And when they are all recovered, they will seek you out and batter you to a bloody pulp. But unless they entirely pulverise your brain, you too will heal, after months of agony. And then, consumed with rage, you will take your revenge upon them, and they will be beaten and bloody and in pain. Then they will heal, and-”

“I’m guessing you don’t approve of all this wretched backing-and-forthing,” he said quietly.

I sighed, from my tentacle tips, and noted with approval that Sharrock did finally seem a little embarrassed.

“These creatures are not your enemies,” I said. “We are all of us in this together.”

Sharrock made a sharp exclamation-it was his version of a laugh, I realised. But there was no humour in his tone.

“Fuck your anus!” Sharrock said viciously. “Those tree-fuckers bit my nose off! They broke my arm, my legs, then they tried to take my intestines out with a sharpened branch. Those shit-eaters deserve to die by choking on the barbed cock of a [untranslatable]!” Sharrock concluded, spitting with rage again by now.

“Make peace with them,” I said.

“Never!”

“You can’t,” I told him, “go on like this.”

He glared at me.

“Sai-ias, you mean well,” Sharrock said, icily, with what I felt was odious condescension. “You have a good soul. But the truth is,” and now Sharrock’s contempt for me shone through in every syllable, “you are nothing but a fucking coward.”

Sharrock’s scorn was hard to bear; but bear it I will and must.

For I have learned, over many aeons, to ignore the disdain of others, as warriors shrug off ghastly wounds without showing even a flicker of pain.

This is my tale; the tale how I shaped my world.

I was but a child when the Ka’un invaded my home world; just fifteen years old, two or three years away from my metamorphosis.

And I remembered how we young ones were amused when the alien spaceships first appeared in the sky. We made a game of swiftly dodging their bombs as they crashed to the ground, scattering earth and terrifying the land animals. And then we ran home and told our parents.

My parents comforted me, and told me we would be safe. But they did not fight, they fled, using flying ships to convey us at speeds faster than sound, as far away as we could get from the alien ship. And when the bombs continued to fall from the sky, we and millions of our kind took refuge deep in the earth’s crust. We would, my mother said, wait it out. When the enemy tired of destroying our cities and houses, such as they were, we would emerge and rebuild our planet. Or we would find another planet. It would be easy enough.

But when the earthquakes began my father was crushed by a wall of rock that collapsed on to him. He cut himself free, knowing he could, eventually, regrow his lost limbs. But he was worried now.

Then poison gas came through the rock and my brothers and sisters died in agony. My mother nursed them all, stroking them with her tentacle tips and mouth and thus absorbing the poison into her own body. And then she too died, while holding me in her tentacles, exhaling deadly air upon me, killing me with foolish love, for by then she had lost her senses with grief.

My father found me in time and sucked out the poisoned air out of my lungs and into his own body, dooming himself but saving me. Then he wrapped me in protective shielding, and placed me in a space capsule. And he fired the capsule into orbit, with a course set for another of the worlds occupied by our kind, so that one of us at least should live.

When he said goodbye, my father vowed that I would live a happy life, and that these invaders would not find it so easy to invade our other planets. For mind-messages had been sent with instantaneous effect to all my people-to those living on alien soil and also those who lived on artificial orbiting cities and those who chose to slowly drift in space, living on the energy from distant suns-to warn them that the ways of peace must come to an end. We must, as a species, resort to war, using all of our formidable powers.

All this he told me; and I marvelled at the rage in his voice, and the anger-fuelled expansion of his normally compact body. And I sorrowed for him, and for my dead mother; they were kind and full of joy and I loved them, and they will live for ever in my memories and in the depth of my soul.

Then, as I grieved, a child forced to confront evil for the first time, my father sealed the capsule and I was shot out into space in a cylinder of metal that was, my father hoped, to be my home for the next one thousand years.

However, his plans failed; and I was captured by the alien invaders as my craft made its way out the atmosphere. I lay in semi-sleep and woke abruptly when I felt my capsule lose all its momentum in a moment.

And later the capsule was broken open and I was confronted by an ugly tiny creature with two legs and fur, which I later learned was clothing. This was a Kindred; but at the time I thought it was a Ka’un.

I clambered out of my capsule to confront the creature, and lashed at him with my tentacles; and found he was made of air. A projection.

I realised I was alone inside a huge room shaped like a globe, made of some kind of glass; and beneath me and all around was the blackness of space, and the stars. And shining in the midst of the emptiness of space was a planet, my own planet; which our people had called Tendala. I knew this view of Tendala well; for I had flown in orbit around her many times; and as I looked now at the planet in space, I saw the oceans that I had swum in, and the mountains I had climbed.