Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

I was confused, and frightened, and baffled. My confining shell was large and had no features and no visible doors; and because the floor too was made of glass it felt as if I were floating in space.

And, there, from my vantage point inside the glass belly of the Ka’un spaceship, I saw my planet start to break into pieces.

It was an impossible yet haunting image. I saw none of the terror and destruction that must have existed on the ground-the cities and forests burning, the seas racked with storms, the volcanoes erupting. All I saw was a beautiful blue globe breaking apart like smashed glass, and fragments the size of entire countries tumbling into space.

And my soul was rent with pain.

I knew I would never seen my loved ones again; never again would I feel the winds of Tendala, or swim in the Parago Seas, or watch the beauteous birds of Tharbois in colourful flight. Child though I was, I knew by now that these monsters took joy in the extermination of other sentient beings. And I knew them to be, by our own moral code, “evil.”

But though I was full of rage back then, my anger eventually, over the ensuing months, dimmed into a calm acceptance.

I was, I admit, grievously disappointed that others of my kind did not come to rescue me; but I did not resent them for this failure. Perhaps, I mused, they had decided to forgive the alien invaders? For forgiveness is the way of my species. We will, if absolutely necessary, fight; but continuing hatred is not in our nature, and indeed runs counter to our philosophy of life.

So I did not, as many Kau’un captives do, wallow in thoughts of vengeance. Nor did my captivity terrify me; and the prospect of spending eternity as a slave caused me little grief. For my kind are long-lived, and patient, and we endure.

And yet!

Even now the memories of the horrors that I saw in those early years on the Hell Ship cause me pain. The savagery! The cruelty! I arrived, a fresh slave, and was greeted by a slavering mob of creatures of all shapes and sizes, with claws and beaks and horns and soft pulsing flesh and hard scales and thick hides, creatures who flew and creatures who crawled and creatures who walked on a hundred legs and others who were nightmares made manifest. And all these monsters taunted and mocked me. And then they advanced upon me in a ruthless mass and savaged me, and tried to rip the outer shell off my three segments with their teeth and claws and horns and feelers and feet. One of the creatures spat acid upon my skin. Another wrapped its coils around me and tried to crush my body into a state of suffocation. And then one of them, a giant flying biped, picked me up in its claws and carried me up to the summit of the mountain range, over bleak and terrible terrain, and there he dropped me from a great height upon the sharpest crag. And I tried to fly away to safety, but my cape was shattered and I could not see because my eyes had been pecked out, and I could not hear because small worms were crawling in my brain and affecting my ability to sense my surroundings or to think.

When I hit the rocky crag the wind was driven out of my body and my carapace was cracked and my heart ruptured and my back spine was shattered.

And I was in agony for many months until I managed to drag myself down from the mountain. And then I hauled myself across the grasslands in the baking heat, until I found a well full of soothing water and dived in. And this, I later learned, was the well of the water of life; and these waters healed me.

Within months, I was restored to health; my spine was restored; my eyes grew back; my wounds healed; though my fear of my fellow captives was undimmed.

Carulha was the dominant warrior on the Hell Ship back then. A giant red polypod with spear-like protrusions on his flesh and a hundred bony arms that could cut and sever flesh and a thousand snake-tails that could spit venom and lash like whips. Carulha had led the mob that tortured and taunted me. And when I was healed, it was Carulha who sought me out and told me the laws of my new world. I must obey him, and him alone; for I was his slave, just as he was the slave of the Masters of the Ship. And I must, he told me, at all times use my strength to intimidate and humiliate the smaller bipeds (though not the Kindred) and the arboreals and the sentient aerials and the multi-legs and the swamp-dwellers, for that was the way of things on this ship.

I refused.

So Carulha went away and when he returned he once more led a mob of huge and deadly creatures. I can remember them now: Sairyrd, the hairy three-legged grey-skinned breaker of bones. Marosh, a serpentine with wings and teeth that could rip and tear in all the many mouths that ran the length of her slithering body. And Tarang, a creature with no fixed form, who oozed and shapeshifted and had the power to hurt by absorbing the bodies of her prey into her own soft sucking loathsome body. And more, many more. The bipeds fought too, for they served Carulha then, not the Kindred as they do now; and though they were small, they were armed with bows and spears and knives and wooden machines that could hurl rocks and balls of fire. The arboreals also joined this army; they were agile and guileful, and used their teeth and tails to maim and hurt at Carulha’s behest. And the aerials flocked at his command, and could peck out the eyes of a helpless new slave in a matter of seconds.

This was the mob that for the second time faced me. But this time, I was no longer a child; for I had been prematurely metamorphosed into my adult self through pain and grief. Thus, my strength and powers were enhanced a thousandfold, as is the way of our kind.

And so, sorrow in my heart, adulthood forced upon me, I defended myself.

After six hours of combat, I left behind me a trail of broken bodies and screaming, agonised monsters, and slept that night by the shores of the lake, watching the sun go down above the Tower. The wind was cold.

I missed my world.

Naturally, once I had proved my superior strength, Carulha and the others left me undisturbed. And that made me glad; and yet also broke my soul. For it is not in my nature to be alone, and unloved.

And even though I now enjoyed a protected existence, Carulha and his gang continued to hound and humiliate all the other slaves; and everything I saw brought me fresh torment.

For in those days, the lives of the slaves on the Hell Ship were truly dark and desperate. We were our own worst enemies, there was no comfort to be got, and no comradeship, and no kindness or compassion, and, most appallingly of all, no routine.

And those facts made me, deeply and wretchedly, sad.

And indeed it makes me sad even now, looking back, to remember how when I was a new slave, no one helped me; no one trained me. And there were no cabins either, not back then. No sanctuary, no friendship, just savagery.

Thus, in my first few years on the Ship, I lived in a state of perpetual disgust with the ways of my world. For all was hate! In the days, the slaves would fight and rip each other limb from limb, with pointless brutality. And at night their bodies would lie still and bleeding before they, slowly and painfully, began to heal.

And also, every night, after all the bickering and warring, we Ka’un slaves would lie on the grass while the sun set; and we would be filled with terror as the sheer blackness descended. A night so dark that nocturnal animals were blinded; a night where nothing moved, and no sound carried, and creatures possessed of echo-location were as helpless as those with eyes. A night of total and terrifying silence.

Then, after a few hours, screams would rend the night. As the absence of all light sent creature after creature to the brink of madness, or into the arms of cold Despair.

Then, eventually, the sun would rise, and cold light would leach across the land. And we would see before us the forests of the Despairing: dead and petrified figures that stretched as far as the eye could see, their warm bodies turned to icy stone, their screams of agony preserved for all eternity in rock. Such are the consequences of the bodily apocalypse we call Despair.