Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

Cantrell sighed. “Where your girlfriend’s nipples are, those are its ears.”

And so I stared at the monster’s nipples; they were as sharp as a dagger’s point. I counted six of them; and I wondered, idly, if this creature’s aural organs could also lactate.

Then I lowered my head, and scraped my right foot on the ground five times, the FanTang ritual for greeting.

“You did hear some of the briefing then,” Cantrell hissed. I cast him a brief but brilliant smile; then looked at the FanTang leader, lowered my head, and scraped my foot on the ground five times once more. Hello, again.

But the FanTang leader did not move. His three advisers did not move either. They glared fiercely with body-eyes that appeared to be made of glass; and their open mouths dripped saliva through fangs on to the cavern floor. And I noticed that the spikes upon the bodily carapace of the FanTang leader were stained with what looked like red-celled blood.

“We wish you to hear us,” I said, in fluent FanTang, and the FanTang leader’s glassy eyes all blinked, in unison.

I took the translating pads out of my sack-having reached the limits of my idiomatic FanTangian-and knelt, then crawled on my hands and knees to the FanTang leader. I held out the translating pads.

The giant FanTang took the pads.

I touched my own chest with my hands. The FanTang copied the gesture and the adhesive pads gripped his breasts and then the listening pads were in place.

“We wish you to hear us,” I said, in Olaran, which was then translated into the FanTang’s language by the listening pads.

“Can you in fact hear and comprehend us?” I said.

The FanTang leader was still. “I can hear,” he said in his own language, and the translator did its job, and I heard the worlds in Olaran.

I crawled back on my hands and knees to rejoin Cantrell.

“Mission accomplished,” I said grinning.

“How does this work?” the FanTang leader asked, querulously.

“It’s a translator,” I explained. “It translates.”

“We have seen this device before,” said the FanTang leader. “You sent swamp-wolves into our camps and they spat these things on to our bodies and the wolves howled at us and we understood them and marvelled, and then we slew them.”

“And what did they say?” Cantrell asked, dryly.

“Don’t,” the FanTang leader admitted, “Kill. Us.”

Cantrell sighed, disapprovingly, and the translator turned the sigh into words: “[Disapproving exhalation.]”

The Fan Tang leader was startled.

“We sent the swamp-wolves,” I explained smoothly, “to prepare the way. We know that you are afraid of us.”

“We are not afraid of you!” roared the FanTang leader.

“We come from deepest space, in ships that spit fire, and you are right to be wary of us,” I said diplomatically.

“We are not wary of you!”

“You blew up,” I said impatiently, “all our scout ships with your nuclear missiles. In our culture, that counts as ‘wary.’ ”

“Wary, perhaps,” conceded the FanTang leader, “but not afraid.”

“Our ships were piloted by robots,” I said. “Non-living creatures, not alive. You did us no harm. We bear you no grudge.”

“You are our enemy, it is therefore your duty to hate and destroy us,” the FanTang leader rebuked me.

It was by now apparent that these creatures were small-minded, ignorant, bloodthirsty savages; nonetheless, I persevered.

“We are not your enemy, we are your friends,” I said, as carefully and clearly as I was able. “We come not to fight war, but to make peace. We do not wish to conquer, we wish to trade.”

“What,” said the FanTang leader, “is this word ‘peace’? And what is ‘trade’?”

“Peace is the opposite of war.”

“Surrender is the opposite of war,” the FanTang leader explained.

“No, not-fighting is the opposite of war,” I said. “Collaborating. Being-friends-ing. Concord. Not killing each other.”

“These parent-fucking monsters have no fucking idea,” Cantrell muttered sourly.

The FanTang leader roared, but in a cheerful way; I realised it was a laugh. “Parent-fucking, that is a good phrase. We can adopt that in our own language,” the FanTang leader said gleefully.

“Trade means we give you what you want, you give us what we want.”

“We want your deaths,” said the FanTang leader, and took out a stick that was tied to his belt, and shook the stick so it became a sword, and struck off my head.

[I woke, in agony. I forced myself back down on to my couch.]

“That won’t help you,” Cantrell said mildly.

Blood poured out of my neck-stump; I made it congeal. My heart stopped beating; I made it beat again. I opened my eyes and found I was on the floor staring up at an odd angle at the entourage of green, angry, aristocratic FanTangs.

“We come in peace,” my head said mildly.

The FanTang leader jerked in shock.

My torso sat up. My hands picked up my head and put it back on my bloody shoulders. The broken blood vessels rejoined; the neck healed, leaving an ugly scar. I stood up.

“You can survive the loss of a head,” said the FanTang leader, marvelling.

“Can’t you?” I said, mockingly, and took out my ray gun and fired it, a flech to the right of the FanTang leader’s skull-protrusion.

A chunk of the marble column behind the monster vaporised, with a sharp hiss. I fired again, and the rock-table vanished. I fired a third time, at the feet of the FanTang leader’s monsterly advisors, and a hole appeared in the ground beneath them and they leaped for safety.

(“Good shooting,” murmured Cantrell.)

“If we fought a war,” I explained gently to the FanTang leader, “you would lose.”

“Yeah! You parent-fucking bastards!” added Cantrell, viciously.

The FanTang leader emitted a sad, pathetic howl. He looked around helplessly. “I am humiliated,” he said, feebly.

“Not so,” I said calmly, and handed the monster the ray gun. “Look. A gesture of trust. We come in peace. Here is my magic weapon. I give it to you to show that I trust you. We come in peace, which is not-war, which is better than war, which is-”

(“Quit while you’re ahead,” murmured Cantrell.)

“All we want to do, you see,” I said patiently, to this savage green-hided brute with skin like lava and no control whatsoever of its salivary glands, “is trade.”

“You give me your weapon!” said the FanTang leader, marvelling, holding the ray gun as if it were a-well, as if it were a deadly weapon of extra-FanTangian origin that had just been given to him as an unexpected present. “That shows much respect! And trust. And-”

He pressed the button on the side, and the gun fired.

“And folly!” the FanTang leader roared, delighted by his own rhetoric.

The blast ripped me into pieces; I flew through the air and landed in fragments, and my blood gushed on to the floor messily.

Then the monster pointed the ray gun at Cantrell, and fired again.

[I woke, in agony again. I took a moment to recover my wits. All was going according to plan.]

I returned into my shadow body. It was a perfect simulacrum of my real body, accessible to all the senses including touch. But it was, at the end of the day, no more than a computer simulation, which I could easily control with the power of my thought.

And so this time I allowed my pools of blood to coagulate and merge until they stood upright and formed a human silhouette. My severed limbs slicked across the floor and reformed and rejoined, and my arms then placed my head back on my body, until I stood before the monsters as a flaccid blood-emptied sac of skin. Then I opened my mouth…

… and I drank my own blood-silhouette, like a squelched fruit travelling backwards in time; and resumed my normal shape.