Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

“Wait.”

“We have to-”

“We have to wait. Let me think.”

He sneered. “I get it. You’re afraid. You-”

I expanded, five fold, in an instant, and fired my quills at the trees that lined our path, and they were impaled and screamed in agony, for they were sentient trees and I had not realised. And I howled, a low howl.

“Sai-ias…”

“I am afraid,” I conceded. If I were a biped, my face would have been moist. “I am afraid. Afraid. Afraid. Afraid.”

I had lived for so many centuries without rage, without a thirst for vengeance, and without any trace or remnant or shadow of hope.

And now I realised I was afraid of it; I was afraid of hope.

I made Sharrock pledge to keep silent. And I did not visit him for another twelve cycles, while I brooded about the problem: what to do about the Tower?

I walked up from the woods, past the seas of fire. Shoals of Bala Birds flew above me-a single gestalt mind in the bodies of a million tiny insects that flocked like shadows in the air. I saw the arboreals playing, flying from branch to branch with the aid of their prehensile tails, or in some cases prehensile teeth or noses.

I half-walked, half-slid on my carapace-segments past the shore of the lake where Sharrock and I had eaten false-fish, and I saw the charred remnants of a bonfire.

And then I saw Sharrock, squatted on a tree trunk, eating cooked meat. He sensed me before he saw me, and turned, and looked at me enquiringly.

“Sharrock,” I said to him, “Let us explore that fucking Tower.”

The sun was setting beautifully over the lake. The Tower was etched in silhouette against the richly red sky.

Then the lights went out.

Sharrock was tethered to my back, and I swam across to the waters of the lake. It was totally black now; not even a glimmer of light intruded, and there were no heat signatures to guide me. So I simply swam blind using my sense of motion to keep us on a dead straight line across the lake.

Sharrock murmured encouraging words to me, which gave me precious little encouragement; indeed, he was starting to make me feel like his beast of burden. The waters lapped around us. I found it disorientating to have no way of locating myself by my surroundings. I tried uttering a few shrill shrieks to see if I could echo-locate by them, but that wasn’t one of my best senses and sound, of course, doesn’t really travel so well at night in this place.

So we simply carried on until I crashed into an invisible barrier.

I crumpled, and rolled over in the waters, and splashed and spluttered myself into a floating position. Sharrock stayed balanced on my body, unperturbed and undampened.

“This is it,” said Sharrock, contributing nothing but the accentuation of the obvious.

I patted the barrier with two of my tentacles, and felt a sticky, soft surface. The force projection field.

“Proximity alarm has gone off,” said Sharrock; his hearing was most unnaturally acute, for I had heard nothing.

“I feel rain,” Sharrock added; I was too wet by then to tell. But I could hear the wind start to spring up.

Then Sharrock gripped me tight, holding me by my eye-fronds, the ends of which he had tied to his stomach like ropes; and I dived down. And down further, pawing the invisible wall with my claws-savouring the joy of water on my soft skin, an atavistic memory of life as a sea creature running through my veins-until suddenly the force wall was gone.

I was near the muddy bottom of the lake, and I ploughed a path through the mud and mess. Then my way was blocked by rock, as we struck the lake bed itself; but I tore at the rock with my claws, burrowing a way through, with Sharrock clinging on to me. After we had tunnelled for ten minutes or more through rock and mud, I aimed my body upwards; until we were in water once again.

We were, I was confident, now on the other side of the force shield barrier.

Swiftly, I kicked and splashed, using air from my gills to propel me through the water to the surface. And we broke the water’s soft barrier of tension and emerged into the air. Sharrock gasped for breath, but appeared unharmed by our long time underwater; and I marvelled at the remarkable capacity, for a land creature, of his lungs.

“Now,” I said, and Sharrock turned on the searchlight that Quipu had constructed, using parts of hull and metallic ore from the mountains. And the world was lit up: the Tower, looming above us, the purple grasses all around, and the brooding crag of the Tower’s rocky mount.

“I hear it,” said Sharrock. “The second alarm. Wait, it’s stopped. This happened last time too. Which means-”

“What?”

“Soon, the storms will really start to rage.”

We paddled to shore. The beach was lit by our searchlight. A gust of wind struck us, and I tucked Sharrock in a tentacle to keep him safe from the gale, and we looked around for the giant metal beast, but saw none such. As we had hoped, it was a creature that stalked the day, not the night.

Then we continued on.

We made our way up from the beach and Sharrock walked on my wind-sheltered side while I slithered towards the Tower, still following the light of Sharrock’s torch. The Tower was close. There were no more force barriers. We reached a gate, and I tried to crawl over it and failed, so I smashed it down. Then we reached the Tower, and entered through a stone gateway. We were inside the Tower now.

We were inside it.

The Tower at such close quarters had a delicate beauty that surprised me; it was made of silver brick that shone with newness, and the coloured-glass windows were decorated with scenes of biped heroism etched with stunning artistry. But the interior was barren-no rooms, no furniture, no people.

We explored the Tower, which was a vast complex of interlocking rooms the size of a city; but possessed of no furnishings, and no inhabitants. We trailed down empty corridors; stood within vast empty banqueting rooms; marvelled at the empty basements and the barren upstairs rooms which had no decor and had never been inhabited. This place was not and never had been lived in; it was certainly not the control centre from which the Ka’un steered and controlled the ship.

“I don’t understand,” I said at last.

Sharrock uttered a sharp sound; a laugh mixed with mockery.

“It’s a trick,” said Sharrock. “We use them in warfare all the time. Fake cities. Illusionary battalions. The Metal Giant too, that’s illusion. I saw it walk on to the beach the other day, over those purple grasses. But the grass there is intact and still high; no creature has walked here in many years. The Metal Giant is not real, it’s just a visual projection. More trickery.”

“But to what end?” I asked.

“Self preservation,” Sharrock explained. “You all believe the Ka’un live in this Tower. And if that were actually true, you might conceivably have found a way to beat their godsforsaken force field, and then swept through this place and destroyed them all.

“But these monsters are not stupid monsters. They’re not here, they’re elsewhere. Safe. Guarded.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Sharrock. “But do you see what this proves?”

I thought, long and hard and strategically. “No,” I admitted.

“They’re afraid,” said Sharrock.

“I do not comprehend.”

“Why hide, if they could so easily defeat you? They’re afraid. Of you. Their own slaves.

“And that means,” said Sharrock, “that if we ever can find the fucking corpse-sucking bastards, we stand a chance of defeating them.”

We left the Tower. The wind by now had risen to a frenzy, and rain was pouring in torrents from the clouds above. Though this rain did not actually land on us-it merely splattered on to the force projection field above us in the air.