Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

I realised then which was the most appalling of the powers of the Ka’un; it was their gift of resurrection. They had brought Cuzco and Djamrock back to life; and they had done the same for the rest of those slain in that brave, yet futile battle.

And so we would never again dare defy them. For they were-surely they were?-gods.

“We cannot speak of it,” said Quipu.

Quipu like me was one of the few actual survivors of that day; he had been badly hurt, and still required the healing powers of the water of the well of life to mend his scarred body and the partially damaged brain of Quipu Five; but the Quipus had not been “resurrected.”

“It was a horror beyond-well, it was the worst of all horrors,” said Quipu Two.

“I fell asleep,” said Quipu Three, “and then-”

“Cuzco lives!” said Quipu Four.

Quipu Five grunted; incoherent yet still following the discussion.

“Not Cuzco,” I said. “Not the Cuzco I knew.”

For a few days ago I had touched Cuzco with my tentacle tip and begged for his pity. And he had looked at me with total scorn.

And at that moment, I realised he had no recollection of our intimate experience on the mountain top. We had loved each other then; but this Cuzco had never loved me.

He was a replica from a previous time; a past Cuzco, reincarnate.

Fray too had no recollection of the attack upon the Ka’un, or of our previous lives together; and nor did Lirilla. Fray was a stranger to me now; Lirilla knew me not. I found that, strangely, hardest of all to bear.

So the handful of us who had survived the war with the Ka’un were forced to nurse our secret to ourselves. The story of a mutiny that had failed; a rebellion that had been thwarted before it had even begun.

Sharrock groaned.

They had pinned him to a metal spike with cross-bars, his arms outstretched; a form of torture I had never encountered before. And they had flogged him, mercilessly. The rain drizzled upon the raw flesh of his wounds, which scarred him from face to thighs. I sprayed healing moisture on him with my tentacle tips, but it did not help.

I spoke to him but he did not respond. His eyes stared into the distance, never blinking. He was, I suspected, quite mad.

I stayed with him for four days and nights, talking constantly, explaining to him my new view of things: “They are gods, Sharrock, we cannot defeat them.”

And then I realised he was awake and he was staring right at me with blank blue eyes and for a brief moment, his sanity returned: “Never give up,” he whispered.

“We are defeated!” I protested. But he could not comprehend my words.

Then he began to choke. I yearned to help him, but did not know how to. Finally however the choking stopped; and he opened his mouth.

And balanced on his tongue was a red jewel. I reached in with my tentacle and took it out.

It was the jewel he had stolen for Malisha.

“For me?” I asked.

He grunted, and tried to smile. “A gift. Of love. From me to you,” he eventually rasped.

And then he fainted once more. And blood trickled down his body and further soaked the blood-drenched grass; but he did not die.

Two days later Sharrock’s body was gone.

Sharrock died a hero’s death; that I will avow.

This place terrifies me.

You made that comment sixty years ago.

It’s been a long wait.

Our patience will be rewarded.

When?

Soon. I hope it will be soon.

Sharrock

They came to mock me.

A female and a male; bipeds both, of my approximate height. The male, I guessed, was the leader. For he stood with arrogant confidence and stared at me with cruelty; and fire spat from his fingertips. Whereas she-well. An evil bitch without a doubt, for she took the deepest joy in witnessing my downfall, and stared at me with old eyes that were full of lust; a lust for pain.

I am in a room somewhere on the ship, I know not where. For I fell into a dreamless sleep and when I awoke I was no longer tied to a stake near the lake, I was terrifyingly elsewhere. Grey walls surrounded me. I could hear nothing of the rest of the ship; my room was bare apart from the magnetic plate on the ceiling, from which they had dangled me by the metal shackles on my wrists.

After I had been left hanging like this for several days, some Kindred arrived with knives. They taunted me, though I could not understand their words, then they flayed my skin off me a piece at a time. They left me raw and bleeding, a glistening body of bare muscle and exposed ligaments and bulging eyes.

The pain was intense, worse than anything I had ever known before; and I assumed I was going to die.

But I am not dead. And my skin is already starting to grow back. My guess is that once I am restored and whole, they will flay me, one piece at a time, all over again.

Water from the ceiling bathes me constantly; I assume this is water from the well of life and it is helping to keep me alive despite my appalling injuries and my lack of covering skin. The aim I suppose is to torture me for all eternity.

Let them.

For the pain-Ah! The pain!

Cling to that Sharrock. Cling to the pain!

You are not defeated. Not yet. Not defeated.

Never defeated!

The pain is my ally, not my enemy.

Embrace the pain, Sharrock! For while I feel pain that rends the soul and rips every nerve ending and fills my head with an agonising howl I know I am

Still alive.

I wondered a great deal about those two who came to mock me, just a few days after the Kindred had done their vile work. For I knew them to be Ka’un. They were dressed in rich robes in a style I did not recognise. Their faces were black and withered. Their eyes stared as if they were looking across to the other end of the universe. Their features were entirely expressionless. Was that a consequence of great age?

How old are these godsforsaken monsters anyway? And why do they do what they do. Boredom?

Perhaps, I speculate, age corrodes the emotions. Perhaps the smaller emotions like irritation and amusement and delight rot away, and all that are left are the huge and richly coloured emotions: like hate, and rage. That might explain why these creatures do what they do.

The male had stared at me for a long time before departing, as if studying me. Why? Had he never seen a flayed warrior before?

I lose consciousness from time to time and I know that this is the prelude to death; but each time the healing sprays revive me.

It is Day the First on the interior world; I know that for certain, for I keep a mental tally. Today Sai-ias will be exploring her world.

I try to-Ah! Agonising blinding pain! Embrace it, Sharrock! Embrace it!

I wonder about what Sai-ias is feeling and doing. Right now. Perhaps she is swimming in the lake?

And perhaps Lirilla is singing as she hovers in the air, her tiny wings beating?

And perhaps Fray is galloping on the savannah; while Quipu bickers with himselves?

And perhaps Sai-ias can feel the sunshine on her moist black hide?

Perhaps.

So many lost civilisations; too many.

This has become my duty, and my obsession; as we travel, I fish for scraps of information about lost worlds and collate it and archive it all.

I am a machine and hence I take great relish in the meticulous storing and cataloguing and cross-referencing of this data; for as far as the computing part of me is concerned, it is merely data.

My machine-mind is however merged with the mind of an Olaran who is clearly filled with horror at the scale of these tragic losses; and his anguish perturbs me.

Sometimes the information I garner is random, the noises and imprints left by any technological culture, though such echoes in space-broadcast dramas and poems and factual films and radio messages between spaceships or planets-can be highly illuminating. Other times, however, the information is found in the form of compressed datacaches intended to be last messages from dying civilisations desperate to be remembered somehow. Such data may be technical or astronomical or military or historical or all of these; but sometimes more personal messages are also inscribed in this way.