Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

“You will never have the chance,” I told her.

“Don’t be so sure. I’m not like the rest of you shameful cowards! I will fight, and I will win!” she raged.

“No,” I said. “Acceptance is all. The Ka’un cannot be defeated.

“Believe me,” I added, bitterly, “we have tried.”

Jak/Explorer

I am ready. My mind is now fully merged once more with the mind of Explorer. I exist in many places; in the missiles we carry, in the concealed flying-bombs that orbit these planets, in our drone craft, in the matter traps that cordon off the entire stellar system. I am no longer Olaran; I am a killing machine.

Less talk, please Jak. Let’s commence to kill this parent-fucker.

First missiles have been fired.

Feel them fly. Ah! Feel them fly!

“I could bathe you,” I said to Fray, as she paced by the borders of the yellow savannah. “You might enjoy that.”

Fray glared at me. “Why in all fuckery,” she said angrily, “would I allow you to do such a thing?”

“In the past you-”

“There is no past! Stop your fantasies, you vile creature! I have only just been captured, my world has been destroyed. And it happened just a few months ago. You talk as if-no, we do not know each other! You are simply some strange alien monster with whom I am trapped!”

“You remember nothing?” I said, sadly.

“There is nothing to remember!” Fray roared. “Don’t lie! Don’t tell these lies!”

Lirilla too had no past memories of me; nor did Lardoi, or Miaris, or Raoild, or Biark, Sahashs, Loramas, Thugor, Amur, Kairi, Wapax, Fiymean, or Krakkka; nor many others of those who had fought that day and died at Sharrock’s behest. Only Quipu and I and a sprinkling of others could bear witness to the events of the day. The rest had been resurrected as the creatures they were when their worlds were first lost.

And so I was living with utter strangers who had been my intimate companions for centuries.

Our missiles have lost velocity. No damage has been caused to their hull.

Their shields were fully charged; they were ready for us.

Of course they were. This is a game to them.

Again, missiles fly!

And so we fight.

We, this computer brain and I, have been preparing for this battle for so many years. And yet now it’s happening, I feel totally un prepared. Panic consumes me. Each small setback disheartens me. I am convinced in my soul that we will lose, and all will be for naught.

Explorer, fortunately, is not so temperamental; she fights with a savagery and a guile that awes me.

And so, once again, our missiles fire and rift through space and then strike the forceshields of the Death Ship; and instantly lose momentum and drift aimlessly. But this time, before they can be destroyed, we trigger the detonators and all the missiles erupt as one, creating a halo of energy the size of a star around the black-sailed ship. Nothing can survive this.

But a moment later we realise the black-sailed ship is behind us. It has rifted to safety. And our forceshields are overheating, as it bathes us in sheets of energy and then

We, too, rift to safety.

I felt a tingle of anxiety down my central spine.

I was walking through the grasslands near the savannah, to join Quipu and Lirilla. And as I approached Quipu, I saw his heads flick uncontrollably, for a just a moment. And I noticed an excited light in his five pairs of eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, puzzled.

“Something’s happening-” said Quipu One.

“-with the ship,” said Quipu Two.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

The heads replied, babblingly:

“The engine noise.”

“The force of artificial gravity.”

“The clarity of the light.”

“The density of [Quipu used a word I could not fathom].”

“You can detect all that?” I asked.

“Perhaps we have collided,” said Quipu One, “with an object in space-”

“Or been attacked by,” said Quipu Three.

“Some other vessel,” said Quipu Four.

“The light is degrading; the power sources are being diverted. The Hell Ship is in trouble. One way or another, it is experiencing some kind of appalling catastrophe,” said Quipu Five triumphantly.

The battle rages, if space battles can actually rage; for the explosions are eerily silent. And, despite the use of rift weapons, the pace of the action is often stately. It is a dance of light and power and confusion, to the music of an imaginary band; the sleek and black-sailed Death Ship and the now vast and ugly and ungainly Explorer craft flicker frantically through rift space leaving missiles scattered and exploding in all the places where they are absent.

Explorer and I no longer speak. We are lost in the moment, the to and fro of missiles and energy beams, the switching of shield patterns, the ceaseless rifting to safety just in the nick of time.

We use our drone ships and robot missiles to create a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth front to the battle. The power of our weapons is awesome, even to me-accustomed as I am to the vast battle fleets of the Olara. For we have spent all this time building up an armoury that dwarfs anything known before in any of the universes. The ship too has grown; it is five hundred thousand times the size it was when Galamea was her commander. And much of the bulk consists of weapons and energy sources and shield generators and layers of armoured hull within more layers of armoured hull.

But despite our vast bulk we are swift. Swifter than the Death Ship. And powerful. More powerful than the Death Ship. And adept at rifting. More adept than they are.

Yet why are we not triumphing? Again and again the Death Ship suffers damage that ought to be fatal, but again and again it survives.

Then the Death Ship starts to waver. It has switched on its disreality drive in order to escape to another universe.

We attack on all fronts. We charge the Death Ship. This time it cannot endure.

“What kind of catastrophe?” I asked.

“Can you feel that?” said Quipu One.

And I could; the tingle down the spine again, coupled with a sense of oddness.

“We’re passing through a strange place,” said Quipu Two.

“Experiencing some kind of reality dilation,” said Quipu Three.

“It is time,” said Quipu Four. “Every seventy-two of my years, with some degree of variation, this sensation occurs. But we do not know why. We suspect dimensional or rift travel of some extraordinary kind is occurring.”

The oddness intensified. I braced myself; this was a familiar sensation to me also, after all these years on the ship. Yet it was still deeply eerie and unsettling. I felt as if I existed in a million places all at once. I felt sick. Bile rose up in my mouth

And finally,

NO!

The strangeness ended.

We were back to normal.

And I was baffled.

This shouldn’t have happened! Normally the strangeness lasted an hour or more. Had something gone wrong with the Ka’un’s technology? Would they be unable, this time, to flee from their pursuers?

The Death Ship is trapped by our disjunctive energy lattices which wrap around the black-sailed ship like webbing around a flailing insect. And we fire another fusillade of missiles from all our vessels, for Explorer and I now exist in sixty different ships at the same time.

The odds are overwhelming! We surely must prevail!

Sai-ias

Quipu and I looked at each other; puzzled and alarmed. The strangeness had passed, but now a terrible foreboding filled us.