Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

Relics left by this civilisation include the image of a map of the universe which shows a single planet at the centre of a universe of stars, indicative of a pre-technological society without sophisticated astronomical apparatus. This is at odds, however, with certain fragments in the data trail, where there are references to colony ships settling multiple planets and ruling the universe.

These stories may of course be fictional, a legacy of a society that dreamed of settling the stars but never did so.

This civilisation is unique in that there is no record of it having encountered the Death Ship prior to cessation of its reality.

For an account of the end of this universe and surmises about its possible causes, read the files archived here and here.

The second of these files consists of a long account by an artist from this civilisation called Minos which is of considerable interest to this archive. It contains details of a war between his people and a species they called the Parakka; tall creatures with a single eye and claws for hands and with three tongues which hiss when the creature speaks. The memoir begins with the words: Hate me if you like. I care not. Love and hate are just illusions. Death is the only truth. And I should have died a long time ago. I wish indeed that I had. For I have sought death; I have taken bold and reckless gambles; I and my crew have fought wars that we could not possibly have won, and we have won. When I do eventually die, this voice recording will be left as a trace in the folds of space. It will be found, one day, by some explorer ship or other. And my story will be known. The greatest story in the history of all the universes. So my words will live for ever, but I care not for that. I just want to die. This is why I am dictating this, my suicide note, my declaration of defeat.

It is not clear what these last lines mean; the rest of the broadcast is partially corrupt, and is currently being studied by Star-Seeker Jak who for some reason takes a particular interest in the Parakka and in this lost civilisation and claims he will one day be able to decipher the rest of the story.

My world was chaos.

I had returned to the interior world from the hull bay to find the lake emptied of water, bodies strewn all around; and a vast fissure stretching across the Great Plain. But gravity had been restored; and now the shattered bodies of the dead and injured in the attack lay on the grass and savannah and in the muddy lake bed, rather than hovering in mid-air as before.

“Sai-ias.” A flutter of wings by my head; Lirilla was still with me.

“Save me,” Lirilla said, in acknowledgement of the fact I had saved her. Though she did not know why; for she had no notion we had been friends for hundreds of years.

“Quipu? Fray? Doro? Are they safe?” I asked.

She knew the names of these beasts of course. And obediently, Lirilla vanished, and returned.

“Quipu, safe,” she said.

“Fray? Doro?”

“No Fray. No Doro.”

She had been around the ship and back in the blink of an eye; I knew she could not be wrong.

Quipu was safe; but Doro and Fray were missing; fallen, or so I feared, through the crack in our world.

“Sai-ias?” said Lirilla anxiously.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“Lirilla, fear, full,” said Lirilla.

“You’re safe, you’re safe. I’m here now.”

“Lirilla, wish, dead.”

“What are you saying sweet bird?”

“Lirilla, wish, dead-ship.”

“Me too. Me too.”

But the attack had failed; the Ka’un were still alive.

We spoke of it that night, Quipu and Lirilla and I, in the hours after the disaster; in a series of rambling and repetitive dialogues.

“No need to ask who,” said Quipu One. “We know who.”

“Some lost civilisation,” added Quipu Two.

“Seeking revenge,” added Quipu Three.

“From this universe or from some other universe?” asked Quipu Four.

The Quipus together intoned: “We will never know.”

“It must have pursued us,” said Quipu Three, “for-who knows how long.”

“And yet it failed,” Quipu One pointed out.

“It tried, at least,” said Quipu Three. “There’s grandeur in that. My own people-well. We were so powerful and yet-we-”

“Gone,” said Quipu One, “like a light being switched off; all our people, gone.”

“Ground, healed?” said Lirilla. For earlier that day the crevasse that had opened up in the grasslands slowly, over the space of several hours, had closed.

“I do not know how that could have happened,” admitted Quipu Four.

“Magic,” I said.

“Not magic,” contradicted Quipu Two. “Some kind of force-field effect.”

“?” said Quipu Five, who was struggling to keep up with the discussion.

“A structural skeleton made of invisible force,” agreed Quipu Three. “When the hull is breached, the force field rejoins; the metal is forced back into place.”

“I touched it,” I reminded Quipu, as I kept doing every few minutes. “I touched the ship.”

And so we sat there, stunned, survivors of a disaster, huddled and muttering the same things over and over: “It was terrible.” “We almost died.” “I can’t believe it!” and so on, endlessly.

“I touched it,” I muttered again. My claws had scraped the hull of their vessel, before I had been scooped up by invisible beams of force and made captive once again.

I remembered the vast and awkward shape of the attacking ship; and its squat central hub, with its colourful stripes faded by time; and the inscription on the top of the vessel, blazoning a name which, even in the absence of the translating air, I had somehow been able to read, which said:

Explorer 410: Property of the Olara Trading Fleet.

“Explorer 410,” said Quipu Two, “Property of the Olara Trading Fleet.”

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“Not even a warship,” said Quipu Three. “A reconnaissance vessel, for a merchant fleet. And it was nearly our salvation.”

“Nearly,” I said.

“But why did the Ka’un save you, Sai-ias?” asked Quipu One. “They plucked you out of space; why you, and not any of the others?”

“I do not know,” I said.

Over the next few days and nights, Quipu interrogated me at length; and pieced together the progress and nature of the space battle.

One or more of the missiles fired by the attacking spaceship had struck its target; that much could not be denied. And that missile had ripped several holes in our hull, through which I, and Doro and Fray and so many others, had tumbled out. But the ship that I had seen that looked like a Helix was but an illusion. And thus, Quipu concluded, the Hell Ship that was destroyed before my eyes must have been illusion too.

“The cheapest of tricks,” said Quipu One.

“A distortion of space-time,” added Quipu Two, “that allowed an image to linger here when the reality had moved there.”

It was clear to all of us that Explorer 410: Property of the Olaran Trading Fleet had been duped by a conjurer’s stunt. If only it had fought on, and fired more missiles, it might have succeeded in once again striking the invisible but real Hell Ship; and the result of the battle would have been quite different.

This thought haunted me. These aliens who attacked us had been so very close to victory. A single miscalculation had cost them everything.

A few weeks later Fray returned; though Doro did not.

Once again, Fray’s memories were gone; and once again she was convinced her world had only just been destroyed.

It was agonising to see the rawness of her pain. And painful too to witness her bewilderment when she was told of a great space battle in which she had “died,” though she remembered nothing of it.