Hell Ship

Jak/Explorer

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.