Hell Ship

Sai-ias

After the explosion, the ground below me opened up. And I found myself tumbling into the hole and then falling and flailing wildly through the layers of the hull itself, until I was floating freely in black space.

And all was calm and silence, though all about me bodies were erupting into blood and gore. I alone had survived the rupture of the ship’s hull.

When I looked more carefully around, I could see the many unfamiliar stars that were the hazy backdrop to the myriad corpses of creatures I had known and liked, now ripped into pieces. And, stretching out beneath me like a continent seen from the air, was a huge and eerily beautiful black-sailed space vessel with a silver, glowing hull.

But though magnificent, the ship was rent and broken. The sails were slack. And bodies continued to pour out of the several huge cracks in the hull and, for reasons I didn’t fathom, they continued to explode and die. Small pieces of flesh and slicks of blood hung messily in space in seeming orbit around my body; and would remain out here as undecayed fragments, I supposed, for all eternity.

I prayed that my friends were safe, as I sucked up breath from my lungs into my mouth (for Lirilla was trapped there and would need to breathe) and spread my cape and soared through space, propelling myself with gusts of air from my gills, away from the damaged Hell Ship.

Joy! I was free!

And instead of breathing air, I was now breathing energy, captured from the undertow of all space that only my kind seem able to perceive and access. And instead of drinking water, I was supping the light from the stars and making it into me.

And instead of being trapped in a globular cage that mockingly pretended to be a planet, I was swooping through a small and precious portion of the infinity of space; and I exulted at the end of my captivity!

I noted however that the main part of the Ka’un’s ship was still intact, even though the rear area had been holed; and I knew that the battle was far from over.

Then I looked further, using eyes that were as powerful as telescopes, and saw the Hell Ship’s enemy vessel-a huge and ugly spaceship that looked as if it had been constructed by a blind creature with more energy and materials than talent. And at the heart of the asymmetric more-planet-than-spaceship was a striped hub that looked as if it had once been the entire original craft.

And from this monstrous murder machine pillars of missiles were pouring forth then vanishing then crashing against the shields of the Hell Ship; these corporeal bomb-blasts followed instants later by vision-bending stems of light that also thrashed the Hell Ship’s beautiful lines. Smaller vessels scattered in space were also playing a vicious harrying role in this anarchic battle of light and energy; spitting missiles then darting elsewhere before reprisal could strike. The pace and blur and bright and splash of it all made my perceptions swim; I felt as if I were on the inside a star watching a deadly duel between sunlight and plasma.

And suddenly, I could hear voices, in my head:

After all these years…

We’ll kill the parent fuckers! Kill them!

Don’t miss.

I shall not miss.

As the voices spoke, more missiles were launched from the Ka’un ship and travelled instantaneously through space and exploded on the hull of its enemy vessel. Light splashed on the vast and ugly hull of our potential saviours, but no damage was done; and then the saviour craft retaliated, and haloes of light now appeared above the Hell Ship and crashed down upon it, striking sparks like burning fronds spat from the mouth of a Padiux.

The blackness of deep space was lit up by missiles exploding and light-haloes writhing and burning, and the invisible walls of protective energy around both ships glowed brightly, oh so brightly, to my eyes which saw energy as if it were light.

The space between the ships shimmered as deadly beams of energy were unleashed and repelled and reflected back.

I could hear atoms fusing and sundering and interacting to form massive eruptions of raw power that seared my sight. And I could sense the universe itself being bruised as the two ships dived in and out of tunnels in space, to emerge once more vomiting forth fire and metal and nuclear holocaust.

The attacking ship vanished; reappeared; vanished; reappeared; and for one astonishing moment it appeared beneath me and my claws were scratching at its hull; and then it was gone again.

And a moment later, a jagged spike of coloured energy shot through the glow of the Ka’un ship’s shields, and struck the Ka’un ship itself, and my vision blurred again as the massive impact shook the very soul of my perception.

And, as I watched, more bodies billowed out of the hole in the rear of the Ka’un vessel.

I glided closer to see them and I recognised arboreals and aerials and sessiles who had been sucked out of the ship, and I saw too I saw too a body in a space suit, with a face as black as a starless sky, and its voice spoke to me. Rescue me, I am your master, said the voice, and I knew it was a Ka’un. It was small, a biped, protected by its space suit but cast adrift into space in the midst of this dazzling space war.

I wrapped my tentacle around the Ka’un’s body. You can fly in space? You crazy Saviour-shagger! cackled the Ka’un.

I wanted to break the evil bastard’s body in half with my tentacle and eat him; just as Djamrock would have done.

And I imagined how that would feel: I imagined the Ka’un’s howls of pain, slowly fading as he died. And I felt a rush of exhilaration. It was in my power to kill a Ka’un! And the power felt good.

But-I couldn’t do it.

For some reason, my limbs would not obey me. And so I relaxed the tightness of grip on the Ka’un; I still held him in my tentacle, but gently now.

I raged at myself; I did not lack the will or desire to kill this creature, but suddenly my body was not my own.

That’s better. You always do as we tell you, don’t you, sea monster? Now, take me back to the sh -said the Ka’un, then a stray energy beam caught him and his head vanished.

He was dead. But not through my doing.

The energy beam also raked my body in passing; I absorbed it, and grew.

Then out of the front part of the ship, a new vessel appeared, in a twisting turning shape which I knew was called a Helix. And the Helix darted towards the enemy ship, raining missiles as it flew.

But the enemy ship ignored it, and continued firing its missiles upon the Hell Ship itself. The Helix faded into nothing; it was a mirage, a trick.

And then another missile struck the Hell Ship’s hull; and time itself seemed to stand still as the Hell Ship erupted in a massive explosion, a single dazzling flash! The ship lit up like a Biollai seed exploding and igniting in mid-air.

And then the light faded and there was nothing left. No Hell Ship, just debris.

The corona of light had dazzled my eyes, though I felt no heat on my carapace. I floated in space with my cape outspread and the memory of the dead Ka’un in the spacesuit haunting my mind.

And I realised that it was all over. All my friends were dead; but so were all the Ka’un.

Fragments of the hull of the Hell Ship drifted closer to me. Corpses and coils of blood and limbs and torsos and heads and ruptured internal organs cluttered the once-empty blackness of space.

The attacking ship was badly damaged, but intact. I began to glide towards it, hoping they would realise I was a friend and not Ka’un. But something held me, and tugged at me; I felt as if I was in a dream and had no power over my own body. I was being pulled, pulled, pulled And then the pulling stopped. But when I tried once more to glide through space, I found I could not. I could no longer swirl and swoop, and I could not go beyond a certain point here. Or a certain point there.

These obstacles to my movements were corporeal. Not like a force shield, such as that which surrounded the Tower; more like walls.

I was surrounded by walls!

I summoned my inner eyes and saw the truth; and the truth was that I was no longer in space surrounded by stars; I was in a hangar bay shaped like a huge globe within a space vessel. And the walls of my confining space were silver, just like my cabin; the light was pale and yellow, just like the light from our sun.

I was back inside the Hell Ship.

And the strangeness was upon me again. We were travelling somewhere far away; escaping the enemy’s wrath.

I spat, and Lirilla emerged from my mouth.

“Safe?” she asked, plaintively.

“Not safe,” I told her, sombrely.

My cape retreated back into my body. And I realised that the destruction of the Hell Ship had, like the appearance of the smaller Helix vessel, been just an illusion.

The Hell Ship had been damaged, I was sure of that, but not destroyed. And then it had fled; and it was now, once again, swimming in what Quipu called the rivers of chaotic flux until, at some point, it would re-enter the Real.

And then it would all, the terror and the horror, begin again.