planet, which is actually a ship, surrounded by aliens who are monstrous beyond belief, ruled by unseen devils who all fear but none dare defy.
It was, I resolved, time for Sharrock to show what he could really do!
For I remembered the time A figure dropped to the ground behind me; I interrupted my reverie, and turned in a single easy gesture. It was the silver-skinned monkey, Mangan, glaring at me with his evil eyes.
“Greetings,” I said.
“You are to be our cabin friend, I gather,” said Mangan.
“That was the stated intention of the monster Sai-ias,” I said. “But I am happy to live alone.”
“That is not an option, cock-brain,” said Mangan, cackling.
“I will live alone,” I said calmly.
“You will do as Sai-ias requires,” Mangan insisted.
“I think not,” I said smiling.
Mangan cackled again. He was a vile creature. And then, to my shock and dismay, he hunched down and he shat, like the most vulgar of beasts. Then he captured his column of shit in one hand, and squeezed it into a tight compact ball.
And then he threw it at me. It was so fast I did not have time to dodge; and the shit-ball was remarkably hard, harder than any stone. I felt the dampness of my own blood trickle down my cheek.
But I ignored the provocation.
“My people were killed, I will take revenge somehow, I will live alone,” I explained patiently.
Three other monkeys dropped to the ground beside Mangan. One of them had a sharpened stick, and I relaxed, hefting the home-made fang-weapon in my hand.
I sensed another home-made missile about to hit me from behind, and this time I was ready; I rolled easily to the ground; the shit-ball flew past me, but a second ball of excrement from an assailant I hadn’t spotted hit me on the side of the head.
I cursed; the months of captivity had sapped my warrior reflexes.
Fortunately, however, this particular ball had been inadequately compacted; it was soft, not hard; thus, I had sustained no damage. My head however, felt damp and sticky and I touched it with a finger. The smell overwhelmed me.
However, I laughed uproariously, to show I could take a joke.
“Do you have a hole where you ought to have a cock?” asked Mangan, provocatively.
“Not so,” I said cheerfully.
Mangan cackled, then he turned his back to me, and then he At this moment, I am bound to relate, I foolishly lost my temper.
Jak
Albinia closed her eyes. I watched as she sank into a trance.
Her worry lines faded, her angry look disappeared. She was, once more, radiant.
I could see on my phantom control display the images she beheld via Explorer’s riftscope. Glimpses of planets and suns and black wildernesses of space and U shaped galaxies and oval galaxies and spilled-milk galaxies and fast-whirling galaxies and exploding stars.
“Three civilisations in subsector 412, planet O431,” said Albinia, through her trance.
We saw, on our display screens: stars, then planets, then seas, then fields, and plains, and savannahs, forests, mountains, cities, walkways, flying vehicles, temples, houses, shops and, finally, images of three kinds of sentients.
Furred bipeds with three arms, living in the cities.
Scaled polypods with tusks, dwelling in the savannahs.
And feathered aerials nesting in clouds made of excreted webbing, above the forests.
“Three Grade 2 civilisations on one planet?” I asked.
“It looks that way.” Albinia murmured.
“Any of them aggressive?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Can’t tell.”
“Any artefacts? Jewellery? Artworks?”
“Too soon to say.”
“Do they have shifting-sands technology?”
“Yes. Maybe. No. I don’t know.”
Albinia’s head twitched. She was seeing the not-real as well as the real; visualising shards of possibilities that existed on the other side of the rift, of worlds and civilisations that might in fact not exist.
“Set the coordinates,” I said.
“We have an incoming message,” said Phylas.
“Take the message, then get ready for rift flight,” I said.
A face appeared on the screen; I recognised it as a FanTang.
(This memory comes to me now laden with such terrible ironical agony; for those loathsome murderous creatures did perhaps deserve to die. But not us; we did not deserve it! Not all of us.)
“We wish you wealth and health, and success in all your dealings,” I said formally to the FanTang.
“You betrayed us!” roared the FanTang, with the hysterical rage so typical of his species.
“We may,” I admitted, “have out-negotiated you. It’s a cultural thing: we see no harm in it, you see.”
“You brought death and destruction to our planet!” roared the FanTang.
I hesitated.
And then continued to hesitate.
“What are you talking about?” I eventually asked, baffled.
“Earthquakes have ravaged our land! Fires from the sky have-”
The transmission was interrupted.
I blinked, totally at a loss. “What was that about?”
“I have no idea,” said Morval.
“A hoax?” suggested Phylas.
“A trap?” suggested Galamea.
“No,” said Albinia. Her eyes opened. “Explorer has accessed other such messages, sent to other Olaran vessels. We have also made contact with the Fleet. There is a story is emerging about what has befallen the planet of the FanTang.”
“And what is that?” I asked, impatiently.
“Apocalypse.”
The sun of the FanTangs had exploded. Or rather, to be more precise, it had flared to an exceptional degree; coronal mass was billowing forth, and a vast proton swarm had radiated into the stellar system, where it was wreaking terrible havoc on the various planets and asteroids and space towns where the FanTang dwelt. Our sensors told us that there were now no traces of organic life in the entire stellar system.
And the home world of the FanTang was a fireball. As we flew our cameras closer, we could see that the forests were ablaze. Volcanoes were spewing their hot lava into the atmosphere. Even the seas burned. The seas?
“How can that be?” I asked. “The oceans on fire?”
I and the rest of the ship’s officers were watching camera images transmitted from Explorer via Albinia’s mind; images that were being filmed by robot scouts that flew through the cloud and into the depths of the inferno.
“It’s possible,” said Phylas, “but only if-”
“Do we have the technology to do such a thing?” I snapped.
“No,” Phylas conceded.
The robot scouts flew down closer. We could see lava spurting out of cracks in the planet’s crust. The cities were wrecked, and entire mountain ranges had been demolished after devastating crust-plate shifts ripped the planet apart. FanTang military aeroplanes had fallen from the sky like snowflakes ablaze, and the remnants of futile missiles were scattered on fields and plains wherever we looked. Mushroom clouds from nuclear explosions billowed and their clouds merged to form an ugly grey shell in the sky.
