“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.
Other fatalities of the battle were in the same plight; their bodies were intact, but they knew nothing of what had just happened. It was a whole army of new ones, all at the same time; and there was no way for me to ease them gently into their new world.
As Cuzco would have said: they had to fly or die.
Why did Doro not return?
And was he actually dead? Perhaps that strange creature could actually survive in the depths of space? Perhaps he shifted his shape one final time, to be a star among stars?
In the cycles that followed the failed attack on the Hell Ship, our world was in turmoil. Many angry creatures stalked the interior world; duels and vicious assaults were commonplace.
But I did not care; not any more. For my entire personality had changed.
I was no longer calm, reassuring, and accepting. Instead, I was engulfed in a constant edgy rage.
The smallest things infuriated me. I found that I could no longer tolerate the company of others. Even Quipu, even Lirilla, enraged me by their very presence.
After a while I stopped spending the nights in my cabin with my so-called friends and their wretched fucking stories. Instead, I slept outside, in the pitch black night, atop mountain crags or in the depths of the lake.
And each dawn I re-entered the world after a night’s dark reverie of regrets.
I thought about Sharrock a lot. I was convinced that if he and I had had acted sooner, our rebellion might have prevailed. With my strength, and his knowledge of warfare, we would have been an unstoppable team.
Another missed opportunity. First Sharrock; then Explorer 410: Property of the Olaran Trading Fleet.
Though these two failures did, I realised, prove the Ka’un were not invulnerable.
Indeed, as I had seen while floating in space, they were slight creatures, bipeds, with no natural armour. I could kill one easily! I could snap its body in half and swallow it, and crunch its bones in the ridges of my gut which is robust enough, if the mood takes me, to consume raw rock.
These pathetic puny easily-killed creatures-how could I ever have been afraid of such as they?
Many cycles passed. The new ones were becoming acclimatised. The daily violence began to lessen. The Rhythm of Days was resumed, though I took no part in it.
A thousand more cycles passed.
The ship was now restored. The lake was re-filled. Our numbers were fewer, for not all the lost had been resurrected; but we were still many. And I resumed my role in the Rhythm of Days. I explored. I listened to poetry and tales. I struggled to comprehend science. I raced against my fellow sentients. I meditated. I refreshed old friendships, with friends who had forgotten all our years together. And I made new friends as a trickle of new ones began to join us.
I realised, with horror, that life had returned to normal.
And then one night I slept a dreamless sleep.
And when I woke I was no longer in the interior world.
I was inside a spherical cargo hold of some kind. Grey metal walls surrounded me. And all around me, their bodies bare-armed and sweating, were twenty or more of the Kindred. They wore golden tunics of a kind I had never seen, and were testing pipe-shaped weapons I did not recognise. A small cheer rose up when I awoke, and I could tell it was intended mockingly.
“Where am I?” I said; but no words emerged.
I took a step forward; but I did not move.
“Show arms,” my voice said, and the Kindred warriors stood upright and held their weapons at an angle to their bodies.
“We are,” my voice added, “facing an imposing enemy. These creatures have disreal technology and remote weaponry. We have rarely fought an enemy of such sophistication. Do not be complacent.”
“Yes, Captain,” roared the Kindred, almost as one.
My body was the commander of this army; and yet I had no control of it!
I remembered what had happened when I killed Sharrock. It was just like this; this same experience. I had lost the power over my own body.
There was a Ka’un in my head.
The hull gates opened and I flew out of the ship, escorted by ten Kindred soldiers in space-suit body armour.
I was gliding through the blackness of space above a small green and blue planet, which blazed with artificial lights. I was encased in some kind of protective shield, and wore a transportation device around my neck which made it possible for me to travel large distances in an instant. So one moment I was far from the planet, seeing it as a distant balloon; and the next I was close up to the orb, gripped by its gravitational forces.
We were, I knew, without knowing how I knew, too small to register on the enemy’s detection devices. They were geared to spot enemy spaceships, not individual soldiers and a caped sea creature able to breathe in vacuum.
This is why the Ka’un had saved me, I realised. They had discovered I could survive in space, during the battle with Explorer 410, and as a consequence they decided they would keep my skills for a day like today.
