Hell Ship
Philip Palmer
BOOK 1
Sharrock
I could see flames in the night sky; and fear for those I loved burned in my soul.
I had been riding for five days and five nights through the red and lonely desert. My throat was parched, and my skin was like ash. And I had been dreaming, vividly, of the pleasures I would soon enjoy: a lazy bath in warm and perfumed waters; a slow massage of my angry muscles; a richly sensual copulation with my beloved wife Malisha; a long draught of rich wine; and, finally, a deep, soul-enriching sleep on a mattress filled with shara feathers.
All these dreams ended when I saw the glow in the sky. The clouds above and beyond the gnarled escarpment of grey rocks were bloodied by red flame; white floating pillows now transformed into ghastly red carcasses.
And I knew that my village had been torched.
I dismounted my cathary and knelt, and put my ear to the soft sound-conducting sand. And I waited, until my mind and ears were in tune with the planet and its hidden truths. And then I heard:
A faint humming noise, like the murmur of blood running along a warrior’s veins, and I guessed that it was the sound of a skyplane hovering.
Shrill receding cries, remote, celebratory, in a language I did not recognise.
The hooves of riderless mounts, aimlessly pit-pattering.
The low moans of warriors and wives and husbands and children; sad cries of dying grief that mingled agony with impotent rage.
I heard also, faintly but unmistakably: the soft, hoarse death gasps of throats scorched by sun-fire blasts; the pants and grunts of those enduring brutal wounds; the wretched sobs of wounded children; the despairing howls of mothers cradling their lost beloved.
A massacre.
I took out a shovel from my saddle-pack and dug a deep hole in the sand. Then I took my cathary by the reins and led her down into the hole, and coaxed her to lie down. The beast whinnied and kicked, but I stroked her mane and whispered in her neck-ear and calmed her. Then I lay beside her, still whispering, and the winds swept sand over us, and before long we were buried deep and invisible.
After four days buried in the sand I crawled my way out. The cathary was in a coma by now, and I gently massaged the creature’s heart until her eyes flickered. I drank from my canteen and spat the water into her moisture holes. And then slowly the cathary got to her feet, and shook her head, and whinnied, and was ready to ride once more.
It took two hours for me to ride through the teeth and gaping jaws of the rocky escarpment and reach my village. The flames had died down by now. The bodies that had burned so fiercely as to light the evening sky were now but charred corpses. The shrubs and trees whose blazing leaves and bark had sent daggers of flame to falsely dawn the sky were now no more than patches of ash. The tents were still intact-no fire could ever harm them -but the mountains and foothills of the dead stretched before me, like the remnants of a bonfire in an abattoir. Too many to count, too blackened to recognise.
And all were dead now. No moans, cries, whimpers, sobs. This was a village of the dead, and all those I had known and loved were gone.
I was sure beyond doubt that my wife Malisha was trapped somewhere in the decaying mass of suppurating flesh. And I supposed too that my daughter Sharil must be one among the many black and silently howling tiny bodies I witnessed inside the tents, whose impregnable walls had kept out the flames though not, tragically, the heat. This was a systematic slaughter. There would be no survivors; only those wounded beyond hope of recovery would have been left behind.
I could see plainly that the warriors had all died in combat, and I counted more than a hundred of them. Their bare faces were frozen in screams, and their swords were gripped in hands, or had fallen close to their bodies; but no traces of gore could be seen on their sharp and fearsome blades. No glorious battle this, but a long-distance act of butchery.
My friends, all. All but a few were wearing body armour, and this puzzled me. For I knew that only a long and sustained burst of sun-fire rays could burn the hard-weave plate in such a way. And the warriors of my tribe were too swift and agile to be trapped in the path of such deadly beams for that long. But all were dead anyway, sundered into pieces by a fast-moving beam of power that could incinerate bodies encased in armour in an instant. And dead, too, were the husbands and wives of warriors, and the daughters and sons of warriors. And dead too were the Philosophers, forty and more or them, small and helpless and beautiful as they were, caught up in a battle they were unable by temperament to participate in and slain like ignorant beasts.
Which tribe could have done this thing? The Kax? Or the Dierils? Or the Harona? All had sworn peace in the days after the Great Truce. But truces could be broken, and there was no underestimating the guile and malice of these island tribes.
Or could this be an act of revenge by the exiled Southern Tribes, who long had hated our peoples of Madagorian for expelling their vile nation from our planet? I had lately spent six months in the decadent and perfumed city of Sabol, on a mission that almost cost me my life and the future freedom of our entire race (and yet, let it be known: Sharrock was not defeated!) And so I knew only too well how hated we were by these fat and effete Southerners, with their technology and their “mechanoids” and their passion for ceaseless expansion through space.
Could they have done this? Did they send their sleek and powerful space vessels to wage war upon their former home? Surely they would know that such an act of barbarity would incur our deepest wrath, and their own inevitable destruction?
I realised I was weeping. Not for my dead wife or my murdered child, for that grief lay deep in my heart and would torment me until my dying day. No, I wept from shame, that I had not taken my place with my fellow warriors and died in glory. Instead, I had buried myself in sand and lay there like a corpse until all those who were slowly dying had agonisingly perished, and their attackers were long gone.
The shame ate at me like a double-edged knife carving a path through my innards; but I knew I had done the right thing. Sometimes, a warrior must be a coward.
I filmed the carnage carefully with the camera in my eye and then inspected the sands where the battle had taken place for forensic evidence; for the performance of this vital task was my purpose in surviving. I found no enemy bodies, even though some of our warriors had clearly fired their projectile weapons and sun-fire guns in the course of the bitter conflict. In places, the red sands themselves had been burned by the crossfire; and the rock escarpment and the grey mountain ridges were pitted with bullet holes and heat scars.
I surmised from all I had witnessed that the village had been attacked by stealth fighters of some kind, armed with weapons more powerful than any I had ever encountered, and with armoured hulls that were impervious to the rifles of our warriors and our anti-skycraft cannons. Our warriors would have had only minutes to prepare for battle; that would explain why they had not taken to the air in their own fighter jets.
I knelt before the body of one of the dead warriors who had been killed but not burned, and recognised him as Baramos, a noble warrior indeed. Baramos’s guts had spilled from his body and sandworms were eating them. I ignored that and took out my thinnest dagger and thrust it into Baramos’s skull, and split the bone open. Then I used the tip of the blade to root inside Baramos’s inner ear until I retrieved the dead warrior’s pakla.
This would provide the scientists and Philosophers in the city with all the information they needed; every word uttered between the warriors in the course of the battle would be recorded here.
Baramos had been, I recalled, as I gouged the pakla out of his brain, a magnificent fighter and a fine scientist and (so his wife had often bragged) an astonishing lover and also (as I knew from my own experience) an inventive and poetic story-teller.