“Sarcasming is not a word,” Morval reminded me, with his usual long memory.
“It has a ring to it,” I said defensively.
Commander Galamea arrived on the Hub, in a blaze of implicitly-rebuking-the-rest-of-us-for-being-so-lazy energy.
“Master-of-the-Ship, report!” she barked.
“Morval, brief the Commander please,” I said, sneakily.
“Explorer seems to have detected an imminent attack, we have no more data,” said Morval, which irked me, because I could have said that much.
Albinia groaned, lost in communion with Explorer.
And, just as the last of the enemy drones emerged from the artificial asteroid, Explorer’s missiles began to silently detonate. It was like a birthday sky-fire display against the blackness of space.
Moments later, a haze appeared on the screen; and the enemy drones began to slowly fall apart, like dancers breaking away from a tableau into separated solos. There were no subsequent explosions as these craft broke up; these were merely objects sundering into their myriad pieces as if changing their minds about existing.
I realised that our gen-gun missiles were not just kinetic, they also harboured atom-disruptor particles. The snarling swarm of enemy drone bombs were being destabilised at sub-atomic level.
“What information do we have about this civilisation?” asked the Commander.
“Hostile?” guessed Morval.
“Type 3, post-nuclear, pre-shiftingsands, the home planet is the gas giant fifth from the sun but they also inhabit five other planets and twelve satellites and those comets are in fact space stations with tails,” said Albinia, with her usual calm dreamy certainty.
“Explorer is preparing to fire again,” said Morval.
And thin rays of energy erupted once more from the gen-gun tubes.
And before long, the panoramic wall-screen showed nothing but empty space, and the faint wisps of former menace that was all that remained of the enemy fusillade.
“See this,” said Morval, somehow once again miraculously anticipating the action.
A juggernaut of a spaceship was emerging from the hollow asteroid. It was clearly expecting an easy passage behind its escort of killer drone bombs. Instead, it was met with a withering hail of destructive energy from Explorer. The juggernaut shimmered, like a firebird on a midsummer night about to explode; then abruptly dematerialised.
And I looked at Morval, puzzled. How did he manage, time and again, to predict so accurately what was going to happen?
Explorer glided deeper into the stellar system, until it reached planet Five, the home of these unpleasant sentients.
It was a gas giant, with six natural rings and a larger artificial ring which Explorer identified as a space defence system.
And there we waited. We had already demonstrated that we (or rather Albinia in communion with Explorer) had powers beyond the imagining of these beings. The rational response would be for them to surrender unconditionally, in the hope of averting further fatalities.
That seemed, however, unlikely.
I reclined in my Master’s chair, watching it all on the wall-screen. “How many times,” I asked Phylas, “do the wretched aliens try to kill you when you appear?”
“Always.”
“Not always,” corrected Morval.
“There was that time-”
“That was a feint. They greeted us in peace, and ambushed the Traders a century later.”
“How did you know-”
“I always know what you will say,” said Morval.
Phylas glowered; hurt at being shut out from his own conversation.
Commander Galamea prowled the deck.
“Explorer, progress report,” said Galamea.
“Wait and see,” said Albinia dreamily.
We waited.
And then an image appeared on our panoramic wall-screen; Albinia had made contact with the aliens’ leader. He was a squat, asymmetrical, slimy and undeniably ugly creature, with no visible eyes and a mouth that went up instead of across.
“Greetings,” I said. Explorer had of course been intercepting all the radio traffic from these creatures since we arrived in their system, and had gathered enough information about their language to run a translation facility.
“You speak language our,” growled the alien.
“Apparently not that well,” I conceded. “We come in peace, and so forth; and we wish to trade.”
“You kill have of hundreds our people,” said the alien.
“Albinia,” I snapped.
“Give us time; their language has a weird syntax,” Albinia said defensively.
“We did not destroy your warriors and their spaceship,” I explained carefully. “We have merely concealed them in another dimension, from which we can retrieve them easily if you prove you are peaceful. And now we wish to negotiate.”
“You hold people our hostage!” roared the alien.
“Indeed we do.”
“Smart is thinking,” said the alien, evidently reassured. “Down welcome planet ours.”
“I would be delighted,” I said.
Our landing craft emerged like a child being birthed from the hull of Explorer, and rocket-propelled across the expanse of open space. The shadow-selves of Albinia and I sat side by side in the cockpit and watched the view. I was close enough to smell her skin, and hear her breath, if she had been possessed of skin and breath.
It occurred to me that I had certain clandestine personal reasons for wanting Albinia on this mission with me; and I was delighted at my own unsuspected subterfuge.
Our craft reached the outer atmosphere of the bright purple gas giant; and we looked down at the swirling winds below.
“Are you still inhabiting Explorer?” I asked Albinia.
“Yes.”
“Whilst operating the simulacrum.”
“Yes.”
“And do you have, perhaps, enough reserves of consciousness remaining to engage in idle chat?”
“No.”
“As I feared.”
The landing craft descended; we were held in position by our stay-still fields, as the vessel rocked and shook. The hull was being buffeted by powerful gales and seared with toxic gases, but the craft’s force-mantle protected it entirely. The electronic eyes on the craft’s hull looked deep into the wild screaming madness of the atmosphere, and Albinia saw it all too.
“ How do they endure this place?” I marvelled, using a murmur-link to connect directly to Albinia.
“ It is, strangely, magnificent, ” Albinia said and smiled. And then the smile faded and she was, once more, off in a world of her own, barely aware of me.
I looked at the view from my tiny porthole, a maelstrom of heat and burning gases, and I felt nauseous. Outside the craft, the pressure was so great it would crush a space suit and condense an Olaran body to the size of a crumb, if we had been so foolish as to go for a walk.
Thus, through air as thick as ice, we fell downwards, until, finally, we were in the midst of the alien flock.
These creatures-the Prismas-were spawned of gas and plasma, yet somehow (the physics entirely eluded me) nevertheless existed in squat asymmetrical solid and eyeless form that could survive without a spacesuit in the atmosphere of a gas giant.
According to Phylas, these strange beings could act like suns-creating metals out of their own substance, and then weaving them into spaceships. Thus, their drone ships were spawned like eggs; and their “missiles” were not mere artefacts, they were in effect, cells discharged from the Prisma host bodies.
“Can understand us you?” said a voice over our radio net. I looked outside the porthole; and I could see a hundred Prismas hovering in the air like fat turds with mouths all around us. This was as near as our species could get to each other; the Prismas could not survive in our atmosphere; and we would not be able to see or hear a thing in their atmosphere. So we would have to talk to them from within the landing craft.
“Yes we can,” I said, peering out and wondering which Prisma I was talking to.