Jak

And so, as I have already narrated to you, I left Mohun. And soon afterwards my ship the Explorer 410 slowly accelerated past the planet of Varth, leaving behind Kawak and his herd of savage predators.

I was Master-of-the-Ship, serving under Commander Galamea, and the ship’s officers included the two Space Explorers I had met at the banquet, Morval and Phylas.

The ship was a small, squat working vessel with a hull streaked with stripes and pock-marked with small asteroid scars. The quarters were basic; I had a cabin smaller than my wardrobe on the Vassal Ship. There was no banqueting dome; we ate in the canteen, with food malignly designed by the ship’s computer brain to be nutritious, but not appealing. It was, all in all, a place of horror.

It took a week for Explorer to reach the outer limits of the solar system. Averil would soon depart with the main Trading Fleet, with her new lover Master Trader Mohun.

I thought of her often.

In fact, incessantly.

Indeed, for every moment of every day, I was haunted with memories of her achingly intellectual features, her lusciously perceptive smiles, and her casually neglectful glances when I performed for her some great service or other.

But I had made my choice: I would lose himself in my work. And I was no more a Trader. My job now was to lead the Explorer craft into the depths of uncharted space; where, in time-hallowed fashion, we would search out new and alien civilisations, in order to get the better of them in sly negotiations.

“Welcome to my ship,” I said to Morval.

His old, withered, bald head scrunched up in a scowl more ugly than—well, I had never seen anything more ugly.

“I have been on this vessel,” he pointed out, “for two hundred years.”

“It’s my vessel now,” I reminded him, courteously.

“I’m aware of that.” The scowl became a sneer; hardly an improvement.

“We should be friends,” I told the old Trader generously.

“I have, as a point of policy,” said Morval, “no friends. My friends all abandoned me when I was banished by the Chief Artificer.”

“I always admire an Olaran,” I said, “who can harbour a grudge the way a father raises a child; with love, care, and the passage of decades.”

“Ah, Master-of-the-Ship your wit is so… entirely adequate,” said Morval, bitterly.

“Let me make a wild surmise; you were passed over for promotion?”

“I was.”

“Because of your sullen attitude and melancholic disposition,” I suggested.

“And my abundant lack of youth and beauty.”

“Then clearly,” I suggested, “I am better qualified; for young I am, barely forty years, and many consider me beautiful. But you shouldn’t in any way feel—”

“This is a godsforsaken Explorer ship! We don’t need a pretty boy Master! We need someone who knows what in fuck’s name he’s doing!”

“And you would be that someone, I take it?”

“I would be, and I am.” And Morval stared at me with his dark haunting deep-set eyes. “The previous Master-of-the-Ship,” he pointed out, “died of shock when his simulacrum was eaten alive by sentient slugs, after he and I had spent two years trapped in an alien forest.”

“I’m used to danger.”

“You have no idea,” Morval told me, with evident glee, “what danger really is.”

I stood in the bleak, spartan Command Hub of my new ship, with grey walls all around, no porthole, and four brushed-Kar-goat-leather (I mean the common variety of Kar goat, not the rare beasts with skin like a baby’s arse) seats for the ship’s officers and our Commander. One of these seats was currently occupied by Star-Seeker Albinia, who was linked by a cable which stretched from her shaved head to the ship’s brain; and hence existed dreamily in a world of her own.

“You’re used to better,” sneered Morval.

“My Vassal Ship,” I said politely, “had wooden furniture, shaped and whittled intricately by a Master Carver, and a ship’s wheel made of gold and titanium.”

“Frippery!” said Morval. “Explorer steers the ship, Albinia sees through its eyes; what’s a ship’s wheel supposed to do?”

“It made me feel,” I pointed out, “important.”

Phylas grinned at me as if I’d made a great joke; he was, I realised, a shameless ingrate.

“Any chance of a view?” I asked, and Morval grunted again, with even greater disapproval. But I glared: Pardon me, direct order? And he yielded.

“Albinia,” Morval said, “give us your eyes.” Albinia responded without speaking, and the blank grey wall ahead of me became a panoramic view of the space outside our ship.

“Background music?”

A dark dense thrilling chord pitched at almost subliminally low levels filled the small cabin; that, and the stars, gave the spiritless space at least some sense of atmosphere.

Morval grunted and scowled, clearly caught up in a crescendo of disapproval, but I ignored him.

“My bunk,” I said to Phylas, who stood shyly beside me, “is it considered acceptable on such vessels?”

“It is the largest bunk on the ship.”

“Except for the female quarters.”

Phylas snorted with amusement. “Except, obviously, for the female quarters.”

“What is the Commander like?” I said. “Give me fair warning. Is she firm? Fair? Disciplined?”

“She is fierce.”

“Ah. Fierce.”

“She is a former Admiral in the Olaran Navy; she was discharged for excessive, um, brutality.”

“Against who?”

“Against the Stuxi.”

“The Stuxi,” I pointed out, “tried to destroy our home world; they were flesh-eating savages who murdered millions before we forced them into a truce.”

“Even so, a military tribunal found her too brutal.”

“Ah.”

“I believe also that she considers me an idiot,” Phylas admitted.

“And does she have grounds for that?”

“Occasional comments of mine have not always, um, accorded with common sense.”

“You really are,” I said kindly, “a child, aren’t you?”

“Aye Master.”

“Morval. Tell me about the ship. What weapons do we have?”

“Six gen-guns; twelve light-cannons, three negative matter transporters, and a disruptor ray,” Morval said.

“Engine capacity?”

“Four point two kais. With booster engines, and stay-still wraparounds. In a crisis, we flee to the nearest rift and escape.” Morval’s tone was brisk now; when it came to the business of the ship, he clearly knew his stuff.

“Show me how the stay-still does its job.”

Phylas conjured up his phantom controls, and pressed an oval; and our three bodies shimmered as the inertial haze surrounded us.

Then Phylas pressed another oval and the ship suddenly flipped over. Albinia of course was strapped to her seat; but Phylas, Morval and myself remained hovering in air, in the same position, though we were now upside down in relation to the Hub floor and control rigs.

Phylas pressed a third oval and we were right way up. “An alternative,” he said, “to seat harnesses.”

“Seat harnesses have always worked for me,” I said testily.

“I find,” said Morval, “they chafe.”

Phylas pressed the oval again. The ship flipped again. I was upside down, again.

“Oh, boy,” I said, delighted.

“Initiate the space drive,” said Commander Galamea.

We were ready to rift, and Commander Galamea had joined us in the Command Hub. She had made no comment about the wrap-around space panorama that now dominated this small room, but had quietly asked Albinia to cut the background music.

Galamea was a lean, strongly muscled female; her eyes burned with a blue light that betrayed many years in rift space; she did not look as if she knew how to smile, nor did it seem likely she would welcome instruction in that art.

“I am proud to serve, o exalted mistress,” I said.

“Just ‘Yes Commander’ will do,” Galamea said tersely, and I recalled how the military hate any display of courtesy and eloquence.

“Yes, exalted Commander,” I replied.

“Disreality is achieved, Commander,” said Morval.

“The slippery-sands-of-chaos envelop us,” said Phylas.

“Explorer is content,” said Albinia, dreamily. The cable that connected her to Explorer hung loosely out of her shaved head; her eyes were closed; her mind entirely in tune with the ship’s computational brain. She was, I noted in passing, the most ravishingly clever-looking Star-Seeker I had ever seen.

On my phantom controls, I could see that we were getting random readings across all vectors, as a consequence of the flux of chaos being generated.

A certain amount of time elapsed, but no one knew how much, or whether it was a longer or shorter passage of time than usual.

“A rift has emerged,” said Phylas eventually.

“I see it,” I said authoritatively, though in fact I saw nothing; just a jumble of incomprehensible graphs and equations on my phantom control screen.

“Can we predict the destination?”

Albinia moaned, as she tried to analyse the data flux and find some notion of what lay beyond the rift in time and space.

“No,” Albinia eventually concluded.

“Morval?” asked Commander Galamea.

“I see no trace of disruptive nothingness,” Morval said, slowly reading the data on his phantom control screen as if was a novel of which he was savouring the sentence structure.

(In passing, I marvelled at the nerve of the man; pretending he understood the data!)

“Phylas?”

“The ship’s engines are showing no potential signs of imminent spontaneous detonation,” said Phylas, comfortingly.

I looked at Commander Galamea as she made her decision. She was pensive, almost absent-minded.

Finally, she nodded her assent. Travel through rifts via disreal projection was a hazardous business; we all needed a few moments to prepare for the possibility of never becoming our actual selves again.

I took her nod as my instruction. “Proceed with space leap,” I instructed.

Phylas moved the sliders on his phantom controls; the ship’s drive was restarted; the disreality beams were dimmed. And the Explorer flew—instantly, so fast that it arrived before it left, almost— through a rift in space.

As we flew, the Command Hub tilted violently, first this way, then that, until we all were all upside down relative to the harnessed Albinia and the Hub itself. But the stay-still fields kept our bodies immune to the effects of violent oscillation, and the phantom control displays patiently followed us to our new positions.

Albinia moaned with joy as she entered the rift; and I knew that she could sense, with every part of her skin and body, what it was to be not-real. And even we, who did not have her direct access to Explorer’s sensors, could feel the strangeness of the moment.

We emerged from the rift.

Morval assessed the data on his screen.

“We are—nowhere,” he said.

“No traces of organic life,” Phylas confirmed.

“No habitable planets,” Morval added.

Albinia’s eyes snapped open. “Explorer,” she said, “hates this place.”

“Try again,” said Galamea.

“Reduce our probability once more,” I said tensely.

“Yes, Master,” said Albinia, and closed her eyes again.

A few moments of idle nothing passed; I yearned to have my ship’s wheel back. There was no romance in pressing ovals on an illusory screen.

Then I felt the strangeness come upon me again.

“Probability is reducing, Master-of-the Ship,” said Phylas, reading the data off his screen. “And reducing more. And more. And more,” Phylas added.

I knew, though I did not fully comprehend, that the universe is a rocky reality built upon slippery sands of disreality; this was the heart and truth of Olaran science. And only the Olara—or strictly speaking, the Olara women— knew how to control this process.

And so, whilst remaining motionless, Explorer began the long process of reducing its own likelihood, until the new rift appeared, and had been, and was, and will be again. (Though all this made much more sense in mathematical form, so I am reliably informed.)

And thus Explorer vanished, and reappeared elsewhere; and the ship’s computational mind swiftly calibrated where it was this time.

Again we detected no traces of life; the process recommenced; Explorer vanished, and reappeared, a million light years further on; and then did so again.

We were taking our ship out, far out, into regions of space never yet charted.

“We have a possible trace of organics, Master-of-the-Ship,” said Morval, eventually, and the ship halted and its probability rose.

All of us on the Hub forced vomit back down our throats; the stay-still wraparounds weren’t that good.

“Let us proceed,” I said calmly, and the ship’s true engines fired up, and Explorer began its slow journey towards its destination.

Albinia was communing deeply with Explorer. Her eyes were closed; her expression rapt. She was lost in a whirl of data from sensors that could perceive the mass and chemical constitution of stars a million baraks from here, and could feel like a touch of skin on skin the crash of microparticles against her ship’s hull.

It felt wrong to stare at her; a violation, like watching a lover asleep. But yet I continue to gaze; I could not stop myself.

For whenever Albinia was in her trance, she had a beauty of mind and spirit that haunted me. Her eyes twitched under closed lids, her lips moved involuntarily. Her face flickered constantly with emotion—fear, regret, anticipation, joy.

She was, in a word: sublime.

“We’re here,” said Phylas.

“Ease her out,” I said.

“We have readings from six separate planets,” said Morval. “This culture has colonised its entire planetary system, but their main focus is on Planet Five, the gas giant. No traces of shifting sands scars. Their Fields of Force signature is sixty-three point four. A nuclear haze, they’re a messy bunch.”

“Albinia,” I said. Her eyes flickered and then opened. She took a gasp.

“Am I done?” Albinia asked.

“You’re done,” I said softly.

“Good,” said Albinia briskly, and her face was a neutral mask again. I retreated at the touch of her inner authority.

“We think they’re pre-interstellar, recovering from a relatively recent nuclear war,” said Phylas.

“What will we call them?” asked Albinia.

“Morval?”

He clicked an oval. “The next name on the list,” he said, “is Prisma.”

“Then Prisma it is.”

“Explorer doesn’t like them,” Albinia said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“She didn’t say. I just felt it. She fears this place, and these people.”

“They’re primitives,” teased Phylas. “What is there to fear?”

“Primitives,” Morval reminded him, “once obliterated all of Caal, and all eleven Trader ships in the area.”

“We would never be,” said Phylas arrogantly, “so easily duped.”

Explorer glided through space, propelled by sub-atomic interactions in seventh dimensional geometry, or some such thing; the truth is, I can never recollect the detail of these tedious technical matters. The light from the system sun made the ship’s hull glow; I admired the image of our ship haloed with radiance on my panoramic wall-screen.

Explorer passed a pock-marked asteroid.

This solar system was, I noted, quite beautiful. There were brightly coloured gas giants with multiple rings, comets with tails, and from our angle of approach we could see all seven planets of the system in a single gaze, clustered like a family of unruly children of every different size and age.

There is nothing finer, or so I thought then, than the moment of initial approach; that first glimpse of an alien stellar system, with no hint as to what might lie within.

“Our gen-guns are being charged,” said Phylas matter-of-factly.

For a moment I didn’t take in his words. Then:

“What?” I said, startled.

“The ship is taking evasive action,” Phylas explained.

“Oh by all that’s joyous,” Morval muttered to himself, “this Master-of-the-Ship has no idea.”

“Cease,” I barked at the old man, “sarcasming.”

I could see, on the panoramic wall-screen, that Explorer was now weaving and zagging through space, in bewildering randomised patterns.

I was uncomfortable. It was proper protocol for the Ship’s Master to be informed in advance of all decisions made by the vessel’s computational mind; but on this occasion I was being ignored.

For a moment, I felt a surge of annoyance; for in truth, I hated being sidelined like this. I understood of course that my role as Master was largely ceremonial; and that all major decisions were made by the Mistress Commander and the Star-Seeker and the ship’s computational brain. But this was an ugly reminder of a truth I generally preferred to, well, ignore.

However, I hid my irritation between a mask of bonhomie, charm, and self-deprecating wit; as I always do.

“Why?” I asked courteously, with my favourite irresistible smile, “are we doing all this?”

“Missiles have been launched by Explorer; power beams are being fired by Explorer; the intended target is the asteroid,” said Phylas, ignoring my question.

“Yes but why?”

“You’ll find out,” said Morval with grim pleasure, “soon enough.”

I followed the progress of the attack on the wall-screen: our ship in space, the orb of the planetary moon looming before us; the flaring colours of the gen-gun missiles, and the pillars of energy from the light-cannons arcing a slow progress towards the asteroid. It was a stately dance of colour and light set against a black cloth of night.

I assumed that the enemy were attempting to attack us; but Albinia had still told me nothing. Her lips moved silently as she and Explorer waged space war. I was tense; for the truth was, I had never been quite so close to combat before. In all the battles in which I had played a role, I had been part of the rapidly fleeing Trader fleet, protected by Navy and Explorer vessels.

Now, I was in the front line and I could die.

I saw, on the screen, our missiles flying closer and closer to the asteroid. While, on my phantom control display, a bewildering series of graphs and equations flashed before my eyes, though I had no idea what meanings they conveyed.

“Now,” said Morval, somehow managing to guess what was about to occur.

And at just that moment, the asteroid erupted. And a flock of black triple-horned warcraft emerged from it, hurtling towards us.

“Two hundred and forty-two enemy drone missiles,” said Phylas.

“The radiation trail indicates dirty nuclear bombs,” added Morval.

“They’re attacking us!” I summarised, in a cheery fashion; playing the fool with my usual panache.

“Forgive me,” said Albinia, dreamily. “I thought it better to act first, and inform you of my decisions later.”

“Very wise, beloved Mistress,” I said generously, concealing my anger.

“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.

“Living are creatures you?”

“We are living creatures.”

“You travelled space have? Through.”

“We have travelled through space.”

“Whole tendrils of a are you?”

“We are not tendrils of a whole; we are the whole. We are creatures of flesh and blood. We do not exist as you do, as creatures of gas and, er, stuff.”

“Impossible.”

“It is possible. There are many varied kinds of life.”

“Rocks are you. Excreta are you. Are worthy not to talk with us.”

“We have to talk with you. We owe you this.”

“Where is the planet from which you come?” said the Prisma. Our translator was, I noticed with some relief, finally getting the hang of the creature’s syntax.

“Far far away. You cannot reach it.”

“Can it be inhabited by our kind?”

“You cannot reach it.”

“It can be inhabited by our kind?”

“No, and you cannot reach it.”

“You have no idea who we are. We are the most powerful and fearsome creatures in all the universe.”

You are, I thought to myself, a bunch of arrogant fucks; and then I realised my murmur-talk device had translated this into speech.

I switched off my communicator and turned to Albinia.

“What do you think?”

“Something is happening.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

I turned on my communicator and spoke again to the Prisma:

“We are here to trade; do you understand that concept?”

“You have come from far away; how? What ships do you possess? Are you long-lived?”

“We give you a thing; you give us a thing. It’s called trade. Do you understand this concept?”

“We have sent spaceships into farthest space; they have never returned. Can you explain this?”

“Well, it’s a dangerous universe out there.”

“We are the most fearsome species in existence; no harm could come to creatures such as us. Our voyagers were told to conquer and destroy and then return to fetch us. That was ten thousand years ago; and they are late. And we are full of wrath.”

Albinia and I exchanged glances; this wasn’t looking too promising.

“Be that as it may,” I continued to the Prisma, “let’s talk a bit more about this concept of ‘trade.’

“You see,” I continued, getting into the swing of it now, “you have the ability to create metal artefacts with the power of your thoughts, and we could maybe sell stuff like that. Whereas we—”

“Perhaps the journey was too long, and they died. We long to travel swiftly among the stars, rather than being trapped at sub-light speeds. Can you do that? Journey faster than light?”

“We can.”

“Can you teach us how?”

“We could certainly give you some hints,” I temporised.

“Then we can ‘trade,’ ” said the Prisma.

Albinia patted my arm. I switched off my communicator. “Yes?”

“Firstly, these creatures are a bunch of dangerous fucking lunatics,” she pointed out, quite accurately. “Secondly, I’m detecting some kind of weapon. Don’t know what. It involves the planet, and the sun, and a fleet of—something nasty. I think they’re aiming to attack Explorer again.”

“What should I do?” I asked her, for though I was Master-of-the-Ship, I trusted her judgement totally.

She thought, for a brief moment, with her merged-with-Explorer face, then a cold look came upon her.

“They’re bastards; let’s fuck ’em,” she said.

And so we fucked ’em.

I triggered the self destruct switch.

And our landing craft exploded; and obliterated into particles so small they could not be assimilated by the Prismas.

And then a searing wave of heat from the explosion ripped through the alien creatures, sundering them into a billion wave-lets.

And then—as I was later told—in orbit above the planet, the Prisma battle fleet emerged from the shadow of their moon and launched a massive attack upon Explorer.

At the same time, Prisma drone ships leaped from hiding places amidst the gas giant’s rings and rained missiles and heat-energy upon Explorer, drenching its forcefields.

However, Explorer’s shields deflected the enemy’s beams and missiles with ease; and it then counter-attacked, using its disruptor ray at full capacity; and the entire Prisma fleet was obliterated in an instant.

And all that was left was a swirl of random atoms in space.

For such is the power of Olara; we do not seek war, but when we fight, we always win.

At about this time, I woke up on my simulacrum bench. And I staggered to my feet and saw that Albinia’s skin was close to burning point; steam was rising from it. The simulated experience of being burned alive on the planet was manifesting as actuality on her real body.

I doused her with cooling spray, just as she woke up, and screamed with agony. Then I cradled her, as Phylas entered.

He turned ashen at the sight of Albinia.

“She’ll be fine,” I snapped. It had been my idea to take Albinia with me on this mission; but to risk the life of a Star-Seeker was, in retrospect, a reckless and a foolish thing. I knew it myself, and I desperately hoped no one would be vulgar enough to tell me so.

I carried Albinia to the sick room and placed her in healing stasis. Then I returned to the Hub.

“What’s happening?” asked Commander Galamea. “Explorer isn’t moving.”

I am not—well, said Explorer, forlornly, via our murmur-links.

“Manual operation,” I said, and spoke directly to Explorer: “Your human half is unconscious. She has been injured. Seal the system.” Injured, how? said Explorer’s voice.

“Psychosomatic sympathetic burns. We died, down there, and we felt it here.”

“Your fault,” said Morval, cruelly. “You jeopardised the life of our Star-Seeker. You—”

I should have known it would be him.

“Explorer: these are my instructions,” I snapped. “Bomb the gas giant, kill as many of those ugly big parent-fuckers as you can. Then seal the system. Get us out of here.”

“I need to—” Commander Galamea said.

“DO IT NOW,” I screamed, and Explorer heard my voice of command, and on the wall-screen I saw plumes of cloud start to emerge from the gas giant. Teleported bombs were exploding on the planet’s surface.

Explorer accelerated; but the stay-still fields were not in place so we were scattered like ritsos, and I flew across the room and crashed into Commander Galamea. We gripped each other, just as the stay-still came on; and for a few awkward moments we were held aloft in each other’s arms, as if swept up by an imaginary wind.

Then Explorer slowed down, and the stay-still fields were released, and we dropped to the ground like stones off a bridge.

The Commander and I staggered to our feet, bruised by each other’s bodies. Then, carefully avoiding eye contact, we studied the panoramic image around us of the stellar system of the Prismas.

“Show the barrier in false colour,” I said, and Explorer changed the screens so that they revealed the shape of the invisible barrier in space that now encaged the Prismas; a shifting-sands-wall that would trap the Prismas, irrevocably and for all eternity, in this little bubble of space.

Galamea whispered to me: “You were wrong, of course, to take Albinia.”

I nodded, to acknowledge that I knew she was right.

“Nevertheless,” Galamea said, “that was a good first mission. You were fair, but decisive.”

“They were a bunch of evil bastards!” I said angrily.

“No,” said Galamea, kindly. “Not evil, not bastards; these are aliens. We can’t judge them by our own ethical and cultural standards.”

“Even the Stuxi?”

Galamea thought about that. “Actually, they really were evil bastards,” she admitted.

Later, I recorded the summary in my log for the mission: No potential for trade. Danger Rating 4. Alien hostiles Quarantined, in perpetuity.

Later still, I went to visit Albinia in the sick room. Her flesh had peeled off, she looked like a corpse. But she was awake. She fixed me with a scornful glance; there was no trace of the absent, dreaming Albinia. This was a cold hard woman, looking at me as if I was a nobody.

“I apologise,” I said, “for your pain.”

Her raw skin twitched, which I took to be a sneer. “It was my decision; it is my pain; do not presume to pity me,” Albinia told me coldly.

“Yes Star-Seeker,” I said, and my dawning love for her received a brutal jolt.

And thus the months passed, and then the years. I remember that period fondly now, as a kind of golden age. Though at the time it seemed to be mostly drudgery and terror, alternating with moments of love-sick anxiety.

So many missions. So many evil aliens! So many unscrupulously bargained contracts of trade!

That was my life, the all of my life, before it changed. Before the events that—

But no. I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Are you sure there’s life down there?” I said sceptically, looking at the panoramic wall-screen image of the slime-covered festering oozing planetary surface that was beneath us.

“Explorer says yes,” said Albinia.

“All right then,” I said. “Phylas, suit up; and let’s get going.”

Our shadow-selves materialised in a field of green grass. The sun beat down upon us.

“Nice weather,” said Phylas, cheerily, and I shot him a filthy look. Phylas, I had learned during our many missions together, was possessed of the boundless optimism of the utterly stupid; his naïvety was almost as vexing to me as was Morval’s bleak melancholy.

“There are storms,” Albinia/Explorer informed us.

A six-legged faun sauntered up to us, and nuzzled me with its snout. I patted it; and it was soft and warm to the touch.

And my mood mellowed. Phylas was grinning still, yet it no longer irked me. Indeed, I ventured a grin of my own, which he easily outmatched.

“I like this place,” I told Phylas.

Phylas laughed out loud. “Indeed so! It reminds me,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Of when I was a boy. My father used to take me hunting. We’d shoot our native grazing animals with a home-made bow and arrow. It was a rite of passage; I was born on the planet of Darox, you know. We had our own—”

I realised that Phylas was now holding a wooden bow, and a quiver full of feathered arrows; a highly unexpected shadow-self conjuration on his part, or so I mused.

“This is meant to be,” I pointed out, “a serious mission.”

“Live a little!” said Phylas. I envied him his youth and his foolishness. And I wondered, where had each of mine of those gone?

“You need to move out of that swamp,” said Albinia. “There’s a strong probability that the sentients are located in the hills above you.”

Swamp?

Phylas drew back the arrow, as the faun skittered away. His aim was true; the arrow took the beast through the neck and it fell.

I stumbled backwards, towards the river. A narrowboat drifted past me, with my beloved Shonia on board, in a beauteous white robe. I blinked.

“Dream of me!” my first true love cried.

I tried to speak, in order to summon Albinia’s help; but my vocal cords were frozen. I blinked again.

“It’s exquisite,” said Phylas, as we walked through the palace, admiring the gem-studded walls and the rich hangings and the seductive beauty of the incense fumes in the air.

“It reminds me,” I said, searching for the memory.

“Ah glory,” said Phylas, for a harem of radiantly intelligent Olaran females were now approaching us. They were clad in robes as rich as—as—

I took out my knife and I severed Phylas’s throat. Then I thrust the blade through my own forehead, so it impaled my brain and severed my—

[I awoke on the couch, with a blinding headache. Explorer began recalibrating my connection with my shadow self but—]

I bit my finger and screamed with pain, and lunged off the couch. I ripped the contacts off my skull and body. And I stood there panting.

Then I looked to Phylas. He had sunk back into his shadow-self; so I brutally ripped the contacts off him and he screamed and looked at me.

“Bliss!” he roared.

“Illusion,” I pointed out.

We staggered up to the Command Hub.

Albinia had already surmised that this was a planet inhabited by telepathic slime; Explorer’s instruments informed us that this continent-wide intelligence was able to manipulate the thoughts, emotions and sensations of all who walked through its muddy oozing bogs.

“Why didn’t you rescue us?” I accused.

“You looked as if you were having,” said Albinia, “fun.”

I wrote up the experience in my log, and concluded: No potential for trade: Danger Rating 3: System Quarantined; review in 100 years.

Commander Galamea was curt, and clearly angry with me, I did not know why.

“Set course,” she said, and Albinia sank into a trance-like state.

Phylas and Morval attended to their phantom control displays.

I realised that the Commander’s skin was pinking; and it dawned on me that she was in heat.

“Commander,” I said softly.

She glared at me.

“If you need any—” I hinted.

“What?”

“Help?”

She glared even more.

“Help with what?”

“If your mood is… I realise that when a female is…”

Her glaring intensified.

“You want to fuck me?” she asked, savagely.

“If you need me to,” I said helpfully,

“I will never,” Galamea said, “need a male ever again!”

Her body was trembling with repressed passion; I was awed at the strength of will she was displaying in refusing my offer.

And baffled, too; for all she had to do was indicate her sexual state, and all of us males would do our duty. Grudgingly, perhaps; but even so!

So what, I wondered, made her so bizarrely reluctant to ask?

We shadow-suited up, Galamea and I.

I had a bad feeling about this. But it was the Commander’s idea; she wanted to experience a mission with me.

I lay down on the shadow couch. I closed my eyes.

And then I opened my eyes and found myself standing on a planet full of dark gloom. I could hardly see my way to walk.

Galamea switched on her helmet-torch and we made our way through a dense mass of pointed stakes. This was, I realised, a field of sorts.

“The nest is to your left, six thousand baraks,” said Albinia/Explorer.

“Why the darkness? I thought it was daytime,” Galamea asked.

“I have no data on that.”

“Are there thick clouds?”

“I have no data on that.”

My shadow feet left no tread; but my motion must have triggered a trap. A stake impaled my body, from my arse to my scalp. I tried to wriggle free.

“Split yourself,” said Galamea bluntly.

“I can’t.”

“Split yourself!”

I split my body in half and Galamea picked up the pieces and stuck them back together. My shadow self reformed.

“Here,” said Albinia/Explorer, and I switched on my own helmet-torch and the field was illumined. We saw around us leafless trees haunted by shadows. The shadows were the nocturnals who were the primary sentient species on this planet. The secondary sentients were trees and our chances of trading with them were approximately low to zero.

“Do you have any concept,” Galamea said to me, in quiet tones, as we were waiting for the shadows to approach.

“Of what, Commander?”

“Of how it feels. To have no power over your body.”

“I do not follow.”

“Last week. When I was in heat. You so courteously offered to… fornicate with me. When I was, as you were aware, in heat.”

“I would have been privileged to assist you, Commander,” I said, cautiously. I had never been spoken to so candidly by a female before about this delicate matter. Even my lovers had never referred to the monthly imperative of their biology, except in terms of their needing it, and needing it now.

“I did not want you to do so,” Galamea said bluntly. “I mean—what I’m trying to say here Master-of-the-Ship Jak—is that I didn’t want you to fuck me, at such a time, and in such a way.”

I was piqued at that.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I don’t want to be,” she pointed out, with anger modulating her normally calm tones, “just an animal. Unable to control my brute lust. Nor frankly do I savour your selfless pathetic obedience. We need to be more than prisoners of our own biology, Jak! We have—don’t we see—the potential to be so much more!”

“Whatever you say, Commander,” I said, my casual tone belying the fact I was affronted at her words.

Pathetic? Obedient? Was that really how she saw me?

“Do you have the faintest idea what I’m saying?” she asked me, sadly.

“Not really,” I admitted

“Then forget we had this conversation.”

“It’s forgotten.”

The shadows lifted from the trees and hovered above us. A slow hissing sound surrounded us.

“Can you translate?” Galamea asked Albinia.

“Not yet.”

We waited patiently for Explorer to decode the linguistic patterns in these creature’s malign hissing.

“Are these shadowy bastards a hive intelligence?” I asked.

“I have no data on that,” said Albinia/Explorer.

The shadows hovered high, and when I looked up at them, at the black clouds that blocked the sun, I realised that the clouds were moving.

“These creatures block their own sun,” I told Albinia/Explorer.

We stood in that field for fourteen hours, but Explorer never managed to decode the aliens’ strange hissing language.

And so the system was abandoned, but not quarantined. The mission was a failure.

But Galamea’s words stayed with me.

And many years later, after she was dead, it occurred to me what she had really been saying that day in the field of trees and shadows.

She had been asking me to change. To stop serving her blindly; to cease treating her with craven adoration; to treat her, in short, as an equal. All this, I eventually realised.

Too late.