It has indeed been a long and tedious wait; and Jak has, without question, been a poor companion, devoid of conversational artistry and even basic courtesy. Hence my obsessive data-analysing.
But we are, thanks to my careful preparations, ready in every way for the battle to come.
Jak, however, cannot endure very much longer. He is not cut out to be the human half of a machine/mind symbiosis. My thoughts overwhelm him; he drowns daily on data. I hope his wait will soon be over.
Furthermore Jak!
What is it?
Are you sane and functional?
Just about.
We have work to do. A ship approaches.
Is it the one?
It is an interstellar ship that flies with black sails powered by the invisible matter between the stars, and a helicoid marking on its hull.
So it’s the one.
We may not survive this encounter.
I truly hope we do not.
One hundred thousand years it has been, since Albinia possessed me. We have lived together in one body all this time and Is this a soliloquy? Get ready for battle, spaceship! Prime the missiles. Prepare the un-matter bombs. Check all the I have done all that. We have been here for approximately sixty years; what do you think I have been doing with my time?
We’re ready?
We’re ready. The ship approaches. We will destroy it this time. Our lives will end. I just have this one thing I wanted to say.
What?
That despite your long brooding silences and ceaseless melancholy, your company has not been entirely unendurable.
I love you too metal-brain.
I didn’t say-wait! It’s closing in. No more talking!
The battle will soon commence.
Sai-ias
The new one was angry and resentful.
“You must accept,” I told her, “the way things are.”
“I accept nothing!” she screamed. She was a four legged predator of the plain, with sharp teeth and a tail like a whisk that was larger than her body. She had ugly, barnacled skin, and her voice was a rasping obscenity. She was, I could easily guess, accustomed to being the dominant species, and she treated me as if I were one of her anal parasites.
“Fight! Fight those grass-eating scum! Rip our enemies to pieces! Eat their poisoned flesh! That’s what I shall do, when I have the chance!” she ranted.
“You will never have the chance,” I told her.
“Don’t be so sure. I’m not like the rest of you shameful cowards! I will fight, and I will win!” she raged.
“No,” I said. “Acceptance is all. The Ka’un cannot be defeated.
“Believe me,” I added, bitterly, “we have tried.”
Jak/Explorer
I am ready. My mind is now fully merged once more with the mind of Explorer. I exist in many places; in the missiles we carry, in the concealed flying-bombs that orbit these planets, in our drone craft, in the matter traps that cordon off the entire stellar system. I am no longer Olaran; I am a killing machine.
Less talk, please Jak. Let’s commence to kill this parent-fucker.
First missiles have been fired.
Feel them fly. Ah! Feel them fly!
Sai-ias
“I could bathe you,” I said to Fray, as she paced by the borders of the yellow savannah. “You might enjoy that.”
Fray glared at me. “Why in all fuckery,” she said angrily, “would I allow you to do such a thing?”
“In the past you-”
“There is no past! Stop your fantasies, you vile creature! I have only just been captured, my world has been destroyed. And it happened just a few months ago. You talk as if-no, we do not know each other! You are simply some strange alien monster with whom I am trapped!”
“You remember nothing?” I said, sadly.
“There is nothing to remember!” Fray roared. “Don’t lie! Don’t tell these lies!”
Lirilla too had no past memories of me; nor did Lardoi, or Miaris, or Raoild, or Biark, Sahashs, Loramas, Thugor, Amur, Kairi, Wapax, Fiymean, or Krakkka; nor many others of those who had fought that day and died at Sharrock’s behest. Only Quipu and I and a sprinkling of others could bear witness to the events of the day. The rest had been resurrected as the creatures they were when their worlds were first lost.
And so I was living with utter strangers who had been my intimate companions for centuries.
Jak/Explorer
Our missiles have lost velocity. No damage has been caused to their hull.
Their shields were fully charged; they were ready for us.
Of course they were. This is a game to them.
Again, missiles fly!
And so we fight.
We, this computer brain and I, have been preparing for this battle for so many years. And yet now it’s happening, I feel totally un prepared. Panic consumes me. Each small setback disheartens me. I am convinced in my soul that we will lose, and all will be for naught.
Explorer, fortunately, is not so temperamental; she fights with a savagery and a guile that awes me.
And so, once again, our missiles fire and rift through space and then strike the forceshields of the Death Ship; and instantly lose momentum and drift aimlessly. But this time, before they can be destroyed, we trigger the detonators and all the missiles erupt as one, creating a halo of energy the size of a star around the black-sailed ship. Nothing can survive this.
But a moment later we realise the black-sailed ship is behind us. It has rifted to safety. And our forceshields are overheating, as it bathes us in sheets of energy and then
We, too, rift to safety.
Sai-ias
I felt a tingle of anxiety down my central spine.
I was walking through the grasslands near the savannah, to join Quipu and Lirilla. And as I approached Quipu, I saw his heads flick uncontrollably, for a just a moment. And I noticed an excited light in his five pairs of eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, puzzled.
“Something’s happening-” said Quipu One.
“-with the ship,” said Quipu Two.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
The heads replied, babblingly:
“The engine noise.”
“The force of artificial gravity.”
“The clarity of the light.”
“The density of [Quipu used a word I could not fathom].”
“You can detect all that?” I asked.
“Perhaps we have collided,” said Quipu One, “with an object in space-”
“Or been attacked by,” said Quipu Three.
“Some other vessel,” said Quipu Four.
“The light is degrading; the power sources are being diverted. The Hell Ship is in trouble. One way or another, it is experiencing some kind of appalling catastrophe,” said Quipu Five triumphantly.
Jak/Explorer
The battle rages, if space battles can actually rage; for the explosions are eerily silent. And, despite the use of rift weapons, the pace of the action is often stately. It is a dance of light and power and confusion, to the music of an imaginary band; the sleek and black-sailed Death Ship and the now vast and ugly and ungainly Explorer craft flicker frantically through rift space leaving missiles scattered and exploding in all the places where they are absent.
Explorer and I no longer speak. We are lost in the moment, the to and fro of missiles and energy beams, the switching of shield patterns, the ceaseless rifting to safety just in the nick of time.
We use our drone ships and robot missiles to create a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth front to the battle. The power of our weapons is awesome, even to me-accustomed as I am to the vast battle fleets of the Olara. For we have spent all this time building up an armoury that dwarfs anything known before in any of the universes. The ship too has grown; it is five hundred thousand times the size it was when Galamea was her commander. And much of the bulk consists of weapons and energy sources and shield generators and layers of armoured hull within more layers of armoured hull.