Hull Zero Three Read online

  More shadows within the churn… My throat constricts.

  I see another. Alive and huge. It’s swimming through the tank to my left, at the sphere’s one o’clock, tracking our motion. It resembles a gigantic rubbery spring, tens of meters wide, pulling forward with a jerky, screwlike twist. The outer edges of the thick coils push out fins that sweep like fishermen’s nets through the liquid. Red-ruby eyes—like the Tracker’s, only bigger, with oblate dark centers—poke out from the sweeping fins.

  It’s at least a hundred meters long, though that’s hard to judge—it can contract, after all, like a spring. Within the helix long, flexible blades thrust in like pale bony swords or teeth—baleen, perhaps. The blades trail bubbles as the monster swims along with us, following our motion.

  I can easily imagine the helix-knife’s eyes are watching, eager for me to join its slicing frolics in a world’s endless blue ocean. It doesn’t matter that I’m tiny. Tiny things are its business.

  As it slowly loses our dreamlike race, I notice white, fleshy shreds trailing from the baleen. It has already twisted and chewed its way through something alive. And where there is one Killer on Ship, there have always been more.

  Ship has rotated to begin years of deceleration. The secret parts of the Catalog offer complete suites of alternatives for desperate travelers. Pick and choose from a prearranged list. Find answers to all your problems.

  A terminal solution.

  “We picked a star,” I tell Tsinoy. “We’ve found our new planet. It’s rich with life-forms—even intelligent beings. We can’t stop now. We can’t go back.”

  Tsinoy’s snout flexes. Her eyes close. The infants are silent. I hope they haven’t been smothered.

  I think of our friends in the bow. “What the hell are they doing up there?” I ask.

  “Nell has taken control—partly. She sent me aft to find you and retrieve the new ones.”

  “New ones? Not enough crew?”

  “I don’t know,” Tsinoy says. “I don’t think she asked for them.”

  “Who told her the babies would be there? Why bring me back and not Kim?”

  “She says that after the first system was chosen, Ship was damaged. The conflict began.”

  “Damn it, Ship’s memory was damaged or nearly destroyed, so Ship unloaded all its dirty secrets into us. But something happened. Some of us didn’t go along with the picture. We split up to fight it out. Did Destination Guidance start the war?”

  “I don’t know,” Tsinoy says.

  I’m ripening like a fruit, connecting the dots on my interior map. Nell wanted me to see this. I am a key part of the plan. Long before arrival—after Destination Guidance has made its choice and is presumably dead and gone—Ship creates imprints for prep and landing crew, complete with all the necessary instincts, emotions, and patriot love of life—Ship-bred life. All imbedded with the patterns of Earth.

  Ship would have been instructed to prepare detailed and customized imprints for the arrival crew. My imprinting would have included an updated, in vitro education about the nature of the chosen system, the star and its world or worlds. I’ll help Earth’s children understand why we have to destroy a planet in order to live on it. Someone else will make the monsters, the factors, the killing organisms… someone given the proper hormonal flows and mindset, a master of biology—shaped for a desperate time and unwavering in her protective passion.

  Mother was put in charge of exploring the most hideous Kladistic phase spaces, selecting, creating the necessary factors, and testing their efficacy.

  And here they are, all around us. Planets have oceans, which can harbor competitive life—competitive, intelligent life. Solution: turn your shipboard water supplies into artificial oceans, filled with Killers.

  Me? I’m the Teacher. I’ll justify their use. I’ll join in the abomination, wholeheartedly, without guilt….

  Except that there is guilt. Some of us are at cross-purposes with our intended design and function—Kim, Nell, Tomchin. And Tsinoy.

  Most tellingly, Tsinoy.

  I jerk and twist my head around. In my quest for large shadows within the tanks, I’ve missed schools of little black shapes, equipped with sharp, rotating fins like sawblades with shining diamond teeth. Then—finger-sized things that seem to be nothing more than eyes and depending tiny mouths. I have no idea how they kill. Perhaps they act as scouts.

  And scattering these schools, as if in festive play—agile torpedoes equipped with nightmare, head-mounted arrays of fangs or scythes or other cutting implements. There are also aqueous variations on the spiny claw-claspers with grinding mouths. They don’t make sense in any sane ecological system. All of them are pure assassins. Liquidators.

  Grim humor seems inescapable. Teacher is supposed to be cheerful, clever, charismatic. All the girls love Teacher. But my body is numb, my thoughts like icy needles. I simply want to be Never Born. Never Made.

  I turn my head right, to another tank, and witness the passage of a ponderous, gray-green eel more than twenty meters in length, with tiny button eyes and a shrewd pout of a mouth. The eel reacts to our motion, shuddering and lancing out. In a void between spiraling waves of liquid, sheets of fire writhe—lightning!

  No sense putting your most deadly weapons in the same arena only to kill each other before their time arrives. Hence, six tanks.

  Tsinoy makes an odd sound—not quite a growl, not yet a whimper. I look left and follow her gaze back to the tank that contains the helix-knife. As if one of those monsters is not enough, there are now five. They’ve joined nose to tail in a single, long, rolling, flexing coil. The coil inverts, and the tips of flexible knife-teeth furiously scrub the wall of the tank, as if trying to reach through to us. Practicing to obliterate some distant native ocean floor. I can see it: chained helix-knives destroying the heart of a planet’s life from its very foundations—and then themselves quietly dying, sinking, leaving the ocean waves to roll on, clear, pristine, and sterile.

  Welcome to the truth of our world—a massive seed shot out to the stars, filled with deadly children. A seed designed to slay everything it touches.

  The sphere speeds through a supporting bulkhead and a hollow, dark space surrounded by huge pipes, and into a ghostly, livid glow, where it slows and stops. The blue cube sighs and the sphere opens. We are allowed to leave.

  We have returned to the forward tank chamber.

  TSINOY IS DOUBLY nervous now that we have arrived at the bow. I notice a shift in the way everyone looks at me, at my twin. Suspicion has fallen on both of us.

  “What happened to Kim?” my twin asks. “What about the girls?”

  “The girls are aft,” I say. “I think they’re okay. I finally met Mother.” My throat constricts and my eyes well up. “She’s holding on to Kim. She seems busy. In charge. You might recognize her.”

  “What’s she like?” my twin asks, and looking at the way his eyes move, I wonder if he hasn’t already guessed—or knows. Perhaps he also saw the drawing in the shaft. He might know instinctively—a purer form of adapted Teacher.

  I describe her as best I can, words remarkably incapable of capturing her essence. My twin gives one large shiver—just as I did, hours before. “It can’t be her,” he says, without conviction. Instead, I detect a spooky longing. “Did she recognize you?” he asks.

  “In a manner of speaking. We’re all mixed together,” I say. “Somebody filled our molds with mixed ingredients—mixed personalities.”

  “Souhbuddy?” Tomchin asks. In our absence, Tomchin has devised a nasal sort of speech that I only half understand.

  “Nell’s been communicating with Ship Control since you left,” my twin says as we pull ourselves to the thin forest of pylons. Nell still has her long, thin hands on the blue hemisphere. “She never lets go, but sometimes she talks. She says she’s receiving updates. I’m worried about her.”

  We pause to digest all that we think we know, all that we think we have seen. I explain both legs of the journey as
best I can—the monsters, the factors, in their huge tanks. I try to describe the gene pool—but my twin seems to see it already, in revived memory.

  Nell stays attached, impassive, seemingly deaf to our words.

  I conclude, “This isn’t just a colonizing ship; it’s a death factory.” I feel the conflict—and what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with surviving at all costs?

  Nell releases her hands from the hemisphere and wrings her long fingers to get blood flow. “I’m famished,” she says.

  “Whau’s Shibb gaeing to do?” Tomchin asks.

  “Food first,” Nell insists. “We have to stay calm and think things through. There’s been too much confusion and conflict. But maybe—just maybe—we have enough clues that we can finally make good decisions.”

  My twin volunteers to get food. I join him, just for camaraderie—and also because I want to keep an eye on him. I haven’t told anyone that Mother wants him to go back.

  We retrieve food and bulbs of sweet liquid. Ship is still taking care of us—perhaps at Mother’s command. Or because of Nell.

  Over food, Nell begins. “I’ve been speaking with someone who claims to represent—or to be—Destination Guidance,” she says. “I can’t trace where this voice comes from. I can’t even know if it’s one, or many, male or female or…” She holds back from saying human. “And I don’t know if we can trust anything it says. And, yes, the voice says Ship has been diverted.”

  “From where, to where?” Tsinoy asks.

  “Unknown. It’s all a mess. Some of us were created at the instigation of Destination Guidance—that’s what the voice claims.” Nell makes a face. “Destination Guidance tapped into a vein of conscience—something to that effect. It made sure that vein fed into some of us. Sometimes the patterns sent to the birthing rooms got confused, perhaps deliberately. Signals overlapping and parasitizing other signals. We were mixed in the mold, and even our molds were mixed—as Teacher says. Ship itself created another group to defend the original mission. One faction took control—and then another.” She looks at me with sad appraisal. “I think the fight has been going on for at least a hundred years. Mother has finally won control of the gene pool. She’s in charge of most of the factors.”

  “Oh, Lord,” my twin says. He looks bleak.

  “You both seem to know who and what this Mother is,” Nell says. “The girls helped you get born, favored you, escorted you to safety—and to this hull. It’s only natural to assume that one or both of you was created to be Mother’s ally, her consort. The rest of us were a necessary risk. We’d be eliminated later. There’s just one question left. Did either of you come equipped with a conscience?”

  My twin has stayed close, interweaving his position with mine, as if to confuse the others. Until now, most of them could not have told us apart—or didn’t care to try. But Tsinoy has scrupulously watched us, tracking our scents. “Mother rejected him,” she tells Nell, raising a limb in my direction. “She sent him away to be killed. I brought him here through the killing tanks, as you suggested.”

  Nell looks me over with narrow eyes, infinitely weary. She does not want this responsibility, this power.

  “He smelled angry,” Tsinoy finishes. Then her snout does something that makes it more porous, less plated and shiny—and she sniffs my twin. “He’s in rut.”

  He does smell a little rank.

  My twin tries to kick away. Tsinoy intercepts him, holds him firmly but gently.

  “Not you,” she husks.

  PART THREE

  THE WORLD

  My twin stammers out an argument that he’s as innocent as I am, that we’ve been making bad decisions all along and that there’s no way we can trust anything Destination Guidance says. He’s panicky, sharp-voiced. I feel sorry for him—and for me. He’s ruining it for both of us. Weakly, he concludes, “Maybe it fed all of you delusions in Dreamtime—just made it all up.”

  “You have always smelled different,” Tsinoy grumbles. Her grumble sounds like distant thunder, and my hair stands on end. Inflection is not one of her talents.

  “How in hell would you know what rut is?” he shouts, squirming in her grip. His face turns red. “You’re sexless—you’re neuter!”

  “Only my body,” Tsinoy says.

  He twists his face toward me. “You’d let them kill your own twin! You’ll be next!”

  “Nobody says we’re going to kill you,” Nell says. She manages to look as if she’s reclining, one ankle under a bar, head on hand, elbow resting on empty space—all long limbs and fluid poise. Nell catches my look and bristles. “You’re both handicapped,” she says. “She’s played on your emotions.”

  “Who was your mother?” my twin shouts.

  “I don’t think my patterns go that deep,” Nell says. “I don’t remember a childhood or a mother or a family.”

  My twin’s face has screwed into tears. “Let me go to her,” he begs. “I belong with her.”

  “The wrong one went aft,” Nell says, and prims her lips. Nell and Tsinoy have turned their eyes toward the windows, longing for a cleanness of vast spaces and suns, for what lies beyond Ship. The relief of infinity, of choices, of futurities lost. But the windows are still being repaired. They are fogged, dark.

  I feel weak.

  We hear a noise behind us. A deep brown shadow moves through darkness into the bow’s illumination.

  It’s Big Yellow.

  “Kim!” Nell cries. “We worried about you.”

  “No need,” Kim says. “I did some gardening and got loose. I don’t think anyone got hurt. But you guys really pissed her off. She’s making her move.”

  “How soon?” Nell asks, dead calm.

  “Minutes, maybe. After I got loose, I passed about a dozen forest balls, and they were filled with growing things, big things and small. Worse than any I’ve seen so far.”

  Kim approaches Tsinoy, who is still holding on to my twin, and reaches out with one huge hand. One finger caresses my twin’s cheek. “He’s the one she wanted, right?” he asks.

  Nell nods, then points to me. “This one’s okay. I think.”

  “Yeah. He did good back there.” Kim reaches out with his other hand, places it on my twin’s opposite cheek, then clamps and twists my twin’s neck. It snaps like a stick. Instantly, he just hangs.

  My body jerks and I shove away from the group.

  “We need to leave,” Kim says. “Back to the other hulls… anyplace but here. I don’t think even Tsinoy can fight what’s coming.”

  The Tracker cradles the lifeless body and makes a soft, strange sound, then pulls back her claws, releasing it. It slips away, head bobbling, no hurry, eyes wide. Then it follows a new, slow curve toward the floor.

  Tomchin looks around, stretches his arms. Points back to the transport craft.

  “We should get more food and water,” Nell says.

  “No time,” Kim says. He’s already grabbing and shoving, moving us toward the transport, happy to abandon the last viable hull—the last place that could feed us and clothe us.

  No protest. Mother has won another round.

  Aft of the staging area, in the tent-shaped chamber, we hear low, awful sounds, like whispers or snakes slithering through grass. Tsinoy shifts her muscles and bulks up, clamping her paw-claws down on the deck between us and the noises.

  We pull ourselves toward the entrance of the egg-craft. I look aft. Something moves along the deck, clinging and transparent, like a wash of water but dotted with twitching, shining hairs and ruby spots for eyes. It laps up over Tsinoy’s feet. Smoke lifts and she begins to bleed—thick red drops. The liquid is cutting her up like razors. She lets go with a mewl, swiping the fluid off with quick strokes of ivory claws, and Kim grabs her outstretched limb, pulling her after the rest of us.

  I catch a glimpse of what might be cherubim in the bow, little angels hovering over the lapping tide. They are jumping, climbing, yanking themselves forward—Mother’s vanguard.

  The fluid is
on the lip of the hatch when Nell tells it to close. We push away from Hull Zero Three. We’ve had enough of monsters, of Mothers and daughters and dreams and lies and incomprehensible wars. We can only hope the moon-bound sphere of Destination Guidance is any sort of sanctuary.

  If not, we will choose black space and the deadly grit between the stars.

  END DOCUMENT

  SWEEP SURVEY

  COMPLETE

  This document has been judged original and authentic.

  FILED: SHIP ARCHAEOLOGY REPORT

  SURVEY TEAM PERSONAL ADDENDUM

  He was you, wasn’t he?” my partner asks. “He was a Teacher, after all.”

  The survey of the joined hull and all of its nooks and hiding places, the sweep of extraneous biology—what little remains—has taken our team sixty days. We’ve multitasked throughout that time, my partner and our seven team members, working other jobs, preparing the staging areas and providing instruction for both the Ship’s maintenance crew and those who will go planetside.

  “But…” My partner is almost at a loss. “Was she me?”

  “Which one?”

  “You know which one I’m referring to.”

  “No way of knowing,” I say. “No pictures. Nothing we can use to judge.”

  “Ship could have kept a record of it.”

  “Who understands Ship?” I ask. “We still haven’t unraveled all of the systems and controls.”

  “It must have been a horrible time.”

  I wonder if I’ve made a mistake by letting her read ten of the books—ten out of eleven, all contained in a ragged, tattered gray bag. No other books or bags have been found. The survey team that gathered them can’t read the writing, but for some reason I can, and so can my partner. Ship is full of languages. The books are written in colloquial English, with a heavy slant toward twenty-first century cultural values and norms. My partner and I naturally speak Pan-Sinense, perhaps like the Knob-Crest called Tomchin. We have confirmed that such physiological forms are within Ship’s creative capabilities, including the monster factors—