Hull Zero Three

I’m not really in charge anymore.

Oh, hello. Here you are.

It’s a silvery smooth, sculptured face, more female than male but almost without feature, hovering before my darkened field of vision. I think I’m dreaming. Then I realize my eyes are halfway open. I’m not yet fully asleep. It’s going to take some time to rouse up out of this exhausted torpor. The shock of seeing this face makes my muscles tingle, but it’s still going to be another few seconds….

A silvery-smooth hand reaches out. Cool fingers lightly caress my cheeks, my forehead, poke under my hair to make combing motions. The face angles and gets closer, nose to nose, as if in affectionate curiosity.

Its eyes are blue, empty, and infinitely deep.

With a strangled yell, I regain control of my body and thrash. The face and questing fingers back off into shadow. I think my fist briefly connects with a semisolid, rubbery object—a shoulder or arm. I scream and thrash some more. My foot is still hooked under the half-formed table, and the pain of wrenching my ankle brings me back to self-control.

The chamber is empty but for me.

I take a deep breath, look around with several jerking motions, and confirm I am alone… now.

The room’s illumination comes and goes in slow waves, as before.

I reach for the bottle of water and squeeze it into my mouth, draining it dry. Then I reach down for the bags. They’re both strung around my leg, as I left them before trying to sleep.

But what I assume was—is—the girl’s bag is now empty. No book. The remains of her loaf and bottle of water, still in my bag, have not been touched.

RULES AND DECORUM

I don’t know how long I actually slept, but my mind feels sharper, more able to observe and cope with what I might find. This chamber is a mess. Maybe the fire scarred it so badly it just died—a funny concept, that parts of this hull are active and alive but can be injured and even die.

If I look at something long enough, I begin to put it into place, arrange it in some loosely defined perspective. But I did not dream the silvery face, because the girl’s book is gone.

I’ve decided to drink her water and eat her loaf. With the book gone, I will have nothing to offer her should we find each other again. I don’t want to think about it.

I move through the half-melted door into the next chamber. It’s cooler here, but not dangerously so—not below freezing. As I enter, the walls brighten, and for the first time I see everything all at once, clearly, almost too bright to bear. My eyes take a while to adjust, and I feel exposed, but the moment passes, and I see what these rooms must be like when they’re healthy—when they’re not burned.

The chamber is about thirty meters long, twenty wide, and five high—larger. Rectangular cubbies line the aft wall. The floor has many soft, square pads, arranged in parallel rows. I dimple one with my foot. Rods at the end of each pad support cocoons made of some sort of netlike fabric, bunched up and tied. They can be pulled out and crawled into so that one can sleep during spin-down. When there’s weight, there are the pads. No blankets, except maybe the gray bags. Many gray bags hang from the forward wall, their drawstrings slung on loops.

I think, People live here. Maybe they use this as a base camp while they go exploring. People retrieve bags and supplies and drop them off here. Someone should be watching over them.

But this room is as deserted as the first. One thing seems obvious—the thing that grabbed the girl and the two others, the thing that jammed Blue-Black into the hole in the domicile bubble, couldn’t fit through the gap in the jammed and half-melted door. I barely made it through myself.

Here comes the familiar push and outward tug. I grab hold of a cocoon and its rod and hang on while the spin-up brings back weight—less than I experienced in the outer reaches of the hull, but enough to allow me to walk without difficulty.

The temperature remains cool but gets no colder.

I let go of the rod and lick my lips at the thought of what might be in those bags. I’m distracted by a humming sound. The half-melted door has managed to open some more—a lot more. It’s jammed at about two- thirds of its full width, a lunate remnant stuck in place. It’s now about three meters wide, almost floor to ceiling.

My hope that it might block monsters is crushed.

Another door—undamaged—has opened as well, this one on the far side wall. My path is clear. Too clear, I think.

I walk to the wall of hanging bags and feel them. Most are empty, no loaves, no water bottles, no books. One contains soft goods. I pull it from its loop and pour its contents on the floor. Clothing. Blue and red, bright colors—as in the Dreamtime. Clean, no blood. I lift the overalls and hold them up to my body, then the jacket. They fit better than Blue-Black’s outfit, so I strip down and put them on. They’re more than a close fit—they might have been tailored for me. I reach into the overall pockets and find something in the right one—a thin, crinkly leaf. I pull it out. It’s a flat square made of plastic, like a thick sheet of paper. It’s been roughly erased on one side; there are still grayish marks that might once have been words. On the other side there’s a red stripe.

I replace it in the pocket. My pocket. There’s something in the other pocket as well—also small, flat, square, and flexible. I take that out. It’s a reflective foil. It lies flat in my hand. I see my face in it. The image confirms what I was sure I knew already.

Mostly.

I have a nose, two eyes, a fuzz of black hair on my crown. There are raw patches on my cheeks where I fell to the freezing floor after being rescued from the storage sac—it seems months ago.

But there’s something else as well. I have a ridge of low bony knobs under my skin, across the upper forehead. I feel it—it’s real, solid beneath the hair and scalp. My nose is unchanged, my skin is the right color, but the bumps shake me.

It is one thing to wake up with a weird, half-functioning memory—quite another to wake up looking different.

I make a face, stick out my tongue, then put the mirror back in my pocket and examine the other gray bags. There are forty-three of them. Most are empty. A few contain clothing—too large, too small—but three carry bottles and loaves. Six bottles, six loaves—two of each per bag, like a ration.

The water in the bottles is not fresh but it’s drinkable. I half drain one, then squat on a pad to eat one of the loaves. I finish it in a few minutes. Not luxury, certainly not the promised joy of Dreamtime (I still can’t catch more than colored glimpses), but better than anything I’ve experienced until now.

I have strength. A stirring of curiosity.

I feel almost human.

I walk between the pads to the next door.

AN UNEXPECTED PLEASURE

The little girl is waiting beyond. The room is dark. She’s half in shadow. She quirks her face, turns, walks away.

I pinch my arm to make sure I’m awake.

The room beyond lights up and shows her silhouette a third of the way across. She’s wearing green overalls. She looks back at me through those piercing gray eyes.

“Go away,” she says. “You’re useless. You always die.”

I can’t think of any response except, “Where are the others?”

Two different people step into view—not our previous companions. They stand beside the girl. One’s an adult female, the other a half-grown boy. The adult female is haggard. The half-grown boy has a face that seems ready to smile. They might be related—same color hair, brown, same shape and color of eyes, brown. Their skin is pale, and