Hull Zero Three

A visit from my own ghost would be strange. I vaguely recall stories of the oracular dead: spirits, hauntings. What if all of me decided to return at once, babbling incoherently? Spooky fables. Useless crap rising up at odd moments. Part of some sort of artificial cultural heritage. Why can’t I retrieve the knowledge I need? The reason and shape behind the Ship—a good schematic. Why three hulls? Why the moon of dirty ice? What, if anything, lives in the other hulls? Is there still someone alive from the Destination Guidance team?

How long has it been? How long since the Ship departed… and where did it depart from? I can think of reasonable answers to some of these questions, but they don’t yet feel convincing.

This much is clear. Ship makes people and stuff as it goes along.

I’m just a youngster.

The shaft behind me is like the shaft below me, a vanishing obscurity. Down, down, downward… hundreds of meters. I pause to drink, but I’m not hungry yet. I had my fill back in the boy’s room. I almost feel guilty partaking of that food, and I feel sorry for the woman in the boy’s thrall.

What did the boy do or give up to find favor with Ship?

There’s a nightmare thought I don’t need to deal with as I hand-over-hand along the rungs.

Spin-up comes, but I’m instinctively prepared. I lock feet and hands on the rungs and wait until things are stable. When I resume, a bottle of water falls out of the bag before I draw the cinch, and I can’t help but watch its twisting, bouncing, accelerating progress into vanishing twilight.

Now it’s a climb in earnest. If I let go and don’t catch myself, I’ll fall down the shaft like the bottle. I’ll bounce and gather speed and… splat.

Another body for the freezer.

Another book for someone to retrieve, with nothing new added.

Is that what the little girls do? Retrieve everyone’s books—Blue-Blacks, Scarlet-Browns, visitors from Destination Guidance?

Descending inboard, always inboard.

After two hours, my fingers and hands have blisters, worse where I touched the frosted cases or laid palms on the freezing deck after I was made. I’m leaving a little blood trail, of which I see no evidence as I climb.

There’s a shadow above—a big one. I pause and lean out to get details, hanging by hands and feet. It’s just a rough black plug higher in the shaft. I climb another dozen meters. The shadow assumes a trilateral outline: a cleaner, about forty yards inboard. It doesn’t move and appears to be stuck. Dead or broken—or patiently waiting. It blocks the rungs at an angle.

I stop and hang for several minutes. I know it’s waiting. It’s a sentinel left in the shaft—not a cleaner, some sort of Killer. A big one, at least, not the little one, which is worse…

I have no idea what any of that means.

Drops of my sweat drip and fall outboard.

Then the black shadow shifts—makes a scraping jerk along one side. The movement so unnerves me I let go of my slippery grip. I fall a few rungs, manage to grab hold again, but wrench my foot.

I see that now the shadow has wedged three broad appendages against the wall of the shaft. Whatever sort of grip a factor might have—suction, friction, like lizard’s feet, it’s coming unstuck. Dead or alive, it’s about to slip loose and drop. All I can do is lay myself tight against the rungs, swing sideways and hang with one hand and one foot flat against the wall.

I don’t dare look up. I can hear it scraping, sliding, jamming again, scraping some more—and that’s all I hear. No scrabbling, no attempt to hang on, no sounds of apprehension or fear.

The glow around and above me dims in a rush. I feel air. Then the big black shape whooshes past, edgewise but brushing my shirt, and I look just in time to see two other bodies, parts of bodies, falling in its wake. One is a Scarlet-Brown—just a head and shoulders terminating in old meat and clotted gore. The other is more like me, probably male. I can’t see the face, but he’s bigger and bulkier, dressed in reddish overalls and seemingly intact, with skin about the same color. Could be a Knob-Crest.

I watch the whole tangle fall with softer, dead, diminishing sounds… Into the shadows. Only in the backdraft do I smell the char of singed meat.

For some reason, survival makes me laugh. I’ve come this far, I become multitudes—I’m more than eccentric, I’m plain silly—my life makes me laugh in mad earnest. I stop laughing, suck as much air as I can stand, try not to retch, and continue my climb, hand over hand. Following instinct.

The walls of the shaft from this point on are covered with spiraling sweeps of soot and rainbow-oily discolorations. The surface has been heat-treated. Burned. The rungs are still intact and strong… so far.

Another hour.

I’m not feeling all that bright. I wonder if I’m taking the same path I took the last time, or whether my counterparts followed one or both of the forking corridors. The shaft gets more soot-stained. Then I see it clear.

A swirl of superheated air or actual flame, carrying bits of fuel, swept down the shaft and came up against the cleaner, just doing its duty but plugging the flow. It crisped, died, and jammed, and debris fell on its upper surface. Parts of bodies.

This is like a war.

This is a war.

Another half hour of climbing and I arrive at the end. Not the end of the shaft as designed, but a shattered, burned stump of internal piping, intimate ship architecture opening onto dark, smelly nastiness.

Thrusting into amazing destruction.

The melted and cracked rim of the broken shaft rises three meters from a shadowy churn of broken bulkheads, conduits, decking. I poke up and look around.

I’m on one side of a roughly cylindrical void about sixty meters across. I now weigh considerably less than I did when I began. I might be half a kilometer closer to the center of the hull. Much farther inboard and spin-up will be little more than a nuisance—my weight will be negligible.

I can’t make sense of the mess. Any prior design, any obvious function has been obliterated. The pervasive smell is bitter-flowery, nauseating. Everything around me is coated with an iridescent film. I reach out from the last rung to touch the outer surface of the shaft, and my finger comes away slick. Using the inadequate illumination from the shaft’s few remaining glim lights, I hold my finger close to my eye and see that the film is trying to bead up, organize. It doesn’t want to have anything to do with my flesh.

I wipe the film off on the shaft’s internal surface. There, I watch it spread out and join with other patches of iridescence, migrating toward the ruined edge. The patches are trying to form a kind of dressing. The film wants to completely coat the destruction and begin… what? Repairs?

Ship can fix itself even without factors? Or is the film another kind of factor, another lively tool?

There’s movement on the opposite side of the void. Something large clambers over the wreckage, hooking its way, then stopping to hang loose—a shiny black conoid trunk with a skirt or fringe and twelve long, sinuous but jointed appendages, delicately poking, feeling, attempting to shift broken pieces, as if putting together a shattered vase. It emits soft wheeps and whirs, despondent, overwhelmed. Its trunk, fringe, and radiating limbs flicker with channeled spots of blue and red luminescence.

Some wreckage breaks away and falls casually to my side of the void, jarring the conoid. Its fringe rises in a lapping wave. The limbs sweep the stinking air. It could be a fixer—one of the factors you’d expect in a ruined space. Drawing up its estimate for repairs and not happy with the bill.

Above me, I make out a breach in a far bulkhead, and beyond that, a fluctuating brightness like cold flame. Another fixer squeezes into the void through the breach and scuttles to join its fellow, knocking loose more debris. I duck into the tube as a conduit slams onto the top of the shaft, falls to one side, wobbles, settles. I poke up again. The fixers touch limbs, whir and wheep with a dignified musical pattern.

In a short while, after spin-down, I’ll try to leap across to the breach, which seems to offer access to another chamber beyond. I have no notion whether the space will be undamaged or livable, but the smell here is intolerable.

I look around the void and wonder what spin-down will do to the wreckage—how it will rearrange, drift loose. I’ve already had experience with junk in free fall and don’t wish to repeat it. I could drop back into the shaft and hide, but there’s no guarantee the wreckage won’t cover the opening. No, my only chance is to kick out across the damaged space to the breach as soon as spin-down is complete and hope for the best.