Hull Zero Three

we don’t want to think about… The occupants took control of almost everything. They did something wrong—bad for Ship.”

“Fair enough,” Nell says. “I can see that as a possibility. But where do the monsters come from? Why can’t we remember anything about them?”

“Present company excluded,” Tsinoy says, and looks at me—then at my twin. “Something made me different. Why? What am I made to do?”

“Originally, you’re designed to help clear a planet,” my twin says. “But you’re not supposed to have a human personality. You’re just a tool. You’re…” He hesitates.

“Expendable,” Tsinoy finishes. “But what about you two—how is it you both know about me?”

We’ve been through this before. I thought we’d explained ourselves, as much as we could, but now I’m not so sure. All this thickens our mood, helps spread a new gloom that overcomes even full bellies and clean bodies. And it’s interrupted our story telling. Nobody wants to pursue these questions—not now, not yet.

Nell lounges back. “We need to talk this through. But we also need to rest. Ladies?” She looks at the girls. “You’re in charge here, right? Along with the Teachers?”

“Sleep,” the girls say. “More later.”

“Dim the lights,” my twin says. “Sleep mode, whatever.”

The hull complies. The lights under the tent-shaped chamber dim until we’re bathed in a shadowy golden glow.

“Which one am I, again?” I ask my twin as we lie down next to each other. We don’t touch. I’m not even sure I like him, actually.

“Sanjay,” he says.

“And you are… Sanjim.”

“Right.”

I close my eyes. I don’t realize how truly tired I am, but it seems just a blink before Nell pokes me.

Sanjim and I rise up.

“Noises,” she says. “Grinding noises aft.”

We can hear them, too—we all can. The sounds are deep, harsh, big. They set my teeth on edge. The deck vibrates and now we feel a jerky sort of spin-down. We start to slide as the hull slows its rotation. We’re away from the cables and rails, so we flatten and press our hands on the smooth deck, or grab hold of a cot frame, or slip up against a bulkhead, as Tsinoy does, all bristled.

The girls are nowhere to be seen.

Kim and Tomchin crawl back toward us. The hull is jerking, spinning up again—then down. More grinding. The whole frame around us shudders.

“We should look at the control center and see what we can learn—then, what we can do,” Kim says. “It’s coming quicker than we thought.”

“What?” I ask, still dopey.

“More bad.”

THE BIG VIEW

For a moment, it seems that the entire hull is about to shiver itself to pieces and blow us all out into space. Maybe this is intentional. Maybe this is the last part of Ship they can’t control, so they’re going to destroy it completely—but then, where will that leave them, whatever they are?

Surely they wouldn’t destroy the entire Ship just to purge us. Would they?

But we do have Tsinoy, who understands something about what lies all around us. And Kim, who has more than a normal sense of finding his way around. And Nell, who seems to know something about engineering and hull operations—and who desperately needs to recover all she knows.

The grinding and vibration settle long enough for us to make our way through the hatch, across the staging area, and along the bars and cables, back to the forward chamber. Here, we’re almost floating, the spin has been so reduced. We’re used to that. We’re used to having things go wrong. We seem hardly rattled at all, and the way we move, the way we help each other—I even grab Tsinoy’s paw to pull it through a tight hatch—means we’re finally acting as a team.

Tomchin is right beside us as we tug and haul ourselves up to the bow chamber, where nascent outlines— squares and rectangles and ovals—still glow gently. Where pylons and controls will pop up, we hope, if only we ask.

“Tell it!” Nell shouts at the two of us, looping her foot around a cable and stretching to her full, impressive two and a half meters.

“Show us the stars, build us controls—” my twin says.

Before he can finish, the hull is already fulfilling our request. More teardrops rise, then shape into horizontal control boards, thickening, spreading wide, and all the while, the panels covering the bow viewports slide up and away. Once more, we stare out at the universe—at wisps and the endless diamond-dust glow of uncounted millions of stars.

But something’s missing.

Tsinoy lets out a whimpering groan, far beneath his dignity, and I slowly catch on, then share his concern. It’s all about what we don’t see. The grayish misty lines and the forward umbrella shield are no longer visible.

“The deflection cone,” Tsinoy says. “It’s gone.”

“Great,” Nell says.

“What’s that mean?” Kim asks.

“We’re moving very fast,” Tsinoy says, and shivers uncontrollably. Its teeth snap—it can hardly control its rage and disappointment. “The interstellar medium—grains of dust, gas… on the edge of the nebula…”

“We’re naked, right in the middle of a big storm,” Nell says. She moves over to the far edge of the viewports and tries to look down and back. She doesn’t have to look far. “The hulls are exposed, but that bump down there on the little moon, it’s still got something around it—the moon is protected, too. They’ve got a shield.”

“It’s Destination Guidance. They’re trying to scrape us off,” Kim says.

Nell has moved back to the board mounted farthest forward. It, too, has a small blue dome mounted in the center, and little else. She places her hands on the dome, and dim lights flicker around her face and arms. My twin and I join her, with Tomchin coming up right beside us, a new expression on his generally stoic face.

“What’s he know?” Kim asks from behind us. Nell breaks contact long enough to look, then urges us to put our hands on the dome, as before.

“All together,” she says.

We connect to the hull, becoming receptive points in a vast space full of information. The abstraction seems familiar, exactly what we expect—but there are far too many ugly patches of what looks like char, burned darkness, signifying blank spots in the hull’s memory. At a rough guess, it looks as if more than ninety percent of the space is damaged, inaccessible—or simply gone.

Tomchin is here with us. He’s controlling a part of the display, searching, leaving the rest of us to explore in our own regions of, what, expertise? Instinct? Programming?

“I hate this,” my twin says. I hear him through my ears but see flashes of his presence in the void—an angry, searching presence, matching my moves closely, but not exactly. “We need ten of us up here!”

“Only if the knowledge still exists to spread among you,” Tomchin says. It’s his voice, but in the space, we hear it in our language—and we understand it. His patch of awareness is off in a far corner of the area. He seems to be rummaging, searching for landmarks.

Then his presence rejoins us, and he’s hauling a tendril of connectivity, like a brilliantly jeweled cable— signifying a distant branch of hull memory. “It’s broken,” Tomchin says. “But this used to lead directly to the gene