Hull Zero Three

try.

We’re out of fuel, we can’t move on…. Time to explore the far reaches of the Klados, the possibilities inherent in the nastiest neighborhoods of genetic phase space.

Time to bring out the Trackers and the Wastelayers. Time to convert the factors, the biomechanical servants that tended Ship while it grew from its egg into a mighty three-hulled starship, for the first twenty years of our journey, and that lit off the bosonic drives far from Earth’s star….

Time to turn the page to a nightmare of destruction. And along with this comes my—our—new, tougher personality and a new, harsher personal history. Earth was in desperate trouble when we left—it wasn’t the social and technological paradise depicted in our previous biography. No, it was a wreck. People were dying everywhere and pumped all their resources into creating this lifeboat to the stars. We’re humankind’s last hope, and now all that stands in our way is a planet covered with indigenous slime, hardly worthy of the name of intelligent life.

All we have to do is send down our Killers and Wastelayers and muck out that slime, then deactivate our weapons… and send down, in their place…

But that’s another cluster of points in the Klados, another page in the Catalog, not as grim and more than a little hazy. What is becoming clear is that the Catalog has been damaged along with everything else in hull memory. We have no idea what the Klados is capable of delivering.

Still, the pages turn. Something wants to unburden its psyche. Something needs to confess.

We’ve encountered a primitive technological civilization, capable of rudimentary exploration of their stellar system—that is, our target system. We’re here, we’re out of fuel, nowhere else to go—and they attack. They’re advanced enough that their weapons can do real damage, blow us to bits, in fact, and they won’t listen.

They refuse to share.

We can’t bargain with them. It’s going to be a long, drawn-out fight, ending in our extinction, unless we—

Turn the page. Another page. We’ve plowed our way to the margin of the deepest, darkest corner of genetic phase space, and beyond, it seems, lies a genius-level zoo of madness and destruction.

Death’s secret menagerie.

ACCESS GIVEN TO TOTAL WARRIORS ONLY.

Unexpectedly, we’re dumped back into the main gallery. Sweetness, light, deception. We don’t have the proper training, the proper indoctrination. None of us qualifies to venture into that section of the Catalog.

Rejected.

Tomchin bravely tries to hook us up to other cables, but we’re balky, burned down to nubbins—too much shock, too much contradiction, almost worse than the first time we were squeezed from our birth sacs.

When we let go of the blue hemisphere, we bumble and thrash and cry. It must look as bad to the others as it feels to us. Nell orders Kim to pull us aside. Kim moves in and holds us in his arms while we shiver and curse out our misery.

That takes a few minutes. Tomchin seems relatively unaffected, but now that we’re out, we don’t understand what he says, and without the girls, neither does anyone else.

The control chamber gets quiet.

Nell has a report to make. She looks around. All of the adults are listening, possibly even Tsinoy, still deep in her interstellar survey.

“Ever since we were born, things have been trying to kill us,” Nell says. “Dropping the shield seems to be a last-ditch attempt to get rid of us. We should assume that someone is willing to sabotage Ship operations and even destroy the hulls. Well, we may be able to fight back. I think there’s a way to initiate hull combination—to unite the Triad. Because Destination Guidance is supposed to be gone before the Triad is united, bringing the hulls together will squash and absorb that little ball down there—and reclaim the moonlet. It may give us back complete control. I just activate this system—”

The Tracker moves too fast for us to see and is suddenly right next to us, her paw on Nell’s hands, pushing them away from the hemisphere. “We can’t do that!” Tsinoy roars—a terrifying sound completely impossible to ignore.

Nell backs down from her control board. “Why not?” she asks, teeth gritted.

“Because I can’t find most of the navigational data or any way to control Ship’s engines,” Tsinoy says. “I think we’ve been sidetracked into bad space—a really dangerous region—and as far as I can tell, we’re less than halfway to where we want to be. We can’t destroy Destination Guidance. Whoever they are, we need their help.”

“But they want us dead,” Nell says.

None of us, it seems, has noticed that the girls have returned—and are listening to us all with worried faces.

“How do we know that?” Tsinoy asks.

“Ship Control,” I say.

“How reliable is that?” Tsinoy asks, her spikes at full defensive posture, an awesome display that expands her to three times her former dimensions.

We all back away.

The girl nearest me pushes out her lower lip. “We tell you. Mother tells us.”

“Oh, it’s that, is it?” Tsinoy says. “We’ve never met Mother. We have no way to question her. We can’t make this decision without more evidence, because if we do, there’s a very real chance we’ll never find our way to a good star. Ship will die out here.”

“We’re dying now,” my twin says. “Can’t you hear it? We’re being sandblasted to oblivion. You said so yourself.”

Nell listens to all this with a frightened grimace. She’s trying to form the right words to bring us back on some sort of constructive track. But the problem is being stated very clearly by our formidable astrogation expert.

Tsinoy pulls in her spines. “There’s a maneuver that might explain turning off the shield, temporarily,” she says. “It’s part of Ship’s standard procedure. But it doesn’t make sense—not now, not yet.”

BAD NEWS, WORSE

If you’re like me, you’ve been trying to form a picture of Destination Guidance. Chances are you’ve been at least as successful. We’re not supposed to know about them. Our brains refuse to seriously consider their little spherical refuge down there on the leading point of the moonlet—and we have no idea what they look like or what they want. If they were ever a planned part of this mission—and that makes sense, at least as far as our ignorance allows us to judge—then they’ve failed. From what we’ve been able to piece together, they’ve stayed past their time, and they are very likely responsible for most, if not all, of our problems.

But to fight something, you really have to try to understand its motivations—particularly when the something you’re fighting holds most of the cards, the deck is stacked against you, and the whole gambling hall is on fire and filled with thugs.

The shivering and grinding gets louder. Unbearably loud. We shouldn’t be here when this happens.

“Our brains are packed with crap,” my twin shouts to me as we move aside. Then we put our heads together. We’re both thinking as fast as we can to arrange what few facts we have into some usable order. “Fake history, fake lives—storybook crap. How can we replace all that crap with useful information? We have to force our way into data that doesn’t want to be known.”