Hull Zero Three

“We just tried,” I say, working to keep my voice low but still be heard over the cacophony. “Why does Ship even tempt us?”

“We should be getting the hell out of here!” Kim cries out, covering his ears. The big fellow is on the edge of panic, and if he loses it, where does that leave us?

“Because there’s a contradiction in Ship’s systems, all of them,” my twin says. “Right?”

That much is obvious.

“So talk to me,” he says, staring into my eyes. “Double-team with me. Tell me what I should be thinking.”

I go back through a quick selection of my inner mumblings and fragmented theories. We’re both so far into this little game that we don’t see until we’re almost finished that everyone else is watching us, quiet, waiting.

All but Nell. She has once more applied herself to the blue hemisphere controls, her eyes turned up in her head. We silently wish her luck.

“We’ve got false memories,” I say, “so that when we arrive at a destination, we’re fully rounded individuals. We might be teachers, of a sort—but we need to have something to teach. Cultural history, rules and regulations, courtesy, patterns of behavior… How to get things done as a group.”

“Good,” my twin says. “My thoughts almost exactly.”

“We’re more effective if we believe in what we’re teaching—if we’ve lived it and experienced some of the consequences of screwing up. We have to have a history. So we’re given one. But we also have to be filled in on the real-world situation.”

My twin carries on from this, nodding his head frantically and holding up one hand as if he wants to control an orchestra. “That’s right. And there is no real-world situation. Something has asked us to be made and trotted out before the stage has been set, our stage, our play—before there are colonists to teach or any situation someone could possibly expect us to face.”

I’m getting the rhythm. Two heads are better than one. And it might be possible that we’ve been fed different parts of the puzzle.

“We saw part of the Catalog,” I say. “Centuries of effort and money and programming, all poured into the gene pool.” I look over my shoulder at Tomchin and Kim. “Not all the suitable planets are going to be exactly like Earth. So colonists come in a variety of styles, suited to particular environments. If you don’t have to carry around fully formed people, if all you’ve got is embryos—or even more simple than that, instruction sets fed into bio-generators…”

I am surprised by that word.

“You just made that up?” my twin asks.

“Maybe. Bio-generators hooked up to a database of all possible life-forms, Earth life modified to occupy the far-flung reaches of all practical evolution….” I’m shivering again. The others, including Nell, are like a crowd in a jazz club, moving in around a hot jam session.

Nell says, “Whoever put together Ship wanted us ignorant of our true nature and origins? That’s what you’re saying, right?”

My twin says, “We wouldn’t need to know about our origins. In fact, it might distract us.” Even Tomchin is following our dialogue with signs of comprehension. Tsinoy is so close I feel her ivory spikes digging into my calf. I withdraw that leg and look at her resentfully.

“Go on,” she grumbles. “Whoever made me screwed me over and told me nothing about why.”

“Well, you are the real puzzle here,” my twin says. “Trackers shouldn’t have fully formed human intellects and probably would never be employed as navigators.”

“Astrogators,” Tsinoy corrects. “But why would you have any memory of something that shouldn’t be in the first place?”

This pushes us into the embarrassing zone of our speculations. I am no braver than my twin but am less experienced, so I go first. “I think part of our programming, our historical indoctrination, might contain contingency plans—dark ones. Secrets we’d never acknowledge, never need to acknowledge—unless things go badly wrong.”

“Cleaning up planets,” Tsinoy says. “I’m a Killer.”

“Oh,” Nell says, a sound of dread.

“If we get where we’re going and there’s competition…”

“We can’t go anywhere else,” my twin says. “We’ll be out of fuel. It’s either get along—which may or may not happen—or kill and strip the system to survive. To accomplish our mission.”

“You say that’s what I’m designed for,” Tsinoy says.

“Maybe. But now it’s starting to make sense.”

“And as Teachers, cultural instructors, you’d have to persuade the colonists they need to destroy the natives,” Kim says. “That’s total crap.”

“Yeah,” Tsinoy says. “Maybe they give you a fine-tuned moral compass.”

“And you?” I ask her.

She’s all bristle and no grace, and now her voice is low and not in the least musical. She sounds confused. “I don’t like what I’m made to do.”

“Well, here’s some relief,” my twin says. “From what we’ve been able to access, you’re not the worst this ship can do. Not by half.”

“Actually, we didn’t get that far,” I add. “We don’t qualify—we’re not total warriors. There’s a part of the Catalog that’s kept hidden—for a good reason.” My twin seems unhappy I’m telling them about this. I go on, anyway. “If our destination is super-bad, if there’s already a civilization with weapons that could hurt us, we’re given access to the most powerful and destructive points of creativity in the Klados—the Wastelayers. That’s what they were called. Our designers didn’t want us to carry that kind of history in our normal patterns. That kind of…”

“Guilt,” Nell says. She moves back and touches the hemisphere again, a light caress. Her eyes flutter.

“Right,” my twin says, with a glance in my direction. “Now you all know.” He seems regretful.

Nell lets go of the controls. “That’s enough for me,” she says. “The sequence that begins hull combination has three checkpoints. We can do it all from here, if we want. We can initiate, then hold—that should send some sort of message to Destination Guidance. Put back the shields.”

“How long would that take?” Kim asks.

“Total combination… at least ten hours. But the process starts right away.”

“And how long until this damned storm knocks us loose?” I ask.

“This part of the nebula is filled with protoplanetary dust, blown out from an exploding star,” Tsinoy says.

“Any minute…” Nell says. She stops, but we’re all immediately thinking the same thing. Destination Guidance must have steered us wrong—deliberately. Dropping the shields and letting the dust wear us all away was in the works from the very beginning.

They don’t want us to find a new home. They don’t need the hulls, they don’t need to travel, they don’t need to arrive. All they want to do is survive in their little sphere, sitting on top of all the fuel they could ever use.

With the engines shut down, hundreds of thousands of years’ worth.

“Do we vote,” Nell asks, “or just act?”

“Doesn’t take long to vote,” Kim points out.

Tsinoy agrees with a raised claw-paw-arm.

“Seconds count.”

“Do it,” everyone says, almost as one.

Tomchin adds a low whistle.

“Right,” Nell says, and slaps her hands on the hemisphere. “Starting combination sequence.”

She drops into eyes-up contact. It seems forever, but it’s probably just a few minutes, before the control chamber brightens, small alarms go off like little fairy bells. Then instructive lines and arrows glow, barricades rise, and a voice announces, “Find safe positions within the indicated outlines. When hulls begin to merge, additional safe areas will be created, and you will be instructed how to retreat and maintain.”

Rails and cables rearrange around us, and new controls rise to our right while others sink down to our left