Hull Zero Three

And the hidden deity we tried to kill might be our new ally.

I can’t encompass any of it, so I’ve stopped thinking.

No time at all passes before we reach the end of the inboard-pointing tube, and kick off into the aft tank cap, far from the path I took when I was in the charge of the daughters.

Tsinoy takes my hand. The reticulated surface of her paw-claw-hand is hot. But I have known frost to whiten that same cuticle. Perhaps she is made to survive under all conditions. What else can she do? Can she live without breathing?

The great blue eyes of the six tanks wheel and spin in slow majesty—but it’s me, in Tsinoy’s grip, who is wheeling and spinning like a paper toy in a huge wine cellar.

I see a cable and grab it, as does Tsinoy, and we conclude this part of our journey, a few meters from the edge of a tank, voids, sheets, and bubbles writing cursive on the other side.

HERITAGE

We crawl along a layer of suspended cables to the opposite side of the chamber cap. Tsinoy leads me to an open hatch, which is crusted with age and jammed with disuse. Beyond stretches a maintenance corridor, smaller than most, more of a pipe and filled with debris, some of it cemented to the outboard curve from a succession of spin-ups, the rest messing the stale air. There’s been no attention paid to this part of the hull for a long time.

“Nobody’s been here,” I say, as much as my wit and energy allow. I still feel the sting of rejection, but something clean and sensible in me has taken the upper hand. “Where does it go?”

“I don’t know,” Tsinoy says, and reduces to a minimum diameter, then squeezes along the pipe ahead of me, just barely fitting. “Nell wanted me to bring you back this way, that’s all.”

Our pace is slow. The ratcheting, keratinous scrape of her ivory plates and spines grates on my nerves. But I feel safer the closer I am to her. The pipe leads past a number of circular holes opening to hull voids, darkness and broad, empty volumes, silent and cold.

“This part of the hull is dead,” I murmur.

“Maybe,” Tsinoy says, barely audible through her own bulk. She twists and I pause, then push myself aft to allow her to reorient and back up. “Wait,” she says. All her sinews and muscles rearrange, but something discourages her efforts. “I can’t fit,” she says. “You’ll have to go. I’ll instruct you.”

She flattens against one side of the pipe and tells me to squeeze past—a difficult trick in narrow quarters, made even worse by the fact that I’m working my way forward against her spines and plates, some of which are razor sharp. She accepts the gross indignity of my elbows and hands and hips pushing down those protrusions. My clothes become torn and sliced—and several gashes open in my chest and legs—but I manage to shimmy past and feel out the pipe beyond, and then, in the near-darkness, illuminated only by the faint glow of small blue organs around Tsinoy’s jaws, I see a gap in the side, just large enough to admit one midsized human being.

“Maybe this is why Nell asked for you,” Tsinoy suggests. “Kim wouldn’t fit.”

I ignore that as a joke—but if I can judge the Tracker’s tone, and likely I can’t, it may not be a joke at all. I grab the edge with my fingertips and tell her to give me a shove—not too hard. I still manage to stick halfway through. For some reason, I think of honeypots—(can’t quite remember what honey is, except it’s sweet and amber and sticky). “I could go for some honey,” I say, but Tsinoy doesn’t hear me. Another brusque shove from her paw-claw and I’m through, sliding into a small cubic chamber. It seems familiar. I’ve been in a place like this before.

Tsinoy helps by shining her blue “headlamps” into the cube. The opposite wall looks rubbery, with five swelling bulges arranged in two rows, three and two. There’s a rich, slightly sour smell in the close, still air. I’ve smelled it before, but the air was much colder in that first room in Hull Zero One, the place where I was pulled into this life.

This chamber is well above freezing.

“A birthing room,” I say, shaking with the memory. “What’s the hull making this time?”

“Pull them out,” Tsinoy says. “Rip the skin of each cell.”

I look. “I don’t think they’re finished.”

“Nell says we need as many as you can save.”

For a long moment, I feel pure terror. “Nell says… but who tells her? Destination Guidance?” This is worse than seeing my lover’s face on Mother’s long, productive body. There’s something primally wrong about interfering with the growth of something patterned by the gene pool. But any outraged moral sense seems very much out of place.

Tsinoy’s ice-colored teeth knock against the lip of the hole. “Pull them out.”

“What are they?”

“Use your fingernails,” she suggests with a ratcheting sigh.

I try this and, to my surprise, rip through the membrane. It’s remarkably easy, even with my puny nails, like tearing a thin sponge. The bump parts and a grayish, shining sac emerges, filled with fluid—and something small and lumpy, about as long as my forearm. I see the outline of a small head. It moves.

“Leave the inner membrane intact but separate the cords, then pull it out,” Tsinoy says, and from somewhere she produces gray bags, five or six, shoving them through. They drift across the cube.

“What if it isn’t ready?” I ask, my voice small.

“Pull it out, then the others.”

The inner sac is tougher, slicker—hard to grab—but after a twisting tussle, I dig in, brace my feet against the rubbery wall, and tug harder. The sac emerges with a sucking plop, falling into my arms, followed by a tangle of flimsy, tumescent, fluid-filled cords.

Inside the sac is what appears to be a young human. A baby, squirming and making soft sounds. The connective cords, still pulsing, are attached to a venous, purplish lump at one end of the sac. I rotate the sac, puzzling out how to separate the cords.

“Use your teeth,” Tsinoy suggests. I glare back at her, then twist again, and after a moment, to my infinite relief, the cords simply pull off, leaving seeping dimples. Then the cords withdraw, exuding blobs of fluid that I do my best to avoid inhaling.

The baby in the sac struggles reflexively in my arms.

“Now the others,” Tsinoy says.

I stuff the sac into a gray bag. “Leave it room to breathe,” Tsinoy tells me. I open the cinch a little and pass it back. Tsinoy takes it through the hole.

Four to go. After too long—and a bout of severe choking from inhaling a blob—I manage to half-birth the remaining four—all alive, all squirming.

The cords separate. Inside the gray bags, they grow quiet. I pass each to Tsinoy. “Who will feed them?”

“Nell says they’ll last long enough in the sacs.”

“Long enough for what?”

The Tracker withdraws and allows me to exit, just as the membrane wall closes up and swells outward, filling the cube, bumping my feet.

The hole closes. The hull has finished with this area.

I see no sign of the infants and with shock realize that Tsinoy is slightly larger. I have to say the worst possible thought flashes into my head, but she quickly demonstrates that she’s taken them under her spikes, where she can keep them warm and safe.

“They’d grow to adults if we let them, inside the sacs,” I say as we return the way we came. “That’s where I’m from. Like that. You, too, I suppose.”

Tsinoy squeezes back down the pipe to the chamber cap. I wonder if she has maternal instincts. I would no longer be surprised. Me, I feel something deeper than I can express.

“We’re taking them forward, right?” I ask, wiping my fingers and palms on my pants. “We’re not just going to