Hull Zero Three

twenty meters in length, with tiny button eyes and a shrewd pout of a mouth. The eel reacts to our motion, shuddering and lancing out. In a void between spiraling waves of liquid, sheets of fire writhe— lightning!

No sense putting your most deadly weapons in the same arena only to kill each other before their time arrives. Hence, six tanks.

Tsinoy makes an odd sound—not quite a growl, not yet a whimper. I look left and follow her gaze back to the tank that contains the helix-knife. As if one of those monsters is not enough, there are now five. They’ve joined nose to tail in a single, long, rolling, flexing coil. The coil inverts, and the tips of flexible knife-teeth furiously scrub the wall of the tank, as if trying to reach through to us. Practicing to obliterate some distant native ocean floor. I can see it: chained helix-knives destroying the heart of a planet’s life from its very foundations—and then themselves quietly dying, sinking, leaving the ocean waves to roll on, clear, pristine, and sterile.

Welcome to the truth of our world—a massive seed shot out to the stars, filled with deadly children. A seed designed to slay everything it touches.

The sphere speeds through a supporting bulkhead and a hollow, dark space surrounded by huge pipes, and into a ghostly, livid glow, where it slows and stops. The blue cube sighs and the sphere opens. We are allowed to leave.

We have returned to the forward tank chamber.

———

TSINOY IS DOUBLY nervous now that we have arrived at the bow. I notice a shift in the way everyone looks at me, at my twin. Suspicion has fallen on both of us.

“What happened to Kim?” my twin asks. “What about the girls?”

“The girls are aft,” I say. “I think they’re okay. I finally met Mother.” My throat constricts and my eyes well up. “She’s holding on to Kim. She seems busy. In charge. You might recognize her.”

“What’s she like?” my twin asks, and looking at the way his eyes move, I wonder if he hasn’t already guessed—or knows. Perhaps he also saw the drawing in the shaft. He might know instinctively—a purer form of adapted Teacher.

I describe her as best I can, words remarkably incapable of capturing her essence. My twin gives one large shiver—just as I did, hours before. “It can’t be her,” he says, without conviction. Instead, I detect a spooky longing. “Did she recognize you?” he asks.

“In a manner of speaking. We’re all mixed together,” I say. “Somebody filled our molds with mixed ingredients—mixed personalities.”

“Souhbuddy?” Tomchin asks. In our absence, Tomchin has devised a nasal sort of speech that I only half understand.

“Nell’s been communicating with Ship Control since you left,” my twin says as we pull ourselves to the thin forest of pylons. Nell still has her long, thin hands on the blue hemisphere. “She never lets go, but sometimes she talks. She says she’s receiving updates. I’m worried about her.”

We pause to digest all that we think we know, all that we think we have seen. I explain both legs of the journey as best I can—the monsters, the factors, in their huge tanks. I try to describe the gene pool—but my twin seems to see it already, in revived memory.

Nell stays attached, impassive, seemingly deaf to our words.

I conclude, “This isn’t just a colonizing ship; it’s a death factory.” I feel the conflict—and what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with surviving at all costs?

Nell releases her hands from the hemisphere and wrings her long fingers to get blood flow. “I’m famished,” she says.

“Whau’s Shibb gaeing to do?” Tomchin asks.

“Food first,” Nell insists. “We have to stay calm and think things through. There’s been too much confusion and conflict. But maybe—just maybe—we have enough clues that we can finally make good decisions.”

My twin volunteers to get food. I join him, just for camaraderie—and also because I want to keep an eye on him. I haven’t told anyone that Mother wants him to go back.

We retrieve food and bulbs of sweet liquid. Ship is still taking care of us—perhaps at Mother’s command. Or because of Nell.

Over food, Nell begins. “I’ve been speaking with someone who claims to represent—or to be—Destination Guidance,” she says. “I can’t trace where this voice comes from. I can’t even know if it’s one, or many, male or female or…” She holds back from saying human. “And I don’t know if we can trust anything it says. And, yes, the voice says Ship has been diverted.”

“From where, to where?” Tsinoy asks.

“Unknown. It’s all a mess. Some of us were created at the instigation of Destination Guidance—that’s what the voice claims.” Nell makes a face. “Destination Guidance tapped into a vein of conscience—something to that effect. It made sure that vein fed into some of us. Sometimes the patterns sent to the birthing rooms got confused, perhaps deliberately. Signals overlapping and parasitizing other signals. We were mixed in the mold, and even our molds were mixed—as Teacher says. Ship itself created another group to defend the original mission. One faction took control—and then another.” She looks at me with sad appraisal. “I think the fight has been going on for at least a hundred years. Mother has finally won control of the gene pool. She’s in charge of most of the factors.”

“Oh, Lord,” my twin says. He looks bleak.

“You both seem to know who and what this Mother is,” Nell says. “The girls helped you get born, favored you, escorted you to safety—and to this hull. It’s only natural to assume that one or both of you was created to be Mother’s ally, her consort. The rest of us were a necessary risk. We’d be eliminated later. There’s just one question left. Did either of you come equipped with a conscience?”

My twin has stayed close, interweaving his position with mine, as if to confuse the others. Until now, most of them could not have told us apart—or didn’t care to try. But Tsinoy has scrupulously watched us, tracking our scents. “Mother rejected him,” she tells Nell, raising a limb in my direction. “She sent him away to be killed. I brought him here through the killing tanks, as you suggested.”

Nell looks me over with narrow eyes, infinitely weary. She does not want this responsibility, this power.

“He smelled angry,” Tsinoy finishes. Then her snout does something that makes it more porous, less plated and shiny—and she sniffs my twin. “He’s in rut.”

He does smell a little rank.

My twin tries to kick away. Tsinoy intercepts him, holds him firmly but gently.

“Not you,” she husks.

PART THREE THE WORLD

My twin stammers out an argument that he’s as innocent as I am, that we’ve been making bad decisions all along and that there’s no way we can trust anything Destination Guidance says. He’s panicky, sharp-voiced. I feel sorry for him—and for me. He’s ruining it for both of us. Weakly, he concludes, “Maybe it fed all of you delusions in Dreamtime—just made it all up.”

“You have always smelled different,” Tsinoy grumbles. Her grumble sounds like distant thunder, and my hair stands on end. Inflection is not one of her talents.

“How in hell would you know what rut is?” he shouts, squirming in her grip. His face turns red. “You’re sexless—you’re neuter!”

“Only my body,” Tsinoy says.

He twists his face toward me. “You’d let them kill your own twin! You’ll be next!”

“Nobody says we’re going to kill you,” Nell says. She manages to look as if she’s reclining, one ankle under a