Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

I don’t dare look up. I can hear it scraping, sliding, jamming again, scraping some more—and that’s all I hear. No scrabbling, no attempt to hang on, no sounds of apprehension or fear.

The glow around and above me dims in a rush. I feel air. Then the big black shape whooshes past, edgewise but brushing my shirt, and I look just in time to see two other bodies, parts of bodies, falling in its wake. One is a Scarlet-Brown—just a head and shoulders terminating in old meat and clotted gore. The other is more like me, probably male. I can’t see the face, but he’s bigger and bulkier, dressed in reddish overalls and seemingly intact, with skin about the same color. Could be a Knob-Crest.

I watch the whole tangle fall with softer, dead, diminishing sounds… Into the shadows. Only in the backdraft do I smell the char of singed meat.

For some reason, survival makes me laugh. I’ve come this far, I become multitudes—I’m more than eccentric, I’m plain silly—my life makes me laugh in mad earnest. I stop laughing, suck as much air as I can stand, try not to retch, and continue my climb, hand over hand. Following instinct.

The walls of the shaft from this point on are covered with spiraling sweeps of soot and rainbow-oily discolorations. The surface has been heat-treated. Burned. The rungs are still intact and strong… so far.

Another hour.

I’m not feeling all that bright. I wonder if I’m taking the same path I took the last time, or whether my counterparts followed one or both of the forking corridors. The shaft gets more soot-stained. Then I see it clear.

A swirl of superheated air or actual flame, carrying bits of fuel, swept down the shaft and came up against the cleaner, just doing its duty but plugging the flow. It crisped, died, and jammed, and debris fell on its upper surface. Parts of bodies.

This is like a war.

This is a war.

Another half hour of climbing and I arrive at the end. Not the end of the shaft as designed, but a shattered, burned stump of internal piping, intimate ship architecture opening onto dark, smelly nastiness.

Thrusting into amazing destruction.

The melted and cracked rim of the broken shaft rises three meters from a shadowy churn of broken bulkheads, conduits, decking. I poke up and look around.

I’m on one side of a roughly cylindrical void about sixty meters across. I now weigh considerably less than I did when I began. I might be half a kilometer closer to the center of the hull. Much farther inboard and spin-up will be little more than a nuisance—my weight will be negligible.

I can’t make sense of the mess. Any prior design, any obvious function has been obliterated. The pervasive smell is bitter-flowery, nauseating. Everything around me is coated with an iridescent film. I reach out from the last rung to touch the outer surface of the shaft, and my finger comes away slick. Using the inadequate illumination from the shaft’s few remaining glim lights, I hold my finger close to my eye and see that the film is trying to bead up, organize. It doesn’t want to have anything to do with my flesh.

I wipe the film off on the shaft’s internal surface. There, I watch it spread out and join with other patches of iridescence, migrating toward the ruined edge. The patches are trying to form a kind of dressing. The film wants to completely coat the destruction and begin… what? Repairs?

Ship can fix itself even without factors? Or is the film another kind of factor, another lively tool?

There’s movement on the opposite side of the void. Something large clambers over the wreckage, hooking its way, then stopping to hang loose—a shiny black conoid trunk with a skirt or fringe and twelve long, sinuous but jointed appendages, delicately poking, feeling, attempting to shift broken pieces, as if putting together a shattered vase. It emits soft wheeps and whirs , despondent, overwhelmed. Its trunk, fringe, and radiating limbs flicker with channeled spots of blue and red luminescence.

Some wreckage breaks away and falls casually to my side of the void, jarring the conoid. Its fringe rises in a lapping wave. The limbs sweep the stinking air. It could be a fixer—one of the factors you’d expect in a ruined space. Drawing up its estimate for repairs and not happy with the bill.

Above me, I make out a breach in a far bulkhead, and beyond that, a fluctuating brightness like cold flame. Another fixer squeezes into the void through the breach and scuttles to join its fellow, knocking loose more debris. I duck into the tube as a conduit slams onto the top of the shaft, falls to one side, wobbles, settles. I poke up again. The fixers touch limbs, whir and wheep with a dignified musical pattern.

In a short while, after spin-down, I’ll try to leap across to the breach, which seems to offer access to another chamber beyond. I have no notion whether the space will be undamaged or livable, but the smell here is intolerable.

I look around the void and wonder what spin-down will do to the wreckage—how it will rearrange, drift loose. I’ve already had experience with junk in free fall and don’t wish to repeat it. I could drop back into the shaft and hide, but there’s no guarantee the wreckage won’t cover the opening. No, my only chance is to kick out across the damaged space to the breach as soon as spin-down is complete and hope for the best.

I measure the distance and the angle with my eye, searching for a relatively smooth surface from which to kick off.

Any reasonable trajectory will take me across two-thirds of the void. The breach is three meters wide. A tiny target to reach in one jump.

Something becomes silhouetted within the blue glow. It might be a head. I can’t see clearly. The sting in the air is filming my eyes, and wiping them seems a bad idea. The next time I get a good look, the breach is open, empty.

I’m sure some of the film has coated my clothes, where it’s unhappily trying to clump up and break loose. Much longer in this space and I’ll likely have enough of the active stuff in my lungs to kill me.

The lurch comes. I grab a rung and hang on. All around, wreckage tumbles, rolls, cascades away from the outer reaches of the void. Big pieces break loose and wobble and spin. The whole void becomes a noisy, slamming, chiming circus of mindless debris—all of it tending toward the opposite of our spin. There, it loosely gathers, bounces, and with spin-down finished, drifts across my proposed path with all the leisure of strolling elephants.

I stay low in the shaft but keep an eye on the blue glow within the breach. Debris transits. Some pieces threaten to enter the shaft—but miss. I can’t make out the fixers. If they’ve lasted this long, they’ve likely hooked themselves down and are patiently waiting out the change of momentum.

My jumping-off point, a relatively smooth, broad shaft edge, is just above the last rung. I give some thought to using the rung itself, but it’s too narrow to accommodate both my feet.

Things aren’t going to get any better.

I swing out like an inchworm (another amusing but useless image—some sort of young insect, not a spider) and straddle the edge of the shaft, then grip it with my thighs, straighten my torso, transfer grip to my hands, and arch my back again—plant my feet firmly, bend my knees, look over my shoulder…

A piece the size of a horse just misses me. I don’t give a damn what a horse is.

I kick off. It’s a solid kick, the angle looks good. I sail across the void at a decent clip. Still looks good. I draw in both arms and a leg to avoid a twirling chunk of pipe about as wide as my thigh. This starts me wheeling around an axis through my hips. I can’t stop it, but the motion is slow enough not to cause injury, unless I collide with something sharp. I see lots of sharp things. I count the rotations, having nothing better to do, but at the end of five, something large and translucent dims the light from the breach. Could be the film in my eyes. I don’t see it now—don’t want to see it, can’t help but look. Something big and confusing, like an animal made of rods of glass. Not entirely colorless, however. A small, bright red spot clues me that the thing is actually moving in my direction, not just spreading out….