Greg Bear: Hull Zero Three

“Wait!” I shout.

“Quiet,” she says. “If you’re noisy, I’ll leave you behind. Lots of things don’t want us here.”

The girl flies well ahead of me. Her trail is a kind of vortex of objects she has used to maneuver, most of which get in my way. I wonder what will happen if the heaviness returns while we’re caught in all this debris. This thought forces a rapid learning curve—much better than the alternative, panic—and soon I’m kicking, spinning, and fending with an alacrity I hope is skill, until the half-armored furry thing looms, a wall of leaking fluid and tufty darkness, and there’s nothing I can do to avoid it. I curl into a ball and crunch up against the shiny carapace. This halts my flight abruptly and sets the dead thing spinning. Dark drops and spheroids, some trailing little tails of fluid, radiate outward in a thin, clumpy cloud.

I’m now truly adrift, nothing to kick against, and thus in a position to study the black thing more closely. It’s been severely damaged; wounded might be the right word. One whole furry side is heavily lacerated. This is the source of most of the leakage, though some fluid has also seeped from what might be a mouth, gaping beneath a trio of tiny, shiny eyes. The head, where the eyes and mouth are, is tiny, underslung, on a thick, short neck.

The sectioned carapace covers what might have been a huge hump of back, while on the sides—now spinning into view—there are six thick, equally spaced legs, culminating in flat, bristle-edged feet with central pits or holes. The legs have drawn inward in death.

As it spins, I realize that the thing has three heads, really, like the points of a rounded triangle. Two legs flank each head. To one side of a head is what might have been the ruglike appendage that scooped up the girl, now rolled tight and almost withdrawn into a sheath.

I can’t connect this creature to anything I’ve experienced, and what little I can draw out of the Dreamtime is also no help.

Another chunk of debris—flat and gray and, I am thankful, not leaking—rotates slowly into position. I pull up my legs, tuck in my arms, and wait for it to connect with my feet—flat, dense, perfect. I kick away and straighten, then draw in my legs, hold out my arms, and make wide stroking motions with my hands. I think I’m swimming.

The void’s great curving wall draws closer. I see now that its surface is spattered with carbonized, crusty stains, like the inside of an immense oven. I look for the opening that leads back to the tube. I see it, and there, just inside, waits the girl, floating in lotus again—the position named after a flower.

A flower from old Earth.

Pleased with myself—I got the words, I got the moves—I bounce and claw and push toward her. But she’s not paying me a bit of attention. Instead, hovering near the fistula that joins the tube and the junk-filled void, she’s alerted on something just out of sight, outside the void, still inside the tube. Whatever it is makes scrabbling noises—and then speaks. I hear several voices, using words I don’t understand. I stop my forward motion by setting a block of white ceramic whirling away. The block hits other objects with resonant clunks, like caroming billiard balls.

“Billiard. Billiards.” I say these words aloud. Brilliant! All my right words are returning in a rush—just in time for something to come out of the tube and kill us both.

The girl looks my way, one eyebrow lowered in disapproval, holds a finger to her slightly twisted lip, and nods, as if we understand perfectly well what we need to do next.

I shake my head, clueless. But I’m all she has.

The voices inside the tube grow louder, insistent. Maybe they’re calling to us. The girl isn’t about to risk revealing herself, so I keep quiet as well. I have to trust her, though if worse comes, I suspect she’ll not hesitate to sacrifice me, use me as a shield or a decoy.

The whole situation falls into a profound quiet—all but the shuffle and clunk of slowly moving, colliding objects behind and around us.

Perversely, I again notice my hunger. I wonder if the furry armored thing has any parts that are edible. My mouth starts to water with what little spit I can muster. Maybe that’s why it was killed and lacerated—to liberate chunks of food. The blood may taste bad but the rest of it good. If that’s so, then why isn’t the void swarming with hunters, diners? A Ship this size—if it is a Ship—should carry thousands like the girl and me. Hungry thousands, trying to survive in pointless chaos.

The girl points to the fistula—the opening. She jabs her finger and opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Then I see what she means.

The fistula is shrinking. All the debris is shifting in one direction—to our left. We’re moving as well. We’re going back to being heavy. The girl unfolds her arms and legs, looks for an opportunity to push off. I follow her motions and try to calculate the vectors of tons of broken objects. More bodies come into view, one or two human, most not, some much larger, unfolding long chains of armor plates—carapaces, I think.

All dead, not moving.

Except for one.

Until now, it must have been at the far side of the void, listening for movement. I glimpse it in the gaps. The gaps are closing as the debris is compressed to one side of the void, with me in it—along with what I’ve just seen, a sinuous, eel-like creature, many times my size. Thick bands of limbs spaced along its length flex in unison. A huge circular maw at one end pushes out a cone-shaped rasp, studded with glistening, silvery teeth.

The dead black cleaner comes between us. I’m on one side, the long eel on the other.

The girl is flying toward the fistula, which is now less than two body lengths wide.

I see my opportunity and kick against a curved beam, but the beam rotates under my foot. Its mass is less than I calculated—very light, in fact. My opposite motion is barely a crawl. I windmill my arms and legs. The fistula is six or seven body lengths away.

The long thing with the big mouth has tried taking a gobbet out of the six-legged beast, but shivers violently, undulating in the collapsing cloud—

It all tastes bad, I guess.

A big flat sheet of something with broken, melted edges comes into view, angled just right if I kick off the leading edge—but I have to swim, push air, grab a small soggy chunk and throw it, increase my speed any way I can….

The chunk is a severed hand. No matter.

The long eel has wrapped part of its length around a big gray object and suddenly stabs at me with its toothy rasp, and from the end of the rasp thrusts out a snapping beak. The sheet is almost within reach. I hope it’s massive. It wobbles on a rolling, complex axis. Then, mercifully, it hides the raspy, beaky eel from my view.

Last chance. I stretch my legs, connect solidly with the edge of the sheet, kick as hard as I can, and arrow toward the fistula.

The sheet spins and moves off in the general direction of a new heaviness. The fistula is just wide enough to drop through….

I glide toward it, arguably toward the safer option, hungry, scared out of my wits. I see it behind me again, the toothy snout and beak so close!

I can smell its acid, sour-sweet breath—

I’m through! I slam into the far surface of the tube, then scramble for purchase with my raw knees and feet and hands to get out of the way of what I know is coming—

The rasp and head thrusts through the fistula, beak snapping, teeth gnashing, meshing, gnashing in reverse, then withdrawing behind thick lips, the whole apparatus sphinctering shut. The top of the long thing’s body whips in my direction. I see the little girl and behind her, other figures—but I have to get out of the way.