Galactic North

  “Adds up, I guess,” I said.

  “Money will make a lot of things add up,” Nicolosi replied.

  After two days, the Death of Sophonisba sped deeper into the night, while Martinez’s ship followed a pre-programmed flight plan designed to bring us within survey range of the hospital ship. The Ultras had scanned Nightingale again, and once again they’d elicited no detectable response from the dormant vessel. All indications were that the ship was in a deep cybernetic coma, as close to death as possible, with only a handful of critical life-support systems still running on a trickle of stored power.

  Over the next twenty-four hours we crept in closer, narrowing the distance to mere light-seconds, and then down to hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Still there was no response, but as the distance narrowed, so our sensors began to improve the detail in their scans. While the rest of us took turns sleeping, Martinez sat at his console, compositing the data, enhancing his schematic. Now and then Norbert would lean over the console and stare in numb concentration at the sharpening image, and occasionally he would mumble some remark or observation to which Martinez would respond in a patient, faintly condescending whisper, the kind that a teacher might reserve for a slow but willing pupil. Not for the first time I was touched by Martinez’s obvious kindness in employing the huge, slow Norbert, and I wondered what the war must have done to him to bring him to this state.

  When we were ten hours from docking, Martinez revealed the fruits of his labours. The schematic of the hospital ship was three-dimensional now, displayed in the navigational projection cylinder on the ship’s cramped flight deck. Although the basic layout of the ship hadn’t changed, the new plan was much more detailed than the first one. It showed docking points, airlocks, major mechanical systems and the largest corridors and spaces threading the ship’s interior. There was still a lot of guesswork, but it wouldn’t be as if we were entering completely foreign territory.

  “The biggest thermal hot spot is here,” Martinez said, pointing at an area about a quarter of the way along the vessel from the bow. “If Jax is anywhere, that’s my best guess as to where we’ll find him.”

  “Simple, then,” Nicolosi said. “In via that dorsal lock, then a straight sprint down that access shaft. Easy, even under weightless conditions. Can’t be more than fifty or sixty metres.”

  “I’m not happy,” Sollis said. “That’s a large lock, likely to be armed to the teeth with heavy-duty sensors and alarms.”

  “Can you get us through it?” Nicolosi asked.

  “You give me a door, I’ll get us through it. But I can’t bypass every conceivable security system, and you can be damned sure the ship will know about it if we come through a main lock.”

  “What about the others?” I asked, trying not to sound as if I was on her case. “Will they be less likely to go off?”

  “Nothing’s guaranteed. I don’t like the idea of spending a minute longer aboard that thing than necessary, but I’d still rather take my chances with the back door.”

  “I think Ingrid is correct,” Martinez said, nodding his approval. “There’s every chance of a silent approach and docking. Jax will have disabled all non-essential systems, including proximity sensors. If that’s the case—if we see no evidence of having tripped approach alarms—then I believe we would be best advised to maintain stealth.” He indicated further along the hull, beyond the rounded midsection bulge. “That will mean coming in here, or here, via one of these smaller service locks. I concur with Ingrid: they probably won’t be alarmed.”

  “That’ll give us four or five hundred metres of ship to crawl through,” Nicolosi said, leaving us in no doubt what he thought about that. “Four or five hundred metres for which we only have a very crude map.”

  “We’ll have directional guidance from our suits,” Martinez said.

  “It’s still a concern to me. But if you’ve settled upon this decision, I shall abide by it.”

  I turned to Sollis. “What you said just then—about not spending a minute longer aboard Nightingale than we have to?”

  “I wasn’t kidding.”

  “I know. But there was something about the way you said it. Do you know something about that ship that we don’t? You sounded spooked, and I don’t understand why. It’s just a disused hospital, after all.”

  Sollis studied me for a moment before answering. “Tell her, Nicolosi.”

  Nicolosi looked placidly at the other woman. “Tell her what?”

  “What she obviously doesn’t know. What none of us are in any great hurry to talk about.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “ ‘Oh please’ what?” I asked.

  “It’s just a fairy story, a stupid myth,” Nicolosi said.

  “A stupid story that nonetheless always claimed that Nightingale didn’t get blown up after all,” Sollis said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “What story?”

  It was Martinez who chose to answer. “That something unfortunate happened aboard her. That the last batch of sick and injured went in, but for some reason were never seen to leave. That all attempts to contact the technical staff failed. That an exploratory team was put aboard the ship, and that they too were never heard from again.”

  I laughed. “Fuck. And now we’re planning to go aboard?”

  “Now you see why I’m somewhat anxious to get this over with,” Sollis said.

  “It’s just a myth,” Martinez chided. “Nothing more. It is a tale to frighten children, not to dissuade us from capturing Jax. In fact, it would not surprise me in the least if Jax or his allies were in some way responsible for this lie. If it were to cause us to turn back now, it would have served them admirably, would it not?”

  “Maybe,” I said, without much conviction. “But I’d still have been happier if you’d told me before. It wouldn’t have made any difference to my accepting this job, but it would have been nice to know you trusted me.”

  “I do trust you, Dexia. I simply assumed that you had no interest in childish stories.”

  “How do you know Jax is aboard?” I asked.

  “We’ve been over this. I have my sources, sources that I must protect, and it would be—”

  “He was a patient, wasn’t he?”

  Martinez snapped his glasses from his nose, as if my point had taken an unexpected tangent from whatever we’d been talking about. “I know only that Jax is aboard Nightingale. The circumstances of how he arrived there are of no concern to me.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you that maybe he’s just dead, like whoever else was aboard at the end?” Sollis asked.

  “If he is dead, you will still receive twenty-five thousand Australs.”

  “Plus the extra ten we already agreed on.”

  “That too,” Martinez said, as if it should have been taken for granted.

  “I still don’t like this,” Sollis muttered.

  “I don’t like it either,” Nicolosi replied, “but we came here to do a job, and the material facts haven’t changed. There is a ship, and the man we want is aboard it. What Martinez says is true: we should not be intimidated by stories, especially when our goal is so near.”

  “We go in there, we get Jax, we get the hell out,” Sollis said. “No dawdling, no sightseeing, no souvenir-hunting.”

  “I have absolutely no problem with that,” I said.

  “Take what you want,” Martinez called over Norbert’s shoulder as we entered the armoury compartment at the rear of the shuttle’s pressurised section. “But remember: you’ll be wearing pressure suits, and you’ll be moving through confined spaces. You’ll also be aboard a ship.”

  Sollis pushed bodily ahead of me, pouncing on something that I’d only begun to notice. She unracked the sleek, cobalt-blue excimer rifle and hefted it for balance. “Hey, a Breitenbach.”

  “Christmas come early?” I asked.

  Sollis pulled a pose, sighting along the rifle, deploying its targeting aids, flipping the power-up toggle. The weapon whi
ned obligingly. Blue lights studded its stock, indicating it was ready for use.

  “Because I’m worth it,” Sollis said.

  “I’d really like you to point that thing somewhere else,” I said.

  “Better still, don’t point it anywhere,” Nicolosi rumbled. He’d seen one of the choicer items, too. He unclipped a long, matt-black weapon with a ruby-red dragon stencilled along the barrel. It had a gaping maw like a swallowing python. “Laser-confined plasma bazooka,” he said admiringly. “Naughty, but nice.”

  “Finesse isn’t your cup of tea, then.”

  “Never got to use one of these in the war, Dexia.”

  “That’s because they were banned. One of the few sensible things both sides managed to agree on.”

  “Now’s my chance.”

  “I think the idea is to extract Jax, not to blow ten-metre-wide holes in Nightingale.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be very, very careful.” He slung the bazooka over his shoulder, then continued down the aisle.

  I picked up a pistol, hefted it, replaced it on the rack. Found something more to my liking—a heavy, dual-gripped slug-gun—and flipped open the magazine to check that there was a full clip inside. Low-tech but reliable: the other two were welcome to their directed-energy weapons, but I’d seen how easily they could go wrong under combat conditions.

  “Nice piece, Dexia,” Sollis said, patronisingly. “Old school.”

  “I’m old school.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.”

  “You have a problem with that, we can always try some target practice.”

  “Hey, no objections. Just glad you found something to your liking. Doing better than old Norbert, anyway.” Sollis nodded over her shoulder. “Looks like he’s really drawn the short straw there.”

  I looked down the aisle. Norbert was near the end of one of the racks, examining a small, stubby-looking weapon whose design I didn’t recognise. In his huge hands it looked ridiculous, like something made for a doll.

  “You sure about that?” I called. “Maybe you want to check out one of these—”

  Norbert looked at me as if I was some kind of idiot. I don’t know what he did then—there was no movement of his hand that I was aware of—but the stubby little weapon immediately unpacked itself, elongating and opening like some complicated puzzle box until it was almost twice as big, twice as deadly-looking. It had the silken, precision-engineered quality of expensive off-world tech. A Demarchist toy, probably, but a very, very deadly toy for all that.

  Sollis and I exchanged a wordless glance. Norbert had found what was probably the most advanced, most effective weapon in the room.

  “Will do,” Norbert said, before closing the weapon up again and slipping it into his belt.

  We crept closer. Tens of thousands of kilometres, then thousands, then hundreds. I looked through the hull windows, with the interior lights turned down, peering in the direction where our radar and infrared scans told us the hospital ship was waiting. When we were down to two dozen kilometres I knew I should be seeing it, but I was still only looking at stars and the sucking blackness between them. I had a sudden, visceral sense of how easy it would be to lose something out here, followed in quick succession by a dizzying sense of how utterly small and alone we were, now that the lighthugger was gone.

  And then, suddenly, there was Nightingale.

  We were coming in at an angle, so the hull was tilted and foreshortened. It was so dark that only certain edges and surfaces were visible at all. No windows, no running lights, no lit-up docking bays. The ship looked as dark and dead as a sliver of coal. Suddenly it was absurd to think that there might be anyone alive aboard it. Colonel Jax’s corpse, perhaps, but not the living or even life-supported body that would guarantee us full payment.

  Martinez had the ship on manual control now. With small, deft applications of thrust he narrowed the distance down to less than a dozen kilometres. At six kilometres, Martinez deemed it safe to activate floodlights and play them along the length of the hull, confirming the placement of locks and docking sites. There was a peppering of micrometeorite impacts and some scorching from high-energy particles, but nothing I wouldn’t have expected on a ship that had been sitting out there since the armistice. If the ship possessed self-repair mechanisms, they were sleeping as well. Even when we circled around the hull and swept it from the other side, there was no hint of our having been noticed. Still reluctant, Nicolosi accepted that we would follow Sollis’s entry strategy, entering via one of the smaller service locks.

  It was time to do it.

  We docked. We came in softly, but there was still a solid clunk as the capture latches engaged and grasped our little craft to the hull of the hospital ship. I thought of that clunk echoing away down the length of Nightingale, diminishing as it travelled, but potentially still significant enough to trip some waiting, infinitely patient alarm system, alerting the sleeping ship that it had a visitor. For several minutes we hung in weightless silence, staring out of the windows or watching the sensor read-outs for the least sign of activity. But the dark ship stayed dark in all directions. There was no detectable change in her state of coma.

  “Nothing’s happened,” Martinez said, breaking the silence with a whisper. “It still doesn’t know we’re here. The lock is all yours, Ingrid. I’ve already opened our doors.”

  Sollis, suited-up now, moved into the lock tube with her toolkit. While she worked, the rest of us finished putting on our own suits and armour, completing the exercise as quietly as possible. I hadn’t worn a spacesuit before, but Norbert was there to help all of us with the unfamiliar process: his huge hands attended to delicate connections and catches with surprising dexterity. Once I had the suit on, it didn’t feel much different from wearing full-spectrum bioarmour, and I quickly got the hang of the life-support indicators projected around the border of my faceplate. I would only need to pay minor attention to them: unless there was some malfunction, the suit had enough power and supplies to keep me alive in perfect comfort for three days; longer if I was prepared to tolerate a little less comfort. None of us were planning on spending anywhere near that long aboard Nightingale.

  Sollis was nearly done when we assembled behind her in the lock. The inner and outer lock doors on our side were open, exposing the grey outer door of the hospital ship, held tight against the docking connector by pressure-tight seals. I doubted that she’d ever had to break into a ship before, but nothing about the mechanism appeared to be causing Sollis any difficulties. She’d tugged open an access panel and plugged in a fistful of coloured cables, running back to a jury-rigged electronics module in her toolkit. She was tapping a little keyboard, causing patterns of lights to alter within the access panel. The face of a woman—blank, expressionless, yet at the same time somehow severe and unforgiving—had appeared in an oval frame above the access panel.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s Nightingale,” Sollis said, adding, by way of explanation, “The ship had its own gamma-level personality, keeping the whole show running. Pretty smart piece of thinkware by all accounts: full Turing compliance; about as clever as you can make a machine before you have to start giving it human rights.”

  I looked at the stern-faced woman, expecting her to query us at any moment. I imagined her harsh and hectoring voice demanding to know what business any of us had boarding Nightingale, trespassing aboard her ship, her hospital.

  “Does she know . . .” I started.

  Sollis shook her head. “This is just a dumb facet of the main construct. Not only is it inactive—the image is frozen into the door’s memory—but it doesn’t appear to have any functioning data links back to the main sentience engine. Do you, Nightingale?”

  The face gazed at us impassively, but still said nothing.

  “See: deadsville. My guess is the sentience engine isn’t running at all. Out here, the ship wouldn’t need much more than a trickle of intelligence to keep itself ticking over.”

 
“So the gamma’s off-line?”

  “Uh-huh. Best way, too. You don’t want one of those things sitting around too long without something to do.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause they tend to go nuts. That’s why the Conjoiners won’t allow gamma-level intelligences in any of their machines. They say it’s a kind of slavery.”

  “Running a hospital must have been enough to stop Nightingale’s gamma running off the rails.”

  “Let’s hope so. Let’s really hope so.” Sollis glanced back at her work, then emitted a grunt of satisfaction as a row of lights flicked to orange. She unplugged a bunch of coloured cables and looked back at the waiting party. “Okay: we’re good to go. I can open the door any time you’re ready.”

  “What’s on the other side of it?” I asked.

  “According to the door, air: normal trimix. Bitchingly cold, but not frozen. Pressure’s manageable. I’m not sure we could breathe it, but—”

  “We’re not breathing anything,” Martinez said curtly. “Our airlock will take two people. One of them will have to be you, Ingrid, since you know how to work the mechanism. I shall accompany you, and then we shall wait for the others on the far side, when we have established that conditions are safe.”

  “Maybe one of us should go through instead of you,” I said, wondering why Norbert hadn’t volunteered to go through ahead of his master. “We’re expendable, but you aren’t. Without you, Jax doesn’t go down.”

  “Considerate of you, Dexia, but I paid you to assist me, not take risks on my behalf.”

  Martinez propelled himself forward. Norbert, Nicolosi and I edged back to permit the inner door to close again. On the common suit channel I heard Sollis say, “We’re opening Nightingale. Stand by: comms might get a bit weaker once we’re on the other side of all this metal.”

  Nicolosi pushed past me, back into the flight deck. I heard the heavy whine of servos as the door opened. Breathing and scuffling sounds followed, but nothing that alarmed me.