“I think I have stated my case, Ingrid. Dwelling on myths won’t bring a wanted man to justice.”
“We’re looking at about a million tonnes of salvageable spacecraft here. Gotta be worth something to someone. So why didn’t anyone get their hands on it after the war?”
“Because something bad happened,” Nicolosi said. “Maybe there was some truth in the story about that boarding party coming here and not leaving.”
“Oh, please,” Martinez said.
“So who was fighting back?” I asked. “Who stopped them taking Nightingale?”
Nicolosi answered me. “The skeleton staff . . . security agents of the postmortals who financed this thing . . . maybe even the protective systems of the ship itself. If it thought it was under attack—”
“If there was some kind of firefight aboard this thing,” I asked, “where’s the damage?”
“I don’t care about the damage,” Sollis cut in. “I want to know what happened to all the bodies.”
We came to another blocked double-door airlock. Sollis got to work on it immediately, but my expectation that she would work faster now that she had already opened several doors without trouble was wrong. She kept plugging things in, checking read-outs, murmuring to herself just loud enough to carry over the voice link. Nightingale’s face watched us disapprovingly, looking on like the portrait of a disappointed ancestor.
“This one could be trickier,” she said. “I’m picking up active data links, running away from the frame.”
“Meaning it could still be hooked into the nervous system? ” Nicolosi asked.
“I can’t rule it out.”
Nicolosi ran a hand along the smooth black barrel of his plasma weapon. “We could double back, try a different route.”
“We’re not going back,” Martinez said. “Not now. Open the door, Ingrid: we’ll take our chances and move as quickly as we can from now on.”
“You sure about this?” She had a cable pinched between her fingers. “No going back once I plug this in.”
“Do it.”
She pushed the line in. At the same moment a shiver of animation passed across Nightingale’s face, the mask waking to life. The door spoke to us. Its tone was strident and metallic, but also possessed of an authoritative femininity.
“This is the Voice of Nightingale. You are attempting to access a secure area. Report to central administration to obtain proper clearance.”
“Shit,” Sollis said.
“You weren’t expecting that?” I asked.
“I wasn’t expecting an active facet. Maybe the sentience engine isn’t powered down quite as far as I thought.”
“This is the Voice of Nightingale,” the door said again. “You are attempting to access a secure area. Report to central administration to obtain proper clearance.”
“Can you still force it?” Nicolosi asked.
“Yeah . . . think so.” Sollis fumbled in another line, made some adjustments and stood back as the door slid open. “Voilà.”
The face had turned silent and masklike again, but now I really felt as if we were being watched; as if the woman’s eyes seemed to be looking in all directions at once.
“You think Jax knows about us now?” I asked, as Sollis propelled herself into the holding chamber between the two sets of doors.
“I don’t know. Maybe I bypassed the door in time, before it sent an alert.”
“But you can’t be sure.”
“No.” She sounded wounded.
Sollis got to work on the second door, faster now, urgency overruling caution. I checked that my gun was still where I’d left it, and then made sure that the safety catch was still off. Around me, the others went through similar preparatory rituals.
Gradually it dawned on me that Sollis was taking longer than expected. She turned from the door, her equipment still hooked into its open service panel.
“Something’s screwed up,” she said, before swallowing hard. “These suits we’re wearing, Tomas . . . how good are they, exactly?”
“Full-spectrum battle-hardened. Why do you ask?”
“Because the door says that the ship’s flooded behind this point. It says we’ll be swimming through something.”
“I see,” Martinez said.
“Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re not doing this. We’re not going underwater.”
“I can’t be sure it’s water, Dexia.” She tapped the read-out panel, as if I should have been able to make sense of the numbers and symbols. “Could be anything warm and wet, really.”
Martinez shrugged within his suit. “Could have been a containment leak . . . spillage into this part of the ship. It’s nothing to worry about. Our suits will cope easily, provided we do not delay.”
I looked him hard in the faceplate, meeting his eyes, making certain he couldn’t look away. “You’re sure about this? These suits aren’t going to stiff on us as soon as they get wet?”
“The suits will continue to function. I am so certain that I will go first. When you hear that I am safe on the other side, you can all follow.”
“I don’t like this. What if Ingrid’s tools don’t work under water?”
“We have no choice but to keep moving forward,” Martinez said. “If this section of the ship is flooded, we’ll run into it no matter which route we take. This is the only way.”
“Then let’s do it,” I said. “If these suits made it through the war, surely they’ll get us through the next chamber.”
“It’s not the suits I’m worried about,” Nicolosi said, examining his weapon again. “No one mentioned immersion when we were in the armoury.”
I cupped a hand to my crude little slug-gun. “I’ll swap you, we make it to the other side.”
Nicolosi didn’t say anything. I don’t think he saw the funny side.
Two minutes later we were inside, floating weightless in the unlit gloom of the flooded room. It felt like water, but it was difficult to tell. Everything felt thick and sluggish when you were wearing a suit, even thin air. My biohazard detectors weren’t registering anything, but that didn’t necessarily mean the fluid was safe. The detectors were tuned to recognise a handful of toxins in common wartime use; they weren’t designed to sniff out every harmful agent that had ever existed.
Martinez’s voice buzzed in my helmet. “There are no handholds or guide wires. We’ll just have to swim in a straight direction, trusting to our inertial compasses. If we all stay within sight of each other, we should have no difficulties. ”
“Let’s get on with it,” Nicolosi said.
We started swimming as best as we could, Nicolosi leading, pushing himself forward with powerful strokes, his weapons dangling from their straps. It would have been hard and slow with just the suits to contend with, but we were all wearing armour as well. It made it difficult to see ahead; difficult to reach forward to get an effective stroke; difficult to kick our legs enough to make any useful contribution. Our helmet lamps struggled to illuminate more than ten or twenty metres in any direction, and the door by which we’d entered was soon lost behind us in gloom. I felt a constricting sense of panic: the fear that if the compasses failed we might never find our way out again.
The compasses didn’t fail, though, and Nicolosi maintained his unfaltering pace. Two minutes into the swim he called, “I see the wall. It’s dead ahead of us.”
A couple of seconds later I saw it hove out of the deep-pink gloom. Any relief I might have felt was tempered by the observation that the wall appeared featureless, stretching away blankly in all illuminated directions.
“There’s no door,” I said.
“Maybe we experienced some lateral drift,” Nicolosi said.
“Compass says no.”
“Then maybe the doors are offset. It doesn’t matter: we’ll find it by hitting the wall and spiralling out from our landing spot.”
“If there’s a door.”
“If there isn’t,” Nicolosi said, “we shoot our way out.
”
"Glad you’ve thought this through,” I said, realising that he was serious.
We drew nearer to the wall. The closer we got and the more clearly it was picked out by our lamps, the more I realised there was something not quite right about it. It was still blank—lacking any struts or panels, apertures or pieces of shipboard equipment—but it wasn’t the seamless surface I’d have expected from a massive sheet of prefabricated spacecraft material. There was an unsettling texture to it, with something of the fibrous quality of cheap paper. Faint lines coursed through it, slightly darker than the rest of the wall, but not arranged according to any neat geometric pattern. They curved and branched, and threw off fainter subsidiary lines, diminishing like the veins in a leaf.
In a nauseating flash I realised exactly what the wall was made of. When Nicolosi’s palms touched the surface, it yielded like a trampoline, absorbing the momentum of his impact and then sending him back out again, until his motion was damped by the surrounding fluid.
“It’s . . .” I began.
“Skin. I know. I realised just before I hit.”
I arrested my motion, but not quickly enough to avoid contact with the wall of skin. It yielded under me, stretching so much that I felt in danger of ripping my way right through. But it held, and began to trampoline me back in the direction I’d come from. Fighting a tide of revulsion, I pulled back into the liquid and floated amidst the others.
“Fuck,” Sollis said. “This isn’t right. There shouldn’t be fucking skin—”
“Don’t be alarmed,” Martinez said, wheezing between each word. “This is just another form of organ library, like the room we already passed through. I believe the liquid we’re swimming in must be a form of growth-support medium . . . something like amniotic fluid. Under wartime conditions, this whole chamber would have been full of curtains of growing skin, measured by the acre.”
Nicolosi groped for something on his belt, came up with a serrated blade that glinted nastily even in the pink fluid.
“I’m cutting through.”
“No!” Martinez barked.
Sollis, who was next to Nicolosi, took hold of his forearm. “Easy, soldier. Got to be a better way.”
“There is,” Martinez said. “Put the knife away, please. We can go around the skin, find its edge.”
Nicolosi still had the blade in his hand. “I’d rather take the short cut.”
“There are nerve endings in that skin. Cut them and the monitoring apparatus will know about it. Then so will the ship.”
“Maybe the ship already knows we’re here.”
“We don’t take that chance.”
Reluctantly, Nicolosi returned the knife to his belt. “I thought we’d agreed to move fast from now on,” he said.
“There’s fast, and there’s reckless,” Sollis said. “You were about to cross the line.”
Martinez brushed past me, already swimming to the left. I followed him, with the others tagging on behind. After less than a minute of hard progress, a dark edge emerged into view. It was like a picture frame stretching tight the canvas of skin. Beyond the edge, only just visible, was a wall of the chamber, fretted with massive geodesic reinforcing struts.
I allowed myself a moment of ease. We were still in danger, still in about the most claustrophobic situation I could imagine, but at least now the chamber didn’t seem infinitely large.
Martinez braked himself by grabbing the frame. I came to rest next to him and peered around the edge, towards what I hoped would be the wall we’d been heading towards all along. But instead of that I saw only another field of skin, stretched across another frame, separated from the first by no more than the height of a man. In the murky distance was the suggestion of a third frame, and perhaps a fourth beyond that.
“How many?” I asked as the others arrived on the frame, perching like crows.
“I don’t know,” Martinez said. “Four, five . . . anything up to a dozen, I’d guess. But it’s okay. We can swim around the frames, then turn right and head back to where we’d expect to find the exit door.” He raised his voice. “Everyone all right? No problems with your suits?”
“There are lights,” Nicolosi said quietly.
We turned to look at him.
“I mean over there,” he added, nodding in the direction of the other sheets of skin. “I saw a flicker of something . . . a glow in the water, or amniotic fluid, or whatever the fuck this is.”
“I see light, too,” Norbert said.
I looked down and saw that he was right—Nicolosi had not been imagining it. A pale, trembling light was emerging from between the next two layers of skin.
“Whatever that is, I don’t like it,” I said.
“Me neither,” Martinez said. “But if it’s something going on between the skin layers, it doesn’t have to concern us. We swim around, avoid them completely.”
He kicked off with surprising determination, and I followed quickly after him. The reverse side of the skin sheet was a fine mesh of pale support fibres, the structural matrix upon which the skin must have been grown and nourished. Thick black cables ran across the underside, arranged in circuit-like patterns.
The second sheet, the one immediately behind the first, was of different pigmentation from the one behind it. In all other respects it appeared similar, stretching unbroken into pink haze. The flickering, trembling light source was visible through the flesh, silhouetting the veins and arteries at the moments when the light was brightest.
We passed around the second sheet and peered into the gap between the second and third layers. Picked out in stuttering light was a tableau of furtive activity. Four squid-like robots were at work. Each machine consisted of a tapering, cone-shaped body, anchored to the skin by a cluster of whip-like arms emerging from the blunt end of the cone. The robots were engaged in precise surgery, removing a blanket-sized rectangle of skin by cutting it free along four sides. The robots generated their own illumination, shining from the ends of some of their arms, but the bright flashing light was coming from some kind of laser-like tool that each robot deployed on the end of a single segmented arm that was thicker than any of the others. I couldn’t tell whether the flashes were part of the cutting, or the instant healing that appeared to be taking place immediately afterwards. There was no bleeding, and the surrounding skin appeared unaffected.
“What are they doing?” I breathed.
“Harvesting,” Martinez answered. “What does it look like?”
“I know they’re harvesting. I mean, why are they doing it? What do they need that skin for?”
“I don’t know.”
“You had plenty of answers in the organ library, Mister Martinez,” Sollis said. All five of us had slowed, hovering at the same level as the surgical robots. “For a ship that’s supposed to be dormant . . . I’m not seeing much fucking evidence of dormancy.”
“Nightingale grows skin here,” I said. “I can deal with that. The ship’s keeping a basic supply going, in case it’s called into another war. But that doesn’t explain why it needs to harvest some now.”
Martinez sounded vague. “Maybe it’s testing the skin . . . making sure it’s developing according to plan.”
“You’d think a little sample would be enough for that,” I said. “A lot less than several square metres, for sure. That’s enough skin to cover a whole person.”
“I really wish you hadn’t said that,” Nicolosi said.
“Let’s keep moving,” Martinez said. And he was right, too, I thought: the activity of the robots was deeply unsettling, but we hadn’t come here to sightsee.
As we swam away—with no sign that the robots had noticed us—I thought about what Ingrid Sollis had said before. About how it wasn’t clever to leave a gamma-level intelligence up and running without something to occupy itself. Because otherwise—since duty was so deeply hardwired into their logic pathways—they tended to go slowly, quietly, irrevocably insane.
And Nightingale had been alone o
ut there since the end of the war. What did that mean for its controlling mind? Was the hospital running itself out there—reliving the duties of its former life, no matter how pointless they had become—because the mind had already gone mad, or was this the hospital’s last-ditch way of keeping itself sane?
And what, I wondered, did any of that have to do with the man we had come here to find in the first place?
We kept swimming, passing layer upon layer of skin. Now and then we’d come across another surgical party: another group of robots engaged in skin-harvesting. Where they’d already completed their task, the flesh had been excised in neat rectangles and strips, exposing the gauzelike mesh of the growth matrix. Occasionally I saw a patch that was half-healed already, the skin growing back in rice-paper translucence. By the time it was fully repaired, I doubted that there’d be any sign of where the skin had been cut.
Ten layers, then twelve—and then finally the wall I’d been waiting for hove into view like a mirage. But I wasn’t imagining it, or seeing another layer of drum-tight skin. There was the same pattern of geodesic struts as I’d seen on the other wall.
Sollis’s voice came through. “Got a visual on the door, people. We’re nearly out of here. I’m swimming ahead to start work.”
“Good, Ingrid,” Martinez called back.
A few seconds later I saw the airlock for myself, relieved that Sollis hadn’t been mistaken. She swam quickly, then—even as she was gliding to a halt by the door— commenced unclipping tools and connectors from her belt. Through the darkening distance of the pink haze I watched her flip down the service panel and begin her usual systems-bypass procedure. I was glad Martinez had found Sollis. Whatever else one might say about her, she was pretty hot at getting through doors.
“Okay, good news,” she said after a minute of plugging things in and out. “There’s air on the other side. We’re not going to have to swim in this stuff for much longer.”
“How much longer?” Nicolosi asked.
“Can’t risk a short circuit here, guy. Gotta take things one step at a time.”
Just as she was saying that, I became aware that we were casting shadows against the wall—shadows we hadn’t been casting when we arrived. I twisted around and looked back the way we’d just swum, in the direction of the new light source I knew had to be there. Four of the squid-like machines were approaching us, dragging a blanket of newly harvested skin between them, one robot grasping each corner between two segmented silver tentacles. They were moving faster than we could swim, driven by some propulsion system jetting fluid from the sharp ends of their cone-shaped bodies.