Galactic North

  The flashing red lights ran all the way to the end of the corridor. I was just looking at the door, wondering how easy it was going to be for Sollis to crack, when Norbert/ Martinez brought the three of us to a halt, braking my forward momentum with one tree-like forearm.

  “Blast visor down, Scarrow.”

  I understood what he had in mind. No more sweet-talking the doors until they opened for us. From now on we’d be shooting our way through Nightingale.

  Norbert/Martinez aimed the Demarchist weapon at the airlock. I cuffed down my blast visor. Three discharges took out the first airlock door, crumpling it inward as if punched by a giant fist.

  “Air on other side,” Norbert/Martinez said.

  The Demarchist gun was soon ready again. Through the visor’s near-opaque screen I saw three more flashes. When I flipped it back up, the weapon was packing itself back into its stowed configuration. Sollis patted aside smoke and airborne debris. The emergency lights were still flashing in our section of corridor, but the space beyond the airlock was as pitch dark as any part of the ship we’d already traversed. Yet we’d barely taken a step into that darkness when wall facets lit up in swift sequence, with the face of Nightingale looking at us from all directions.

  Something was definitely wrong now. The faces really were looking at us, even though the facets were flat. The images turned slowly as we advanced along the corridor.

  “This is the Voice of Nightingale,” the faces said simultaneously, as if we were being serenaded by a perfectly synchronised choir. “I am now addressing a moving party of three individuals. My systems have determined with a high statistical likelihood that this party is responsible for the damage I have recently sustained. The damage is containable, but I cannot tolerate any deeper intrusion. Please remain stationary and await escort to a safe holding area.”

  Sollis slowed, but she didn’t stop. “Who’s speaking? Are we being addressed by the sentience engine, or just a delta-level subsidiary?”

  “This is the Voice of Nightingale. I am a Turing-compliant gamma-level intelligence of the Vaaler-Lako series. Please stop and await escort to a safe holding area.”

  “That’s the sentience engine,” Sollis said quietly. “It means we’re getting the ship’s full attention now.”

  “Maybe we can talk it into handing over Jax.”

  “I don’t know. Negotiating with this thing might be tricky. Vaaler-Lakos were supposed to be the hot new thing around the time Nightingale was put together, but they didn’t quite work out that way.”

  “What happened?”

  “There was a flaw in their architecture. Within a few years of start-up, most of them had gone bugfuck insane. I don’t even want to think about what being stuck out here’s done to this one.”

  “Please stop,” the voice said again, “and await escort to a safe holding area. This is your final warning.”

  “Ask it . . .” Norbert/Martinez said. “Speak for me.”

  “Can you hear me, ship?” Sollis asked. “We’re not here to do any harm. We’re sorry about the damage we’ve already caused. We’ve come for someone . . . There’s a man here, a man aboard you, that we’d really like to meet.”

  The ship said nothing for several moments. Just when I’d concluded that it didn’t understand us, it said, “This facility is no longer operational. There is no one here for you to see. Please await escort to a safe holding area, from where you can be referred to a functioning facility.”

  “We’ve come for Colonel Jax,” I said. “Check your patient records.”

  “Admission code Tango Tango six one three, hyphen five,” said Norbert/Martinez, forcing each word out like an expression of pain. “Colonel Brandon Jax, Northern Coalition. ”

  “Do you have a record of that admission?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the Voice of Nightingale replied. “I have a record for Colonel Jax.”

  “Do you have a discharge record?”

  “No such record is on file.”

  “Then Jax either died in your care, or he’s still aboard. Either way there’ll be a body. We’d really like to see it.”

  “That is not possible. You will stop now. An escort is on its way to escort you to a safe holding area.”

  “Why can’t we see Jax?” Sollis demanded. “Is he telling you we can’t see him? If so, he’s not the man you should be listening to. He’s a war criminal, a murderous bastard who deserves to die.”

  “Colonel Jax is under the care of this facility. He is still receiving treatment. It is not possible to visit him at this time.”

  “Damn thing’s changing its story,” I said. “A minute ago it said the facility was closed.”

  “We just want to talk to him,” Sollis said, “that’s all. Just to tell him that the world knows where he is, even if you don’t let us take him with us now.”

  “Please remain calm. The escort is about to arrive.”

  The facets turned to look away from us, peering into the dark limits of the corridor. There was a sudden bustle of approaching movement, and then a wall of machines came squirming towards us. Dozens of squid-robots were nearing, packed so tightly together that their tentacles formed a flailing mass of silver-blue metal. I looked back the other way, back the way we’d come, and saw another wave of robots coming from that direction. There were far more machines than we’d seen before, and their movements in dry air were at least as fast and fluid as they’d been underwater.

  “Ship,” Sollis said, “all we want is Jax. We’re prepared to fight for him. That’ll mean more damage being inflicted on you. But if you give us Jax, we’ll leave nicely.”

  “I don’t think it wants to bargain,” I said, raising my slug-gun at the advancing wall just as it reached the ruined airlock. I squeezed off rounds, taking out at least one robot with each slug. Sollis started pitching in to my left, while Norbert/Martinez took care of the other direction with the Demarchist weapon. He could do a lot more damage with each discharge, taking out three or four machines every time he squeezed the trigger. But he kept having to wait for the weapon to re-arm itself, and the delay was allowing the wall of hostiles to creep slowly forwards. Sollis and I were firing almost constantly, taking turns to cover each other while we slipped in new slug clips or ammo cells, but our wall was gaining on us as well. No matter how many robots we destroyed, no gap ever appeared in the advancing wave. There must have been hundreds of them, squeezing us in from both directions.

  “We’re not going to make it,” I said, sounding resigned even to myself. “There’s too many of them. Maybe if we still had Nicolosi’s rifle, we could shoot our way out.”

  “I didn’t come all this way just to surrender to a haunted hospital,” Sollis said, replacing an ammo cell in her energy weapon. “If it means going out fighting . . . so be it.”

  The nearest robots were now only six or seven metres away, the tips of their tentacles probing even nearer. She kept pumping shots into them, but they kept coming closer, flinging aside the hot debris of their damaged companions. There was no possibility of falling back any further, for we were almost back to back with Norbert/Martinez.

  “Maybe we should just stop,” I said. “This is a hospital. It’s programmed to heal people. The last thing it’ll want to do is hurt us.”

  “Feel free to put that to the test,” Sollis said.

  Norbert/Martinez squeezed off the last discharge before his weapon went back into recharge mode. Sollis was still firing. I reached over and tried to pass Norbert/Martinez my gun, so he’d at least have something to use while waiting for his weapon to power up. But the machines had already seen their moment. The closest one flicked out a tentacle and wrapped it around the big man’s foot. Everything happened very quickly, then. The machine hauled Norbert/Martinez towards the flailing mass until he fell within reach of another set of tentacles. They had him, then. He cartwheeled his arms, trying to reach for handholds on the walls, but there was no possibility of that. The robots flicked the Demarchist weapon from hi
s grip and then took the weapon with them. Norbert/Martinez screamed as his legs, and then his upper body, vanished into the wall of machines. They smothered him completely. For a moment we could still hear his breathing— he’d stopped screaming, as if knowing it would make no difference—and then there was absolute silence, as if the carrier signal from his suit had been abruptly terminated.

  Then, a moment later, the machines were on Sollis and me.

  I woke. The fact that I was still alive—not just alive but comfortable and lucid—hit like me like a mild electric shock, one that snapped me into instant and slightly resentful alertness. I’d been enjoying unconsciousness. I remembered the robots, how I’d felt them trying to get into my suit, the sharp cold nick as something pierced my skin, and then an instant later the painless bliss of sleep. I’d expected to die, but as the drug hit my brain, it erased all trace of fear.

  But I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t even injured, so far as I could tell. I’d been divested of my suit, but was now reclining in relative comfort on a bed or mattress, under a clean white sheet. My own weight was pressing me down onto the mattress, so I must have been moved into the ship’s reactivated centrifuge section. I felt tired and bruised, but other than that I was in no worse shape than when we’d boarded Nightingale. I remembered what I’d told Sollis during our last stand: how the hospital ship wouldn’t want to do us harm. Maybe there’d been more than just wishful thinking in that statement.

  There was no sign of Sollis or Norbert/Martinez, though. I was alone in a private recovery cubicle, surrounded by white walls. I remembered coming around in a room like this during my first visit to Nightingale. The wall on my right contained a white-rimmed door and a series of discrete hatches, behind which I knew lurked medical monitoring and resuscitation equipment, none of which had been deemed necessary in my case. A control panel was connected to the side of the bed by a flexible stalk, within easy reach of my right hand. Via the touchpads on the panel I was able to adjust the cubicle ’s environmental settings and request services from the hospital, ranging from food and drink, washing and toilet amenities, to additional drug dosages.

  Given the semi-dormant state of the ship, I wondered how much of it was still online. I touched one of the pads, causing the white walls to melt away and take on the holographic semblance of a calming beach scene, with ocean breakers crashing onto powdery white sand under a sky etched with sunset fire. Palm trees nodded in a soothing breeze. I didn’t care about the view, though. I wanted something to drink—my throat was raw—and then I wanted to know what had happened to the others and how long we were going to be detained. Because, like it or not, being a patient aboard a facility like Nightingale wasn’t very different from being a prisoner. Until the hospital deemed you fit and well, you were going nowhere.

  But when I touched the other pads, nothing happened. Either the room was malfunctioning, or it had been programmed to ignore my requests. I made a move to ease myself off the bed, wincing as my bruised limbs registered their disapproval. But the clean white sheet stiffened to resist my efforts, hardening until it felt as rigid as armour. As soon as I relaxed, the sheet relinquished its hold. I was free to move around on the bed, to sit up and reach for things, but the sheet would not allow me to leave the bed itself.

  Movement caught my eye, far beyond the foot of the bed. A figure walked towards me, strolling along the holographic shoreline. She was dressed almost entirely in black, with a skirt that reached all the way to the sand, heavy fabric barely moving as she approached. She wore a white bonnet over black hair parted exactly in the middle, a white collar and a jewelled clasp at her throat. Her face was instantly recognisable as the Voice of Nightingale, but now it appeared softer, more human.

  She stepped from the wall and appeared to stand at the foot of my bed. She looked at me for a moment before speaking, her expression one of gentle concern.

  “I knew you’d come, given time.”

  “How are the others? Are they okay?”

  “If you are speaking of the two who were with you before you lost consciousness, they are both well. The other two required more serious medical intervention, but they are now both stable.”

  “I thought Nicolosi and Quinlan were dead.”

  “Then you underestimated my abilities. I am only sorry that they came to harm. Despite my best efforts, there is a necessary degree of autonomy amongst my machines that sometimes results in them acting foolishly.”

  There was a kindness there that had been entirely absent from the display facets. For the first time I had the impression of an actual mind lurking behind the machine-generated mask. I sensed that it was a mind capable of compassion and complexity of thought.

  “We didn’t intend to hurt you,” I said. “I’m sorry about any damage we caused, but we only ever wanted Jax, your patient. He committed serious crimes. He needs to be brought back to Sky’s Edge, to face justice.”

  “Is that why you risked so much? In the interests of justice? ”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Then you must be very brave and selfless. Or was justice only part of your motivation?”

  “Jax is a bad man. All you have to do is hand him over.”

  “I cannot let you take Jax. He remains my patient.”

  I shook my head. “He was your patient, when he came aboard. But that was during the war. We have a record of his injuries. They were serious, but not life-threatening. Given your resources, it shouldn’t have been too difficult for you to put him back together again. There’s no question of Jax still needing your care.”

  “Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?”

  “No. It’s simple: either Jax died under your care, or he’s well enough to face trial. Did he die?”

  “No. His injuries were, as you note, not life-threatening.”

  “Then he’s either alive, or you’ve got him frozen. Either way, you can hand him over. Nicolosi knows how to thaw him out, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “There is no need to thaw Colonel Jax. He is alive and conscious, except when I permit him to sleep.”

  “Then there’s even less reason not to hand him over.”

  “I’m afraid there is every reason in the world. Please forget about Colonel Jax. I will not relinquish him from my care.”

  “Not good enough, ship.”

  “You are in my care now. As you have already discovered, I will not permit you to leave against my will. But I will allow you to depart if you renounce your intentions concerning Colonel Jax.”

  “You’re a gamma-level persona,” I said. “To all intents and purposes you have human intelligence. That means you’re capable of reasoned negotiation.”

  The Voice of Nightingale cocked her head, as if listening to a faraway tune. “Continue.”

  “We came to arrest Colonel Jax. Failing that, we came to find physical proof of his presence aboard this facility. A blood sample, a tissue scraping: something we can take back to the planetary authorities and alert them to his presence here. We won’t get paid as much for that, but at least they can send out a heavier ship and take him by force. But there’s another option, too. If you let us off this ship without even showing us the colonel, there’s nothing to stop us planting a few limpet mines on your hull and blowing you to pieces.”

  The Voice’s face registered disapproval. “So now you resort to threats of physical violence.”

  “I’m not threatening anything: just pointing out the options. I know you care about self-preservation: it’s wired deep into your architecture.”

  “I would be well advised to kill you now, in that case.”

  “That wouldn’t work. Do you think Martinez kept your coordinates to himself? He always knew this was a risky extraction. He’d have made damn sure another party knew of your whereabouts, and who you were likely to be sheltering. If we don’t make it back, someone will come in our place. And you can bet they’ll bring their own limpet mines as well.”

  “In which case I would
gain nothing by letting you go, either.”

  “No, you’ll get to stay alive. Just give us Jax, and we’ll leave you alone. I don’t know what you’re doing out here, what keeps you sane, but really, it’s your business, not ours. We just want the colonel.”

  The ship’s persona regarded me with narrowed, playful eyes. I had the impression she was thinking things through very carefully indeed, examining my proposition from every conceivable angle.

  “It would be that simple?”

  “Absolutely. We take the man, we say goodbye and you never hear from us again.”

  “I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in the colonel. I would find it difficult to part company with him.”

  “You’re a resourceful persona. I’m sure you’d find other ways to occupy your time.”

  “It isn’t about occupying my time, Dexia.” She’d spoken my name for the first time. Of course she knew who I was: it would only have taken a blood or tissue sample to establish that I’d already been aboard the ship. “It’s about making my feelings felt,” she continued. “Something happened to me around Sky’s Edge. Call it a moment of clarity. I saw the horrors of war for what they were. I also saw my part in the self-perpetuation of those horrors. I had to do something about that. Removing myself from the sphere of operation was one thing, but I knew there was more that I could do. Thankfully, the colonel gave me the key. Through him, I saw a path to redemption.”

  “You didn’t have to redeem yourself,” I said. “You were a force for good, Nightingale. You healed people.”

  “Only so they could go back to war. Only so they could be blown apart and returned to me for more healing.”

  “You had no choice. It was what you were made to do.”

  “Precisely.”

  “The war’s over. It’s time to forget about what happened. That’s why it’s so important to bring Jax back home, so that we can start burying the past.”

  The Voice studied me with a level, clinical eye. It was as if she knew something unspeakable about my condition, some truth I was as yet too weak to bear.