Galactic North

  “What would be the likely sentence, were Jax to be tried?”

  “He’d get the death penalty, no question about it. Cruci fixion at the Bridgetop, like Sky Haussmann.”

  “Would you mourn him?”

  “Hell, no. I’d be cheering with the rest of them.”

  “Then you would agree that his death is inevitable, one way or another.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then I will make a counter-proposition. I will not permit you to take Jax alive. But I will allow you an audience with him. You shall meet and speak with the colonel.”

  Wary of a trap, I asked, “Then what happens?”

  “Once the audience is complete, I will remove the colonel from life support. He will die shortly afterwards.”

  “If you’re willing to let him die . . . why not just hand him over?”

  “He can’t be handed over. Not any more. He would die.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what I have done to him.”

  Fatigue tugged at me, fogging my earlier clarity of thought. On one level I just wanted to get out of the ship, with no additional complications. I’d expected to die when the hospital sent its machines against us. Yet as glad as I was to find myself alive, as tempted as I was to take the easier option and just leave, I couldn’t ignore the prize that was now so close at hand.

  “I need to talk to the others.”

  “No, Dexia. This must be your decision, and yours alone.”

  “Have you put the same proposition to them?”

  “Yes. I told them they could leave now, or they could meet the colonel.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I’d rather hear what you have to say first.”

  “I’m guessing they had the same reaction I did. There’s got to be a catch somewhere.”

  “There is no catch. If you leave now, you will have the personal satisfaction of knowing that you have at least located the colonel, and that he remains alive. Of course, that information may not be worth very much to you, but you would always have the option of returning, should you still wish to bring him to justice. Alternatively, you can see the colonel now—see him and speak with him—and leave knowing he is dead. I will allow you to witness the withdrawal of his life support, and I will even let you take his head with you. That should be worth more than the mere knowledge of his existence.”

  “There’s a catch. I know there’s a catch.”

  “I assure you there isn’t.”

  “We all get to leave? You’re not going to turn around and demand that one of us takes the colonel’s place?”

  “No. You will all be allowed to leave.”

  “In one piece?”

  “In one piece.”

  “All right,” I said, knowing the choice wasn’t going to get any easier no matter how many times I reconsidered it. “I can’t speak for the others . . . and I guess this has to be a majority decision . . . but I’m ready to see the son of a bitch.”

  I was allowed to leave the room, but not the bed. The sheet tightened against me again, pressing me flat to the mattress as the bed tilted to the vertical. Two squid robots entered the room and detached the bed from its mountings, and then carried it between them. I was glued to it like a figure on a playing card. The robots propelled me forward in an effortless glide, silent save for the soft metallic scratch of their tentacles where they touched the wall or the floor.

  The Voice of Nightingale addressed me from the bedside panel, a small image of her face appearing above the touchpads.

  “It’s not far now, Dexia. I hope you won’t regret your decision.”

  “What about the others?”

  “You’ll be joining them. Then you can all go home.”

  “Are you saying we all made the same decision, to see the colonel?”

  “Yes,” the Voice said.

  The robots carried me out of the centrifuge section, into what I judged to be the forward part of the ship. The sheet relinquished its hold on me slightly, just enough so that I was able to move under it. Presently, after passing through a series of air-locks, I was brought to a very dark room. Without being able to see anything, I sensed that this was as large as any pressurised space we’d yet entered, save for the skin-cultivation chamber. The air was as moist and blood-warm as the inside of a tropical greenhouse.

  “I thought you said the others would be here.”

  “They’ll arrive shortly,” the Voice said. “They’ve already met the colonel.”

  “There hasn’t been time.”

  “They met the colonel while you were still asleep, Dexia. You were the last to be revived. Now, would you like to speak to the man himself?”

  I steeled myself. “Yes.”

  “Here he is.”

  A beam of light stabbed across the room, illuminating a face that I recognised instantly. Surrounded by blackness, Jax’s face appeared to hover as if detached from his body. Time had done nothing to soften those pugnacious features; the cruel set of that heavy jaw. Yet his eyes were closed, and his face lolled at a slight angle, as if he remained unaware of the beam.

  “Wake up,” the Voice of Nightingale said, louder than I’d heard her speak so far. “Wake up, Colonel Jax!”

  The colonel woke. He opened his eyes, blinked twice against the glare, then gazed out steadily. He tilted his head to meet the beam, projecting his jaw forward at a challenging angle.

  “You have another visitor, Colonel. Would you like me to introduce her?”

  His mouth opened. Saliva drooled out. From the darkness, a hand descended from above the colonel’s face to wipe his chin dry. Something about the trajectory of the hand’s movement was terribly, terribly wrong. Jax saw my reaction and let out a soft, nasty chuckle. That was when I realised that the colonel was completely, irrevocably insane.

  “Her name is Dexia Scarrow. She’s the last member of the party you’ve already met.”

  Jax spoke. His voice was too loud, as if it was being fed through an amplifier. There was something huge and wet about it. It was like hearing the voice of a whale.

  “You a soldier, girl?”

  “I was a soldier, Colonel. But the war’s over now. I’m a civilian.”

  “Goodee for you. What brought you here, girly girl?”

  “I came to bring you to justice. I came to take you back to the war crimes court on Sky’s Edge.”

  “Maybe you should have come a little sooner.”

  “I’ll settle for seeing you die. I understand that’s an option. ”

  Something I’d said made the colonel smile. “Has the ship told you the deal yet?”

  “The ship told me she wasn’t letting you out of here alive. She promised us your head.”

  “Then I guess she didn’t get into specifics.” He cocked his head away from me, as if talking to someone standing to my left. “Bring up the lights, Nightingale: she may as well know what she’s dealing with.”

  “Are you sure, Colonel?” the ship asked.

  “Bring up the lights. She’s ready.”

  The ship brought up the lights.

  I wasn’t ready.

  For a moment I couldn’t process what I was seeing. My brain just couldn’t cope with the reality of what the ship had done to Colonel Jax, despite the evidence of my eyes. I kept staring at him, waiting for the picture before me to start making sense. I kept waiting for the instant when I’d realise I was being fooled by the play of shadows and light, like a child being scared by a random monster in the folds of a curtain. But the instant didn’t come. The thing before me was all that it appeared to be.

  Colonel Jax extended in all directions: a quivering expanse of patchwork flesh, of which his head was simply one insignificant component; one hill in a mountain range. He was spread out across the far wall, grafted to it in the form of a vast breathing mosaic. He must have been twenty metres wide, edged with a crinkled circular border of toughened flesh. Under his head was a thick neck, merging into the upper half of a
n armless torso. I could see the faint scars where the arms had been detached. Below the slow-heaving ribcage, the torso flared out like the melted base of a candle. Another torso rose from the flesh two metres to the colonel’s right. It had no head, but it did have an arm. A second torso loomed over him from behind, equipped with a pair of arms, one of which must have cleaned the colonel’s chin. Further away, emerging from the pool of flesh at odd, arbitrary angles, were other living body parts. A torso here; a pair of legs there; a hip or shoulder somewhere else. The torsos were all breathing, though not in perfect synchronisation. When they were not engaged in some purposeful activity, such as wiping Jax’s chin, the limbs twitched, palsied. The skin between them was an irregular mosaic formed from many ill-matched pieces that had been fused together. In places it was drum-tight, pulled taut over hidden armatures of bone and gristle. In other places it heaved like a stormy sea. It gurgled with hidden digestive processes.

  “You see now why I’m not coming with you,” Colonel Jax said. “Not unless you brought a much bigger ship. Even then, I’m not sure you’d be able to keep me alive very long without Nightingale’s assistance.”

  “You’re a fucking monstrosity.”

  “I’m no oil painting, that’s a fact.” Jax tilted his head, as if a thought had just struck him. “I am a work of art, though, wouldn’t you agree, girly girl?”

  “If you say so.”

  “The ship certainly thinks so—don’t you, Nightingale? She made me what I am. It’s her artistic vision shining through. The bitch.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Very probably. Do you honestly think you could take one day of this and not go mad? Oh, I’m mad enough, I’ll grant you that. But I’m still sane compared to the ship. Around here, she’s the imperial fucking yardstick for insanity.”

  “Sollis was right, then. Leave a sentience engine like that all alone and it’ll eat itself from the inside out.”

  “Maybe so. Thing is, it wasn’t solitude that did it. Nightingale turned insane long before she ever got out here. And you know what did it? That little war we had ourselves down on Sky’s Edge. They built this ship and put the mind of an angel inside it. A mind dedicated to healing, compassion, kindness. So what if it was a damned machine? It was still designed to care for us, selflessly, day after day. And it turned out to be damned good at its job, too. For a while, at least.”

  “Then you know what happened.”

  “The ship drove herself mad. Two conflicting impulses pushed a wedge through her sanity. She was meant to treat us, to make us well again, to alleviate our pain. But every time she did her job, we were sent back down to the theatre of battle and ripped apart again. The ship took our pain away only so that we could feel it again. She began to feel as if she was complicit in that process: a willing cog in a greater machine whose only purpose was the manufacture of agony. In the end, she decided she didn’t much like being that cog.”

  “So she took off. What happened to all the other patients? ”

  “She killed them. Euthanised them painlessly rather than have them sent back down to battle. To Nightingale, that was the kinder thing to do.”

  “And the technical staff who were aboard, and the men who were sent to reclaim the ship when she went out of control?”

  “They were euthanised as well. I don’t think Nightingale took any pleasure in that, but she saw their deaths as a necessary evil. Above all else, she wouldn’t allow herself to be returned to use as a military hospital.”

  “Yet she didn’t kill you.”

  A dry tongue flicked across Jax’s lips. “She was going to. Then she delved deeper into her patient records and realised who I was. At that point she began to have other ideas.”

  “Such as?”

  “The ship was smart enough to realise that the bigger problem wasn’t her existence—they could always build other hospital ships—but the war itself. War itself. So she decided to do something about it. Something positive. Something constructive.”

  “Which would be?”

  “You’re looking at it, kid. I’m the war memorial. When Nightingale started doing this to me—making me what I am—she had in mind that I’d become a vast artistic statement in flesh. Nightingale would reveal me to the world when she was finished. The horror of what I am would shame the world into peace. I’d be the living, breathing equivalent of Picasso’s Guernica. I’m an illustration in flesh of what war does to human beings.”

  “The war’s over. We don’t need a memorial.”

  “Maybe you can explain that to the ship. Trouble is, I don’t think she really believes the war is over. You can’t blame her, can you? She has access to the same history files we do. She knows that not all ceasefires stay that way.”

  “What was she intending to do? Return to Sky’s Edge with you aboard?”

  “Exactly that. Problem is, the ship isn’t done. I know I may look finished to you, but Nightingale—well, she has this perfectionist streak. She’s always changing her mind. Can’t ever seem to get me quite right. Keeps swapping pieces around, cutting pieces away, growing new parts and stitching them in. All the while she has to make sure I don’t die on her. That’s where her real genius comes in. She’s Michelangelo with a scalpel.”

  “You almost sound proud of what she’s done to you.”

  “Would you rather I screamed? I can scream if you like. It just gets old after a while.”

  “You’re way too far gone, Jax. I was wrong about the war crimes court. They’ll throw your case out on grounds of insanity. ”

  “That would be a shame. I’d love to see their faces when they wheel me into the witness box. But I’m not going to court, am I? Ship’s laid it all out for me. She’s pulling the plug.”

  “So she says.”

  “You don’t sound as if you believe her.”

  “I can’t see her abandoning you, after all the effort she’s gone to.”

  “She’s an artist. They act on whims. Maybe if I was ready, maybe if she thought she’d done all she could with me . . . but that’s not the way she feels. I think she felt she was getting close three or four years ago . . . but then she had a change of heart, a major one, and tore out almost everything. Now I’m an unfinished work. She couldn’t bear to see me exhibited in this state. She’d rather rip up the canvas and start again.”

  “With you?”

  “No, I think she’s more or less exhausted my possibilities. Especially now that she’s seen the chance to do something completely different; something that will let her take her message a lot closer to home. That, of course, is where you come in.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “That’s what the others said as well.” Again, he cocked his head to one side. “Hey, ship! Maybe it’s time you showed her what the deal is, don’t you think?”

  “If you are ready, Colonel,” the Voice of Nightingale said.

  “I’m ready. Dexia’s ready. Why don’t you bring on the dessert?”

  Colonel Jax looked to the right, straining his neck. Beyond Jax’s border, a circular door opened in part of the wall. Light rammed through the opening. Something floated in silhouette, held in suspension by three or four squid robots. The floating thing was dark, rounded, irregular. It looked like half a dozen pieces of dough balled together. I couldn’t make out what it was.

  Then the robots pushed it into the chamber, and I saw, and then I screamed.

  “It’s time for you to join your friends now,” the ship said.

  That was three months ago—an eternity, until we remember being held down on the surgical bed while the machines emerged and prepared to work on us, and then it feels as if everything happened only a terror-filled moment ago.

  We made it safely back to Sky’s Edge. The return journey was arduous, as one might expect given our circumstances. But the shuttle had little difficulty flying itself back into a capture orbit, and once it fell within range it emitted a distress signal that brought it to the attention of t
he planetary authorities. We were off-loaded and taken to a secure orbital holding facility, where we were examined and our story subjected to what limited verification was actually possible. Dexia had bluffed the Voice of Nightingale when she told the ship that Martinez was certain to have revealed the coordinates of the hospital ship to someone else. It turned out that he hadn’t informed a soul, too wary of alerting Jax’s allies. The Ultras who had found the ship in the first place were now a fifth of a light-year away, and falling further from Sky’s Edge with every passing hour. It would be decades, or longer, before they returned this way.

  All the same, we don’t think anyone seriously doubted our story. As outlandish as it was, no one could suggest a more likely alternative. We did have the head of Colonel Brandon Jax, or at least a duplicate that passed all available genetic and physiological tests. And we had clearly been to a place that specialised in extremely advanced surgery, of a kind that simply wasn’t possible in and around Sky’s Edge. That was the problem, though. The planet’s best surgeons had examined us with great thoroughness, each eager to advance their own prestige by undoing the work of Nightingale. But all had quailed, fearful of doing more harm than good. No separation of Siamese twins could compare in complexity and risk with the procedure that would be necessary to unknot the living puzzle Nightingale had made of us. None of the surgeons was willing to bet on the survival of more than a single one of us, and even the odds of that weren’t overwhelmingly optimistic. That pact we’d made with each other was that we would only consent to the operation if the vote was unanimous.

  At massive expense (not ours, for by then we were the subject of considerable philanthropy), a second craft was sent out to snoop the coordinates where we’d left the hospital ship. It had the best military scanning gear money could buy. But it found nothing out there but ice and dust.

  From that, we were free to draw two possible conclusions. Either Nightingale had destroyed herself soon after our departure, or had relocated to avoid being found again. We couldn’t say which alternative pleased us less. At least if we’d known that the ship was gone for good, we could have resigned ourselves to the surgeons, however risky that might have been. But if the ship was hiding herself, there was always the possibility that someone might find her again. And then somehow persuade her to undo us.