Galactic North (41 page)

“No one’s nervous,” I said, but it came out all wrong, making me sound as if I was the one who was spooked.

“Let’s get to the other side,” Nicolosi said.

“We’re halfway there,” Sollis reported. “I can see the far wall, sort of. Looks like there’s a door waiting for us.”

We kept on moving, hand over hand, mostly in silence. Surrounded by all those glass-encased body parts, I couldn’t help but think of the people many of them had once been part of. If these parts had belonged to me, I think I’d have chosen to haunt
Nightingale
, consumed with ill-directed, spiteful fury.

Not the right kind of thinking, I was just telling myself, when the flasks started moving.

We all stopped, anchoring ourselves to the nearest handhold. Two or three rows back from the railed crawlway, a row of flasks was gliding smoothly towards the far wall of the chamber. They were sliding in perfect lock-step unison. When my heart started beating again, I realised that the entire row must be attached to some kind of conveyor system, hidden within the support framework.

“Nobody move,” Nicolosi said.

“This is not good,” Sollis kept saying. “This is not good. The damn ship isn’t supposed to know—”

“Quiet,” Martinez hissed. “Let me past you: I want to see where those flasks are going.”

“Careful,” Norbert said.

Paying no attention to the man, Martinez climbed ahead of the party. Quickly we followed him, doing our best not to make any noise or slip from the crawlway. The flasks continued their smooth, silent movement until the conveyor system reached the far wall and turned through ninety degrees, taking the flasks away from us into a covered enclosure like a security scanner. Most of the flasks were empty, but as we watched, one of the occupied, active units slid into the enclosure. I’d only had a moment to notice, but I thought I’d seen a forearm and hand, reaching up from the life-support plinth.

The conveyor system halted. For a moment all was silent, then there came a series of mechanical clicks and whirrs. None of us could see what was happening inside the enclosure, but after a moment we didn’t need to. It was obvious.

The conveyor began to move again, but running in reverse this time. The flask that had gone into the enclosure was now empty. I counted back to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake, but there was no doubt. The forearm and hand had been removed from the flask. Already, I presumed, the limb was somewhere else in the ship.

The flasks travelled back—returning to what I presumed to have been their former positions—and then halted again. Save for the missing limb, the chamber was exactly as when we had entered it.

“I don’t like this,” Sollis said. “The ship is supposed to be dead.”

“Dormant,” Martinez corrected.

“You don’t think the shit that just happened is in any way related to us being aboard? You don’t think Jax just got a wake-up call?”

“If Jax were aware of our presence, we’d know it by now.”

“I don’t know how you can sound so calm.”

“All that has happened, Ingrid, is that
Nightingale
has performed some trivial housekeeping duty. We have already seen that it maintains some organs in pre-surgical condition, and this is just one of its tissue libraries. It should hardly surprise us that the ship occasionally decides to move some of its stock from A to B.”

She made a small, catlike snarl of frustration—I could tell she hadn’t bought any of his explanations—and pulled herself hand over hand to the door.

“Any more shit like that happens, I’m out,” she said.

“I’d think twice if I were you,” Martinez said, “It’s a hell of a long walk home.”

I caught up with Sollis and touched her on the forearm. “I don’t like it either, Ingrid, but the man’s right. Jax doesn’t know we’re here. If he did, I think he’d do more than just move some flasks around.”

“I hope you’re right, Scarrow.”

“So do I,” I said under my breath.

We continued along the main axis of the ship, following a corridor much like the one we’d been following before the organ library. It swerved and jagged, then straightened out again. According to the inertial compasses, we were still headed towards Jax, or at least the part of the ship where it appeared most likely we’d find him, alive or dead.

“What we were talking about earlier,” Sollis said, “I mean, much earlier—about how this ship never got destroyed at the end of the war after all—”

“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
—”