The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Martinez glanced at Norbert, then—with an expression that suggested he was giving in under duress—he nodded at Sollis. “Ten thousand Australs it is. You drive a hard bargain, Ingrid.”

  “While we’re debating terms,” Nicolosi said, “is there anything else you feel we ought to know?”

  “I have told you that the ship is Nightingale.” Martinez directed our attention back to the sketchy diagram on the wall. “That, I am ashamed to admit, is the sum total of my knowledge of the ship in question.”

  “What about constructional blueprints?” I asked.

  “None survived the war.”

  “Photographs? Video images?”

  “Ditto. Nightingale operated in a war zone, Dexia. Casual sightseeing was not exactly a priority for those unfortunate enough to get close to her.”

  “What about the staff aboard her?” Nicolosi asked. “Couldn’t they tell you anything?”

  “I spoke to some survivors: the doctors and technicians who’d been aboard during the commissioning phase. Their testimonies were useful, when they were willing to talk.”

  Nicolosi pushed further. “What about the people who were aboard before the ceasefire?”

  “I could not trace them.”

  “But they obviously didn’t die. If the ship’s still out there, the rogue missile couldn’t have hit it.”

  “Why would anyone make up a story about the ship being blown to pieces, if it didn’t happen?” I asked.

  “War does strange things to truth,” Martinez answered. “No malice is necessarily implied. Perhaps another hospital ship was indeed destroyed. There was more than one in orbit around Sky’s Edge, after all. One of them may even have had a similar name. It’s perfectly conceivable that the facts might have got muddled, in the general confusion of those days.”

  “Still doesn’t explain why you couldn’t trace any survivors,” Nicolosi said.

  Martinez shifted on his seat, uneasily. “If Jax did appropriate the ship, then he may not have wanted anyone talking about it. The staff aboard Nightingale might have been paid off—or threatened—to keep silent.”

  “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 a completely foreign territory.

  “The biggest thermal hotspot is here,” Martinez said, pointing at a spot about a quarter of the way down from the front. “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 other ones?” I asked, trying not to sound as if I was on her case. “Will they be less likely to go off?”

  “Nothing’s guaranteed. But I’d always rather take my chances with the backdoor.”

  “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, and that will include 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 farther 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 leave us with 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 have 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. Is there something about that ship you know 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 which nonetheless always claimed that Nightingale didn’t get blown up after all.”

  “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 kind of anxious to get this over with,” Sollis said.

  “It’s just a myth,” Martinez chided. “Nothing more. It is a thing 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 been at an unexpected tangent to 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 the rest of whoever was aboard at the end?” Sollis asked.

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

  “Plus the ten we already agreed on.”

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

  “I 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 pressurized 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 whined obligingly. Blue lights studded its stock, indicating it was ready for use.

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

  “I’d really like it if you pointed 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, matte-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.”

  “Then now’s my chance.”

  “I think the idea was 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 his way 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 loading bay 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, patronizingly. “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 recognize. In his huge hands it looked ridiculous, like something made for a doll.

  “You sure about that?” I called. “Maybe you want to look at one of these…”

  Norbert looked at me like 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 was 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 visible 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 dead corpse, perhaps, but not the living or even life-supported body that would guarantee us the rest of our 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 micro-meteorite impacts and some scorching from high-energy particles, but nothing that I wouldn’t have expected for a ship that had been sitting out here 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 trace of our having been noticed. Still with reluctance, Nicolosi accepted that we would follow Sollis’s entry strategy, coming in by one of the 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 still not becoming weak enough not 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 the windows or watching the sensor readouts 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 than wearing full-spectrum bioarmour, and I quickly got the hang of the life-support indicat
ions 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 quite that long in 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 door seemed 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 severe and unforgiving—had appeared in an oval frame above the access panel.