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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s Nightingale,” Sollis said, adding, by way of explanation: “The ship had its own gamma-level personality, keeping the whole show running. Pretty smart piece of thinkware by all accounts: full Turing-compliance; about as clever as you can make a machine before you have to start giving it human rights.”

  I looked at the stern-faced woman, expecting her to query us at any moment. I imagined her harsh and hectoring voice demanding to know what business any of us had boarding Nightingale, trespassing aboard her ship, her hospital.

  “Does she know…” I started.

  Sollis shook her head. “This is just a dumb facet of the main construct. Not only is it inactive—the image is frozen into the door memory—but it doesn’t seem to have any functioning data links back to the main sentience engine. Do you, Nightingale?”

  The face looked at us impassively, but still said nothing.

  “See: deadsville. My guess is the sentience engine isn’t running at all. Out here, the ship wouldn’t need much more than a trickle of intelligence to keep itself ticking over.”

  “So the gamma’s off-line?”

  “Uh-huh. Best way, too. You don’t want one of those things sitting around too long without something to do.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ‘Cause they tend to go nuts. That’s why the Conjoiners won’t allow gamma-level intelligences in any of their machines. They say it’s a kind of slavery.”

  “Running a hospital must have been enough to stop Nightingale’s gamma running off the rails.”

  “Let’s hope so. Let’s really hope so.” Sollis glanced back at her work, then emitted a grunt of satisfaction as a row of lights flicked to orange. She unplugged a bunch of coloured cables and looked back at the waiting party. “OK: we’re good to go. I can open the door anytime you’re ready.”

  “What’s on the other side of it?”

  “According to the door, air: normal trimix. Bitchingly cold, but not frozen. Pressure’s manageable. I’m not sure we could breathe it, but…”

  “We’re not breathing anything,” Martinez said curtly. “Our airlock will take two people. One of them will have to be you, Ingrid, since you know how to work the mechanism. I shall accompany you, and then we shall wait for the others on the far side, when we have established that conditions are safe.”

  “Maybe one of us should go through instead of you,” I said, wondering why Norbert hadn’t volunteered to go through ahead of his master. “We’re expendable, but you aren’t. Without you, Jax doesn’t go down.”

  “Considerate of you, Dexia, but I paid you to assist me, not take risks on my behalf.”

  Martinez propelled himself forward. Norbert, Nicolosi and I edged back to permit the inner door to close again. On the common suit channel I heard Sollis say: “We’re opening Nightingale. Stand by: comms might get a bit weaker once we’re on the other side of all this metal.”

  Nicolosi pushed past me, back into the flight deck. I heard the heavy whine of servos as the door opened. Breathing and scuffling sounds, but nothing that alarmed me. “OK,” Sollis said. “We’re moving into Nightingale’s lock. Closing the outer door behind us. When you need to open it again, hit any key on the pad.”

  “Still no sign of life,” Nicolosi called.

  “The inner door looks like it’ll open without any special encouragement from me,” Sollis said. “Should be just a matter of pulling down this lever… you ready?”

  “Do it, Ingrid,” I heard Martinez say.

  More servos, fainter now. After a few moments Sollis reported back: “We’re inside. No surprises yet. Floating in some kind of holding bay, about ten metres wide. It’s dark, of course. There’s a doorway leading out of the far wall: might lead to the main corridor that should pass close to this lock.”

  I remembered to turn on my helmet lamp.

  “Can you open both lock doors?” Nicolosi asked.

  “Not at the same time, not without a lot of trouble that might get us noticed.”

  “Then we’ll come through in two passes. Norbert: you go first. Dexia and I will follow.”

  It took longer than I’d have liked, but eventually all five of us were on the other side of the lock. I’d only been weightless once, during the recuperation program after my injury, but the memory of how to move—at least without making too much of a fool of myself—was still there, albeit dimly. The others were coping about as well. The combined effects of our helmet lamps banished the darkness to the corners of the room, emphasizing the deeper gloom of the open doorway Sollis had mentioned. It occurred to me that somewhere down that darkness was Colonel Jax, or whatever was left of him.

  Nervously, I checked that the slug gun was still clipped to my belt.

  “Check your helmet maps,” Martinez said. “Does everyone have an overlay and a positional fix?”

  “I’m good,” I said, against a chorus from the other three, and acutely aware of how easy it would be to get lost aboard a ship as large as Nightingale, if that positional fix were to break down.

  “Check your weapons and suit systems. We’ll keep comms to a minimum all the way in.”

  “I’ll lead,” Nicolosi said, propelling himself into the darkness of the doorway before anyone could object.

  I followed hard on his heels, trying not to get out of breath with the effort of keeping up. There were loops and rails along all four walls of the shaft, so movement consisted of gliding from one handhold to the next, with only air resistance to stop one drifting all the way. We were covering one metre a second, easily: at that rate, it wouldn’t take long to cross the entire width of the ship, which would mean we’d somehow missed the axial corridor we were looking for, or that it just didn’t exist. But just when it was beginning to strike me that we’d gone too far, Nicolosi slowed. I grabbed a handhold to stop myself slamming into his feet.

  He looked back at us, making me squint against his helmet lamp. “Here’s the main corridor, just a bit deeper than we were expecting. Runs both ways.”

  “We turn left,” Martinez said, in not much more than a whisper. “Turn left and follow it for one hundred metres, maybe one hundred and twenty, until we meet the centrifuge section. It should be a straight crawl, with no obstructions.”

  Nicolosi turned away, then looked back. “I can’t see more than twenty metres into the corridor. We may as well see where it goes.”

  “Nice and slowly,” Martinez urged.

  We moved forward, along the length of the hull. In the instants when I was coasting from one handhold to the next, I held my breath and tried to hear the ambient noises of the ship, relayed to my helmet by the suit’s acoustic pickup. Mostly all I heard was the scuffing progress of the others, the hiss and hum of their own life-support packs. Other than that, Nightingale seemed as silent as when we’d approached. If the ship was aware of our intrusion, there was no sign of it.

  We’d made maybe forty metres from the junction: at least a third of the distance we had to travel before hitting the centrifuge, when Nicolosi slowed. I caught a handhold before I drifted into his heels, then looked back to make sure the others had got the message.

  “Problem?” Martinez asked.

  “There’s a T-junction right ahead. I didn’t think we were expecting a T-junction.”

  “We weren’t,” Martinez said. “But it shouldn’t surprise us that the real ship deviates from the blueprint here and there. As long as we don’t reach a dead-end, we can still keep moving towards the colonel.”

  “You want to flip a coin, or shall I do it?” Nicolosi said, looking back at us over his shoulder, his face picked out by my helmet light.

  “There’s no indication, no sign on the wall?”

  “Blank either way.”

  “In which case take the left,” Martinez said, before glancing at Norbert. “Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” the big man said. “Take left, then next right. Continue.”

  Nicolosi kicked off, and the rest
of us followed. I kept an eye on my helmet’s inertial compass, gratified when it detected our change of direction, even though the overlay now showed us moving through what should have been a solid wall.

  We’d moved twenty or thirty metres when Nicolosi slowed again. “Tunnel bends to the right,” he reported. “Looks like we’re back on track. Everyone cool with this?”

  “Cool,” I said.

  But we’d only made another fifteen or twenty metres of progress back along the new course when Nicolosi slowed and called back again. “We’re coming up on a heavy door; some kind of internal airlock. Looks like we’re going to need Sollis again.”

  “Let me through,” she said, and I squeezed aside so she could edge past me, trying to avoid knocking our suits together. In addition to the weapons she’d selected from the armoury, Sollis’s suit was also hung with all manner of door-opening tools, clattering against each other as she moved. I didn’t doubt that she’d be able to get through any kind of door, given time. But the idea of spending hours inside Nightingale, while we inched from one obstruction to the next, didn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm.

  We let Sollis examine the door: we could hear her ruminating over the design, tutting, humming and talking softly under her breath. She had panels open and equipment plugged in, just like before. The same unwelcoming face glowered from an oval display.

  After a couple of minutes Martinez sighed and spoke: “Is there a problem, Ingrid?”

  “There’s no problem. I can get this door open in about ten seconds. I just want to make damned sure this is another of Nightingale’s dumb facets. That means sensing the electrical connections on either side of the frame. Of course, if you’d rather we just stormed on through…”

  “Keep voice down,” Norbert rumbled.

  “I’m wearing a spacesuit, dickhead.”

  “Pressure outside. Sound travel, air to glass, glass to air.”

  “You have five minutes,” Martinez said, decisively. “If you haven’t found what you’re looking for by then, we open the door anyway. And Norbert’s right: let’s keep the noise down.”

  “So, no pressure then,” Sollis muttered.

  But in three minutes she started unplugging her tools, and turned aside with a beaming look on her face. “It’s just an emergency airlock, in case this part of the ship depressurizes. They must have decided to put it in after the original blueprints were drawn up.”

  “No danger that tripping it will alert the rest of Nightingale?” I asked.

  “Can’t ever say there’s no risk, but I’m happy for us to go through.”

  “Open the door,” Martinez said. “Everyone brace in case there’s vacuum or underpressure on the other side.”

  We followed his instructions, but when the door opened the air remained as still as before. Beyond, picked out in our wavering lights, was a short stretch of corridor terminating in an identical-looking door. This time there was enough room for all of us to squeeze through, while Sollis attended to the second lock mechanism. Some hardwired system required that the first door be closed before the second one could be opened, but that posed us no real difficulties. Now that Sollis knew what to look for, she worked much faster: good at her job and happy for us all to know it. I didn’t doubt that she’d be even faster on the way out.

  “We’re ready to go through, people. Indications say that the air’s just as cold on the other side, so keep your suits buttoned.”

  I heard the click as one of us—maybe Nicolosi, maybe Norbert—released a safety catch. It was like someone coughing in a theatre. I had no choice but to reach down and arm my own weapon.

  “Open it,” Martinez said quietly.

  The door chugged wide. Our lights stabbed into dark emptiness beyond: a suggestion of a much deeper, wider space than I’d been expecting. Sollis leaned through the door frame, her helmet lamp catching fleeting details from reflective surfaces. I had a momentary flash of glassy things stretching away into infinite distance, then it was gone.

  “Report, Ingrid,” Martinez said.

  “I think we can get through. We’ve come out next to a wall, or floor, or whatever it is. There are handholds, railings. Looks like they lead on into the room, probably to the other side.”

  “Stay where you are,” Nicolosi said, just ahead of me. “I’ll take point again.”

  She glanced back and swallowed hard. “It’s OK, I can handle this one. Can’t let you have all the fun, can I?”

  Nicolosi grunted something: I don’t think he had much of a sense of humour. “You’re welcome to my gun, you want it.”

  “I’m cool,” she said, but with audible hesitation. I didn’t blame her: it was different being point on a walk through a huge dark room, compared to a narrow corridor. Nothing could leap out and grab you from the side in a corridor.

  She started moving along the crawlway.

  “Nice and slowly, Ingrid,” Martinez said, from behind me. “We still have time on our side.”

  “We’re right behind you,” I said, feeling she needed moral support.

  “I’m fine, Dexia. No problems here. Just don’t want to lose my handhold and go drifting off into fuck knows what…”

  Her movements became rhythmic, moving into the chamber one careful handhold at a time. Nicolosi followed, with me right behind him. Apart from our movements, and the sound of our suit systems, the ship was still as silent as a crypt.

  But it wasn’t totally dark anymore.

  Now that we were inside the chamber, it began to reveal its secrets in dim spots of pale light, reaching away into some indeterminate distance. The lights must have always been there; just too faint to notice until we were inside.

  “Something’s running,” Sollis said.

  “We knew that,” Martinez said. “It was always clear that the ship was dormant, not dead.”

  I panned my helmet around and tried to get another look at the glassy things I’d glimpsed earlier. On either side of the railinged walkway, stretching away in multiple ranks, were hundreds of transparent flasks. Each flask was the size of an oil drum, rounded on top, mounted on a steel-grey plinth equipped with controls, readouts and input sockets. There were three levels of them, with the second and third layers stacked above the first on a skeletal rack. Most of the plinths were dead, but maybe one in ten was showing a lit-up readout.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Sollis said, and I guess she’d seen what I’d just seen: that the flasks contained human organs, floating in a chemical green solution, wired up with fine nutrient lines and electrical cables. I was no anatomist, but I still recognized hearts, lungs, kidneys, snakelike coils of intestine. And there were things anyone would have recognized: things like eyeballs, dozens of them growing in a single vat, swaying on the long stalks of optic nerves, like some weird species of all-seeing sea anemone, things like hands, or entire limbs, or genitals, or the skin and muscle masks of eyeless faces. Every external body part came in dozens of different sizes, ranging from child-sized to adult, male and female, and despite the green suspension fluid one could make out subtle variations in skin tone and pigmentation.

  “Easy, Ingrid,” I said, the words as much for my benefit as hers. “We always knew this was a hospital ship. It was just a matter of time before we ran into something like this.”

  “This stuff…” Nicolosi said, his voice low. “Where does it come from?”

  “Two main sources,” Martinez answered, sounding too calm for my liking. “Not everyone who came aboard Nightingale could be saved, obviously—the ship was no more capable of working miracles than any other hospital. Wherever practicable, the dead would donate intact body parts for future use. Useful, certainly, but such a resource could never have supplied the bulk of Nightingale’s surgical needs. For that reason the ship was also equipped to fabricate its own organ supplies, using well-established principles of stem-cell manipulation. The organ factories would have worked around the clock, keeping this library fully stocked.”

  “It doesn’t look full
y stocked now,” I said.

  Martinez said: “We’re not in a war zone anymore. The ship is dormant. It has no need to maintain its usual surgical capacity.”

  “So why is it maintaining any capacity? Why are some of these flasks still keeping their organs alive?”

  “Waste not, want not, I suppose. A strategic reserve, against the day when the ship might be called into action again.”

  “You think it’s just waiting to be reactivated?”

  “It’s just a machine, Dexia. A machine on standby. Nothing to get nervous about.”