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

by Gardner Dozois

  “No one’s nervous,” I said, but it came out all wrong, making me sound like 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-cased 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 railinged crawlway, a row of flasks was gliding smoothly toward the far wall of the chamber. They were sliding in perfect, lock-step unison. When my heart started beating again, I realized 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 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 came back on 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, it was somewhere else in the ship.

  The flasks travelled back—returning to what must 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 was 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 traversing before the organ library. It swerved and jogged, 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 was it 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 if I’d expected that she would work faster now that she had already opened several doors without trouble, I was wrong. She kept plugging things in, checking readouts, 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 through 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 feminity.

  “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. “Voila.”

  The face had turned silent and masklike again, but now I really felt that we were being watched; that 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 got to the door in time, before it sent an alert.”

  “But you can’t be sure.”

  “No.” She sounded wounded.


  Sollis got to the 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, with her equipment still hooked into its open service panel.

  “Something’s screwed up,” she said, before swallowing hard. “These suits you’ve got us 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 readout panel, as if I’d 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 work. 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 underwater?”

  “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.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said. “If these suits made it through the war, I’m pretty sure 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 hard 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 recognize 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 carrying armour as well. It made it difficult to see ahead; difficult to reach forward to get an effective stroke; difficult to kick the 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 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 for myself, hoving 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’ve picked up 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, realizing that he was serious.

  The wall came nearer. The closer we got, the more clearly it was picked out by our lamps, the more I realized 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 realized exactly what the wall was. 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 realized just before I hit.”

  I arrested my motion, but not enough to avoid contacting the wall of skin. It yielded under me, stretching so much that I felt I was in danger of ripping my way right through. Then it held, and began to trampoline me back in the direction I’d come. 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…”

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Martinez said, wheezing between each word. “This is just another form of organ library, like the room we already passed through. I believe the liquid we’re swimming in must be a form of growth support medium—something like amniotic fluid. Under wartime conditions, this whole chamber would have been full of curtains of growing skin, measured by the acre.”

  Nicolosi groped for something on his belt, came up with a serrated blade that glinted nastily even in the pink fluid.

  “I’m cutting through.”

  “No!” Martinez barked.

  Sollis, who was next to Nicolosi, took hold of his forearm. “Easy, soldier. Got to be a better way.”

  “There is,” Martinez said. “Put the knife away, please. We can go around the skin, find its edge.”

  Nicolosi still had the blade in his hand. “I’d rather take the short cut.”

  “There are nerve endings in that skin. Cut them and the monitoring apparatus will know about it. Then so will the ship.”

  “Maybe the ship already knows.”

  “We don’t take that chance.”

  Reluctantly, Nicolosi returned the knife to his belt. “I thought we’d agreed to move fast from now on,” he said.

  “There’s fast, and there’s reckless,” Sollis said. “You were about to cross the line.”

  Martinez brushed past me, already swimming to the left. I followed him, with the others tagging on behind. After less than a minute of hard progress a dark edge emerged into view. It was like a picture frame stretching tight the canvas of the skin. Beyond the edge, only just visible, was a wall of the chamber, fretted with massive geodesic reinforcing struts.

  I allowed myself a moment of ease. We were still in danger, still in about the most claustrophobic situation I could imagine, but at least now the chamber didn’t seem infinitely large.

  Martinez braked himself by grabbing the frame. I came to rest next to him, and peered over the edge, towards what I hoped would be the wall we’d been headi
ng towards all along. But instead of that I saw only another field of skin, stretched between another frame, spaced from ours by no more than the height of a man. In the murky distance was the suggestion of a third frame, and perhaps one beyond that as well.

  “How many?” I asked as the others arrived on the frame, perching like crows.

  “I don’t know,” Martinez said. “Four, five—anything up to a dozen, I’d guess. But it’s OK. We can swim around the frames, then turn right and head back to where we’d expect to find the exit door.” He raised his voice. “Everyone all right? No problems with your suits?”