“There are lights,” Nicolosi said quietly.
We turned to look at him.
“I mean down there,” he added, nodding in the direction of the other sheets of skin. “I saw a flicker of something—a glow in the water, or amniotic fluid, or whatever the fuck this is.”
“I see light too,” Norbert said.
I looked down and saw that he was right; that Nicolosi had not been imagining it. A pale, trembling light was emerging between the next two layers of skin.
“Whatever that is, I don’t like it,” I said.
“Me neither,” Martinez said. “But if it’s something going on between the skin layers, it doesn’t have to concern us. We swim around, avoid them completely.”
He kicked off with surprising determination, and I followed quickly after him. The reverse side of the skin sheet was a fine mesh of pale support fibres, the structural matrix upon which the skin must have been grown and nourished. Thick black cables ran across the underside, arranged in circuit-like patterns.
The second sheet, the one immediately below the first, was of different pigmentation to the one above it. In all other respects it appeared similar, stretching unbroken into pink haze. The flickering, trembling light source was visible through flesh, silhouetting the veins and arteries at the moments when the light was brightest.
We passed under the second sheet, and peered into the gap between the second and third layers. Picked out in stuttering light was a tableau of furtive activity. Four squidlike robots were at work. Each machine consisted of a tapering, cone-shaped body, anchored to the skin by a cluster of whiplike arms emerging from the blunt end of the cone. The robots were engaged in precise surgery, removing a blanket-sized rectangle of skin by cutting it along four sides. The robots had their own illumination, shining from the ends of some of their arms, but the bright flashing light was coming from some kind of laser-like tool that each robot deployed on the end of a single segmented arm that was thicker than any of the others. I couldn’t tell whether the flashes were part of the cutting, or the instant healing that appeared to be taking place immediately afterwards. There was no bleeding, and the surrounding skin appeared unaffected.
“What are they doing?” I breathed.
“Harvesting,” Martinez answered. “What does it look like?”
“I know they’re harvesting. I mean, why are they doing it? What do they need that skin for?”
“I don’t know.”
“You had plenty of answers in the organ library, Mr. Martinez,” Sollis said. All five of us had slowed, hovering at the same level as the surgical robots. “For a ship that’s supposed to be dormant, I’m not seeing much fucking evidence of dormancy.”
“Nightingale grows skin here,” I said. “I can deal with that. The ship’s keeping a basic supply going, in case it gets called into another war. But that doesn’t explain why it needs to harvest it now.”
Martinez sounded vague. “Maybe it’s testing the skin—making sure it’s developing according to plan.”
“You’d think a little sample would be enough for that,” I said. “A lot less than several square metres, for sure. That’s enough skin to cover a whole person.”
“I really wish you hadn’t said that,” Nicolosi said.
“Let’s keep moving,” Martinez said. And he was right, too, I thought: the activity of the robots was deeply unsettling, but we hadn’t come here to sight-see.
As we swam away—with no sign that the robots had noticed us—I thought about what Ingrid Sollis had said before. About how it wasn’t clever to leave a gamma-level intelligence up and running without something to occupy itself. Because otherwise—because duty was so deeply hardwired into their logic pathways—they tended to go slowly, quietly, irrevocably insane.
But Nightingale had been alone out here since the end of the war. What did that mean for its controlling mind? Was the hospital running itself out here—reliving the duties of its former life, no matter how pointless they had become—because the mind had already gone mad, or was this the hospital’s last-ditch way of keeping itself sane?
And what, I wondered, did any of that have to do with the man we had come here to find in the first place?
We kept swimming, passing layer upon layer of skin. Now and then we’d pass another surgical party: another group of robots engaged in skin harvesting. Where they’d already been, the flesh was excised in neat rectangles and strips, exposing the gauzelike mesh of the growth matrix. Occasionally I saw a patch that was half-healed already, with the skin growing back in rice-paper translucence. By the time it was fully repaired, I doubted that there’d be any sign of where the skin had been cut.
Ten layers, then twelve—and then finally the wall I’d been waiting for hoved into view like a mirage. But I wasn’t imagining it, nor seeing another layer of drum-tight skin. There was the same pattern of geodesic struts as I’d seen on the other wall.
Sollis came through. “Got a visual on the door, people. We’re nearly out of here. I’m swimming ahead to start work.”
“Good, Ingrid,” Martinez called back.
A few seconds later I saw the airlock for myself, relieved that Sollis hadn’t been mistaken. She swam quickly, then—even as she was gliding to a halt by the door—commenced unclipping tools and connectors from her belt. Through the darkening distance of the pink haze I watched her flip down the service panel and begin her usual systems-bypass procedure. I was glad Martinez had found Sollis. Whatever else one might say about her, she was pretty hot at getting through doors.
“OK, good news,” she said, after a minute of plugging things in and out. “There’s air on the other side. We’re not going to have to swim in this stuff for much longer.”
“How much longer?” Nicolosi asked.
“Can’t risk a short circuit here, guy. Gotta take things one step at a time.”
Just as she was saying that, I became aware that we were casting shadows against the wall; ones that we hadn’t been casting when we arrived. I twisted around and looked back the way we’d just swum, in the direction of the new light source I knew had to be there. Four of the squid-like machines were approaching us, dragging a blanket of newly harvested skin between them, one robot grasping each corner between two segmented silver tentacles. They were moving faster than we could swim, driven by some propulsion system jetting fluid from the sharp end of the cone.
Sollis jerked back as the outer airlock door opened suddenly.
“I didn’t…” she started.
“I know,” I said urgently. “The robots are coming. They must have sent a command to open the lock.”
“Let’s get out of the way,” Martinez said, kicking off from the wall. “Ingrid: get away from the lock. Take what you can, but don’t spend too long doing it.”
Sollis started unplugging her equipment, stowing it on her belt with fumbling fingers. The machines powered nearer, the blanket of skin undulating like a flying carpet. They slowed, then halted. Their lights pushed spears of harsh illumination through the fluid. They were looking at us, wondering what we were doing between them and the door. One of the machines directed its beam to Martinez’s swimming figure, attracted by the movement. Martinez slowed and hung frozen in the glare, like a moth pinned in a beam of sunlight.
None of us said a word. My own breathing was the loudest sound in the universe, but I couldn’t make it any quieter.
One of the machines let go of its corner of the skin. It hovered by the sheet for a moment, as if weighing its options. Then it singled me out and commenced its approach. As it neared, the machine appeared far larger and more threatening than I’d imagined. Its cone-shaped body was as long as me; its thickest tentacle appearing powerful enough to do serious damage even without the additional weapon of the laser. When it spread its arms wide, as if to embrace me, I had to fight not to panic and back away.
The robot started examining me. It began with my helmet, tap-tapping and scraping, shining its light through my visor. It appl
ied twisting force, trying to disengage the helmet from the neck coupling. Whether it recognized me as a person or just a piece of unidentifiable floating debris, it appeared to think that dismantling was the best course of action. I told myself that I’d let it work at me for another few seconds, but as soon as I felt the helmet begin to loosen I’d have to act—even if that meant alerting the robot that I probably wasn’t debris.
But just when I’d decided as much, the robot abandoned my helmet and worked its way south. It extended a pair of tentacles under my chest armour from each side, trying to lever it away like huge scab. Somehow I kept my nerve, daring to believe that the robot would sooner or later lose interest in me. Then it pulled away from the chest armour and started fiddling with my weapon, tap-tapping away like a spirit in a séance. It tugged on the gun, trying to unclip it. Then, as abruptly as it had started, the robot abandoned its investigation. It pulled away, gathering its tentacles into a fistlike bunch. Then it moved slowly in the direction of Nicolosi, tentacles groping ahead of it.
I willed him to stay still. There’d be no point in swimming. None of us could move faster than those robots. Nicolosi must have worked that out for himself, or else he was paralysed in fright, but he made no movements as the robot cruised up to him. It slowed, the spread of its tentacles widening, and then tracked its spotlight from head to toe, as if it still couldn’t decide what Nicolosi was. Then it reached out a pair of manipulators and brushed their sharp-looking tips against his helmet. The machine probed and examined with surprising gentleness. I heard the metal-on-metal scrape through the voice link, backgrounded by Nicolosi’s rapid, sawlike breathing.
Keep it together…
The machine reached his neck, examined the interface between helmet and torso assembly, and then worked its way down to his chest armour, extending a fine tentacle under the armour itself, to where the vulnerable life-support module lay concealed. Then, very slowly, it withdrew the tentacle.
The machine pulled back from Nicolosi, turning its blunt end away. It seemed to have completed its examination. The other three robots hovered watchfully with their prize of skin. Nicolosi sighed and eased his breathing.
“I think…” he whispered.
That was his big mistake. The machine righted itself, gathered its tentacles back into formation and began to approach him again, its powerful light sweeping up and down his body with renewed purpose. The second machine was nearing, clearly intent on assisting its partner in the examination of Nicolosi.
I looked at Sollis, our horrified faces meeting each other. “Can you get the door…” I started.
“Not a hope in hell.”
“Nicolosi,” I said, not bothering to whisper this time. “Stay still and maybe they’ll go away again.”
But he wasn’t going to stay still: not this time. Even as I watched, he was hooking a hand around the plasma rifle, bringing it around like a harpoon, its wide maw directed at the nearest machine.
“No!” Norbert shouted, his voice booming through the water like a depth charge. “Do not use! Not in here!”
But Nicolosi was beyond reasoned argument now. He had a weapon. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to use it.
So he did.
In one sense, it did all that he asked of it. The plasma discharge speared the robot like a sunbeam through a cloud. The robot came apart in a boiling eruption of steam and fire, with jagged black pieces riding the shockwave. Then the steam—the vaporized amniotic fluid—swallowed everything, including Nicolosi and his gun. Even inside my suit, the sound hit me like a hammerblow. He fired one more time, as if to make certain that he had destroyed the robot. By then the second machine was near enough to be flung back by the blast, but it quickly righted itself and continued its progress.
“More,” Norbert said, and when I looked back up the stack of skin sheets, I saw what he meant. Robots were arriving in ones and twos, abandoning their cutting work to investigate whatever had just happened here.
“We’re in trouble,” I said.
The steam cloud was breaking up, revealing the floating form of Nicolosi, with the ruined stump of his weapon drifting away from him. The second time he fired it, something must have gone badly wrong with the plasma rifle. I wasn’t even sure that Nicolosi was still alive.
“I take door,” Norbert said, drawing his Demarchist weapon. “You take robots.”
“You’re going to shoot us out, after what happened to Nicolosi?” I asked.
“No choice,” he said, as the gun unpacked itself in his hand.
Martinez pushed himself across to the big man. “No. Give it to me instead. I’ll take care of the door.”
“Too dangerous,” Norbert said.
“Give it to me.”
Norbert hesitated, and for a moment I thought he was going to put up a fight. Then he calmly passed the Demarchist weapon to Martinez and accepted Martinez’s weapon in return; the little slug gun vanishing into his vast gauntleted hand. Whatever respect I’d had for Norbert vanished at the same time. If he was supposed to be protecting Martinez, that was no way to go about it.
Of the three of us, only Norbert and I were carrying projectile weapons. I unclipped my second pistol and passed it to Sollis. She took it gratefully, needing little persuasion to keep her energy weapon glued to her belt. The robots were easy to kill, provided we let them get close enough for a clean shot. I didn’t doubt that the surgical cutting gear was capable of inflicting harm, but we never gave them the opportunity to touch us. Not that the machines appeared to have deliberately hostile designs on us anyway. They were still behaving as if they were investigating some shipboard malfunction that required remedial action. They might have killed us, but it would only have been because they did not understand what we were.
We didn’t have an inexhaustible supply of slugs, though, and manual reloading was not an option underwater. Just when I began to worry that we’d be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, Martinez’s voice boomed through my helmet.
“I’m ready to shoot now. Follow me as soon as I’m through the second door.”
The Demarchist weapon discharged, lighting up the entire chamber in an eyeblink of murky detail. There was another discharge, then a third.
“Martinez,” I said. “Speak to me.”
After too long a delay, he came through. “I’m still here. Through the first door. Weapon’s cycling…”
More robots were swarming above us, tentacles lashing like whips. I wondered how long it would take before signals reached Nightingale’s sentience engine and the ship realized that it was dealing with more than just a local malfunction.
“Why doesn’t he shoot?” Sollis asked, squeezing off one controlled slug after another.
“Sporting weapon. Three shots, recharge cycle, three shots,” Norbert said, by way of explanation. “No rapid-fire mode. But work good underwater.”
“We could use those next three shots,” I said.
Martinez buzzed in my ear. “Ready. I will discharge until the weapon is dry. I suggest you start swimming now.”
I looked at Nicolosi’s drifting form, which was still as inert as when he had emerged from the steam cloud caused by his own weapon. “I think he’s dead…” I said softly. “But we should still—“
“No,” Norbert said, almost angrily. “Leave him.”
“Maybe he’s just unconscious.”
Martinez fired three times; three brief bright strobe flashes. “Through!” I heard him call, but there was something wrong with his voice. I knew then that he’d been hurt as well, although I couldn’t guess at how badly.
Norbert and Sollis fired two last shots at the robots that were still approaching, then kicked past me in the direction of the airlock. I looked at Nicolosi’s drifting form, knowing that I’d never be able to live with myself if I didn’t try to get him out of there. I clipped my gun back to my belt and started swimming for him.
“No!” Norbert shouted again, when he’d seen my intentions. “Leave him! To
o late!”
I reached Nicolosi and locked my right arm around his neck, pulling his head against my chest. I kicked for all I was worth, trying to pull myself forward with my free arm. I still couldn’t tell if Nicolosi was dead or alive.
“Leave him, Scarrow! Too late!”
“I can’t leave him!” I shouted back, my voice ragged.
Three robots were bearing down on me and my cargo, their tentacles groping ahead of them. I squinted against the glare from their lights and tried to focus on getting the two of us to safety. Every kick of my legs, every awkward swing of my arm, seemed to tap the last drop of energy in my muscles. Finally I had nothing more to give.
I loosened my arm. His body corkscrewed slowly around, and through his visor I saw his face: pale, sweat-beaded, locked into a rictus of fear, but not dead, nor even unconscious. His eyes were wide open. He knew exactly what was going to happen when I let him go.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 116
