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

by Gardner Dozois

  I had no choice.

  A strong arm hooked itself under my helmet, and began to tug me out of harm’s way. I watched as Nicolosi drifted towards the robots, and then closed my eyes as they wrapped their tentacles around his body and started probing him for points of weakness, like children trying to tear the wrapping from a present.

  Norbert’s voice boomed through the water. “He’s dead.”

  “He was alive. I saw it.”

  “He’s dead. End of story.”

  * * * *

  I pulled myself through a curtain of trembling pink water. Air pressure in the corridor contained the amniotic fluid, even though Martinez had blown a man-sized hole in each airlock door. Ruptured metal folded back in jagged black petals. Ahead, caught in a moving pool of light from their helmet lamps, Sollis and Martinez made awkward, crabwise progress away from the ruined door. Sollis was supporting Martinez, doing most of the work for him. Even in zero gravity, it took effort to haul another body.

  “Help her,” Norbert said faintly, shaking his weapon to loosen the last of the pink bubbles from its metal. Without waiting for a reaction from me, he turned and started shooting back into the water, dealing with the remaining robots.

  I caught up with Sollis and took some of her burden. All along the corridor, panels were flashing bright red, synchronized to the banshee wail of an emergency siren. About once every ten metres, the ship’s persona spoke from the wall; multiple voices blurring into an agitated chorus. “Attention. Attention,” the faces said. “This is the Voice of Nightingale. An incident has been detected in culture bay three. Damage assessment and mitigation systems have now been tasked. Partial evacuation of the affected ship area may be necessary. Please stand by for further instructions. Attention. Attention…”

  “What’s up with Martinez?”

  “Took some shrapnel when he put a hole in that door.” She indicated a severe dent in his chest armour, to the left of the sternum. “Didn’t puncture the suit, but I’m pretty sure it did some damage. Broken rib, maybe even a collapsed lung. He was talking for a while back there, but he’s out cold now.”

  “Without Martinez, we don’t have a mission.”

  “ I didn’t say he was dead. His suit still seems to be ticking over. Maybe we could leave him here, collect him on the way back.”

  “With all those robots crawling about the place? How long do you think they’d leave him alone?”

  I looked back, checking on Norbert. He was firing less frequently now, dealing with the last few stragglers still intent on investigating the damage. Finally he stopped, loaded a fresh clip into his slug gun, and then after waiting for ten or twenty seconds turned from the wall of water. He began to make his way towards us.

  “Maybe there aren’t going to be any more robots.”

  “There will,” Norbert said, joining us. “Many more. Nowhere safe, now. Ship on full alert. Nightingale coming alive.”

  “Maybe we should scrub,” I said. “We’ve lost Nicolosi… Martinez is incapacitated… we’re no longer at anything like necessary strength to take down Jax.”

  “We still take Jax,” Norbert said. “Came for him, leave with him.”

  “Then what about Martinez?”

  He looked at the injured man, his face set like a granite carving. “He stay,” he said.

  “But you already said the robots—“

  “No other choice. He stay.” And then Norbert brought himself closer to Martinez and tucked a thick finger under the chin of the old man’s helmet, tilting the faceplate up. “Wake!” he bellowed.

  When there was no response, Norbert reached behind Martinez’s chest armour and found the release buckles. He passed the dented plate to me, then slid down the access panel on the front of Martinez’s tabard pack, itself dented and cracked from the shrapnel impact. He scooped out a fistful of pink water, flinging the bubble away from us, then started making manual adjustments to the suit’s life-support settings. Biomedical data patterns shifted, accompanied by warning flashes in red.

  “What are you doing?” I breathed. When he didn’t hear me, I shouted the question.

  “He need stay awake. This help.”

  Martinez coughed red sputum onto the inside of his faceplate. He gulped in hard, then made rapid eye contact with the three of us. Norbert pushed the loaded slug gun into Martinez’s hand, then slipped a fresh ammo clip onto the old man’s belt. He pointed down the corridor, to the blasted door, then indicated the direction we’d all be heading when we abandoned Martinez.

  “We come back,” he said. “You stay alive.”

  Sollis’s teeth flashed behind her faceplate. “This isn’t right. We should be carrying him—anything other than just leaving him here.”

  “Tell them,” Martinez wheezed.

  “No.”

  “Tell them, you fool! They’ll never trust you unless you tell them.”

  “Tell them what?” I asked.

  Norbert looked at me with heavy lidded eyes. “The old man… not Martinez. His name… Quinlan.”

  “Then who the fuck is Martinez?” Sollis asked.

  “I,” Norbert said.

  I glanced at Sollis, then back at the big man. “Don’t be silly,” I said gently, wondering what must have happened to him in the flooded chamber.

  “I am Quinlan,” the old man said, between racking coughs. “He was always the master. I was just the servant, the decoy.”

  “They’re both insane,” Sollis said.

  “This is the truth. I acted the role of Martinez—deflected attention from him.”

  “He can’t be Martinez,” Sollis said. “Sorry, Norbert, but you can barely put a sentence together, let alone a prosecution dossier.”

  Norbert tapped a huge finger against the side of his helmet. “Damage to speech centre, in war. Comprehension… memory… analytic faculties… intact.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” the old man said. “He’s the one who needs to survive, not me. He’s the one who can nail Jax.” Then he tapped the gun against the big man’s leg, urging him to leave. “Go,” he said, barking out that one word like it was the last thing he expected to say. And at almost the same moment, I saw one of the tentacled robots begin to poke its limbs through the curtain of water, tick-ticking the tips of its arms against the blasted metal, searching for a way into the corridor.

  “Think the man has a point,” Sollis said.

  * * * *

  It didn’t get any easier from that point on.

  We left the old man—I still couldn’t think of him as “Quinlan”—slumped against the corridor wall, the barrel of his gun wavering in the rough direction of the ruined airlock. I looked back all the while, willing him to make the best use of the limited number of shots he had left. We were halfway to the next airlock when he squeezed off three rapid rounds, blasting the robot to twitching pieces. It wasn’t long before another set of tentacles began to probe the gap. I wondered how many of the damned things the ship was going to keep throwing at us, and how that number stacked up against the slugs the old man had left.

  The flashing red lights ran all the way to the end of the corridor. I was just looking at the door, wondering how easy it was going to be for Sollis to crack, when Norbert/Martinez brought the three of us to a halt, braking my momentum with one tree-like forearm.

  “Blast visor down, Scarrow.”

  I understood what he had in mind. No more sweet-talking the doors until they opened for us. From now on we were shooting our way through Nightingale.

  Norbert/Martinez aimed the Demarchist weapon at the airlock. I cuffed down my blast visor. Three discharges took out the first airlock door, crumpling it inward as if punched by a giant fist.

  “Air on other side,” Norbert/Martinez said.

  The Demarchist gun was ready again. Through the visor’s near-opaque screen I saw three flashes. When I flipped it back up, the weapon was packing itself back into its stowed configuration. Sollis patted aside smoke and airborne debris. The eme
rgency lights were still flashing in our section of corridor, but the space beyond the airlock was as pitch dark as any part of the ship we’d already traversed. Yet we’d barely taken a step into that darkness when wall facets lit up in swift sequence, with the face of Nightingale looking at us from all directions.

  Something was wrong now. The faces really were looking at us, even though the facets were flat. The images turned slowly as we advanced down the corridor.

  “This is the Voice of Nightingale,” she said, as if we were being addressed by a perfectly synchronized choir. “I am now addressing a moving party of three individuals. My systems have determined with a high statistical likelihood that this party is responsible for the damage I have recently sustained. The damage is containable, but I cannot tolerate any deeper intrusion. Please remain stationary and await an escort to a safe holding area.”

  Sollis slowed, but she didn’t stop. “Who’s speaking? Are we being addressed by the sentience engine, or just a delta-level subsidiary?”

  “This is the Voice of Nightingale. I am a Turing-compliant gamma-level intelligence of the Vaaler-Lako series. Please stop, and await escort to a safe holding area.”

  “That’s the sentience engine,” Sollis said quietly. “It means we’re getting the ship’s full attention now.”

  “Maybe we can talk it into handing over Jax.”

  “I don’t know. Negotiating with this thing might be tricky. Vaaler-Lakos were supposed to be the hot new thing around the time Nightingale was put together, but they didn’t quite work out that way.”

  “What happened?”

  “There was a flaw in their architecture. Within a few years of start-up, most of them had gone bugfuck insane. I don’t even want to think about what being stuck out here’s done to this one.”

  “Please stop,” the voice said again, “and await escort to a safe holding area. This is your final warning.”

  “Ask it…” Norbert/Martinez said. “Speak for me.”

  “Can you hear me, ship?” Sollis asked. “We’re not here to do any harm. We’re sorry about the damage we caused already. It’s just that we’ve come for someone. There’s a man here, a man aboard you, that we’d really like to meet.”

  The ship said nothing for several moments. Just when I’d concluded that it didn’t understand us, it said: “This facility is no longer operational. There is no one here for you to see. Please await escort to a safe holding area, from where you can be referred to a functioning facility.”

  “We’ve come for Colonel Jax,” I said. “Check your patient records.”

  “Admission code Tango Tango six one three, hyphen five,” said Norbert/Martinez, forcing each word out like an expression of pain. “Colonel Brandon Jax, Northern Coalition.”

  “Do you have a record of that admission?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the Voice of Nightingale replied. “I have a record for Colonel Jax.”

  “Do you have a discharge record?”

  “No such record is on file.”

  “Then Jax either died in your care, or he’s still aboard. Either way there’ll be a body. We’d really like to see it.”

  “That is not possible. You will stop now. An escort is on its way to escort you to a safe holding area.”

  “Why can’t we see Jax?” Sollis demanded. “Is he telling you we can’t see him? If so he’s not the man you should be listening to. He’s a war criminal, a murderous bastard who deserves to die.”

  “Colonel Jax is under the care of this facility. He is still receiving treatment. It is not possible to visit him at this time.”

  “Damn thing’s changing its story,” I said. “A minute ago it said the facility was closed.”

  “We just want to talk to him,” Sollis said. “That’s all. Just to let him know the world knows where he is, even if you don’t let us take him with us now.”

  “Please remain calm. The escort is about to arrive.”

  The facets turned to look away from us, peering into the dark limits of the corridor. There was a sudden bustle of approaching movement, and then a wall of machines came squirming towards us. Dozens of squid-robots were nearing, packed so tightly together that their tentacles formed a flailing mass of silver-blue metal. I looked back the other way, back the way we’d come, and saw another wave of robots coming from that direction. There were far more machines than we’d seen before, and their movements in dry air were at least as fast and fluid as they’d been underwater.

  “Ship,” Sollis said, “all we want is Jax. We’re prepared to fight for him. That’ll mean more damage being inflicted on you. But if you give us Jax, we’ll leave nicely.”

  “I don’t think it wants to bargain,” I said, raising my slug gun at the advancing wall just as it reached the ruined airlock. I squeezed off rounds, taking out at least one robot with each slug. Sollis started pitching in to my left, while Norbert/Martinez took care of the other direction with the Demarchist weapon. He could do a lot more damage with each discharge, taking out three or four machines every time he squeezed the trigger. But he kept having to wait for the weapon to re-arm itself, and the delay was allowing the wall to creep slowly forward. Sollis and I were firing almost constantly, taking turns to cover each other while we slipped in new slugs clips or ammo cells, but our wall was gaining on us as well. No matter how many robots we destroyed, no gap ever appeared in the advancing wave. There must have been hundreds of them, squeezing us in from both directions.

  “We’re not going to make it,” I said, sounding resigned even to myself. “There’s too many of them. Maybe if we still had Nicolosi’s rifle, we could shoot our way out.”

  “I didn’t come all this way just to surrender to a haunted hospital,” Sollis said, replacing an ammo cell. “If it means going out fighting… so be it.”

  The nearest robots were now only six or seven metres away, with the tips of their tentacles probing even nearer. She kept pumping shots into them, but they kept coming closer, flinging aside the hot debris of their damaged companions. There was no possibility of falling back any farther, for we were almost back to back with Norbert/Martinez.

  “Maybe we should just stop,” I said. “This is a hospital. It’s programmed to heal people. The last thing it’ll want to do is hurt us.”

  “Feel free to put that to the test,” Sollis said.

  Norbert/Martinez squeezed off the last discharge before his weapon went back into recharge mode. Sollis was still firing. I reached over and tried to pass him my gun, so he’d at least have something to use while waiting for his weapon to power up. But the machines had already seen their moment. The closest one flicked out a tentacle and wrapped it around the big man’s foot. Everything happened very quickly, then. The machine hauled Norbert/Martinez towards the flailing mass, until he fell within reach of another set of tentacles. They had him, then. He cartwheeled his arms, trying to reach for handholds on the walls, but there was no possibility of that. The robots flicked the Demarchist weapon from his grip, and then took the weapon with them. Norbert/Martinez screamed as his legs, and then his upper body, vanished into the wall of machines. They smothered him completely. For a moment we could still hear his breathing—he’d stopped screaming, as if knowing it would make no difference—and then there was absolute silence, as if the carrier signal from his suit had been abruptly terminated.

  Then, a moment later, the machines were on Sollis and me.

  * * * *

  I woke. The fact that I was still alive—not just alive but comfortable and lucid—hit like me like a mild electric shock, one that snapped me into instant and slightly resentful alertness. I’d been enjoying unconsciousness. I remembered the robots, how I’d felt them trying to get into my suit, the sharp cold nick as something pierced skin, and then an instant later the painless bliss of sleep. I’d expected to die, but as the drug hit my brain, it erased all trace of fear.

  But I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t even injured, so far as I could tell. I’d been divested of my suit, but I was
now reclining in relative comfort on a bed or mattress, under a clean white sheet. My own weight was pressing me down onto the mattress, so I must have been moved into the ship’s reactivated centrifuge section. I felt tired and bruised, but other than that I was in no worse shape than when we’d boarded Nightingale. I remembered what I’d told Sollis during our last stand: how the hospital ship wouldn’t want to do us harm. Maybe there’d been more than just wishful thinking in that statement.

  There was no sign of Sollis or Norbert/Martinez, though. I was alone in a private recovery cubicle, surrounded by white walls. I remembered coming around in a room like this during my first visit to Nightingale. The wall on my right contained a white-rimmed door and a series of discrete hatches, behind which I knew lurked medical monitoring and resuscitation equipment, none of which had been deemed necessary in my case. A control panel was connected to the side of the bed by a flexible stalk, within easy reach of my right hand. Via the touchpads on the panel I was able to adjust the cubicle’s environmental settings and request services from the hospital, ranging from food and drink, washing and toilet amenities, to additional drug dosages.