Galactic North (38 page)

Slowly, we all turned and looked at Martinez. Even Norbert, who had contributed nothing until that point, turned to regard his master. Martinez blinked, but otherwise his composure was impeccable.

“The ship is indeed
Nightingale.
It was too risky to tell you when we were still on the planet. Had any of Jax’s allies learned of the identity—”

Sollis cut him off. “Is that why you didn’t tell us? Or is it because you knew we’d all been aboard that thing once already?”

“The fact that you have all been aboard
Nightingale
was a factor in your selection, nothing more. It was your skills that marked you out for this mission, not your medical history. ”

“So why didn’t you tell us?” she persisted.

“Again, had I told you more than was wise—”

“You lied to us.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Wait,” Nicolosi said, his voice calmer than I was expecting. “Let’s just . . . deal with this, shall we? We’re getting hung up on the fact that we were all healed aboard
Nightingale
, when the real question we should be asking is this: what the hell is Jax doing aboard a ship that doesn’t exist any more?”

“What’s the problem with the ship?” I asked.

“The problem,” Nicolosi said, speaking directly to me, “is that
Nightingale
was reported destroyed near the end of the war. Or were you not keeping up with the news?”

I shrugged. “Guess I wasn’t.”

“And yet you knew enough about the ship to recognise it.”

“Like I said, I remember the view from the medical shuttle. I was drugged-up, unsure whether I was going to live or die . . . everything was heightened, intense, like in a bad dream. But after they healed me and sent me back down surfaceside? I don’t think I ever thought about
Nightingale
again.”

“Not even when you look in the mirror?” Nicolosi asked.

“I thought about what they’d done to me, how much better a job it could have been. But it never crossed my mind to wonder what had happened to the ship afterwards. So what
did
happen?”

"You said ‘they healed me,’” Nicolosi observed. “Does that mean you were treated by doctors, by men and women?”

“Shouldn’t I have been?”

He shook his head minutely. “My guess is you were wounded and shipped aboard
Nightingale
soon after it was deployed.”

“That’s possible.”

“In which case
Nightingale
was still in commissioning phase. I went aboard later. What about you, Ingrid?”

“Me, too. I hardly saw another human being the whole time I was aboard that thing.”

“That was how it was meant to operate: with little more than a skeleton staff, to make medical decisions the ship couldn’t make for itself. Most of the time they were meant to stay behind the scenes.”

“All I remember was a hospital ship,” I said. “I don’t know anything about ’commissioning.’”

Nicolosi explained it to me patiently, as if I was a small child in need of education.

Nightingale
had been financed and built by a consortium of well-meaning postmortal aristocrats. Since their political influence hadn’t succeeded in curtailing the war (and since many of their aristocratic friends were quite happy for it to continue) they’d decided to make a difference in the next-best way: by alleviating the suffering of the mortal men and women engaged in the war itself.

So they created a hospital ship, one that had no connection to either the Northern Coalition or the Southland Militia.
Nightingale
would be there for all injured soldiers, irrespective of allegiance. Aboard the neutral ship, the injured would be healed, allowed to recuperate and then repatriated. All but the most critically wounded would eventually return to active combat service. And
Nightingale
itself would be state-of-the-art, with better medical facilities than any other public hospital on or around Sky’s Edge. It wouldn’t be the glittering magic of Demarchist medicine, but it would still be superior to anything most mortals had ever experienced.

It would also be tirelessly efficient, dedicated only to improving its healing record.
Nightingale
was designed to operate autonomously, as a single vast machine. Under the guidance of human specialists, the ship would slowly improve its methods until it had surpassed its teachers. I’d come aboard ship when it was still undergoing the early stages of its learning curve, but—as I learned from Nicolosi—the ship had soon moved into its “operational phase.” By then, the entire kilometre-long vehicle was under the control of only a handful of technicians and surgical specialists, with gamma-level intelligences making most of the day-to-day decisions. That was when Sollis and Nicolosi had been shipped aboard. They’d been healed by machines, with only a vague awareness that there was a watchful human presence behind the walls.

“It worked, too,” Nicolosi said. “The ship did everything its sponsors had hoped it would. It functioned like a huge, efficient factory: sucking in the wounded, spitting out the healed.”

“Only for them to go back to the war,” I said.

“The sponsors didn’t have any control over what happened when the healed were sent back down. But at least they were still alive; at least they hadn’t died on the battle field or the operating table. The sponsors could still believe that they had done something good. They could still sleep at night.”

“So
Nightingale
was a success,” I said. “What’s the problem? Wasn’t it turned over to civilian use after the armistice?”

“The ship was destroyed just before the ceasefire,” Nicolosi said. “That’s why we shouldn’t be seeing it now. A stray NC missile, nuke-tipped . . . too fast to be intercepted by the ship’s own countermeasures. It took out
Nightingale
, with staff and patients still aboard her.”

“Now that you mention it . . . maybe I did hear about something like that.”

Sollis looked fiercely at Martinez. “I say we renegotiate terms. You never told us we were going to have to spring Jax from a fucking ghost ship.”

Norbert moved to his master’s side, as if to protect him from the furious Sollis. Martinez, who had said nothing for many minutes, removed his glasses, buffed them on his shirt and replaced them with an unhurried calm.

“Perhaps you are right to be cross with me, Ingrid. And perhaps I made a mistake in not mentioning
Nightingale
sooner. But it was imperative that I not compromise this operation with a single careless indiscretion. My whole life has been an arrow pointing to this one task: the bringing to justice of Colonel Jax. I will not fail myself now.”

“You should have told us about the hospital ship,” Nicolosi said. “None of us would have had any reason to spread that information. We all want to see Jax get his due.”

“Then I have made a mistake, for which I apologise.”

Sollis shook her head. “I don’t think an apology’s going to cut it. If I’d known I was going to have to go back aboard that . . .
thing
—”

“You are right,” Martinez said, addressing all of us. “The ship has a traumatic association for you, and it was wrong of me not to allow for that.”

“Amen to that,” Sollis said.

I felt it was time I made a contribution. “I don’t think any of us are about to back out now, Tomas. But maybe— given what we now know about the ship—a little more incentive might go a long way.”

“I was about to make the same suggestion myself,” Martinez said. “You must appreciate that my funds are not inexhaustible, and that my original offer might already be considered generous . . . but shall we say an extra five thousand Australs, for each of you?”

“Make it ten and maybe we’re still in business,” Sollis snapped back, before I’d had a chance to blink.

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?” 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 completely foreign territory.

“The biggest thermal hot spot is here,” Martinez said, pointing at an area about a quarter of the way along the vessel from the bow. “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 others?” I asked, trying not to sound as if I was on her case. “Will they be less likely to go off?”

“Nothing’s guaranteed. I don’t like the idea of spending a minute longer aboard that thing than necessary, but I’d still rather take my chances with the back door.”

“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, including 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 further 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 give us 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’ve settled upon this decision, I shall abide by it.”