Galactic North (42 page)

“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’re here.”

“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 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 around the edge, towards what I hoped would be the wall we’d been heading towards all along. But instead of that I saw only another field of skin, stretched across another frame, separated from the first by no more than the height of a man. In the murky distance was the suggestion of a third frame, and perhaps a fourth beyond that.

“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 okay. 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?”

“There are lights,” Nicolosi said quietly.

We turned to look at him.

“I mean over 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—Nicolosi had not been imagining it. A pale, trembling light was emerging from 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 behind the first, was of different pigmentation from the one behind it. In all other respects it appeared similar, stretching unbroken into pink haze. The flickering, trembling light source was visible through the flesh, silhouetting the veins and arteries at the moments when the light was brightest.

We passed around 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 squid-like robots were at work. Each machine consisted of a tapering, cone-shaped body, anchored to the skin by a cluster of whip-like 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 free along four sides. The robots generated 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, Mister 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’s called into another war. But that doesn’t explain why it needs to harvest some
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 sightsee.

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—since duty was so deeply hardwired into their logic pathways—they tended to go slowly, quietly, irrevocably insane.

And
Nightingale
had been alone out there since the end of the war. What did that mean for its controlling mind? Was the hospital running itself out there—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 come across another surgical party: another group of robots engaged in skin-harvesting. Where they’d already completed their task, the flesh had been excised in neat rectangles and strips, exposing the gauzelike mesh of the growth matrix. Occasionally I saw a patch that was half-healed already, 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 hove into view like a mirage. But I wasn’t imagining it, or seeing another layer of drum-tight skin. There was the same pattern of geodesic struts as I’d seen on the other wall.

Sollis’s voice 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.

“Okay, 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—shadows 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 ends of their cone-shaped bodies.

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 make it snappy.”

Sollis started unplugging her equipment, stowing it on her belt with fumbling fingers. The machines powered nearer, the blanket of skin undulating between them like a flying carpet. They slowed, then halted, their lights pushing 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 towards 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. Silently, the airlock door closed itself again, as if the robots had detected our presence and decided to bar our exit from the flooded chamber.

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 expected. 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 applied twisting force, trying to disengage the helmet from the neck coupling. Whether it recognised 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 I had to move, 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 a 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 seance. 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 trying to swim away. None of us could move faster than those robots. Nicolosi must have worked that out for himself, or else he was paralysed with 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.

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, apparently finished with 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 gazes locking. “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, swinging it in front of him like a harpoon, its wide maw directed at the nearest machine.