Galactic North (46 page)

“And the technical staff who were aboard, and the men who were sent to reclaim the ship when she went out of control?”

“They were euthanised as well. I don’t think
Nightingale
took any pleasure in that, but she saw their deaths as a necessary evil. Above all else, she wouldn’t allow herself to be returned to use as a military hospital.”

“Yet she didn’t kill you.”

A dry tongue flicked across Jax’s lips. “She was going to. Then she delved deeper into her patient records and realised who I was. At that point she began to have other ideas.”

“Such as?”

“The ship was smart enough to realise that the bigger problem wasn’t her existence—they could always build other hospital ships—but the war itself.
War
itself. So she decided to do something about it. Something positive. Something constructive.”

“Which would be?”

“You’re looking at it, kid. I’m the war memorial. When
Nightingale
started doing this to me—making me what I am—she had in mind that I’d become a vast artistic statement in flesh.
Nightingale
would reveal me to the world when she was finished. The horror of what I am would shame the world into peace. I’d be the living, breathing equivalent of Picasso’s
Guernica.
I’m an illustration in flesh of what war does to human beings.”

“The war’s over. We don’t need a memorial.”

“Maybe you can explain that to the ship. Trouble is, I don’t think she really believes the war
is
over. You can’t blame her, can you? She has access to the same history files we do. She knows that not all ceasefires stay that way.”

“What was she intending to do? Return to Sky’s Edge with you aboard?”

“Exactly that. Problem is, the ship isn’t done. I know I may look finished to you, but
Nightingale
—well, she has this perfectionist streak. She’s always changing her mind. Can’t ever seem to get me quite right. Keeps swapping pieces around, cutting pieces away, growing new parts and stitching them in. All the while she has to make sure I don’t die on her. That’s where her real genius comes in. She’s Michelangelo with a scalpel.”

“You almost sound proud of what she’s done to you.”

“Would you rather I screamed? I can scream if you like. It just gets old after a while.”

“You’re way too far gone, Jax. I was wrong about the war crimes court. They’ll throw your case out on grounds of insanity. ”

“That would be a shame. I’d love to see their faces when they wheel me into the witness box. But I’m not going to court, am I? Ship’s laid it all out for me. She’s pulling the plug.”

“So she says.”

“You don’t sound as if you believe her.”

“I can’t see her abandoning you, after all the effort she’s gone to.”

“She’s an artist. They act on whims. Maybe if I was ready, maybe if she thought she’d done all she could with me . . . but that’s not the way she feels. I think she felt she was getting close three or four years ago . . . but then she had a change of heart, a major one, and tore out almost everything. Now I’m an unfinished work. She couldn’t bear to see me exhibited in this state. She’d rather rip up the canvas and start again.”

“With you?”

“No, I think she’s more or less exhausted my possibilities. Especially now that she’s seen the chance to do something completely different; something that will let her take her message a lot closer to home. That, of course, is where you come in.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s what the others said as well.” Again, he cocked his head to one side. “Hey, ship! Maybe it’s time you showed her what the deal is, don’t you think?”

“If you are ready, Colonel,” the Voice of
Nightingale
said.

“I’m ready. Dexia’s ready. Why don’t you bring on the dessert?”

Colonel Jax looked to the right, straining his neck. Beyond Jax’s border, a circular door opened in part of the wall. Light rammed through the opening. Something floated in silhouette, held in suspension by three or four squid robots. The floating thing was dark, rounded, irregular. It looked like half a dozen pieces of dough balled together. I couldn’t make out what it was.

Then the robots pushed it into the chamber, and I saw, and then I screamed.

“It’s time for you to join your friends now,” the ship said.

That was three months ago—an eternity, until we remember being held down on the surgical bed while the machines emerged and prepared to work on us, and then it feels as if everything happened only a terror-filled moment ago.

We made it safely back to Sky’s Edge. The return journey was arduous, as one might expect given our circumstances. But the shuttle had little difficulty flying itself back into a capture orbit, and once it fell within range it emitted a distress signal that brought it to the attention of the planetary authorities. We were off-loaded and taken to a secure orbital holding facility, where we were examined and our story subjected to what limited verification was actually possible. Dexia had bluffed the Voice of
Nightingale
when she told the ship that Martinez was certain to have revealed the coordinates of the hospital ship to someone else. It turned out that he hadn’t informed a soul, too wary of alerting Jax’s allies. The Ultras who had found the ship in the first place were now a fifth of a light-year away, and falling further from Sky’s Edge with every passing hour. It would be decades, or longer, before they returned this way.

All the same, we don’t think anyone seriously doubted our story. As outlandish as it was, no one could suggest a more likely alternative. We did have the head of Colonel Brandon Jax, or at least a duplicate that passed all available genetic and physiological tests. And we had clearly been to a place that specialised in extremely advanced surgery, of a kind that simply wasn’t possible in and around Sky’s Edge. That was the problem, though. The planet’s best surgeons had examined us with great thoroughness, each eager to advance their own prestige by undoing the work of
Nightingale.
But all had quailed, fearful of doing more harm than good. No separation of Siamese twins could compare in complexity and risk with the procedure that would be necessary to unknot the living puzzle
Nightingale
had made of us. None of the surgeons was willing to bet on the survival of more than a single one of us, and even the odds of that weren’t overwhelmingly optimistic. That pact we’d made with each other was that we would only consent to the operation if the vote was unanimous.

At massive expense (not ours, for by then we were the subject of considerable philanthropy), a second craft was sent out to snoop the coordinates where we’d left the hospital ship. It had the best military scanning gear money could buy. But it found nothing out there but ice and dust.

From that, we were free to draw two possible conclusions. Either
Nightingale
had destroyed herself soon after our departure, or had relocated to avoid being found again. We couldn’t say which alternative pleased us less. At least if we’d known that the ship was gone for good, we could have resigned ourselves to the surgeons, however risky that might have been. But if the ship was hiding herself, there was always the possibility that someone might find her again. And then somehow persuade her to undo us.

But perhaps
Nightingale
will need no persuasion, when she decides the time is right. It seems to us that the ship will return one day, of her own volition. She will make orbit around Sky’s Edge and announce that the time has come for us to be separated.
Nightingale
will have decided that we have served our purpose, that we have walked the world long enough. Perhaps by then she will have some other memorial in mind. Or she will conclude that her message has finally been taken to heart, and that no further action is needed. That, we think, will depend on how the ceasefire holds.

It’s in our interests, then, to make sure the planet doesn’t slip back into war. We want the ship to return and heal us. None of us likes things this way, despite what you may have read or heard. Yes, we’re famous. Yes, we’re the subject of a worldwide outpouring of sympathy and goodwill. Yes, we can have almost anything we want. None of that compensates, though. Not even for a second.

It’s hard on all of us, but especially so for Martinez. We’ve all long since stopped thinking of the big man as Norbert. He’s the one who has to carry us everywhere: more than twice his own bodyweight.
Nightingale
thought of that, of course, and made sure that our own hearts and respiratory systems take some of the burden off Martinez. But it’s still his spine bending under this load; still his legs that have to support us. The doctors who’ve examined us say his condition is good, that he can continue to play his part for years to come—but they’re not talking about for ever. And when Martinez dies, so will the rest of us. In the meantime we just keep hoping that
Nightingale
will return sooner than that.

You’ve seen us up close now. You’ll have seen photographs and moving images before, but nothing really compares with seeing us in the flesh. We make quite a spectacle, don’t we? A great tottering tree of flesh, an insult to symmetry. You’ve heard us speak, all of us, individually. You know by now how we feel about the war. All of us played our part in it to some degree, some more than others. Some of us were even enemies. Now the very idea that we might have hated each other—hated that which we depend on for life itself—lies beyond all comprehension. If
Nightingale
sought to create a walking argument for the continuation of the ceasefire, then she surely succeeded.

We are sorry if some of you will go home to nightmares tonight. We can’t help that. In fact, if truth be told, we’re not sorry at all. Nightmares are what we’re all about. It’s the nightmare of us that will stop this planet falling back into war.

If you have trouble sleeping tonight, spare
us
a thought.

The two of them crouched in a tunnel of filthy ice, bulky in spacesuits. Fifty metres down the tunnel, the servitor straddled the bore on skeletal legs, transmitting a thermal image onto their visors. Irravel jumped whenever the noise shifted into something human, cradling her gun nervously.

“Damn this thing,” she said. “Hardly get my finger around the trigger.”

“It can’t read your blood, Captain.” Markarian, next to her, managed not to sound as if he was stating the obvious. “You have to set the override to female.”

Of course. Belatedly remembering the training session on Fand where they’d been shown how to use the weapons— months of subjective time ago; years of worldtime—Irravel told the gun to reshape itself. The memory-plastic casing squirmed in her gloves to something more manageable. It still felt wrong.

“How are we doing?” she asked.

“Last team’s in position. That’s all the tunnels covered. They’ll have to fight their way in.”

“I think that might well be on the agenda.”

“Maybe so.” Markarian sighted along his weapon like a sniper. “But they’ll get a surprise when they reach the cargo.”

True: the ship had sealed the sleeper chambers the instant the pirates had arrived near the comet. Counter-intrusion weaponry would seriously inconvenience anyone trying to break in, unless they had the right authorisation. And there, Irravel knew, was the problem; the thing she would rather not have had to deal with.

“Markarian,” Irravel said, “if we’re taken prisoner, there’s a chance they’ll try to make us give up the codes.”

“Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind already.” Markarian rechecked some aspect of his gun. “I won’t let you down, Irravel.”

“It’s not a question of letting me down,” she said, carefully. “It’s whether or not we betray the cargo.”

“I know.” For a moment they studied each other’s face through their visors, acknowledging what had once been more than professional friendship; the shared knowledge that they would kill each other rather than place the cargo in harm’s way.

Their ship was the ramliner
Hirondelle.
She was damaged; lashed to the comet for repair. Improbably sleek for a creature of vacuum, her four-kilometre-long conic hull tapered to a needle-sharp prow and sprouted trumpet-shaped engines from two swept-back spars at the rear. It had been Irravel’s first captaincy: a routine seventeen-year hop from Fand, in the Lacaille 9352 system, to Yellowstone, around Epsilon Eridani—with twenty thousand reefersleep colonists aboard. What had gone wrong should only have happened once in a thousand trips: a speck of interstellar dust had slipped through the ship’s screen of anti-collision lasers and punched a cavernous hole in the ablative ice shield, vaporising a quarter of its mass. With a vastly reduced likelihood of surviving another collision, the ship had automatically steered towards the nearest system capable of supplying repair materials.

Luyten 726-8 had been no one’s idea of a welcoming destination. No human colonies had flourished there. All that remained were droves of scavenging machines sent out by various superpowers. The ship had locked into a scavenger’s homing signal, eventually coming within visual range of the inert comet the machine had made its home, and which ought to have been chequered with re-supply materials. Irravel had been revived from reefersleep just in time to see that none of the goods were there—just acres of barren comet.

“Dear God,” she’d said. “Do we deserve this?”

After a few days, despair became steely resolve. The ship couldn’t safely travel anywhere else, so they would have to process the supplies themselves, doing the work of the malfunctioning surveyor. It would mean stripping the ship just to make the machines to mine and shape the cometary ice— years of work by any estimate. That hardly mattered. The detour had already added years to the mission.