The Revelation Space Collection

‘Nothing’s happened,’ Martinez said, breaking the silence with a whisper. ‘It still doesn’t know we’re here. The lock is all yours, Ingrid. I’ve already opened our doors.’

Sollis, suited-up now, moved into the lock tube with her toolkit. While she worked, the rest of us finished putting on our own suits and armour, completing the exercise as quietly as possible. I hadn’t worn a spacesuit before, but Norbert was there to help all of us with the unfamiliar process: his huge hands attended to delicate connections and catches with surprising dexterity. Once I had the suit on, it didn’t feel much different from wearing full-spectrum bioarmour, and I quickly got the hang of the life-support indicators projected around the border of my faceplate. I would only need to pay minor attention to them: unless there was some malfunction, the suit had enough power and supplies to keep me alive in perfect comfort for three days; longer if I was prepared to tolerate a little less comfort. None of us were planning on spending anywhere near that long aboard Nightingale.

Sollis was nearly done when we assembled behind her in the lock. The inner and outer lock doors on our side were open, exposing the grey outer door of the hospital ship, held tight against the docking connector by pressure- tight seals. I doubted that she’d ever had to break into a ship before, but nothing about the mechanism appeared to be causing Sollis any difficulties. She’d tugged open an access panel and plugged in a fistful of coloured cables, running back to a jury-rigged electronics module in her toolkit. She was tapping a little keyboard, causing patterns of lights to alter within the access panel. The face of a woman — blank, expressionless, yet at the same time somehow severe and unforgiving — had appeared in an oval frame above the access panel.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘That’s Nightingale,’ Sollis said, adding, by way of explanation, ‘The ship had its own gamma-level personality, keeping the whole show running. Pretty smart piece of thinkware by all accounts: full Turing compliance; about as clever as you can make a machine before you have to start giving it human rights.’

I looked at the stern-faced woman, expecting her to query us at any moment. I imagined her harsh and hectoring voice demanding to know what business any of us had boarding Nightingale, trespassing aboard her ship, her hospital.

‘Does she know…’ I started.

Sollis shook her head. ‘This is just a dumb facet of the main construct. Not only is it inactive — the image is frozen into the door’s memory — but it doesn’t appear to have any functioning data links back to the main sentience engine. Do you, Nightingale?’

The face gazed at us impassively, but still said nothing.

‘See: deadsville. My guess is the sentience engine isn’t running at all. Out here, the ship wouldn’t need much more than a trickle of intelligence to keep itself ticking over.’

‘So the gamma’s off-line?’

‘Uh-huh. Best way, too. You don’t want one of those things sitting around too long without something to do.’

‘Why not?’

‘’Cause they tend to go nuts. That’s why the Conjoiners won’t allow gamma-level intelligences in any of their machines. They say it’s a kind of slavery.’

‘Running a hospital must have been enough to stop Nightingale’s gamma running off the rails.’

‘Let’s hope so. Let’s really hope so.’ Sollis glanced back at her work, then emitted a grunt of satisfaction as a row of lights flicked to orange. She unplugged a bunch of coloured cables and looked back at the waiting party. ‘Okay: we’re good to go. I can open the door any time you’re ready.’

‘What’s on the other side of it?’ I asked.

‘According to the door, air: normal trimix. Bitchingly cold, but not frozen. Pressure’s manageable. I’m not sure we could breathe it, but—’

‘We’re not breathing anything,’ Martinez said curtly. ‘Our airlock will take two people. One of them will have to be you, Ingrid, since you know how to work the mechanism. I shall accompany you, and then we shall wait for the others on the far side, when we have established that conditions are safe.’

‘Maybe one of us should go through instead of you,’ I said, wondering why Norbert hadn’t volunteered to go through ahead of his master. ‘We’re expendable, but you aren’t. Without you, Jax doesn’t go down.’

‘Considerate of you, Dexia, but I paid you to assist me, not take risks on my behalf.’

Martinez propelled himself forward. Norbert, Nicolosi and I edged back to permit the inner door to close again. On the common suit channel I heard Sollis say, ‘We’re opening Nightingale. Stand by: comms might get a bit weaker once we’re on the other side of all this metal.’

Nicolosi pushed past me, back into the flight deck. I heard the heavy whine of servos as the door opened. Breathing and scuffling sounds followed, but nothing that alarmed me.

‘Okay,’ Sollis said, ‘we’re moving into Nightingale’s lock. Closing the outer door behind us. When you need to open it again, hit any key on the pad.’

‘Still no sign of life,’ Nicolosi called.

‘The inner door looks as if it’ll open without any special encouragement from me,’ Sollis said. ‘Should be just a matter of pulling down this lever… you ready?’

‘Do it, Ingrid,’ Martinez replied.

More servos, fainter now. After a few moments, Sollis reported back: ‘We’re inside. No surprises yet. Floating in some kind of holding bay, about ten metres wide. It’s dark, of course. There’s a doorway leading out through the far wall: might lead to the main corridor that should pass close to this lock.’

I remembered to turn on my helmet lamp.

‘Can you open both lock doors?’ Nicolosi asked.

‘Not at the same time, not without a lot of trouble that might get us noticed.’

‘Then we’ll come through in two passes. Norbert: you go first. Dexia and I will follow.’

It took longer than I’d have liked, but eventually all five of us were on the other side of the lock. I’d only been weightless once, during the recuperation programme after my injury, but the memory of how to move — at least without making too much of a fool of myself — was still there, albeit dimly. The others were coping about as well. The combined effects of our helmet lamps banished the darkness to the corners of the room, emphasizing the deeper gloom of the open doorway Sollis had mentioned. It occurred to me that somewhere deep in that darkness was Colonel Jax, or whatever was left of him.

Nervously, I checked that the slug-gun was still clipped to my belt.

‘Call up your helmet maps,’ Martinez said. ‘Does everyone have an overlay and a positional fix?’

‘I’m good,’ I said, against a chorus from the other three, and acutely aware of how easy it would be to get lost aboard a ship as large as Nightingale if that positional fix were to break down.

‘Check your weapons and suit systems. We’ll keep comms to a minimum all the way in.’

‘I’ll lead,’ Nicolosi said, propelling himself into the darkness of the doorway before anyone could object.

I followed hard on his heels, trying not to get out of breath with the effort of keeping up. There were loops and rails along all four walls of the shaft, so movement consisted of gliding from one handhold to the next, with only air resistance to stop one drifting all the way. We were covering one metre a second, easily: at that rate, it wouldn’t take long to cross the entire width of the ship, which would mean we’d somehow missed the axial corridor we were looking for, or that it simply didn’t exist. But just when it was beginning to strike me that we’d gone too far, Nicolosi slowed. I grabbed a handhold to stop myself slamming into his feet.

He looked back at us, his helmet lamp making me squint. ‘Here’s the main corridor, just a bit deeper than we were expecting. Runs both ways.’

‘We turn left,’ Martinez said, in not much more than a whisper. ‘Turn left and follow it for one hundred metres, maybe one hundred and twenty, until we meet the centrifuge section. It should be a straight crawl, with no obstructions.’

Nicolosi turned away, then looked back. ‘I can’t see more than twenty metres into the corridor. We may as well see where it goes.’

‘Nice and slowly,’ Martinez urged.

We moved forward, along the length of the hull. In the instants when I was coasting from one handhold to the next, I held my breath and tried to hear the ambient noises of the ship, relayed to my helmet by the suit’s acoustic pick-up. Mostly all I heard was the scuffing progress of the others, the hiss and hum of their own life-