recognised: things like eyeballs, dozens of them growing in a single vat, swaying on the long stalks of optic nerves like some weird species of all-seeing sea anemone; things like hands, or entire limbs, or genitals, or the skin and muscle masks of eyeless faces. Every external body part came in dozens of different sizes, ranging from child-sized to adult, male and female, and despite the green suspension fluid one could make out subtle variations in skin tone and pigmentation.
‘Easy, Ingrid,’ I said, the words as much for my benefit as hers. ‘We always knew this was a hospital ship. It was just a matter of time before we ran into something like this.’
‘This stuff…’ Nicolosi said, his voice low. ‘Where does it come from?’
‘Two main sources,’ Martinez answered, sounding too calm for my liking. ‘Not everyone who came aboard Nightingale could be saved, obviously — the ship was no more capable of working miracles than any other hospital. Wherever practicable, the dead would donate intact body parts for future use. Useful, certainly, but such a resource could never have supplied the bulk of Nightingale’s surgical needs. For that reason the ship was also equipped to fabricate its own organ supplies, using well-established principles of stem-cell manipulation. The organ factories would have worked around the clock, keeping this library fully stocked.’
‘It doesn’t look fully stocked now,’ I said.
Martinez said, ‘We’re not in a war zone any more. The ship is dormant. It has no need to maintain its usual surgical capacity.’
‘So why is it maintaining any capacity? Why are some of these flasks still keeping their organs alive?’
‘Waste not, want not, I suppose. A strategic reserve, against the day when the ship might be called into action again.’
‘You think it’s just waiting to be reactivated?’
‘It’s only a machine, Dexia. A machine on standby. Nothing to get nervous about.’
‘No one’s nervous,’ I said, but it came out all wrong, making me sound as if I was the one who was spooked.
‘Let’s get to the other side,’ Nicolosi said.
‘We’re halfway there,’ Sollis reported. ‘I can see the far wall, sort of. Looks like there’s a door waiting for us.’
We kept on moving, hand over hand, mostly in silence. Surrounded by all those glass-encased body parts, I couldn’t help but think of the people many of them had once been part of. If these parts had belonged to me, I think I’d have chosen to haunt Nightingale, consumed with ill-directed, spiteful fury.
Not the right kind of thinking, I was just telling myself, when the flasks started moving.
We all stopped, anchoring ourselves to the nearest handhold. Two or three rows back from the railed crawlway, a row of flasks was gliding smoothly towards the far wall of the chamber. They were sliding in perfect lock-step unison. When my heart started beating again, I realised that the entire row must be attached to some kind of conveyor system, hidden within the support framework.
‘Nobody move,’ Nicolosi said.
‘This is not good,’ Sollis kept saying. ‘This is not good. The damn ship isn’t supposed to know—’
‘Quiet,’ Martinez hissed. ‘Let me past you: I want to see where those flasks are going.’
‘Careful,’ Norbert said.
Paying no attention to the man, Martinez climbed ahead of the party. Quickly we followed him, doing our best not to make any noise or slip from the crawlway. The flasks continued their smooth, silent movement until the conveyor system reached the far wall and turned through ninety degrees, taking the flasks away from us into a covered enclosure like a security scanner. Most of the flasks were empty, but as we watched, one of the occupied, active units slid into the enclosure. I’d only had a moment to notice, but I thought I’d seen a forearm and hand, reaching up from the life-support plinth.
The conveyor system halted. For a moment all was silent, then there came a series of mechanical clicks and whirrs. None of us could see what was happening inside the enclosure, but after a moment we didn’t need to. It was obvious.
The conveyor began to move again, but running in reverse this time. The flask that had gone into the enclosure was now empty. I counted back to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake, but there was no doubt. The forearm and hand had been removed from the flask. Already, I presumed, the limb was somewhere else in the ship.
The flasks travelled back — returning to what I presumed to have been their former positions — and then halted again. Save for the missing limb, the chamber was exactly as when we had entered it.
‘I don’t like this,’ Sollis said. ‘The ship is supposed to be dead.’
‘Dormant,’ Martinez corrected.
‘You don’t think the shit that just happened is in any way related to us being aboard? You don’t think Jax just got a wake-up call?’
‘If Jax were aware of our presence, we’d know it by now.’
‘I don’t know how you can sound so calm.’
‘All that has happened, Ingrid, is that Nightingale has performed some trivial housekeeping duty. We have already seen that it maintains some organs in pre-surgical condition, and this is just one of its tissue libraries. It should hardly surprise us that the ship occasionally decides to move some of its stock from A to B.’
She made a small, catlike snarl of frustration — I could tell she hadn’t bought any of his explanations — and pulled herself hand over hand to the door.
‘Any more shit like that happens, I’m out,’ she said.
‘I’d think twice if I were you,’ Martinez said. ‘It’s a hell of a long walk home.’
I caught up with Sollis and touched her on the forearm. ‘I don’t like it either, Ingrid, but the man’s right. Jax doesn’t know we’re here. If he did, I think he’d do more than just move some flasks around.’
‘I hope you’re right, Scarrow.’
‘So do I,’ I said under my breath.
We continued along the main axis of the ship, following a corridor much like the one we’d been following before the organ library. It swerved and jagged, then straightened out again. According to the inertial compasses, we were still headed towards Jax, or at least the part of the ship where it appeared most likely we’d find him, alive or dead.
‘What we were talking about earlier,’ Sollis said, ‘I mean, much earlier — about how this ship never got destroyed at the end of the war after all—’
‘I think I have stated my case, Ingrid. Dwelling on myths won’t bring a wanted man to justice.’
‘We’re looking at about a million tonnes of salvageable spacecraft here. Gotta be worth something to someone. So why didn’t anyone get their hands on it after the war?’
‘Because something bad happened,’ Nicolosi said. ‘Maybe there was some truth in the story about that boarding party coming here and not leaving.’
‘Oh, please,’ Martinez said.
‘So who was fighting back?’ I asked. ‘Who stopped them taking Nightingale?’
Nicolosi answered me. ‘The skeleton staff… security agents of the postmortals who financed this thing… maybe even the protective systems of the ship itself. If it thought it was under attack—’
‘If there was some kind of firefight aboard this thing,’ I asked, ‘where’s the damage?’
‘I don’t care about the damage,’ Sollis cut in. ‘I want to know what happened to all the bodies.’
We came to another blocked double-door airlock. Sollis got to work on it immediately, but my expectation that she would work faster now that she had already opened several doors without trouble was wrong. She kept plugging things in, checking read-outs, murmuring to herself just loud enough to carry over the voice link.
‘This one could be trickier,’ she said. ‘I’m picking up active data links, running away from the frame.’
‘Meaning it could still be hooked into the nervous system?’ Nicolosi asked.
‘I can’t rule it out.’
Nicolosi ran a hand along the smooth black barrel of his plasma weapon. ‘We could double back, try a different route.’
