passing through a series of airlocks, I was brought to a very dark room. Without being able to see anything, I sensed that this was as large as any pressurised space we’d yet entered, save for the skin-cultivation chamber. The air was as moist and blood-warm as the inside of a tropical greenhouse.
‘I thought you said the others would be here.’
‘They’ll arrive shortly,’ the Voice said. ‘They’ve already met the colonel.’
‘There hasn’t been time.’
‘They met the colonel while you were still asleep, Dexia. You were the last to be revived. Now, would you like to speak to the man himself?’
I steeled myself. ‘Yes.’
‘Here he is.’
A beam of light stabbed across the room, illuminating a face that I recognised instantly. Surrounded by blackness, Jax’s face appeared to hover as if detached from his body. Time had done nothing to soften those pugnacious features; the cruel set of that heavy jaw. Yet his eyes were closed, and his face lolled at a slight angle, as if he remained unaware of the beam.
‘Wake up,’ the Voice of
The colonel woke. He opened his eyes, blinked twice against the glare, then gazed out steadily. He tilted his head to meet the beam, projecting his jaw forward at a challenging angle.
‘You have another visitor, Colonel. Would you like me to introduce her?’
His mouth opened. Saliva drooled out. From the darkness, a hand descended from above the colonel’s face to wipe his chin dry. Something about the trajectory of the hand’s movement was terribly, terribly wrong. Jax saw my reaction and let out a soft, nasty chuckle. That was when I realised that the colonel was completely, irrevocably insane.
‘Her name is Dexia Scarrow. She’s the last member of the party you’ve already met.’
Jax spoke. His voice was too loud, as if it was being fed through an amplifier. There was something huge and wet about it. It was like hearing the voice of a whale.
‘You a soldier, girl?’
‘I was a soldier, Colonel. But the war’s over now. I’m a civilian.’
‘Goodee for you. What brought you here, girly girl?’
‘I came to bring you to justice. I came to take you back to the war crimes court on Sky’s Edge.’
‘Maybe you should have come a little sooner.’
‘I’ll settle for seeing you die. I understand that’s an option.’
Something I’d said made the colonel smile. ‘Has the ship told you the deal yet?’
‘The ship told me she wasn’t letting you out of here alive. She promised us your head.’
‘Then I guess she didn’t get into specifics.’ He cocked his head away from me, as if talking to someone standing to my left. ‘Bring up the lights,
‘Are you sure, Colonel?’ the ship asked.
‘Bring up the lights. She’s ready.’
The ship brought up the lights.
I wasn’t ready.
For a moment I couldn’t process what I was seeing. My brain just couldn’t cope with the reality of what the ship had done to Colonel Jax, despite the evidence of my eyes. I kept staring at him, waiting for the picture before me to start making sense. I kept waiting for the instant when I’d realise I was being fooled by the play of shadows and light, like a child being scared by a random monster in the folds of a curtain. But the instant didn’t come. The thing before me was all that it appeared to be.
Colonel Jax extended in all directions: a quivering expanse of patchwork flesh, of which his head was simply one insignificant component; one hill in a mountain range. He was spread out across the far wall, grafted to it in the form of a vast breathing mosaic. He must have been twenty metres wide, edged with a crinkled circular border of toughened flesh. Under his head was a thick neck, merging into the upper half of an armless torso. I could see the faint scars where the arms had been detached. Below the slow-heaving ribcage, the torso flared out like the melted base of a candle. Another torso rose from the flesh two metres to the colonel’s right. It had no head, but it did have an arm. A second torso loomed over him from behind, equipped with a pair of arms, one of which must have cleaned the colonel’s chin. Further away, emerging from the pool of flesh at odd, arbitrary angles, were other living body parts. A torso here; a pair of legs there; a hip or shoulder somewhere else. The torsos were all breathing, though not in perfect synchronisation. When they were not engaged in some purposeful activity, such as wiping Jax’s chin, the limbs twitched, palsied. The skin between them was an irregular mosaic formed from many ill- matched pieces that had been fused together. In places it was drum-tight, pulled taut over hidden armatures of bone and gristle. In other places it heaved like a stormy sea. It gurgled with hidden digestive processes.
‘You see now why I’m not coming with you,’ Colonel Jax said. ‘Not unless you brought a much bigger ship. Even then, I’m not sure you’d be able to keep me alive very long without Nightingale’s assistance.’
‘You’re a fucking monstrosity.’
‘I’m no oil painting, that’s a fact.’ Jax tilted his head, as if a thought had just struck him. ‘I am a work of art, though, wouldn’t you agree, girly girl?’
‘If you say so.’
‘The ship certainly thinks so — don’t you,
‘You’re insane.’
‘Very probably. Do you honestly think you could take one day of this and not go mad? Oh, I’m mad enough, I’ll grant you that. But I’m still sane compared to the ship. Around here, she’s the imperial fucking yardstick for insanity.’
‘Sollis was right, then. Leave a sentience engine like that all alone and it’ll eat itself from the inside out.’
‘Maybe so. Thing is, it wasn’t solitude that did it. Nightingale turned insane long before she ever got out here. And you know what did it? That little war we had ourselves down on Sky’s Edge. They built this ship and put the mind of an angel inside it. A mind dedicated to healing, compassion, kindness. So what if it was a damned machine? It was still designed to care for us, selflessly, day after day. And it turned out to be damned good at its job, too. For a while, at least.’
‘Then you know what happened.’
‘The ship drove herself mad. Two conflicting impulses pushed a wedge through her sanity. She was meant to treat us, to make us well again, to alleviate our pain. But every time she did her job, we were sent back down to the theatre of battle and ripped apart again. The ship took our pain away only so that we could feel it again. She began to feel as if she was complicit in that process: a willing cog in a greater machine whose only purpose was the manufacture of agony. In the end, she decided she didn’t much like being that cog.’
‘So she took off. What happened to all the other patients?’
‘She killed them. Euthanised them painlessly rather than have them sent back down to battle. To
‘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?’
