And then, suddenly, there was Nightingale.
We were coming in at an angle, so the hull was tilted and foreshortened. It was so dark that only certain edges and surfaces were visible at all. No windows, no running lights, no lit-up docking bays. The ship looked as dark and dead as a sliver of coal. Suddenly it was absurd to think that there might be anyone alive aboard it. Colonel Jax’s corpse, perhaps, but not the living or even life-supported body that would guarantee us full payment.
Martinez had the ship on manual control now. With small, deft applications of thrust he narrowed the distance down to less than a dozen kilometres. At six kilometres, Martinez deemed it safe to activate floodlights and play them along the length of the hull, confirming the placement of locks and docking sites. There was a peppering of micrometeorite impacts and some scorching from high-energy particles, but nothing I wouldn’t have expected on a ship that had been sitting out there since the armistice. If the ship possessed self-repair mechanisms, they were sleeping as well. Even when we circled around the hull and swept it from the other side, there was no hint of our having been noticed. Still reluctant, Nicolosi accepted that we would follow Sollis’s entry strategy, entering via one of the smaller service locks.
It was time to do it.
We docked. We came in softly, but there was still a solid clunk as the capture latches engaged and grasped our little craft to the hull of the hospital ship. I thought of that clunk echoing away down the length of Nightingale, diminishing as it travelled, but potentially still significant enough to trip some waiting, infinitely patient alarm system, alerting the sleeping ship that it had a visitor. For several minutes we hung in weightless silence, staring out of the windows or watching the sensor read-outs for the least sign of activity. But the dark ship stayed dark in all directions. There was no detectable change in her state of coma.
‘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 walclass="underline" might lead to the main corridor that should pass close to this lock.’