‘We’re ready to go through, people. Indications say that the air’s just as cold on the other side, so keep your suits buttoned.’
I heard the click as one of us — maybe Nicolosi, maybe Norbert — released a safety catch. It was like someone coughing in a theatre. I had no choice but to reach down and arm my own weapon.
‘Open it,’ Martinez said quietly.
The door chugged wide. Our lights stabbed into dark emptiness beyond: a suggestion of a much deeper, wider space than I’d been expecting. Sollis leaned through the doorframe, her helmet lamp catching fleeting details from reflective surfaces. I had a momentary flash of glassy things stretching away into infinite distance, then it was gone.
‘Report, Ingrid,’ Martinez said.
‘I think we can get through. We’ve come out next to a wall, or floor, or whatever it is. There are handholds, railings. Looks as if they lead on into the room, probably to the other side.’
‘Stay where you are,’ Nicolosi said, just ahead of me. ‘I’ll take point again.’
Sollis glanced back and swallowed hard. ‘It’s okay, I can handle this one. Can’t let you have all the fun, can I?’
Nicolosi grunted something: I don’t think he had much of a sense of humour. ‘You’re welcome to my gun, you want it.’
‘I’m cool,’ she said, but with audible hesitation. I didn’t blame her: it was different being point on a walk through a huge dark room, compared to a narrow corridor. Nothing could leap out and grab you from the side in a corridor.
She started moving along the crawlway.
‘Nice and slowly, Ingrid,’ Martinez said, from behind me. ‘We still have time on our side.’
‘We’re right behind you,’ I said, feeling she needed moral support.
‘I’m fine, Dexia. No problems here. Just don’t want to lose my handhold and go drifting off into fuck knows what…’
Her movements became rhythmic, progressing into the chamber one careful handhold at a time. Nicolosi followed, with me right behind him. Apart from our movements, and the sounds of our suit systems, the ship was still as silent as a crypt.
But it wasn’t totally dark any more.
Now that we were inside the chamber, it began to reveal its secrets in dim spots of pale light, reaching away into some indeterminate distance. The lights must have always been there, just too faint to notice until we were inside.
‘Something’s running,’ Sollis said.
‘We knew that,’ Martinez said. ‘It was always clear that the ship was dormant, not dead.’
I panned my helmet around and tried to get another look at the glassy things I’d glimpsed earlier. On either side of the railed walkway, stretching away in multiple ranks, were hundreds of transparent flasks. Each flask was the size of an oil drum, rounded on top, mounted on a steel-grey plinth equipped with controls, read-outs and input sockets. There were three levels of them, with the second and third layers stacked above the first on skeletal racks. Most of the plinths were dead, but maybe one in ten was showing a lit-up read-out.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Sollis said, and I guess she’d seen what I’d just seen: that the flasks contained human organs, floating in a green chemical solution, wired up with fine nutrient lines and electrical cables. I was no anatomist, but I still recognised hearts, lungs, kidneys, snakelike coils of intestine. And there were things anyone would have 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.