Nicolosi didn’t say anything. I don’t think he saw the funny side.
Two minutes later we were inside, floating weightless in the unlit gloom of the flooded room. It felt like water, but it was difficult to tell. Everything felt thick and sluggish when you were wearing a suit, even thin air. My biohazard detectors weren’t registering anything, but that didn’t necessarily mean the fluid was safe. The detectors were tuned to recognise a handful of toxins in common wartime use; they weren’t designed to sniff out every harmful agent that had ever existed.
Martinez’s voice buzzed in my helmet. ‘There are no handholds or guide wires. We’ll just have to swim in a straight direction, trusting to our inertial compasses. If we all stay within sight of each other, we should have no difficulties.’
‘Let’s get on with it,’ Nicolosi said.
We started swimming as best as we could, Nicolosi leading, pushing himself forward with powerful strokes, his weapons dangling from their straps. It would have been hard and slow with just the suits to contend with, but we were all wearing armour as well. It made it difficult to see ahead; difficult to reach forward to get an effective stroke; difficult to kick our legs enough to make any useful contribution. Our helmet lamps struggled to illuminate more than ten or twenty metres in any direction, and the door by which we’d entered was soon lost behind us in gloom. I felt a constricting sense of panic: the fear that if the compasses failed we might never find our way out again.
The compasses didn’t fail, though, and Nicolosi maintained his unfaltering pace. Two minutes into the swim he called, ‘I see the wall. It’s dead ahead of us.’
A couple of seconds later I saw it hove out of the deep-pink gloom. Any relief I might have felt was tempered by the observation that the wall appeared featureless, stretching away blankly in all illuminated directions.
‘There’s no door,’ I said.
‘Maybe we experienced some lateral drift,’ Nicolosi said.
‘Compass says no.’
‘Then maybe the doors are offset. It doesn’t matter: we’ll find it by hitting the wall and spiralling out from our landing spot.’
‘If there’s a door.’
‘If there isn’t,’ Nicolosi said, ‘we shoot our way out.’
‘Glad you’ve thought this through,’ I said, realising that he was serious.
We drew nearer to the wall. The closer we got and the more clearly it was picked out by our lamps, the more I realised there was something not quite right about it. It was still blank — lacking any struts or panels, apertures or pieces of shipboard equipment — but it wasn’t the seamless surface I’d have expected from a massive sheet of prefabricated spacecraft material. There was an unsettling texture to it, with something of the fibrous quality of cheap paper. Faint lines coursed through it, slightly darker than the rest of the wall, but not arranged according to any neat geometric pattern. They curved and branched, and threw off fainter subsidiary lines, diminishing like the veins in a leaf.
In a nauseating flash I realised exactly what the wall was made of. When Nicolosi’s palms touched the surface, it yielded like a trampoline, absorbing the momentum of his impact and then sending him back out again, until his motion was damped by the surrounding fluid.
‘It’s…’ I began.
‘Skin. I know. I realised just before I hit.’
I arrested my motion, but not quickly enough to avoid contact with the wall of skin. It yielded under me, stretching so much that I felt in danger of ripping my way right through. But it held, and began to trampoline me back in the direction I’d come from. Fighting a tide of revulsion, I pulled back into the liquid and floated amidst the others.
‘Fuck,’ Sollis said. ‘This isn’t right. There shouldn’t be fucking skin—’
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ Martinez said, wheezing between each word. ‘This is just another form of organ library, like the room we already passed through. I believe the liquid we’re swimming in must be a form of growth-support medium… something like amniotic fluid. Under wartime conditions, this whole chamber would have been full of curtains of growing skin, measured by the acre.’
Nicolosi groped for something on his belt, came up with a serrated blade that glinted nastily even in the pink fluid.
‘I’m cutting through.’
‘No!’ Martinez barked.
Sollis, who was next to Nicolosi, took hold of his forearm. ‘Easy, soldier. Got to be a better way.’
‘There is,’ Martinez said. ‘Put the knife away, please. We can go around the skin, find its edge.’
Nicolosi still had the blade in his hand. ‘I’d rather take the short cut.’
‘There are nerve endings in that skin. Cut them and the monitoring apparatus will know about it. Then so will the ship.’
‘Maybe the ship already knows we’re here.’
‘We don’t take that chance.’
Reluctantly, Nicolosi returned the knife to his belt. ‘I thought we’d agreed to move fast from now on,’ he said.
‘There’s fast, and there’s reckless,’ Sollis said. ‘You were about to cross the line.’
Martinez brushed past me, already swimming to the left. I followed him, with the others tagging on behind. After less than a minute of hard progress, a dark edge emerged into view. It was like a picture frame stretching tight the canvas of skin. Beyond the edge, only just visible, was a wall of the chamber, fretted with massive geodesic reinforcing struts.
I allowed myself a moment of ease. We were still in danger, still in about the most claustrophobic situation I could imagine, but at least now the chamber didn’t seem infinitely large.
Martinez braked himself by grabbing the frame. I came to rest next to him and peered around the edge, towards what I hoped would be the wall we’d been heading towards all along. But instead of that I saw only another field of skin, stretched across another frame, separated from the first by no more than the height of a man. In the murky distance was the suggestion of a third frame, and perhaps a fourth beyond that.
‘How many?’ I asked as the others arrived on the frame, perching like crows.
‘I don’t know,’ Martinez said. ‘Four, five… anything up to a dozen, I’d guess. But it’s okay. We can swim around the frames, then turn right and head back to where we’d expect to find the exit door.’ He raised his voice. ‘Everyone all right? No problems with your suits?’
‘There are lights,’ Nicolosi said quietly.
We turned to look at him.
‘I mean over there,’ he added, nodding in the direction of the other sheets of skin. ‘I saw a flicker of something… a glow in the water, or amniotic fluid, or whatever the fuck this is.’
‘I see light, too,’ Norbert said.
I looked down and saw that he was right — Nicolosi had not been imagining it. A pale, trembling light was emerging from between the next two layers of skin.
‘Whatever that is, I don’t like it,’ I said.
‘Me neither,’ Martinez said. ‘But if it’s something going on between the skin layers, it doesn’t have to concern us. We swim around, avoid them completely.’
He kicked off with surprising determination, and I followed quickly after him. The reverse side of the skin sheet was a fine mesh of pale support fibres, the structural matrix upon which the skin must have been grown and nourished. Thick black cables ran across the underside, arranged in circuit-like patterns.
The second sheet, the one immediately behind the first, was of different pigmentation from the one behind it. In all other respects it appeared similar, stretching unbroken into pink haze. The flickering, trembling light source was visible through the flesh, silhouetting the veins and arteries at the moments when the light was brightest.