We passed around the second sheet and peered into the gap between the second and third layers. Picked out in stuttering light was a tableau of furtive activity. Four squid-like robots were at work. Each machine consisted of a tapering, cone-shaped body, anchored to the skin by a cluster of whip-like arms emerging from the blunt end of the cone. The robots were engaged in precise surgery, removing a blanket-sized rectangle of skin by cutting it free along four sides. The robots generated their own illumination, shining from the ends of some of their arms, but the bright flashing light was coming from some kind of laser-like tool that each robot deployed on the end of a single segmented arm that was thicker than any of the others. I couldn’t tell whether the flashes were part of the cutting, or the instant healing that appeared to be taking place immediately afterwards. There was no bleeding, and the surrounding skin appeared unaffected.
‘What are they doing?’ I breathed.
‘Harvesting,’ Martinez answered. ‘What does it look like?’
‘I know they’re harvesting. I mean, why are they doing it? What do they need that skin for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You had plenty of answers in the organ library, Mister Martinez, ’ Sollis said. All five of us had slowed, hovering at the same level as the surgical robots. ‘For a ship that’s supposed to be dormant… I’m not seeing much fucking evidence of dormancy.’
‘Nightingale grows skin here,’ I said. ‘I can deal with that. The ship’s keeping a basic supply going, in case it’s called into another war. But that doesn’t explain why it needs to harvest some now.’
Martinez sounded vague. ‘Maybe it’s testing the skin… making sure it’s developing according to plan.’
‘You’d think a little sample would be enough for that,’ I said. ‘A lot less than several square metres, for sure. That’s enough skin to cover a whole person.’
‘I really wish you hadn’t said that,’ Nicolosi said.
‘Let’s keep moving,’ Martinez said. And he was right, too, I thought: the activity of the robots was deeply unsettling, but we hadn’t come here to sightsee.
As we swam away — with no sign that the robots had noticed us — I thought about what Ingrid Sollis had said before. About how it wasn’t clever to leave a gamma-level intelligence up and running without something to occupy itself. Because otherwise — since duty was so deeply hardwired into their logic pathways — they tended to go slowly, quietly, irrevocably insane.
And Nightingale had been alone out there since the end of the war. What did that mean for its controlling mind? Was the hospital running itself out there — reliving the duties of its former life, no matter how pointless they had become — because the mind had already gone mad, or was this the hospital’s last-ditch way of keeping itself sane?
And what, I wondered, did any of that have to do with the man we had come here to find in the first place?
We kept swimming, passing layer upon layer of skin. Now and then we’d come across another surgical party: another group of robots engaged in skin-harvesting. Where they’d already completed their task, the flesh had been excised in neat rectangles and strips, exposing the gauzelike mesh of the growth matrix. Occasionally I saw a patch that was half-healed already, the skin growing back in rice-paper translucence. By the time it was fully repaired, I doubted that there’d be any sign of where the skin had been cut.
Ten layers, then twelve — and then finally the wall I’d been waiting for hove into view like a mirage. But I wasn’t imagining it, or seeing another layer of drum-tight skin. There was the same pattern of geodesic struts as I’d seen on the other wall.
Sollis’s voice came through. ‘Got a visual on the door, people. We’re nearly out of here. I’m swimming ahead to start work.’
‘Good, Ingrid,’ Martinez called back.
A few seconds later I saw the airlock for myself, relieved that Sollis hadn’t been mistaken. She swam quickly, then — even as she was gliding to a halt by the door — commenced unclipping tools and connectors from her belt. Through the darkening distance of the pink haze I watched her flip down the service panel and begin her usual systems-bypass procedure. I was glad Martinez had found Sollis. Whatever else one might say about her, she was pretty hot at getting through doors.
‘Okay, good news,’ she said after a minute of plugging things in and out. ‘There’s air on the other side. We’re not going to have to swim in this stuff for much longer.’
‘How much longer?’ Nicolosi asked.
‘Can’t risk a short circuit here, guy. Gotta take things one step at a time.’
Just as she was saying that, I became aware that we were casting shadows against the wall — shadows we hadn’t been casting when we arrived. I twisted around and looked back the way we’d just swum, in the direction of the new light source I knew had to be there. Four of the squid-like machines were approaching us, dragging a blanket of newly harvested skin between them, one robot grasping each corner between two segmented silver tentacles. They were moving faster than we could swim, driven by some propulsion system jetting fluid from the sharp ends of their cone-shaped bodies.
Sollis jerked back as the outer airlock door opened suddenly.
‘I didn’t…’ she started.
‘I know,’ I said urgently. ‘The robots are coming. They must have sent a command to open the lock.’
‘Let’s get out of the way,’ Martinez said, kicking off from the wall. ‘Ingrid — get away from the lock. Take what you can, but make it snappy.’
Sollis started unplugging her equipment, stowing it on her belt with fumbling fingers. The machines powered nearer, the blanket of skin undulating between them like a flying carpet. They slowed, then halted, their lights pushing spears of harsh illumination through the fluid. They were looking at us, wondering what we were doing between them and the door. One of the machines directed its beam towards Martinez’s swimming figure, attracted by the movement. Martinez slowed and hung frozen in the glare, like a moth pinned in a beam of sunlight.
None of us said a word. My own breathing was the loudest sound in the universe, but I couldn’t make it any quieter. Silently, the airlock door closed itself again, as if the robots had detected our presence and decided to bar our exit from the flooded chamber.
One of the machines let go of its corner of the skin. It hovered by the sheet for a moment, as if weighing its options. Then it singled me out and commenced its approach. As it neared, the machine appeared far larger and more threatening than I’d expected. Its cone-shaped body was as long as me; its thickest tentacle appearing powerful enough to do serious damage even without the additional weapon of the laser. When it spread its arms wide, as if to embrace me, I had to fight not to panic and back away.
The robot started examining me. It began with my helmet, tap-tapping and scraping, shining its light through my visor. It applied twisting force, trying to disengage the helmet from the neck coupling. Whether it recognised me as a person or just a piece of unidentifiable floating debris, it appeared to think that dismantling was the best course of action. I told myself that I’d let it work at me for another few seconds, but as soon as I felt the helmet begin to loosen I’d have to act… even if that meant alerting the robot that I probably wasn’t debris.
But just when I’d decided I had to move, the robot abandoned my helmet and worked its way south. It extended a pair of tentacles under my chest armour from each side, trying to lever it away like a huge scab. Somehow I kept my nerve, daring to believe that the robot would sooner or later lose interest in me. Then it pulled away from the chest armour and started fiddling with my weapon, tap-tapping away like a spirit in a seance. It tugged on the gun, trying to unclip it. Then, as abruptly as it had started, the robot abandoned its investigation. It pulled away, gathering its tentacles into a fistlike bunch. Then it moved slowly in the direction of Nicolosi, tentacles groping ahead of it.