‘Blast visor down, Scarrow.’
I understood what he had in mind. No more sweet-talking the doors until they opened for us. From now on we’d be shooting our way through Nightingale.
Norbert/Martinez aimed the Demarchist weapon at the airlock. I cuffed down my blast visor. Three discharges took out the first airlock door, crumpling it inward as if punched by a giant fist.
‘Air on other side,’ Norbert/Martinez said.
The Demarchist gun was soon ready again. Through the visor’s near-opaque screen I saw three more flashes. When I flipped it back up, the weapon was packing itself back into its stowed configuration. Sollis patted aside smoke and airborne debris. The emergency lights were still flashing in our section of corridor, but the space beyond the airlock was as pitch dark as any part of the ship we’d already traversed. Yet we’d barely taken a step into that darkness when wall facets lit up in swift sequence, with the face of Nightingale looking at us from all directions.
Something was definitely wrong now. The faces really were looking at us, even though the facets were flat. The images turned slowly as we advanced along the corridor.
‘This is the Voice of Nightingale,’ the faces said simultaneously, as if we were being serenaded by a perfectly synchronised choir. ‘I am now addressing a moving party of three individuals. My systems have determined with a high statistical likelihood that this party is responsible for the damage I have recently sustained. The damage is containable, but I cannot tolerate any deeper intrusion. Please remain stationary and await escort to a safe holding area.’
Sollis slowed, but she didn’t stop. ‘Who’s speaking? Are we being addressed by the sentience engine, or just a delta-level subsidiary?’
‘This is the Voice of Nightingale. I am a Turing-compliant gamma-level intelligence of the Vaaler-Lako series. Please stop and await escort to a safe holding area.’
‘That’s the sentience engine,’ Sollis said quietly. ‘It means we’re getting the ship’s full attention now.’
‘Maybe we can talk it into handing over Jax.’
‘I don’t know. Negotiating with this thing might be tricky. Vaaler-Lakos were supposed to be the hot new thing around the time Nightingale was put together, but they didn’t quite work out that way.’
‘What happened?’
‘There was a flaw in their architecture. Within a few years of start-up, most of them had gone bugfuck insane. I don’t even want to think about what being stuck out here’s done to this one.’
‘Please stop,’ the voice said again, ‘and await escort to a safe holding area. This is your final warning.’
‘Ask it…’ Norbert/Martinez said. ‘Speak for me.’
‘Can you hear me, ship?’ Sollis asked. ‘We’re not here to do any harm. We’re sorry about the damage we’ve already caused. We’ve come for someone… there’s a man here, a man aboard you, that we’d really like to meet.’
The ship said nothing for several moments. Just when I’d concluded that it didn’t understand us, it said, ‘This facility is no longer operational. There is no one here for you to see. Please await escort to a safe holding area, from where you can be referred to a functioning facility.’
‘We’ve come for Colonel Jax,’ I said. ‘Check your patient records.’
‘Admission code Tango Tango six one three, hyphen five,’ said Norbert/Martinez, forcing each word out like an expression of pain. ‘Colonel Brandon Jax, Northern Coalition.’
‘Do you have a record of that admission?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ the Voice of Nightingale replied. ‘I have a record for Colonel Jax.’
‘Do you have a discharge record?’
‘No such record is on file.’
‘Then Jax either died in your care, or he’s still aboard. Either way there’ll be a body. We’d really like to see it.’
‘That is not possible. You will stop now. An escort is on its way to escort you to a safe holding area.’
‘Why can’t we see Jax?’ Sollis demanded. ‘Is he telling you we can’t see him? If so, he’s not the man you should be listening to. He’s a war criminal, a murderous bastard who deserves to die.’
‘Colonel Jax is under the care of this facility. He is still receiving treatment. It is not possible to visit him at this time.’
‘Damn thing’s changing its story,’ I said. ‘A minute ago it said the facility was closed.’
‘We just want to talk to him,’ Sollis said, ‘that’s all. Just to tell him that the world knows where he is, even if you don’t let us take him with us now.’
‘Please remain calm. The escort is about to arrive.’
The facets turned to look away from us, peering into the dark limits of the corridor. There was a sudden bustle of approaching movement, and then a wall of machines came squirming towards us. Dozens of squid-robots were nearing, packed so tightly together that their tentacles formed a flailing mass of silver-blue metal. I looked back the other way, back the way we’d come, and saw another wave of robots coming from that direction. There were far more machines than we’d seen before, and their movements in dry air were at least as fast and fluid as they’d been underwater.
‘Ship,’ Sollis said, ‘all we want is Jax. We’re prepared to fight for him. That’ll mean more damage being inflicted on you. But if you give us Jax, we’ll leave nicely.’
‘I don’t think it wants to bargain,’ I said, raising my slug-gun at the advancing wall just as it reached the ruined airlock. I squeezed off rounds, taking out at least one robot with each slug. Sollis started pitching in to my left, while Norbert/Martinez took care of the other direction with the Demarchist weapon. He could do a lot more damage with each discharge, taking out three or four machines every time he squeezed the trigger. But he kept having to wait for the weapon to re-arm itself, and the delay was allowing the wall of hostiles to creep slowly forwards. Sollis and I were firing almost constantly, taking turns to cover each other while we slipped in new slug clips or ammo cells, but our wall was gaining on us as well. No matter how many robots we destroyed, no gap ever appeared in the advancing wave. There must have been hundreds of them, squeezing us in from both directions.
‘We’re not going to make it,’ I said, sounding resigned even to myself. ‘There’s too many of them. Maybe if we still had Nicolosi’s rifle, we could shoot our way out.’
‘I didn’t come all this way just to surrender to a haunted hospital,’ Sollis said, replacing an ammo cell in her energy weapon. ‘If it means going out fighting… so be it.’
The nearest robots were now only six or seven metres away, the tips of their tentacles probing even nearer. She kept pumping shots into them, but they kept coming closer, flinging aside the hot debris of their damaged companions. There was no possibility of falling back any further, for we were almost back to back with Norbert/Martinez.
‘Maybe we should just stop,’ I said. ‘This is a hospital. It’s programmed to heal people. The last thing it’ll want to do is hurt us.’
‘Feel free to put that to the test,’ Sollis said.
Norbert/Martinez squeezed off the last discharge before his weapon went back into recharge mode. Sollis was still firing. I reached over and tried to pass Norbert/Martinez my gun, so he’d at least have something to use while waiting for his weapon to power up. But the machines had already seen their moment. The closest one flicked out a tentacle and wrapped it around the big man’s foot. Everything happened very quickly, then. The machine hauled Norbert/Martinez towards the flailing mass until he fell within reach of another set of tentacles. They had him, then. He cartwheeled his arms, trying to reach for handholds on the walls, but there was no possibility of that. The robots flicked the Demarchist weapon from his grip and then took the weapon with them. Norbert/Martinez screamed as his legs, and then his upper body, vanished into the wall of machines. They smothered him completely. For a moment we could still hear his breathing — he’d stopped screaming, as if knowing it would make no difference — and then there was absolute silence, as if the carrier signal from his suit had been abruptly terminated.