The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “In essence, yes.”

  “Won’t he put up a fight?”

  “I don’t think so. The Ultras that located the vehicle for me reported that it appeared dormant, in power-conservation mode. Jax himself may be frozen, in reefersleep. The ship did not respond to the Ultras’ sensor sweeps, so there’s no reason to assume it will respond to our approach and docking.”

  “How close did the Ultras get?” Sollis asked.

  “Within three or four light-minutes. But there’s no reason to assume we can’t get closer without alerting the ship.”

  “How do you know Jax is aboard this ship?” Nicolosi asked. “It could just be a drifter, nothing to do with him.”

  “The intelligence I’d already gleaned pointed towards his presence aboard a vehicle of a certain age, size and design—everything matches.”

  “So let’s cut to the chase,” Sollis said, again presuming to speak for the rest of us. “You’ve brought us here because you think we’re the team to snatch the colonel. I’m the intrusion specialist, so you’ll be relying on me to get us inside that ship. Nicolosi’s a freeze/thaw veteran, so—apart from the fact that he’s probably pretty handy with a weapon or two—he’ll know how to spring Jax from reefersleep, if the colonel turns out to be frozen. And she—what was your name again?”

  “Dexia,” I said, like it was a threat.

  “She’s done some extractions. I guess she must be OK at her job, or she wouldn’t be here.”

  Martinez waited a moment, then nodded. “You’re quite right, Ingrid: all credit to you for that. I apologize if my machinations are so nakedly transparent. But the simple fact of the matter is that you are the ideal team for the operation in question. I have no doubt that, with your combined talents, you will succeed in returning Colonel Jax to Sky’s Edge, and hence to trial. Now admit it: that would be something, wouldn’t it? To fell the last dragon? “

  Nicolosi indicated his approval with a long nasal sigh. “Men like Kessler are just a distraction. When you hang a monster like Kessler, you’re punishing the knife, not the man who wielded it. If you wish true justice, you must find the knifeman, the master.”

  “What do we get paid?” Sollis asked.

  Martinez smiled briefly. “Fifty thousand Australs for each of you, upon the safe return of Colonel Jax.”

  “What if we find him dead?” I asked. “By then we’ll already have risked an approach and docking to his ship.”

  “If Jax is already dead, then you will be paid twenty-five thousand Australs.”

  We all looked at each other. I knew what the others were thinking. Fifty thousand Australs was life-changing money, but half of that wasn’t bad either. Killing Jax would be much easier and safer than extracting him…

  “I’ll be with you, of course,” Martinez said. “So there’ll be no need to worry about proving Jax was already dead when you arrived, should that arise.”

  “If you’re coming along,” I asked, “who else do we need to know about?”

  “Only Norbert. And you need have no fears concerning his competency.”

  “Just the five of us, then,” I said.

  “Five is a good number, don’t you think? And there is a practical limit to the size of the extraction team. I have obtained the use of a small but capable ship, perfectly adequate for our purposes. It will carry five, with enough capacity to bring back the colonel. I’ll provide weapons, equipment and armour, but you may all bring whatever you think may prove useful.”

  I looked around the cloisterlike confines of the room, and remembered the dismal exterior of the offices, situated at the bottom of Threadfall Canyon. “Three times fifty thousand Australs,” I mused. “Plus whatever it cost you to hire and equip a ship. If you don’t mind me asking… where exactly are the funds coming from?”

  “The funds are mine,” Martinez said sternly. “Capturing Jax has been a long-term goal, not some whimsical course upon which I have only recently set myself. Dying a pauper would be a satisfactory end to my affairs, were I to do so knowing that Jax was hanging from the highest mast of Bridgetop.”

  For a moment, none of us said anything. Martinez had spoken so softly, so demurely, that the meaning of his words seemed to lag slightly behind the statement itself. When it arrived, I think we all saw a flash of that corpse, executed in the traditional way, the Haussmann way.

  “Good weapons?” I asked. “Not some reconditioned black-market shit?”

  “Only the best.”

  “Technical specs for the ship?” Sollis asked.

  “You’ll have plenty of time to review the data on the way to the rendezvous point. I don’t doubt that a woman of your abilities will be able to pinpoint an entry point.”

  Sollis looked flattered. “Then I guess I’m in. What about you, Salvatore?”

  “Men like Colonel Jax stained the honour of the Northern Coalition. We were not all monsters. If I could do something to make people see that…” Nicolosi trailed off, then shrugged. “Yes, I am in. It would be an honour, Mr. Martinez.”

  “That leaves you, Dexia,” Sollis said. “Fifty thousand Australs sounds pretty sweet to me. I’m guessing it sounds pretty sweet to you as well.”

  “That’s my call, not yours.”

  “Just saying… you look like you could use that money as much as any of us.”

  I think I came close to saying no, to walking out of that room, back into the incessant muddy rain of Threadfall Canyon. Perhaps if I’d tried, Norbert would have been forced to detain me, so that I didn’t go blabbing about how a team was being put together to bring Colonel Jax back into custody. But I would never get the chance to find out what Martinez had in mind for me if I chose not to go along with him.

  I only had to think about the way I looked in the mirror, and what those fifty thousand Australs could do for me.

  So I said yes.

  * * * *

  Martinez gestured to one of the blank pewter-grey walls in the shuttle’s compartment, causing it to brighten and fill with neon-bright lines. The lines meshed and intersected, forming a schematic diagram of a ship, with an accompanying scale.

  “Intelligence on Jax’s ship is fragmentary. Strip out all the contradictory reports, discard unreliable data, and we’re left with this.”

  “That’s it?” Sollis asked.

  “When we get within visual range we’ll be able to improve matters. I shall reexamine all of the reports, including those that were discarded. Some of them—when we have the real ship to compare them against—may turn out to have merit after all. They may in turn shed useful light on the interior layout, and the likely location of Jax. By then, of course, we’ll also have infrared and deep-penetration radar data from our own sensors.”

  “It looks like a pretty big ship,” I said as I looked at the schematic, scratching at my scalp. We were a day out from Armesto Field, with the little shuttle tucked into the belly hold of an outbound lighthugger named Death of Sophonisba.

  “Big but not the right shape for a lighthugger,” Sollis said. “So what are we dealing with here?”

  “Good question,” I said. What Martinez was showing us was a rectangular hull about one kilometre from end to end; maybe a hundred metres deep and a hundred metres wide, with some kind of spherical bulge about halfway along. There was some suggestion of engines at one end, and of a gauntlet-like docking complex at the other. The ship was too blunt for interstellar travel, and it lacked the outrigger-mounted engines that were characteristic of Conjoiner drive mechanisms. “Does look kind of familiar, though,” I added. “Anyone else getting that déjà vu feeling, or is it just me?”

  “I don’t know,” Nicolosi said. “When I saw it I thought…” He shook his head. “It can’t be. It must be a standard hull design.”

  “You’ve seen it too,” I said.

  “Does that ship have a name?” Nicolosi asked Martinez.

  “I have no idea what Jax calls his ship.”

  “That’s not what the man asked,” Sollis
said. “He asked if—“

  “I know the name of the ship,” I said quietly. “I saw a ship like that once, when I was being taken aboard it. I’d been injured in a fire-fight, one of the last big surface battles. They took me into space—this was after the elevator came down, so it had to be by shuttle—and brought me aboard that ship. It was a hospital ship, orbiting the planet.”

  “What was the name of the ship?” Nicolosi asked urgently.

  “Nightingale,” I said.

  “Oh, no.”

  “You’re surprised.”

  “Damn right I’m surprised. I was aboard Nightingale too.”

  “So was I,” Sollis said, her voice barely a whisper. “I didn’t recognize it, though. I was too fucked up to pay much attention until they put me back together aboard it. By then, I guess…”

  “Same with me,” Nicolosi said. “Stitched back together aboard Nightingale, then repatriated.”

  Slowly, we all turned and looked at Martinez. Even Norbert, who had contributed nothing until that point, turned to regard his master. Martinez blinked, but otherwise his composure was impeccable.

  “The ship is indeed Nightingale. It was too risky to tell you when we were still on the planet. Had any of Jax’s allies learned of the identity…”

  Sollis cut him off. “Is that why you didn’t tell us? Or is it because you knew we’d all been aboard that thing once already?”

  “The fact that you have all been aboard Nightingale was a factor in your selection, nothing more. It was your skills that marked you out for this mission, not your medical history.”

  “So why didn’t you tell us?” she asked.

  “Again, had I told you more than was wise…”

  “You lied to us.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “Wait,” Nicolosi said, his voice calmer than I was expecting. “Let’s just… deal with this, shall we? We’re getting hung up on the fact that we were all healed aboard Nightingale, when the real question we should be asking is this: what the hell is Jax doing aboard a ship that doesn’t exist anymore?”

  “What’s the problem with the ship?” I asked.

  “The problem,” Nicolosi said, speaking straight at me, “is that Nightingale was reported destroyed near the end of the war. Or were you not keeping up with the news?”

  I shrugged. “Guess I wasn’t.”

  “And yet you knew enough about the ship to recognize it.”

  “Like I said, I remember the view from the medical shuttle. I was drugged-up, unsure whether I was going to live or die… everything was heightened, intense, like in a bad dream. But after they healed me and sent me back down surfaceside? I don’t think I ever thought about Nightingale again.”

  “Not even when you look in the mirror?” Nicolosi asked.

  “I thought about what they’d done to me, how much better it could have been. But it never crossed my mind to wonder what had happened to the ship afterwards. So what did happen?”

  “You say ‘they healed me,’ “ Nicolosi observed. “Does that mean you were treated by doctors, by men and women?”

  “Shouldn’t I have been?”

  He shook his head minutely. “My guess is you were wounded and shipped aboard Nightingale soon after it was deployed.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “In which case, Nightingale was still in commissioning phase. I went aboard it later. What about you, Ingrid?”

  “Me too. I hardly saw another human being the whole time I was aboard that thing.”

  “That was how it was meant to operate: with little more than a skeleton staff, to take medical decisions the ship couldn’t take for itself. Most of the time they were meant to stay behind the scenes.”

  “All I remember was a hospital ship,” I said. “I don’t know anything about ‘commissioning.’ “

  Nicolosi explained it to me patiently, as if I was a small child in need of education.

  Nightingale had been financed and built by a consortium of well-meaning postmortal aristocrats. Since their political influence hadn’t succeeded in curtailing the war (and since many of their aristocratic friends were quite happy for it to continue) they’d decided to make a difference in the next best way: by alleviating the suffering of the mortal men and women engaged in the war itself.

  So they created a hospital ship, one that had no connection to either the Northern Coalition or the Southland Militia. Nightingale would be there for all injured soldiers, irrespective of allegiance. Aboard the neutral ship, the injured would be healed, allowed to recuperate, and then repatriated. All but the most critically wounded would eventually return to active combat service. And Nightingale itself would be state-of-the-art, with better medical facilities than any other public hospital on or around Sky’s Edge. It wouldn’t be the glittering magic of Demarchist medicine, but it would still be superior to anything most mortals had ever experienced.

  It would also be tirelessly efficient, dedicated only to improving its healing record. Nightingale was designed to operate autonomously, as a single vast machine. Under the guidance of human specialists, the ship would slowly improve its methods until it had surpassed its teachers. I’d come aboard ship when it was still undergoing the early stages of its learning curve, but—as I learned from Nicolosi—the ship had soon moved into its “operational phase.” By then the entire kilometre-long vehicle was under the control of only a handful of technicians and surgical specialists, with gamma-level intelligences taking most of the day-to-day decisions. That was when Sollis and Nicolosi had been shipped aboard. They’d been healed by machines, with only a vague awareness that there was a watchful human presence behind the walls.

  “It worked, too,” Nicolosi said. “The ship did everything its sponsors had hoped it would. It functioned like a huge, efficient factory: sucking in the wounded, spitting out the healed.”

  “Only for them to go back to the war,” I said.

  “The sponsors didn’t have any control over what happened when the healed were sent back down. But at least they were still alive; at least they hadn’t died on the battlefield or under the operating table. The sponsors could still believe that they had done something good. They could still sleep at night.”

  “So Nightingale was a success,” I said. “What’s the problem? Wasn’t it turned over to civilian use after the armistice?”

  “The ship was destroyed just before the ceasefire,” Nicolosi said. “That’s why we shouldn’t be seeing it now. A stray NC missile, nuke-tipped—too fast to be intercepted by the ship’s own countermeasures. It took out Nightingale, with staff and patients still aboard her.”

  “Now that you mention it… maybe I did hear about something like that.”

  Sollis looked fiercely at Martinez. “I say we renegotiate terms. He never told us we were going to have to spring Jax from a fucking ghost ship.”

  Norbert moved to his master’s side, as if to protect him from the furious Sollis. Martinez, who had said nothing for many minutes, removed his glasses, buffed them on his shirt and replaced them with an unhurried calm.

  “Perhaps you are right to be cross with me, Ingrid. And perhaps I made a mistake in not mentioning Nightingale sooner than I did. But it was imperative to me that I not compromise this operation with a single careless indiscretion. My whole life has been an arrow pointing to this one task: the bringing to justice of Colonel Jax. I will not fail myself now.”

  “You should have told us about the hospital ship,” Nicolosi said. “None of us would have had any reason to spread that information. We all want to see Jax get his due.”

  “Then I have made a mistake, for which I apologize.”

  Sollis shook her head. “I don’t think an apology’s going to cut it. If I’d known I was going to have to go back aboard that thing…”

  “You are right,” Martinez said, addressing all of us. “The ship has a traumatic association for you, and it was wrong of me not to allow for that.”

  “Amen to that,” So
llis said.

  I felt it was time I made a contribution. “I don’t think any of us are about to back out now, Tomas. But maybe—given what we now know about the ship—a little bit more incentive might not be a bad idea.”

  “I was about to make the same suggestion myself,” Martinez said. “You must appreciate that my funds are not inexhaustible, and that my original offer might already be considered generous—but shall we say an extra five thousand Australs, for each of you?”

  “Make it ten and maybe we’re still in business,” Sollis snapped back, before I’d had a chance to blink.