Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  IT . . . HURTS . . . NOW, was the reply.

  I hated working without anesthetic, but the way a species transmits signals through its central nervous system—­pain, temperature, pressure, or the more esoteric impulses for emotions or thoughts—­is as unique as the way it deals with immune responses. I can block pain in a human patient easily enough because we understand how human pain works through the doloric receptors inside the thalamus and the insular cortex of the brain, but we have no idea how the analogous system works in the M’nangat. We just don’t understand their biochemistry well enough yet.

  “Okay,” I said, slipping a laser scalpel from my M-­7 pack and snapping it on. “Brace yourself.”

  I made a single quick, short incision, trying to slice through just the tough and gnarled outer integument without touching the nano-­clad bullet just underneath. The M’nangat tensed, and its tentacles whiplashed for an instant, threatening to put us both into a microgravity tumble.

  “Steady,” I told herm. “Hold on now . . .”

  Several tentacles flicked up and wrapped themselves around my legs, gripping me tightly. That hadn’t been what I’d meant by “hold on,” but it seemed to serve as the Broc equivalent of biting the bullet. Green blood emerged from the cut in a dense, expanding cloud . . . and the nano-­D round came with it.

  I let the bullet float free as I released the scalpel and snatched another bag of skinseal, thumbing it open. Right about then, I felt another shudder and weight returned . . . again, about a tenth of a gravity.

  The meta thrusters were firing again.

  Chapter Three

  For a terrifying moment I was way too busy for only two hands, but I slapped the sealant in place, then pulled out a glass specimen container for the M550 round, which was now drifting toward the bulkhead at a bit less than a meter per second, reached out, and scooped it up just before it hit the wall. As I sealed the cap, the bullet abruptly dissolved, filling the vial with an inky black syrup. My breath caught in my throat; if the stuff was programmed to disassemble everything, the vial would dissolve in less than a second, and then we would have a cloud of charged nano-­D floating into the interior of Capricorn Zeta.

  But . . . no. The glass contained the ink, and I let out a deep and fervent breath of relief. The stuff must have been programmed to go after carbon, and the silica molecules—­silicon dioxide—­of the glass were beyond its scope. The scalpel and the N-­prog both hit the bulkhead and clung there, and a second later my patient and I thumped against the wall as well.

  WHAT . . . IS . . . HAPPENING?

  “I’m hoping the Marines managed to hack into the station’s drive,” I told herm, “and are boosting us back into a stable orbit. Um . . . can you let go of my legs now?” The largest of those tentacles, as thick as my thigh and a ­couple of meters long, were strong.

  Obligingly, they unfurled, then coiled up again into a tight ball. I picked up the N-­prog and used it to call up a scan of the being’s internal systems, ordering the nanobots still inside to spread out and give me a full-­body image.

  The major bleeders, I noted, had been sealed off. Good. Both hearts were throbbing in lockstep with each other, first one, then the other, and both appeared to be beating steadily. My downloaded medical data suggested that the M’nangat’s temperature, respiration, and heart rate all were more or less within normal ranges. That was a damned good thing, too, since I didn’t have the nano programming or drugs to change them if they were off.

  Down near the creature’s base I saw three small shadows. Buds. The growing young that in all probability would kill the M’nangat at parturition.

  The shudder of the base’s engines cut off, and once again, we were in microgravity. I completed my examination. What I could understand appeared to be working okay; I just wished I understood more.

  “Okay, Gunny?” I called. “I’ve got the patient stabilized. We need a medevac, though, to someplace that understands Broc physiology.”

  “We have a ­couple of medevacs inbound, Doc.” Hancock replied. “Your friend’ll be heading down to San Antone.”

  “Excellent.”

  The San Antonio Military Medical Center—­usually abbreviated as “SAMMC” and pronounced “Sam-­sea”—­was an enormous installation located at Fort Sam Houston on the northeast edge of San Antonio, Texas. It was where I’d had my Navy Hospital Corps training and where I’d gone to Advanced Medical Technology School a few months later. The naval hospital there is our biggest and best, and if any human facility could handle M’nangat physiology, they could.

  “How about our wounded?” I asked.

  “Sergeant Rutherford is doing okay,” Hancock replied. “Private Donohue is tech-­dead.”

  “How long?”

  “Six . . . six and a half mikes.”

  Fuck.

  The human brain starts to break down the moment blood stops flowing through it. After three minutes, it might just be possible to bring a person back with little or no brain damage. Longer than that, though, and the damage from oxygen starvation is irreversible. The person is “tech-­dead,” technically dead, and is going to need extensive stem-­cell grafts and transplants for the brain to be brought back on-­line again.

  And that’s why we use CAPTR technology to try to put the patient’s mind back in his brain after we’ve repaired it. It doesn’t always work. More often than not it doesn’t. If there’s been too much damage and neuron replacement, the CAPTR download won’t take.

  And if it does, the Marine becomes a “zombie,” shunned or worse by other Marines. They’re usually redeployed to a different unit after they recover, to avoid being ostracized by superstitious nonsense.

  Caryl Donohue had been brain dead too long for me to be able to pull her back.

  Would it have made a difference if I’d been able to treat her within a minute or two of being hit? There was no way to tell. Everything depended on the severity of the wound.

  But I did know that she would have had a better chance if I’d been there, if I hadn’t been trying to gentle that nano-­D round out of the M’nangat carrier’s chest.

  And that made me feel . . . guilty, somehow. Like I’d not been doing my job. Like I’d let down another member of the platoon.

  I didn’t want to think about that. “What’s the situation, Gunny?” I asked, changing the topic. In any case, I wanted to know if the mission had succeeded . . . or if it had all been for nothing.

  “We’re in good shape,” Hancock replied. “The bastards planted a blocker virus in the thruster control system, but First Platoon touched down on the rock and took direct control of the thrusters. They hardwired a new control system into the jets, and that let us stabilize the rock’s orbit.”

  So, the bad guys had sabotaged Capricorn Zeta’s controls so that no matter what we’d done, the station and a one-­kilometer asteroid would have burned into Earth’s atmosphere and impacted somewhere on the surface moments later. First Platoon had been on an approach vector above and behind us, with the goal of landing on the asteroid itself and securing the thruster complex. Evidently, the plan had worked.

  “We were thirty-­five minutes from re-­entry,” Hancock added, “and about forty from impact.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere just south of Japan.”

  In many ways, an ocean impact is far worse for the planet than having an asteroid come down on solid ground. Billions of tons of water flashed into vapor . . . a thick cloud ceiling over most of the planet reflecting the heat of the sun back into space . . . and, oh yes, titanic tidal waves racing across the ocean at the speed of sound. The western coast of the Americas would have been hard hit.

  But it would have been a hell of a lot worse for Japan and both Chinas. Again, it didn’t seem logical that the North Chinese were behind the terror attack on Capricorn Zeta. They would have been vulnerable to an impact anywher
e in the Pacific basin—­a bull’s-­eye covering one-­third of the planet. But if not them, who?

  That, however, was for the politicians to argue about. Right now, it was our job to finish securing the mining station, making sure the black hats hadn’t planted any bombs or otherwise compromised the base. We also had to process the rescued hostages, still floating around with their hands zip-­tied behind them. This meant interviewing each one, comparing their story with both station computer records and records off the Net, checking their DNA to make sure each man or woman was who he or she claimed to be, and evacuating the wounded shoreside. The Marines were taking care of that part of the evolution.

  My job was to prep our wounded for evac . . . and to pull suit recordings on the Marines who’d been hit. Marine combat armor has simple-­minded AIs resident within the electronics that keep a log of events in a battle. What a Marine does wrong during a firefight can be helpful as a basis for Marine training sims, a means of keeping other Marines from making the same mistakes.

  Second Platoon had suffered three wounded and one dead—­not a bad casualty ratio, actually, for space combat, where even minor damage to vacuum armor can very easily mean a fast and unpleasant death. We’d lost Lance Corporal Stalzar going in; the others we’d been able to treat or stabilize. We still didn’t know about Private Donohue . . . wouldn’t know about her until we could get her to a proper med facility. I didn’t have a report yet from 1st Platoon. I tagged HM2 Michael C. Dubois, the 1st Platoon Corpsman, over the company Net. If he needed help out there on the rock’s surface, he could yell for me.

  “Carlyle!” Lieutenant Singer called. “What are you doing?”

  “Grabbing suit recordings, sir,” I replied.

  “That can wait. I need you sweeping the station for goo threats.”

  I sighed. No rest for the Wiccans . . .

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “That includes the prisoners. Especially the prisoners. We can’t allow the medevacs in until the mining station is declared clean.”

  Shit. “I’m on it, sir.”

  I wondered whether that order was coming down from Washington, or if it represented the technoparanoia of the local brass—­at a battalion or company level, or even of Second Lieutenant Singer himself.

  No matter. Orders were orders. I pulled out my N-­prog and began resetting it.

  Gray goo. That was the old and fear-­entangled term invented by Eric Drexler, one of the twentieth-­century fathers of nanotechnology—­though he’d later said he wished he’d never come up with the phrase. Back in those early days, before the first molecular disassemblers had even been brought on-­line, there’d been a widespread concern about nanomachines programmed to take apart raw materials and create more of themselves. Since human beings are as good as sources of raw materials as an ancient landfill, the fear was that nano-­D would keep on eating and eating until the entire planet was converted to so-­called gray goo.

  It couldn’t happen, of course. Run until the raw material is used up is a piss-­poor way to program molecular machines, first off. They also require energy, a lot of it, to break molecular bonds, and are generally fairly limited in range. Nanodisassemblers are designed to reach an end point and quit. They’re also easily shut down by an ultraviolet radiation bath, or by transmission of a seek-­kill signal in their immediate vicinity.

  But Humankind has had a love-­hate relationship with nano since the beginning. Medical nano has effectively tripled our expected life span, ended the tyranny of pain, overturned the death sentences of cancer and heart disease, and even holds out the eventual promise of . . . if not immortality, then the next best thing: lifetimes measured by millennia rather than years. Some ­people with full-­course nananagathics in their systems have been around for well over a century, now, and still look like they’re in their thirties. Not only that, nanotechnology has completely transformed the way we control and interact with our material surroundings, allowing us to grow everything from a sizzling steak to a house, and pull what we need from the background matrix—­furniture, workstations, nanufactories, anything that can be stored in digital AI memory and retrieved by a thoughtclick.

  But the term gray goo remains a bugaboo, a terror phrase for anyone nervous about the ever-­increasing pace of our technology. Washington in particular was afraid of what would happen if terrorists got hold of so-­called black nano, which when released would proceed to chow down on Earth’s ecosphere.

  Ecophagia—­devouring the ecosphere.

  Machines—­even very tiny ones—­only did what humans told them to do.

  But then, humans were always the weak part of the equation, capable of the most incredibly stupid or irresponsible of acts.

  I started scanning the compartment with my N-­prog, looking for the telltale electronic signature of nanobots. The trouble was, there were ’bots everywhere. When my N-­prog detected active nano, it transmitted the data to my in-­head, which painted green pinpoints against my vision, marking objects that otherwise would have been invisibly small. I looked at the station bulkhead in front of me, gray-­painted and consisting entirely of massive pipes running from deck to overhead. The biggest, I knew, were sorting pipes, carrying the component elements of Atun 3840 into storage and assembly bays. The thinner tubes were nano-­D feeders, sending microscopic disassemblers into the depths of the captive asteroid. The pipes were silent at the moment, the mining process shut down. But they showed as solid masses of green, each packed with trillions upon uncountable trillions of live nanobots—­motionless, but still powered and on standby. Most of the Marines around me showed diffuse green masses within the outlines of their bodies—­the medical nano we all carried to improve our combat efficiency, react to wounds, and keep us healthy.

  There was loose nano drifting in the air too. The damned things are so tiny that there’s always leakage, and any environment with active nano running will have escapees. I pointed my N-­prog at several, interrogating them; a lot of the floaters actually were disassemblers—­leftovers from the rounds the tangos had used. They’d shut down but were still broadcasting. Damn, they were everywhere.

  This was freaking hopeless.

  “Lieutenant Singer?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’ve got nano soup in here. It appears inert, but there’s so much it’s overloading my readings. I recommend a UV bath. The whole station, top to bottom.”

  Facilities like Capricorn Zeta were required by law to have ultraviolet lights installed in every compartment, a means of turning off any loose nano that leaked into the environment or came inside on workers’ spacesuits. It was the simplest solution, and the only one we had time for.

  “Very well,” Singer said. “But check out the tangos. One of them might be a carrier.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The prisoners were being held in the next compartment out from the rock, a common area that served as lounge and mess hall for the miners. One entire bulkhead was transplas, looking down on the cloud tops hugging the Earth. We were crossing the terminator into night, and the clouds were red and flaming orange. The planet looked fragile and terribly vulnerable.

  Sergeant Aguirre and a ­couple of privates had the tangos under guard—­five of them. They’d been yanked out of their spacesuits, stripped naked, and tied hand and foot. We were taking no chances with these animals.

  They watched with large, dark, and angry eyes as I scanned the first one with my N-­prog. No RFID tag, no edentity. “Name?” I asked him.

  He spat at me, the shimmering glob of saliva drifting past my helmet in microgravity to splat against the transparent bulkhead at my back. I shrugged and kept scanning. There was, of course, nothing.

  Neo-­Ludds. They’ve been with us forever, I think. When Tharg the caveman first discovered fire, there were probably members of the tribe who wanted to make the stuff illegal, a clear and present danger
to the community. The original Luddites had been early-­nineteenth-­century textile workers who’d sabotaged the machinery introduced by the Industrial Revolution, machinery that was putting them out of work. Toward the end of the twentieth century neo-­Luddism had arisen—­a rejection of those technologies perceived as having a negative impact on both individuals and ­communities.

  Nanotechnology was at the top of the neo-­Ludds’ hit list, of course, not only because of the whole “gray goo” scenario, but because it was changing the very meaning of what it meant to be human. Nano-­chelated circuitry grown inside the human brain, control contacts in the palms of our hands, genetic reconfiguration . . . sure, we might have cured cancer with the stuff, but was it safe?

  I would have been extremely surprised if any of these ­people had nanobots in them, or any of the nanotech extensions—­cerebral implants, neural circuitry, or other internal hardware.

  For neo-­Ludds, asteroid mining came right behind nanotech as a key target—­especially when that industry involved moving asteroids into Earth orbit. Proponents suggested that the technology, with massively redundant backups, was failsafe. The neo-­Ludds pointed out that sooner or later technology always fails, and that Earth could not risk even a single such failure.

  But did it make sense, I wondered, for them to protest the technology by bringing about the very disaster they feared? That simply wasn’t rational.

  But then, I had trouble thinking of neo-­Ludds as rational.

  I went down the line, scanning each man in turn. All of them were clean—­no active nano circulating inside their bodies. Curious, I put the N-­prog away and pulled out a DNA tester. Approaching the first man, I touched it to his upper arm. He yelped when it bit him, and cut loose with a torrent of invective in a language I didn’t understand.

  “You understand any of that, Sarge?” I asked Aguirre.

  “Negative, Doc,” he replied. “The station translators aren’t programmed for it, whatever it is.”