Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  “My vessel . . . did not . . . return.”

  No, I thought, it damned well hadn’t. The Gykr sub must have dropped some of them off here, then returned toward the surface where it had encountered the Walsh coming down. These Gykr were marooned, and the only way back to the surface was on board the Walsh.

  “We’re here to rescue you,” I said. “All of you.”

  “You are . . . here . . . to rescue you.”

  “We are not your enemy,” I said. “We’re not at war, you and I. We can help you.”

  I could almost see the Gykr struggling with alien concepts. Xenosophontologists back on Earth had speculated that the Gykr had no concept for “war,” in the same way that a fish might not understand the concept of “water.” And yet they had accepted the treaty of Tanis, at least more or less.

  Damn it, was there something there I could use? The Battle of Tanis had been a one-­sided affair, with the Fifth Fleet catching a much smaller Gykr squadron and supply base by surprise. And . . . when we’d arrived in the GJ 1214 system, that lone Gykr starship had run for it, rather than putting up a fight.

  I would need access to a history database—­something I didn’t have right now, a thousand kilometers underwater—­but I thought I remembered that in the forty-­some years since the Battle of Tanis, there’d been numerous Gykr raids and skirmishes with the bastards, but nothing like a stand-­up war. Maybe that idea of “fight-­or-­fight,” suggesting that they always attacked no matter what the tactical situation, wasn’t entirely true.

  Could it be true, even, for any species worthy of the term intelligent? There would always be situations that were simply too dire, too unbalanced in number, too hopeless to permit an attack-­at-­any-­odds response. Creatures that always attacked and never ran away when the odds were against them were unlikely to survive in the long haul. Evolution was damned efficient at culling those who were reckless.

  It could be that Tanis had taught the Gykr a measure of caution.

  “You would have to take our vessel by force,” I told them. “I don’t think you have the numbers to do that.”

  It was pure bluff. The ­people still back on board the Walsh were completely unarmed.

  “How many . . . of you . . . on vessel?”

  “Twenty,” I said. “Heavily armed.”

  “You are . . . twenty?”

  “Twenty-­two,” I replied. “Dr. Ortega and I didn’t know there were more of you here when we left our vessel.” I wondered if I should mention it, then pushed ahead. “We killed the two Gykr we met in the passageway. They tried to kill us, so we felt . . . justified.”

  The Gykr appeared to be uncertain. I couldn’t read their body language, but that was okay because I was willing to bet that they couldn’t read ours, either.

  “The deaths . . . of two units . . . is of no consequence.”

  “I repeat,” I said, “we are not at war. We can cooperate to get out of this.”

  “You will . . . leave the vessel,” the Gykr said after a moment, as though it had just seen the perfect solution. “All but . . . the vessel’s guide. You will . . . remain here with . . . the rest of you.”

  The vessel’s guide . . . they meant our pilot, Gina Lloyd. And the rest of us would be trapped on this ice-­bound derelict a thousand kilometers beneath the surface. That wasn’t quite what I had in mind by cooperate.

  As it spoke, I was trying to assess the Gykr’s worldview, the way it saw the world around it and interacted with it. Thanks, perhaps, to an e-­entertainment industry favoring simple plots and exciting action sequences, most ­people see aliens as ­people . . . funny-­looking, perhaps, and with some odd ideas now and again, but beings essentially the same as them, with the same values and the same ways of responding to stimuli, with reactions as varied as anger, love, hatred, or fascination. And, of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

  We’d assumed the Gykrs to be a hive mentality. Their entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica had got us thinking along those lines. That did not mean that all Gykrs everywhere were a single vast and complex individual—­which was what most ­people thought when they considered termite mounds or bee swarms. No, what it seemed to mean in this case was that Gykrs had leaders within any given group, and those leaders did most of the thinking and communicating for the whole. I noticed that all four of the Gykrs in front of me appeared identical. Nothing marked one off as distinct or different from the others . . . but one was doing all of the talking while the others just . . . crouched there.

  Well, you could say the same thing about the U.S. Marines, or of any well-­disciplined but non-­democratic organization of humans. The difference, perhaps, was that Marines had to be carefully trained to be both able and willing to set aside their personal urges and reactions—­like fear—­and accept what was necessary for the entire group. Charging an enemy plasma-­gun nest—­or, say, a space station occupied by dangerous terrorists—­was lunacy for any individual. Lunacy, however, might be necessary to prevent those terrorists from dropping a small planetoid onto a densely populated Earth.

  The Gykr had evolved within an environment utterly hostile and alien to human sensibilities, and to do so they would have evolved a native sense of discipline as thorough and as rigorous as that of any human Marine. They had to have done so.

  Marines are the way they are because of training, and that gives them a certain amount of flexibility. The Gykr are the way they are because of breeding, the way their brains are hardwired from birth or hatching or whatever it is they do.

  And that was the tactical advantage I was looking for.

  “I’m not the leader of this group,” I told the Gykr. “I’m not in charge, I don’t give the orders. I can’t order everyone off our vessel. The others would never agree.”

  All of the Gykr stirred uneasily. “ ‘Leader’?” the one said. “We are having . . . trouble . . . understanding this.”

  Well, of course that would be true. The concept was so deeply rooted in their evolutionary design they might not even be aware of it . . . like a fish unaware of the water within which it swam.

  “Do you have a word,” I asked, treading carefully, “for the one of you who makes decisions for the group? Who speaks for the group?”

  I heard a harsh clack in my in-­head, evidently the Gykr word itself, untranslated. “It means . . . ‘chosen.’ ”

  “I see.” That made sense. Not “chosen” as in democratically elected or anything so cerebral as determining who was best to lead. “Chosen” as in chosen by circumstances, or by an uncaring universe. A group of Gykr finds itself isolated, and one among them becomes the leader, making decisions for the entire group, which automatically rallies around the flag. Perhaps there were subtle biochemical cues that nudged the process along; the selection process probably wasn’t due to chance.

  I remembered reading of certain species of fish in Earth’s oceans. Clownfish schools have a female fish at the top of the hierarchy; when she dies, the most dominant male in the school will change into a female and take over. Among wrasses, the largest female will turn into a male and take over the harem if the school’s male leader dies. The choosing of a Gykr leader might be similar, although apparently the condition was temporary. A leader is needed, and one appears, with all others falling into line and following orders.

  As a survival tool, the process would neatly avoid the dangers of warring tribes or egoistic posturings or the idiocy of power for power’s sake alone within a deadly and unforgiving environment.

  “Among humans,” I told the Gykr, “we’re all chosen. We agree to cooperate to achieve certain goals, and we’ll agree to accept orders from one trained or experienced individual . . . but if I give orders that the others disagree with, like leaving the submarine, they will not do what I say.”

  “But . . . if the Akr strikes, you would be devoured!”

  I c
ould actually hear the emotion shaking behind the Gykr’s words. Human individuality must be sheer insanity from the Gykr point of view.

  “You’ve been a Galaxy-­faring species for a long time,” I said. “You must have encountered other species who think . . . who behave the way we do.”

  “Not . . . we, personally. We have heard . . . stories . . .”

  I remembered that the Gykr had something like 10 percent fewer synaptic connections within their brains. Knowledge might circulate within the entire species as hearsay or legend or be accessed, as with us, through a download from the local Net, but in general they would respond more to habit, to tradition, or to biochemical tides within their neural makeups than they did to education.

  It was tempting to think of them as stupid, but I resisted the thought. Their system worked well enough for them, as proven by the fact that they’d not only survived the night-­shrouded world of their birth, but freed themselves from it.

  The distinction was bogus in any case. One version of the IQ scale designated normal as anything between 85 and 115, so an average species IQ of 90 certainly qualified as human-­normal.

  “Your ship abandoned you here, didn’t it?” I said in what I hoped was a light and conversational tone. “You need to get back to the surface, so your ship can return and pick you up?”

  “My submersible . . . has not returned . . . as expected. The . . . Akr . . . might have attacked. . . .”

  That was the second time the being had used that untranslatable term. In context, I assumed that it was the Gykr name for some sort of sea monster in the ancient ocean of their world. It took me a moment longer to realize that the Gykr must be referring to the cuttlewhales.

  And that was an entirely different piece of the puzzle. We’d battled cuttlewhales on the surface ice—­and I’d watched a Gykr devoured by one. And yet, a cuttlewhale had . . . helped us, if that was the word, by swallowing the Walsh and transporting us hundreds of kilometers deeper into the ocean, to bring us here.

  “Then let me offer you this: Our vessel can’t take all of you back to the surface at once. We can provide transport for you to the surface . . . one at a time. Each trip our submersible makes will carry one of you, plus several of the humans trapped here, to safety. Our pilot will then return for another load . . . and another, until all of us have reached safety.”

  It was a monstrous gamble on several levels. By limiting each trip to one Gykr, I knew we could maintain control over them—­Gunny Hancock or Dr. Montgomery watching it with a plasma weapon in his good hand. It would also avoid letting the Gykr remaining below know that I’d exaggerated the number of armed humans on board the Walsh.

  But each trip would take a hell of a long time unless one of the cuttlewhales decided again to intervene and shorten the passages for us. Would a lone Gykr assume the role of leader during the long voyage to the surface, and perhaps make its own decisions about whether or not to go along with the process?

  I was reminded of an ancient riddle. A man reaches a ferry on a river with two chickens and a fox. The ferry will carry two at a time; if the fox is left alone with a chicken, the chicken will be killed. So how does the man get across with his livestock intact?

  Obviously, you took the fox across first, went back for one chicken, carried it across, then brought the fox back with you to the near bank and left it there when you picked up the second chicken. You could then make a third crossing to retrieve the fox.

  This situation wasn’t quite that simple, but there were ways to guarantee the safety of the human chickens.

  “You and I will remain here,” I added, “until the very last trip. So that you can trust me.”

  “We do not . . . understand . . . the term . . . ‘trust.’ ”

  Well, that stood to reason, didn’t it? “You trust your chosen to make the appropriate decisions in a group,” I suggested.

  “No. We accept that . . . necessary decisions . . . are made.”

  “Close enough.” The Gykr appeared to be far more passive in their relationships with one another, again, the result, I guessed, of the biochemical imperatives that had arisen through their evolutionary history. “If we’re going to get out of this trap, humans and Gykr together, we’re going to have to cooperate. That is a necessary decision, agreed?”

  “A decision might be made . . . to kill . . . all of you here,” the Gykr replied, impassive, “and take your vessel . . . for my own use. Or . . . you all remain here . . . while we and your vessel’s guide . . . make the ascent.”

  The Gykr’s curious, broken mode of conversation was fast becoming annoying. It was as though the being had to stop and think about each phrase before speaking it.

  “We won’t agree to that,” I said. “We don’t trust you. But we have a means of working together, so that all of us can get out of this.”

  I wondered, though, about that Gykr starship. On board the Haldane, we’d assumed that they’d be back, probably with a larger fleet. There was the distinct possibility that we would return to the surface and find Haldane fled, with a Gykr fleet in complete possession of the surface of GJ 1214 I.

  “We could . . . kill all of you.”

  “Can you?” I said. “All of us in here, yes. You have the weapons. But can you attack our submarine, and everyone on board? Without damaging the vessel so badly that it can’t undock? And I promise you . . . if you kill the humans on this station, the humans on board our submarine will never trust you, never work with you, never agree to cooperate with you. You will be trapped down here in the darkness, at the mercy of the . . . of the Akr, forever. . . .”

  The Gykr stirred, again uneasy. They were definitely on new and uncertain ground. The question was, Were they flexible enough to overcome hardwired evolutionary conditions and try something as alien to them as interspecies cooperation?

  “Tell you what,” I added. “If your ship is waiting for us when we reach the surface, we can agree to turn control of the transfer over to one of them . . . a new chosen, one of yours.”

  “Doc!” Ortega said, startled. “What are you saying?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a foregone conclusion, isn’t it?” I asked him. “If the Gykr are in control up there, they’ll take command of the Walsh anyway, no matter what we do. We’ll be forced to trust them to come get the rest of us.”

  “I don’t like it . . .”

  “Neither do I. You have another suggestion?”

  “What you offer . . . is acceptable,” the Gykr chosen said after another long moment’s pause. “I see no . . . reasonable alternative.”

  “You will permit us full contact with our vessel.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will put down your weapons. As have we.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we will work together in order to survive.”

  “Yes.”

  As an interstellar treaty, it had a few shortcomings, but it was the best we could hope for at the moment. I exchanged thoughts with Hancock, back on board the Walsh. As it happened, they’d been able to follow most of the exchange, having picked up on the fact that both Ortega and I had killed our privacy interlocks.

  “You done good, Doc,” Hancock said. “We’ll make a Marine of you yet.”

  “Thanks, Gunny. There are still twenty of you over there, heavily armed, right?”

  “Right.”

  That, I knew, was the weakest part of the plan. It seemed unlikely that we’d be able to get one of our weapons over to the Walsh without the Gykr knowing about it. Once the first Gykr came on board the Walsh, he would realize that things were not as I’d represented them. If he was in communication with the other three Gykr, the whole situation could change in an instant.

  As it would if a landing party from the Gykr starship was waiting for us topside.

  “Tell ’em, Doc,” Hancock said, “that we’ve removed all weapo
ns from the Walsh’s bridge, and that there’s just four of us here, okay? And the Gykr and the base survivors can ride up with us. The armed Marines are in the main compartment aft.”

  “Did you hear that, Chosen?” I asked the temporary Gykr leader.

  “We . . . did.”

  How long could we carry off the bluff? Well . . . once the Walsh de­coupled from the docking collar, submarine and base would be cut off from each other. It would be up to Hancock to continue the deception on the Walsh. Maybe he had a means of cobbling together something that looked like a weapon. Or maybe he actually had a holdout somewhere on board; Marines often did.

  The idea was to keep the Gykr here calm and reasonably satisfied as we transferred them, one by one, to the surface.

  One of the uncommunicative Gykrs went through the airlock into the access tunnel, along with eight human survivors and one M’nangat. I braced myself for some sort of protest or scene . . . but eventually we heard some muffled, metallic sounds and felt a distant tremor through the deck. Walsh had just cast off from the station and was on her way to the surface.

  Unfortunately, the base did not have any outside nano to provide us with vid images of what was going on. Whatever had been out there had been encased in the ice shell deliberately woven around what was left of the base, so we were blind to everything outside the base’s crumpled interior.

  I would have liked to see if one of the cuttlewhales had moved in to give us another assist.

  “So . . . Dr. Murdock,” I said. “What the hell happened here?”

  His eyes shifted to the remaining Gykr. “We were . . . attacked,” he said. “A bombardment from orbit. The ice around and under us melted enough that the weight of the main base caused us to break through and sink.”

  “But how did you end up here?” Ortega asked. “Floating . . . but a thousand kilometers down!”

  “Our specific gravity,” Murdock said with a wan smile, “the ratio of CM hull to internal air space, was . . . low enough that we sank fairly slowly. It was a near thing, though. The pressure was seriously beginning to deform the hull before we could reprogram the external hull nano to begin adding layers of ice . . . a jury-­rigged pressure hull.”