by Ian Douglas
WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND . . . ‘RIGHT TO LIFE.’
M’nangat attitudes, I was beginning to think, could be compared to those of salmon on Earth. You go through hell to get back to the pond where you were born, you have sex, the female lays her eggs . . . and then there’s no reason left to live, so you die. Nature is full of similar examples; after all, what’s important is continuing the species, not your quality of life after you give birth. Look at humans . . . as they came in the package, not what we got after we started tinkering with life extension. Like all Earthly animals, they grow up, they reproduce . . . and a few years later, the telomeric time bombs built into human DNA go off, and both the man and woman die.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” I grumbled, “that the M’nangat are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . .”
While I worked, I was injecting a stream of medical nanobots into D’nah’s abdomen. I’d done a lot of research on M’nangat anatomy and physiology since that incident in the mining station in low Earth orbit. Their immune system, especially, would tolerate the nanobots okay. Using the table’s N-prog link, I programmed them to move in on the bleeders and seal them off. I dispatched another fleet of ’bots to herm’s brain. M’nangat pain receptors are different for their nervous system than they are for ours, but my research had suggested that I could cut off the pain signals from herm’s body if I could deaden a particular nerve bundle just at the base of the brain. My biggest worry was that in shutting down one set of nerves, I would turn off something really important, like the autonomous neural connections required to keep both of the Broc’s hearts beating in synch.
The one bit of good news here was that the M’nangat actually had deoxyribonucleic acid—good old DNA—as a means of expressing genomic characteristics and for controlling cell growth and reproduction. This wasn’t as unlikely as it might seem at first glance. We’ve only encountered a handful of ways of passing on genes or gene equivalents among the extraterrestrial species we’ve encountered. The Gykr use glycol nucleic acid for the purpose–GNA. The Qesh use threose nucleic acid, or TNA, and there are five or six others. A very few, like the Deep, appear not to need genes at all.
But the Brocs use DNA, which crops up a lot as the result of parallel evolution. Because it’s flexible and efficient at what it does and comes together naturally and easily from RNA and from nucleotides, its organic precursors. That doesn’t mean the Brocs are related to terrestrial life in any way; they just use the same biochemical building blocks as we do.
But the similarity allowed me to fine-tune the nanobots to begin manipulating cells to encourage healing. It also gave me a fair chance of at least dulling the pain D’dnah was feeling right now. I checked the Broc’s hearts-beat, and yanked on one tentacle, looking for a response. D’dnah appeared to be unconscious, now, though herm’s bodily functions continued to work.
The babies, meanwhile, all three of them, appeared to have latched onto D’dnah’s internal organs and were beginning to feed.
I looked up at the two M’nangat hovering nearby. “I’m going to open herm up to get the babies out,” I said. “Is there a problem with that?”
D’deen’s tentacles writhed helplessly. I DO NOT KNOW. . . .
DO WHAT MUST BE DONE, D’drevah said.
Typical . . . the female in the delivery room cool and calm, the male a helpless wreck.
“I am not going to let D’dnah die,” I told them. At least—though I didn’t add this out loud—not if I could help it, but I didn’t feel that I was on real solid ground, here. I’d had training in human obstetrics—a little, anyway, enough to manage an emergency delivery—but this was a whole new world for me.
SOMETIMES THE LIFE-BEARER LIVES. She said it as if saying that sometimes humans had two heads.
“You just be ready to take the babies when I pull them out. If there’s anything you need to do with it to make sure they’re healthy, you take care of that. Right?” I certainly wasn’t going to give the things a slap to the things’ bottoms to get them breathing . . . but if there were other, peculiarly M’nangat rituals to ensure a healthy birth, they would have to do them, not me.
WE ARE READY.
“Is herm ready?”
I BELIEVE THE INJECTION YOU GAVE HERM HAS MADE HERM UNCONSCIOUS.
“That’s the idea.” I glanced at Chief Garner. “Scalpel . . .”
Chief Garner handed me a laser cutter the size of a pen. Holding it against D’dnah’s midsection, I pressed the pressure switch and made a careful slice along the gray-green integument, watching for a physical response. Getting none, I extended the slice, going deeper. We had the sterile field switched on over the table, just to be sure. Despite the similarities in genetics, M’nangat biology is different enough from ours that our bugs shouldn’t hurt them and theirs wouldn’t hurt us. That’s why I was now confident that the nano I was putting into D’dnah wouldn’t hurt herm. Still, there would be M’nangat bacteria or other microorganisms on the Haldane simply because they’d been aboard her so the sterile field would protect D’dnah from their bugs now that I had herm opened up.
Black-green liquid welled up out of the incision, copper-based M’nangat blood plus various internal fluids. Garner used a handful of gauze pads to mop the stuff away, but it kept coming. I ordered the nanobots to redistribute themselves, to begin sealing off the new bleeders.
And at that moment, the Haldane lurched violently, there was a crack of thunder, and the sick bay lights winked out.
“What the fuck?” I yelled, pulling back the scalpel. The laser, I noted, no longer had power.
A siren whooped in the darkness, though I wasn’t sure what it meant since we already were on full red alert. Then the compartment lights and the laser cutter both came back on. “I’ll check,” Garner said, closing his eyes. I kept working, opening the incision further. It would have to be large enough for me to get both hands inside. The trouble was the cartilaginous latticework that served as an internal skeleton. I would have to cut through that, or I wouldn’t have room to work.
His eyes snapped open. “The Gucks are attacking,” he said. “It looks like just warning shots, but I gather that the skipper told them we weren’t moving until our medical emergency was over. And the Gykr captain is expressing his displeasure at that idea.”
Haldane lurched again. What were they doing, trying to shoot up the ice underneath us? “This would go a lot easier if they wouldn’t do that,” I said.
There . . . that should be enough. I switched off the scalpel, drew a deep breath, and then reached into the incision with both hands. The cartilage closed in on my wrists. “Retractors,” I told Garner.
He used a pair of manual retractors to pull the incision open a bit. I could watch the table’s screen, then, watch my hands slip deep inside D’dnah’s body and began working their way in toward the first of those damned parasitic babies.
The damned slippery parasitic baby. I could feel it wiggling, but it didn’t feel like there was anything convenient to grab and hang on to.
I heard a shrill screech from somewhere overhead, and assumed Captain Summerlee had just returned fire from Haldane’s dorsal turret. We were in a bad position, tactically . . . outnumbered eight to one, and we were parked on the ice while the Gykr ships were either in orbit or free to move through the atmosphere at will.
“Uh-oh,” Garner said.
“What? Ah! Damn it!” The baby slithered away from my grasp again, tucking its way up behind D’dnah’s lower heart. It liked it in there. . . .
“Gykr ground troops. I’m linked in through the ship’s outside cameras. I can see a line of those walker tank-things of theirs moving toward us.”
There! I had the baby by a handful of tentacles! Holding on with my right hand, I slipped my left f
arther in, trying to gently untangle the squirming creature from D’dnah’s lower heart. I could feel the hearts-rate increasing through my arms. Was herm feeling pain? Or simply reacting to the stress? I didn’t know, and couldn’t tell.
A sharp, searing pain jolted my right hand and shot up my arm, and I lost hold of the creature. “Fuck!”
“What’s wrong?”
“The little bastard bit me!”
From my research, I knew that the baby M’nangat began feeding on the life carrier, drawing blood directly from the interior body wall while they were buds, then breaking free and literally gnawing their way out with a kind of parrot’s beak arrangement located among the caudal tentacles. More often than not, they began by feeding on the carrier’s internal organs. Usually, the life carrier was dead by the time all three had chewed their way to freedom.
I knew there were some spider species on Earth that exhibited matriphagy—the young eating the mother. Aristotle had written about this charming behavior a couple of thousand years ago, but I’d never expected to see it manifested by sapient species. Nature, however, doesn’t much care who gets hurt, so long as the survival of the genes is ensured. And in the case of the M’nangat, of course, it wasn’t the mother that was devoured, but the living incubator.
The living, intelligent, self-aware incubator. I shuddered.
I almost pulled out to tend my hand—I was sure I was bleeding—but I was so damned close. I thought I had the knack of it now, and grabbed the writhing bundle of tentacles at the infant’s bottom, gently held D’dnah’s beating lower heart aside, and pulled. . . .
Again, the Haldane shuddered and the power went down. “They hit the dorsal turret,” Garner told me. “We’re helpless, now. . . .”
But I maintained my grip, holding the Broc baby’s tentacle-legs in the wet dark, and continued a slow, steady pull. The lights came back up, and with a sharp sucking sound, then, the infant came free, emerging from the incision covered in black and green glop and hissing.
“Here you go, Mom,” I said, handing the squirming infant to D’drevah, who was waiting with a towel in outstretched tentacles. “I do hope you know what to do, because I sure don’t.”
THANK YOU, DOC CARLYLE. . . .
She took the squirming, snapping infant from me, dried it carefully, and then pressed its tentacles against her torso. She keened, suddenly, as the infant bit down.
Human infants are suckled with milk from the mother’s breasts. Among the M’nangat, newborns are suckled with mother’s blood for several months. Eventually, the newborn’s beak falls off, and it begins eating regurgitated food.
And human mothers thought they had it rough!
I couldn’t watch her—fortunately—because I still had two more of those little monsters inside my patient. Of somewhat less concern at the moment was the fact that I’d left some protein inside D’dnah’s body cavity; my right index finger was bleeding freely where the little monster had bitten me. Alien proteins could be a problem . . . though I suspected that human and M’nangat biologies were too different for my blood to trigger an allergic anaphylaxis.
I would worry about that later.
The next one was nestled in among the coils of D’dnah’s intestine, and I needed to get it out before it chewed its way through and flooded herm’s body with toxins.
“All hands, all hands,” sounded from a loudspeaker in the sick bay, as words wrote themselves across my in-head repeating the message. “Stand by to repel boarders. Marine fireteams to the airlocks.”
The Gykr must be closing in. If Garner was right, and they’d managed to take out our dorsal turret, the ship was pretty much defenseless. I briefly wondered why Summerlee hadn’t lifted the ship up off the ice . . . then realized that that was a really dumb question. Once we were in space, or even while we were moving up through the atmosphere, we’d be easy prey for the circling Gykr starships. We were easy prey on the ice, too, for shots from orbit or the sky, but evidently the Gykr were more interested in capturing the Haldane than in reducing it to radioactive fragments.
But I had absolutely no doubt that they would vaporize us if it looked like we were getting away.
Or . . . would they? Maybe they were just ensuring that we left. Unfortunately, there were still human personnel in the dome outside on the ice . . . and the Walsh might still be underwater, making a final trip up from Base Murdock. Summerlee certainly wasn’t going to abandon them to the Gykr . . . and there was still the question about abandoning the Deep.
The Deep. Was there a possible answer there?
I grabbed the second Broc infant by the tentacles, carefully disentangled it from several meters of ropy intestine, and pulled it free. I handed it to Mom, who dried it off with Dad’s help, then parked it on what might pass for a Broccoli’s hip next to the first one.
I looked at the table image. The third and final Broc baby appeared to have attached itself to the body cavity wall. There was a lot of blood . . . but at least it wasn’t about to take a bite out of D’dnah’s heart or intestine.
“Relax a sec,” I told Garner, and he let the incision close.
“You okay, Elliot?” he asked.
I nodded. “I’m fine. Just give me a moment, here.”
I rested a moment, leaning against the side of the table. Gods, there was so much alien blood. I was soaked in the stuff almost up to my armpits.
I closed my eyes. . . .
How do you make contact with a super-intelligent planetary mind? In the past, the Deep had been the one to initiate contact . . . we thought by manipulating electrical fields either through its ice VII substance, or through the body of a cuttlewhale. Was it possible for me to reach out and talk to it? Might a channel of some sort been opened when it had taken me into its thoughts?
I reached out . . . questing . . . pushing . . .
Nothing.
Okay, let’s try something else. I opened a new channel, this one to the bridge. “Captain Summerlee?”
“This is the XO,” Walthers’ voice came back. “Clear the channel! We’re busy right now, damn it!”
I could actually hear some of the chaos in the background of Walthers’ mind, leakage from what he was seeing and hearing at the moment. Someone was shouting that there was a breach at Airlock One.
Damn, I’d forgotten that the skipper was off-line.
“Look . . . we might have a chance if we can get in touch with the Deep!” I said. “We could ask it to help!”
A pause. “I’m listening. . . .”
“If you can patch a comm signal through to the sonar transmitters . . . are they up and running?”
There was another brief pause. “Affirmative. What do you want to transmit?”
I thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “Try this. . . .”
It worked, of course.
I didn’t get to see what happened, damn it, though I was able to watch recordings of the battle’s conclusion later, at my leisure. As soon as I told Lieutenant Walthers what to try, I went back to work on D’dnah . . . in D’dnah, rather, fishing around for the third and last bud.
That one took me almost ten minutes. It had reattached itself to herm’s body wall and was chewing away happily. In another hour, or two, it might have eaten its way all the way out.
I wanted to save D’dnah that physical trauma, though. I had Chief Garner pull way back on the retractors, giving me as much room to work as possible, and I extended the incision a bit farther, opening the body cavity more toward where the infant was latched on. I reached in with my left hand then, and did my best to gather up all of those tentacles, pulling them aside and out of my way, until I had a good view on the table display of that chewing beak imbedded inside D’dnah’s muscle wall. Carefully, I moved my right hand in, holding the laser scalpel. The trick was getting the emitter head right up against muscle
tissue before I pressed the trigger, because otherwise the dark green and black ichor of D’dnah’s blood and internal fluids would absorb the beam and begin to boil, cooking my patient from the inside out.
I did wish I could have brought ROBERT in on the operation, but I did feel a responsibility to the M’nangat, who, after all, had requested that I do this. Maybe I could have convinced them that ROBERT was under my supervision, and so that would count . . . but on the other hand, there was something wonderful, something exhilarating about bringing these new lives into the light, and in saving the carrier’s life at the same time.
To tell the truth, I’m not sure how much I trust robotic surgery in any case. Sometimes—with brain or eye surgery, the precision is absolutely vital, especially with microsurgeries . . . but usually it’s better, I think, if you can actually feel what you’re doing through your own hands and senses.
Carefully, watching the table projection the whole time, I sliced away a three-centimeter circle of muscle tissue around the infant’s beak, cauterizing the wound as I cut. I slipped once; the infant gave a sudden twist and lost one of its tentacles. It almost let go then, I think, but then it dug in harder and tighter. I finished cutting it free and then carefully pulled it out, black and glistening in the overhead lights of the sick bay.
In another moment, Mom had the third infant attached to her other side, and she had three gray-green blobs attached in a band of writhing tentacles around what technically would have been her hips if she’d been human.
“Are you okay, D’drevah?” I asked. When I didn’t hear a reply, I looked at D’deen. “Is she okay?”
SHE IS FINE, D’deen wrote. I could see the relief as the words printed themselves across my in-head. SHE IS FINE. . . .
“It looks like the battle outside is all over but for the shouting,” Garner told me. “Very well done.”
I’d actually suggested three different approaches to Lieutenant Walthers. We knew that the sonar transmitters we’d buried in the ice would reach all the way down to the Deep. We also knew that too strong a signal had been interpreted as an attack. I don’t know; maybe the chirp had hurt the Deep’s equivalent of ears. Or maybe the cuttlewhales closer to the surface had felt like they were being attacked, and since they’d already experienced an attack by the Gykr, they’d surfaced to stop what they perceived as a threat.