by Ian Douglas
So as a first attempt, I’d suggested that they transmit the words help us into the depths. The problem, of course, was that Gina had heard the words help us in her head, not out loud. The Deep had certainly been accessing my personal RAM storage in English, and learning the language as it did so, but I couldn’t be certain that it would interpret the sound of “help us” and realize it was the same as the collection of zeros and ones stored in my in-head hardware.
Okay, so then try a second approach. Run “help us” through Haldane’s AI, and have it convert that audio signal into an electrical signal. Wavelengths and frequencies, after all, are wavelengths and frequencies, whether they occur as sound waves in water or as electromagnetic waves in a radio transmission. Make the conversion, and transmit that as sonar waves into the depths.
And, while you’re doing all of that, have the AI run one final set of calculations. Take the wavelength and frequency of the initial “h” sound in “help us,” and raise the number one to that power. Take the wavelength and frequency of the short “e” sound and raise the number two to that power. Then do three to the “l” and five to the “p,” and go on to the numbers seven and eleven for the “m” and the “e.” Now multiply those together to get one very large number.
And transmit that: the phrase “help us” encoded as a Gödel expression.
As it turned out, we didn’t actually do the Gödel number thing. It would have taken a long time for Haldane’s AI to do the necessary calculations, too long for our survival, at any rate . . . and in any case the Deep had responded to either the first or the second attempt. We still don’t know which.
But respond it did. . . .
I was on the mess deck, which was crowded with Marines and Haldane crew members and the other Corpsmen. Even Captain Summerlee was there, grinning ear to ear as Lieutenant Walthers called up the recordings of the battle from different camera vantage points. Chief Garner was there. . . . and Gunny Hancock . . . and Dr. Murdock and a number of his people as well.
So was Gina Lloyd, sitting next to me with her arm around me. I was a bit concerned at first about Doob . . . but he was on the other side of me, and didn’t seem concerned.
“Here it is! Here it is!” the skipper said, excited, pointing at the viewall. “Watch this!”
It was only the third or fourth time we’d seen it.
The deck-to-overhead scene showed the unrelenting ice outside. Haldane had grounded about five kilometers from the edge of the ice pack, and perhaps three from the nanoflaged base. Drawn out in a long line about a kilometer from the ship we could see a line of black dots—the four-meter-tall, six-legged walking tanks used as heavy mobile armor by the Gykr.
Closer—much closer—crossing Haldane’s shadow on the ice, a dozen individual Gykr were sprinting toward the Number One airlock.
About halfway between the two, the ice began to buckle, heaving up . . . and up . . . and up, then shattering in sparkling shards of crystal as the massive, shaggy, and impossibly huge front end of a cuttlewhale emerged from beneath the surface, heaving itself into the red-violet sky, tentacles questing, and then the sound reached us: a low, throbbing, pounding thunder that went on and on.
A few hundred meters away, a second cuttlewhale breached the ice, exploding into the open air in a geyser of ice fragments and spray and churning steam.
The third emerged farther off, almost on top of the advancing line of walkers.
Walthers shifted to other cameras, giving us an all-around view. Altogether, sixty-five of the monstrous cuttlewhale shapes broke through the ice, emerging around both the Haldane and the dome of our base.
There was the small problem that cuttlewhales had trouble telling the difference between humans and Gucks, but that was handily solved by the fact that we didn’t have anyone out on the ice . . . not at first, anyway. In a few seconds, the air was so filled with ice crystals whipped along by the incessant wind that we couldn’t see what was happening in any case. We could still see the Gykr who’d reached Haldane, of course. The appearance of the cuttlewhales between them and their main force seemed to have utterly paralyzed them, however. Several were on the ice, twitching, while others were wandering around in vague circles, as though lost. I wondered which one was Chosen. . . .
Then the Marines appeared, spilling out of the airlock, firing into the confused Gykr, which immediately began dropping their weapons.
Gykrs, surrendering. We’d not known if that was even possible with their take-no-prisoners psychology.
But the final act still had to play itself out.
The camera angle shifted, looking up at a Gykr starship as it drifted in closer, black, ominous, its down-canted wings shuddering as it fought the wind. We couldn’t see the beam, of course, but below, a cuttlewhale exploded into hurtling chunks of exotic ice, steam, and slush. The enemy ship drifted closer, coming lower. Another cuttlewhale exploded under that onslaught, and it appeared to be lining itself up for a shot at the Haldane.
The Deep and its cuttlewhale creations understand pressure. We still don’t know how they do it, but it is clear that they manipulate pressure in various ways . . . and we watched in jaw-hanging awe as they manipulated it here, on the surface.
A cuttlewhale reared high, tentacles spread open. Something glinted in the weak, red sunlight as it squirted from gaping mouth to hovering starship too quickly to see. And the starship . . . came apart.
Somehow, muscles of exotic ice-jelly powerful enough to resist pressures of hundreds of tons per square centimeter had closed within the cuttlewhale’s gut, forcing a stream of water out the mouth and across several hundred meters of open air. We have cutting tools that use high pressure to expel streams of water at several times the speed of sound, pressure enough to slice through solid titanium or plasteel like a hot knife through butter. This was like that . . . a thin stream of water traveling at an estimated Mach 40 . . . a living squirt gun that could shred a starship like paper.
Other cuttlewhales were looking up into the heavens now, and radar indicated that they were opening up on Gykr starships in orbit.
In orbit. But I worked out the numbers later. Abyssworld has an escape velocity of a bit less than eleven kilometers per second. The speed of sound is roughly a kilometer per three seconds . . . a bit less in Abyssworld’s thinner atmosphere, or call it a thousand kilometers per hour. Forty times that is a bit more than eleven kilometers per second.
Cuttlewhales could spit at escape velocity, and with careful aim could hit a starship in low orbit. I don’t know if what hit those ships was solid ice, liquid water, or gaseous steam, but whatever it was carried enough kinetic energy to do some serious damage, even after transiting a couple of hundred kilometers of atmosphere. We found out later that one Gykr starship had been destroyed, and two others damaged. The others pulled back in a considerable hurry.
And Walthers was able to open a Gal3 dialog with them a few minutes later.
The entire engagement, from the moment when the first cuttlewhale had broken through the ice to the Gykr ships’ retreat, had taken two minutes and five seconds.
“All I can say,” Summerlee said, grinning, “is that I’m sure as hell glad those things are on our side!”
“Having a super-intelligent planet on your side doesn’t hurt either,” I said. I don’t think she heard me, though. There was too much wild cheering and thunderous applause going on in the background.
Some hours later, Haldane’s AI worked out the Gödel algorithms for another set of transmissions into the Deep. The message was pretty simple, though it took a long time to work out the math.
“Thank you,” it said. “We will help.”
If it took Humankind a million years, we would help. . . .
Epilogue
Two weeks later, I was back on Earth . . . well, at the Commonwealth’s Starport, anyway, up-El. Haldane had
pulled into port alongside the Clymer. Liberty had been granted, and most of the Marines were elsewhere now, down on Earth, or enjoying the entertainment facilities at Geosynch.
Me . . . well, I wasn’t up for partying much.
The message from Personnel had been waiting for me when we pulled into port. It told me that Sergeant Joy Leighton had deployed with Marine 1/1 to Dushanbe a week after Haldane’s departure. Her Cutlass had grounded just outside of Dushanbe, where she’d participated in a ground assault against a heavily fortified missile base.
She’d been killed, one of fifteen Marines caught in the open by a pocket nuke. Not even Mk. 10 MMCA combat armor can stand up to a one-kiloton warhead going off a couple of hundred meters away.
They’d recovered her body. They’d flown her back to NNMC Bethesda.
And they’d brought her back with CAPTR technology: Cerebral Access PolyTomographic Reconstruction.
The trouble was that her brain had been badly damaged in the blast; parts of it had been fried by the radiation pulse. What was left had not been enough to take the implant download.
“Treatment is continuing,” the message told me, “and massive infusions of stem cells may yet restore Sergeant Leighton’s cerebral activity in full. Partial success has been achieved in personality reconstruction. However, Sergeant Leighton as yet has no memory of her life more recently than approximately ten years ago. She does not remember her time with the Marines, and cannot remember acquaintances and relationships developed since that time. We request that you not attempt to contact her directly, as such contact would be disturbing or upsetting, and might possibly interfere with her recovery. . . .”
Apparently, that message had gone out to a number of her friends in the service. Our personnel records keep track of the friends we make while we’re in—and those who are more than friends—just in case this sort of thing happens.
Of course, what the records didn’t show, couldn’t show, was that desperate battle to save Joy’s life during the fight on Bloodworld, or her intense, desperate gratitude later, when she’d thanked me for bringing her back without turning her into a zombie.
And here she’d become a zombie after all, her life saved by CAPTR, but her mind a recording downloaded into her brain . . . and an incomplete recording at that.
I’d prayed for CAPTR technology when Paula had her stroke. I’d not been able to get her help in time, and she had died.
And now Joy had been CAPTRed . . . but it seemed that I’d lost her as well.
Gods!
Dr. Kirchner, it turned out, was doing just fine, thank you. He’d been shipped down to SAMMC, where the cause of his psychosis had finally been diagnosed. It turned out that there’d been a problem during his last rejuvenation treatment. Certain types of schizophrenia—and autism, too—can be caused when for some reason new proteins in the brain don’t fold quite right. One bad fold can actually trigger a cascade of identical mistakes, and the result can be a serious imbalance in brain chemistry. They were using nanobots and stem-cell injections to repair his brain’s physical problems, and CAPTR technology to fill in the holes. He was going to be fine.
And Kari Harris? She’d been shipped down to Bethesda in her S-tube. The official word was that she would live, though an awful lot of her body would need to be grown from scratch. There’d been enough brain damage that they’d used her CAPTR backup as well. Apparently, that had gone okay, but they wouldn’t know for sure for a few weeks yet.
Gunny Hancock was well on the way to having a whole new lower left arm. I was happy for him, at least. D’dnah was doing well, too, as were all three baby Broccolets.
Everyone was doing great, apparently . . . except for Joy.
Damn it, and she’d been worried about me when I’d shipped out!
Yeah, I was feeling thoroughly sorry for myself. Survivor guilt, I guess. Why had she been killed, and not me?
For that matter, why had they been able to bring Kirchner back, but not Joy?
That was a disgustingly unworthy thought . . . but I savored it anyway. It hurt. Damn it, I wanted to hurt. . . .
“How’s the hero?” Gina Lloyd asked.
I was in my old quarters on board the Clymer. I’d not been aware of the door opening; maybe she’d used an override. But now she was there, wearing civilian clothes . . . though her garment appeared to be more light than anything else, a shimmering, rainbow sheath of radiance hugging her form.
“What do you want?” I asked. Okay, I was being less than welcoming, probably even less than civilized . . . but I really didn’t want to see anyone right now.
“Doob and McKean and Chief Garner and a few others are headed down-El,” she told me, ignoring my poor manners. “We’re celebrating!”
“Celebrating what?”
She shrugged, the movement doing delightful things to the light hugging her skin. “Getting back from Abyssworld? That new treaty with the Gucks? A formal long-term mutual-assistance protocol with the Deep? I’ll bet that makes your dad happy!”
“I suppose.” I’d shot off a file to him while we were still inbound, with as many details as I was allowed to share. The military would be looking for civilian corporations to follow up our contact with the Deep. General Nanodynamics stood to make a lot of money with the work out there . . . especially when full communication was established with the Deep and it began to share with us everything it had been thinking about for the past billion years.
There was also talk of using Gödel encoding with the Medusae at Europa.
“Damn it, Elliot, you’ve made a real difference on this voyage.”
“I suppose. But Joy . . .”
“You couldn’t have helped her, even if you’d been there with her, okay? And she knew the risks when she raised her hand and swore in as a Marine.”
“But I’m alive, and Joy . . . the real Joy, the Joy I knew . . . she’s—”
“Fuck you, Carlyle!” The profanity on her lips startled me. “Get a grip, okay?”
“What . . . ?”
“You lost your friend. I’m sorry about that, I really am! But you have other friends who love you and care for you and want to help! Damn it, you’ve pulled off the coup of the century and saved all of our lives in the bargain, and we’re going to celebrate with you if it kills you! You hear me?”
I knew what she was doing, of course—trying to shock me out of the doldrums. Maybe distract me from myself. Maybe even remind me that life was still worth living.
I didn’t want to be jollied along, no . . . but she wasn’t jollying me. She was metaphorically giving me a swift, hard kick in the ass.
I sighed. “Okay, okay. Let put on some civvies.”
She watched while I dissolved my utilities and then slapped on a conservative black skinsuit. I wondered what Doob would say about his girlfriend watching me dress, then decided it didn’t matter. He . . . they . . . we were friends, with a bond forged in blood.
“Ready?” she said. She reached out, grabbed my hand, and yanked me toward the door. “You’ve been healing so many other people, E-Car, it’s about time you had some for yourself! Let’s go!”
I went. And . . . she was right.
I felt myself starting to heal.
About the Author
IAN DOUGLAS, one of the many pseudonyms for writer William H. Keith, is the New York Times bestselling author of the popular military SF series The Heritage Trilogy, The Legacy Trilogy, The Inheritance Trilogy, and the ongoing Star Carrier series. A former naval corpsman, he lives in Pennsylvania.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
By Ian Douglas
Star Corpsman
BLOODSTAR
ABYSS DEEP
Star Carrier
EARTH STRIKE
CENTER OF GRAVITY<
br />
SINGULARITY
DEEP SPACE
The Galactic Marines Saga
The Heritage Trilogy
SEMPER MARS
LUNA MARINE
EUROPA STRIKE
The Legacy Trilogy
STAR CORPS
BATTLESPACE
STAR MARINES
The Inheritance Trilogy
STAR STRIKE
GALACTIC CORPS
SEMPER HUMAN
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by Fred Gambino
ABYSS DEEP. Copyright © 2013 by William H. Keith, Jr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780062198099
Print Edition ISBN: 9780061894770
FIRST EDITION
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.