Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  Yeah, the more I thought about it, the more I knew I’d screwed up big-time. It hadn’t seemed that way at the time . . . but laying hands on a civilian like that, tossing him across the compartment? If he’d missed the net he might have gone on to hit the rotating deck hard enough to hurt himself, especially since he obviously wasn’t experienced with low-G.

  “Okay, Doc. I understand your problem with the newsies, so I’ll go easy on you. Fourteen days’ restriction, fourteen days’ extra duty.”

  This was going easy on me? Singer had hit me with just about the hardest punishment he could manage as a lowly O-2 imposing Article 15 punishment.

  But then, if he’d chosen to hand me company-grade punishment, I could have lost seven days of base pay, taken a reduction in grade, from HM2 back to HM3, and had a written reprimand put into my personnel folder. And if I’d gone up in front of the Old Man, I could have been slapped with restriction and extra duty for forty-five days, forfeiture of half my pay for two months, reduction in grade, a written reprimand—hell, even bread and water for three days if he was feeling real generous.

  So maybe I was getting off light after all.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “I also want a written letter of apology to Mr. Ivarson on my desk by oh eight thirty tomorrow.”

  I started to bristle, and I almost said something like “I’m so sorry you’re an asshole, Mr. Ivarson,” but bit my tongue. This wasn’t the time to try to win points with insulting comments that could only make things worse.

  “Aye, aye, sir.” I hesitated. “Uh . . . will this be going on my record, sir?”

  “Do a good job, keep your nose clean . . . and no. No it won’t.”

  I sagged with relief. A downgrudge letter in your file will pursue you to the end of your naval career. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Okay. That takes care of you and your reporter friend. Back to what happened at Zeta Capricorn. Damn it, Doc, do you have any idea what kind of a firestorm you’ve released around here?”

  “I wasn’t aware of any firestorm, sir.”

  “Jesus, Doc! Where’s your head, up your ass? To start with, we just might be looking at a shooting war, and all because you released information about the ethnic and political identity of our prisoners onto the open Net! Half the world wants to nuke or railgun Dushanbe into a kilometer-deep crater right now. And Dushanbe claims we’re lying, that we set the whole thing up to discredit them, to create a causus bellum.”

  Well, they would claim something like that, I thought. But I didn’t say so out loud.

  “Captain Reichert has been ragging my ass, asking me how I plan to tighten my operational security in my platoon. What the hell am I going to tell him?”

  “Sir. You can tell him that the man responsible has learned his lesson and promises not to open channels directly to the HQ Net again.”

  “Why’d you do it, Doc?” The anger evaporated, and he seemed friendly again . . . a bit puzzled, perhaps, at why I’d been so careless. Or maybe the anger had all been a put-on, a bit of drama designed to show me he cared.

  “I saw a chance to gather some useful intel, sir. This is Deep Recon, after all.”

  I didn’t think he could fault me there. “Deep Recon” is the designation used for elite Marine units normally operating in deep space on interstellar deployments. They’re supposed to be the first ones in, usually, to scout out the terrain and the ecology, determine what and where the enemy is, and, if necessary, pin that enemy until heavier forces can be deployed. Our primary business is gathering intelligence.

  That doesn’t mean we’re not occasionally tapped for other missions—like taking down a bunch of terrorists holed up in an orbital mining facility. We’d been the closest available assault force when the bad guys stormed the mining facility the other day. We are FMF—Fleet Marine Force—and we go where we’re told. But above all else we’re trained to gather intelligence, any intelligence that may be of use to someone farther up the chain of command.

  And the Black Wizards, Deep Recon 7 of the One MarDiv, were the best.

  When Singer didn’t respond right away, I added, “Sir, I really didn’t know the channel had been compromised. How the hell was I supposed to know?”

  “Ahh . . . you couldn’t know, Doc. Hell, I didn’t know either. The damned newsies slipped their netbots in to spy on the operation. I should have known they’d be keeping an eye on you, especially.”

  “I’m nothing special, sir.”

  “Maybe. But they know your name, and they have your ID tagged so they can track you on the Net. They remember you from the Bloodworld affair, so the second you go on-line with a query or a message, they’re going to be swarming all over you. You been getting harassed by the sons-of-bitches at all?”

  “My secretary tells me I’ve had a lot of calls, requests for interviews, requests for bios and backgrounds, that sort of thing.” I managed a grin. “I haven’t been answering them. In fact, that’s why Ivarson came looking for me.”

  “Good. And in another couple of days, they won’t be able to find you.”

  That made my blood run cold for a moment. “Sir? You’re shipping me out?”

  “That we are, Doc. Your new orders just came through.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Between you and me, I think General Craig just wants to be rid of you.”

  Major General William Craig was the commander of One MarDiv. Shit. It’s never a good idea for a lowly enlisted man to attract the attention of a general.

  “Yes, sir.” I desperately wanted to ask where they were sending me, but knew better than to appear anxious. He would tell me, but he’d tell me in his own time.

  He must have read the worried expression on my face. “Don’t worry, Doc. You’re not going alone.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it.”

  “You’ll be deploying on the Haldane with a Marine scout-recon element. Five Corpsmen, pulled from the company as science-tech staff, plus a couple of xeno experts. One of the other docs will be your buddy Dubois. Net media has been after him as well.”

  “They have?” It was news to me. “Why Doob?”

  Singer shrugged. “Maybe one doc is as good as another, to them. He was at Bloodworld too. And he’s your buddy.”

  “Not for long. The guy’s gonna kill me.” HM2 Michael C. Dubois had a snug and happy billet for himself in Alpha Company. He had an under-the-counter deal with the lab to use their assemblers to manufacture paint stripper . . . ah, ethanol, rather, and he was the original cumshaw artist. He wasn’t going to appreciate being yanked out of his comfortable little world because he associated with the likes of me.

  “The seven of you will be the expedition’s scientific survey team.”

  That caught my attention. “What are we surveying?”

  “Ever hear of a place called Abyss Deep?”

  I refrained from pulling down the data off the ship’s Net. “No, sir.”

  “It’s not much. GJ 1214 I. A lot like Bloodworld, so you ought to feel right at home. Just be sure you pack your long flannel undies. It’s a hundreds-of-kilometers-deep ocean covered over by ice. Doc, this place is cold.”

  Great, I thought. Just what I really like. Ice . . .

  As soon as I left Singer’s office and got back to my quarters, I downloaded the Net information available on GJ 1214.

  I had a strong sense of déjà vu as the data scrolled through my in-head window. GJ 1214 was another red dwarf, one even smaller and cooler than the primary of Bloodworld we’d visited the year before. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at that. In all the Galaxy, out of 400 billion stars, something like 80 percent are class-M red dwarfs, at least out in our general stellar neighborhood. Red dwarfs range from something like half the mass of our sun down to cool, red stars of only .075 solar masses—the cut-off line. Any smaller and they’re not stars anymore, but brown dwarfs.

  In our galactic neighborhood, twenty of the thirty nearest stars are red dwarfs, but
they’re so small and dim that we can’t see any of them with the naked eye. The closest star to us outside of the Sol System, Proxima Centauri, is a Type M5 red dwarf, and you need a pretty powerful telescope to see it from Earth at all.

  Proxima’s partners in the cosmic dance, Alpha Centauri A and B, are very much like our sun . . . and, damn it, someday I’d like to be deployed to an Earthlike world of that kind of star, instead of another of these dim, cool, blood-red misers.

  This time, though, I was stuck with another tide-locked split-personality planet: half ice, half steam. The readout wasn’t pretty at all.

  Download

  Commonwealth Planetary Ephemeris

  Entry: GJ 1214 I

  “Abyssworld”

  Star: GJ 1214

  Type: M4.5V

  M = .157 Sol; R = 0.206 Sol; L = .0033 Sol; T = 3000oK

  Coordinates: RA 17h 15m 19s; Dec +04o 57’ 50”; D = 42 ly

  Planet I

  Name: GJ 1214 I; Gliese 1214b, Abyssworld, Abyss Deep

  Type: Terrestrial/rocky core, ocean planet; “super-Earth”

  Mean orbital radius: 0.0143 AU; Orbital period: 1d 13h 55m 47s

  Inclination: 0.0o; Rotational period: 1d 13h 55m 47s (tide-locked with primary)

  Mass: 3.914 x 1028 g = 6.55 Earth; Equatorial diameter: 34,160 km = 2.678 Earth

  Mean planetary density: 1.87 g/cc = 0.34 Earth

  Surface gravity: 0.91 G

  Surface temperature range: ~ -120oC [nightside] to 220oC [dayside]

  Surface atmospheric pressure: ~0.47 x 103 kPa [0.47 Earth average]

  Percentage composition (mean): H2 54.3, CO2 20.3, H2O 11.2, CH4 9.3, CO 4.2, NH3 3.1, Ar 0.5; others < 500 ppm

  Age: 6 billion years

  Biology: H2O (exotic ices), C, N, O, H2O, S, PO4: mobile submarine heterotrophs in reducing aquatic medium in presumed symbiosis with unknown deep marine auto- or chemotrophs.

  Human presence: The Murdock Expedition of 2238 established the existence of large deep-marine organisms known as cuttlewhales. Subsequent research at the colony designated Murdock Base demonstrated possible intelligent activity, and attempts were made to establish communications in 2244. Contact with the colony abruptly ended in early 2247, and there has been no futher contact since. . . .

  The Commonwealth government had decided that word from the research colony on the ice out there on Abyssworld was too long overdue, and they were dispatching a small Navy task force and some Marines to find out what had happened. The Marines were volunteers drawn from First, Second, and Third Platoons, plus the headquarters platoon of Bravo Company, forty-two men and women in all, and all of them blooded both by combat and by experience on extrasolar worlds. Lieutenant Lyssa Kemmerer, Captain Reichert’s exec, would be leading us.

  The five Navy Corpsmen, however, were not volunteers. Where the Marines went, we would go as well.

  The company’s senior Corpsman was Chief Richard R. Garner, an old hand with gold hash marks running halfway up his dress uniform sleeve, each stripe showing four years of good-conduct duty. He was a bluff, craggy, no-nonsense sort, and when he barked at you he meant business.

  Garner called us to a briefing the next morning. There were four of us sitting in the lounge in front of Garner—me and Dubois, plus HM1 Charlie “Machine” McKean and HM2 Kari Harris.

  There was another man present as well, a Navy lieutenant commander with the gold caduceus at his throat indicating he was Medical Corps.

  “Good morning, people,” Garner began. “We’ve been tapped as tech support for an important mission, and it’s important to get this off on the right foot. We’ll be transferring to the USRS Haldane tomorrow. There’s a download waiting for each of you giving billeting information and duty schedules.”

  DuBoise and McKean both groaned. Harris remained impassive.

  “Knock it off,” Garner said. “First off, it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Lyman Kirchner, fresh up-El from Sam-Sea. He will be our department head on this expedition.”

  I looked at Kirchner with curiosity. He was a small older man with an intense gaze that made me uncomfortable. If he was from SAMMC, though, he would be good. I wondered about his age, though. His white hair was thickly interspersed with black, and his face, with deep-set wrinkles, was an odd mixture of weathered skin and baby-pink new.

  Anagathic treatments. He was under treatment for that most deadly of the diseases to afflict Humankind—old age.

  “Dr. Kirchner,” Garner continued, “was chief of the xenopathology department at Sam-Sea, so he will be our expedition xenologist as well as ship’s doctor. We’re very lucky to have him on board.”

  And that was a relief. I’d been wondering since Singer had told me I was being assigned to this mission whether we’d have a medical officer on board. I knew that Garner was IDC, but none of the rest of us were.

  Independent-duty Corpsmen were the medical department on ships or bases too small to have a ship’s doctor, and that was a hellacious responsibility. Oh, we operated independently in the field as often as not . . . but it was always good to have a real doctor backing you up.

  You know, even today, we still hear the story of an independent-duty Corpsman during the Second World War—we were called Pharmacy Mates in those days—who successfully performed an appendectomy while on board a submarine, the USS Seadragon, while she was on her fourth war patrol, in 1942. He was twenty-three-year-old PhM1/c Wheeler B. Lipes—a first class, like McKean.

  In fact, though it’s not well known, there were three emergency appendectomies carried out by Pharmacy Mates on board Navy submarines during that war, this when the only commonly available antibiotics were powdered sulfanilamide and phenol, and the only anesthetic was ether. My God! The responsibility those guys faced was staggering! But, damn it, when there were no qualified surgeons within a thousand miles, you did what you had to do. . . .

  Kirchner stood and acknowledged Garner’s introduction. “Thank you, Chief.” He glared at us. “No speeches, people. I know you’re well trained, I know you’re experienced, and I know you’re going to do your jobs competently and well. With pre-screening of the ship’s complement, we shouldn’t have any major health issues, and Haldane’s medical department will be able to focus on the tech support at GJ 1214. So do your jobs, do what you’re told, and we’ll all get along just fine. Chief Garner?”

  “Thank you, sir.” Garner turned to face us again. “Okay, I want all of you to pull down the Abyss Deep docuinteractive from the Clymer’s library. On your own time.”

  “Aw, Chief,” Dubois said. “What for? The place is nothing but a freaking ice ball.” He’d been angry ever since his orders had come down telling him he was deploying to Abyss Deep, and he didn’t mind letting everyone else within range know it.

  “Can the gripeload, Doobie. That goddamn bleak ball of ice can kill you faster and in more ways than a Qesh Daitya platform.”

  McKean and Harris both grumbled a bit, too, and, I have to admit, I did as well. Sailors hate having official shit intrude on their precious downtime, and I already had the extra duty tagged onto my daily schedule by my NJP. But as the ancient adage has it, a griping sailor is a happy sailor. Garner had scored a point by bringing up the Daityas, heavy-weapons platforms named for a class of giant or demon in Hindu mythology. We’d faced Qesh Daityas out on Bloodworld, and had a healthy respect for the things.

  “Okay,” Garner went on, “we’re slated to board the Haldane tomorrow evening. Our civilian . . . guests will be joining us on board. They are Dr. Carla Montgomery and Dr. Raúl Ortega. Montgomery is an expert on exobiology. Ortega is an expert on planets and environments with extreme temperatures or other exotic conditions.

  “We have absolutely no idea what happened to Murdock Base. None. The last report from there, via robot courier, mentioned sightings of the autochthones, the native life, but no contact . . . and no danger. The next courier was due from them four days later. It’s been three weeks, now, with no word from them whatsoever. We
must assume that the base has suffered some significant problem. It may be as minor as a failure in the AIs they use to launch and transmit to the couriers. Or it may be more serious. A lot more serious.

  “So they’re sending in the Marines. And us.”

  More download information flooded through our in-heads, a schematic view of a multilevel dome equipped with living quarters, common areas, airlocks, and a large central laboratory space.

  “The base,” Garner went on, “is a standard nano-grown all-climate dome, with several outlying structures . . . but only the main dome is pressurized. The colony consists of eighty-five men and women—mostly science staff, but including admin and support—plus twelve M’nangat in four family triads. The M’nangat are there to liaise with the EG, if need be, in order to conduct deep research on any locals that they might manage to contact.”

  The Brocs had become more and more important as we researched the labyrinth of data that was the Encyclopedia Galactica. Our best guess right now is that we have been able to access something less than one hundredth of 1 percent of the EG data that’s out there, and we wouldn’t have been able to tap that much if not for M’nangat help. If the organisms discovered on GJ 1214 I were intelligent—and that was by no means certain yet—there ought to be a listing and a lot more data available on the local EG nodes.

  As yet we could find nothing, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. There are an estimated 50 to 100 million intelligent species scattered through our Galaxy, and perhaps a thousand times that number that have existed during the past billion years, but which now are extinct. Many, though by no means all, of these have entries in the EG. Technic species that discover the EG and learn how to tap in, sometimes, though not always, list themselves. Atechnic species—marine organisms that have never discovered fire and metal smelting, for instance—or the more inwardly focused species who have turned their backs on space travel are often described by others who encounter them.

  For a billion years—as long as multicellular life has existed on Earth—the Encyclopedia Galactica has grown in both size and complexity, with millions of separate channels, nested frequencies, and deep-heterodyned polylogues. Lots of channels we can’t even access yet; we’re certain there are neutrino channels, for instance, but we don’t know how to read them. When we discovered the local node at Sirius, just 8.6 light years from Earth, we swiftly decided that we needed friendly native guides to lead us through the data jungles.