Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  We would have copies of small parts of the EG with us at GJ 1214, as much as could be accommodated by the Haldane’s sizeable quantum computer storage. We’re still working out how the EG is organized, but we think it includes data on all nearby stars in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus, which is where GJ 1214 is located in the night sky. With luck, we’d scooped up the still-hidden entry on Abyssworld along with known nearby stars in that region—70 and 36 Ophiuchi, Sabik, Raselhague, and others—and our AIs could be hacking through the jungle while we worked.

  Eventually the briefing ended—a lot of talk with no surprises—and I went back to work. I was working in the Clymer’s main sick bay that week, which meant the usual shipboard morning routine of sick call, screening Marines and naval personnel who were showing up with problems ranging from colds to an eye infection to a full-blown case of pneumonia. The pneumonia actually was easier to treat than the colds. Despite our much-vaunted advances in medical technology over the past couple of centuries, the collection of minor infections and immune-system failures known as “the common cold” is still tough to treat other than purely symptomatically. Rather than being a single malady, the complaint we call a cold can be caused by any of some two hundred different viruses. The rhinovirus associated with the majority of colds alone has ninety-nine serotypes. That makes it tough to program an injection of nanobots to go in and kill the viruses, and the preferred treatment remains taking care of the symptoms rather than the cause.

  There were an unusual number of colds this morning, though, so I pulled some nasopharyngeal samples and sent them up to the lab for a full serotypal workup. We often had these little micro epidemics running their course of the ship when we were in port. Sailors and Marines went ashore on liberty, of course—even taking the elevator down-El to Earth—and they were exposed to bugs they wouldn’t have otherwise encountered if they’d stayed on board. If we could identify a specific strain of virus, we could whip up a nanobot to attack it. In the meantime, though, I’d stick with the old-fashioned treatment—acetaminophen, chlorpheniramine maleate, phenylephrine hydrochloride, and dextromethorphan, plus lots of water. The pain reliever, the antihistamine, the decongestant, and the cough suppressant would do everything a round of nanobots would, and—heresy!—might even do it better.

  At a few past 1700 hours I checked out of sick bay and reported to Chief Garner, who was in charge of handing out my extra-duty hours each evening. He just grinned at me and said, “You have your duty assignment, Carlyle. Go bone up on Abyss Deep.”

  So after a quick sonoshower back in my quarters, I prepared to climb into my rack-tube to take the sim. Just as I slipped inside, though, a call came through from Doob, suggesting that we rack out together in the ship’s lounge. I told him I’d meet him there.

  “E-Car!” he called as I entered the lounge. “Let’s get this fucking sim out of the way, okay? I have a hot date tonight and I’m damned if I’m going to miss it.”

  “Who is it, Doob? Carla again?” HM3 Carla Harper was a lab assistant whom Dubois had bedded . . . a lot. There was a pool running among some of the platoon Corpsmen as to whether or not he would pop the question, and when.

  “Nah. Someone new.”

  “Someone new? My God, it’s the end of life as we know it!”

  “Knock it off.”

  “Who is it?”

  “None of your damned business!” He scowled at me. “What I wanna know is how come you get in trouble, but I get to share in the punishment!”

  “Welcome to the Navy,” I told him. “At least you didn’t get two weeks’ restriction.”

  “What restriction? We boost for Abyssworld day after tomorrow, we’ll be gone a couple of months at least, and all you miss is a couple of liberties!”

  That stopped me. I hadn’t thought about that. Restriction means you stay in your quarters except when you’re going about your normal day-to-day duties, or eating in the mess hall, or doing whatever your CO tells you to do . . . so Doob was right. Maybe I had gotten off light.

  “Okay, Doobie,” I told him. “You wanna tag the ’interactive together? It’ll go faster that way, and you can be off to your mystery date.”

  “My thought exactly, E-Car.”

  I thoughtclicked an internal control. “Compartment, two chairs, downloungers with full link capability. Here and here.”

  The active nanomatrix in the deck obediently shaped two areas into egg-shaped chairs, both almost completely enclosed except for the oval front openings, and with deeply padded interiors that let you stretch out and back in fair comfort. I backed into one, brought my palm contacts down on the link board, and ordered a library download of the required docuinteractive.

  Dubois dropped into the second seat. “I hate these things.”

  “I kind of like ’em,” I replied. “Just like being there, but you don’t get eaten by the bug-eyed monster.”

  “That’s the problem. You get used to ignoring dangers in a sim, they could bite you for real when you’re actually there.”

  “So? Don’t be complacent. The idea is that we can step into another world and learn about it experientially. No surprises when you step into the world for real.”

  “So, what did the chief call it? ‘That goddamn bleak ball of ice?’ No fun at all, man!”

  “I didn’t realize we were going out there to have fun!” I nestled back into the yielding foam of the seat and put my palm on the contact pad.

  There was a burst of in-head static, and then I was standing on the surface of Abyssworld.

  My God, I thought. “Goddamn bleak” doesn’t even begin to cover it. . . .

  Chapter Six

  A bit of background came down the link first.

  The formal name of the place is GJ 1214 I, but most people call it either Abyssworld or Abyss Deep. The data we were simming had been sent back to Earth just five years ago, but in fact the world has been known since the early twenty-first century. It was discovered by the MEarth Project, which was searching for extrasolar planets by watching for minute dips in the brightness of some thousands of red dwarfs, an indicator of a planet transiting the star’s face. They used red dwarfs because it was easier to record light fluctuations against a dimmer light source, and because planets circling red dwarfs tended to be tucked in a lot closer to their parent suns, and therefore had orbital periods measured in days as opposed to months or years. In 2009, the planet named—by the astronomical convention of the day—GJ 1214b was first detected, and subsequent observations showed that it was a so-called super-Earth, with more than six and a half times Earth’s mass and over two and a half times Earth’s diameter.

  The real surprise came when they did the math and determined that the new planet had a density of just one-third of Earth’s, which meant that the huge world had a quite small rocky core covered by either ice or liquid water.

  It was, in fact, the first true ocean exoplanet discovered; the side of the world eternally locked beneath a small sun just 2 million and some kilometers away was hot, well above the boiling point of water. At first it was assumed that the surface of any world so close to its parent would have to be well above habitable temperatures. The measured equilibrium temperatures, however, turned out to be from dayside cloud decks; the nightside was cold enough that the global ocean was half covered by a permanent ice cap, with the entire night hemisphere locked in ice.

  The extreme differences in temperature between the day and night hemispheres, though, resulted in some absolutely incredible storms.

  If Dubois and I had really been standing on the edge of the Abyss Deep icepack in nothing but our shipboard utilities, we would have been dead in moments. The environment was nothing short of hellish, balanced precariously between frigid ice and scalding steam, with a poisonous pea-soup-fog atmosphere and a wind thundering in from the day with tornadic force. The docuinteracive wasn’t recreating all of the possible physical sensations, though. I could see water spray and surface clouds whipping past me, hear the
deafening roar of moving air, but the wind didn’t sweep me off my feet. The two of us could stand there, at the very edge of the ice, and take in the view.

  And the view was . . . spectacular.

  Despite both high-altitude cloud decks and the scud whipping across the surface of water and ice, I could see the star on the knife-edge horizon across the purple-red ocean, a swollen, deep ruby dome mottled by vast, ragged sunspots. Clouds—black, green, and purple—banked hugely to either side in an emerald sky; lightning played along the horizon. As I watched, fast-moving clouds filled the momentary crack in the sky that had revealed the star, blotting it out.

  In the opposite direction, the sky grew darker still and heavy with snow. Ice, undulating and raw, ran off into the distance in a barren white desert, punctuated here and there by upthrusts—slabs, pillars, daggers, and tumbled blocks of ice, some of them hundreds of meters across. A hundred meters away, a low, bright orange dome added a spot of color to the endless white—the colony’s main dome. Smaller domes and Quonset-style huts were scattered about nearby, and I could see a large, bright yellow quantum spin-floater grounded outside the main entrance to the base.

  The colony was obscured by a sudden gust of spray and windblown snow. It made me shiver just looking at it, though I couldn’t feel the actual cold.

  “The place is a lot like Bloodworld,” Dubois said, turning to look back out to sea. We were standing at the edge of the icepack, though waves and spray made it a little difficult to tell exactly where the sea ended, and the ice began. “Hurricanes, high winds, hellacious storms . . .”

  “It’s worse,” a voice told us. We turned and faced the program’s interactive agent, an older man with the look of a college professor. “I’m Dr. Murdock. I’ll be your guide to Abyss Deep this evening.”

  Well, it wasn’t the real Dr. Murdock, of course, since the Abyssworld Expedition’s science team leader was currently on the planet some forty-two light years away . . . assuming he was even alive now. Based on the real James Eric Murdock, the man in a civilian tunic and dark slacks was a computer-generated image, data seamlessly woven together inside our heads by Clymer’s library AI. This simulation component was the whole point of a docuinteractive; we could ask the program questions, and it could take us through the landscape as if we were really there. The AI running the show was programmed to incorporate the voice, mannerisms, and recorded thoughts of the real Murdock, and present them as though we were actually there.

  The simulated Murdock held out his hand, palm up, and a small globe representing the planet came up between us. He rotated it in front of us.

  “We call the main atmospheric disturbance Abysstorm,” he said. “It’s generated by the heat of the star, and serves to transfer that heat across the planet.”

  On the globe, Abyss Deep’s dayside was blanketed by a perpetual hurricane many thousands of kilometers across, pinned in place by the glare of the star directly over its eye. It showed vast, far-reaching spirals of cloud that reached across half the planet. The nightside was completely covered by ice.

  “Hang on a sec,” Dubois said, pointing. “Something’s wrong. Hurricanes are caused by the spin of the planet. Coriolis effect, right? Abyss Deep doesn’t rotate, so the winds ought to blow straight back from dayside to night.”

  The simulated Dr. Murdock gave him a sharp look. “Idiot. Why do you say the planet doesn’t rotate? Of course it does.”

  “Hey!” Doob said. Evidently he wasn’t used to personality coming through in a sim along with basic information. Murdock reminded me of an acid, acerbic professor of A and P—anatomy and physiology—I remembered from my training in San Antonio. He’d called students “idiot,” and worse, as well.

  “ ‘Tidally locked means the planet rotates once in its year,” I put in.

  “Precisely,” Murdock said. “GJ 1214 I does spin, and does so fairly quickly, quickly enough that it generates its own magnetic field, which is a damned good thing considering the background radiation flux from the star. It makes one rotation in just over a day and a half as it moves around its star, its day perfectly matching its year.

  “The storm dynamics are quite complex, with smaller storms constantly spinning off of the one big one and following gently curved tracks around the planet and into the night. The atmosphere is fairly thin, about half of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at the surface, so a lot of the heat dissipates before it reaches the nightside. The world-ocean traps a lot of it. Most of the dissipation, however, appears to be through molecular escape. The star turns water into steam, which rises high in the atmosphere above the Abysstorm. Solar radiation then blasts a lot of that water completely away from the planet. See?”

  The model of Abyss Deep floating above Murdock’s hand developed a faint, ghostly tail streaming away from the daylight side. “In many ways,” he continued, “Abyssworld is similar to a comet . . . a very large comet with a tail of hot gasses blowing away from the local star.”

  “That can’t be a stable configuration,” I said. “It’s losing so much mass that the whole planet is going to boil away.”

  “Correct. We believe Abyssworld formed much farther out in the planetary system, then migrated inward as a result of gravitational interactions with the two outer gas giants. We don’t have a solid dating system with which to work, but it’s possible that the planet began losing significant mass as much as five billion years ago, when it would have been perhaps six times the diameter it is now.

  “Abyssworld is now losing mass, which has the advantage of bleeding away excess heat. Within another billion years, though, this ongoing loss of mass will significantly reduce the planet’s size, until the entire world ocean has boiled away. At that point, Abyssworld will be dead.”

  “There’s life here now?” Dubois asked. He looked around the encircling landscape, wind-blasted waves and spray in one direction, and in the other an endless plain of undulating white ice beneath black and lightning-shot clouds.

  “Of course,” Murdock told him. “The cuttlewhales.”

  Murdock turned, sweeping the ocean panorama with his arm. In the distance, halfway to the horizon, something sinuous emerged from the sea.

  The thing wasn’t close enough to get a decent look at it. It was large, obviously, perhaps fifty meters or more in length, and a good half of that was arcing high above the wind-whipped surface of the ocean. It was also obviously alive, twisting and arcing and writhing as it plowed ahead through the water, tantalizing in its mist-shrouded obscurity. It put me in mind of a mythical Earthly sea serpent, and I wanted to see it up close.

  “Can we get out there?” I asked. “Or bring that thing in close? I can’t see through the spray.”

  “Sorry, no,” Murdock told me. “This is the best data we had prior to sending the last courier to Earth.”

  I had to remind myself that the information I was seeing was five years out of date. Had the colony managed to make contact since then?

  Had something gone wrong with that meeting . . . something that had ended with the colony’s destruction?

  That was what we were going to try to find out.

  “Some of our people saw one close up,” Murdock continued, “but they didn’t get any images. They said the head is something like the head of a terrestrial squid or cuttlefish . . . and that it could change the coloration on its body in pretty complex patterns. Dr. Samuelson believes they may use their chromataphores to communicate fairly complex ideas . . . which is why he reported that they may be intelligent.”

  A number of species on Earth could change the color and patterning and even the apparent texture of their skin by controlling their chromataphores, which are pigment-containing organelles in their skin. That didn’t make them intelligent, however. They used it for camouflage or to display emotion rather than for more complex communication. Sure, an octopus flashes dark red when it’s angry and white if it’s afraid, which is pretty complex when you think about it, but that doesn’t make them starship builders, either.<
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  I found it interesting that one of the toughest jobs in xenobiology is determining whether a given species is intelligent in the first place. The jury was still out on these Abyss cuttlewhales. Hell, we still aren’t sure what intelligence is, though we know there are many different kinds, and that it includes things like problem-solving skills, curiosity, and self-awareness. Wegener, the guy who made first contact with the Brocs, is supposed to have said, “I don’t know what intelligence is, but I know it when I see it.”

  The trouble is that often we don’t know it when we see it . . . or we find we’ve been looking for all the wrong things. The Europan Medusea are a case in point. Are they intelligent? Beats me. And we may well never know, simply because we don’t have enough in common with them to even begin to communicate with them on a meaningful level.

  “Come on,” Murdock said. “I’ll show you the base.”

  Two hours later, we’d been through the dome top to bottom, and met a number of the researchers there. They seemed like nice people, most of them, and that left me with a nagging depression. It was entirely possible, even likely, that every one of them was already dead, that I was speaking, in a way, to their digitized ghosts.

  But the ordeal ended at last, and I emerged back in the lounge area on board the Clymer.

  “That’s it, E-Car,” Doobie said. “I’m outta here!”

  “Have fun,” I told him.

  And I resolved to have chow in the mess hall, then retire to my quarters for a quiet evening alone.

  Supper was a mystery-meat culture that was actually pretty tasty if you dialed up the habanero sauce. It was well past the main mess period, and the place was nearly empty. I finished up, then went back to my quarters.