Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  Kirchner hadn’t shown that symptom before. I’d been listening for it, because I’d suspected schizophrenia. But the rapidly escalating situation, the Gykr attack, and now the cuttlewhale outside, could easily have pushed him over the edge.

  I’d spent the last few seconds linking in through the sick bay AI and transferring the nanobot programming now running in Summerlee’s skull to Bob, the lab robot now patiently standing against the far bulkhead. One of the ROBERT’s arms ended in a nanobot pressure injector, designed to fire a few hundred million micron-sized nanobots right through the skin and into an artery.

  The question was whether I could put my plan to work in time. . . .

  “Give me the gun, Doctor,” Garner said, taking a cautious step forward. “You need—”

  Kirchner shifted his hand slightly and squeezed the trigger. There was a snap and a stink of burning flesh, and Garner clutched at his shoulder with a grimace of pain.

  I sent a command to Bob, then shouted “Doctor Kirchner!”

  Kirchner spun, facing me, the laser raised, his hand trembling. “Summerlee after Captain ice shambles!” he screamed. “Down the back in never was!” His back now was to Bob, who glided forward silently and with astonishing speed and precision.

  I lunged to my right. I’d thought of dropping behind the table, but I didn’t want him hitting the captain accidentally. He pivoted and fired again, and I heard glassware shatter behind me.

  Then the ROBERT’s arms closed around Kirchner’s, and the pressure gun slipped smoothly around and up against the angle of his jaw. I heard the hiss. . . .

  Kirchner’s eyes, still wild and staring, lost some of the intensity of focus . . . and then he sagged into Bob’s mechanical arms, the laser dropping from a nerveless hand. I moved to Garner’s side. “You okay, Chief?”

  “Not bad. Been better . . .”

  His voice shook, and the burnt-meat smell was strong. The bolt, I saw, had melted through his utilities and charred an area the size of my fist right at the joint of his right shoulder.

  “Better sit down,” I told him.

  “What about Kirchner?”

  I glanced at the doctor, slumped unconscious against the ROBERT. “He’ll keep. I put him into deep coma.”

  “We’ll need to put him in a tube and keep him that way,” Garner said, “until we can get him back to Earth.”

  “What, you don’t want a madman running around the ship? Imagine that.” I had my M-7 kit open and was applying burn-repair nano.

  “Duty Corpsman to Airlock One,” a voice called through our in-heads. “Duty Corpsman to Airlock One . . .”

  “Go ahead, Carlyle,” Garner told me. “You take it. I’ll handle things here.”

  I glanced again at Kirchner. There really wasn’t anything we could do for him here. His insanity might be treatable, but we would need to get him to a full-facility psych unit Earthside before we could even begin to guess what had gone wrong.

  “You sure you can—”

  “Of course I can!” He snatched the burn spray unit from my hand. “Go!”

  “Aye, aye, Chief.”

  On my way down to the Number One airlock, I patched through to the bridge and told Walthers about what had happened to Kirchner and to the chief.

  “Shit,” he said. “Do we need to keep you on board?”

  “Chief Garner should be okay,” I told him, “and he’s putting Kirchner on ice for the rest of the expedition. But why do you need a shore party? What’s going down?”

  “Some of our people are on the ice,” he said. “Trapped . . . by one of those things.”

  And a Marine shore party was being detailed to go rescue them. Right. It never rains but it pours and sometimes it pours liquid nitrogen, or worse.

  I reached the airlock, where a party of Marines was already suited up, checking weapons, and getting ready to go outside. “Hey, Doc!” Thomacek called. “About fucking time! Armor up!”

  I squeezed into a waiting Mark 10 hanging on the rack, sealed it off, and accepted a helmet from Thomason. “Thanks, Staff Sergeant,” I told him.

  Wiseman handed me a Mk. 30 carbine. I checked the safety, wondering if a half-megajoule laser pulse would even register in a cuttlewhale’s consciousness. I might have better luck throwing snowballs at the things.

  “Open the hatch!” Gunny Hancock called. The dim reddish light of Abyssworld spilled into the lock as the ramp lowered in front of us. “Move out! Move-move-move!”

  Haldane had touched down on the ice perhaps a kilometer away from the spot where the cuttlewhale had lunged up through the ice. Thirty Marines and two Corpsmen were out here, converging on the ship as quickly as possible. I could see several of them using their meta-thrusters to make low, bounding leaps across the pressure ridges, their combat-armor nanoflage making them almost invisible in the dim light. In the distance, the snaky silhouette of a cuttlewhale weaved against the swollen red face of the sun.

  “Perimeter defense!” Hancock called. “Dalton! Set up your weapon to put fire on that thing!”

  We spread out, creating a broad circle around the grounded Haldane. Visibility sucked. The wind from the west had picked up, and we were staring into a layer of blowing ice crystals and freezing fog perhaps two meters deep. I dropped to the ice alongside Bob Dalton, helping him unship his M4-A2 plasma weapon. I was wondering, though, who we were fighting—the cuttlewhales or the Gykrs. The mission on GJ 1314 I’s icy surface had just become very complicated.

  I got my answer in the next couple of moments, when a chunk of ice a hundred meters off to my left erupted in a flash and a plume of steam, followed by a rain of fist-sized chunks of ice. A second explosion rocked us, closer. That was portable artillery, not native life forms, and they were looking for our range.

  “Combat Command, Marine Red-One!” Hancock’s voice called. “We have incoming HP at coordinates . . .”

  Hancock rattled off a string of alphanumerics, locating the explosions even as a third blast slammed into the ice somewhere behind us.

  “Copy Red-One,” came the reply from Haldane. “We are tracking.”

  A fourth explosion cracked in the sky. It had taken Haldane a moment to set up her radar net, but now they had it up and running and were tracking any round coming in toward the ship or our perimeter. Haldane’s dorsal laser turret began methodically swatting the incoming out of the cloud-wracked purple sky.

  Thunder boomed, and our two A/S-40 Star Raiders flashed low overhead with a sound like tearing cloth. They were in their atmospheric flight configuration, blunt-nosed deltas with drooping wingtips, and they were being vectored in by the combat command center on board Haldane. A moment later, a savage blast beyond a jagged line of pressure ridges to the south lit up the sky, and we felt the shock wave slam at our armor through the ice. Several Marines cheered.

  But we had another problem close on the heels of the first. The last of the Marines left out on the ice were crossing our perimeter now, emerging from the ground fog like racing ghosts . . . and very close behind came a scattering of hunchbacked, massive shapes, a dozen Gykrs in dark gray combat armor. Dalton twisted around with his weapon, snapping off a rapid-fire string of plasma bolts that tore through one of the armored Guckers and shredded the upper half in molten gobbets. The Gykrs carried long and complicated-looking weapons, like two-meter lances with rods and serrations that might have been purely decorative or ceremonial . . . but which were a lot more likely to be part of what made them deadly. There was a swift, brutal exchange at point-blank range fifty meters from my position; the Guckers appeared to be coming up out of the ice, materializing from the fog; how the hell were they doing that?

  Twenty meters short of the Marine perimeter, one of our people staggered and went down. “Marine down! Corpsman . . . !”

  But I was already moving. My in-head marked the fallen Marine even though I couldn’t see him in the murk. “Cover me, Bob!” I shouted at Dalton, and I kicked in my M287 and sailed across the intervening distance i
n a long, flat trajectory. I landed short, but scrambled the last few meters on hands and knees, keenly aware of energy bolts hissing and cracking through the air around me. The Marines were using infrared for targeting, and I hoped my armor’s IFF—Identification Friend or Foe—was working as advertised.

  It was Lance Corporal Enrique Gonzalez. Whatever had hit him had taken off his right arm at the shoulder, and he was writhing about on the ice in agony, his severed arm still encased in white armor a couple of meters away.

  “Easy, buddy,” I told him. You’re gonna be okay!”

  His armor had operated as programmed, sealing off his shoulder joint and the bleeding with a guillotine blade that kept him from losing atmosphere. It had also automatically fired a jolt of nananodynes into his carotid artery; the nanobots were already starting to shut down the pain receptors both in his shoulder and in his brain, and his twisting struggles grew less exaggerated as the pain receded.

  “I’m hit, Doc! I’m hit!”

  I heard the panic in his voice. With the pain turning off, a lot of his reaction would be due simply to the shock and fear of having seen his arm torn off. I jacked into his armor and coded for more nananodynes . . . and added a sedative effect.

  “Doc! Watch it!”

  That was Dalton’s voice, from fifty meters behind me. I looked up and saw the hulking mass of a Gykr, its armor shifting from a mottled off-white to gray as it rose from the ice. It was bringing its lance-weapon around to aim at the two of us. . . .

  I rolled over onto Gonzalez’s body, grabbing him with one arm as I brought my M30 carbine off my shoulder with the other. I triggered the weapon one-handed, trying to aim for that vulnerable patch on the front-underside. I don’t know if I hit it or not; as soon as I’d dropped out of the way, Dalton was able to trigger a burst from his plasma weapon, and the Gykr exploded three meters in front of me. The Guckers might not have had blood like we do, but the effect of cupric hemolymph splattering across the ice was remarkably similar, in shades of blue-green instead of scarlet. I rolled off of Gonzalez, picked him up in a fireman’s carry, and started moving toward the Marine perimeter.

  I left his right arm on the ice. If he made it back to an OR, he’d be able to grow a new one.

  I had to engage my suit’s power-assist to manage that carry. Gonzalez plus his combat armor massed about 120 kilos, though in the weaker gravity of Abyssworld he only weighed about 109. That was still a considerable load, too much for just me by myself. Fortunately, Mk. 10 armor could serve as a powered exoskeletal unit, giving the wearer superhuman strength—strength enough, at least, to hoist Gonzalez across my shoulders and stagger unsteadily toward the Marine lines. A couple of Marines ran out to meet me as I approached, and helped carry Gonzalez the last few meters. “Get him aboard the ship!” I yelled, releasing my load. There wasn’t a lot more we could do for him, save get him out of the armor and get him stable. His blood pressure had dropped in the last few moments, a sign he was going into shock. I instructed some of the nanobots in his brain to handle that, then turned back to the perimeter.

  The Gykr attack appeared to have broken off. A number of smoking bodies lay scattered across the ice. I didn’t know if we’d gotten them all, or if survivors had retreated; hell, I didn’t know if Gykrs could retreat, the way their brain wiring worked. It was possible that they were like soldier termites or ants, that they would just keep coming, keep attacking until a threat was neutralized.

  Or maybe . . .

  From the frying pan to the fire. Off to the west, a couple of cuttlewhales were making their ponderous way across the ice.

  The wind-whipped fog was thicker off toward the horizon, so we heard them before we saw them . . . a steady, grinding crack and pop as those incredibly massive bodies ground their way over shattering ice. A dark blur slowly resolved into an enormous, sinuous body. As it grew closer, its head lifted above the ice, questing, the weaving tentacles surrounding that maw giving it a top-heavy, shaggy look in silhouette. It was so ponderously massive, it was hard to imagine how it could possibly move over solid ice . . . how it could possibly rear its questing head that far into the air.

  An age or two ago, on a vacation visit to the newly minted glaciers of Vancouver, I had seen elephant seals, bloated and nearly immobile on the beach. Those beasts had seemed barely able to move, and yet the cuttlewhales, millions of times heavier, forged ahead faster than a man could walk. Their physiological structure must have been awesomely strong. . . .

  “Hold your fire!” Hancock told us. “We’re supposed to talk with these critters. . . .”

  He didn’t sound very sure of himself. The nearest cuttlewhale was still a couple of hundred meters away, but it was rearing off the ice to the height of a three-story building. The mouth of the thing reminded me of a terrestrial lamprey—circular, lined with gray-silver teeth. It was puckered at first . . . almost closed, but then the opening dilated, rolling back on itself to reveal a cavern almost as wide as the entire creature, lined with blades. Six stalked eyes surrounded the head, moving independently of one another; between each pair of eye stalks was a slender, in-curving blade or tusk longer than any of the teeth.

  Could this monster possibly be intelligent? One of the basic rules of xenobiology is that intelligence requires manipulatory organs of some sort—articulated claws or tentacles or hands with fingers . . . something with which to grasp and hold and interact with its environment. Those six, curving tusks might fit the bill . . . I could all too vividly imagine the beast plucking a Marine from the perimeter like massive chopsticks picking up a single grain of rice, but they didn’t appear able to manipulate small objects, other than, possibly, to swallow them.

  And still the beast crawled closer with vast, sinuous weavings of a seemingly endless body, becoming more and more clear and sharp as it emerged from the wind-blown fog and frozen sea spray. Something moved in front of it . . . a Gykr suddenly flushed from hiding. That massive, shaggy head ducked suddenly, with surprising speed, snatching up the fleeing Gykr with astonishing precision and dexterity between twenty-meter tusks.

  I didn’t see what happened to the alien. I think my eyes were squeezed shut. They opened when the cuttlewhale’s head fell forward and dropped into the ice.

  It was coming straight toward us . . . with a second just emerging from the fog in the distance.

  “Marines!” That was Lieutenant Lyssa Kemmerer, back in Haldane’s Combat Command Center. “Commence fire! I say again . . . commence fire!”

  Clearly, both we and the ship were in danger. Laser and plasma-gun fire opened up along the Marine line, and Haldane joined in with her turreted lasers. I hesitated. A laser carbine against that?

  Then I steadied down, brought my weapon to my shoulder, and opened fire. I don’t know that I did any damage to the enormous thing at all, but the full weight of a Marine combat platoon seemed to be getting through to the beast. The Star Raiders flashed overhead as well, and a bright flash against the creature’s body seemed to spray a cloud of chunks and steaming liquid off to the side.

  The cuttlewhale jerked and writhed at that onslaught, its advance halted for the moment. “Cease fire! Cease fire!” Kemmerer ordered. I saw what she was doing: initiating a conversation that basically ran something like, “Halt, or we keep hurting you!”

  The cuttlewhale began moving forward once more, slower now.

  “Commence fire! Commence fire!”

  Again chunks were blasted from the hide of the beast, and I wondered how thick the hide was, how heavily armored it might be. Something that big might have an integument—a skin—so thick that even the ship’s lasers would have trouble drilling through it.

  But a lot of the damage caused by both lasers and plasma weapons is generated by thermal shock. My helmet’s infrared scanners were showing the monster to be about the same temperature as the air outside—just below zero centigrade. When a laser bolt hit the monster’s skin, the sudden spike in local temperature was enough to cause a fair-sized explosion
, especially if that skin contained a fair amount of moisture.

  Damn . . . what was the cuttlewhale made of?

  “Everyone fall back to the ship,” Kemmerer’s voice ordered. “We’ll cover you . . .”

  Made sense. As near as I could see, our weapons weren’t making a dent in the monsters. Only the turret weapons on Haldane and the two Star Raiders were hurting it at all. Despite the fire, the nearest beast continued advancing, sliding now slowly across broken and uneven ice, its titanic body slowly undulating, the hissing roar and crackling thunder of its approach growing louder.

  How the hell were they able to move? One of those monsters must have weighed as much as a small mountain. . . .

  We started moving back toward the ship, now lost in the ground fog somewhere in that direction. There was nothing more we could do out here. The mission, so far as I could tell, was a shambles now. No sign of the research station . . . and if we were communicating with the cuttlewhales, I didn’t much like the direction in which the conversation was going.

  The ground—the ice—was shaking. I felt a shock through my boots, and a tremor so violent I nearly fell. Ice was buckling and cracking off to my left. A third cuttlewhale was breaking through from underneath. Ice shattered and sprayed into the sky . . . and a gray-white wall rose precipitously just thirty meters away, the shaggy head weaving uncertainly far above our heads.

  The wall began falling toward us. . . .

  “Move . . . move!” I screamed. I triggered my jumpjet and catapulted through hurtling chips of ice as the wall fell, meters behind me. Visibility was zilch. Had everyone made it clear? I couldn’t tell.

  “Corpsman!”

  Shit! Where was he? I superimposed tactical data over my normal vision, trying to see through the nearly opaque, wind-whipped murk around me. There . . . !

  Dalton was down, his leg pinned under an overturned block of ice. I dropped in next to him, trying to lever the ice off of him, but it wouldn’t budge. That block must have weighed half a ton.