Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  His plasma weapon was lying next to him. I snatched it up, cleared it, then opened fire at point-blank range, slamming bolts of ionized plasma into the upper half of the boulder.

  Thermal shock. The explosion knocked me back a step. What was left of the boulder I could probably move . . . but as I reached for it, movement tugged at my awareness. An eye . . . shiny black, stalked, and a couple of meters across, was coming at me out of the fog. Behind it and stretching far above it, tentacles writhed . . . and an obscenely puckered mouth peeled itself open. The side of the thing was wet and . . . and shifting, almost as though it were unraveling . . . melting . . . coming apart . . . what was that stuff?

  I shouldered Dalton’s plasma weapon and mashed down on the trigger, firing at the eye . . . at the mouth . . . at the looming cliff of a head covered in snaking, twisting tendrils. More thermal shock, and chunks of broken monster sprayed us both.

  But the head reared back and up off the ice, vanishing into fog. I dropped the weapon, grabbed Dalton’s suit two-handed, and triggered my jumpjets. The load was too much for a clear flight, but it kicked us hard across the ice. I took a second to pull up an electronic overlay marking the ship, corrected my vector, and jumped—or half-jumped—again, an ungainly leap that dropped both of us back to the ice in a tumble. Thunder boomed behind me . . . all around me . . . and as the fog ahead cleared I could see the Haldane already hovering just above the ice ten meters away, its ramp still down, as a couple of Marines at the entryway waved me on.

  The wind from dayside shrieked around me, the blowing snow threatening to shut down my vision again.

  “Doc!” Someone yelled. “Move your fucking ass!”

  Another Marine—it was Hancock—landed next to me, grabbed hold of Dalton’s harness, and the two of us dragged him the rest of the way to the ship. I looked back over my shoulder in time to see that yawning, tooth-and-tendril-lined maw gaping as it loomed above us.

  The Star Raiders shrieked low overhead, and a blast caught all of us as we struggled in the open. I staggered, then fell off the ramp to the ice a meter below.

  “Doc . . . !”

  “I’m okay!” I shouted back. Standing, I looked around the cuttlewhale. Much of the head had been torn open by particle beams from the Raiders, and chunks of pale pink-gray flesh lay steaming in a huge splash out from the body.

  Had we killed it? The body was still twitching spasmodically, a vast and ragged cliff stretching twenty meters up into the sky. The surface looked . . . odd. Fuzzy . . . almost fluffy, and like it was melting.

  “Doc! Get your ass back on board!”

  “Hold on a sec!” I wanted a sample. A piece of cuttlewhale half a meter wide lay nearby. Stooping, I hoisted it up in front of me and lugged it back toward Haldane’s ramp. The thing was heavy, a good fifty kilos at least, and I was glad my armor had that exoskeleton capability. I wouldn’t have been able to stagger back onto the ship otherwise.

  “What the fuck, Doc?” Hancock said, his voice acid. “Out getting your last-minute shopping done?”

  “Collecting specimens, Gunny. Know your enemy.”

  I was still struggling up the ramp as the Haldane lifted higher, clearing the ice.

  One of the other monsters reached for us, neck stretching impossibly high.

  It missed. Its body stretched upright—I couldn’t see its tail—and then it began to sink, falling back to the ice, which was obscured by the wind-lashed ground fog.

  Spray burst up through the fog. I realized that I could no longer see any of the cuttlewhales. Had they broken back through the ice, and into the ocean beneath?

  We were accelerating . . . boosting back to orbit. The two Star Raiders followed us up, pulling victory rolls as they boosted. They would dock with us in orbit.

  And the rest of us would consider the failure of the mission . . . and what we could do about it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Haldane fell into orbit around the planet. I dropped my ungainly specimen into a sealer unit in the main airlock, then got some Marine help and a quantum spin-floater to haul it up to the lab. I followed as soon as I got out of my armor.

  I quite literally wanted to know what a cuttlewhale was made of.

  Two hours later, we remained on red alert. All of us were all too aware that the Gykr ship we’d spooked on our arrival might be back at any moment . . . and likely with friends. We thought that Guck technology was pretty close to ours, but technological development between two space-faring species is never identical and is never parallel. They had picked up tricks we didn’t know. It worked the other way around, too, of course, but right now we were worried about what they could do that we couldn’t. A very small difference in faster-than-light drives might mean that they could jump a thousand parsecs in a few hours, while we’d taken a leisurely couple of weeks to make it across forty-two light years.

  In other words, we knew the Gykr would be back. We just didn’t know when . . . or how many of them there would be when they arrived.

  Walthers had called for an after-action debrief on Haldane’s mess deck, which had been transformed into an ad hoc briefing room. There were twelve of us physically present, including the ship’s department heads and the four most senior Marines—Lieutenant Kemmerer and Second Lieutenant Tom Regan, plus Gunny Hancock and Staff Sergeant Thomason. I was there representing the science/technical department as well as the medical department. Both Ortega and Montgomery were present, as mission specialists.

  There were electronic presences as well. Chief Garner was linked in from sick bay, as department head, and both Machine McKean and Doob were there electronically. So were our three nonhuman passengers, the Broc family, D’dnah, D’drevah, and D’deen. Brocs like things a bit on the chilly side, compared to humans. A pleasant twenty degrees is sweltering to them. Our three tended to stay to themselves, in a compartment on board Haldane that could be kept at a comfortable zero to ten Celsius.

  The discussion had been going on for several minutes, and so far the consensus appeared to be that we should declare defeat and go home.

  “Why do we even need to stay here?” Lieutenant Walthers asked with a shrug. He was the ship’s skipper now, with Summerlee still recovering in sick bay, and I think the safety of both ship and crew was weighing on him heavily. “We’ve confirmed that Murdock Base is gone. And those . . . those things down there are going to make it damned hard for us to look around.”

  Lieutenant Kemmerer agreed. “Between the Gykr and the cuttlewhales, we’ve had three Marines killed,” she said. “A Corpsman may not recover, and Sergeant Dalton has a broken leg. There’s a Gykr submersible still loose in the ocean, and there may still be Gykr stragglers on the surface. We need a bigger force to deal with the threat.”

  “But we can’t go back!” Dr. Ortega sounded shocked. “Not yet!”

  “You can’t believe we actually have a chance of communicating with the goddamn cuttlewhales, do you?” Walthers asked.

  “Maybe not the cuttlewhales,” Dr. Montgomery said. “But there’s Sierra Five to consider.”

  Before the cuttlewhales had made their precipitous appearance, the Marines on the surface, along with McKean and Dubois, had drilled through the ice in three places and dropped in SNR-12 units—remote autonomous sonar transponders intended to paint us a picture of what was going on beneath the ice. The results had been . . . surprising.

  The three-dimensional image was projected on a mess deck viewall—an empty blue abyss with several targets showing as bright white points of light. One—identified as Sierra One, for the first sonar contact—was a hard, bright target nearly two hundred meters down and twelve kilometers away from the transponders. Three more, Sierras Two through Four, looked softer—fuzzier around the edges. They were deeper, much, much longer than they were wide, like thread-slender worms, and were almost certainly the three cuttlewhales that had attacked us on the surface.

  Sierra Five was a hard target, almost directly below the transponder positions, but it
was deep . . . very deep. Exact triangulation was something of a problem, since the three transponders were relatively close to one another and didn’t provide much in the way of a baseline, but the best estimate suggested that the target was something like a thousand kilometers almost straight down.

  Not meters down. Kilometers.

  The water pressure at that depth would be . . . horrific. A hundred times the depth of the Challenger Deep on Earth, or more, something like a hundred thousand atmospheres. Even at that, a thousand kilometers is still only about 10 percent of the distance from Abyssworld’s icecap to the ocean floor.

  The range was too great to tell what we were looking at, but it was pretty large . . . as large, perhaps, as the Haldane.

  “We need to consider the possibility,” Montgomery went on, “that Sierra Five is an artificial structure of some sort. If it’s artificial, then it was manufactured by intelligence. It might well be an intelligence native to Abyssworld.”

  “And it might also be a submerged Gykr ship,” Walthers pointed out. “Or just another very big native life form, like the cuttlewhales. It might even be another cuttlewhale, though I’ll admit that the sonar return looks a lot different.”

  “At that depth,” Garner said, “we might expect cuttlewhales to look different. Harder. Firmer. More metallic, even. Carlyle here has something to say about that.”

  “Ah, yes,” Ortega said. “Our young hero!”

  “What the hell were you thinking, Carlyle?” Kemmerer said. “Running back outside to collect a piece of that thing.”

  “I wasn’t exactly thinking,” I said, and when several of the others at the table laughed, I shook my head and kept talking. “I mean . . . I fell off the ramp, okay? And a piece of a cuttlewhale was right there. I just saw an opportunity—”

  “Carlyle’s actions may help us actually make sense of the biology on this planet,” Garner said. “I’ve seen the results. This is important.”

  “So what did you learn?” Montgomery wanted to know. “You analyzed that piece of flesh?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m not sure we can call it flesh, though. . . .”

  “What is it, then?” Kemmerer demanded.

  “Ice,” I told them. When that single word elicited a confused babble of voices and protests, I added, “Specifically, Ice Seven.”

  The sample I’d collected had been taken to the lab, where it had gone into the bio-secure compartment for Bob to do remote analyses on it. Since we didn’t know what might be in that chunk of cuttlewhale I’d brought back, I’d coated it with sealant in the Haldane’s airlock to avoid exposing the crew to any possible microorganisms, opening it up again only when it was safely inside the secure biological containment compartment in the lab. Through Bob, I’d run a standard spectrographic analysis first . . . then done a chem series. The whole process had taken me perhaps twenty minutes.

  “What the devil,” Second Lieutenant Regan said, “is Ice Seven?”

  “It is, sir, a very, very special kind of water ice. . . .”

  Dr. Montgomery nodded. “That would explain a lot.”

  “It’s created under extremely high pressure,” I went on. “Here, I pulled this down off the Haldane’s Net.” I showed them the chart I’d been studying before the meeting.

  We’re all familiar with ordinary ice, of course . . . water that freezes at zero degrees Celsius, becoming a solid. But it turns out that, depending on the temperature and on the pressure, water can freeze in a great many different ways—fifteen that we know of for sure, plus several variants, and there are almost certainly others.

  Ordinary ice, which forms as hexagonal crystals, is known in exotic chemistry as Ice Ih. All the ice found within Earth’s biosphere is Ice Ih, with the exception of a small amount in the upper atmosphere that occurs as a cubic crystal called Ice Ic.

  But compress Ice Ih at temperatures of sixty to eighty degrees below zero and it forms a rhombohedral crystal with a tightly ordered structure known as Ice II. Heat Ice II to minus twenty-three degrees . . . or cool water to that temperature at something just over thirty atmospheres, and it becomes Ice III.

  And so it goes, running up the list of exotic ices all the way to Ice XV, which forms at pressures of over 10,000 atmospheres and at temperatures of around 100 degrees Kelvin—or minus 173 degrees Celsius.

  Still with me?

  On Earth, the deepest point in the ocean is in the Marianas Trench, the Challenger Deep, which reaches 11 kilometers down and has a pressure of 1,100 atmospheres . . . which translates to just over one ton per square centimeter. We wouldn’t hit 10,000 atmospheres until we were ten times deeper—an impossible 100 to 110 kilometers down, assuming there was a terrestrial ocean that deep.

  Using the download, I gave the assembled personnel a quick overview of exotic ice chemistry. I’m not an expert, by any means, but I was drawing on research downloads from the sick bay AI, which pretty much covered the basics. I had to explain to the non-technical people present that temperatures were given in degrees Kelvin, meaning degrees Celsius above absolute zero, with 273oK marking the freezing point of water. Pressure was given in pascals, or in millions of pascals—MPa—or in billions of pascals—GPa. One atmosphere of pressure was equal to 101,325 pascals.

  Download

  Chemical Breakdown of Exotic Ices

  Ice Ih: Normal crystalline ice, formed in hexagonal crystals. Formed from water at normal pressures cooled to 273ºK [0ºC.] Nearly all ice within Earth’s biosphere is Ih.

  Ice Ic: Metastable variant of Ih with a cubic crystalline structure, and its oxygen atoms arranged in a diamond pattern. Produced at temperatures between 130º and 220ºK, but is stable up to 240ºK. It is sometimes found in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

  Amorphous ice: Ordinary ice lacking a crystal structure. Formed in low-, high-, and very-high-density variants, depending on pressure and temperature. Commonly found on comets, outer-planet moons, or elsewhere in space.

  Ice II: Formed from ice Ih when it undergoes pressure at 190º to 210ºK. Rhombohedral crystalline structure.

  Ice III: Formed from Ice II when heated, or by cooling water to 250ºK at a pressure of 300 MPa [very approximately, 3,000 standard atmospheres]. Tetragonal crystalline structure. Denser than water, but the least dense of all high-pressure ice phases.

  Ice IV: Metastable rhombohedral crystalline phase, formed by heating high-density amorphous ice at a pressure of 810 MPa [8,100 atm].

  Ice V: Most complex of all exotic ice phases, with a monoclinic crystalline structure, formed by cooling water to 253ºK at 500 MPa [5,000 atm].

  Ice VI: A tetragonal crystalline phase formed by cooling water to 290ºK at 500 MPa. Exhibits dielectric changes [Debye relaxation] in the presence of an alternating electrical field.

  Ice VII: Cubic crystalline structure with disordered hydrogen atoms, exhibiting Debye relaxation.

  Ice VIII: A more ordered cubic crystalline form with fixed hydrogen atoms, formed by cooling Ice VII to temperatures below 278ºK

  Ice IX: A tetragonal crystalline phase formed by cooling Ice III to temperatures between 208ºK and 165ºK. Remains stable at temperatures below 140oK and at pressures between 200 MPa and 400 MPa [2,000 to 4,000 atm].

  Ice X: Highly symmetrical ice with ordered protons, formed at 70 GPa [700,000 atm].

  Ice XI: A low-temperature form of hexagonal ice, formed at 240ºK and with an orthorhombic structure, sometimes considered to be the most stable form of ice Ih. It forms very slowly, and has been found within Antarctic ice up to 10,000 years old.

  Ice XII: Dense, metastable, tetragonal crystalline phase formed by heating high-density amorphous ice to temperatures between 77ºK and 183ºK at 810 MPa.

  Ice XIII: A proton-ordered form of monoclinic crystalline ice V, formed by cooling water to temperatures below 130ºK at 500 MPa.

  Ice XIV: The proton-ordered form of ice XII, formed below 118ºK at 1.2 GPa [120,000 atm], with an orthorhombic crystalline structure.

  Ice XV: The
proton-ordered form of ice VI, formed by cooling water to temperatures between 80oK and 108oK at a pressure of 1.1 GPa [110,000 atm].

  “ ‘Hexagonal crystals,’ I think I understand,” Ortega said with grim humor. “Some of this is pretty thick. But ‘proton-ordered’?”

  “Let’s just say that ice comes in a lot of different forms,” I said, “and those forms can have different chemical, electrical, and even nuclear effects. Here, maybe you should just see the biostats I got in the lab.”

  I pulled the worksheet down from the lab AI and spread it out for their in-head inspection. “This,” I told them, “is the biochemistry of a cuttlewhale.”

  I then proceeded to explain . . . and hoped to hell that I wasn’t making their eyes glaze over. I was afraid I’d already done that with the exotic ice table.

  It turns out that some exotic ices are pretty weird, and appear only under extreme conditions. Ice IX, for instance, forms at pressures of around 3,000 atmospheres and temperatures around 165 degrees Kelvin. Ice X doesn’t form until pressures hit 700,000 atmospheres. We’re not certain, but we think that at pressures of around one and a half terapascals—that’s almost 15 million atmospheres, or more than 15,500 tons per square centimeter—water actually becomes a metal. We’ve never worked with that kind of pressure directly. Even at the core of the Earth, pressures are estimated to reach “only” 3.5 million atmospheres; Jupiter’s core may hit around seven terapascals—or 70 million atmospheres—enough to create metallic hydrogen.

  But what we had in the lab was a sample of Ice VII, and compared to some of the exotic ices we knew, it was pretty tame. The stuff forms at about a thousand atmospheres, and at surprisingly high temperatures—around minus 3 degrees Centigrade. Odd things happen to the water’s hydrogen molecules at that pressure, and the hydrogen bonds actually form interpenetrating lattices. That means there are unusual electrical effects in the material, though we don’t understand yet what those might be.

  “Electrical effects?” Haldane’s chief engineering officer, Lieutenant Mikao Ishihara, sounded skeptical. “What electrical effects?”