Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  Once the powders were down, we released a few trillion nanobots programmed for materials construction, beamed them an architectural plan, and in about two hours they’d grown our new base from the component atoms. On Earth, we build four-kilometer-tall towers of spun glasstic or ferrocrete from the carbon, hydrogen, silica, and metals right there in the dirt and rock of the construction site. The only native raw materials here, though, were the oxygen and hydrogen of the water ice, plus some traces of carbon and nitrogen from the CO2, CH4, and NH3 in the atmosphere or trapped within the ice. When the main dome was up, though, we used drilling bots inside to tunnel down through the ice to reach the seawater below, and were able to reach quite a few more elements dissolved in the water.

  We began manufacturing the base’s interior gas mix then. The oxygen came from the water, of course . . . but the nitrogen was tougher, since the only source we had for N2 was the ammonia that made up about 3 percent of the planetary atmosphere. We grew the atmosphere processing machinery for that, and seasoned the mix with three hundred parts per million of CO2. As counter-intuitive as it seems, too little carbon dioxide in the blood—a medical condition called hypocapnia—can be as bad as too much.

  We continued to wear breathing masks inside the base for a time, however, just to be on the safe side. There was a danger, a small one, that toxins or organic molecules had been mixed in with the surface ice, and we were taking no chances with toxic fumes or anaphylaxis. The base atmospheric regulators would continue to scrub the gas mix until we were sure there was no chance of contamination.

  While some of us worked on making the new facility habitable, another team from the Haldane melted a hundred-meter-wide hole in the ice outside, extending it to connect with the open water beyond the edge of the icecap. Haldane lifted on her spin-floaters and slowly lowered the Walsh from her cargo bay and into the dark water. Walsh, with her compressed-matter construction, was designed to fly through the water, rather than control her depth with ballast tanks. To keep her from sinking as soon as they dropped her into the water, Haldane’s people had rigged her with quantum floaters that were kept running continually, holding the Walsh steady at her moorings.

  By that time, we were putting the finishing touches on the base—one large dome with four smaller subsidiary domes evenly spaced around the perimeter. After laying down an airlock cylinder extending some distance from the main hab dome, Haldane was able to pull up several million liters of water and dump it over the outside of the facility, letting it freeze in uneven masses to disguise the regular and artificial look of the place. A molecule-thin film of specially programmed nanoflage went over that, breaking up the outlines and bending incoming light in order to create the illusion of completely natural pressure ridge.

  If the Gykr came by now, they wouldn’t be able to see us.

  We spent another five hours transferring tons more rawmat off of the Haldane and into both the hab modules and the submarine. This was mostly carbon, raw material for the nanufactories on the sub and in the base. Combined with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and numerous trace elements taken from the sea and atmosphere, this would become our food supply for the next several months. If Haldane had to abandon us, we would be on our own for at least a month before she could return with reinforcements.

  Quite apart from that, however, it would take time to descend into the depths. Sierra Five was at a depth of around a thousand kilometers. With a maximum descent rate of around ten meters per second, it would take us a bit less than thirty hours to reach Sierra Five. If we wanted to venture into the real depths of Abyssworld, though, it was going to take a while—more than twelve days to descend eleven thousand kilometers, and longer to come back up.

  The chances were good that we would not be going that deep . . . and the experts weren’t even certain that Walsh would survive such a dive. But we would need to take plenty of food along just to be on the safe side. Fortunately, air and water were easily enough pulled from the surrounding ocean.

  The Walsh was large enough to carry seven people—ten or twelve if they were very friendly. How many of us would actually be descending into the abyss was yet to be determined.

  And that was the purpose of our final meeting on Haldane’s mess deck, a few hours before we would be ready to make the descent. Eleven of us were in physical attendance this time, and quite a few more were virtually present, listening in over the ship’s computer Net. The three Brocs were on-line . . . and so was Chief Garner, who was still recovering from his burn in sick bay.

  “Doc! How is the captain doing?” Walthers asked with no preamble.

  “We’re bringing her up out of deep sedation,” I told him. “That’ll take a couple more hours. Aside from that, she’s fine . . . but we don’t have the medical tech on board Haldane to deal with her prosthesis failure.”

  “You mean we have to get her back to Earth.”

  I nodded. “We could give her a rough-and-ready implant, the sort of thing we’d do for someone who’d lost all connectivity with a bad accident or something like a severe stroke. But for full function, she’ll need to have her implant traced almost molecule by molecule, and a lot of it will have to be dissolved, then rechelated as new circuitry.”

  That kind of work was incredibly delicate and fussy, not the sort of thing you want to try in the field at all. Fortunately, there was no need. I knew Walthers was uncomfortable being in command, but he could run the ship until we got the captain back home.

  He sighed. “Okay. I guess I’m it. What about Kirchner?”

  That was a tougher question. Kirchner had been worrying me more than anything else in the department. Before his final break, I’d been doing more private research, trying to plug in psychiatric symptoms. For a while, there, I’d begun wondering about Asperger’s disorder, and the AI had been throwing that out as well. I’d doubted that diagnosis, however. Asperger’s is part of the autism spectrum, tends to have a gradual onset, and is characterized not only by problems with social interaction but by restricted patterns of interests or behavior as well. And though we don’t know yet what causes Asperger’s, it appears to be a developmental problem, probably with genetic roots. You’re not likely to develop it at 108.

  Which had brought me back to schizophrenia. That diagnosis had been looking unlikely as well. He had the problems with social responsiveness and interpersonal dysfunction, but there’d been no sign of the usual disorganized thinking or speech. And we couldn’t get inside his head to tell if he was delusional, truly paranoid, or suffering from auditory hallucinations . . . the “voices in the head” so characteristic of the disease. Besides, classic schizophrenia usually begins manifesting before the age of 30, not in old age.

  But then he’d gone and pulled a gun, used the gun, and started spewing word salad.

  That pretty much confirmed the schizophrenia diagnosis . . . but not completely. Damn it, we were still so helpless in the face of psychiatric pathology. Broken legs, epidural hematomas, even a spinal fracture . . . that stuff is child’s play compared to figuring out what’s gone wrong inside a person’s mind.

  “The doctor,” I said, “is in a tube down in Medical. We’ll be keeping him in a deep coma until we can get him back to Earth for proper treatment.”

  “Yes, but what’s wrong with him?”

  “Our provisional diagnosis is paranoid schizophrenia . . . but I need to emphasize that that’s provisional, meaning we’re really not sure. His genome shows none of the usual markers predicting that disease, he has no family history or personal record of either schizophrenia or schizoid personality disorder, and those diseases are just not that likely to come out of nowhere.”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “In his treatment, yes. Of course it does.”

  “But not in how we care for him until we get him home.”

  “No, sir.”

  No, the difference it made had to do with me and my mind, not Kirchner’s. I was still kicking myself for not having picked up o
n his illness sooner. Dammit, I hated that kind of responsibility . . . having the training to spot something like that and failing to pick up on the clues that were there. The real problem was that diseases—especially mental illness—simply didn’t present a one, two, three listing of signs and symptoms. The human body and, even more, the human mind, were incredibly complex, and they steadfastly resisted being shoved into narrow little boxes with labels on them.

  And just maybe that’s why I wanted to leave the relative safety of the Haldane for the uncertain but deadly darkness of Abyssworld’s deeps. While I’d be there in case someone got hurt, of course, my real purpose would be as a science technician, taking readings, running the nano programming, and just maybe getting to meet a new intelligence in the deeps.

  “So,” Walthers said, “we need to make some final decisions on sending the Walsh into the Abyss.”

  “Why do we need to send anybody?” Gunny Hancock demanded of the group. “We have Double-R-Ess twelves. We can teleoperate them from here.”

  It was a valid point, at least within limits. On Niffelheim-e, I’d helped teleoperate a small submarine into the depths of that ice world’s ocean . . . and lived to tell about it when something the size of a city flattened the robot against the underside of the ice. The RRS-12 was a basketball-sized teleoperated submarine—the alphabet soup stood for remote reconnaissance submersible—running on the end of a hair-thin fiber-optic cable.

  “Yes,” Montgomery said, “we can. But if we have the opportunity to actually meet the whales . . . or whatever is behind them, don’t you think we should do it in person?”

  “But what’s the point?” Chief Garner asked. “I mean . . . seriously. If the person making contact is locked up inside a twenty-meter CM cigar, he’s not exactly going to be able to step outside and shake hands or tentacles or whatever, right? Not at those depths.”

  “There’s another issue too,” I pointed out. “A practical one. I think the maximum cable length on an RRS is . . . what? Something like fifty kilometers? Beyond that, we wouldn’t be able to control them.”

  Radio signals do not propagate more than a few meters through water before they’re absorbed and lost. Blue-green lasers can penetrate perhaps a hundred meters of crystal-clear water before they’re lost. Sonar can be used to teleoperate remotes, but it doesn’t pack anywhere near the information density of electromagnetic radiation—radio or light. Besides, there was the possibility that the cuttlewhales were angered by our sonar.

  Remotes like the one I’d piloted beneath the ice on Niffelheim-e were tethered to their base by fiber-optic cables transmitting laser light, signals carrying electronic commands from the base to the probe, and returning sensory data. They worked quite well . . . but even cables as thin as a human hair were limited in how long they could be grown before they broke under their own weight. Sierra Five was more than a thousand kilometers down, well beyond range of a cable-directed remote.

  “He’s right,” Ortega said. “If we’re going to go down there at all, it has to be in person.”

  “We could take along a small fleet of Double-R-esses,” Lieutenant Kemmerer suggested. “Remote-operate them from the Walsh.”

  “If we can do that without compromising the Walsh’s hull integrity,” Lieutenant Ishihara observed. “Under tons of pressure per square centimeter, the slightest weakness in the hull would be fatal.”

  “So how many of us are going?” Lieutenant Kemmerer asked. “The Walsh is big enough for eight—maybe ten—people.”

  “We could manage fifteen or twenty if we’re very friendly,” Montgomery said. “Food, water, and air supplies won’t be a concern, since we’ll be making our own as we go.”

  “But do we need that many?” Walthers said. He shook his head. “I’m with Gunny Hancock. I’m still skeptical about this whole idea.”

  “Right!” Garner’s voice said over our in-heads. “Paying a personal visit may be a luxury we can’t afford.”

  “What luxury?”

  “A suicide mission, of course. How many lives can we afford to throw away?”

  “It won’t be suicide,” Montgomery told him. “And there are way too many opportunities for misunderstanding if we try to make contact long distance.”

  “Perhaps. But I’m . . . concerned. The Walsh is not armed, and we still have a hostile submersible down there someplace . . . plus some very large creatures that have already attacked us.”

  “I am going,” Montgomery said, and the tone of her voice blocked any thought of argument. “It’s why I came on this godforsaken mission in the first place!”

  “Me too,” Ortega said. “We’re still guessing about conditions more than a few kilometers down. This will be an unprecedented opportunity.”

  “I would suggest two Marines,” Kemmerer said. “Myself and one other, preferably a pilot. Plus a couple of Corpsmen as technical staff.”

  “Why Marines?” Walthers wanted to know. “They won’t be able to shoot, can’t threaten the bad guys or scare off the Gucks. Nobody will be able to board the Walsh without opening her up, and under those pressures, that would instantly kill everyone on board. In fact, they won’t be able to do anything but take up space.”

  “Point,” Kemmerer said. She sounded disappointed.

  ONE OF US SHOULD BE THERE, D’deen, one of the M’nangats, printed out in our in-heads. IF THERE IS INDEED ANOTHER INTELLIGENCE BEHIND THE CUTTLEWHALES, IT LIKELY WOULD BE EXTREMELY ADVANCED. YOU WILL WANT AN EXPERT ON GALACTIC CULTURE AND LANGUAGE ALONG.

  “Just one of you?” Montgomery asked. “Or all three of you?”

  ONE SHOULD BE ENOUGH, AND I ADVANCE MYSELF AS THE LOGICAL AND EXPENDABLE CHOICE.

  That seemed a cold-blooded way to look at the situation. But then, D’deen, I remembered, was the life donor of the triad . . . the equivalent of a male in human reproduction. For millennia in human society it had been the male who risked his life in warfare, with the idea of protecting women—the egg bearers and life bearers—back home. It wasn’t that different with the Brocs.

  “We still need a mission commander,” Kemmerer said. “A military commander.”

  “Why military, for God’s sake?” Montgomery said. Her face wrinkled in what I swear was disgust. “Like Mr. Walthers said, you won’t be able to shoot anything down there . . . or threaten it. This is a civilian research operation. . . .”

  “A civilian research operation under the aegis of a military mission,” Kemmerer said firmly, “and one, I will remind you, facing hostile military forces. We need someone down there capable of making key military judgments and command decisions.”

  “Jesus!” Garner exclaimed over the link. “What the fuck will it matter?”

  “Chief Garner is right,” Walthers said. “You won’t be able to give orders to the Marines from up here. If anything goes wrong down there, we won’t even know about it.”

  “Not quite true, Captain,” Kemmerer told him. “Walsh has a bail-out sphere, right?”

  “Well . . . yes . . .” Walthers said with obvious reluctance.

  “If the Walsh is destroyed, even if she’s completely crushed, the bail-out sphere will break free and pop to the surface. And it can carry a complete log recording of everything that happens down there.”

  The bail-out sphere, in essence, was a one-man escape capsule, a sphere of ultradense collapsed matter with space enough inside for one or, just possibly, two, embedded within the submersible’s hull just aft of her crew compartment. It would still be a long shot, of course. If the sphere popped up underneath the ice—a good chance of that—the people at the surface base or on board Haldane might never hear its emergency transmissions.

  I pulled down a set of engineering stats to check. Okay . . . the sphere did have through-ice capability. If it was trapped beneath an ice ceiling, it could release nano from an external unit that would chew through the ice in order to send up a radio antenna . . . but there were limits. The ice would have to be less than about a kilometer in thickness fo
r that to have a chance of working.

  Most of the ice on Abyssworld’s nightside was between ten and a hundred kilometers thick.

  “I think you will all agree that this is a military situation,” Kemmerer went on, “and that it may require trained military judgment. If whatever we encounter down there is, in my judgment, a military threat, I will be able to communicate that to the surface, even if the Walsh is destroyed.”

  “With respect, ma’am,” Gunny Hancock told her, “your place will be here with the rest of the Marines, not gallivanting off on your own with the civilians.”

  “Command prerogative, Gunny.”

  “There’s no such thing, ma’am. Your responsibility is to the entire unit . . . and to the mission.”

  “Then who do you suggest?”

  He grinned at her. “Why, me, Lieutenant. Who else?”

  “He does have FO experience, ma’am,” Thomason pointed out. FO—Forward Observer—was a military specialty involving sneaking in close to an enemy and passing information back to the artillery, air, or space units that could actually do something about it.

  And in any case, that’s the way of it in the military. Any officer worth the cost of his or her training knows you rely on the experience, the training, and the judgment of your noncommissioned officers—NCOs like Gunny Hancock or Staff Sergeant Thomason or Chief Garner. The gunny could assess any military threat we encountered in the abyss and make suggestions as well as a lieutenant could, and probably a hell of a lot better. The lieutenant would be in a better position to evaluate the threat from her office in the base topside, or on board Haldane, and give the appropriate orders to the Marines under her command.