by Ian Douglas
The various naval officers didn’t count. Walthers was needed topside to command the ship, and the other officers under his command all were specialists, each running his or her own department. They were needed topside as well . . . and none had the type of combat experience necessary to make command judgments of the sort Kemmerer and Hancock were talking about.
“Very well,” Kemmerer said. “You’ve made your point. But we still need a pilot.”
“The AI will serve that function,” Walthers said.
“I’d like a human pilot if we can . . . a drone driver for preference.”
“How about ET2 Lloyd?”
I didn’t know the name. I looked it up on my in-head, from Haldane’s personnel roster, and found her quickly enough. Gina Lloyd. She was a Navy ET, an Electronics Tech Second Class in Haldane’s flight squadron. She wasn’t a fighter pilot like the Marines flying the two Star Raiders, but was part of the research vessel’s flight control staff who teleoperated various recon drones, fueling remotes, and robotic vessels from the Haldane’s combat command center.
“Is she linked in?” Kemmerer asked.
“I’m here, ma’am,” a woman’s voice said.
“Do you want in on this craziness? It’s volunteers only.”
“Wouldn’t miss it, ma’am.”
“Okay,” Kemmerer said. “Last but not least, which Corpsmen?”
“I think only one, ma’am,” Hancock told her, “not two. With Harris in cold storage and Chief Garner hurt—”
“I’m not hurt bad. I could—”
“ . . . and Garner needed up here to run tech-support and sick bay,” Hancock continued, ignoring him. “That leaves—”
“I’ll go,” I said, cutting in. “I have some experience with deep diving.”
There was no objection from either Dubois or McKean. I wondered why there wasn’t an objection from me.
“Carlyle would be my first choice, Lieutenant,” Hancock said. “He’s piloted a submersible . . . and he’s been in first-contact situations before.”
I wasn’t sure my stint of duty running a tether-teleoperated remote beneath the ice of Gliese 581 VI-e would count for something like this, but I did carry a lot of data in my in-head RAM on pressure and exotic high-pressure chemistry. I guess that counted for something. And apparently, so did talking to a wounded Qesh pilot on Gliese 581 IV.
But in any case, wasn’t this why I’d signed on with the Corps? Not just giving first aid to wounded Marines in the field, but learning new wrinkles in exobiology and alien biochemistries.
And we couldn’t get a whole lot more alien than a hundred kilometers down.
In any case, it was first-contact work that I loved the most.
“Damn it, I outrank E-Car,” McKean said. “I should go!”
“They’re both nuts, Gunny,” Dubois said. “If you want expendable . . .”
“It’s Carlyle,” Hancock said, with a tone of that’s final in his voice.
“Young Carlyle’s understanding of cuttlewhale biology,” Ortega said, “and especially insights into the possibility that there is another intelligence behind the cuttlewhales . . . that alone recommends him.”
Hancock grinned at me. “You should’ve kept your big mouth shut, E-Car.”
“Hell . . . getting to look at exotic high-pressure ice?” I said. “How could I pass up an opportunity like that?”
I was suddenly remembering just how much I hated ice.
But then . . . in the oceanic abyss of this watery world, I’d actually be about as far from the surface ice as it was possible to get.
“Very well,” Lieutenant Walthers said. “Drs. Montgomery and Ortega as mission specialists. D’deen as Galactic cultural liaison. HM2 Carlyle as technical specialist. ET2 Lloyd as pilot. And Gunnery Sergeant Hancock as operational CO and military liaison and forward observer. That’s six. Are we missing anything?”
“I think,” Hancock said, “that we’re good to go.”
“You be careful down there, Hero,” McKean told me. We were standing on the ice, clad in our Mk. 10s, as the dayside wind hissed and whined around us.
“Yeah,” Dubois added. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? Didn’t anyone tell you never to volunteer?”
“I’m a slow learner, I guess.”
“Well, watch your tail down there.”
“At least you won’t have to worry about Kirchner,” I told him. I hesitated, then added, “You have the records I sent you?”
“Yeah. You know you could get in a lot of trouble doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“An enlisted guy prying into the medical records of an officer?” McKean said, shaking his head. “Checking up on him . . . keeping covert records of his behavior? That’s heavy shit, my friend.”
I’d already started worrying about a court-martial once I got home. Oh, there was no question that Kirchner was totally batshit—another of those technical medical terms—but a court of inquiry likely would be taking a very close look at what I’d done in the time leading up to his mental break.
“The only way to prove schizophrenia,” I told him, “is by keeping records of the patient’s behavior over time . . . and putting that together with whatever he cares to tell you. At least in the absence of a brain scan. They’ll need those records to legally order a deep brain scan when we get him home.”
“Carlyle,” McKean said, “they’re going to hang, draw, and quarter you, and then hang you out to dry.”
“And then they’ll keelhaul your sorry ass,” Dubois added.
“Getting keelhauled on a starship sounds pretty serious,” I told them. “I think I’ll take my chances a thousand kilometers down.”
“Good luck, E-Car,” Dubois said.
“Yeah,” McKean said. “Remember you’re still needed back up here to play midwife to a stalk of broccoli.”
“How could I forget?” In fact, I had forgotten. The pregnant M’nangat, D’dnah, and its consorts still wanted me to deliver its buds . . . probably within the next couple of weeks.
I still wasn’t looking forward to that.
A boarding gangway had been lowered between the ice and the deck of the Walsh. I was about to step onto it when Dubois added, over a private channel, “Hey, E-Car?”
“Yeah?”
“Do me a favor?”
“If I can do it a thousand kilometers underwater, sure.”
“Keep a close eye on Gina, would you?”
“Gina Lloyd?” I stared at him through my visor for a second, and then realization dawned. Maybe I am slow. . . . “Not you and—”
“Yeah. Me and Gina.”
“So she’s your secret girlfriend?”
“Fuck. Why do you think I volunteered to come on this wild goose chase? And if you hadn’t beaten me to the punch during the meeting earlier . . .”
“From the sound of it,” I told him, “she doesn’t need anybody taking care of her. Certainly not me!”
“Yeah, but I’d like her to come back topside, y’know?”
I thought of Joy Leighton, waiting for me forty-two light years away.
“I know. Don’t sweat it, Doob. We’ll be back. All of us.”
I almost believed that.
I clung to the safety railing as I made my way across the submersible’s deck, gripping it tightly in the teeth of that unrelenting wind. Walsh was a simple, blunt-ended cigar shape—no conning tower, no control surfaces, and with only a very low swell of her dorsal surface visible above the choppy dark water. She was slightly flattened, however, with a lateral bulge that included the active nanomatrix part of her hull that allowed her to maneuver underwater. Her airlock hatch was open on the flattened portion of her deck’s dorsal surface. Once I descended the ladder to her interior, the airlock wouldn’t simply close, but would be completely filled in with compressed matter. As Haldane’s chief engineer had pointed out, even the slightest weakness in Walsh’s hull would be deadly.
The interior of the submers
ible was cozy, an oval space just eight meters long, three wide, and two high. They’d grown enough seats out of the deck for the six of us, including all the linkages we would need to communicate with Walsh’s AI and direct the craft. The entire curved forward surface of the compartment was a permanent viewall, though the other surfaces could project images of our surroundings as well. There was nothing so primitive on board as portholes, of course. Even the strongest, thickest glasstic would shatter under the pressures we were about to encounter.
This was definitely a no-frills cruise. We would sleep in our chairs. There was a tiny compartment aft, next to the entrance to the bail-out sphere, that would absorb our wastes right through the deck, and which would serve as a sonoshower. Privacy? What’s that? I wondered how Dr. Montgomery and ET2 Lloyd felt about being crammed into a narrow sewer pipe with three guys and a Broc for as long as this mission would require.
Thirty hours—over a day—to reach the mysterious Sierra Five.
And then what?
After removing our suits, we settled down in our seats and let them partially enclose us, the palms of our hands on the palmpads on either arm. D’deen, I saw, was positioned in a special seat individually programmed for him, a flat, padded board rising at a slant from a round bucket. He nestled his tentacles into the bucket and leaned back against the upright, which gently closed around his narrow torso. “Are you going to be okay there?” I asked. I was concerned about the cabin being too warm for him.
I AM QUITE CONTENT, the Broc replied. THE DIFFICULT PART WAS REPROGRAMMING YOUR NANOTECHNIC MATRICES TO GROW M’NANGAT FURNISHINGS.
The others completed securing themselves within the remaining, human-shaped couches. Gina Lloyd was in the left-front seat, right ahead of me, and I admired her competence as she brought up the sonar display on the main viewall, and an instrument display on the screen across her lap. “Walsh ready in all respects for departure,” she said aloud.
“You’re clear for departure, Walsh,” Kemmerer’s voice said in our heads. “Good luck, people.”
The sonar display winked out, replaced by a camera view looking forward from the submarine’s nose. The camera was already under water, but I could see the dance of light from the opening in which we were floating, and the darker shapes of the surrounding ice.
“Gunny?” Lloyd asked. “Give the word.”
“Word,” Hancock said. “Let’s see what this baby’ll do.”
“Submerging,” Lloyd said, and the broken, jagged patterns of red-gold light rose, replaced by a darkness so profound I almost immediately regretted my decision to volunteer. Doob was right. Never volunteer. . . .
But we were dropping rapidly. “Descent rate at ten meters per second,” Lloyd told us.
And our destination was waiting a mere thirty hours below. . . .
Chapter Seventeen
The darkness was absolute, an enveloping and muffling cloak, and Gina Lloyd soon switched back to the sonar imaging, turning deck, overhead, and both sides to viewall displays along with directly forward. We were deliberately pinging the surrounding waters at low power, low enough, we hoped, to not invoke the wrath of the cuttlewhales again. As a result, we were picking up targets, but they were faint. Sierra Five wasn’t much more than a pinpoint directly below us, while Sierra One cruised slowly off to port and occasionally emitted sonar pings of its own.
The Gykr submarine, almost certainly, tracking us.
A small eternity passed as we dropped steadily into the depths, minute dragging after minute. After a time, Lloyd had our AI overlay the optical and sonar imaging, but the darkness was so complete we could see nothing. Even when Lloyd switched on external lighting, our external nano illuminating the surrounding gulf, there was no sign of life save for those two somewhat uncommunicative sonar targets. No fish, or whatever Abyssworld might have evolved that were like fish . . . no invertebrates . . . not even any organic “snow” sifting down from the upper layers as it did on Earth. If not for the obvious exception of the cuttlewhales, I would have guessed that this world was lifeless.
“Sixteen minutes,” Lloyd said from her control seat. “Passing the ten-kilometer mark.
“Ten thousand meters,” I said. “That’s almost as deep as the deepest spot in Earth’s ocean.”
“And here we’ve scarcely begun the descent,” Ortega said.
In a sense, we were flying through the water, angled nose-down about ten degrees, our flattened hull giving us some lift in order to control the descent. Eleven kilometers . . .
Twelve . . .
“Is that target closing on us?” Hancock wanted to know.
“Contact Sierra One is at a range of three kilometers,” the voice of Walsh’s AI said in our heads, “and is closing obliquely at a rate of fifteen kilometers per hour.”
“Convergent course,” Lloyd told us. “I think they’re trying to sneak in closer.”
“I wonder if they have weapons?” Ortega said.
“Unlikely,” Hancock told him. “The only reason to have a submarine on this planet would be to explore the extreme depths . . . and torpedoes or antiship lasers would mean weaknesses built into the hull. I don’t think they’d risk it.”
It was a good point, I thought. I’d been assuming that the Gykr vessel had some sort of weapon—whatever it had been that had destroyed the research station—but the outside pressure now was somewhere around a ton on every square centimeter of our hull. Hatches or torpedo tubes would have been an invitation to disaster. Our external nano-coating could produce outside light, of course, or pick up and transmit external images, but the signals were passed through our CM hull by electrical induction—no openings, no wires, no weakness at any point.
“I hope you’re right, Gunny,” Lloyd said. “Because that Guck boat just turned and accelerated to close the gap. It looks an awful lot like an attack run.”
On the starboard bulkhead, the patch of light representing Sierra One had just sharply narrowed, as though we were seeing it now bow-on. “Range now two point five kilometers,” the AI told us, “and closing at thirty kph.”
Thirty kph—half a kilometer per minute.
“Target Sierra One is accelerating,” the AI added. “Closing now at seventy kilometers per hour.”
“What are they using for motive power?” Hancock asked.
“Sierra One almost certainly is employing a magnetic drive,” the AI replied, “powered by a small quantum tap or equivalent technology.”
“Looks like the same setup we have, Gunny,” Lloyd added.
We were moving through the water under a variant of the Plottel Drive used for interplanetary travel, working against the local magnetic field in order to accelerate and maneuver. I wasn’t certain what our top speed was, but it certainly was in excess of seventy kph.
“Target Sierra One now closing at ninety kilometers per hour,” the AI said. “I am detecting signs of supercavitation.”
Supercavitation happens when an object is moving through a fluid so quickly that a bubble of gas forms around the object, greatly reducing the friction of its passage through the liquid and allowing it to reach extremely high speeds.
“Hang on!” Lloyd called. “This could get nasty!”
Walsh’s deck tilted suddenly, nose down, and I could sense our acceleration deeper into the ocean depths. To either side, visible by our external lighting, the flattened bulges in the sub’s hull were pulling in and contracting, reducing our lift in the water, letting us descend faster. We weren’t flying now so much as we were plunging, arrowing down past the fifteen kilometer mark. Our view into the surrounding darkness became misted over as we began supercavitating as well.
“Sonar target Sierra One is in pursuit,” the AI told us. Its voice was calm and rational enough for it to have been commenting on the weather. “Range one point one kilometer, closing at one hundred kph.”
Closing at that speed . . . which meant it was that much faster than we were. The thing must be pushing two hundred kilometers per
hour.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Montgomery asked.
“I’ve got it flat out now, ma’am,” Lloyd replied. “This thing is a civilian explorer, not a fighter.”
Which begged the question, was the Gykr machine designed for combat rather than for exploration? Or did they simply build everything to military specs, or with a military attitude? From the little we knew about them, the second option seemed more likely.
“Range four hundred meters, closing at one hundred fifteen kph. . . .”
We could hear it now, a high-pitched whine transmitted through water and the compressed matter of our hull, a whine edged with a warbling, stuttering thunder that spoke of tremendous energies released in a small volume of space. Thirty-two meters per second . . . four hundred meters . . . twelve and a half seconds . . . The numbers cascaded unbidden through my in-head as I turned in my seat to look at the fast approaching vehicle.
It came in from the starboard side aft, angled down, and it flashed past so close that I could see our external lights gleaming from dark metal and tortured water. Its shape, an echo of the Walsh, was enveloped in a translucent haze, the visual equivalent of a supersonic aircraft’s shock wave as it rocketed past.
That shock wave struck us broadside and jolted us hard. If our seats hadn’t been gripping us, we all would have been hurled against the bulkhead; for a terrifying second, we hung on our beam, wondering if we were going to flip completely over.
Then Walsh righted herself, at least partway, her sides flaring out under Lloyd’s direction to grab the shock wave and ride it. We turned sharply away from the Gykr vessel’s wake, grabbing for open water. Ahead and below, the Gykr submarine was turning, making a broad, open half circle as it slowed . . . then began accelerating again.
In space, you’re moving through hard vacuum, which means the limit to your maneuvering is the amount of acceleration the crew can stand. In a fluid medium—in air or, even more, underwater—you use control surfaces to react against that medium in order to maneuver . . . and the slower combatant often has the advantage in any attempt to outmaneuver the enemy. It took long seconds for the Gykr machine to complete its turn, and the radius of that turn must have been five kilometers or more.