Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  Then I pulled back and had the ’bots do a simple electrical activity scan. I hoped that M’nangat brains operated on the same sort of biochemical-electrical interaction as human neurons. The chemistry, I noted, was different, but there were still exchanges of ions across synaptic gaps, creating what amounted to a very low-voltage current.

  I would need a full brain-function scan back in Haldane’s sick bay to be sure, but it looked to me like D’deen’s brain was working okay . . . but quiescent.

  In other words, he was unconscious.

  “I don’t see any cellular damage in D’deen’s brain,” I told the others. “Nothing burned out, or bleeding, or anything like that. He’s just been knocked unconscious.”

  I just hoped that what I was seeing wasn’t the Broc equivalent of deep coma, or that there was some other serious medical issue that I simply didn’t recognize because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

  I made certain that D’deen’s seat was holding him securely. “Did anyone else . . . see anything?” I asked. “During that blast of static?”

  “I did,” Montgomery said. “A white ball against a black background.”

  “I thought it might be the planet, the planet’s nightside, seen from space,” Hancock said.

  “It looked uniformly lit to me,” Ortega said. “And there was no local sun, no stars. I don’t know what it was.”

  “I think I . . . heard something,” Lloyd said, hesitant.

  “Oh?” Hancock said. “What?”

  “It was hard to make out . . . but something like the words . . . ‘help us’?”

  “Interesting,” Hancock said, frowning. “Does anyone have any idea, any idea at all, what happened just then?”

  “I’m not sure, Gunny,” I said, “but I think maybe somebody was trying to talk to us.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever . . . whatever is running things down here.”

  “The cuttlewhale gods?” Ortega said. He laughed, a sharp, almost barking laugh that felt uncomfortably close to hysteria. “And they want us to help them?”

  “But how did they do that?” Hancock wanted to know.

  “You know, Gunny,” I said slowly, thinking it out carefully with each word that I spoke, “if you have something big enough, intelligent enough, powerful enough to create a pseudo life form as impressive as the cuttlewhales . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I just wonder if there’s anything they can’t do.”

  “Explain that,” Hancock said.

  I shook my head. “I can’t. But . . . okay. Somehow, someone interfered with our in-head circuits, right? That would have to be either a very powerful radio signal, or possibly a focused magnetic induction of some kind.”

  “You lost me there, Doc,” Montgomery said.

  “That’s because I really don’t know what I’m talking about,” I replied. “But maybe a cuttlewhale carrying us inside its throat can somehow sense us, and the wiring inside our brains. Or maybe it’s . . . someone, something, working through the cuttlewhale, using it like a teleoperated probe or a remote explorer.”

  “Through a CM hull?” Ortega said. “I don’t think so.”

  I shrugged. “Why not? We use wave induction to send signals through our hull . . . for the outside lights, and to pick up vid images.”

  “Point,” Ortega said. “But this ‘someone’ of yours would have to be very, very sophisticated technologically.”

  “So, it sends us a signal. A message. Maybe it’s learned enough through our AI’s communications attempts to make a guess about how our electronics work.”

  “Somehow, Doc,” Montgomery said, “I find it very hard to imagine an underwater species understanding electronics!”

  “Why? Electricity conducts through saltwater.”

  “They would have had to develop a lot of science first,” she said. “Starting with metallurgy . . . smelting metals, developing ways to make wires, electromagnets, radio transmission in a medium that absorbs radio waves . . . uh-uh. No fire, no metalworking.”

  “The way we did things on Earth, you’re right. But maybe this someone didn’t do things the same way we did. Maybe it learned to smelt metals at hot, undersea volcanic vents. Maybe it learned tricks with exotic ice shot through with metallic impurities. Maybe—”

  The Walsh gave another lurch, and the deck suddenly leveled off.

  “I think we’ve arrived,” Lloyd told us. “Look!”

  Directly ahead, the light still shining off the Walsh’s outer hull was now illuminating a widening tunnel or passage. We felt a kind of surge through the deck as the submarine lurched forward . . . and then . . . my gods. . . .

  We’d emerged within a vast, clear, empty volume lit blue-green by the Walsh’s external lights. For hundreds of meters in all directions, the water was sparklingly transparent, fading to translucence in the distance.

  “Out of the belly of the beast . . .” Ortega said, his voice almost reverently hushed.

  “My God,” Hancock said. “What is that?”

  It was difficult to know exactly what we were looking at, and impossible to determine a scale of what we were seeing. Above us, the blue-green glow faded rapidly into the blackness of the Abyss, but below, the water appeared to be . . . thick. Gelatinous, perhaps, something not quite water, but not solid either, something spreading out in motionless waves and folds and hills and gently rolling valleys extending into the distance in all directions as far as we could see. It reflected our light in odd ways, creating a shimmering, diffuse effect that was indescribably beautiful. Was it ice? Or . . . something like thick water? I couldn’t tell.

  “Do you think we could have a sonar ping sent down into that translucent stuff?” I asked.

  “I advise against it,” Ortega said. “Remember what happened when we used sonar from the surface.”

  “That was at extremely high power and low frequency,” I said. “The cuttlewhales weren’t reacting to low-power scans.”

  “Try it,” Hancock said.

  “Pinging . . .” Lloyd said. “Low power.”

  Sonar targets appeared on the viewalls, overlaying the shimmering panorama of light and water.

  “We’re getting odd reflections off that jelly stuff,” she said. She paused, then added, “it’s more like refractions . . . and the sound waves are moving a lot faster through it.”

  “Sonar indicates the water beneath us is unusually dense,” the AI added. “It appears to be fluid, and may represent an extremely diffuse form of amorphous ice VIII.”

  I didn’t remember offhand the characteristics of ice VIII, except for one. All of the exotic ices from ice III on were denser than water . . . which meant that they would sink rather than float like normal ice Ih. Quite possibly, most of the Abyssworld ocean was a fluid form of ice, solid or semisolid, but dense enough to sink to the seafloor thousands of kilometers below. It was even possible that what we were looking at was not on the list of fifteen known phases of ice, that it was something really exotic—ice XVI, perhaps.

  And in this environment . . . why not? I checked with the AI and noted that we were at a depth of close to a thousand kilometers, and that the pressure on our hull was now in excess of ninety tons per square centimeter. At such pressures, the exotic would be commonplace—ice that acted like fluid, perhaps, or water that acted like thick, glassy gelatin.

  “What the hell,” Hancock said, leaning forward, “is that?”

  He was staring at a sonar target forward and slightly below us.

  “Can you magnify the image?” Ortega asked.

  “Here you go . . .”

  The image expanded, centered on the object we’d earlier tagged as target Sierra Five. Lloyd gasped, and I nearly shouted.

  Sierra Five was a perfect sphere floating within the glassy-water zone right at the border between ocean and amorphous ice.

  A white sphere identical to the thing I’d glimpsed during that burst of in-head static earlier.

  “Curiouser
and curiouser,” Montgomery said, thoughtful. “Miss Lloyd . . . can you perhaps probe that sphere with the sonar? A very tight beam?”

  “To get an idea of what it’s made of?” she said. “Maybe. Just a sec. . . .”

  “Whatever it is,” Ortega said, “it must be artificial. You don’t get perfect spheres in nature.”

  “You might,” I said. “Remember, sir, down here the absolute best shape to resist pressure is a sphere. The pressure would be evenly distributed over the entire surface that way.”

  “As near as I can tell,” Lloyd informed us, “that thing is ice.”

  “Ordinary water ice?” I asked. “Or something exotic?”

  “Ordinary ice . . . I think. It’s under a lot of pressure.”

  I pulled up the data on exotic ices I’d downloaded earlier. Several ice phases, I saw, could be formed by applying insane pressure to ordinary ice, and it was likely that this had happened here. But there was no way to tell without moving in close and taking a sample.

  “That’s odd . . .” Lloyd said after a few moments. We were moving slowly toward Sierra Five, which was now only a few kilometers distant.

  “What?” Hancock asked her.

  “I’m getting . . . I think it’s a signal!”

  “What kind of signal?”

  She put the sound on the cabin speakers. The surrounding water, it seemed, was filled with noise—a kind of low-grade rushing sound, punctuated by creaks, groans, clicks, and whistles. It was possible, more than possible, that we were hearing life out there in those normally lightless depths.

  “I don’t hear any—” Ortega started to say.

  “Shh!” Lloyd hissed. “Wait . . . there!”

  I heard it. We all did. A clank—the unmistakable sound of metal striking metal. And again . . . and again. The noise was muffled, and so faint that it almost wasn’t there at all.

  Clank-clank-clank . . . clank . . . clank . . . clank . . . clank-clank-clank . . .

  “The cuttlewhales?” Montgomery asked.

  “Shit, no,” Hancock said, shaking his head. “That’s someone banging on a bulkhead with a wrench!”

  “Or a piece of pipe,” Lloyd agreed.

  “Another Gykr sub?” Ortega suggested.

  “If it was, they’d have jumped us by now,” I said. “That sound is close. I think it’s coming from Sierra Five.”

  Clank-clank-clank . . . clank . . . clank . . . clank . . . clank-clank-clank . . .

  “Christ on a crutch!” Hancock shouted. “That’s Morse!”

  “What is Morse?” Montgomery asked.

  “A kind of code. From centuries ago, before radio. People sent dots and dashes representing letters over wires, and later with primitive radio, wireless transmission.”

  “So . . . do you know this code?” Ortega asked.

  “Don’t need to! They’re sending SOS!”

  “That used to be some kind of a distress call, didn’t it?” I asked.

  “Not a distress call. The distress call . . . the international signal for help. It means ‘save our ship.’ ”

  I was amazed that Hancock knew this bit of historical trivia. We’d had voice radio and in-head transmissions for so long now that this Morse Code he was talking about must by now be of interest only to historians.

  “The first use of ‘SOS’ in an emergency radio broadcast was the HMS Titanic, when she sank in 1912,” he went on. “Before that, they’d used a different code group . . . ‘CQD.’ ”

  “How the hell do you know this stuff?” Ortega asked.

  Hancock shrugged. “I’ve always been a nut on maritime history,” he said.

  That made sense. I knew that Gunny Hancock cared passionately for his Marines, and that passion obviously extended to arcane tidbits of Marine history or ancient military technology. When he went in for rejuvenation some year, he’d have his hands full deciding what memories to cull.

  “There’s something else,” I said.

  “What’s that, son?” Ortega asked.

  “ ‘Save our ship,’ ” I said. “And when we got blasted by that static a while ago, Gina heard the words ‘help us.’ ”

  “Are you sure of what you heard, Lloyd?” Hancock asked her.

  “As sure as I can be, Gunny. It was faint . . . real faint, almost not there at all.”

  “I’d say that this code we’re hearing validates what she thinks she heard,” Montgomery pointed out. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “What?” Hancock asked her.

  “That white sphere out there is what’s left of Murdock Base . . . and there are still survivors on board.”

  “My God!” Hancock said.

  “She’s right,” I said. “It makes sense. The wreckage of the base would sink to the point where it was the same specific gravity as the water around it. Or maybe it sank until it’s floating on that gelatinous liquid ice.”

  “But the base wasn’t a sphere!” Ortega said.

  “No . . . but they would have had an external nanomatrix, same as we do,” I said. “Suppose they programmed their external nano to grab water molecules and reassemble them into hexagonal crystals.”

  “Freeze them, you mean,” Hancock said.

  “Freeze enough of them to make a giant ice ball,” I said, nodding. “To withstand the increasing pressure as it sank.”

  “That’s . . . crazy . . .” Hancock said.

  “I don’t know how else they would have survived the pressure this deep,” I said. “If they were sinking slowly enough, they might have been able to keep adding on more and more ice, and letting the ice get squeezed until it was essentially incompressible. If their original dome was CM, it might work.”

  “ ‘Save us,’ ” Montgomery said. “A call for help. . . .”

  Save us . . .

  At dead-slow speed, we continued our approach to Sierra Five.

  Chapter Twenty

  “There’s something else,” Montgomery said as we approached the huge dull-white sphere adrift in the eerie light. “The cuttlewhales . . . they deliberately brought us down here. They want to help!”

  “Looks that way,” Ortega replied. “Still, we’re best off if we don’t jump to wild conclusions.”

  “What else are we supposed to think?” I said. “It would have taken us over a day to get down here at a steady descent rate of ten meters per second. That cuttlewhale swallowed us, brought us here, and let us go, bang on target.”

  “Where is that cuttlewhale, anyway?” Hancock asked.

  “Astern,” Lloyd said. “And drawing off. I’m picking up a lot of them in the area . . . over two hundred. They seem to be keeping their distance.”

  “They dropped us off, then withdrew to a discreet distance,” Montgomery said. “To observe? To appear non-threatening?”

  “Maybe just to watch what we do,” Hancock said. “And speaking of which . . . what can we do? If Dr. Montgomery is right and that’s our base . . . we’re going to have a hard time just getting in there. And the Walsh is way too small to take more than a handful of survivors to the surface at a time.”

  “How many people were stationed at the base?” Lloyd wanted to know.

  “Eighty-five humans,” Hancock told her. He glanced over his shoulder at D’deen, still unconscious in his bowl, before adding, “And twelve Brocs.”

  “Ninety-seven,” I said, “would make things a bit crowded in here.”

  “How thick is that ice?” Ortega asked.

  “The original central dome of the station was about thirty meters across,” Hancock said. “That sphere is . . . what? A hundred meters wide?”

  “Almost that,” Lloyd confirmed. “Sonar readings give a diameter ninety-eight point one meters.”

  “Close enough. So assuming the base itself is at the exact center of all that, it’s underneath a minimum of thirty-five meters of super-compressed ice.”

  “It might not be that bad,” Lloyd said. “We have a see-through.”

  One of the bulkhead view
alls brought up a translucent image of the sphere. “Sound waves travel through solid structure,” Lloyd told us, “and their backscatter can give us an idea of what’s inside.”

  “Sonograms,” Montgomery said. “So where’s the baby?”

  “We can see a kind of hollow area inside,” Lloyd said. On the image, the dome inside the ice, given a yellow color by the computer, had a broken, crumpled look, but a deep purple blob at the center suggested an internal void. A slender purple shaft ran from the interior space to within a few meters of the outside surface.

  “What’s that?” I asked. “An access shaft?”

  “I think so,” Hancock said, studying the image closely. “I’m not sure how it’s holding up under the pressure, though.”

  “The borders of that shaft are CM,” Lloyd said. “I think they must have built it by cannibalizing other parts of the dome itself with construction nano.”

  “It certainly looks like the way in,” Hancock said. “Let’s get in close.”

  The Walsh slowly moved to within twenty meters of the sphere and carefully circled it, probing with her sonar. Lloyd was using a lower-frequency pinging now, the better to penetrate ice and CM metal, but there seemed to be no response from the distant, watching cuttlewhales. Perhaps they’d thought of the earlier, extremely loud sonar pulses as a hostile act, but now knew that we were using them to feel our way through the depths.

  At close range, we were able to get a bit more detail on the sunken base’s interior, but not much. Sound imaging is wretchedly imprecise for fine detail, compared to electromagnetic radiation. We couldn’t tell if there were people moving around inside or not. It was all blobs and fuzziness inside.

  “The survivors have stopped banging,” Hancock observed.

  “They probably heard our sonar,” Lloyd told him. “They stopped to listen.”

  “Give them one ping . . . then two more.”

  A moment later, an answer came back. Clank . . . clank . . . clank.

  “I’d say we’ve established communications,” Montgomery said.

  “Great,” Ortega said. “So what do we do about it?”

  “We see about getting inside,” Hancock replied. “Lloyd? Take us in close. Put us up next to where that long passageway is.”