Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  And then I tripped over something large and hard in the darkness.

  I was sure I must be close to the end of that seemingly endless passageway, and we’d not yet been challenged. Stepping back, cautioning Ortega to stop, I decided to take a chance. I pulled my penflash out of my M-7 and directed it at the deck ahead.

  It was another Gykr, curled into that same, familiar fetal position, and quite dead. I picked up the plasma weapon lying beside it. “You want this?” I asked, offering it to Ortega.

  “Hell, no,” he said. He gestured with the Republic-12. “I barely know which end is the business end of this thing.”

  “Fair enough.” At least I had fired one of these things before. It wasn’t hard to operate—hold this and press that—but it was clumsy for a human hand. Gykr manipulators are combinations of one long claw and six spidery, double-jointed fingers, and the grip is damned awkward for a human hand. I felt a bit foolish facing that last door at the end of the long tunnel with an alien plasma weapon in each hand, but I wasn’t about to leave the second weapon lying on the deck.

  I was staring at the door, wondering how to make it work, when it puckered suddenly and flowed open. According to our sonar scans, that door should open into the sunken base at an airlock.

  Four Guckers were waiting on the other side of that door, weapons raised and pointing straight at my head. “Drop weapons!” a harsh voice clattered in my head. “Drop now!”

  There was nothing Ortega or I could do but comply. . . .

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Gykrs crouched in a semicircle in front of us, heads low to the deck, threatening us with their plasma weapons. Behind them, in the near darkness of a ruined lab, I could see several humans, dirty, ragged, and unshaven . . . about what you would expect of people cut off from most technological amenities for several weeks.

  “Do what they tell you, please,” one of the humans said. He was an older man . . . and I thought he looked familiar. It took me a moment to place him, though—Dr. James Eric Murdock, the commander of the first Abyssworld research base.

  “Dr. Murdock?” I said. “Are you and your people okay?”

  “Do . . . do I know you, sir?”

  “Your virtual avatar was my guide in a docuinteractive, sir,” I said.

  “No speech!” the Gykr growled. The words were coming through my in-head circuitry, which meant that the Gykrs had their own cerebral implants, along with the software that let them translate their thoughts into Gal3, which in turn could be translated into English by my own implants. That, I thought, was a considerable relief. Dealing with hostile aliens when you don’t share a common language can leave you with no options at all except gunfire.

  I opened a second channel back to the Walsh. “Trouble!” I snapped. “We have a number of human survivors, but they’ve been captured by Gykr—”

  “No speech!” The Gykr reared up on its splayed, long hind legs, its shorter forelegs weaving in an agitated manner. Apparently, it was linked in closely enough with the local communications Net that it could pick up any back-channel chatter that might be going on in the area. Secret conversations would be impossible.

  I was able to drop the security interlock on my cerebral hardware. I wouldn’t be able to get a direct signal out without being detected, apparently, but perhaps the others could listen in over the local Net.

  I hoped.

  “Take it easy,” I thought at him. “We are not a threat to you. . . .”

  It was the only approach that occurred to me. From the little we new of Gykr psychology, they were easily triggered by the perception of a threat, and their response tended to be immediate and violent.

  It was easy to think of them as hostile alien monstrosities . . . or as somewhat dim-witted sociopaths who would kill you as soon as look at you . . . but the truth, I knew, had to be considerably different. They had developed a technological civilization sophisticated enough to give them starflight . . . after evolving deep within a solitary rogue planet light years from any other world. How had they managed to pull that off?

  If what we thought we knew of their origins was accurate, they’d evolved from marine organisms deep within a lightless ocean . . . or possibly inside lightless caves warmed by upwelling magma within their dark and isolated world’s crust. How long had it taken them to develop even simple tools, smelting, their equivalent of an industrial revolution, electronics? . . .

  How long before Gykr explorers first tunneled up to the frozen surface of their world, wearing artificial armor to protect them from the airlessness and cold?

  With eyes evolved to see the near infrared, the heat within their caverns . . . how long before they even became aware of the stars?

  Humankind had gone from primitive experiments with electricity to putting men on Earth’s moon in two centuries, more or less . . . and to sending ships to the nearer stars in three and a half. It might have taken the Gykr a million years to reach the stars . . . 10 million . . . or more. . . .

  The fact that they had done so, to my mind, was an astonishing statement of the sheer persistent determination of life over adversity, of intelligence over darkness. After such a journey, I thought, they might be excused for a certain lack of social graces.

  The upright Gykr appeared to be considering my words and, slowly, it dropped the forward part of its body back to the deck. That odd, golden, compound eye-ring that encircled both the ventral and dorsal surfaces of its head gave it all-round vision, and I knew it was still watching me closely.

  But just how closely was that? According to the information I remembered from Gykr entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica, their visual range overlapped ours only slightly. They could see red and orange light, possibly the way we see blue or violet, but their visual range was actually centered down in the near infrared. That compound eye-ring would be best for seeing movement, not sharp detail . . . and the large, dark simple eyes extending from either side of that blunt excuse for a head probably saw only heat, fuzzy and less than precise. Gykr eyes obviously were evolved for seeing in the dark or near darkness, by the wan and ruddy glow of subsurface volcanic vents, perhaps, and not in the levels of light taken for granted by humans.

  Was there anything there I could use? I didn’t see anything obvious. They would still see if I stooped for one of the plasma weapons lying on the deck at my feet.

  “Your . . . underwater vessel . . . is mine . . . now,” the voice rasped.

  “Mine,” not “ours.” That might be an artifact of the Gykr tendency toward a hive mentality. Did the four beings in front of us really share a hive mind? Could they even be thought of as individuals? Or did the word merely identify the speaker as the leader of this group? I didn’t know.

  “You’re trapped down here, aren’t you?” I said, looking for a way to turn a Gykr monologue into a conversation. “Just like us. . . .”

  “My vessel . . . did not . . . return.”

  No, I thought, it damned well hadn’t. The Gykr sub must have dropped some of them off here, then returned toward the surface where it had encountered the Walsh coming down. These Gykr were marooned, and the only way back to the surface was on board the Walsh.

  “We’re here to rescue you,” I said. “All of you.”

  “You are . . . here . . . to rescue you.”

  “We are not your enemy,” I said. “We’re not at war, you and I. We can help you.”

  I could almost see the Gykr struggling with alien concepts. Xenosophontologists back on Earth had speculated that the Gykr had no concept for “war,” in the same way that a fish might not understand the concept of “water.” And yet they had accepted the treaty of Tanis, at least more or less.

  Damn it, was there something there I could use? The Battle of Tanis had been a one-sided affair, with the Fifth Fleet catching a much smaller Gykr squadron and supply base by surprise. And . . . when we’d arrived in the GJ 1214 system, that lone Gykr starship had run for it, rather than putting up a fight.

  I wou
ld need access to a history database—something I didn’t have right now, a thousand kilometers underwater—but I thought I remembered that in the forty-some years since the Battle of Tanis, there’d been numerous Gykr raids and skirmishes with the bastards, but nothing like a stand-up war. Maybe that idea of “fight-or-fight,” suggesting that they always attacked no matter what the tactical situation, wasn’t entirely true.

  Could it be true, even, for any species worthy of the term intelligent? There would always be situations that were simply too dire, too unbalanced in number, too hopeless to permit an attack-at-any-odds response. Creatures that always attacked and never ran away when the odds were against them were unlikely to survive in the long haul. Evolution was damned efficient at culling those who were reckless.

  It could be that Tanis had taught the Gykr a measure of caution.

  “You would have to take our vessel by force,” I told them. “I don’t think you have the numbers to do that.”

  It was pure bluff. The people still back on board the Walsh were completely unarmed.

  “How many . . . of you . . . on vessel?”

  “Twenty,” I said. “Heavily armed.”

  “You are . . . twenty?”

  “Twenty-two,” I replied. “Dr. Ortega and I didn’t know there were more of you here when we left our vessel.” I wondered if I should mention it, then pushed ahead. “We killed the two Gykr we met in the passageway. They tried to kill us, so we felt . . . justified.”

  The Gykr appeared to be uncertain. I couldn’t read their body language, but that was okay because I was willing to bet that they couldn’t read ours, either.

  “The deaths . . . of two units . . . is of no consequence.”

  “I repeat,” I said, “we are not at war. We can cooperate to get out of this.”

  “You will . . . leave the vessel,” the Gykr said after a moment, as though it had just seen the perfect solution. “All but . . . the vessel’s guide. You will . . . remain here with . . . the rest of you.”

  The vessel’s guide . . . they meant our pilot, Gina Lloyd. And the rest of us would be trapped on this ice-bound derelict a thousand kilometers beneath the surface. That wasn’t quite what I had in mind by cooperate.

  As it spoke, I was trying to assess the Gykr’s worldview, the way it saw the world around it and interacted with it. Thanks, perhaps, to an e-entertainment industry favoring simple plots and exciting action sequences, most people see aliens as people . . . funny-looking, perhaps, and with some odd ideas now and again, but beings essentially the same as them, with the same values and the same ways of responding to stimuli, with reactions as varied as anger, love, hatred, or fascination. And, of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

  We’d assumed the Gykrs to be a hive mentality. Their entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica had got us thinking along those lines. That did not mean that all Gykrs everywhere were a single vast and complex individual—which was what most people thought when they considered termite mounds or bee swarms. No, what it seemed to mean in this case was that Gykrs had leaders within any given group, and those leaders did most of the thinking and communicating for the whole. I noticed that all four of the Gykrs in front of me appeared identical. Nothing marked one off as distinct or different from the others . . . but one was doing all of the talking while the others just . . . crouched there.

  Well, you could say the same thing about the U.S. Marines, or of any well-disciplined but non-democratic organization of humans. The difference, perhaps, was that Marines had to be carefully trained to be both able and willing to set aside their personal urges and reactions—like fear—and accept what was necessary for the entire group. Charging an enemy plasma-gun nest—or, say, a space station occupied by dangerous terrorists—was lunacy for any individual. Lunacy, however, might be necessary to prevent those terrorists from dropping a small planetoid onto a densely populated Earth.

  The Gykr had evolved within an environment utterly hostile and alien to human sensibilities, and to do so they would have evolved a native sense of discipline as thorough and as rigorous as that of any human Marine. They had to have done so.

  Marines are the way they are because of training, and that gives them a certain amount of flexibility. The Gykr are the way they are because of breeding, the way their brains are hardwired from birth or hatching or whatever it is they do.

  And that was the tactical advantage I was looking for.

  “I’m not the leader of this group,” I told the Gykr. “I’m not in charge, I don’t give the orders. I can’t order everyone off our vessel. The others would never agree.”

  All of the Gykr stirred uneasily. “ ‘Leader’?” the one said. “We are having . . . trouble . . . understanding this.”

  Well, of course that would be true. The concept was so deeply rooted in their evolutionary design they might not even be aware of it . . . like a fish unaware of the water within which it swam.

  “Do you have a word,” I asked, treading carefully, “for the one of you who makes decisions for the group? Who speaks for the group?”

  I heard a harsh clack in my in-head, evidently the Gykr word itself, untranslated. “It means . . . ‘chosen.’ ”

  “I see.” That made sense. Not “chosen” as in democratically elected or anything so cerebral as determining who was best to lead. “Chosen” as in chosen by circumstances, or by an uncaring universe. A group of Gykr finds itself isolated, and one among them becomes the leader, making decisions for the entire group, which automatically rallies around the flag. Perhaps there were subtle biochemical cues that nudged the process along; the selection process probably wasn’t due to chance.

  I remembered reading of certain species of fish in Earth’s oceans. Clownfish schools have a female fish at the top of the hierarchy; when she dies, the most dominant male in the school will change into a female and take over. Among wrasses, the largest female will turn into a male and take over the harem if the school’s male leader dies. The choosing of a Gykr leader might be similar, although apparently the condition was temporary. A leader is needed, and one appears, with all others falling into line and following orders.

  As a survival tool, the process would neatly avoid the dangers of warring tribes or egoistic posturings or the idiocy of power for power’s sake alone within a deadly and unforgiving environment.

  “Among humans,” I told the Gykr, “we’re all chosen. We agree to cooperate to achieve certain goals, and we’ll agree to accept orders from one trained or experienced individual . . . but if I give orders that the others disagree with, like leaving the submarine, they will not do what I say.”

  “But . . . if the Akr strikes, you would be devoured!”

  I could actually hear the emotion shaking behind the Gykr’s words. Human individuality must be sheer insanity from the Gykr point of view.

  “You’ve been a Galaxy-faring species for a long time,” I said. “You must have encountered other species who think . . . who behave the way we do.”

  “Not . . . we, personally. We have heard . . . stories . . .”

  I remembered that the Gykr had something like 10 percent fewer synaptic connections within their brains. Knowledge might circulate within the entire species as hearsay or legend or be accessed, as with us, through a download from the local Net, but in general they would respond more to habit, to tradition, or to biochemical tides within their neural makeups than they did to education.

  It was tempting to think of them as stupid, but I resisted the thought. Their system worked well enough for them, as proven by the fact that they’d not only survived the night-shrouded world of their birth, but freed themselves from it.

  The distinction was bogus in any case. One version of the IQ scale designated normal as anything between 85 and 115, so an average species IQ of 90 certainly qualified as human-normal.

  “Your ship abandoned you here, didn’t it?” I said in what I hoped was a light and conversational tone. “You need to get back to the surface, so
your ship can return and pick you up?”

  “My submersible . . . has not returned . . . as expected. The . . . Akr . . . might have attacked. . . .”

  That was the second time the being had used that untranslatable term. In context, I assumed that it was the Gykr name for some sort of sea monster in the ancient ocean of their world. It took me a moment longer to realize that the Gykr must be referring to the cuttlewhales.

  And that was an entirely different piece of the puzzle. We’d battled cuttlewhales on the surface ice—and I’d watched a Gykr devoured by one. And yet, a cuttlewhale had . . . helped us, if that was the word, by swallowing the Walsh and transporting us hundreds of kilometers deeper into the ocean, to bring us here.

  “Then let me offer you this: Our vessel can’t take all of you back to the surface at once. We can provide transport for you to the surface . . . one at a time. Each trip our submersible makes will carry one of you, plus several of the humans trapped here, to safety. Our pilot will then return for another load . . . and another, until all of us have reached safety.”

  It was a monstrous gamble on several levels. By limiting each trip to one Gykr, I knew we could maintain control over them—Gunny Hancock or Dr. Montgomery watching it with a plasma weapon in his good hand. It would also avoid letting the Gykr remaining below know that I’d exaggerated the number of armed humans on board the Walsh.

  But each trip would take a hell of a long time unless one of the cuttlewhales decided again to intervene and shorten the passages for us. Would a lone Gykr assume the role of leader during the long voyage to the surface, and perhaps make its own decisions about whether or not to go along with the process?

  I was reminded of an ancient riddle. A man reaches a ferry on a river with two chickens and a fox. The ferry will carry two at a time; if the fox is left alone with a chicken, the chicken will be killed. So how does the man get across with his livestock intact?