Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  Obviously, you took the fox across first, went back for one chicken, carried it across, then brought the fox back with you to the near bank and left it there when you picked up the second chicken. You could then make a third crossing to retrieve the fox.

  This situation wasn’t quite that simple, but there were ways to guarantee the safety of the human chickens.

  “You and I will remain here,” I added, “until the very last trip. So that you can trust me.”

  “We do not . . . understand . . . the term . . . ‘trust.’ ”

  Well, that stood to reason, didn’t it? “You trust your chosen to make the appropriate decisions in a group,” I suggested.

  “No. We accept that . . . necessary decisions . . . are made.”

  “Close enough.” The Gykr appeared to be far more passive in their relationships with one another, again, the result, I guessed, of the biochemical imperatives that had arisen through their evolutionary history. “If we’re going to get out of this trap, humans and Gykr together, we’re going to have to cooperate. That is a necessary decision, agreed?”

  “A decision might be made . . . to kill . . . all of you here,” the Gykr replied, impassive, “and take your vessel . . . for my own use. Or . . . you all remain here . . . while we and your vessel’s guide . . . make the ascent.”

  The Gykr’s curious, broken mode of conversation was fast becoming annoying. It was as though the being had to stop and think about each phrase before speaking it.

  “We won’t agree to that,” I said. “We don’t trust you. But we have a means of working together, so that all of us can get out of this.”

  I wondered, though, about that Gykr starship. On board the Haldane, we’d assumed that they’d be back, probably with a larger fleet. There was the distinct possibility that we would return to the surface and find Haldane fled, with a Gykr fleet in complete possession of the surface of GJ 1214 I.

  “We could . . . kill all of you.”

  “Can you?” I said. “All of us in here, yes. You have the weapons. But can you attack our submarine, and everyone on board? Without damaging the vessel so badly that it can’t undock? And I promise you . . . if you kill the humans on this station, the humans on board our submarine will never trust you, never work with you, never agree to cooperate with you. You will be trapped down here in the darkness, at the mercy of the . . . of the Akr, forever. . . .”

  The Gykr stirred, again uneasy. They were definitely on new and uncertain ground. The question was, Were they flexible enough to overcome hardwired evolutionary conditions and try something as alien to them as interspecies cooperation?

  “Tell you what,” I added. “If your ship is waiting for us when we reach the surface, we can agree to turn control of the transfer over to one of them . . . a new chosen, one of yours.”

  “Doc!” Ortega said, startled. “What are you saying?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a foregone conclusion, isn’t it?” I asked him. “If the Gykr are in control up there, they’ll take command of the Walsh anyway, no matter what we do. We’ll be forced to trust them to come get the rest of us.”

  “I don’t like it . . .”

  “Neither do I. You have another suggestion?”

  “What you offer . . . is acceptable,” the Gykr chosen said after another long moment’s pause. “I see no . . . reasonable alternative.”

  “You will permit us full contact with our vessel.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will put down your weapons. As have we.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we will work together in order to survive.”

  “Yes.”

  As an interstellar treaty, it had a few shortcomings, but it was the best we could hope for at the moment. I exchanged thoughts with Hancock, back on board the Walsh. As it happened, they’d been able to follow most of the exchange, having picked up on the fact that both Ortega and I had killed our privacy interlocks.

  “You done good, Doc,” Hancock said. “We’ll make a Marine of you yet.”

  “Thanks, Gunny. There are still twenty of you over there, heavily armed, right?”

  “Right.”

  That, I knew, was the weakest part of the plan. It seemed unlikely that we’d be able to get one of our weapons over to the Walsh without the Gykr knowing about it. Once the first Gykr came on board the Walsh, he would realize that things were not as I’d represented them. If he was in communication with the other three Gykr, the whole situation could change in an instant.

  As it would if a landing party from the Gykr starship was waiting for us topside.

  “Tell ’em, Doc,” Hancock said, “that we’ve removed all weapons from the Walsh’s bridge, and that there’s just four of us here, okay? And the Gykr and the base survivors can ride up with us. The armed Marines are in the main compartment aft.”

  “Did you hear that, Chosen?” I asked the temporary Gykr leader.

  “We . . . did.”

  How long could we carry off the bluff? Well . . . once the Walsh decoupled from the docking collar, submarine and base would be cut off from each other. It would be up to Hancock to continue the deception on the Walsh. Maybe he had a means of cobbling together something that looked like a weapon. Or maybe he actually had a holdout somewhere on board; Marines often did.

  The idea was to keep the Gykr here calm and reasonably satisfied as we transferred them, one by one, to the surface.

  One of the uncommunicative Gykrs went through the airlock into the access tunnel, along with eight human survivors and one M’nangat. I braced myself for some sort of protest or scene . . . but eventually we heard some muffled, metallic sounds and felt a distant tremor through the deck. Walsh had just cast off from the station and was on her way to the surface.

  Unfortunately, the base did not have any outside nano to provide us with vid images of what was going on. Whatever had been out there had been encased in the ice shell deliberately woven around what was left of the base, so we were blind to everything outside the base’s crumpled interior.

  I would have liked to see if one of the cuttlewhales had moved in to give us another assist.

  “So . . . Dr. Murdock,” I said. “What the hell happened here?”

  His eyes shifted to the remaining Gykr. “We were . . . attacked,” he said. “A bombardment from orbit. The ice around and under us melted enough that the weight of the main base caused us to break through and sink.”

  “But how did you end up here?” Ortega asked. “Floating . . . but a thousand kilometers down!”

  “Our specific gravity,” Murdock said with a wan smile, “the ratio of CM hull to internal air space, was . . . low enough that we sank fairly slowly. It was a near thing, though. The pressure was seriously beginning to deform the hull before we could reprogram the external hull nano to begin adding layers of ice . . . a jury-rigged pressure hull.”

  I’d not closely examined the base interior, not with all of the back-and-forth with the aliens . . . but I could see now what he meant. The main lab occupied perhaps a quarter of the original dome, but the bulkheads had been crumpled inward under tremendous force, buckling and folding to give the compartment the feel of something more like a natural cavern than an architectural structure. I estimated that well over half of the original internal space had been taken over by collapsing CM hull structure.

  “As for why we’re motionless here,” Murdock continued, “we couldn’t see out, didn’t know what was happening. Before we were attacked, we’d probed as deeply as we could with sonar, and discovered what we think is a layer of exotic ice at this depth. Maybe we’re aground on that.”

  “That is the case,” Ortega told him. “We’re hypothesizing a kind of soft slush of exotic ice in an amorphous state . . . maybe ice VII or ice VIII . . . maybe something even stranger.”

  “We’ve learned that the cuttlewhales are made of ice VII,” I added. “Certain metals and other exotic ices mixed in . . . but it’s organic ice VII. I think it likely that what the b
ase is resting on is a layer of organic ice VII.”

  “Wait-wait,” Ortega said, startled. “Organic ice? Like the cuttlewhales?”

  “The cuttlewhales evolved somewhere,” I said, “and somehow. The entire substrate of compressed amorphous ice VII might actually be alive.”

  “I don’t think I can accept that,” the environmental planetologist said.

  I shrugged. “It may not matter. I’ve just been wondering about how something as unlikely as the cuttlewhales could have come about. Dr. Murdock . . . how about your people? How many are there, anyway?”

  He looked stricken. “Thirty-five,” he said, “plus four of our M’nangat. “Most of the others were caught in compartments that flooded in the first few moments of the attack.”

  “Are there injured?” I patted my M-7 kit. “I’m a combat medic.”

  He nodded. “Six serious ones. We put them in a berthing compartment, through here.”

  “We should have evaced them first,” I said, “with the first load.”

  He sighed. “We’re not sure any of them are going to make it,” he said. “I thought it more important that the living escape this trap. . . .”

  And he had a perfectly valid point. Triage—determining who lives and who dies based on available supplies and seriousness of wounds—can be a heartbreaking aspect of field first aid. I learned that three of the four medical doctors assigned to the base had been killed, and the fourth was one of the unconscious injured. I checked all six of them, four men, two women, and found there was little I could do for them. Automated systems had pumped them full of nano to control the pain and keep them unconscious. Three were hooked up to full life-support units that were doing their breathing for them. Skinseal and injected nano had controlled bleeding and stabilized them all . . . for now. I could use my N-prog to further tweak the nanobots to facilitate healing, but more than anything I could do, they all needed extensive surgical intervention . . . and that meant a sick bay at least as good as Haldane’s, and someone with surgical training at least as good as Kirchner’s, but without the insanity.

  In the meantime . . .

  I’d just emerged from the improvised sick bay. I wanted to discuss with the chosen Gykr the possibility of moving the wounded as soon as the Walsh returned for a second load, when the burst of static in my head came out of nowhere, as suddenly as the last one, and much sharper, more wrackingly painful. I couldn’t help myself; I dropped to my knees, my hands uselessly over my ears.

  Through the pain, I could see, barely, that three remaining Gykrs were being affected as well. All were on the deck, curled up tightly, as if their armor could block out the thundering blast of white noise. The human survivors too, all of them, were down.

  And through the noise I could still hear the Gykr’s electronic voice. “The Akr! The Akr! It is the Akr . . . !”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  If anything, the static became worse, louder and more intrusive, searing down into the very core of my being, drowning thought, burning reason. And this time, I could hear the voice as well.

  I wondered if it had made a difference, my switching off my privacy filters earlier. The . . . Voice, a booming but muffled thunder, was deeply imbedded within my in-head circuitry. Someone, I knew, had figured out how to interface with my cerebral implants, had learned at least the shape of my language, and was now trying to insert words . . . phrases . . . alien concepts from my hardware directly into my left parietal lobe.

  I felt . . . adrift, as if in a vast and achingly empty abyss. That was my right parietal lobe, a part of me thought, trying to make sense of spacial relations.

  My left parietal lobe was just trying to make sense of the words. What I was hearing was . . . something very like a schizophrenic’s word salad, but as isolated sounds that were almost words, achingly close to words . . . somehow just beyond the boundaries of the intelligible.

  We . . . kam . . . off . . . in . . . try . . . shan . . . no . . . kray . . . shem . . .

  The boom of nonsense syllables filled a cosmos. I had the impression that each syllable was a burst of sound, filled with content.

  “Can you . . . turn it down a bit?” I cried out in my mind. “Dial back the damned signal strength!”

  And astonishingly, the thunder receded.

  Theseagullstrengthisseasonofdiscontentbutgoodcontentdialsonetwothreeseeme . . .

  “Almost there,” I hazarded. It was word salad. I could very nearly understand now. . . . “Slower, please! It’s coming through too fast.”

  It’scomingthroughslowernow . . .

  “Still slower. Please!”

  It is coming through slower now . . .

  “Perfect! Perfect! Hold it right there!”

  I expected more words, intelligible at last.

  What I got instead knocked me flat on the deck. I’m not sure even now if I was conscious, or lost in a mind-twisting dream, an intensely vivid hallucination unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

  I was still hearing conversation, like far-off voices, myriads of them, and still just on the edge of comprehension.

  What I was seeing, however, appeared to be a vast, red-violet mist-filled void.

  And I was falling through it.

  “Where am I?”

  Where am I? boomed back in reply. I am where? Am I where? I where am? . . .

  The red-and-purple-mist-filled Creation, but overhead it shaded to black, and beneath me, in the ultimate Deep, lay Night Absolute.

  And then that Night exploded with billions of stars, stars of every brightness, every color, swirling and sparkling and streaming along in vast, surging currents . . . closely packed blood cells rushing along invisible arteries and veins, streams of stars following gravitational currents across and around the shoals and deeps of galactic space, a scintillating, pulsing, living dynamic of light and matter on a truly titanic scale. . . .

  I seemed to merge with the flow, joining a current of fast-moving specks of light, only the individual specks, I now saw, were organisms, huge organisms. They must have been huge if the cuttlewhales I saw moving along those enormous arteries were, like their counterparts on the surface, each hundreds of meters long.

  “Where am I?” I thought. I had the distinct impression that someone, or something, was listening in on my thoughts. Unless, of course, I was in the middle of a psychotic break and hallucinating my little heart out. One possible symptom in paranoid schizophrenia is the sensation, the feeling that someone is listening to your thoughts, eavesdropping on your innermost self.

  I shut that train of thought off in a hurry.

  But I did hear an answer.

  This is the universe.

  I seemed to be hurtling deeper into the streaming network of stars, billions upon billions of them. I tried to understand what I was seeing, tried to see it in my terms, not the terms of whatever was feeding me the vision.

  It didn’t work. “Do you mean your universe? Your experience of the universe? Or something else?”

  The mathematical centers of my brain were being directly stimulated, I knew. In general, the right parietal region handles basic quantity processing, like figuring out which is more, three or five, while the left parietal takes on more precise calculations, like addition and subtraction. I wasn’t seeing anything, not imaging it visually, but it felt as though numbers shifted and flashed and built upon themselves everywhere I looked. The math, it seemed, was as much an integral part of this picture as the image of moving currents and myriad gleaming stars. Some of it was connected to the images; there were, I realized without knowing how, more than 12 billion cuttlewhales moving with me through just this one stream. Other functions were far more complex and intricately interconnected, but had nothing to do with what I was seeing.

  Or . . . did they? I’m not that hot in math; I let my in-head processors do the rough stuff, which for me is just about anything more complicated than two times three. But I knew, without knowing how I knew, that there was a process called Gödel en
coding, that it was possible to assign a unique number to each and every item of information in the cosmos—items that were as diverse as the number two and the quantum wave-form equation describing every object in a solar system—with numbers derived from factored primes.

  These Gödel numbers could be staggeringly large. But once you had such a number, you could manipulate it, extract information such as true or false logical values from it, and eventually retrieve the original information from it, if you had enough computing power.

  The numbers need not be unique. Only the numbering systems of distinct sets were unique, with one set, say, for numbering cuttlewhales, and another for describing minute creatures entering the Intelligence’s awareness.

  And one set for encoding the language and the thoughts of one dust-mote creature that identified itself as Elliot Carlyle, with data sets nested within data sets nested within data sets, stacked to dizzying levels of complexity and subtle meaning.

  I knew, without knowing how I knew, that Kurt Gödel had used Gödel encoding to prove his Incompleteness Theorems in 1931 . . . that even with the advent of the computer, most problems had required years of calculation time until the advent of quantum computing, that even now the system was limited in its scope simply because of the complexity of the more advanced calculations.

  How was I knowing this stuff?

  Ah. That was it. My own in-head AI, the artificial intelligence riding within my cerebral implant that’s served as personal secretary and digital avatar and e-link facilitator was a part of the moving stream, a part of the implacable and cosmic awareness filling me and surrounding me and guiding me through that maze of light and shifting numbers. It was accessing data, lots of data, from my personal RAM.

  And the intelligence carrying me was reading it.

  This is the universe. . . .

  Each individual sound of that phrase—or rather, the individual electrical signals moving through my brain that were interpreted as that sound—could be described as two numbers, frequency and wavelength. Those could be multiplied together, and become the factor for a prime number—two, say—and then all of those factored primes could be multiplied together. . . .