Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  The Deep. Was there a possible answer there?

  I grabbed the second Broc infant by the tentacles, carefully disentangled it from several meters of ropy intestine, and pulled it free. I handed it to Mom, who dried it off with Dad’s help, then parked it on what might pass for a Broccoli’s hip next to the first one.

  I looked at the table image. The third and final Broc baby appeared to have attached itself to the body cavity wall. There was a lot of blood . . . but at least it wasn’t about to take a bite out of D’dnah’s heart or intestine.

  “Relax a sec,” I told Garner, and he let the incision close.

  “You okay, Elliot?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I’m fine. Just give me a moment, here.”

  I rested a moment, leaning against the side of the table. Gods, there was so much alien blood. I was soaked in the stuff almost up to my armpits.

  I closed my eyes. . . .

  How do you make contact with a super-intelligent planetary mind? In the past, the Deep had been the one to initiate contact . . . we thought by manipulating electrical fields either through its ice VII substance, or through the body of a cuttlewhale. Was it possible for me to reach out and talk to it? Might a channel of some sort been opened when it had taken me into its thoughts?

  I reached out . . . questing . . . pushing . . .

  Nothing.

  Okay, let’s try something else. I opened a new channel, this one to the bridge. “Captain Summerlee?”

  “This is the XO,” Walthers’ voice came back. “Clear the channel! We’re busy right now, damn it!”

  I could actually hear some of the chaos in the background of Walthers’ mind, leakage from what he was seeing and hearing at the moment. Someone was shouting that there was a breach at Airlock One.

  Damn, I’d forgotten that the skipper was off-line.

  “Look . . . we might have a chance if we can get in touch with the Deep!” I said. “We could ask it to help!”

  A pause. “I’m listening. . . .”

  “If you can patch a comm signal through to the sonar transmitters . . . are they up and running?”

  There was another brief pause. “Affirmative. What do you want to transmit?”

  I thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “Try this. . . .”

  It worked, of course.

  I didn’t get to see what happened, damn it, though I was able to watch recordings of the battle’s conclusion later, at my leisure. As soon as I told Lieutenant Walthers what to try, I went back to work on D’dnah . . . in D’dnah, rather, fishing around for the third and last bud.

  That one took me almost ten minutes. It had reattached itself to herm’s body wall and was chewing away happily. In another hour, or two, it might have eaten its way all the way out.

  I wanted to save D’dnah that physical trauma, though. I had Chief Garner pull way back on the retractors, giving me as much room to work as possible, and I extended the incision a bit farther, opening the body cavity more toward where the infant was latched on. I reached in with my left hand then, and did my best to gather up all of those tentacles, pulling them aside and out of my way, until I had a good view on the table display of that chewing beak imbedded inside D’dnah’s muscle wall. Carefully, I moved my right hand in, holding the laser scalpel. The trick was getting the emitter head right up against muscle tissue before I pressed the trigger, because otherwise the dark green and black ichor of D’dnah’s blood and internal fluids would absorb the beam and begin to boil, cooking my patient from the inside out.

  I did wish I could have brought ROBERT in on the operation, but I did feel a responsibility to the M’nangat, who, after all, had requested that I do this. Maybe I could have convinced them that ROBERT was under my supervision, and so that would count . . . but on the other hand, there was something wonderful, something exhilarating about bringing these new lives into the light, and in saving the carrier’s life at the same time.

  To tell the truth, I’m not sure how much I trust robotic surgery in any case. Sometimes—with brain or eye surgery, the precision is absolutely vital, especially with microsurgeries . . . but usually it’s better, I think, if you can actually feel what you’re doing through your own hands and senses.

  Carefully, watching the table projection the whole time, I sliced away a three-centimeter circle of muscle tissue around the infant’s beak, cauterizing the wound as I cut. I slipped once; the infant gave a sudden twist and lost one of its tentacles. It almost let go then, I think, but then it dug in harder and tighter. I finished cutting it free and then carefully pulled it out, black and glistening in the overhead lights of the sick bay.

  In another moment, Mom had the third infant attached to her other side, and she had three gray-green blobs attached in a band of writhing tentacles around what technically would have been her hips if she’d been human.

  “Are you okay, D’drevah?” I asked. When I didn’t hear a reply, I looked at D’deen. “Is she okay?”

  SHE IS FINE, D’deen wrote. I could see the relief as the words printed themselves across my in-head. SHE IS FINE. . . .

  “It looks like the battle outside is all over but for the shouting,” Garner told me. “Very well done.”

  I’d actually suggested three different approaches to Lieutenant Walthers. We knew that the sonar transmitters we’d buried in the ice would reach all the way down to the Deep. We also knew that too strong a signal had been interpreted as an attack. I don’t know; maybe the chirp had hurt the Deep’s equivalent of ears. Or maybe the cuttlewhales closer to the surface had felt like they were being attacked, and since they’d already experienced an attack by the Gykr, they’d surfaced to stop what they perceived as a threat.

  So as a first attempt, I’d suggested that they transmit the words help us into the depths. The problem, of course, was that Gina had heard the words help us in her head, not out loud. The Deep had certainly been accessing my personal RAM storage in English, and learning the language as it did so, but I couldn’t be certain that it would interpret the sound of “help us” and realize it was the same as the collection of zeros and ones stored in my in-head hardware.

  Okay, so then try a second approach. Run “help us” through Haldane’s AI, and have it convert that audio signal into an electrical signal. Wavelengths and frequencies, after all, are wavelengths and frequencies, whether they occur as sound waves in water or as electromagnetic waves in a radio transmission. Make the conversion, and transmit that as sonar waves into the depths.

  And, while you’re doing all of that, have the AI run one final set of calculations. Take the wavelength and frequency of the initial “h” sound in “help us,” and raise the number one to that power. Take the wavelength and frequency of the short “e” sound and raise the number two to that power. Then do three to the “l” and five to the “p,” and go on to the numbers seven and eleven for the “m” and the “e.” Now multiply those together to get one very large number.

  And transmit that: the phrase “help us” encoded as a Gödel expression.

  As it turned out, we didn’t actually do the Gödel number thing. It would have taken a long time for Haldane’s AI to do the necessary calculations, too long for our survival, at any rate . . . and in any case the Deep had responded to either the first or the second attempt. We still don’t know which.

  But respond it did. . . .

  I was on the mess deck, which was crowded with Marines and Haldane crew members and the other Corpsmen. Even Captain Summerlee was there, grinning ear to ear as Lieutenant Walthers called up the recordings of the battle from different camera vantage points. Chief Garner was there. . . . and Gunny Hancock . . . and Dr. Murdock and a number of his people as well.

  So was Gina Lloyd, sitting next to me with her arm around me. I was a bit concerned at first about Doob . . . but he was on the other side of me, and didn’t seem concerned.

  “Here it is! Here it is!” the skipper said, excited, pointing at the viewall. “Watch this!”

>   It was only the third or fourth time we’d seen it.

  The deck-to-overhead scene showed the unrelenting ice outside. Haldane had grounded about five kilometers from the edge of the ice pack, and perhaps three from the nanoflaged base. Drawn out in a long line about a kilometer from the ship we could see a line of black dots—the four-meter-tall, six-legged walking tanks used as heavy mobile armor by the Gykr.

  Closer—much closer—crossing Haldane’s shadow on the ice, a dozen individual Gykr were sprinting toward the Number One airlock.

  About halfway between the two, the ice began to buckle, heaving up . . . and up . . . and up, then shattering in sparkling shards of crystal as the massive, shaggy, and impossibly huge front end of a cuttlewhale emerged from beneath the surface, heaving itself into the red-violet sky, tentacles questing, and then the sound reached us: a low, throbbing, pounding thunder that went on and on.

  A few hundred meters away, a second cuttlewhale breached the ice, exploding into the open air in a geyser of ice fragments and spray and churning steam.

  The third emerged farther off, almost on top of the advancing line of walkers.

  Walthers shifted to other cameras, giving us an all-around view. Altogether, sixty-five of the monstrous cuttlewhale shapes broke through the ice, emerging around both the Haldane and the dome of our base.

  There was the small problem that cuttlewhales had trouble telling the difference between humans and Gucks, but that was handily solved by the fact that we didn’t have anyone out on the ice . . . not at first, anyway. In a few seconds, the air was so filled with ice crystals whipped along by the incessant wind that we couldn’t see what was happening in any case. We could still see the Gykr who’d reached Haldane, of course. The appearance of the cuttlewhales between them and their main force seemed to have utterly paralyzed them, however. Several were on the ice, twitching, while others were wandering around in vague circles, as though lost. I wondered which one was Chosen. . . .

  Then the Marines appeared, spilling out of the airlock, firing into the confused Gykr, which immediately began dropping their weapons.

  Gykrs, surrendering. We’d not known if that was even possible with their take-no-prisoners psychology.

  But the final act still had to play itself out.

  The camera angle shifted, looking up at a Gykr starship as it drifted in closer, black, ominous, its down-canted wings shuddering as it fought the wind. We couldn’t see the beam, of course, but below, a cuttlewhale exploded into hurtling chunks of exotic ice, steam, and slush. The enemy ship drifted closer, coming lower. Another cuttlewhale exploded under that onslaught, and it appeared to be lining itself up for a shot at the Haldane.

  The Deep and its cuttlewhale creations understand pressure. We still don’t know how they do it, but it is clear that they manipulate pressure in various ways . . . and we watched in jaw-hanging awe as they manipulated it here, on the surface.

  A cuttlewhale reared high, tentacles spread open. Something glinted in the weak, red sunlight as it squirted from gaping mouth to hovering starship too quickly to see. And the starship . . . came apart.

  Somehow, muscles of exotic ice-jelly powerful enough to resist pressures of hundreds of tons per square centimeter had closed within the cuttlewhale’s gut, forcing a stream of water out the mouth and across several hundred meters of open air. We have cutting tools that use high pressure to expel streams of water at several times the speed of sound, pressure enough to slice through solid titanium or plasteel like a hot knife through butter. This was like that . . . a thin stream of water traveling at an estimated Mach 40 . . . a living squirt gun that could shred a starship like paper.

  Other cuttlewhales were looking up into the heavens now, and radar indicated that they were opening up on Gykr starships in orbit.

  In orbit. But I worked out the numbers later. Abyssworld has an escape velocity of a bit less than eleven kilometers per second. The speed of sound is roughly a kilometer per three seconds . . . a bit less in Abyssworld’s thinner atmosphere, or call it a thousand kilometers per hour. Forty times that is a bit more than eleven kilometers per second.

  Cuttlewhales could spit at escape velocity, and with careful aim could hit a starship in low orbit. I don’t know if what hit those ships was solid ice, liquid water, or gaseous steam, but whatever it was carried enough kinetic energy to do some serious damage, even after transiting a couple of hundred kilometers of atmosphere. We found out later that one Gykr starship had been destroyed, and two others damaged. The others pulled back in a considerable hurry.

  And Walthers was able to open a Gal3 dialog with them a few minutes later.

  The entire engagement, from the moment when the first cuttlewhale had broken through the ice to the Gykr ships’ retreat, had taken two minutes and five seconds.

  “All I can say,” Summerlee said, grinning, “is that I’m sure as hell glad those things are on our side!”

  “Having a super-intelligent planet on your side doesn’t hurt either,” I said. I don’t think she heard me, though. There was too much wild cheering and thunderous applause going on in the background.

  Some hours later, Haldane’s AI worked out the Gödel algorithms for another set of transmissions into the Deep. The message was pretty simple, though it took a long time to work out the math.

  “Thank you,” it said. “We will help.”

  If it took Humankind a million years, we would help. . . .

  Epilogue

  Two weeks later, I was back on Earth . . . well, at the Commonwealth’s Starport, anyway, up-El. Haldane had pulled into port alongside the Clymer. Liberty had been granted, and most of the Marines were elsewhere now, down on Earth, or enjoying the entertainment facilities at Geosynch.

  Me . . . well, I wasn’t up for partying much.

  The message from Personnel had been waiting for me when we pulled into port. It told me that Sergeant Joy Leighton had deployed with Marine 1/1 to Dushanbe a week after Haldane’s departure. Her Cutlass had grounded just outside of Dushanbe, where she’d participated in a ground assault against a heavily fortified missile base.

  She’d been killed, one of fifteen Marines caught in the open by a pocket nuke. Not even Mk. 10 MMCA combat armor can stand up to a one-kiloton warhead going off a couple of hundred meters away.

  They’d recovered her body. They’d flown her back to NNMC Bethesda.

  And they’d brought her back with CAPTR technology: Cerebral Access PolyTomographic Reconstruction.

  The trouble was that her brain had been badly damaged in the blast; parts of it had been fried by the radiation pulse. What was left had not been enough to take the implant download.

  “Treatment is continuing,” the message told me, “and massive infusions of stem cells may yet restore Sergeant Leighton’s cerebral activity in full. Partial success has been achieved in personality reconstruction. However, Sergeant Leighton as yet has no memory of her life more recently than approximately ten years ago. She does not remember her time with the Marines, and cannot remember acquaintances and relationships developed since that time. We request that you not attempt to contact her directly, as such contact would be disturbing or upsetting, and might possibly interfere with her recovery. . . .”

  Apparently, that message had gone out to a number of her friends in the service. Our personnel records keep track of the friends we make while we’re in—and those who are more than friends—just in case this sort of thing happens.

  Of course, what the records didn’t show, couldn’t show, was that desperate battle to save Joy’s life during the fight on Bloodworld, or her intense, desperate gratitude later, when she’d thanked me for bringing her back without turning her into a zombie.

  And here she’d become a zombie after all, her life saved by CAPTR, but her mind a recording downloaded into her brain . . . and an incomplete recording at that.

  I’d prayed for CAPTR technology when Paula had her stroke. I’d not been able to get her help in time, and she had died.
>
  And now Joy had been CAPTRed . . . but it seemed that I’d lost her as well.

  Gods!

  Dr. Kirchner, it turned out, was doing just fine, thank you. He’d been shipped down to SAMMC, where the cause of his psychosis had finally been diagnosed. It turned out that there’d been a problem during his last rejuvenation treatment. Certain types of schizophrenia—and autism, too—can be caused when for some reason new proteins in the brain don’t fold quite right. One bad fold can actually trigger a cascade of identical mistakes, and the result can be a serious imbalance in brain chemistry. They were using nanobots and stem-cell injections to repair his brain’s physical problems, and CAPTR technology to fill in the holes. He was going to be fine.

  And Kari Harris? She’d been shipped down to Bethesda in her S-tube. The official word was that she would live, though an awful lot of her body would need to be grown from scratch. There’d been enough brain damage that they’d used her CAPTR backup as well. Apparently, that had gone okay, but they wouldn’t know for sure for a few weeks yet.

  Gunny Hancock was well on the way to having a whole new lower left arm. I was happy for him, at least. D’dnah was doing well, too, as were all three baby Broccolets.

  Everyone was doing great, apparently . . . except for Joy.

  Damn it, and she’d been worried about me when I’d shipped out!

  Yeah, I was feeling thoroughly sorry for myself. Survivor guilt, I guess. Why had she been killed, and not me?

  For that matter, why had they been able to bring Kirchner back, but not Joy?

  That was a disgustingly unworthy thought . . . but I savored it anyway. It hurt. Damn it, I wanted to hurt. . . .

  “How’s the hero?” Gina Lloyd asked.

  I was in my old quarters on board the Clymer. I’d not been aware of the door opening; maybe she’d used an override. But now she was there, wearing civilian clothes . . . though her garment appeared to be more light than anything else, a shimmering, rainbow sheath of radiance hugging her form.