by B. V. Larson
Submarines can’t normally go deeper than a few thousand feet due to the tremendous pressure. The requirement for breathable gas inside creates such a difference in pressure that the hulls of most subs will collapse if they continue to sink.
On Earth, our oceans are about thirty thousand feet at their deepest. But the oceans of Yale were deeper still. Our instruments measured the rocky bottom, and detected it at some two hundred thousand feet down in places.
At that depth, there is so much pressure that water transforms into alternate states. Back on Earth I’d been accustomed to ice, steam and liquid water. But when you stack up water deeply enough, with enough crushing weight, it takes on new physical properties. It becomes solid, and hotter. A type of “hot ice” develops. Our Fleet eggheads told me about it with a strange light in their eyes.
The pleading transmissions had come from Yale, as well as the strange readings we were getting now. The oceans there were a full six degrees hotter than they’d been a week ago. And still, there was no discernible reason for any of these changes.
When we were only nine hours out from orbit, Marvin came to consult with me. He seemed to be in a state of agitation. He couldn’t stand still. His metal tentacles slapped at the deck like fish in the bottom of boat. It was very distracting, but I’d seen this behavior before. Marvin was excited about something.
“What is it, Marvin?” I asked him. “You look like you’re about to pee your pants.”
“Reference unclear. I do not urinate. In fact, I have few liquids in my structure, with the possible exception of lubrication reservoirs. Are you suggesting I’ve sprung a leak, Colonel? Or is this somehow an apt reference to my findings?”
I chuckled. “It’s an idiom. I’m suggesting you’re excited and agitated.”
Cameras studied me. “You can infer that from my behavior?”
“Yes. Now, tell me what you want. I’ve got a lot of data to go over.”
“That’s exactly it, sir. I think there’s something in the data we’ve missed.”
He finally had my full attention. “Tell me about it.”
“It all came from my previous geological studies concerning the smaller celestial bodies in this system. Remember when we flew into the system and scanned it? I’ve been comparing that data to the current scans we’ve been reading since our arrival in the Thor system.”
“What have you found?”
“It’s very interesting. There’s a discrepancy on my readings of the third moon, Yale. A variation in measurable mass.”
I frowned. “In mass?” I asked. Suddenly, I understood his earlier remark about me making an apt comment. He meant the world had really sprung a leak. “So…the planet is smaller than it was before?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What could be causing such a change?”
“A leak, of course.”
I stared at him for a moment, finally catching on. I turned to the screens and flipped through maps and models.
“You’re telling me their oceans are draining away,” I said. “How long has this been going on?”
A camera snaked over my left shoulder and gazed down at the table with me. I knew it was only Marvin’s way of seeing something from my perspective. He did this from time to time, peeking over people’s shoulders with one of his many eyes. It helped him to understand what we were talking about when discussing visual input, because he could study what we were seeing. Most found it disconcerting, but I understood why he did it and it didn’t bother me. Marvin’s visual input was different from the human norm. He had many more eyes—variable numbers of them, actually. And he could be looking at several things at once. Unlike humans, who were built to visually study one part of their environment at a time, Marvin could see many at once. His cameras weren’t as good as our eyes, but he made up for that by having a lot of them.
Due to this major variation in visual input and processing, his perspective on the visual environment around us was quite different. Rather than looking only at the item we were discussing, he liked to use his mobile visual sensory systems to try to see my point of view. He wasn’t very good at indirect empathy, but he excelled at direct mimicry of behavior.
Finally, I had the data he was referring to. It had been in an old file saved months ago. “According to this, the planetary mass of Yale is about one percent lower than it was when you made your original readings. That’s incredible. Have you got anything else, Marvin?”
He slid up beside me at the table. “Possibly,” he said.
I looked at him expectantly. He studied me with many cameras at once. I knew he wanted me to ask him more about it, and to praise him for his accomplishments. He was odd that way—he liked it when people begged him for facts. He also liked to keep secrets. Sometimes he used critical details of information as bargaining chips to gain privileges. Usually these privileges came in the form of an approval to perform some kind of nasty experiment.
I’d played his little game many times. Over the years, I’d worked up a counter to his manipulations. I decided to employ it now.
My first move was to nod and tap the screen, closing the file.
“Very good, Marvin,” I said. “I think I have enough for now. You’ve done an excellent job. Once again, you’ve proven to me that my decision to make you my Science Officer was the correct one.”
Marvin’s cameras flicked from the blank screen to my blank face and back again.
“Don’t you wish to study the matter further, Colonel Riggs?” he asked.
I shrugged and reached for a cup of algae-based coffee. “You’re the Science Officer. You’ve made the call. Your commander has been briefed, and you’ve decided he’s heard all there is of value to know. I trust your judgment on this one.”
“That’s very gratifying, Colonel Riggs.”
“Good. Now if you don’t mind, I have a number of issues to attend to before we reach orbit. We’re only a few hours from planetfall.”
“But I think there might be something else to discuss.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked, trying to look bored. I fooled with my coffee mug, adding cream and sugar. I hated cream and sugar.
Marvin appeared disappointed. His tentacles drooped and stopped thrashing. “Yes, there’s a localized point where the leak is occurring.”
“You know where the leak is?” I asked.
“Yes—at least I have it down to a one hundred square mile region of the southern oceans.”
I nodded. With languid slowness, I reached out and tapped at the screen. I knew I couldn’t afford to appear eager. I opened the file but didn’t bother to flip to the appropriate screen. Instead, I paused to sip my coffee.
Algae-based coffee tastes pretty bad to begin with. But with sugar in it, the flavor had moved from sewery to sugary-sewery. I winced, but tried to hide my disgust.
Marvin studied me and finally couldn’t handle it anymore. He reached up with two tentacles and touched the screen, making spreading motions and spinning the globe of Yale to the correct angle. I smiled slightly. It was kind of fun to make him impatient for once.
His tentacles rattled and scratched on the touchscreen until he had the correct view displayed. By this time, several staffers had taken note of our conversation and stepped up to watch. I ignored them and pretended to be enjoying my coffee. It was a good thing, I figured, that Marvin had no sense of smell. If he had, he’d have known right away I was faking.
On the screen, he’d displayed a region known as “Light Blue” on the moon’s surface. For the most part, Yale had no real features. It had clouds and a little scrim of polar ice at the top and bottom of the world, but no land. With only an endless ocean encircling the core of the world, there wasn’t much to see.
But, in spots like Light Blue, the ocean floor had heaved up closer to the surface. In this region the color of the surface changed. Most of the world was so thickly covered in deep water it was almost black, even when the bright light of Thor shined down directly upon it. But Li
ght Blue was different, it looked like one of Earth’s oceans.
“The shallow area?” I said. “Isn’t that the highest underwater mountain range on Yale?”
“Yes, it’s also one of the most thickly inhabited regions. The Crustaceans can’t survive in the deepest oceans, which have an estimated depth of two hundred thousand feet.”
I studied the imagery. It didn’t look right to me. “Is that a whirlpool?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Marvin said. “It’s so large, I believed it to be a storm at first. But now I know the truth. The water is circling, draining away.”
“What could be down there?” I asked. “What could possibly swallow such a fantastic volume of liquid?”
Marvin was perking up. He sensed my interest, and I’d given him urgent questions which could be evaded. I knew instantly what he was thinking: soon, he might manage to gain a hold over me.
I smiled, because I knew his game. And for once I was one jump ahead of the sneaky robot. I’d figured out the answer to my own question before I’d asked it.
I snapped my fingers as if getting a sudden flash of insight. “I know!” I said. “It’s a ring! It’s got to be. A ring at the bottom of the sea, draining the water away to nowhere. What else could it be?”
Marvin looked stunned. For a full second, none of his numerous limbs or input devices moved. When they moved again, they were deflated, like a dozen wilting flowers on a hot August day.
“That matches my assessment,” he said.
“Somehow,” I said, “a ring has opened up at the bottom of their ocean. What an ingenious form of attack.”
“You think this is an attack?”
I nodded. “Either that, or the Crustaceans were experimenting. Maybe they tried to open up a pathway from their homeworld to another star system. Maybe the attempt backfired horribly.”
I proceeded to disseminate Marvin’s data to the command staff and the entire fleet. I made sure it was transmitted back to Eden as well. While this went on, Marvin studied me and the data. I knew he was horribly disappointed. He’d given up his data without getting anything for it.
When I managed to slip out of his sight, I dumped the ghastly coffee on the deck of the conference chamber and watched the ship’s nanite hull absorb it. Moments later it was released outside the hull as the waste it truly was. The ship knew garbage when it encountered it.
But Marvin wasn’t quite done yet. He came to me less than an hour later. “I have a new theory, Colonel. Would you like to hear it?”
“If you think it’s absolutely necessary,” I said. “I’m very busy.”
“It concerns Yale’s ocean—I believe I know the cause for the rise in temperature.”
“Oh, that. Never mind then.”
Marvin appeared to be stunned again.
“You don’t have any interest in this critical detail?” he asked.
“I’m interested all right. But I’ve already figured it out. As the oceans recede, the deep, deep hot-ice is being exposed. The rapid lowering of the sea is causing the hot ice to break down and heat up the water. Does that match your theories, Marvin?”
“Yes,” he said. Crushed again, he wandered away a few minutes later.
Since my conversation with Marvin, I’d been poring over science texts. I’d learned about the changed state of water at great depths, and the hot-ice phenomenon. It had been difficult, but the look on Marvin’s structure was worth it all now.
I grinned after him and whispered to myself: “We’ll chalk that one up for the dumbass human.”
-6-
When we were about half an hour out from Yale, all hell broke loose. At the time, I was in the ship’s head relieving myself. The ship was under heavy deceleration—but when you have to go, you have to go.
Operating a ship’s elimination system when under several Gs of force can be a difficult operation by itself, as anyone who’s done it can tell you. Things went from bad to worse, however, when the ship’s klaxons went off and the vessel heeled-over, engaging its automatic evasion routines. I cursed and found myself sliding on my back across the chamber. Fortunately, spilled wastes were quickly removed by the smart metal floor.
When I managed to get out of the head, I struggled up the corridor to the bridge. I was slammed from one side to the other as the ship rocked and lurched. The inertial stabilizers were off-line due to power requirements. The engines were burning at full throttle to keep us from crashing into those deep, blue oceans, and the rest of the power went to the weapons systems.
I crawled into the command center and found a crash seat to strap into. It wasn’t the one I was assigned to, but that was just too bad for whatever staffer I’d displaced. I managed to connect to the Fleet command channel and listened to the chatter long enough to figure out what was going on. We were under attack.
“This is Riggs,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Give me counts and ranges. What have we got incoming right now?”
“Missiles sir. No ships, just missiles. About two thousand of them.”
My mind glazed over. I didn’t have to do the math. We were at close range, and we didn’t have enough time to lock-on and shoot down that many missiles—not if Crustacean missiles were as good as Macro missiles at finding their targets. They were going to hurt us, and hurt us badly.
“It was all a trick, Kyle,” Sandra said on a private line to my helmet. “Those bastards. We’ll lose half the fleet. Fire everything we have back at them. We can at least hurt them this time.”
My mind had come out of shock and was now racing. I couldn’t believe it. These vicious Lobsters had done it twice in a row. I’d not underestimate them again—if I ever got another opportunity.
“Stop decelerating!” I roared. “I want every pilot to plot an individual course. Bring your noses around and accelerate toward Yale, but do it at an angle. I want you all to miss the moon, naturally. But slowing down will just make us easier targets. We need to do a fly-by as fast as we can, giving them as little opportunity to shoot us down as possible.”
Within twenty seconds, the pilot of Lazaro had followed my orders. The results were gut-wrenching. A normal human without nanite-hardened organs would have passed out, or quite possibly died. For us marines, however, there was no such simple relief. We lived, remained conscious, and suffered. It felt as if someone had a firm grip on my intestines and was hell-bent on unraveling them.
The point-defense systems were firing now, on full automatic.
“Vacc-suits, everyone!” I shouted over the command channel. “Assume your vessel will lose pressure before this is over. I want zero casualties from decompression.”
It was all up to a few thousand brainboxes now. The missiles would be hitting their first targets within eight minutes. I’d been watching the counters displayed on the big wall-screens. I’d learned to count again by this time. We weren’t going to get them all. Some of my ships were about to be destroyed. The only question was whether or not any of us would make it home.
As I got over my initial shock, the emotion that followed wasn’t fear, it was rage. None of this made any sense. Why would the Crustaceans do something like this? Sure, they didn’t like us. But going to the trouble of draining their own world, of damaging their own habitat, just to make this ruse convincing? I couldn’t fathom that kind of dedication to deceit.
I tried to think, but it was difficult to do anything other than keep my guts in place and watch the ticking numbers on the displays.
Red slivers were arcing closer every second. Occasionally, one of them blinked out. But the rate of defensive hits was far too slow. My hopes that the majority of their missiles would be shot down faded. They were quality weapons. Probably, they were spinning and coated with reflective polymers to deflect our lasers. Maybe they even had aerogel mists enveloping them, technology we’d only recently mastered ourselves.
I slammed my fist down on the arm of my stolen chair. Even as I did so, a confused looking lieutenant came into view. She
was crawling toward me. I frowned at her, then saw her look up at me in shock. I realized then she must be trying to make it to the chair I was in—her chair.
I waved her away. She turned and crawled out of my sight. My mind wanted to feel bad for her, wanted to wonder if she would survive the next…six minutes, the displays reported…but I didn’t feel bad for her. I didn’t have time.
I had to think. I sucked in a breath and contacted Marvin.
“Marvin!” I shouted.
“Yes, Colonel?”
“Are you aboard this ship?” I demanded.
“What ship, sir?”
“No games, Marvin. Are you on the same ship I am right now?”
“Yes sir, at the moment.”
I felt relief. In general, when Marvin knew or even suspected an attack was coming, he tended to bug out early. Sometimes, very early, before anyone else even knew what was going to happen. The fact that he was still aboard was encouraging. It meant he was just as surprised as I was.
“Marvin, I need you to translate for me. Open a channel to these treacherous Lobsters.”
“They’ve never responded, sir.”
“I don’t care! I know they’ve been listening. Probably, whatever I say will amuse them greatly. But I don’t care about that, either. Open the channel and translate.”
“Channel open.”
I paused to suck in some air, and then I let loose: “To the people of the water-moon under the shadows of my ships, you’re the least honorable of any species I’ve ever encountered. You are cheaters. You are ignorant, and savage. I am a professor among my people. I hereby give you all a failing grade!”
There was no response for several seconds. I’d hoped to elicit some kind of defensive response out of them with my verbal attack. After all, they had no reason to stay quiet now. Their trap had been sprung, and staying quiet no longer benefited them. I also knew they were an arrogant, talkative race that valued academic achievement. Talk of failing grades should sting.
But they didn’t respond. I narrowed my eyes, squinting at the readouts. Less than four minutes left now until their missiles were among us. Four minutes from now, crews would die because I’d screwed up and believed these Lobsters again.