Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  “It did not, ma’am. I couldn’t see it, at any rate.”

  “What about the . . . what did you call it? The slippage?”

  “Spondylolisthesis, ma’am. That depends on the exact angle of the X-­ray shot. I missed it when I saw the X-­rays last night. If you know exactly what to look for, you can maybe see that the one vertebra is very slightly out of line, but it’s not obvious.”

  “I see. So you are challenging Dr. Kirchner’s handling of the case?”

  “Challenging? No, ma’am. Not really. Medicine is not an exact science, whatever they say. It’s an art, and success in medicine depends on luck and skill and training and really good instincts. Private Pollard was very, very lucky, ma’am. And Carlyle here had some excellent instincts going for him.”

  “Has Dr. Kirchner seen these images?”

  “No, ma’am. I just pulled them down from the sick bay AI.”

  “Uh-­huh.” I wondered if she was going to call Garner on his unauthorized tapping of sealed medical records. “And how’s the patient?”

  “Doing well, ma’am. His condition is stable and improving. The swelling inside his skull is down, now that we have it drained, and the intracranial bleeding has stopped. His head and neck are immobilized, of course, but we’ve applied a very slight traction to his head, which let the surrounding soft tissue push the misalignment back into place. Now we have nanobots beginning to reconnect the bone. We’re applying low-­intensity pulsed ultrasound to accelerate bone growth. The prognosis for a full recovery is excellent.”

  “In how long?”

  “Two, maybe three weeks.”

  “I see.” Summerlee looked at me. “So, Carlyle, it seems that you have . . . good instincts.”

  I said nothing. It seemed the safest course of action.

  “However,” she went on, “those instincts have left us with a rather serious problem.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Garner said. He didn’t look happy.

  “I cannot relieve Doctor Kirchner of his responsibilities as expedition medical officer, nor can I challenge his fitness as a physician. That would require a medical board back on Earth. And if Petty Officer Carlyle goes back to working in sick bay, it will raise . . . issues.”

  She was dead right there. I’d just been wondering how the hell I was going to fit back into shipboard routine after this little . . . misunderstanding.

  “We all make mistakes, ma’am,” Garner said.

  “Indeed. But when doctors make mistakes, ­people die. I can’t sideline him. I can’t even write him up for a reprimand, because I don’t have the medical training to sit in judgment on his decisions.”

  “If I could make a suggestion, ma’am?”

  “By all means, Chief. I would love to hear it.”

  “Nurses and Corpsmen are used to . . . let’s call it managing doctors.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Look, doctors are busy, okay? In a hospital, they sweep into a patient’s room, half the time in conversation with an expert AI so they’re not really there. They look at the test results, prescribe a round of treatment, and they’re gone, usually muttering to themselves. It’s the nursing staff that’s with the patient all the time, including the patient-­care AI that’s supervising everything.”

  “So?”

  Garner’s expression said he didn’t really want to go into the details. “Don’t get me wrong. There are good doctors out there, really good ones. But there always are a few bad apples, and nursing staffs know how to take up the slack and look after the patients’ best interests.”

  “That’s horrifying.”

  Garner shrugged. “It’s the way things are. The medical community—­other doctors, mostly—­tend to close ranks and protect the bad ones. Sometimes it’s tough to tell which ones are genuinely bad, and which ones are just having a bad day.”

  “Is Dr. Kirchner . . . a bad doctor?”

  “Ma’am . . . I don’t know. I don’t even want to guess. It’s not my place to say.”

  “Take a shot at it.”

  “Ma’am, he must know his stuff. He taught medicine at SMMC, and that’s not a billet for mediocrity. But since he’s come aboard, he’s been abrupt, short-­tempered, rude, and making snap decisions that . . . aren’t always the best. He doesn’t listen—­”

  “None of which makes him incompetent. He sounds like he’s a little shy on ­people skills.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I’d been wondering if they’d forgotten I was in the room, but now the captain looked at me.

  “What do you think, Carlyle?”

  “I don’t think Dr. Kirchner is incompetent, ma’am. He’s been acting like . . . I don’t know. Like he has personal problems, maybe? Stress at home . . . or maybe he didn’t want to come on this expedition.”

  “Mm. Point. How do you feel about going back to work with him?”

  Damn, what was I supposed to say to that? “I’m not exactly looking forward to it, ma’am . . . but I’ll do what I’m told to do.”

  “What do you have to say about the idea of protecting patients from the man?”

  “Well . . . Chief Garner is right. That sort of thing does happen. Not very often, thank God, but sometimes a doctor gets assigned to a duty station, and you wonder how he ever got through medical school. The nursing staff has to follow his orders . . . but they know when the physician in charge makes a bad call. And . . . well, I don’t expect that there’ll be mass casualties on the Haldane, ma’am. The crew and the Marine complement on board are all healthy. All we’re likely to have are minor complaints and the odd case of accidental trauma, like Pollard.”

  “You’re saying Dr. Kirchner can’t do that much damage.”

  “I guess so, ma’am.”

  “And when we get to Abyssworld?”

  That stopped me. As senior medical officer, Dr. Kirchner would be responsible for everyone on Haldane operating in a highly dangerous, extremely unforgiving environment . . . and he would be the biochemistry expert backing up our civilian specialists, Drs. Montgomery and Ortega.

  “You know, Captain,” Garner put in, “that if the cuttlewhales turn out to be intelligent . . . Dr. Kirchner might be lacking ­people skills, but the cuttlewhales aren’t ­people.”

  It was a lame attempt at humor, and no one laughed.

  “Okay,” Summerlee said, arriving at a decision. “I’ll have a private word with Dr. Kirchner about his . . . attitude. Carlyle . . . I’m dropping all charges against you.”

  The relief I felt was palpable, a warm flush from the head down. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “I’m assigning you to First Section, where you’ll serve as resident Corpsman. Understand?” The MSEP was divided into two sections, First and Second, with twenty-­four Marines in each.

  “Yes, ma’am.” She was essentially pulling me out of sick bay and sticking me in with the Marines full-­time. I wouldn’t have a lot to do, but it would keep me out of Kirchner’s sight.

  “Chief? That means the other Corpsmen will be standing a watch-­in-­three. Is that okay?”

  One of us always had to be in the sick bay, in case there was an emergency, like last night. Garner didn’t stand watches, which meant the remaining four of us split up two night watches—­1600 to 2400, and 2400 to 0800. That meant that we got a full night’s sleep every other night. Taking a watch-­in-­three meant that the other Corpsmen would have to cover for me, basically working two nights, and getting off the third.

  “Not a problem, Captain. I can stand watch in the sick bay, and we’ll keep it simple.”

  “Very well. Anything else to discuss?”

  “No, ma’am,” Garner said.

  “No, ma’am. Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, Carlyle. If I have to invoke Article Ninety-­two, I’m coming to you for validation. Underst
and me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I understood very well. Article 92 was the military regulation covering dereliction of duty, or of gross negligence or incompetence, requiring that someone be relieved of duty. If she had to relieve Dr. Kirchner, she would have me making a statement . . . and testifying later at his court-­martial. It’s never a good thing when an enlisted man has to give testimony against an officer, and that sort of thing can follow you throughout the rest of your career. There goes the guy who ruined Dr. Kirchner’s medical career. . . .

  Not good. Even if Kirchner got what he deserved, not good at all.

  As with medicine, things were rarely clear-­cut or obvious in legal military issues either, not when it was one guy’s word against another’s.

  But then . . . well . . . maybe Kirchner was just having a bad day. Maybe his wife had left him . . . or he really, really hadn’t wanted to leave Earth. Maybe the skipper would have that talk with him, and everything would get straightened out.

  Yeah . . . maybe . . .

  And maybe I was going to get promoted to admiral.

  Chapter Ten

  Three days later, I was in the mess hall with Kari Harris. The viewalls were set to show a spring day on Earth, complete with mountain peaks reflected in a lake, a scene that seemed calculated to raise issues of nostalgia and homesickness. Outside, of course, there was still not a thing to see, as the bubble of tightly wrapped space containing the Haldane continued its faster-­than-­light slide into deep interstellar space.

  There were no relativistic effects, of course; we weren’t moving faster than light—­just the volume of space within which Haldane was resting, and if that sounds counterintuitive to you, well, welcome to the club. How long the forty-­two-­light-­year journey would last depended entirely on how much energy we put into the warp bubble. Theoretically, the amount of energy inside each cubic centimeter of hard vacuum was, if not infinite, then enough to seem infinite for all practical purposes. But there were engineering issues involved, not least of which was accurately calculating when it would be time to release the warp bubble and re-­emerge in normal space—­and that meant that the trip was going to take a ­couple of weeks.

  Still, two weeks for forty-­two light years? Three light years a day? That wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.

  “Kirchner,” Kari told me, “is crazy.”

  “Is that an official diagnosis?” I asked, grinning.

  She missed the sarcasm. “No, of course not. But he’s acting . . . strange.”

  “Doing what?”

  She frowned. “Well, he never leaves his office.”

  “He sleeps in there?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. He might go back to his quarters for a few hours some nights. But I know he’s been there, locked in his office all night, each time I had the twenty-­four to oh-­eight-­hundred watch. It kind of creeped me out, y’know?”

  “Where does he eat?”

  “He’s got a small food nanufactory in there.”

  “Okay, maybe he’s simply behind on his record keeping. Catching up on the backlog, y’know?” Still, acute insomnia could be an important symptom—­a problem with the thalamus, perhaps.

  “Elliot, I really think something is wrong with the guy. The way he rants about you . . . it’s really scary.”

  “About me!”

  “Yeah. He goes on about how enlisted ­people shouldn’t question a doctor’s decisions . . . how you were committing mutiny by disobeying orders, that kind of stuff.”

  I felt a bit of a chill at that. It’s never good to attract the unswerving attention of the brass, especially when that attention is negative.

  But I really didn’t want to get drawn into the discussion. The truth was, I didn’t want to believe that there was something mentally wrong with Kirchner. In some ways, I think we’re still in the Dark Ages when it comes to psychological pathology. I mean, we can reach inside the brain and switch off the pain receptors. We can image the zona fasciculate of the human adrenal glands and actually watch it cranking out cortisol in response to emotional stress. But we’re damned near helpless when the patient starts hearing voices or screaming that he’s being chased by alien demons with big black eyes who are working for the government.

  Was there anything I should do about it? Was there anything I could do?

  The easiest, of course, was simply to stay out of the man’s way.

  The next afternoon, though, I was in the Marine squad bay, hanging out with a number of the Marines. The ship was packed with them, of course. Worse, though, it was packed with bored Marines. You could only link in to training or entertainment sims for so many hours each day, and after that the principle form of recreation became an age-­old art form devised by and for enlisted personnel—­the bull session.

  “Hell, I know what Kirchner’s problem is,” Corporal Benjamin Hutchison declared. “He’s a back-­to-­Earth neo-­Ludd and he’s afraid of pissing off the Qesh!”

  “How do you figure neo-­Ludd? Sergeant Tomacek said. “He’s a fuckin’ doctor fer Chrissakes! They’re all about high tech!”

  Predictably, I suppose, the principle topic of conversation and scuttlebutt was Dr. Kirchner, after I’d been assigned to spend my duty hours with the Marines in their natural habitat. How they knew what they knew about the situation was beyond me; I hadn’t said anything about it, other than admit that the captain had let me off after a . . . misunderstanding with the good doctor. Either one of the other Corpsmen had blabbed, or the Marines were simply demonstrating the reality of psychic powers and reading someone’s mind—­mine, Chief Garner’s, or the skipper’s.

  Whatever it was, every one of them knew what had happened—­and almost happened—­to Pollard. The four Marines who’d helped me get Pollard back to sick bay would have told the others about my being put on report, of course, and why. But unless Chief Garner or the captain had said something about Kirchner’s apparent incompetence—­and that was starkly and absolutely unthinkable—­they were guessing, or they were reading between the lines.

  They’d tried to draw me out, of course, but so far I’d gotten away with declaring ignorance—­or suggesting that it was best that I not say.

  That didn’t stop the speculation, however.

  “Sure,” Private Wiseman said. “The back-­to-­Earthers say we have no business being in space, but not all of them are neo-­Ludd. I think most of ’em are just afraid of the Qesh . . . or the Raggies.”

  “Fuck, the Jackers are our bosom buddies now,” Sergeant Dalton growled. He grinned at me. “Ain’t that right, Doc?”

  “So they say,” I replied. Jacker was Marine slang for the Qesh, drawn from their societal code of JKRS on their entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica.

  “Hell, I don’t trust ’em,” Staff Sergeant Thomason said. “Or the Raggies either, for that matter.”

  The Brocs had told us about the broader political picture in our Galaxy when we’d first met them, and we’d learned more from the Encyclopedia Galactica. We knew that the Galactic Empire—­more properly the R’agch’lgh Collective, though that was a lot harder to pronounce—­had been in the process of falling apart for at least the past twenty thousand years.

  Twenty thousand years? Gods, all of human civilization fit neatly into less than half of that span!

  The R’agch’lgh Collective, the “Raggies,” had been running things in the Galaxy for a long, long time. A million years? More? We’re still not sure. We haven’t found an EG entry for them, though we’ve looked. But we do know that about fifty thousand years ago, they made contact with some seven-­legged armored centaurs known as the Qesh and collectivized them, brought them into their empire, making them one of their sources of military muscle. When things began turning pear-­shaped for the Collective, though, somewhere along about the time that the last major ice age was ending on Earth, the Qesh appear to have cast o
ff the imperial yoke and set up in business for themselves. Predarians, the news nets called them back home, meaning a predator species wandering the Galaxy looking for easy pickings.

  We first encountered the Qesh sixty-­one years ago at a star called Gamma Ophiuchi, eighty-­four light years away, where they figured we were up next on their easy pickings list. Last year, we fought them to a standstill at Bloodstar, and hashed out a treaty of sorts: we promise not to be a nuisance to them, and they promise not to strip-­mine our worlds down to bedrock.

  No one knew how long that treaty was going to hold. Most likely, it would last just about exactly as long as it was convenient for the Qesh not to step on us. They were centuries ahead of us in technology; if and when they decided that we were in their way, it probably wouldn’t take all that much effort on their part to correct matters. We’d seen them destroy planets by slamming rocks into them at close to the speed of light.

  Dalton had directed his snide remark at me because I’d had a hand in making that treaty possible. During a Marine reconnaissance of Bloodworld—­Gliese 581 IV—­I’d saved the life of one of the Jacker warriors, and that had turned out to be a big deal in their warrior-­oriented culture.

  Glad I could help, fellas. . . . but it was a good deed thin enough that we couldn’t count on it to make the agreement last. Nor could we count on Qesh good will. Especially now, since the red dwarf star known as GJ 1214 was located in the constellation in Earth’s sky known as Ophiuchus.

  The same constellation that held two other stars—­Gamma and Eta Ophiuchi.

  Did the Qesh consider that part of the sky to be their sovereign territory? Hell if I knew. All of our encounters with them had been in that general part of the sky—­Gamma Oph, Psi Serpentis, Eta Ophiuchi, HD 147513 in Scorpio, and Gliese 581 in Libra. The presumption was that they’d been coming out of that corner of the sky, each strike closer to us than the one before. Gliese 581 was only twenty light years from Sol, practically chiming our front door by Galactic standards.