Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  And what’s most critical in serious battlefield trauma is protecting the brain. If the blood flow stops—­as Kari’s had—­you’ve got about four or five minutes before the brain becomes starved for oxygen, and individual neurons start to die. Kari’s brain functioning had been CAPTRed before the mission . . . but that wouldn’t do a damn thing if her brain had deteriorated to the point that it couldn’t receive a polytomographic download.

  I used my N-­prog to tell the newly injected nano to hook up with her respirocytes and increase their functional efficiency. I checked on her pain levels—­there were some receptors firing, but she wasn’t feeling any of it, which was what was important. And I took a chance and dialed down her reticular activating system, her RAS, located in her brainstem. That would take Kari into a deeper coma . . . and make certain that she stayed there.

  After that I applied more sealant to close off the remaining breaks in her armor—­around her abdomen and her right shoulder. We weren’t in vacuum, thank God, so there’d been no explosive decompression. The planet’s atmosphere was about at half a bar, and composed mostly of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. I would need to be careful if I decided to boost her oxygen levels at all, and the CO2 hadn’t done her any favors in the time she’d been exposed to it, but there was nothing immediately corrosive in the gas mix to cause her serious harm. Her blood oxygen saturation level, as reported by the nano inside her body, was at 91 percent, a little on the low side, but nothing to worry about immediately. I would have to keep monitoring it. Blood pressure was 80 over 30, heart rate at 110. That was more worrying, a result of her having lost so much blood. I directed a few thousand nanobots already in her brainstem to increase her blood pressure by increasing her heart rate. That was another risk, but a calculated one. Her heart was already in tachycardia; having it pump faster was dangerous, but necessary to get her falling BP under control.

  And after that all I could do was sit back on my heels and watch her . . . that and hate the monstrous little aliens who’d callously sliced her open like this. What had they been doing . . . a quick vivisection to learn about human anatomy? Or just curiosity about what we looked like and carelessness with a cutting tool? Jesus!

  “Ship’s coming in,” Hancock warned.

  I wiggled back out of the narrow tunnel, blinking in the glare of sunlight that was as dim and red as a sunset on Earth, but which seemed bright after the infrared dimness of the strider’s interior. Hancock and Masserotti gaped at me; the arms of my suit were coated in blood.

  “She’s in bad shape,” I told them. “The bastards tried to cut her out of her armor, and didn’t do a very neat job of it. If we can get her into an S-­tube, though, she has a chance.”

  “Good job, Doc,” Hancock said.

  “Don’t congratulate me until we know she’s going to make it,” I said. The words came out more harshly than I’d intended, but I was bitter and mad. I was also frustrated to the point of screaming. Outside of a few supportive things, there was nothing I could do for her. Gods, how long was it going to take to get the stabilizer canister here?

  I could see the Haldane in the distance, slowly drifting our way. It appeared to be engaged in a running battle, however, its weapons turrets laying down a heavy fire across the distant ice. Research vessels like the Haldane were not heavily armed, but they did have weapons—­a ­couple of side-­mounted plasma cannon turrets, and a good thing, too. There was at least one other Guck strider, I remembered, as well as a number of ground troops still out there.

  Burn them, I thought with a white-­hot anger. Burn them all!

  Two small, black delta shapes circled, dipped, and swooped around the larger research vessel—­Marine A/S-40 Star Raiders that had been mounted on the ship’s hull aft of the TMAs. I didn’t know if there were any Marine pilots in the contingent on board Haldane, and it was possible that those two were operating under AI control. It was comforting, though, to know they were up there.

  After a few more moments, the Haldane drifted closer, lowering its bulk gently onto the ice. A ramp came down, and more Marines emerged. Two of them double-­timed it toward the downed strider, lugging an S-­tube between them. I had to go back inside the alien machine and use my plasma cutter to get Kari out from under the body of one alien and, yeah, I took a certain amount of vicious pleasure doing that. Then, as carefully as I could, I pulled her body back out through the hatch and lowered it to the ice.

  “My God,” one of the Marines said as he positioned the S-­tube next to her. “What happened to him?”

  “Her,” I said, correcting him. I didn’t bother answering his question. With the open part of her armor filled with solidified foam packing, she didn’t look as gruesome as she had a moment ago, but there was still a hell of a lot of blood on her armor. Gently, I scooped her up and laid her in the open tube. Later, we would need to open it up and remove the armor and her utilities, make some tube insertions, and package her up once more, but I wasn’t going to do that out here.

  The two Marines picked up the tube and started back toward the Haldane. I followed alongside, keeping track of Kari’s blood pressure and respirocyte function.

  I’d been so busy for the past half hour that I’d scarcely taken note of my surroundings. The surface of GJ 1214 I looked identical to the ice cap growing over Earth’s northern Atlantic, between New England and Greenland. The sky overhead was a deep violet and clear, save for isolated clouds scudding past at a fairly high rate of speed. In the west, the bloated red sun was only just visible through and above a pall of violet and orange mist. I’d expected to see the edge of the permanent storm from here, but decided that the thunderheads must be below the horizon. I could certainly feel the effects, however, in the savage wind blowing in off the dayside ocean. We had to lean into the teeth of the wind to make any progress at all. I estimated that it was blowing a full gale, with surface winds of sixty or seventy kilometers per hour. We struggled into the lee of the grounded Haldane and the going became easier. We made it up the ship’s ramp and headed straight for sick bay.

  Kirchner was there. “You,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if the emotion behind that single word was anger or disdain.

  “HM2 Harris is in a bad way, sir,” I told him.

  I’d spent a fair part of the outbound voyage wondering if Kirchner was any good as a doctor.

  Now I was praying that he was.

  The second strider had been destroyed by the two Marine Star Raiders, but most of the remaining Gucks had escaped . . . into a submersible, if Dubois was to be believed.

  “C’mon, Doob,” I said, shortly after I’d delivered Kari to Dr. Kirchner. We were in the mess hall. “Pull the other one. A fucking submarine?”

  “That’s what it looked like,” he told me. “A small one, maybe twenty-­five meters long, fifteen wide. Kind of egg-­shaped, like that ship of theirs we scared off. It surfaced right through the ice, close to the edge of the water, where the ice was real thin, and the Guckers just swarmed on in.”

  “How many?”

  “Ten or twelve. Must’ve been damned crowded on the sub.”

  “That’s also only about half of what we saw coming in. The others must have scattered across the ice.” That was going to be a nasty security problem while we were here.

  “I understand the skipper has robots out on patrol, looking for stragglers. If they’re out there, we’ll find them.”

  “We’d fucking better.” I was feeling grim, angry, and vindictive as hell. What had the Gucks done to the research scientists at the base . . . dissected them? Hell, what had they done to the base? Except for those few outlying storage sheds we’d seen from the air, not a trace was left of the main dome beyond a hundred-­meter circular patch of very thin, recently refrozen ice.

  But then I began wondering . . . a submarine? What were the Gucks looking for under the water, anyway?

  We know so da
mned little about them. We assume they’re from a sunless rogue planet, and that suggests they prefer darkness. Their homeworld might be an ice-­covered abyss, like Europa or Abyssworld itself, but we’re not sure.

  I opened a mental channel to Chief Garner. “Hey, Chief?”

  “What’s up, E-­Car?”

  “There are a ­couple of Guck bodies outside. It occurs to me that if we do a post, it might answer some questions about what they are, what they want.”

  “Way ahead of you, son. We brought in a ­couple of bodies thirty minutes ago. You want in on the p.m.?”

  “Absolutely, if you can get the authorization for me. Otherwise, I’d like to be present VR.” Normally, a post mortem—­an autopsy—­would be performed by a doctor, ideally by a ­pathologist, but we didn’t have one of those available closer than forty-­two light years at the moment. If Kirchner was going to do the post, he might not want to have me on hand.

  But if that was a problem, I should be able to look over the doctor’s shoulder, as it were, by linking in through virtual reality—­VR—­and watching the procedure in three-­D realtime.

  “Not a problem,” Garner told me. “The doctor’s already delegated it to me. You can assist.”

  “Excellent! Thanks, Chief!”

  While a doctor would normally wield the scalpel in a post mortem, it was not unknown for the task to be delegated to competent personnel, especially when the procedure could be overseen and guided by an expert system AI.

  I was really looking forward to this.

  The dissection took place in the OR suite, which was a small complex of compartments opening up off the sick bay. The morgue was there in an adjoining compartment, which incuded storage for S-­tubes, and I was painfully aware that Kari was behind one of those cold, circular hatches in the bulkhead. Chief Garner was there getting set up when I entered, already wearing a biocontainment suit and helmet. On the big steel table lay a Guck, still wrapped up inside its armor. The precisely placed hole at one of the joints over the torso suggested that it might have been the one Gunny Hancock nailed, but I couldn’t be sure. Our AIs would have been guiding the sighting pictures for all of the Marines.

  I picked up a biosuit pack and slapped it against my chest, activating the nanomatrix, which flowed out over my body, covering everything except my head. A filtration system went on my back rather than a standard life-­support system, and a goldfish bowl sealed with the suit when I settled it over my head. The chances of an alien life form—­especially one as alien as a Gykr—­carrying biological agents that could harm us was vanishingly small, but we would take no chances. The opening in the alien’s armor, I saw, had already been plugged with a sterile sealant so that the being could be brought inside. In addition, the temperature inside the morgue had been dropped to about 5ºC, low enough to inhibit most microorganisms, and the entire OR and morgue areas were sealed off to protect the rest of the ship.

  “Ready, E-­Car?” Garner asked.

  I nodded inside my helmet, and we began.

  The dissection took three hours . . . and at that it was a quick-­and-­dirty one, something to give us a rough overview of Gykr physiology, not a detailed anatomical study. We were hampered by not knowing what we were doing or what we were looking at. We’d seen living Gykrs at Tanis, and there might have been a gross examination of some bodies, but I wasn’t aware of any formal studies or dissections. We recorded this one, of course, through the sick bay AI, start to finish.

  And I’m pleased to say I didn’t even come close to throwing up.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Of course, we ran into trouble almost from the beginning. The damned alien armor wasn’t designed to come off.

  The stuff was definitely organic—­long-­chain molecules of carbon and hydrogen—­and appeared to have emerged from or grown out of the Gykr’s outer calcareous layers of natural armor. Did they actually breed some members of the species to have built-­in space suits or combat armor? Or was the stuff grafted or even welded on somehow, and removed later using some sort of organic solvent?

  That also raised questions about what they’d been doing when they’d peeled off Kari’s armor, and taken body parts with it. Had they really been trying to skin her alive? Or . . . as seemed plausible now, had they possessed only limited experience with humans, knowing that we put armor on and took it off almost as easily as we did clothing, but they didn’t know where to draw the line?

  In any case, we’d used a drill to try to sample the atmosphere inside the Guck’s outer suit, but couldn’t find an airspace. We did succeed in getting blood and tissue samples for analyses. As described by the Gykr entry in the Encylopedia Galactica, they used glycol nucleic acid to pass on genetic information, rather than deoxyribonucleic acid, and used cupric hemocyanin in hemolymph as their oxygen-­bearing circulatory fluid.

  Humans use hemoglobin—­a porphyrin ring containing an iron atom—­to transfer oxygen through their circulatory systems, and use red blood cells drifting through the blood plasma to do so. Most terrestrial mollusks, plus a few arthropods like the horseshoe crab, use an entirely different ogygenation system—­metalloproteins containing two copper atoms suspended directly in hemolymph, which is similar to plasma or interstitial fluid. It works as well as red blood cells do, pretty much, though it’s less efficient as a transport system in what we would consider normal pressures and temperatures . . . but it’s far more efficient than blood at high pressures, low O2 levels, and cold temperatures. It has one extra advantage, too. The stuff can carry certain nucleating agents that turn the hemolymph into a kind of antifreeze. That made sense if they’d evolved beneath an ice cap, on a world heated not by a star, but solely by internal geology.

  “I think we need to bring in Bob,” Garner told me.

  “Coming right up.” I patched a thought through to the sick bay AI, and powered up Bob.

  “Bob” was our nickname for the lab’s ROBERT unit—­that’s RObotic Biological Examination and Remote Teleoperation, a rather contrived acronym referring to using a machine run either by AI or by a linked-­in human working in a room next door to avoid the risk of biological contamination. He came through the morgue airlock from the lab a moment later, wheeled, bulky, and sporting an impressive array of scalpels, laser cutters, syringes, and similar weapons of either healing or destruction, depending upon how he was programmed. He had the advantage of allowing an operator to see through his eyes, which could magnify down to the sub-­micron level. Usually, he worked with a human teleoperator, but he was smart enough to do simple dissections on his own.

  Garner took control of Bob, and began using the machine’s pinchers—­far more accurate and much stronger than human fingers—­to peel back the Gykr’s armor. We were really operating in the dark, here. I became more convinced than ever that they’d cut up Kari out of ignorance, unable to tell the difference between Marine armor, her skinsuit utilities, and her skin.

  Eventually, we managed to peel off the outer layers of the Guck’s armor, and then began investigating the organism’s gross physiology and anatomy. Depending on how you counted, the Gykr had three, four, or five pairs of legs, the longest at the rear of the torso, the shortest up by what passed for a head. Apparently, a Gykr normally walked four-­ or six-­legged, with the head end lower than the abdomen, its ass up in the air; the remaining four sets of clawed appendages could do double duty, as legs or as arms, though the uppermost set was tiny, only ten centimeters long, and probably reserved for eating or facial grooming. The hindmost legs were too long and slender for the Guck to use in order to stand upright, but they definitely were for walking, not swimming. One of my biggest questions about Gykr physiology was whether they had evolved originally as marine life forms—­either as swimmers or as bottom crawlers—­or whether they’d evolved on land, possibly in magma-­warmed underground caverns. Knowing the answer to that might give us some hints about their psychology—­
about how they saw the universe around them, and how they thought.

  The gross anatomy reminded both Chief Garner and myself most of terrestrial isopods. Most ­people are familiar with what are variously known as wood lice or pill bugs, those little silvery, many-­legged critters you find underneath an overturned rock in temperate climates that curl up in a ball if you disturb them. What most ­people don’t know is that there are marine versions of the animal, and some of those grow to enormous size—­as much as forty centimeters and massing almost two kilos. They’ve been around for a long time—­more than160 million years—­and evidently have changed not at all in all that time. The biggest are found at truly impressive ocean depths—­as much as two thousand meters down or more—­where they eat pretty much anything they can find and sink their claws into, living or dead.

  The Gykr were air-­breathers, though we’d known that. Their atmosphere contains oxygen—­though at a lower percentage than we favor—­so like us they employ an oxygen-­based metabolism. However, their lung—­singular—­seemed to have been adapted from a swim bladder. These guys had been marine organisms not too far back in their evolutionary history.

  But the kicker came when I peeled off the last of the artificially grown armor around the creature’s tail. There, tucked in on the soft underbelly beneath the overlapping dorsal strips of natural armor, were four paired structures that definitely weren’t legs, but they weren’t really fins, either. They reminded me of the swimmerets on terrestrial shrimp or lobster—­the technical term is pleopods—­which serve as swimming legs, as support structures for gills, and in some species as sex organs.