by Ian Douglas
It looked to us as though the Gykrs had been marine organisms in the very recent evolutionary past, quite possibly as recent as just a few hundred thousand years ago.
Or—like giant marine isopods living in Earth’s oceans—they might have been in this exact form, unchanging, for hundreds of millions of years. One theory popular among evolutionary biologists suggested that organisms living and breeding in darkness tended to change only very slowly, over long geological eras of time.
The Gykr appeared designed for a life . . . not in total darkness, perhaps, but certainly in low levels of light. They possessed a single large compound eye, arranged as a complete ring or circle around the head and below the puckered, rasping mouth, startlingly gold against the blue-gray skin. There were two simple eyes mounted far apart, large and dark—all pupil—looking out to either side, plus a couple of pits or indentations underneath that made me think of the infrared sensors of certain poisonous terrestrial snakes.
“Ugly sucker, isn’t he?” Garner asked as I pulled the front part of the body back to reveal what passed as a face.
“What are those giant bugs on Madagascar?” I asked. “They look like this thing.”
“Madagascar hissing cockroaches,” Garner said.
“Yeah, right, I replied. “This is cockroach city.”
“Okay, let’s open him up. I want a look at his brain.”
“Where is it?” I asked. The segments holding the face were pretty narrow, without much room.
“About here,” Garner said, beginning the incision with a laser scalpel at just beneath the eyes and slicing down across the abdomen. “At least we think so. This is the first time anyone’s had a chance to actually dissect one of these things. All of what we know about their anatomy comes from nanoscans of some rather badly smashed up bodies at Tanis. Ah! Here it is . . . you see? Just like a squid.”
I saw what he meant. The brain turned out to be a mass of whitish tissue compacted into a doughnut shape completely encircling the esophagus about where the human throat would be. Squid in Earth’s ocean had a similar arrangement, though their brains are a lot smaller in proportion to the animal’s mass. It wasn’t encased within a protective skull like ours, but seemed to rely on the external carapace and layers of antifreeze-saturated fat for protection.
“Fire a charge of nano into the brain,” Garner told me. “I want an estimate on size and function.”
I used an injector to squirt some millions of nanobots into the brain tissue from various angles, then used an N-prog to tell them what to do. Brain function can be very roughly estimated by the number of neurological connections—the gaps between individual neurons jumped by chemical sparks when we have a thought or give our body a command.
As expected from the Gykr entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica, this one had an NCE—a neural connection equivalence—of 8.981796 x 1013, or nearly 90 trillion synaptic gaps. That was an interesting number, actually, because the average human NCE is around 1014, or 100 trillion. Now, there’s some flexibility built into those numbers; humans don’t have exactly 100 trillion synapses, but a range that can run 10 percent or more in either direction. The Encyclopedia Galactica gave the Gykr a slightly lower NCE of 9.3 x 1013.
But what it did suggest was that, on average, the Gykr had a bit less processing power, a bit less mental flexibility, than did humans. That wasn’t necessarily a cause for celebration. I suppose you could say that if the average human IQ was 100, the average Gykr IQ was 93, but, damn it, things are never that simplistic. First off, intelligence is not purely a function of synaptic connections . . . and that assumes that we even know what the thing we call “intelligence” is. Gykr brains might be more efficient than ours in some ways.
We’re pretty sure that they rely more on instinct than we do, for example; that fight-or-fight thing they have going for themselves, for instance, might be an autonomic response that bypasses the brain completely. They also appear to have a close relationship with their community. It doesn’t appear to be a hive mind like that postulated for termites or bees on Earth, nor is it simply a tight, centralized government. The EG gives them a societal code that translates as “V,” representing a “close associative.” We’re not entirely sure what that means; the best guess is that Gykr society is like a close family group . . . a family numbering in the billions.
The family reunions must be hell.
I was also interested in the fact that the Gykr were radially symmetrical in their recent evolutionary history. It was logical in an evolutionary sense, I suppose, if the animal’s marine ancestor had been a radially symmetrical cylinder with a mouth at one end and an anus at the other, connected by the tube of a digestive tract. Gykr weren’t radially symmetrical now, of course, but it looked like their ancestors had been. Its hearts, for example—there were five of them interconnected in a chain around the esophagus farther down, just below the brain. It turns out that there are a hell of a lot of ways to put together a life form in this Galaxy, quite apart from what we know and understand on Earth.
I was almost surprised to see the Gykr skeleton as Garner opened up the wet torso, though I’d known they did have one. The creature looked so much like an oversized bug that I still expected it to have a chitinous exoskeleton. Science fiction recsims are fond of threatening their human characters with giant insects, bugs the size of e-Cars or worse. Utter nonsense, of course. A real insect can’t be larger than about the size of your fist. But the Gykrs did a good job of looking like giant cockroaches or pill bugs without violating basic physics. The internal skeleton turned out to be cartilaginous, lightweight, strong, and flexible, more like the skeletons of sharks or rays, rather than rigid, articulated bones. A kind of central support beam, like flexible plastic, ran down the middle of the body cavity, with rubbery loops alternating side to side that appeared to support the internal organs.
By the time we completed the dissection, we had a somewhat better picture of Gykr evolutionary anatomy. They definitely had evolved in deep, cold, ice-capped water—likely an environment very much like Europa or the deeps of Abyssworld. They’d emerged, though, into a moist but air-filled environment . . . caves, possibly, or hollowed-out pockets inside the ice. Somehow, they’d learned how to smelt metals, and that almost certainly meant in air rather than underwater. It’s damned tough pulling iron out of ferrous ores if you can’t build a fire. Garner wasn’t so sure, and suggested that they might have learned some smelting skills working around hot volcanic vents or lava flows underwater. Even so, you need to know about stars, know they exist, before you can try to reach them.
For that kind of information, we were going to have to question a living Gucker, and that might prove difficult. There were some, evidently, hiding out among the ridges and blocks of the ice cap, and there was that submarine Doob had mentioned, somewhere underneath us.
That stirred some deep-down fear, the more I thought about it. “Chief?”
“Yeah?”
“Doobie was telling me a bunch of Gucks escaped on board some sort of submersible.”
“Yup. We saw it from the air as we were coming in. Managed to submerge before we could target it, though.”
“So . . . what does that mean for us? Could they attack the Haldane through the ice?” I wasn’t entirely sure what I was suggesting, what it was that had me worried . . . some kind of torpedo, maybe. Perhaps a torpedo with a nuclear warhead, fired at the underside of the ice.
“It’s possible. The LT has ordered some Marines to go out and put hydrophones and sonar transponders down through the ice—at the edge of the ice cap, and also through the thin ice where the research base used to be.”
That made sense. Sonar meant sending sound waves down into the ocean, and when they hit something solid, like an alien submarine, the reflected sound waves picked up on the hydrophones would tell us where the sub was, how deep, and how
fast it might be moving.
At the same time, though, I knew that Gykr technology wasn’t all that well understood. If they had torpedoes, how powerful were they? What was their range? So many unknowns, so much that was alien and not understood . . .
And what about the native life forms the researchers had reported on this frozen ice ball, the cuttlewhales? It was beginning to look like it had been the Gykr, not the cuttlewhales, that were responsible for destroying our base. But we couldn’t be sure of that, either. We couldn’t be sure of anything.
“We’re also going to be setting up the dome,” Garner went on. “Once we have that, Haldane can go back into orbit . . . just in case.”
He didn’t add, of course, that Haldane’s safety in orbit didn’t guarantee our safety on the ice. But at least we would still have a way to get home if we survived our time on the surface.
We were still cleaning up after ourselves in the morgue when that guarantee became a lot more slender. The ship lurched, hard, as though a titanic hammerblow had struck us from underneath. In the next moment, the deck took on a distinct tilt; we were listing, perhaps ten degrees, to starboard.
Garner and I stared at each other across the morgue table. A moment later, the voice of Lieutenant Walthers, the ship’s exec, sounded through our in-heads. “All hands! Brace for immediate liftoff! We are under attack . . . repeat, we are under attack!”
We both grabbed hold of the stainless-steel table as the ship lurched again, and we felt momentarily heavier as we accelerated straight up. Captain Summerlee had engaged the ship’s quantum-spin fields, lifting us up off the ice. By juggling the spin-states on Haldane’s belly, we could push against the electron spin of the ice below and even Abyssworld’s magnetic field, turning us into a giant quantum-state floater.
The ship’s AI, I saw, was transmitting a situation update; we were already at red alert, of course, ever since we’d arrived on planet, but the information coming down from the bridge said that we were under attack. How . . . whether from the alien submarine beneath the surface, or by individual Gykr out on top of the ice, we didn’t know.
And almost before we’d absorbed the fact that we were being attacked, the automated voice of our AI came through our in-heads. “Emergency! Corpsman to the bridge! Emergency! Corpsman to the bridge . . . !”
“Go,” Garner told me. “I’ll finish up here.”
I checked through the sick bay AI. Dubois was outside . . . shit, and so was McKean. That left me and Garner on board the Haldane to take care of whatever was going down.
I grabbed an M-7 on my way up to the bridge. I queried the ship’s AI, asking about what had happened, but I didn’t get an immediate reply. Well, of course not. The ship’s AI is good for information about the ship’s condition, and where a particular person might be on board, but not so much about things like medical emergencies. Sensors on the bridge would have detected something out of the ordinary—someone had a heart attack or had stopped breathing—and summoned me with the AI voice in my head.
All I knew for sure was that someone up there had been hurt by the attack.
I wondered who it had been.
It was the skipper.
“What happened?” I asked as I entered the bridge and hurried across to the woman sprawled on the deck.
“She got thrown from her chair,” Lieutenant Walthers said. He pointed at a hard plastic console. “Hit her head there.”
There were eight other officers on the bridge, plus two civilians, Ortega and Montgomery. The bridge was a broad dome-shaped compartment extending above Haldane’s dorsal side, and with deck-to-overhead viewalls around all sides, giving a 360-degree view horizontally, and a 180 vertically, creating the startling illusion that the bridge was a circular pit completely open to the sky. The captain’s station was raised above and behind a crescent-shaped bank of instrumentation and high-tech link couches on a low dais; Captain Summerlee evidently had pitched forward off the dais and hit her head on a helm workstation. A couple of naval ratings were kneeling on the deck next to her. The rest were still at their stations.
“We didn’t think we should move her,” one of the ratings said.
I nodded at her. “Absolutely right. You have to be careful with head injuries. Someone call for a stretcher team.”
I was already bringing the business end of my nanobot injector up under the angle of Summerlee’s jaw, sending a few tens of millions of micron-sized nanobots into her carotid artery. She was unconscious, with a five-centimeter gash high on the side of her head, a few centimeters above her left ear. Pulling her hair aside, I could see the beginnings of an ugly, bruised lump. She was bleeding, too, as only scalp wounds can bleed. I thought about Private Pollard, and prayed there was no hematoma inside the skull. She obviously had one on the outside, and at least a mild concussion.
It took only seconds for the ’bots to diffuse through her brain and down her spine. I checked the image coming through on my N-prog. No injury to the neck or thoracic spine, thank the gods, none that showed up here. I would want to do a full soft-tissue scan in sick bay, of course. No sign of the epidural hematoma Pollard had suffered . . . and no sign of a skull fracture. I peeled back her eyelids, checking the pupils. They were both the same size, and both responded to a flash from my mini light.
Blood pressure 120 over 70. Normal. Heart rate at 85 . . . a bit elevated.
Okay. So far so good.
Along about then her eyes fluttered and she started to move. “What the hell was that?” she asked.
“Please don’t move, Captain,” I told her. “You fell, hit the side of your head. I’m checking you out.”
“Go ahead and check me out all you want,” she said. “But we’re not going to have a date. . . .”
If she could joke, she was doing well.
I went ahead and put skin sealant on the cut, closing it off, and used some nanobots to double-check to make sure there wasn’t a major bleeder in there. I reprogrammed some of them, putting them on hemostat duty—closing off any torn blood vessels and capillaries that hadn’t been reached by the foam. Two Marines with a stretcher arrived, and I supervised getting her onto it.
“Damn it, no,” she said. “We’re under attack!”
“I’ve assumed command, Skipper,” Walthers told her. “There’s been no sign of further attack since that first shock. I suggest you go with the nice Corpsman and behave yourself, ma’am.”
“We have people out on the surface,” she said.
“I know, Captain. I’m in communication with them now. The situation is under control.”
“If it was that Gykr submersible . . .”
“The situation is under control, Captain. Please don’t worry so much!”
“It’s my fucking job to worry!” But she relaxed then, lying back on the stretcher and closing her eyes.
“Anybody else hurt up here?” I asked.
“No,” Walthers said. “Freak accident. We were hit just as she was starting to stand up, and she got thrown forward. No reports of other injuries on the ship . . . nothing but a few bumps and bruises.”
“Okay. I’m taking her down to sick bay. Let Chief Garner know if anybody else needs help.”
“Right.”
I wondered what had hit us. Something fired from that sub? Or artillery from the Gykrs on the surface? The people on Haldane’s bridge would tell us, I assumed, when they were ready. Presumably that meant when they knew what it was.
“Jacobs,” Walthers said. “Give us one-eighty down on the bridge view.”
“One-eighty down, aye, sir.”
I was starting to follow the stretcher off the bridge when the image projected on the dome overhead shifted. The ship hadn’t changed attitude, but the image had been flipped to show the ice directly underneath the ship. For a moment, I felt like I was hanging v
ertiginously upside down. I looked up . . . at an expanse of smashed and broken ice. And there was something coming up out of the ice toward us. . . .
“My God!” someone yelled. “What the hell is that?”
It looked like a titanic black flower, myriad short tentacles, several longer arms uncoiling, six stalked, black eyes spaced evenly around a gaping, central maw . . .
And with the inverted display it appeared to be lunging down toward the open bridge.
The thing appeared to reach for us, tentacles weaving, then settled back into the frothing roil of ice chunks and black water.
“Cuttlewhale!” I said. I didn’t know if the Haldane’s bridge crew had been briefed on the things or not. I’d assumed they knew. There was, of course, an enormous gulf between seeing those graceful, far-off serpentine forms on the horizon on the images sent back from the research base and looking down the throat of a monster that must have been nearly as wide as Haldane herself was long. I felt weak inside. This was the mysterious life form that might be intelligent . . . a creature that Commonwealth Naval HQ had sent us across forty-two light years in the hope that we might learn to communicate with it. I looked at the two civilians, Montgomery and Ortega, seated at the rear of the bridge. They were staring up into the horror above us with expressions that could only translate as dismay.
Yeah, good luck with that xenocommunication thing, I thought. Damn, those two did have their work cut out for them. How do you talk to a monster sixty or seventy meters wide and the gods alone knew how long?
I hurried out the bridge entryway after Captain Summerlee.
Chief Garner was waiting for us in sick bay . . . as was Kirchner.
“Let’s get her on the scanner,” Garner told me.
“The Captain!” Kirchner said, eyes widening. “Madre de Dios!”
Kirchner looked . . . bad. His hair looked like Einstein’s on a bad day, his face looked hollow and starved, and his eyes were bugging out like a Gyrkr’s. There was something terrifying about that wild expression.
