Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  “Doctor,” I said, hesitating. “Are you all right?”

  Those eyes were piercing. “Of course I’m all right! Why does everyone insist on asking me that?”

  “You’re looking—­”

  “Just get the patient on the table, damn it!”

  I caught Garner’s glance, and he gave a little shake of his head. I shut up and helped him move the Captain off the stretcher and onto the STS table. At least Kirchner wasn’t inclined to argue about whether or not she needed the scan. “I’m okay,” she said.

  “No, Captain, you are not,” Kirchner told her. He was studying the scan results closely as they came off the machine. “Tell me, Captain,” he said after a moment. “Can you access the ship’s AI?”

  She closed her eyes . . . then opened them again, looking startled and slightly afraid. “I can’t! I can’t reach the ship’s AI!”

  Kirchner nodded. “You have a slight concussion . . . but the shock appears to have severed much of the microcurcuitry wiring to your parietal lobe. It’s not serious . . . but you are going to be off-­line for a while.”

  “No . . . !”

  The look of fear deepened to terror. I put my hand on her arm. “Take it easy, Captain,” I told her. “It’ll be okay. . . .”

  “I can’t feel the ship!”

  It must have been horrible for her. Most ­people nowadays—­and anyone with a career in a technical, scientific, or military field, had cerebral implants, allowing direct connections to local AIs, including those resident within their own heads. We joked about how many medical personalities and expert systems were running inside a typical doctor’s head . . . but it was almost as bad for a ship’s captain, who had to link in with her vessel’s computer Net in order to run the ship. Being cut off like that would feel like being lobotomized.

  In a sense, that’s exactly what had happened to Summerlee. The parietal lobe of the brain—­located above and ahead of the occipital lobe, at the back of the head, and behind the frontal lobe up at the front—­primarily integrates sensory information coming from many different sources . . . especially data involving our spatial sense, navigation, vision, touch, hearing, tactile sensations, and somatosensation, our awareness of where the different parts of our body are at any given moment. The parietal lobe is divided in two, left and right, like most other parts of the brain. The left hemisphere is involved with symbolic functions, including language and mathematics, while the right side predominantly handles spatial relationships, including images, navigation, and understanding maps.

  Janice Summerlee’s organic brain was undamaged, according to the scan, but in-­head circuitry feeds language and math from the implanted processors into the left parietal lobe. That’s how we can hear the voice of an AI or someone we’re e-­comming inside our heads, and when we talk to someone in-­head, the signals go out from the same region for processing and transmission. When a person suffers a concussion, what has happened essentially is that the brain, adrift in its cushion of cerebrospinal fluid, has been slammed against the inside of the skull. When Captain Summerlee hit that console, she’d done so hard enough to slam her brain to one side, and break the nano-­chelated wiring in her left parietal lobe—­wires that were a micron or less in thickness.

  “I need to get back to the bridge,” she said, trying to rise from the table.

  “Sedation!” Kirchner snapped.

  “Aye, sir,” Garner said. He used the table controls to signal the nanobots inside the Captain’s head, sending them to the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex to bind with her NMDA receptors, sending her into a drowsy, half-­awake state of relaxation.

  “S’feels good . . . m’okay. . . .” she said.

  “Deep sedation!” Kirchner said.

  I really didn’t like Kirchner’s expression . . . the quintessential mad doctor, wild eyes, wild hair. Something was seriously wrong. . . .

  Garner hesitated, then made the adjustment. Summerlee’s eyes, still wide open, went glassy as she drifted into a deep coma.

  “You two pack her into one of the storage tubes,” Kirchner said, stepping back from the table. “I’ve got to get up to the bridge.”

  “Why, Doctor?” Garner asked. “I’m sure they have things—­”

  “For the simple reason, Chief Garner, that I am now the ranking officer on board this ship! I am taking command!”

  “Sir!” I said, shocked. “That’s not right! You’re not line! Lieutenant Walthers—­”

  “I am in command of this ship and this expedition!” Kirchner screamed. “And I can have you tossed out of an airlock for insubordination!”

  I saw Kirchner’s eyes, and knew in that moment that I really was staring into complete, utter, and horrific madness. . . .

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Easy, now, Doctor,” Garner said, making gentle calm-­down motions with his hands. “We need to talk this out. . . .”

  “There is nothing to talk about!” If anything, his voice went up a notch in pitch and in decibels. “I am a lieutenant commander, and that idiot Walthers is a lieutenant! A mere lieutenant! The ship is in grave danger, and I’m in command!”

  The ship chose that moment to give another lurch, and it felt as though Haldane was turning, rotating swiftly on her z-­axis. There was a sensation of rapid descent, like going down in an elevator, and then a heavy jolt. Kirchner stumbled back a step, bracing himself against a bulkhead, and both Garner and I had to grab the scanner table to keep from falling. It felt as though we’d just rapidly come down out of the sky and grounded again on the ice.

  “Doctor,” Garner said, his voice the calm and studied monotone of a harried parent trying to reason with a small child, “only line officers can command a ship. You’re not line, you’re a medical officer. You are not in the line of command.”

  Kirchner turned away for a moment, palming open a storage locker in a bulkhead. When he turned back, he held a nasty, snub-­muzzled little laser pistol in his fist. “And I say I am!” he shrieked. “Get the hell out of my way!”

  Kirchner was out-­and-­out nut case now—­a technical term. I didn’t see anything I could do to stop him . . . or . . . maybe . . .

  “Put the gun down, please,” Garner said, still speaking to a child . . . a child throwing a particularly shrill tantrum. “You . . . you’re not well. . . .”

  “I am perfectly cuttled!” He paused, drawing a deep breath. “We need to get us now before the ice sculpts and whale all see commanding . . . !”

  Shit. Word salad. His condition was going downhill fast. In schizophrenia, certain kinds of dementia, and a few other mental conditions, the patient’s language can devolve into an incoherent babble. That babble might be grammatical, but the meaning is always confused to the point of being unintelligible. Sometimes, it can sound like stream-­of-­consciousness rambling, with one word or phrase triggering a new word or thought, with the meaning hopelessly scrambled. Medical ­people called the babble word salad.

  Kirchner hadn’t shown that symptom before. I’d been listening for it, because I’d suspected schizophrenia. But the rapidly escalating situation, the Gykr attack, and now the cuttle­whale outside, could easily have pushed him over the edge.

  I’d spent the last few seconds linking in through the sick bay AI and transferring the nanobot programming now running in Summerlee’s skull to Bob, the lab robot now patiently standing against the far bulkhead. One of the ROBERT’s arms ended in a nanobot pressure injector, designed to fire a few hundred million micron-­sized nanobots right through the skin and into an artery.

  The question was whether I could put my plan to work in time. . . .

  “Give me the gun, Doctor,” Garner said, taking a cautious step forward. “You need—­”

  Kirchner shifted his hand slightly and squeezed the trigger. There was a snap and a stink of burning flesh, and Garner clutched at his shoulder with a
grimace of pain.

  I sent a command to Bob, then shouted “Doctor Kirchner!”

  Kirchner spun, facing me, the laser raised, his hand trembling. “Summerlee after Captain ice shambles!” he screamed. “Down the back in never was!” His back now was to Bob, who glided forward silently and with astonishing speed and precision.

  I lunged to my right. I’d thought of dropping behind the table, but I didn’t want him hitting the captain accidentally. He pivoted and fired again, and I heard glassware shatter behind me.

  Then the ROBERT’s arms closed around Kirchner’s, and the pressure gun slipped smoothly around and up against the angle of his jaw. I heard the hiss. . . .

  Kirchner’s eyes, still wild and staring, lost some of the intensity of focus . . . and then he sagged into Bob’s mechanical arms, the laser dropping from a nerveless hand. I moved to Garner’s side. “You okay, Chief?”

  “Not bad. Been better . . .”

  His voice shook, and the burnt-­meat smell was strong. The bolt, I saw, had melted through his utilities and charred an area the size of my fist right at the joint of his right shoulder.

  “Better sit down,” I told him.

  “What about Kirchner?”

  I glanced at the doctor, slumped unconscious against the ROBERT. “He’ll keep. I put him into deep coma.”

  “We’ll need to put him in a tube and keep him that way,” Garner said, “until we can get him back to Earth.”

  “What, you don’t want a madman running around the ship? Imagine that.” I had my M-­7 kit open and was applying burn-­repair nano.

  “Duty Corpsman to Airlock One,” a voice called through our in-­heads. “Duty Corpsman to Airlock One . . .”

  “Go ahead, Carlyle,” Garner told me. “You take it. I’ll handle things here.”

  I glanced again at Kirchner. There really wasn’t anything we could do for him here. His insanity might be treatable, but we would need to get him to a full-­facility psych unit Earthside before we could even begin to guess what had gone wrong.

  “You sure you can—­”

  “Of course I can!” He snatched the burn spray unit from my hand. “Go!”

  “Aye, aye, Chief.”

  On my way down to the Number One airlock, I patched through to the bridge and told Walthers about what had happened to Kirchner and to the chief.

  “Shit,” he said. “Do we need to keep you on board?”

  “Chief Garner should be okay,” I told him, “and he’s putting Kirchner on ice for the rest of the expedition. But why do you need a shore party? What’s going down?”

  “Some of our ­people are on the ice,” he said. “Trapped . . . by one of those things.”

  And a Marine shore party was being detailed to go rescue them. Right. It never rains but it pours and sometimes it pours liquid nitrogen, or worse.

  I reached the airlock, where a party of Marines was already suited up, checking weapons, and getting ready to go outside. “Hey, Doc!” Thomacek called. “About fucking time! Armor up!”

  I squeezed into a waiting Mark 10 hanging on the rack, sealed it off, and accepted a helmet from Thomason. “Thanks, Staff Sergeant,” I told him.

  Wiseman handed me a Mk. 30 carbine. I checked the safety, wondering if a half-­megajoule laser pulse would even register in a cuttlewhale’s consciousness. I might have better luck throwing snowballs at the things.

  “Open the hatch!” Gunny Hancock called. The dim reddish light of Abyssworld spilled into the lock as the ramp lowered in front of us. “Move out! Move-­move-­move!”

  Haldane had touched down on the ice perhaps a kilometer away from the spot where the cuttlewhale had lunged up through the ice. Thirty Marines and two Corpsmen were out here, converging on the ship as quickly as possible. I could see several of them using their meta-­thrusters to make low, bounding leaps across the pressure ridges, their combat-­armor nanoflage making them almost invisible in the dim light. In the distance, the snaky silhouette of a cuttlewhale weaved against the swollen red face of the sun.

  “Perimeter defense!” Hancock called. “Dalton! Set up your weapon to put fire on that thing!”

  We spread out, creating a broad circle around the grounded Haldane. Visibility sucked. The wind from the west had picked up, and we were staring into a layer of blowing ice crystals and freezing fog perhaps two meters deep. I dropped to the ice alongside Bob Dalton, helping him unship his M4-­A2 plasma weapon. I was wondering, though, who we were fighting—­the cuttlewhales or the Gykrs. The mission on GJ 1314 I’s icy surface had just become very complicated.

  I got my answer in the next ­couple of moments, when a chunk of ice a hundred meters off to my left erupted in a flash and a plume of steam, followed by a rain of fist-­sized chunks of ice. A second explosion rocked us, closer. That was portable artillery, not native life forms, and they were looking for our range.

  “Combat Command, Marine Red-­One!” Hancock’s voice called. “We have incoming HP at coordinates . . .”

  Hancock rattled off a string of alphanumerics, locating the explosions even as a third blast slammed into the ice somewhere behind us.

  “Copy Red-­One,” came the reply from Haldane. “We are tracking.”

  A fourth explosion cracked in the sky. It had taken Haldane a moment to set up her radar net, but now they had it up and running and were tracking any round coming in toward the ship or our perimeter. Haldane’s dorsal laser turret began methodically swatting the incoming out of the cloud-­wracked purple sky.

  Thunder boomed, and our two A/S-­40 Star Raiders flashed low overhead with a sound like tearing cloth. They were in their atmospheric flight configuration, blunt-­nosed deltas with drooping wingtips, and they were being vectored in by the combat command center on board Haldane. A moment later, a savage blast beyond a jagged line of pressure ridges to the south lit up the sky, and we felt the shock wave slam at our armor through the ice. Several Marines cheered.

  But we had another problem close on the heels of the first. The last of the Marines left out on the ice were crossing our perimeter now, emerging from the ground fog like racing ghosts . . . and very close behind came a scattering of hunchbacked, massive shapes, a dozen Gykrs in dark gray combat armor. Dalton twisted around with his weapon, snapping off a rapid-­fire string of plasma bolts that tore through one of the armored Guckers and shredded the upper half in molten gobbets. The Gykrs carried long and complicated-­looking weapons, like two-­meter lances with rods and serrations that might have been purely decorative or ceremonial . . . but which were a lot more likely to be part of what made them deadly. There was a swift, brutal exchange at point-­blank range fifty meters from my position; the Guckers appeared to be coming up out of the ice, materializing from the fog; how the hell were they doing that?

  Twenty meters short of the Marine perimeter, one of our ­people staggered and went down. “Marine down! Corpsman . . . !”

  But I was already moving. My in-­head marked the fallen Marine even though I couldn’t see him in the murk. “Cover me, Bob!” I shouted at Dalton, and I kicked in my M287 and sailed across the intervening distance in a long, flat trajectory. I landed short, but scrambled the last few meters on hands and knees, keenly aware of energy bolts hissing and cracking through the air around me. The Marines were using infrared for targeting, and I hoped my armor’s IFF—­Identification Friend or Foe—­was working as advertised.

  It was Lance Corporal Enrique Gonzalez. Whatever had hit him had taken off his right arm at the shoulder, and he was writhing about on the ice in agony, his severed arm still encased in white armor a ­couple of meters away.

  “Easy, buddy,” I told him. You’re gonna be okay!”

  His armor had operated as programmed, sealing off his shoulder joint and the bleeding with a guillotine blade that kept him from losing atmosphere. It had also automatically fired a jolt of nananodynes i
nto his carotid artery; the nanobots were already starting to shut down the pain receptors both in his shoulder and in his brain, and his twisting struggles grew less exaggerated as the pain receded.

  “I’m hit, Doc! I’m hit!”

  I heard the panic in his voice. With the pain turning off, a lot of his reaction would be due simply to the shock and fear of having seen his arm torn off. I jacked into his armor and coded for more nananodynes . . . and added a sedative effect.

  “Doc! Watch it!”

  That was Dalton’s voice, from fifty meters behind me. I looked up and saw the hulking mass of a Gykr, its armor shifting from a mottled off-­white to gray as it rose from the ice. It was bringing its lance-­weapon around to aim at the two of us. . . .

  I rolled over onto Gonzalez’s body, grabbing him with one arm as I brought my M30 carbine off my shoulder with the other. I triggered the weapon one-­handed, trying to aim for that vulnerable patch on the front-­underside. I don’t know if I hit it or not; as soon as I’d dropped out of the way, Dalton was able to trigger a burst from his plasma weapon, and the Gykr exploded three meters in front of me. The Guckers might not have had blood like we do, but the effect of cupric hemolymph splattering across the ice was remarkably similar, in shades of blue-­green instead of scarlet. I rolled off of Gonzalez, picked him up in a fireman’s carry, and started moving toward the Marine perimeter.

  I left his right arm on the ice. If he made it back to an OR, he’d be able to grow a new one.

  I had to engage my suit’s power-­assist to manage that carry. Gonzalez plus his combat armor massed about 120 kilos, though in the weaker gravity of Abyssworld he only weighed about 109. That was still a considerable load, too much for just me by myself. Fortunately, Mk. 10 armor could serve as a powered exoskeletal unit, giving the wearer superhuman strength—­strength enough, at least, to hoist Gonzalez across my shoulders and stagger unsteadily toward the Marine lines. A ­couple of Marines ran out to meet me as I approached, and helped carry Gonzalez the last few meters. “Get him aboard the ship!” I yelled, releasing my load. There wasn’t a lot more we could do for him, save get him out of the armor and get him stable. His blood pressure had dropped in the last few moments, a sign he was going into shock. I instructed some of the nanobots in his brain to handle that, then turned back to the perimeter.