by Ian Douglas
The Gykr attack appeared to have broken off. A number of smoking bodies lay scattered across the ice. I didn’t know if we’d gotten them all, or if survivors had retreated; hell, I didn’t know if Gykrs could retreat, the way their brain wiring worked. It was possible that they were like soldier termites or ants, that they would just keep coming, keep attacking until a threat was neutralized.
Or maybe . . .
From the frying pan to the fire. Off to the west, a couple of cuttlewhales were making their ponderous way across the ice.
The wind-whipped fog was thicker off toward the horizon, so we heard them before we saw them . . . a steady, grinding crack and pop as those incredibly massive bodies ground their way over shattering ice. A dark blur slowly resolved into an enormous, sinuous body. As it grew closer, its head lifted above the ice, questing, the weaving tentacles surrounding that maw giving it a top-heavy, shaggy look in silhouette. It was so ponderously massive, it was hard to imagine how it could possibly move over solid ice . . . how it could possibly rear its questing head that far into the air.
An age or two ago, on a vacation visit to the newly minted glaciers of Vancouver, I had seen elephant seals, bloated and nearly immobile on the beach. Those beasts had seemed barely able to move, and yet the cuttlewhales, millions of times heavier, forged ahead faster than a man could walk. Their physiological structure must have been awesomely strong. . . .
“Hold your fire!” Hancock told us. “We’re supposed to talk with these critters. . . .”
He didn’t sound very sure of himself. The nearest cuttlewhale was still a couple of hundred meters away, but it was rearing off the ice to the height of a three-story building. The mouth of the thing reminded me of a terrestrial lamprey—circular, lined with gray-silver teeth. It was puckered at first . . . almost closed, but then the opening dilated, rolling back on itself to reveal a cavern almost as wide as the entire creature, lined with blades. Six stalked eyes surrounded the head, moving independently of one another; between each pair of eye stalks was a slender, in-curving blade or tusk longer than any of the teeth.
Could this monster possibly be intelligent? One of the basic rules of xenobiology is that intelligence requires manipulatory organs of some sort—articulated claws or tentacles or hands with fingers . . . something with which to grasp and hold and interact with its environment. Those six, curving tusks might fit the bill . . . I could all too vividly imagine the beast plucking a Marine from the perimeter like massive chopsticks picking up a single grain of rice, but they didn’t appear able to manipulate small objects, other than, possibly, to swallow them.
And still the beast crawled closer with vast, sinuous weavings of a seemingly endless body, becoming more and more clear and sharp as it emerged from the wind-blown fog and frozen sea spray. Something moved in front of it . . . a Gykr suddenly flushed from hiding. That massive, shaggy head ducked suddenly, with surprising speed, snatching up the fleeing Gykr with astonishing precision and dexterity between twenty-meter tusks.
I didn’t see what happened to the alien. I think my eyes were squeezed shut. They opened when the cuttlewhale’s head fell forward and dropped into the ice.
It was coming straight toward us . . . with a second just emerging from the fog in the distance.
“Marines!” That was Lieutenant Lyssa Kemmerer, back in Haldane’s Combat Command Center. “Commence fire! I say again . . . commence fire!”
Clearly, both we and the ship were in danger. Laser and plasma-gun fire opened up along the Marine line, and Haldane joined in with her turreted lasers. I hesitated. A laser carbine against that?
Then I steadied down, brought my weapon to my shoulder, and opened fire. I don’t know that I did any damage to the enormous thing at all, but the full weight of a Marine combat platoon seemed to be getting through to the beast. The Star Raiders flashed overhead as well, and a bright flash against the creature’s body seemed to spray a cloud of chunks and steaming liquid off to the side.
The cuttlewhale jerked and writhed at that onslaught, its advance halted for the moment. “Cease fire! Cease fire!” Kemmerer ordered. I saw what she was doing: initiating a conversation that basically ran something like, “Halt, or we keep hurting you!”
The cuttlewhale began moving forward once more, slower now.
“Commence fire! Commence fire!”
Again chunks were blasted from the hide of the beast, and I wondered how thick the hide was, how heavily armored it might be. Something that big might have an integument—a skin—so thick that even the ship’s lasers would have trouble drilling through it.
But a lot of the damage caused by both lasers and plasma weapons is generated by thermal shock. My helmet’s infrared scanners were showing the monster to be about the same temperature as the air outside—just below zero centigrade. When a laser bolt hit the monster’s skin, the sudden spike in local temperature was enough to cause a fair-sized explosion, especially if that skin contained a fair amount of moisture.
Damn . . . what was the cuttlewhale made of?
“Everyone fall back to the ship,” Kemmerer’s voice ordered. “We’ll cover you . . .”
Made sense. As near as I could see, our weapons weren’t making a dent in the monsters. Only the turret weapons on Haldane and the two Star Raiders were hurting it at all. Despite the fire, the nearest beast continued advancing, sliding now slowly across broken and uneven ice, its titanic body slowly undulating, the hissing roar and crackling thunder of its approach growing louder.
How the hell were they able to move? One of those monsters must have weighed as much as a small mountain. . . .
We started moving back toward the ship, now lost in the ground fog somewhere in that direction. There was nothing more we could do out here. The mission, so far as I could tell, was a shambles now. No sign of the research station . . . and if we were communicating with the cuttlewhales, I didn’t much like the direction in which the conversation was going.
The ground—the ice—was shaking. I felt a shock through my boots, and a tremor so violent I nearly fell. Ice was buckling and cracking off to my left. A third cuttlewhale was breaking through from underneath. Ice shattered and sprayed into the sky . . . and a gray-white wall rose precipitously just thirty meters away, the shaggy head weaving uncertainly far above our heads.
The wall began falling toward us. . . .
“Move . . . move!” I screamed. I triggered my jumpjet and catapulted through hurtling chips of ice as the wall fell, meters behind me. Visibility was zilch. Had everyone made it clear? I couldn’t tell.
“Corpsman!”
Shit! Where was he? I superimposed tactical data over my normal vision, trying to see through the nearly opaque, wind-whipped murk around me. There . . . !
Dalton was down, his leg pinned under an overturned block of ice. I dropped in next to him, trying to lever the ice off of him, but it wouldn’t budge. That block must have weighed half a ton.
His plasma weapon was lying next to him. I snatched it up, cleared it, then opened fire at point-blank range, slamming bolts of ionized plasma into the upper half of the boulder.
Thermal shock. The explosion knocked me back a step. What was left of the boulder I could probably move . . . but as I reached for it, movement tugged at my awareness. An eye . . . shiny black, stalked, and a couple of meters across, was coming at me out of the fog. Behind it and stretching far above it, tentacles writhed . . . and an obscenely puckered mouth peeled itself open. The side of the thing was wet and . . . and shifting, almost as though it were unraveling . . . melting . . . coming apart . . . what was that stuff?
I shouldered Dalton’s plasma weapon and mashed down on the trigger, firing at the eye . . . at the mouth . . . at the looming cliff of a head covered in snaking, twisting tendrils. More thermal shock, and chunks of broken monster sprayed us both.
But the
head reared back and up off the ice, vanishing into fog. I dropped the weapon, grabbed Dalton’s suit two-handed, and triggered my jumpjets. The load was too much for a clear flight, but it kicked us hard across the ice. I took a second to pull up an electronic overlay marking the ship, corrected my vector, and jumped—or half-jumped—again, an ungainly leap that dropped both of us back to the ice in a tumble. Thunder boomed behind me . . . all around me . . . and as the fog ahead cleared I could see the Haldane already hovering just above the ice ten meters away, its ramp still down, as a couple of Marines at the entryway waved me on.
The wind from dayside shrieked around me, the blowing snow threatening to shut down my vision again.
“Doc!” Someone yelled. “Move your fucking ass!”
Another Marine—it was Hancock—landed next to me, grabbed hold of Dalton’s harness, and the two of us dragged him the rest of the way to the ship. I looked back over my shoulder in time to see that yawning, tooth-and-tendril-lined maw gaping as it loomed above us.
The Star Raiders shrieked low overhead, and a blast caught all of us as we struggled in the open. I staggered, then fell off the ramp to the ice a meter below.
“Doc . . . !”
“I’m okay!” I shouted back. Standing, I looked around the cuttlewhale. Much of the head had been torn open by particle beams from the Raiders, and chunks of pale pink-gray flesh lay steaming in a huge splash out from the body.
Had we killed it? The body was still twitching spasmodically, a vast and ragged cliff stretching twenty meters up into the sky. The surface looked . . . odd. Fuzzy . . . almost fluffy, and like it was melting.
“Doc! Get your ass back on board!”
“Hold on a sec!” I wanted a sample. A piece of cuttlewhale half a meter wide lay nearby. Stooping, I hoisted it up in front of me and lugged it back toward Haldane’s ramp. The thing was heavy, a good fifty kilos at least, and I was glad my armor had that exoskeleton capability. I wouldn’t have been able to stagger back onto the ship otherwise.
“What the fuck, Doc?” Hancock said, his voice acid. “Out getting your last-minute shopping done?”
“Collecting specimens, Gunny. Know your enemy.”
I was still struggling up the ramp as the Haldane lifted higher, clearing the ice.
One of the other monsters reached for us, neck stretching impossibly high.
It missed. Its body stretched upright—I couldn’t see its tail—and then it began to sink, falling back to the ice, which was obscured by the wind-lashed ground fog.
Spray burst up through the fog. I realized that I could no longer see any of the cuttlewhales. Had they broken back through the ice, and into the ocean beneath?
We were accelerating . . . boosting back to orbit. The two Star Raiders followed us up, pulling victory rolls as they boosted. They would dock with us in orbit.
And the rest of us would consider the failure of the mission . . . and what we could do about it.
Chapter Fifteen
Haldane fell into orbit around the planet. I dropped my ungainly specimen into a sealer unit in the main airlock, then got some Marine help and a quantum spin-floater to haul it up to the lab. I followed as soon as I got out of my armor.
I quite literally wanted to know what a cuttlewhale was made of.
Two hours later, we remained on red alert. All of us were all too aware that the Gykr ship we’d spooked on our arrival might be back at any moment . . . and likely with friends. We thought that Guck technology was pretty close to ours, but technological development between two space-faring species is never identical and is never parallel. They had picked up tricks we didn’t know. It worked the other way around, too, of course, but right now we were worried about what they could do that we couldn’t. A very small difference in faster-than-light drives might mean that they could jump a thousand parsecs in a few hours, while we’d taken a leisurely couple of weeks to make it across forty-two light years.
In other words, we knew the Gykr would be back. We just didn’t know when . . . or how many of them there would be when they arrived.
Walthers had called for an after-action debrief on Haldane’s mess deck, which had been transformed into an ad hoc briefing room. There were twelve of us physically present, including the ship’s department heads and the four most senior Marines—Lieutenant Kemmerer and Second Lieutenant Tom Regan, plus Gunny Hancock and Staff Sergeant Thomason. I was there representing the science/technical department as well as the medical department. Both Ortega and Montgomery were present, as mission specialists.
There were electronic presences as well. Chief Garner was linked in from sick bay, as department head, and both Machine McKean and Doob were there electronically. So were our three nonhuman passengers, the Broc family, D’dnah, D’drevah, and D’deen. Brocs like things a bit on the chilly side, compared to humans. A pleasant twenty degrees is sweltering to them. Our three tended to stay to themselves, in a compartment on board Haldane that could be kept at a comfortable zero to ten Celsius.
The discussion had been going on for several minutes, and so far the consensus appeared to be that we should declare defeat and go home.
“Why do we even need to stay here?” Lieutenant Walthers asked with a shrug. He was the ship’s skipper now, with Summerlee still recovering in sick bay, and I think the safety of both ship and crew was weighing on him heavily. “We’ve confirmed that Murdock Base is gone. And those . . . those things down there are going to make it damned hard for us to look around.”
Lieutenant Kemmerer agreed. “Between the Gykr and the cuttlewhales, we’ve had three Marines killed,” she said. “A Corpsman may not recover, and Sergeant Dalton has a broken leg. There’s a Gykr submersible still loose in the ocean, and there may still be Gykr stragglers on the surface. We need a bigger force to deal with the threat.”
“But we can’t go back!” Dr. Ortega sounded shocked. “Not yet!”
“You can’t believe we actually have a chance of communicating with the goddamn cuttlewhales, do you?” Walthers asked.
“Maybe not the cuttlewhales,” Dr. Montgomery said. “But there’s Sierra Five to consider.”
Before the cuttlewhales had made their precipitous appearance, the Marines on the surface, along with McKean and Dubois, had drilled through the ice in three places and dropped in SNR-12 units—remote autonomous sonar transponders intended to paint us a picture of what was going on beneath the ice. The results had been . . . surprising.
The three-dimensional image was projected on a mess deck viewall—an empty blue abyss with several targets showing as bright white points of light. One—identified as Sierra One, for the first sonar contact—was a hard, bright target nearly two hundred meters down and twelve kilometers away from the transponders. Three more, Sierras Two through Four, looked softer—fuzzier around the edges. They were deeper, much, much longer than they were wide, like thread-slender worms, and were almost certainly the three cuttlewhales that had attacked us on the surface.
Sierra Five was a hard target, almost directly below the transponder positions, but it was deep . . . very deep. Exact triangulation was something of a problem, since the three transponders were relatively close to one another and didn’t provide much in the way of a baseline, but the best estimate suggested that the target was something like a thousand kilometers almost straight down.
Not meters down. Kilometers.
The water pressure at that depth would be . . . horrific. A hundred times the depth of the Challenger Deep on Earth, or more, something like a hundred thousand atmospheres. Even at that, a thousand kilometers is still only about 10 percent of the distance from Abyssworld’s icecap to the ocean floor.
The range was too great to tell what we were looking at, but it was pretty large . . . as large, perhaps, as the Haldane.
“We need to consider the possibility,” Mo
ntgomery went on, “that Sierra Five is an artificial structure of some sort. If it’s artificial, then it was manufactured by intelligence. It might well be an intelligence native to Abyssworld.”
“And it might also be a submerged Gykr ship,” Walthers pointed out. “Or just another very big native life form, like the cuttlewhales. It might even be another cuttlewhale, though I’ll admit that the sonar return looks a lot different.”
“At that depth,” Garner said, “we might expect cuttlewhales to look different. Harder. Firmer. More metallic, even. Carlyle here has something to say about that.”
“Ah, yes,” Ortega said. “Our young hero!”
“What the hell were you thinking, Carlyle?” Kemmerer said. “Running back outside to collect a piece of that thing.”
“I wasn’t exactly thinking,” I said, and when several of the others at the table laughed, I shook my head and kept talking. “I mean . . . I fell off the ramp, okay? And a piece of a cuttlewhale was right there. I just saw an opportunity—”
“Carlyle’s actions may help us actually make sense of the biology on this planet,” Garner said. “I’ve seen the results. This is important.”
“So what did you learn?” Montgomery wanted to know. “You analyzed that piece of flesh?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m not sure we can call it flesh, though. . . .”
“What is it, then?” Kemmerer demanded.
“Ice,” I told them. When that single word elicited a confused babble of voices and protests, I added, “Specifically, Ice Seven.”
