by Ian Douglas
I glanced back at the M’nangat, which appeared agitated, the tips of its tentacles flickering rapidly along the edge of its bucket and turning bright lime-green. “It’s okay, D’deen,” I told it. “We lost power in the collision, but we’re working to restore it.”
THANK YOU. I WAS CONCERNED.
“So were we all,” Hancock said, but he grinned. “With the AI working again, we’ll have full repairs under way in no time.”
“Damage report,” the AI said, implacable and calm. “Power tap nonfunctioning. Magnetic drive nonfunctioning. Life support—”
“Damn it, we know!” Lloyd snapped. She sounded close to breaking. “Tell us something we don’t know . . . like maybe some good news for a change!”
“Request task hierarchy for power allocation.”
“Life support,” Hancock said. “That’s first.”
“Routing all available internal nanobots to life-support functions.”
The interior of Walsh’s cabin was coated with engineering-grade nanobots, including the ones that had grown our couches out of the deck matrix, and they would be swarming now through our life-support units beneath our feet, trying to bring them back on-line. They drew their motive power from the emergency batteries that were running our lights, now, and took their orders directly from the AI.
“Quantum power tap distributor node identified as source of electrical failure,” the AI told us. “Rerouting eighty percent of available internal nanobots to quantum power tap distribution systems.”
Most vehicles nowadays use quantum power taps—paired sub-microscopic artificial singularities orbiting one another—to pull energy from the seething foam of virtual particles appearing and vanishing at the so-called base-state of reality. If the power tap had broken down, we would have been well and totally screwed, since repairs generally meant a long stretch in spacedock for starships, and an expensive replacement unit for vehicles of Walsh’s size. Our AI had identified our problem, however, as a fault within the bundle of wires transmitting that energy to all of the vessel’s systems, not in the power plant itself. The violence of the impact, apparently, had jarred something loose.
“How long to effect repairs?” Lloyd asked it.
“One moment . . . one moment . . . current time to completion estimated at twenty-three minutes.”
That seemed like a hell of a long time, but it did take longer to nanotechnically repair gross structures like wiring, fiber-optic cable, and power-shunt transmitters than it did to call forth programmed shapes from a prepared nanomatrix.
“Twenty-three minutes!” Montgomery said.
“We should be okay for that long,” Hancock reassured her. He didn’t sound completely certain, however. Privately, I wondered if he was more concerned about CO2 levels in the compartment, or the fetid odor that seemed to be growing steadily stronger.
And we, meanwhile, continued to sink.
“Power distribution node repairs complete,” the AI said after what seemed like forever. “Testing. . . . Test satisfactory. Restoring power to all systems in sequence. . . .”
In fact, according to my in-head, only eleven minutes had passed. The lighting came up to full, and we heard again the gentle hiss of fresh air coming up through the deck. I could also feel my in-head link with the AI being fully restored, and that was a hell of a relief. I’m not as bad as some people are when it comes to losing their cybernetic connections to the local Net, but I certainly didn’t like it. I felt helpless, cut off, and vulnerable.
“Is the damned bathroom working yet?” Ortega demanded.
“Affirmative.”
“Excuse me.” His seat released him and he got up and made his way aft. The close, foul stench filling the small compartment was already clearing rapidly.
“Through-hull connectivity restored,” the AI said. “Hull matrix control systems, lighting, sonar, and imaging systems have been restored but not engaged. Awaiting pilot command.”
“No outside lights yet!” Hancock said, his voice sharp. “Let’s have a look around first.”
If the Gykr were still out there, alive and kicking, we didn’t want them to know that we were alive as well. At least, not yet.
“Good idea, Gunny,” Lloyd said. The bulkheads and overhead switched over to black.
Completely black. I’d forgotten just how dark it was down here. We appeared to be alone in a lightless void.
Gunny stared into the blackness a moment, as though trying to see what lay out there. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “I don’t like it . . . but let’s bring the outside lights up. Slowly. Don’t switch them on full yet.”
“Aye, aye, Gunny.”
Our outer hull began to glow, the light very gradually intensifying. . . .
And then we saw the Gykr submarine.
“My God,” Montgomery said. “They were disabled by the collision too!”
The Gykr vessel was a little longer than we were—perhaps twenty-five meters stem to stern—but slightly bulkier and more egg-shaped. The surface, dimly reflecting our light, had the matte-gray finish of compressed matter, and seemed partially lost in shadow.
Well, it would have to be a CM hull, wouldn’t it? “How deep are we, Gina?” I asked.
“Two hundred ninety kilometers,” she replied.
The figure startled me. We must have been diving at quite a clip during the battle, to have gotten this deep in this short a time.“The pressure on our hull,” she went on, “is roughly twenty-seven tons per square centimeter.”
I looked again at the Gykr sub. It was hanging more or less motionless in relationship to us. I noticed that there were some small fragments drifting in a thin, glittering cloud around it. Not paint, certainly. Tiny flecks of outer CM hull?
I also noticed that the Gykr vessel was not on an even keel. The broad end of the egg shape was hanging lower than the other, at an angle of more than forty-five degrees.
“Are we moving?” I asked.
“We’re descending at approximately five meters per second.”
So that uneasy, queasy feeling of descending in the pit of my stomach wasn’t due to the planet’s lower gravity after all.
“The thing is,” Hancock said after a long moment of watching the thing, “what if they’re busy getting their systems back on-line too?”
IF SO, D’deen wrote, WE MAY HAVE BUT SCANT MOMENTS BEFORE THAT VESSEL WAKES UP AND ATTACKS US AGAIN.
“Lloyd?” Hancock said. “Can you ram them again? Maybe one more good nudge would do it.”
“Gunny!” she cried. “I can’t do that!”
“Do I have to make it an order?”
“But if they’re crippled, that would be like murder!”
THE GYKR, D’deen said, WOULD NOT HESITATE TO DESTROY US.
“I don’t like it either, Lloyd,” Hancock said. “But it’s them or us.”
“Well there’s nothing I can do about it just yet anyway,” she told him. “We still don’t have maneuvering or power to the mag drive.”
“When we do,” Hancock told her, “I’m going to want you to hit them as hard as you can . . . at least, as hard as you can without sinking us as well.”
“What’s this about the Gykr destroying us?” Ortega said. He’d just stepped naked from the washroom. “Uh . . . where? . . .”
“Fresh uniforms in the aft stowage locker,” Hancock told him. “By the galley.”
“Thanks.” He opened a storage compartment, removed a utilities egg, and slapped it against his bare chest. The material activated, running out in a thin, opaque film across his body, growing him a new set of skintight shipboard utilities in a few seconds. “That feels better!”
“Smells better, too, Raúl,” Montgomery told him with a twinkle.
“Yes, well, I’m sorry about that. My God . . . is
that the Guck submarine?”
“It is, Doctor,” Hancock told him. “Apparently they were damaged at least as badly as we.”
“They could be playing possum,” Montgomery pointed out, “just like us.”
“How about it, D’deen?” Hancock asked the Broc in the rear. “We don’t know a lot about Guck psychology. Are they that sneaky?”
I FEAR WE KNOW LITTLE ABOUT GYKR PSYCHOLOGY, GUNNERY SERGEANT, D’deen replied. WHAT LITTLE WE DO KNOW SUGGESTS THAT THEY WOULD ATTACK AUTOMATICALLY AS SOON AS THEY WERE PHYSICALLY CAPABLE OF DOING SO.
“Fight or fight,” I added, nodding.
THEY APPEAR TO EXHIBIT A COLONY-TYPE RESPONSE TO EXTERNAL THREATS. THE INDIVIDUAL MATTERS NOT AT ALL. WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO THEM IS THE SECURITY OF THE ENTIRE COLONY.
“Ants,” Montgomery said. “Or termites. A hive mind, maybe?”
“Not according to the EG,” Ortega told her, using a towel to wipe down his seat thoroughly, then sitting down once more. “It’s more complex than that.”
“So what do we know about them as part of the Collective?” Montgomery asked. “D’deen?”
She was referring to the R’agch’lgh Collective, the interstellar empire that had been losing its grip on this part of the Galaxy for the past few tens of thousands of years.
VERY LITTLE, D'deen told her. THEY ARE NOT LISTED AS PART OF THE COLLECTIVE’S ORIGINAL MAKE-UP. THEY WERE UNKNOWN DURING THE COLLECTIVE’S APEX, AND ONLY APPEARED AS IT CRUMBLED. AS RAIDERS.
“Listen,” I said. “That’s all fascinating . . . but there’s someone else out there we should be worrying about too.”
“My God,” Hancock said, startled. “Doc’s right. Lloyd? Let’s have the lights up a little. We won’t reveal ourselves much more than we have already.”
The external lights brightened, and a hazy sphere of deep blue-green illumination reached out farther into the depths.
And there, just beyond the perimeter of the glow, shadows began to take shape against the night.
Huge shadows, dozens of them, each enormous . . . like vast tentacled snakes, hovering around us on every side, watching us. Waiting . . .
Cuttlewhales . . .
Chapter Eighteen
“Motive power restored,” the AI said. “Pilot has control of the vessel.”
“Gunny?” Lloyd asked. “What should I do?”
“Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing at all.”
“They haven’t made any hostile moves,” Montgomery pointed out. “It’s like they’re just watching us.”
“They may be confused about us,” I suggested. “Or curious. I’ve been wondering if they know the difference between us and the Gykr. The fact that we were fighting may have startled them.”
If something the size of a small starship could be said to be startled.
“C’mon, Doc,” Hancock said. “You’re telling us they can’t tell the difference between a human and an overgrown flea?”
“Well . . . think about it,” I said. “The cuttlewhales we saw on the ice were . . . what? Maybe two hundred meters long?”
“About that,” Montgomery said.
“So if we and the Gykr are both one percent of a cuttlewhale’s length . . . if we were the cuttlewhale, to us the human and the Gykr both would be just this tall.” I held up my thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart. “We don’t know how good their eyes are. Maybe at that scale, we both look the same.”
“I don’t buy it,” Hancock told me. “Gucks have six or eight legs, depending on how you count appendages, and they stand on their heads.”
“When you look at a bug, do you bother to count the legs?” Montgomery asked. “I think Doc’s right. And if their eyes see at infrared wavelengths, they wouldn’t see the same level of fine detail we do.”
“Besides,” I said, “what they’re looking at now are two deep submersibles, and they’re not all that different from one another—an egg shape and a cigar. I—”
A high-pitched squeal sounded through the compartment, and all of us looked up at the overhead, our hearts suddenly hammering. “Jesus!” Lloyd said.
The sound continued, growing slowly deeper, rougher . . . punctuated by a loud, sharp pop.
“Is the hull failing?” I asked.
“N-no,” Lloyd said after a moment. “No. We’re okay, I think. The sound . . . it’s coming from the Guck sub. We’re hearing the sound transmitted through the water.”
We all stared at the other submarine.
The implosion came with startling suddenness. In one instant, the Gykr vessel was egg-shaped. In the next, it was a perfect sphere, and the noise of its collapse was like a cannon’s shot. Walsh rocked heavily as the surrounding water rebounded.
Swiftly, the Gykr vessel, what was left of it, began to outpace us, falling into the depths.
“No air bubbles?” Ortega said. “I would have thought—”
“The pressure probably pushed all the air into solution in the water,” I said. “Like nitrogen in the blood when a diver is under enough pressure.”
“I wonder how many Gykrs were on board,” Lloyd said.
“We saw eight or ten scramble on board when Haldane came in overhead,” Hancock said. “Must have been a damned tight fit, though. I wouldn’t have thought the habitable space on board was much more than what we have here on the Walsh.”
“They have a communal, gregarious culture,” Ortega observed. “They might not mind being packed in like sardines.”
“No reaction from our friends out there,” Hancock observed. “Bring the light up a little more, would you, Lloyd?”
As the light intensified, we could see more details in the surrounding titans.
It was hard to tell how far away they were. They were so big that scale was tough to judge. We could switch on the sonar, of course, but we all remembered the apparent reaction of the cuttlewhales when we’d put sonar transponders into the ocean earlier.
They were quiescent at the moment, but we really, really didn’t want to make them angry.
“Hey,” I said, noticing something odd. “Look at that close one to port. Look at its mouth.”
“I see it,” Montgomery said. “Dr. Murdock’s reports suggested chromataphore communications. That’s why they named them after terrestrial cuttlefish.”
When the creature closed its mouth and stretched its eyestalks and the forest of tentacles around the outside of its head wide, it revealed a ring of flat, pale skin encircling the puckered central opening. The skin there was stretched taut and had a complex, mottled look to it—gray-green markings against a paler gray. And those markings were . . . changing, creating a writhing, shifting series of patterns, one flowing into the next in pulsing waves.
“Do you think it’s trying to communicate with us?” Lloyd asked.
“More likely it’s talking with the others,” Hancock said. He grimaced. “Something along the lines of, ‘Hey, fellas . . . is it good to eat?’ ”
“Can you make anything of it, D’deen?” Ortega asked.
NO. WE HAVE NEVER VISITED THIS WORLD, NOR ENCOUNTERED THESE CREATURES BEFORE, REMEMBER. HOWEVER, WE DO KNOW OF NUMEROUS SAPIENT SPECIES THAT USE SIMILAR METHODS FOR COMMUNICATING AMONG THEMSELVES. SOME OF THESE METHODS ARE QUITE SOPHISTICATED, AND CAPABLE OF TRANSMITTING A GREAT DEAL OF DATA IN A SHORT PERIOD OF TIME.
“Do you think you could figure out what they’re saying?”
HOW? WE HAVE NO STARTING POINT, NO COMMON UNDERSTANDING.
“It’s not like we can point to a chair and have them tell us their name for it,” I pointed out.
“If they’re intelligent,” Ortega said, “they would know that.”
“Hey, Gina?” I said.
“Yes?”
“Could you set up the lights on the outside of our hull to kind of . . . I don’t know, repeat back those pat
terns?”
“Why?” Hancock asked. “We won’t know what we’re saying.”
“It might be interesting to see what they do,” I suggested.
“Yeah . . . like poking one with a stick.” Hancock considered the idea for a moment. “Okay. Can you do it, Lloyd?”
“Sure, Gunny. I’m turning over all light control on the port side of the Walsh to the AI. It can analyze the patterns and reflect them back.”
“Do it.”
It took a few moments to set the system up, but after a moment, the AI said, “We are displaying the patterns of color on the hull now, with a one-tenth second delay.”
Essentially, each square centimeter of Walsh’s surface contained a layer of solid-state nanobots that could generate varying amounts of light, and the AI, using quantum electric effects through the compressed-matter hull, could control them like individual pixels on a display screen. Other external nano registered incoming light and transmitted data to the AI, effectively giving it all-round vision. Our AI could see the pattern shifts in the encircling cuttlewhales, and return the sentiments.
The response was instantaneous. All of the cuttlewhales became agitated, their tentacles and eyestalks lashing about in apparent reaction to our message, and several drew back into the shadows.
“It would appear,” Montgomery said, “that we have established communications. They certainly seem to have gotten the message.”
“A message, at any rate,” Ortega added. “I wonder what the hell we just said?”
The nearest cuttlewhale was signaling again, but its message was different now, a slow and rhythmic pulse beginning at the center and spreading outward. Very slowly, the patterns became more complex, interweaving twists and turns of moving color.
“Maybe we could send pictures,” Hancock suggested. “You know . . . animated images.”
“Maybe eventually,” Montgomery said. “But we’re not just separated from them by language. Doc is right. Things that we know well—a chair, for instance—would be meaningless to them. We show them an animation of a man walking, along with the word . . . but that wouldn’t mean a thing to creatures that swim or crawl.”
