Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  “Not . . . not everyone believes all that stuff,” I said. I hadn’t meant it to be so defensive, but that was what it sounded like to my ears.

  OF COURSE NOT. IT IS THE VERY DIVERSITY OF HUMAN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND BELIEF THAT MAKES YOUR SPECIES SO INTERESTING.

  Great. Fucking great. They were studying us because our religious tendencies were interesting.

  “None of that helps us at the moment,” Hancock said. “Lloyd . . . can you goose the sub a bit? Move us? Maybe we can give our friend out there a case of indigestion.”

  “I’ve tried, Gunny,” she said. She shook her head. “We’re being held in a non-­fluid medium with a pressure exceeding forty tons per square centimeter. Trust me . . . we’re not going anywhere!”

  “Except where it wants to take us,” Montgomery said. “The deck is tilting. I think we’re going—­”

  She shrieked, and Hancock swore again. The deck had suddenly tilted toward the bow until we were hanging in our seats, facing almost directly down. I could feel that stomach-­twisting lightness again, too, stronger now, the feeling of a very rapid descent.

  “Is the pressure increasing?” I asked.

  Lloyd nodded. “Going up at a steady rate. We must be just past the five-­hundred-­kilometer mark now.”

  Hanging like that was hideously uncomfortable, with the safety arm of the seat across my stomach tightly enough that I was having trouble breathing. I toyed with the idea of reprogramming the nanomatrix to rotate my seat 180 degrees, but decided to see if I could tough it out. If the sub changed attitude again while I was trying to scramble from one configuration to another, I might end up slamming into a bulkhead.

  And then the deck began to level off again, though we were still going down at a steep angle.

  “God,” Hancock said. “Is the damned thing deliberately taking us somewhere? Or is it just looking for a quiet place to digest us?”

  “If it is,” I said, “it’s taking us down deep.” I was linked in with the AI, watching the pressure readings increase. Six hundred kilometers . . .

  The cuttlewhale was moving at an astonishing speed. It had just dived an additional hundred kilometers in something just under ten minutes . . . which worked out to six hundred kilometers per hour. I’d never heard of anything traveling at that kind of speed underwater.

  And still we were going down.

  I think all of us had our ears cocked for the warning creak or pop that might tell us that our CM hull was about to fail. I was afraid, sure . . . but the earlier, babbling panic I’d felt was gone. I think that was because some part of my brain knew and accepted the fact that no matter what happened in the next few moments, it was completely out of my control.

  Not only that, but the cuttlewhales had been attempting to communicate! Gods, but that was big! That alone suggested that they were intelligent, at least on some level, and, perhaps most important, they were not acting randomly, but according to some sort of plan. The cuttlewhale that had swallowed us could have crushed us—­I was sure of that, even with our CM hull—­but it had not. Instead, it was carrying us into the deeps.

  Carrying us down, perhaps, to meet its maker.

  The thought struck me funny, enough to make me chuckle out loud.

  “Enjoying yourself, Doc?” Hancock asked. He didn’t sound amused.

  “Sorry, Gunny,” I said. “I just realized we were being taken to meet whatever it was that created the cuttlewhales. Their God . . .”

  “Do you seriously think these things were manufactured?” Ortega asked.

  “It’s the only hypothesis that makes sense,” I replied. “Otherwise . . . why do they have eyes?”

  “Maybe down where they evolved, most life forms make their own light,” Montgomery suggested. “Like in Europa.”

  “Or maybe they feed at the surface,” Ortega added. “Or they evolved at the surface, and gradually migrated to the deeps.”

  “Maybe.” But I wasn’t at all convinced. I didn’t bother arguing the point, though, because I was willing to bet that, in a short time—­a few hours at most—­we would learn the truth firsthand.

  “Well I think Doc’s right,” Lloyd insisted. “Why else would they be taking us this deep?” She hesitated. “Past the seven-­hundred-­kilometer mark, now.”

  “They’re alien,” Ortega said. “Damn it, they’re going to do inexplicable things!”

  I remembered my conversation with Wiseman . . . and with others. There would still be, I was certain, points of common rationality even between species as mutually alien as humans and cuttlewhales. There had to be. Hunger . . . a need to reproduce . . . curiosity. . . . We must share some things in common, even when we live in worlds as far apart as the surface of Earth and the Abyss­world deeps.

  I was well aware that I was grasping at a rather slender hope. If cuttlewhales were created, maybe they didn’t have reproductive urges. Maybe they didn’t feel anything like hunger or curiosity if they were designed as tools and manufactured for a specific purpose. Maybe . . .

  I could speculate about it all day, I knew, and never get anywhere. All I could say with any certainty was that we were getting closer to an answer, one way or another, with every passing minute, with every passing kilometer.

  Eight hundred kilometers.

  We were aware now of a gentle rocking motion from side to side . . . as if the titanic beast enclosing us was weaving slightly back and forth, propelling itself with vast and powerful sinuous weavings of its body. The speed had picked up too. We no longer were going straight down . . . but we were descending now at a rate of about 120 kilometers per hour. The outside pressure continued to increase. I forced myself not to think about that; Walsh’s designers had been confident enough that the little submersible could go considerably deeper than this.

  I did hope that those engineers hadn’t dropped a decimal or two along the way, though.

  Nine hundred kilometers.

  Would cuttlewhale motives be any harder to understand than, say, human religious belief? If we got out of this, I was determined to have a talk with D’deen or the other M’nangat. What did they really think of us and our—­what had the Broc called it?—­our interesting religious thought and belief.

  And what did I believe? That I would be physically reborn some day, in a new life, like my parents had taught me? Or did life simply . . . end?

  Well, if it was the latter, I would never know anything. If the former—­

  Static crashed and howled inside my head.

  I screamed, my hands going up to my ears. Dimly, I saw the others making the same, instinctive protective gesture, clapping their hands over their ears as their faces contorted. Then the static spread from my in-­head windows to my normal vision. For a terrifying moment, I was blind and deaf, assaulted by the raw shriek of white noise at way too high a volume.

  The pain grew worse . . . and I thought I saw something on my in-­head.

  At first I couldn’t tell what it was, what I was seeing. It looked like . . . a planet? A smooth, featureless white sphere against the blackness of space?

  I only had a glimpse of the thing, whatever it was . . . and then the static was gone.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Ortega gasped. “What the fuck was that?”

  “A hack,” Hancock said, still rubbing his ears. “Something just hacked our in-­heads! God knows how!”

  Gina Lloyd was unconscious. I released myself from my chair, leaning against the back of her seat in order to reach around and check the pulse at her throat. It was running at about eighty, strong and a bit fast. I patted her cheek. “Gina! Gina! Snap out of it!”

  Her eyes opened. “Gods!” she said. “What happened?”

  “I think something tapped into our in-­head circuitry. I don’t know how.”

  “That’s not supposed to be possible!” Montgomery said. “Shit! D
’deen is out too!”

  Lloyd seemed to be okay, if a bit shaken. I left her and pulled my way up across the steeply slanted deck to reach D’deen’s bucket. I tried using my in-­head to reach him, but I couldn’t pick up anything. “D’deen? D’deen! Are you okay? Write something to me!”

  No response. The M’nangat’s skin felt clammy and cold . . . but they were always a bit on the chilly side, despite having a body temperature only a degree or so lower than human. The thick, outer integument tended to insulate their body, and felt cool to the touch. The clamminess might just be from the high humidity inside the Walsh. The boat’s environmental controls appeared to be having some trouble catching up with the moisture from our breathing after having been shut down for a while.

  The truth was, I just didn’t know enough about Broc physiology to tell what might be wrong. The data Net running inside the Walsh had only the bare-­bones essentials; I would need a link with Ludwig and the full medical AI complement on board Haldane before I could even make some decent guesses.

  “Leave it, Doc,” Hancock told me. “We have other things to worry about right now.”

  “At least let me know he’s stable,” I replied. I took out my N-­prog and an injector, shooting a dose of medical nanobots into D’deen’s system. Moments later, I could see something of the Broc’s internal functions—­both hearts beating steadily in a back-­and-­forth rhythm, circulatory fluid circulating . . . everything looked fine. I ordered my fleet of ’bots to highlight D’deen’s brain. The problem we’d experienced, all of us, had been a sudden burst of energy going through our cerebral prosthesis, the nano-­chelated electronics grown inside our brains.

  I could see the artificial structures inside D’deen’s brain now . . . a complex web of bright metal threads, like a spider’s web, running through the equivalent of the M’nangat’s cerebral cortex. I magnified the image as much as I could, until my in-­head was actually showing me strands of what looked like gold rope stretched across masses of living cells, with sub-­micron filaments actually connecting the rope with the branching dendrites of alien neurons.

  Then I pulled back and had the ’bots do a simple electrical activity scan. I hoped that M’nangat brains operated on the same sort of biochemical-­electrical interaction as human neurons. The chemistry, I noted, was different, but there were still exchanges of ions across synaptic gaps, creating what amounted to a very low-­voltage current.

  I would need a full brain-­function scan back in Haldane’s sick bay to be sure, but it looked to me like D’deen’s brain was working okay . . . but quiescent.

  In other words, he was unconscious.

  “I don’t see any cellular damage in D’deen’s brain,” I told the others. “Nothing burned out, or bleeding, or anything like that. He’s just been knocked unconscious.”

  I just hoped that what I was seeing wasn’t the Broc equivalent of deep coma, or that there was some other serious medical issue that I simply didn’t recognize because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

  I made certain that D’deen’s seat was holding him securely. “Did anyone else . . . see anything?” I asked. “During that blast of static?”

  “I did,” Montgomery said. “A white ball against a black background.”

  “I thought it might be the planet, the planet’s nightside, seen from space,” Hancock said.

  “It looked uniformly lit to me,” Ortega said. “And there was no local sun, no stars. I don’t know what it was.”

  “I think I . . . heard something,” Lloyd said, hesitant.

  “Oh?” Hancock said. “What?”

  “It was hard to make out . . . but something like the words . . . ‘help us’?”

  “Interesting,” Hancock said, frowning. “Does anyone have any idea, any idea at all, what happened just then?”

  “I’m not sure, Gunny,” I said, “but I think maybe somebody was trying to talk to us.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever . . . whatever is running things down here.”

  “The cuttlewhale gods?” Ortega said. He laughed, a sharp, almost barking laugh that felt uncomfortably close to hysteria. “And they want us to help them?”

  “But how did they do that?” Hancock wanted to know.

  “You know, Gunny,” I said slowly, thinking it out carefully with each word that I spoke, “if you have something big enough, intelligent enough, powerful enough to create a pseudo life form as impressive as the cuttlewhales . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I just wonder if there’s anything they can’t do.”

  “Explain that,” Hancock said.

  I shook my head. “I can’t. But . . . okay. Somehow, someone interfered with our in-­head circuits, right? That would have to be either a very powerful radio signal, or possibly a focused magnetic induction of some kind.”

  “You lost me there, Doc,” Montgomery said.

  “That’s because I really don’t know what I’m talking about,” I replied. “But maybe a cuttlewhale carrying us inside its throat can somehow sense us, and the wiring inside our brains. Or maybe it’s . . . someone, something, working through the cuttlewhale, using it like a teleoperated probe or a remote explorer.”

  “Through a CM hull?” Ortega said. “I don’t think so.”

  I shrugged. “Why not? We use wave induction to send signals through our hull . . . for the outside lights, and to pick up vid images.”

  “Point,” Ortega said. “But this ‘someone’ of yours would have to be very, very sophisticated technologically.”

  “So, it sends us a signal. A message. Maybe it’s learned enough through our AI’s communications attempts to make a guess about how our electronics work.”

  “Somehow, Doc,” Montgomery said, “I find it very hard to imagine an underwater species understanding ­electronics!”

  “Why? Electricity conducts through saltwater.”

  “They would have had to develop a lot of science first,” she said. “Starting with metallurgy . . . smelting metals, developing ways to make wires, electromagnets, radio transmission in a medium that absorbs radio waves . . . uh-­uh. No fire, no metalworking.”

  “The way we did things on Earth, you’re right. But maybe this someone didn’t do things the same way we did. Maybe it learned to smelt metals at hot, undersea volcanic vents. Maybe it learned tricks with exotic ice shot through with metallic impurities. Maybe—­”

  The Walsh gave another lurch, and the deck suddenly leveled off.

  “I think we’ve arrived,” Lloyd told us. “Look!”

  Directly ahead, the light still shining off the Walsh’s outer hull was now illuminating a widening tunnel or passage. We felt a kind of surge through the deck as the submarine lurched forward . . . and then . . . my gods. . . .

  We’d emerged within a vast, clear, empty volume lit blue-­green by the Walsh’s external lights. For hundreds of meters in all directions, the water was sparklingly transparent, fading to translucence in the distance.

  “Out of the belly of the beast . . .” Ortega said, his voice almost reverently hushed.

  “My God,” Hancock said. “What is that?”

  It was difficult to know exactly what we were looking at, and impossible to determine a scale of what we were seeing. Above us, the blue-­green glow faded rapidly into the blackness of the Abyss, but below, the water appeared to be . . . thick. Gelatinous, perhaps, something not quite water, but not solid either, something spreading out in motionless waves and folds and hills and gently rolling valleys extending into the distance in all directions as far as we could see. It reflected our light in odd ways, creating a shimmering, diffuse effect that was indescribably beautiful. Was it ice? Or . . . something like thick water? I couldn’t tell.

  “Do you think we could have a sonar ping sent down into that translucent stuff?” I asked.

  �
�I advise against it,” Ortega said. “Remember what happened when we used sonar from the surface.”

  “That was at extremely high power and low frequency,” I said. “The cuttlewhales weren’t reacting to low-­power scans.”

  “Try it,” Hancock said.

  “Pinging . . .” Lloyd said. “Low power.”

  Sonar targets appeared on the viewalls, overlaying the shimmering panorama of light and water.

  “We’re getting odd reflections off that jelly stuff,” she said. She paused, then added, “it’s more like refractions . . . and the sound waves are moving a lot faster through it.”

  “Sonar indicates the water beneath us is unusually dense,” the AI added. “It appears to be fluid, and may represent an extremely diffuse form of amorphous ice VIII.”

  I didn’t remember offhand the characteristics of ice VIII, except for one. All of the exotic ices from ice III on were denser than water . . . which meant that they would sink rather than float like normal ice Ih. Quite possibly, most of the Abyssworld ocean was a fluid form of ice, solid or semisolid, but dense enough to sink to the seafloor thousands of kilometers below. It was even possible that what we were looking at was not on the list of fifteen known phases of ice, that it was something really exotic—­ice XVI, perhaps.

  And in this environment . . . why not? I checked with the AI and noted that we were at a depth of close to a thousand kilometers, and that the pressure on our hull was now in excess of ninety tons per square centimeter. At such pressures, the exotic would be commonplace—­ice that acted like fluid, perhaps, or water that acted like thick, glassy gelatin.

  “What the hell,” Hancock said, leaning forward, “is that?”

  He was staring at a sonar target forward and slightly below us.

  “Can you magnify the image?” Ortega asked.

  “Here you go . . .”

  The image expanded, centered on the object we’d earlier tagged as target Sierra Five. Lloyd gasped, and I nearly shouted.

  Sierra Five was a perfect sphere floating within the glassy-­water zone right at the border between ocean and amorphous ice.