Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

The barrier opened of its own accord, the metal puckering at the middle and then rippling open in all directions, creating a circular opening, a doorway leading into near total darkness. And beyond, within that darkness just a ­couple of meters away, loomed a shadowy, monstrous figure . . . an armored Gykr.

  “Get down, Doc!” Hancock screamed, drawing his weapon. The Gykr already had a weapon in one of its forward appendages, a complicated-­looking tube with a massive grip designed for its manipulatory claspers.

  It fired, and I heard a sharp crack and smelled the tinny stink of ozone as a bolt of energy snapped above our heads and slammed into the docking collar’s outer hatch behind us. Hancock brought his pistol up and got off two shots. The Republic 12mm was an old-­style slug-­thrower, but had the considerable advantage of not requiring a heavy battery or other power supply. Both rounds, however, appeared to shatter against the Gucker’s carapace without effect. Hancock must have loaded the seven-­round magazine with frangibles . . . a good idea if you were planning for a firefight within an enclosed environment where putting a round through a bulkhead was not recommended, but useless when it came to penetrating armor.

  Hancock cursed, came up off his hands and knees, and collided with the Gykr soldier. The only light was coming from a few nanolights in a circle around the outside of the docking collar behind us; inside the long access tunnel beyond, it was completely dark, so much so that I couldn’t see if there were more Gykrs waiting for us farther along.

  For a moment, Hancock and the Gykr struggled, and all I could see was a confusion of spidery limbs around the black, central mass of the alien; then the Gykr fired its weapon again . . . and again . . . sending one bolt into the overhead. The second burned through Gunny Hancock’s left arm.

  He screamed and sagged to one side. I’d been looking for an opening, but the passageway was too narrow for the two of us to engage the Gucker at once. Now I was able to crowd past Hancock and grapple with the Gykr hand-­to-­hand . . . or maybe, in this case, it was more hand-­to-­hand-­to-­hand-­to-­hand. The Gykr had several limbs that could serve as legs or arms, and several small arms that were useless for heavy lifting, but which could grasp and claw at me.

  “Get him up!” Hancock screamed at my side. “Get him up!”

  I saw what he wanted. Normally, Gykrs went about like giant insects, heads low to the ground, their rounded backs well protected by bands of artificial armor grafted on over bands of natural calcareous armor or chitin. Their undersides were less well protected, especially around the face and mouth parts.

  Grappling with two of the Gykr’s longer arms, including the one wielding the alien weapon, I dug in and pushed, hard, lifting the creature up and back. I was aided by the gravity, 9 percent less than Earth’s, and doubt that I could have lifted it in a full G or without a personal exoskeleton suit.

  I managed to push it up and back, however, its legs flailing as it tried to get a grip on my body. Hancock’s pistol went off right beside my ear, a painful, thundering crack-­crack-­crack that left my ears ringing, but the rounds slammed into the thinner armor covering the Gykr’s face, ripping open its suit above its breathing flaps.

  From the autopsy Chief Garner and I had performed, I knew that there were six breathing slits along its head, three to either side of the being’s face behind and below the bulge of its compound eyes. Gykrs breathed oxygen, though they needed a lower partial pressure than did we—­about 10 percent.

  But they also appeared to need a higher level of carbon dioxide—­over 33 percent—­a level that would have been fatal to humans without breathing gear, and they required an ambient atmospheric pressure a third lower than ours.

  As I wrestled there in the dark with that armored horror, I could hear a hissing, rasping gurgle as it struggled with the tunnel’s gas mix forcing its way into its suit. I freed one hand, stuck two fingers into a gaping hole opened by one of Hancock’s bullets, and yanked as hard as I could, peeling open a layer of artificial outer armor as thin as paper.

  The Gucker broke free from me, staggering backward, its arms flailing wildly, its weapon landing with a splash in a shallow pool of water a meter in front of me. Ducking down, I scooped up the weapon, wondering how to fire it . . . and then finding the trigger recessed into the grip. The bolt slammed into the Gykr’s chest, burning open a ragged crater the size of my head and dropping the struggling creature onto its back.

  I immediately turned to check on Hancock. The bolt, I saw, had burned clean through his left arm about at the level of his elbow. His lower arm and hand were lying on the deck, grotesque and steaming.

  The stump of his arm appeared to have been cauterized, the flesh charred and blackened halfway to his shoulder. There was no bleeding, but when I held my small flash to his eyes, they looked glassy and unfocused.

  “Did . . . we get ’im?”

  “You got him, Gunny. Good shooting!”

  “We—­”

  And then another bolt of hot plasma seared down the tunnel, striking one bulkhead a few meters away in a blue-­white flare of light.

  I spun around, raising the alien weapon again. There was another Gykr down that black passageway, perhaps forty meters away at the far end of the passage, and I couldn’t see it. A second shot, this one hitting the puckered, alien door just behind us. Steadying the captured weapon in both hands, I tried to guess where the bolts had come from and began squeezing off shots one after another.

  The weapon appeared to be a compact plasma weapon—­probably using either water or the local atmosphere, superheating it to an electrified plasma, and hurling the bolt down range with a magnetic accelerator.

  After five or six shots, though, the weapon suddenly became hot, hot enough to burn my unprotected hands. I dropped it, and heard the sizzle as it splashed in water. Picking it up again, I hesitated a moment, then fired again.

  There were no more shots returning from down range, however. I couldn’t see. Had my wild fusillade hit the plasma gunner?

  I returned my attention to Gunny Hancock, though I kept one eye out for movement in the darkness. I gave him a jolt of medical nano programmed to kill the pain and counteract the shock.

  “That’s . . . that’s doing the trick, Doc,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Think you can make it back to the Walsh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “C’mon. I’ll help you.”

  I half carried him back through the airlock, where Ortega and Lloyd helped pull him inside. “He should be okay, at least for now,” I told them. “We’ll need to get him back on board the Haldane to grow him a new arm, but he’s not hurting much right now, and there’s no bleeding.”

  I put skinseal over the end of the stump, though, just to make sure he didn’t start bleeding again . . . and the artificial skin would also start treating the burned tissue, getting it ready for regen.

  “Okay,” I said when I was done. “I’m going back out there, and see what’s at the far end of that tunnel.”

  “You can’t go out there alone!” Montgomery said.

  “Why not? We need to make contact with the base personnel in there.”

  “Suppose there are more Gucks?” Lloyd said.

  “I’ll go with him,” Ortega said.

  “I’ll be fine on my—­”

  “Stop being a fucking hero,” Hancock said from his couch. Hell, I’d thought he was unconscious. He had enough ’bots both inside his skull and in what was left of his arm, all turning off pain receptors with enthusiasm enough to send him off to floaty-­floaty land. “The two of you go across and try to make contact. If you even smell another Gucker, hightail it back to the Walsh, we’ll de­couple, and head for the surface. We might need to come back down with a real military force.”

  And so, a few minutes later, I walked into the dark accessway with Ortega right behind me. I held the captured alien plasma gun, while he had Hancock�
��s Republic-­12. We took a few moments to make sure he understood how the pistol worked, and then Gunny provided us with fresh mags loaded with AP rounds—­armor piercers, which would do a better job on Guckers than would frangibles. “I think the bulkheads will stand up to those,” Hancock said as we prepared to head off. “But don’t test it, okay? If a round went through the accessway bulkhead, it might crack the ice on the other side, and that would likely ruin your whole day.”

  Not to mention ruined days for those we were leaving behind on the Walsh, and the survivors inside the station. One failure, one cascade of incoming water at over a hundred tons per square centimeter, and bulkheads, airlock hatches, and the docking collar doors wouldn’t be able to stop the final, complete, and absolute collapse.

  Just beyond the docking-­collar door, I stooped to check on the wounded Gykr. It had curled up into a kind of fetal position, like an armadillo, so that only its segmented dorsal armor was exposed.

  “Is it dead?” Ortega asked.

  “I think so,” I replied. “I wish I knew more about its respiratory metabolism.”

  Chief Garner and I had pulled a lot of samples from the Gucker we’d dissected, and lab tests should tell us a lot more about them.

  The EG did tell us that the atmosphere they breathed was . . . unusual, with oxygen, which they appeared to use in a metabolic process similar to that of humans, but also apparently requiring a high concentration of carbon dioxide. There were ecosystems, I knew, that used carbon dioxide instead of oxygen—­not to support combustion, obviously, but through a carbolic acid cycle that did much the same thing.

  But a life form that used both was something new.

  Or . . . possibly the CO2 was nothing more for the Gykrs than a background gas, like nitrogen is for us, unreactive and uninvolved in their metabolic processes. That seemed unlikely, because carbon dioxide is rather reactive when put into solution in water . . . though it tends to be unreactive as a gas.

  Damn, we had so much to learn. . . .

  Ten steps from the docking collar, and we were in pitch-­blackness. We could see the wan circle of hull lights behind us, but they didn’t shed much illumination farther into the shaft. I was tempted—­very tempted—­to haul out my light so I could at least see where I was putting my feet, but if there were any more Gucks up ahead, hidden in the darkness, a light would make us perfect targets.

  It was bad enough that we were partially blocking the hull lights at our backs. We must be clearly silhouetted against them for anyone waiting up ahead.

  My steps slowed the farther in I got. Ortega bumped up against me. “Sorry . . .”

  “S’okay,” I whispered. “But hang back a little, okay?”

  Where the docking collar had still been steamy and hot, that forty-­five-­meter tunnel, low and narrow, was bone-­chillingly cold. Water dripped constantly from the walls, and in places it was freezing into sheets of ice. I felt it as I put my hand out to steady myself once. The deck underfoot was treacherous, and the curving tunnel wall was glazed over.

  And then I tripped over something large and hard in the darkness.

  I was sure I must be close to the end of that seemingly endless passageway, and we’d not yet been challenged. Stepping back, cautioning Ortega to stop, I decided to take a chance. I pulled my penflash out of my M-­7 and directed it at the deck ahead.

  It was another Gykr, curled into that same, familiar fetal position, and quite dead. I picked up the plasma weapon lying beside it. “You want this?” I asked, offering it to Ortega.

  “Hell, no,” he said. He gestured with the Republic-­12. “I barely know which end is the business end of this thing.”

  “Fair enough.” At least I had fired one of these things before. It wasn’t hard to operate—­hold this and press that—­but it was clumsy for a human hand. Gykr manipulators are combinations of one long claw and six spidery, double-­jointed fingers, and the grip is damned awkward for a human hand. I felt a bit foolish facing that last door at the end of the long tunnel with an alien plasma weapon in each hand, but I wasn’t about to leave the second weapon lying on the deck.

  I was staring at the door, wondering how to make it work, when it puckered suddenly and flowed open. According to our sonar scans, that door should open into the sunken base at an airlock.

  Four Guckers were waiting on the other side of that door, weapons raised and pointing straight at my head. “Drop weapons!” a harsh voice clattered in my head. “Drop now!”

  There was nothing Ortega or I could do but comply. . . .

  Chapter Twenty-­One

  The Gykrs crouched in a semicircle in front of us, heads low to the deck, threatening us with their plasma weapons. Behind them, in the near darkness of a ruined lab, I could see several humans, dirty, ragged, and unshaven . . . about what you would expect of ­people cut off from most technological amenities for several weeks.

  “Do what they tell you, please,” one of the humans said. He was an older man . . . and I thought he looked familiar. It took me a moment to place him, though—­Dr. James Eric Murdock, the commander of the first Abyssworld research base.

  “Dr. Murdock?” I said. “Are you and your ­people okay?”

  “Do . . . do I know you, sir?”

  “Your virtual avatar was my guide in a docuinteractive, sir,” I said.

  “No speech!” the Gykr growled. The words were coming through my in-­head circuitry, which meant that the Gykrs had their own cerebral implants, along with the software that let them translate their thoughts into Gal3, which in turn could be translated into English by my own implants. That, I thought, was a considerable relief. Dealing with hostile aliens when you don’t share a common language can leave you with no options at all except gunfire.

  I opened a second channel back to the Walsh. “Trouble!” I snapped. “We have a number of human survivors, but they’ve been captured by Gykr—­”

  “No speech!” The Gykr reared up on its splayed, long hind legs, its shorter forelegs weaving in an agitated manner. Apparently, it was linked in closely enough with the local communications Net that it could pick up any back-­channel chatter that might be going on in the area. Secret conversations would be impossible.

  I was able to drop the security interlock on my cerebral hardware. I wouldn’t be able to get a direct signal out without being detected, apparently, but perhaps the others could listen in over the local Net.

  I hoped.

  “Take it easy,” I thought at him. “We are not a threat to you. . . .”

  It was the only approach that occurred to me. From the little we new of Gykr psychology, they were easily triggered by the perception of a threat, and their response tended to be immediate and violent.

  It was easy to think of them as hostile alien monstrosities . . . or as somewhat dim-­witted sociopaths who would kill you as soon as look at you . . . but the truth, I knew, had to be considerably different. They had developed a technological civilization sophisticated enough to give them starflight . . . after evolving deep within a solitary rogue planet light years from any other world. How had they managed to pull that off?

  If what we thought we knew of their origins was accurate, they’d evolved from marine organisms deep within a lightless ocean . . . or possibly inside lightless caves warmed by upwelling magma within their dark and isolated world’s crust. How long had it taken them to develop even simple tools, smelting, their equivalent of an industrial revolution, electronics? . . .

  How long before Gykr explorers first tunneled up to the frozen surface of their world, wearing artificial armor to protect them from the airlessness and cold?

  With eyes evolved to see the near infrared, the heat within their caverns . . . how long before they even became aware of the stars?

  Humankind had gone from primitive experiments with electricity to putting men on Earth’s moon in two centuries, more or le
ss . . . and to sending ships to the nearer stars in three and a half. It might have taken the Gykr a million years to reach the stars . . . 10 million . . . or more. . . .

  The fact that they had done so, to my mind, was an astonishing statement of the sheer persistent determination of life over adversity, of intelligence over darkness. After such a journey, I thought, they might be excused for a certain lack of social graces.

  The upright Gykr appeared to be considering my words and, slowly, it dropped the forward part of its body back to the deck. That odd, golden, compound eye-­ring that encircled both the ventral and dorsal surfaces of its head gave it all-­round vision, and I knew it was still watching me closely.

  But just how closely was that? According to the information I remembered from Gykr entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica, their visual range overlapped ours only slightly. They could see red and orange light, possibly the way we see blue or violet, but their visual range was actually centered down in the near infrared. That compound eye-­ring would be best for seeing movement, not sharp detail . . . and the large, dark simple eyes extending from either side of that blunt excuse for a head probably saw only heat, fuzzy and less than precise. Gykr eyes obviously were evolved for seeing in the dark or near darkness, by the wan and ruddy glow of subsurface volcanic vents, perhaps, and not in the levels of light taken for granted by humans.

  Was there anything there I could use? I didn’t see anything obvious. They would still see if I stooped for one of the plasma weapons lying on the deck at my feet.

  “Your . . . underwater vessel . . . is mine . . . now,” the voice rasped.

  “Mine,” not “ours.” That might be an artifact of the Gykr tendency toward a hive mentality. Did the four beings in front of us really share a hive mind? Could they even be thought of as individuals? Or did the word merely identify the speaker as the leader of this group? I didn’t know.

  “You’re trapped down here, aren’t you?” I said, looking for a way to turn a Gykr monologue into a conversation. “Just like us. . . .”