Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  They were in the lander. He was on a couch. “What happened?” he asked.

  “Here.” She produced a mug from somewhere. “Drink this.” Apple cider. It tasted warm and sweet. But his back and neck felt stiff. “We had to give you a painkiller.”

  He tried to look past her. Saw only Cookie. “Did everybody make it back?”

  “All of Biney’s people.” She squeezed his arm. “But not Biney. Not Sherry. And not Andi.” Her voice caught.

  “There were swarms of the goddam things,” said Cookie. “We were lucky any of us got out of there.”

  “It was horrible.” Tatia shuddered. “They were coordinated. They’d hit us, and back off. Hit us, and back off. They came in waves, came from every direction.”

  Cookie nodded solemnly.

  Nightingale tried to get up, but the painkiller hadn’t taken hold.

  “Careful.” She held him in place. “You got jabbed a couple of times. You were lucky.”

  He didn’t quite see how he was lucky. And my God, Biney was dead. How was that possible? And the others. Six all told.

  It was a disaster.

  He tasted the apple cider, let it slide down his throat.

  “Will says you’ll be okay.” Will was Wilbur Keene, who’d been with Biney. He included an M.D. among his credentials, the principal reason he’d been selected for the voyage.

  “They followed us all the way back,” Tatia said. “Kept attacking.”

  “The bodies are still out there?”

  “We waited until it got dark,” she said. “Then we were able to recover them.”

  “Will says they had venom,” said Cookie. “Thank God for the e-suits. He says it would have worked on us. Paralyzed us. Sent the nervous system into shock.”

  He slept. When he woke again they were getting ready to leave. “Who’s in Tess?” he asked. He was talking about Cappy’s lander. Its pilot and all its original passengers were dead. But they didn’t want to leave it down here.

  “Nobody,” said Cookie. “But it’s no problem. After we’re on our way, I’ll just tell her to come home.” The AI.

  The cabin was dark, save for the soft illumination of the instrument panel. Tatia sat silently on the far side, staring into the darkness.

  He watched lights blink on outside and lift into the night.

  “Okay, folks,” said Cookie. “Looks like our turn.”

  It occurred to Nightingale that Cookie, as the surviving member of the command crew, was now the captain.

  The harness, adjusting for his prone position, slipped down over his thighs and shoulders. It was fortunate that it did, because a sudden gust of wind hit them as they started up, rocking the spacecraft.

  “Hold on,” said Cookie. Nightingale couldn’t see much of what was happening, but the pilot’s movements suggested he’d taken manual control. The lander steadied and rose toward the stars.

  No one spoke. Nightingale stared at the illuminated instruments. Tatia sat with her head thrown back, her eyes now closed. The reality of it was hitting home. Andi’s absence was a palpable quality, something they could touch.

  “Tess.” Cookie spoke to the remaining lander. “Code one one. Accept my voice.”

  Nightingale listened to the wind rushing over the wings. Tatia shifted slightly, opened her eyes, and glanced at him. “How you doing, boss?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Will they send another team, do you think?”

  He shrugged reflexively and felt his neck pull. It was numb. “They’ll have to. I mean, this is a living world, for God’s sake. There’ll be a settlement here one day.” But there’d be some political fallout, too. For him, responsible for the mission, for its people, there’d be hell to pay.

  “Excuse me,” said Cookie. “Randy, I’m not getting a response from Tess.”

  “That’s not so good. Are you telling me we have to go back for the lander?”

  “Let’s see if we can spot what happened.” The displays lit up and Nightingale was looking at a vid record, the woods in daylight. The view from their lander. A flock of redbirds flew across the face of the screen and vanished. People were coming out of the forest. One was being helped, one was being carried. A swarm of the birds ripped into them.

  Nightingale saw Remmy, one of Biney’s people, covered with blood, holding a hand to his left eye. He was down on one knee, firing away. Biney stood over him, providing as much cover as she could.

  He saw himself, cradled in Hal’s arms. Cookie appeared in the picture, swinging a branch.

  Biney’s laser cut everywhere, its white beam slashing through the afternoon. The birds fell to earth whenever it touched them.

  “There,” said Cookie. The laser grazed Tess, scorched her hull, moved up, and sliced off the communication pod. The pod exploded in a shower of sparks.

  Cookie froze the picture.

  “How’d Biney die?” Nightingale asked. “She was there at the end.”

  “She stood outside the airlock and held them off until we got everybody else in.” Cookie was shaking his head. “We’ll have to go back down.”

  No. Nightingale did not want anything more to do with this world. Under no circumstances would they go back.

  “To get the lander,” said Cookie, mistaking Nightingale’s silence for indecision.

  “Leave it, Cookie.”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “It’s too dangerous. We aren’t going to lose anybody else.”

  PART 1

  BURBAGE POINT

  * * *

  November 2223

  I

  The impending collision out there somewhere in the great dark between a gas giant and a world very much like our own has some parallels to the eternal collision between religion and common sense. One is bloated and full of gas, and the other is measurable and solid. One engulfs everything around it, and the other simply provides a place to stand. One is a rogue destroyer that has come in out of the night, and the other is a warm well-lighted place vulnerable to the sainted mobs.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, Have Your Money Ready

  They came back to Maleiva III to watch the end of the world.

  Researchers had been looking forward to it since its imminence was proclaimed almost twenty years earlier by Jeremy Benchwater Morgan, an ill-tempered combustible astrophysicist who, according to colleagues, had been born old. Even today Morgan is the subject of all kinds of dark rumors, that he had driven one child to tranks and another to suicide, that he’d forced his first wife into an early grave, that he’d relentlessly destroyed careers of persons less talented than he even though he gained nothing by doing so, that he’d consistently taken credit for the work of others. How much of this is true, no one really knows. What is on the record, however, is that Morgan had been both hated and feared by his colleagues and apparently by a deranged brother-in-law who made at least two attempts to kill him. When he’d died, finally, of heart failure, his onetime friend and longtime antagonist Gunther Beekman, commented privately that he had beaten his second wife to the punch. In accordance with his instructions, no memorial was conducted. It was, some said, his last act of vindictiveness, denying his family and associates the satisfaction of staying home.

  Because he had done the orbital work and predicted the coming collision, the Academy had given his name to the rogue world that had invaded the Maleiva system. Although that was a gesture required by tradition in any case, many felt that the Academy directors had taken grim pleasure in their action.

  Morgan’s World approached Jovian dimensions. Its mass was 296 times that of Earth. Diameter at the equator was 131,600 kilometers, at the poles about five percent less. This oblateness resulted from a rotational period of just over nine hours. It had a rocky core a dozen times as massive as the Earth. It was otherwise composed primarily of hydrogen and helium.

  It was tilted almost ninety degrees to its own plane of movement, and half as much to the system plane. It was a gray-blue world, its atmosphere appa
rently placid and untroubled, with neither rings nor satellites.

  “Do we know where it came from?” Marcel asked.

  Gunther Beekman, small, bearded, overweight, was seated beside him on the bridge. He nodded and brought up a fuzzy patch on the auxiliary display, closed in on it, and enhanced. “Here’s the suspect,” he said. “It’s a section of the Chippewa Cloud, and if we’re right, Morgan’s been traveling half a billion years.”

  In approximately three weeks, on Saturday, December 9, at 1756 hours GMT, the intruder would collide head-on with Maleiva III.

  Maleiva was the infant daughter of the senator who’d chaired the science funding committee when the initial survey was done, two decades earlier. There were eleven planets in the system, but only the doomed third world had received a name to go with its Roman numeral: From the beginning they called it Deepsix. In the often malicious nature of things, it was also one of the very few worlds known to harbor life. Even though locked in a three-thousand-year-old ice age, it would have made, in time, an exquisite new outpost for the human race.

  “The collision here is only the beginning of the process,” Beekman said. “We can’t predict precisely what’s going to happen afterward, but within a few thousand years Morgan will have made a complete shambles of this system.” He leaned back, folded his hands behind his head, and adopted an expression of complacency. “It’s going to be an interesting show to watch.”

  Beekman was the head of the Morgan Project, a planetologist who had twice won the Nobel, a lifelong bachelor, and a onetime New York State chess champion. He routinely referred to the coming Event as “the collision,” but Marcel was struck by the relative sizes of the two worlds. It would most certainly not be a collision. Deepsix would fall into Morgan’s clouds, like a coin casually dropped into a pool.

  “Why doesn’t it have any moons?” he asked Beekman.

  Beekman considered the question. “Probably all part of the same catastrophe. Whatever ejected it from its home system would have taken off all the enhancements. We may see something like that here in a few centuries.”

  “In what way?”

  “Morgan’s going to stay in the neighborhood. At least for a while. It’s going into a highly unstable orbit.” He brought up a graphic of Maleiva and its planetary system. One gas giant was so close to the sun that it was actually skimming through the corona. The rest of the system resembled Earth’s own, terrestrial worlds in close, gas giants farther out. There was even an asteroid belt, where a world had failed to form because of the nearby presence of a jovian. “It’ll eventually mangle everything,” he said, sounding almost wistful. “Some of these worlds will get dragged out of their orbits into new ones, which will be irregular and probably unstable. One or two may spiral into the sun. Others will get ejected from the system altogether.”

  “Not a place,” said Marcel, “where you’d want to invest in real estate.”

  “I wouldn’t think,” agreed Beekman.

  Marcel Clairveau was captain of the Wendy Jay, which was carrying the Morgan research team that would observe the collision, record its effects, and return to write papers on energy expansion, gravity waves, and God knew what else. There were forty-five of them, physicists, cosmologists, planetologists, climatologists, and a dozen other kinds of specialists. They were a picked group, the leading people in their respective fields.

  “How long’s it going to take? Before things settle down again?”

  “Oh, hell. I don’t know, Marcel. There are too many variables. It may never really stabilize. In the sense you’re thinking.”

  A river of stars crossed the sky, expanding into the North American Nebula. Vast dust clouds were illuminated by far-off Deneb, a white supergiant sixty thousand times as luminous as Sol. More stars were forming in the dust clouds, but they would not ignite for another million years or so.

  Marcel looked down on Deepsix.

  It could have been an Earth.

  They were on the daylight side, over the southern hemisphere. Snowfields covered the continents from the poles to within two or three hundred kilometers of the equator. The oceans were full of drifting ice.

  Frigid conditions had prevailed for three thousand years, since Maleiva and its family of planets plowed into the Quiveras, one of the local dust clouds. They had not yet come out the other side, wouldn’t for another eight centuries. The dust filtered the sunlight, and the worlds had cooled. Had there been a civilization on Deepsix, it would not have lived.

  The climatologists believed that below fifteen degrees south latitude, and above fifteen degrees north, the snow never melted. Had not melted in these thirty centuries. That wasn’t necessarily a long time, as such things went. Earth itself had gone through ice ages of similar duration.

  Large land animals had survived. They sighted herds moving through the plains and forests of the equatorial area, which at present formed a green strip across two of the continents. There was also occasional movement out on the glaciers. But along the equatorial strip, a multitude of creatures had hung on.

  Beekman got up, took a deep breath, rinsed his coffee cup, clapped Marcel on the shoulder, and beamed. “Have to get ready,” he said, starting for the door. “I believe the witching hour has arrived.”

  When he was gone, Marcel allowed himself a long smile. The host of scientific leaders riding on Wendy had given way to unalloyed enthusiasm. On the way out they’d run and rerun simulations of the Event, discussed its potential for establishing this or that view of energy exchange or chronal consequences or gravity wave punctuation. They argued over what they might finally learn about the structure and composition of gas giants, and about the nature of collisions. They expected to get a better handle on long-standing puzzles, like the tilt of Uranus or the unexplained large iron content of worlds like Erasmus in the Vega system and Mercury at home. And the most important implication: It would be their only opportunity to see directly inside a terrestrial planet. They had special sensors for that, because the eruption of energy, during the final spasm, would be blinding.

  “It’s going to begin to break up here,” they’d said, one or another, over and over, pointing at the time line, “and the core will be exposed here. My God, can you imagine what that’ll look like?”

  The common wisdom was that one could not be a good researcher if one had completely outgrown childhood. If that was so, Marcel knew he had good people along. They were kids who’d come to watch a show. And however they tried to disguise the reality of that, pretending that this was first and foremost a fact-gathering mission, nobody was fooling anybody. They were off on a lark, cashing in the real reward that came from lives of accomplishment. They’d broken into the structure of space, mapped the outer limits of the universe, solved most of the enigmas associated with time, and now they were going to sit back and enjoy the biggest wreck of which anyone had ever heard.

  And Marcel was pleased to be along. It was the assignment of a lifetime.

  NCA Wendy Jay was the oldest operating vessel in the Academy fleet. Its keel had been laid almost a half century before, and its interior decor consequently possessed a quaintness that gave one a sense of stepping into another age.

  Its passengers were watching Morgan through a battery of telescopes and sensors, some mounted on the ship’s hull, others on satellite. In every available space throughout the vessel, researchers were peering down into misty blue-gray depths that fell away forever. Gigantic lightning bolts flickered across the face of the world. Occasional meteors raced down the sky, trailing light, vanishing into the clouds.

  They gauged its magnetic field, which was two-thirds as strong as Jupiter’s, and they recorded the squeals and shrieks of its radio output.

  The mood remained festive, and the physicists and planetologists wandered the passageways, visiting one another’s quarters, hanging out in the operations center, visiting the bridge, pouring drinks in the workout room. When Marcel strolled down to Wendy’s project control, he encountered half a dozen
of them gathered around a screen, and when they saw him they raised their glasses to him.

  It was a pleasant feeling, to be toasted by the crème de la crème. Not bad for a kid who’d resisted schools and books for years. One teacher had taken him aside when he was fourteen and suggested he might as well apply for the dole then. Get in line early, she’d advised.

  When they’d finished the Morgan observations, they moved over to Maleiva III and began the process of inserting probes and positioning satellites. The intention, as Chiang Harmon explained it, was to “take the temperature of the victim, and to listen to its heartbeat, throughout its final days.” The team wanted to get every possible physical detail on file. They would establish Maleiva III’s density and record the fluctuations of its albedo. They would watch the shifting tides. They would examine the depth and composition of its core, analyze the atmospheric mix, and record the air pressure. They would chart its hurricanes and its tornadoes, and they would measure the increasing intensity of the quakes that would eventually shatter the planet.

  At breakfast during their first full day in orbit around Deepsix, Beekman announced to everyone in the dining room, and by the PA to the rest, that the correlation of hydrogen to helium, 80.6 to 14.1, matched perfectly with that of Morgan’s suspected home star. So now they knew with near certainty where it had been born.

  Everyone applauded, and somebody suggested in a deliberately slurred voice that the occasion called for another toast. The noise turned to laughter and Beekman passed around the apple juice. They were in fact a sober lot.

  Marcel Clairveau wanted to get a job in management but expected to spend the rest of his life piloting superluminals for the Academy. Prior to that, he’d worked for Kosmik, Inc., shuttling personnel and supplies out to Quraqua, which Kosmik was terraforming. But he hadn’t liked the people running the organization, who were both autocratic and incompetent. When it reached a point at which he was embarrassed to reveal for whom he worked, he’d resigned, done a brief stint as an instructor at Overflight, had seen an opportunity with the Academy, and had taken it.