Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  Their first challenge was to find a way across the chasm. They walked along the northern edge, moving slowly so the two could keep up. Hutch wondered whether MacAllister had been right, that he and Nightingale should have been left behind to take their chances.

  At a patch of forest, they called a halt and fashioned walking staffs for everyone. “Don’t need it,” protested Kellie.

  “Use it anyhow,” Hutch insisted. “It’s good for you.”

  Nightingale took his gratefully. MacAllister manfully swallowed his discomfort and smiled. “We all look good with staffs,” he said. “Adds a certain panache.”

  They traveled well into the afternoon before they were able to get around the crevice. Gradually it closed, and the plain was solid again. They turned southwest.

  Aside from bird sightings, all of which Nightingale treated with barely muted alarm, they encountered their first full-size native beast shortly afterward. It was about the size of a moose, shaggy, with white fur and unsettling blue eyes that gazed steadily at them with, Hutch thought, cool intelligence. For all that, it did not look particularly ferocious. Its snout was shoved into an icy stream, and it did not straighten up as they approached.

  They drew their weapons nonetheless, switched on the power, and spread out.

  It looked at each of them in turn, studying Hutch with special attention as if it recognized that she was directing the small party.

  Hutch glanced at the worried faces and unsteady hands of her comrades, concluded she was in as much danger from them as from the creature, and moved out of MacAllister’s line of fire.

  As the last of them were passing, it startled them by rearing up onto its hind legs. A collar of hard bone rose around its neck. The collar ended in two long spikes, one flanking either jaw. The creature had a wide mouth full of shark’s teeth and a permanent grin that reminded Hutch of an alligator.

  “That thing’s all dental work,” whispered MacAllister.

  It inspected Nightingale and showed him its teeth. Nightingale froze.

  Armored ridges protected the animal’s underside and its back. Its claws looked like daggers.

  “Stay cool,” said Hutch. The exobiologist stood absolutely still, his eyes wide. She slowly inserted herself between him and the creature. It swung its long jaws her way, looked back at Nightingale, and hesitated.

  “We’re not in its food chain,” said Chiang.

  MacAllister snorted. “By the time it discovers that, somebody’s going to have a decided limp.”

  It looked at them, waiting perhaps for a hostile act.

  The drawback of the cutter was its limited range. Notched up to full power, it had little effect beyond a few meters. MacAllister leveled his weapon and his thumb hovered over the punch pad. He was going to shoot.

  “No.” Hutch kept her eyes on the creature. “Don’t do it, MacAllister. Everybody back away.”

  “Why don’t we just kill it while we can?” the editor insisted.

  “Slowly,” said Hutch.

  MacAllister frowned at her. “It’s a mistake.”

  Hutch made her voice cold. “Do what I say.”

  The animal watched and after a few moments appeared to lose interest. It dropped back onto all fours and recommenced drinking.

  After they’d gotten to what appeared to be a safe distance, Kellie let out her breath. “Shoo,” she said quietly.

  Nightingale thought he’d gotten through the experience pretty well. He felt he’d stood his ground, and believed he was ready to use his weapon if need be. He found it hard, however, to control his trembling afterward.

  “You all right?” Kellie asked him.

  He nodded and tried a smile. “I’m fine,” he said.

  They had no compass. Marcel followed their progress from Wendy and occasionally issued course corrections. The landscape remained unfailingly bleak, cold, and desolate. By late in the day they were seeing more hills. Occasional flocks of birds appeared overhead.

  Nightingale was not in anything resembling the kind of physical condition required for this sort of effort. Everything he owned hurt. There was, however, consolation in the knowledge that MacAllister was having an even harder time. Hutch, who was certainly aware that she was encumbered by two people who preferred taxis wherever they went, continued to call frequent breaks.

  The other four talked constantly. Chiang and the two women seemed to have accepted MacAllister in spite of his abrasiveness. Nightingale was once again hampered by his natural shyness and defensiveness. He tried to make acute observations, throw in occasional witty remarks, but it didn’t work. Nobody really seemed to listen to him. He was the outsider, and gradually he withdrew and concentrated his efforts simply on trying to keep up.

  It should have been different. After all, they were the only five human beings on the planet. That fact alone should have bound them together, should have prevented the development of factions and militated against the exclusion of any single member.

  It was unfair, especially in light of the fact he’d given them their one chance at survival.

  By sundown, he was limping badly and was being actively assisted by Kellie. They’d arrived in a glade, and Hutch called a halt. Nightingale eased himself gratefully to the ground, killed his field, pulled off his shoes, and rubbed his soles. By God it felt good.

  He applied more of the salve from the medkit. Warmth spread through his feet, and then a general sense of relief.

  The others fell quiet.

  And something moved in the shrubbery.

  There was a scramble for weapons.

  The thing looked like a big scorpion, a scorpion the size of a child’s wagon. It had a pair of antennas, which swept them in a kind of rhythm. Mandibles clicked audibly. The tail was shorter by far, and bisected. It had eight legs.

  “Stay still,” said Hutch,

  It didn’t matter. At the same moment, the creature charged Chiang. Chiang fell over backward, firing wildly. Hutch and Kellie burned it simultaneously. The thing let go a high keening sound, changed direction, and went for Hutch. They caught it again, and the scorpion crashed into a rock, rolled over, and lay on its back with its legs moving weakly.

  “That’s the biggest bug I’ve ever seen,” Chiang said, getting to his feet.

  MacAllister examined his cutter. “It’s a good weapon,” he said. “Will it run down? How much energy does it have?”

  “It’ll recharge on its own,” said Hutch. “Just like your suit. But yes, there are limits. Don’t play with it.”

  It wasn’t a scorpion, of course. There were major differences, other than size and the tail, which mounted no stinger. The narrowing between cephalothorax and abdomen wasn’t correct. The eyes were wrong. The segmenting was unique. Its chelae were smaller. The head was more heavily armored. Not for the first time, Nightingale mourned the lost opportunity to examine this world’s biology.

  There had been some thought of stopping there for the night, but they now agreed unanimously that it would be a good idea to move on.

  Nightingale had not been able to get used to the shortened days. When they finally made camp, an hour later, he was bone weary and half-starved. They were in light forest, on the crest of a long, gently curving ridge. It had gotten dark. Overhead the superluminals moved serenely among the constellations, and he would have given much to be aboard one of them. Nevertheless, he was, by God, keeping up.

  They broke out the reddimeals.

  Nobody was dressed for this kind of weather. The heaviest garment anyone wore was probably MacAllister’s black sweater. The two women were in jumpsuits. Chiang had only a light pullover shirt and a pair of shorts. And Nightingale’s slacks and casual shirt were designed for a far more balmy climate. None of this would have mattered much were it not that they had to shut off the e-suits to eat.

  They collected some wood and built a fire. When it was up and burning steadily, they keyed the reddimeal containers, which cooked the food. Then, at a kind of prearranged signal, they got
as close to the fire as they could, shut off the suits, and gobbled chicken, beef, and whatever else showed up in the dinners. Everything tasted good that night.

  Kellie made coffee. Nightingale swallowed everything down and, as quickly as he could, buttoned up again. He hated having to gulp his food when he was so hungry. But it was just too cold to linger over it.

  They held a council of war, and agreed it was time to think about testing some of the local food supply, in order to conserve the reddimeals. If they discovered the native stuff was inedible, they would have to resort to rationing. There should be some game in the woods, and Kellie suggested to everyone’s horror that the scorpions might make a food source. If any more showed up.

  No one wanted to discuss it further.

  They asked Nightingale, the resident expert. Did he know what they could expect to find? Was the local food edible?

  “No idea,” he said. “Nobody knows. We terminated the mission too quickly, and what we learned was inconclusive. Deepsix biology uses levo sugars and not dextro. So that’s okay. They use DNA to make proteins, which is good. You might get some nutrition, but I doubt it. You have at least an equal chance of being poisoned. The fact is we have a supply of reddimeals, and we’re only talking about a few days.

  “What I mean is…” He paused, then plunged ahead: “We don’t have to worry about subsisting indefinitely. What we’re really interested in is satisfying our appetites. We could ration, go on half meals. But that’s not going to help old guys trying to walk long distances. There’s no real way we can be sure about toxins or allergens. If there’s, say, a poison, our immune system may not even recognize it, or if it did, it might have no defense against it. I think we’re reasonably safe, but I can’t guarantee it.”

  Hutch nodded, called Embry on Wildside, and asked for advice.

  “Best would be not to go near anything local,” she said.

  “That’ll give us some very hungry people.”

  Embry wasted no time becoming irritated. “Better hungry than dead.”

  There was a long silence. “If you really have to do this,” she continued, “have someone sample the stuff first. A very small sample. Very small. Give it some time. A half hour, at least. If he doesn’t throw up, or get diarrhea—”

  “Or fall over,” said MacAllister.

  “—or fall over, you’re in business.” Embry took a deep breath. “Hutch,” she said, “I feel guilty about the way things turned out.”

  “It’s okay. You didn’t cause the quake.”

  “Still… Well, anyhow, I wanted to wish you luck. Anything I can do, I’m here.”

  “I know.”

  They’d covered eleven kilometers that first day. Not bad, considering they’d gotten a late start, had to detour around the crevice, and were walking through snow.

  They had, of course, no bedding. Nightingale made himself as comfortable as he could, lay back in the firelight, and wondered if his body would ever feel right again.

  They decided to forget trying to divide the nineteen-hour days into standard temporal terminology, because nobody was ever quite sure what nine o’clock actually meant. Instead they thought in terms of dusk and dawn, noon and midnight. There were roughly nine hours of darkness, which they divided into four watches. Midnight came when Morgan’s World rose.

  Nightingale unstrapped his oxygen converter and laid it beside him, where it would continue to work, without pressing into his shoulders. He slept for a while, woke, noticed that the fire had burned down, heard someone throw a fresh branch onto it, slept some more, and eventually found himself gazing up at the stars.

  Morgan had moved over into the west. It was framed within a stellar rectangle. A couple of stars lined up under the rectangle, providing it with a stand or stem. To primitive people, he thought, it would have become a constellation. A flower, perhaps. Or a tree. Or a cup.

  Morgan. It was a commonplace name for a world-killer.

  It glittered through the branches, the brightest star in the sky.

  Clouds were approaching from the west. By the time Chiang knelt beside him and told him the watch was his, the only visible light was the fire.

  He checked his cutter and put on the night goggles. They’d stopped atop a ridge where they could see for kilometers in all directions. Tomorrow they’d cross a narrow basin and begin a long uphill climb into dense forest.

  A few flakes drifted onto his arm.

  Nightingale glanced over at the sleepers. MacAllister had punched up a mound of snow to serve as a pillow. Kellie seemed to be dreaming, and he judged by her expression that it was not altogether unpleasant. He suspected Hutch was awake, but she lay unmoving, with her face in shadow. Chiang was still trying to get comfortable.

  Ordinarily, he would have hated the guard duty assignment. Nightingale liked to keep his mind active. Time not spent in a book or doing research or attempting to solve a problem was time wasted. He had no interest hanging about in a wilderness for two hours peering into the dark. But that night, he stood atop the ridge, watching the snow come down. And he enjoyed the simple fact that he was alive and conscious.

  Marcel brought Wendy back to Deepsix. He felt better if he could stay closer to the people on the ground. They were just completing their first orbit when Beekman came onto the bridge. “Marcel,” he said, “we’ve finished the analysis of the material we took from the artifact.”

  “And…?”

  “They’re enhanced carbon nanotubes.”

  “Which are what?”

  “Precisely the sort of material you’d want to have if you were building a skyhook. They’re extremely light and have incredible tensile strength.” Beekman lowered himself into a chair and accepted some coffee. “We’ll be taking back a whole new technology. Probably revolutionize the construction industry.” He looked quizzically at the captain. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t like the plan to get our people off the ground.”

  “Why?”

  “There are too many things that can go wrong. Tess may not fly. They may not even get there in time. There may be some incompatibility between the capacitors and the onboard spike. Another quake could bury the damned things beyond recovery.”

  “I don’t know what we can do to change any of that.”

  “I’d like a backup option.”

  Beekman smiled patiently. “Of course you would. Wouldn’t we all? What do you suggest?”

  “The ship going to Quraqua. The Boardman. It’s big, loaded with construction equipment. Mostly stuff they’re going to use to put together the ground stations. I looked at the manifest. It has hundreds of kilometers of cable.” Marcel laid emphasis on the last word, expecting Beekman to see immediately where he was headed.

  “Go on,” Beekman said, showing no reaction.

  “Okay. If we were to get some of the cable off the Boardman, and tie together about four hundred kilometers of it, we could attach one end to a shuttle.”

  “And crash the shuttle,” finished Beekman.

  “Right. We take it down as far as it’ll go, which would be within a couple of kilometers of the surface before we’d lose it. It crashes. But the cable’s down. On the ground.”

  “And we use it to haul them out.”

  Marcel thought it seemed too simple. “It won’t work?”

  “No.”

  “Gunther, why not?”

  “How much does the cable weigh?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right. Say it’s on the order of three kilograms per meter. That’s not very heavy.”

  “Okay.”

  “That means one kilometer of the cable would weigh in at about three metric tons.”

  Marcel sighed.

  “That’s one kilometer. And this thing is going to stretch down from orbit? Three hundred kilometers, you say?”

  He did the math in his head. The cable would have to be able to support roughly nine hundred metric tons.

  “You see the problem, Marcel.”
>
  “How about if we went for lighter material? Maybe hemp rope? They’ve got hemp on board.”

  Beekman made a noise in his throat. “I doubt the tensile strength of rope would be very high. How much do you think a piece one meter long would weigh?”

  So they sat, drinking coffee, staring at one another. Once they called down and talked to Nightingale, whom Marcel knew to be the security watch. Any problems? What time did you expect to leave in the morning? How’s everybody holding up?

  That last question was designed to elicit a comment from Nightingale on his own physical condition, as well. But he only said they were fine.

  Marcel noticed that he was beginning to feel disconnected from those on the ground. As if they were somehow already lost.

  XIV

  Walking through these woods, filled with the creatures of an alternate biosystem, constitutes an unusual emotional experience. They are all extinct, or shall be within a very few days. The sum total of six billion years of evolution is about to be erased, leaving nothing behind. Not so much as a tail feather.

  And good riddance, I say.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, Deepsix Diary

  Hours to breakup (est): 226

  All the sunrises on Deepsix were oppressive. The sky was inevitably slate, and a storm was either happening or seemed imminent

  Kellie Collier stood atop the ridge, surveying the woods and plains around her. In all that wilderness, nothing moved save a pair of wings so high and far as to present no detail to the naked eye. Through binoculars, she judged it to be not a bird at all. It had fur and teeth, a duckbill skull, and a long, serpentine tail. As she watched, it descended into a patch of trees and emerged moments later with something wriggling in its claws.

  She turned toward the southwest. The land sloped downhill and rose again gradually and then almost precipitously toward a long spine. The spine extended from one horizon to the other. It was going to be a difficult climb with Nightingale and the great man in tow. The wind tugged at her, trying to blow her off the ridge. Reminding her that they had ground to cover and that time was short.

  Hutch lay quietly near the fire, and Kellie saw that her eyes were open. “How we doing?” she asked softly.