Blade of p’Na

by L. Neil Smith

The dinosaur seemed more nervous and tentative than usual. “You can man, er, person one of the weapons-control positions. Help us fight back. You, as well, Eichra Oren, as well as your lovely female companion.”

  Our lovely female companion dimpled. “Lornis,” she told him.

  “Lornis, then—oh, you’re Mr. Adubudu’s daughter. I—”

  At that moment, another massive blow shook the entire ship, reminding Aelbragh Pritsch that this was no time for idle social chit-chat.

  “I’d be happy to help,” she told him.

  “Me, too,” I said in my thumblessness. “What do we have to fight with?”

  He twiddled his feathery fingers together, shedding powder. “Well, I’m afraid that bullets have very limited range under water, which has nine hundred times the resistance of air. Lasers attenuate much too quickly, and plasma bolides cool down and disappear. Force projectors have to push on the whole ocean, so they’re worse than useless and tend to burn out violently. And they’ve learned to spoof conventional torpedoes.”

  I looked him square in the face, trying to convince myself he was serious. But his face looked too silly for that. “Sounds like we’re well and truly serviced. Stone knives and bearskins, then? Lemme at ’em!”

  More finger-twiddling. “Not quite. We can shoot steel spears from electromagnetic launchers at absolutely terrifying velocities. They travel a long way because they have such high sectional density. The spears—called ‘trajectiles’—are hollow and rather thin-skinned. When they strike and penetrate a little, they crumple and rupture, exposing a solid core of pure sodium, which explodes on contact with water—”

  “Explosions are much more effective in water,” said Eichra Oren.

  He nodded. “—without the need for detonators or anything else mechanically or electrically complicated. We just need a lot more gunners.”

  With Eichra Oren on my left (the man of action always demands the outside seat) and Lornis at my right, I settled myself ninto the Sphinx position and let Treemonisha’s AI make nicey-nice with my implants.

  “Greetings, Oasam Otusam,” the ship said. The voice in my mind was cool, mellow, intelligent, and female. “It is very pleasant to meet you. I am told you will operate one of my guns. I have chosen for you a weapon mounted on my forward, starboard quarter, somewhat below the midline.”

  “‘Operate’ better not require hands,” I told her. “I’m a dog.”

  “So I was told, so I see. I do not need thumbs, Sam—if I may—I need your mind. And I’m told, yours is more than sufficient to the task.”

  Surprise: “I have a fan in the hierarchy?”

  “None other than Misterthoggosh, himself.”

  What was there to say about that? “Tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

  “The crosshairs forming within your mind are connected with your weapon, a kineto-magnetic trajectile emitter—something like an oversized solenoid. I gather that you’ve been told about the sodium cores.”

  “Tell me more.” I indicated a panel forming in the upper left corner of my visual field. Except for the crosshairs in the middle, everything else was black. “Looks like rate of fire and magazine status.”

  “Any rate from a thousand to twenty thousand rounds per minute. Dreadfully slow, really. Capacity is a million rounds before you have to go offline for two minutes for replacement. You’ll receive several warnings.”

  “The bottom of the panel is about visualization. We have sonar, at several different frequencies, radar at extremely low frequency—it can detect a mountain. And of course, there’s lidar, from infrared up to ultraviolet, for very close work—”

  “Hope it doesn’t come to that!”

  There’s also virtual illumination—what the scene outside would look like in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere under strong sunlight. It is purely computer-generated, of course, but also surprisingly accurate.”

  I willed the system to give me virtual illumination—a pale gray-green volume with occasional shadows—seamounts—showing at the very bottom, sonar providing brilliant aiming points, when and if.

  “What does the other side have?”

  “This seems to be their natural environment. Each of them can see what any of the others sees. They have explosive torpedoes and boarding parties.”

  “Boarding parties?”

  “Ineffective, so far.”

  Suddenly, a bright point of light appeared toward the bottom of the sea and grew brighter as the sonar returns said it rose to meet us.

  “That’s them, isn’t it?” I asked Treemonisha.

  “It is,” she answered. “Take your time. They’ll come closer.”

  “No doubt.” I willed the crosshairs over them. They didn’t touch, but left an empty circle in the middle, I was asked if I wanted magnification.

  Sure, I told the system.

  It was one of those bus things, minus the humanoid habitat, plus half a dozen big torpedo tubes along the sides. All of the seats were full: boarding party. Thinking about the big, curved knife whose scar I bore, I drew a bead on the space between the torpedoes and told the system to “Fire!” holding the “button” down for about a dozen shots. The planarian ship exploded, nearly blinding me, scattering confetti everywhere.

  Another followed behind it. I blew it up. Three more and I’d be an ace.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The Seas of Other Earths

  I DON’T KNOW IF WE REALLY MADE A DIFFERENCE, BUT after Eichra Oren, Lornis, and I sat down, the Grays never got quite as close again as before. Of course we had a couple of hundred other gunners helping us.

  After a while, their resistance gradually melted away, and the good ship Treemonisha plowed onward through the Inland Sea at an outlandish speed, using a method of propulsion that converts drag to thrust.

  At the cocktail party celebrating what we all understood was a temporary victory at best, Eichra Oren confronted Misterthoggosh. It was held in two big rooms, separated from another by a transparent sheet of something at least six inches thick. Probably not glass, although it felt like glass to my wet nose. The other side was filled with water or the synthetic fluorocarbon the old mollusc often preferred.

  “Quite a yacht you’ve got here, Misterthoggosh,” observed the p’Nan debt assessor, “I can think of thousands of countries in hundreds of worlds whose entire navies don’t have Treemonisha’s firepower.”

  The nautiloid lifted a casual tentacle, the end of which was wrapped around a beer baggie. “Treemonisha was never meant to be a warship or a pleasure-craft, sir. She’s a vessel of exploration and discovery.”

  “‘Exploration and discovery’?” My boss displayed skepticism with every cell in his body. “Overgunned for that purpose by what, a factor of at least a hundred? Don’t tell me that you’ve actually constructed a portal out there in the Asteroid Belt that’s big enough to shove her through.”

  Misterthoggosh laughed jovially, although we all knew it was purely an electronic effect. “By no means whatever. She was built to explore Europa. Just imagine what a water-world means to folks of my sort.”

  “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” I interjected.

  “Indeed, Sam. Potentially it is a paradise for every sapient marine organism on this planet. And yet, at the same time, it’s a completely unknown territory. Pray tell me, Eichra Oren, would you willingly explore the streets of a completely unknown and alien city without your sword, or that little fusion weapon you carry in your pocket?”

  “Point taken.” my boss replied. “Although I’d give a lot to see the spacecraft that’s going to carry her out to Europa. For a moment, he stood in thought beside the thick transparency that separated him from Misterthoggosh. “Never mind all that; I have another question for you.”

  “I sense,” said the mollusc, “that it’s a moral debt collector’s question.”

  “You sense correctly, Misterthoggosh. I’m here to do the job you hired me to do, and this can’t be avoided any longer. What do you plan to do, once we’v
e arrived at the Grays’ local headquarters? Yes, I saw those nuclear earthmovers being brought on as we boarded.” He was referring to a pair of huge barrel-shaped objects with nose-cones and fins.

  The Proprietor took his time, unfastening another baggie of beer from the fishing line that had just been lowered to him, probably by Aelbraugh Pritsch. “I trust you’ll agree with me that these Grays will almost certainly have built their staging base around their point of entry?”

  He nodded. “That was my thinking, too. Always protect your escape route.”

  “Not to mention the terminus of your supply line,” the ancient nautiloid declared. “I intend to seal it, employing those nuclear explosives.”

  “Killing or injuring dozens or hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Grays in the process,” Eichra Oren replied. “Among them uncountable individuals who never tried to do anything even remotely similar to you.”

  “Eichra Oren,” Misterthoggosh said, “You must—”

  “As your p’Nan moral debt assessor,” said Eichra Oren, “I forbid it, on the grounds that one cannot use nuclear weapons without killing or—”

  A booming alarm sounded throughout the ship. “it appears,” said Misterthoggosh, that we are here. We shall settle this anon, Eichra Oren.”

  Broadcasting to everybody’s implants, every view projector in the house now displayed what Treemonisha’s forward cameras were seeing: a great trench, just off the west coast of the ragged peninsula, three miles deep at the bottom. What we saw appeared to be a combination of actual photography and computer-generated imagery. The great submarine put her nose down, headed for the bottom of the trench. Thanks to the ship’s gravity-control inertial dampers, the floor felt level beneath our feet. I tried imagining I couldn’t hear the vessel’s structure creaking and groaning under the strain of what my implant calculated would soon be 480 atmospheres—6720 pounds of pressure per square inch.

  In time, Treemonisha slowed her descent to a crawl, which was probably what it looked like she was doing, hovering at an angle, nose-down, just above the seabed, kicking up a little sediment, or underwater dust. I went and found the seat I’d been shooting from earlier. It wasn’t really necessary; the ship’s fire control system could talk to my implant anywhere I happened to be. But it just felt right.

  Lornis joined me after a minute. That was good. I didn’t feel like being alone. “Eichra Oren stayed behind,” she said. “He’s having a spectacular argument with Misterthoggosh about ethics and atomic bombs.”

  “I noticed.” Personally, I thought atomic bombs were a good thing to have ethical arguments about, but I told her, “Not the cleverest use of one’s time—or remaining lifespan.” On the network I could see we were drifting nearer to the center of the Grays’ activities. As we came upon it, the place looked like some kind of industrial plant, like a petroleum refinery with glaring lights on tall towers, vehicles and figures moving around with purpose. The water was incredibly clear, and to the extent that it was possible, it was as bright as daylight.

  I asked Treemonisha’s optical system for some magnification and received a shock. At these depths and pressures, the Grays were nearly as flat as their planarian ancestors, flatter than pancakes, flat as an ironed shirt, comic silhouettes, exactly like paper cut-outs of themselves.

  Question: why hadn’t they seen us and why weren’t they attacking us?

  And so we waited. Idly, I said, “Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.”

  “What?” Lornis was cutest with that quizzical look on her face.

  “Never mind.” It was an expression from another world.

  Suddenly: “Sam, I can’t find your boss. I need him to come down here and see something. Misterthoggosh, too.” It was Dlee Raftan Saon, sounding as outraged as an insectoid can sound. I sent Eichra Oren a signal which his implant let through. I could sense his tension and annoyance.

  “Not now, Sam. I’m busy.” I was seeing my boss reflected in a sheet of glass through which he was conversing with his boss, Misterthoggosh.

  “Gotta be now, Boss. Dlee Raftan Saon has something he’s hot to show you and Zee Beeg Squeed. Near as I can tell with a mantoid, it’s urgent.”

  The man thought for a moment. “I suppose he’ll be down aft in the ship’s clinic.” A diagram began to form in my mind’s eye, displaying the quickest route to the location in question. I could tell it came from Misterthoggosh’s mind, not Eichra Oren’s. Lornis hadn’t been privy to the conversation, but she knew something was up and rose with me.

  “Where are we going?” she more or less chirped.

  Unlike Eichra Oren, I was happy to have her company. “Down aft,” as my boss had put it, proved to be dead amidships, as far aft as you could go before running into the engines, and as far below as you could go before wetting your toes in the aquatic sector of the vessel. It was certainly Treemonisha’s best-protected area, which made sense.

  We entered a room through which we could look down through a thick transparency onto the surgeon at his work. Eichra Oren, Lornis, and I were physically present. Our molluscoid host and Lornis’ anthropoid symbiont, Mio, were virtually present. Apparently the little monkey had a sensitive tummy. Dlee Raftan Saon stood at a stainless steel table under strong light. In one hand, he held a bloody red scalpel, in another, a pair of retractors. In a third, he held an improvised-looking electronic box with a dozen multicolored wires dangling from it.

  What lay on the table wasn’t pretty: the body of an average-sized human male, his skin distinctly tinted a shade of blue I’d only seen before at the Battle of the Backyard. Dlee Raftan Saon had done the customary Y-incision to examine his insides, now distributed in pans and buckets here and there about the room—despite the red blood, they all had a distinct dark blue cast—and then peeled his scalp back from just above the eyebrows and removed the upper half of his skull.

  This, not the blue organs, was what had made him angry.

  “This…this unspeakable travesty” the doctor used a fourth hand to indicate the dead man’s brain, and intoned in the crankiest voice his synthesizer could generate, “is what our uninvited guests inflicted, not only on this poor individual, but as near as I can tell, on the entire humanoid population of some other version of our Earth!”

  That got whatever bit of attention my boss and Lornis hadn’t given the good doctor already. I didn’t ask how he’d figured out that last, whole world bit. I caught a wisp of thought concerning the ratio of various isotopes. I felt Mio crank down the resolution of her remote vision.

  “Attend.” He tapped his gory scalpel on a hand-sized shield-like object closely embracing the front and center of the man’s brain. It produced a noise somewhere between a plastic clack and a metallic clink.

  “It would appear that an implant seed was injected through the victim’s skull at the frontal fontanel when he was just an infant. It’s possible that the poor fellow’s never had a thought of his own in his entire life. All he lacks to be fully human is a will, which this implant has suppressed or destroyed. Our good colleague Jakdav Hoj has discovered program language for “sleep”, “wake”, “eat”, and even more personal functions. The fellow retained memories of horrifying mass reproductive activities which, sadly, he recalled with something akin to joy. Truly, it’s a wonder he could breathe without being told to!”

  “And the color?” Misterthoggosh, always a tentacles-on kind of guy.

  “My guess is that it’s resident algae to provide some supplemental oxygen in a high pressure semi-aquatic environment. They’re not water breathers, like their masters. Look at this!” He used the electronic device, apparently a jury-rigged remote control of some kind, evoking, turn by turn, various hand and arm movements, foot and leg movements, blinking, even an erection. I expected some sort of wisecrack from Mio or Lornis, but it was not forthcoming. This was just too horrible. What we were seeing was a human being who had been transformed into robot.

  Like I said, a sort of high-tech zombie.

  “Do yo
u have a ‘stop everything’ command in that little box?” asked the Proprietor. “And is it individually programmed, or broadcast?” “I could evoke instant paralysis, if that’s what you mean, but what good it will do with the specimen already dead I can’t imagine. As to employing such a device on others, you’ll have to ask Jakdav Hoj.”

  Suddenly, two elevator-type bongs were audible. They were followed by something I’d never heard: somebody whispering over what amounted to a public address system. Trouble was, of course, was that no real sound was being generated; it was all being done through the implant network.

  “May I have your attention, please?” It was good old Aelbraugh Pritsch, silly as ever. “This is the Proprietor’s personal assistant. He requests that those who assisted in defending Treemonisha earlier return to battle stations,” Over my shoulder, I saw the boss’s mom, Eneri Relda, take a firing position. I hadn’t noticed her before. “Everybody else is to go to their quarters and hold onto something solid.”

  Or hide under the bed.

  In my mind’s eye, I could see outdoors again. The alien facility ahead looked even more like an industrial plant than before. It was centered on a particular spot on the canyon wall, where coils and pipes had been arranged in a flat circular pattern a hundred feet in diameter.

  Anyone onboard who had a cerebro-cortical implant could see that we were gradually drawing closer to the circular construction. I hurried to my gunner’s seat, with Lornis close behind me. For a mere humanoid, that girl could really run. Eichra Oren had headed off in a different direction, telling us there was something he had to check on.

  From his tone, I suspected that it wasn’t going to end well.

  Somebody on the implant network shouted “Incoming!” and there was an enormous thump. I felt a peculiar queasiness that resulted from the inertial dampers trying, with only partial success, to control the vessel’s motion and leave the decks solidly beneath its passengers’ feet.

  Sitting at my station, I logged onto Treemonisha’s tactical network, which showed a different view. Forward of us, dozens of the Grays’ underwater “buses” were converging on us. Driven by a mixture of Grays and humanoid zombies, each carried an enormous cylinder full, presumably, of explosives. I joined dozens of other shooters firing on them. It almost felt as if the concussions when we blew them up, even at extreme range, were inflicting as much damage on our ship as their bombs.