by Ian Douglas
“Okay,” Garner’s voice said. “We’re testing positive for active biologicals. And a long list of salts.”
“What kinds of biologicals?” That was Dr. Rutherford, one of several civilians in the compartment, and the head of the expedition’s xenosophontology team.
“CHON.”
Two of the civilians broke into applause and cheers, but stopped when they realized that neither their boss nor the military personnel had joined in.
Readouts began scrolling down one of the control-room monitor screens. I tapped into them with my in-head and read them there. High concentrations of ions, including sodium, chlorine, potassium, bromine, magnesium, sulfur. If anything, the percentage of salt in Hymie’s ocean was running higher than Earth’s average salinity: about four percent.
More exciting, though, was the positive result on the initial tests for biologicals. Garner was picking up traces of a number of amino and protein chains. There were far too many coming up through the list to sort out any details as to what kind of life there might be in that ocean, but it was clearly CHON—carbon based, with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen at the top, followed by a scattering of other atoms all the way down the periodic table to iodine. CHON is what we have on Earth, though because of the ease by which carbon atoms form long-chain molecules, it’s a pattern that we’ve found repeated elsewhere, including inside both Europa and Enceladus.
“I’m not getting any sonics,” Garner said. There was a brief hesitation. “What do you say, Carlyle? You ready to assume the duty?”
“Absolutely, Chief,” I replied. Strange to think that my words were transmitted electronically to the probe, then all the way back again to Garner’s brain, by way of more than twenty kilometers of optical cable and the palm of Garner’s hand.
Someone had grown a second recliner out of the deck next to Garner’s. I laid back, settled myself in, and slipped my left hand into the armrest’s cradle. “Coming on-line,” I said through my in-head.
The duty roster had been set up days before. The idea was that Chief Garner, with the most experience, would run the initial tests when the tunneler broke through into the ocean, handle the probe’s final sterilization—the chances were overwhelmingly good that none of our bugs would be compatible with any of Hymie’s bugs, but you never knew, and protocol called for taking every reasonable precaution—and begin the first exploration pass with the microsub. But we expected to be searching Hymie’s hidden ocean for quite a while, so ten of the Corpsmen attached to the expedition, including me, would be pulling rotating shifts piloting the thing.
And I was first up on the duty list.
For a brief moment, I sensed Chief Garner’s electronic presence as he withdrew from the sub. There was an awkward moment of orientation . . . and then I was there, ten kilometers beneath the frigid surface of Niffelheim-e, adrift in a marine world of liquid water filled with pinpoint motes and flecks of debris.
“You have the con, Carlyle,” Garner’s voice said in my head.
“Aye, aye, Chief,” I replied. “I have the con.”
It was like being the microsub, rather than simply steering it. I was seeing through its camera array, mounted beneath the tiny but powerful light on the dorsal surface of the hull. I was hearing through its ears, and I could feel the tiny impacts of bits of muck as they glanced off the teleoperated vehicle, feel the rush of water about me as I surged forward. The ice ceiling blurred past overhead.
I could see better with sonar than with light. The microsub was sending out brief, high-frequency chirps, and the reflected sound waves created shadowy images around me, just out of reach of my light. I saw something big close by the ceiling, fifty meters away. It looked like stalactites hanging from the roof of a cave. Adjusting my course, I moved in that direction.
A shadow loomed at the touch of my light . . . grew sharper . . . resolved . . .
“You guys seeing this?” I asked. “I think . . .”
“My God,” Garner’s voice said in my head. “Is that what I think it is?”
“I think it’s life,” I said.
It looked something like terrestrial coral, branching and blunt-ended—but it was growing upside down, rooted in the underside of the ice. The arms appeared fuzzy, as though the surface was coated with algae or moss; the color was dark gray.
“Definitely living.” That voice was Dr. Rutherford. “Well done!”
I hadn’t done anything, actually, except steer the microsub in the right direction, but the praise glowed in my thoughts nonetheless.
I brought the sub closer to the mass, probing at it gently. The fuzzy mass looked exactly like filaments of algae, but with all of the green washed out.
“Can you get us a sample, young man?” Rutherford asked.
“A small one,” I heard Garner tell him. “That sub doesn’t have much cargo capacity.”
I extended a cutting arm, toothpick-slender, and snicked off a couple of millimeters from the end of a filament. There was no reaction from the organism; it looked like a plant, yeah, but with alien biota you just never knew. Backing away to be sure I didn’t snare the sub in the gently waving forest in front of me, I stowed the sample, then let the microsub begin drifting lower.
I checked the sub’s tether, a fiber-optic connector thinner than a human hair that was paying out from the tunneler, now a good half kilometer behind me. The tunneler nanufactured the stuff to order, growing it as a single very long-chain molecule rather than storing it on a reel; I should have a good eight to ten more kilometers in reserve, and we could always add to that from the surface. The problem was not limitations in range; it was in limitations of depth. The ice above me exerted an extraordinary pressure on the water beneath, despite the lower gravity and the fact that ice was less dense than water; the microsub was now enduring many tons of pressure on every square centimeter of its surface. While most of it was solid state, the specimen chambers would implode if I didn’t make certain the pressures were well balanced.
No human-crewed vehicle would have been able to endure those pressures.
I wanted to go deeper, but none of us was certain about the device’s crush depth. At some point, even solid-state circuitry would collapse.
Something caught my attention at the lower edge of my view forward. There was something there, ahead and deeper.
Whatever it was, the glare from my light was washing it out. Ceasing my forward movement, I cut the light.
“What are you doing, Carlyle?” Garner asked. “The procedure list calls for—”
“I know, I know. But I can’t see. I thought I saw a light or something.”
And then the stars came out.
In the 1930s, William Beebe and Otis Barton conducted a number of dives into the deep ocean off the islands of Bermuda, and became the first humans to observe the organic fireworks displays of bioluminescent creatures half a mile down or more. Their emotions upon seeing the denizens of this bizarre benthic zoo must have been similar to mine at that moment. Many of them looked like shooting stars streaking across my field of vision; others were flashes or pulses or ripples of pale light. The “Hymiean” world-ocean, it appeared, was literally filled with life, at least at its upper levels.
How far did the marine phosphorescence project underwater? That depended entirely on how cloudy the sea water was to begin with, and it would take a while to get accurate readings on that. But my impression, from the vantage point of the microsub, was that most of the light we were seeing was coming from organisms within a very few tens of meters.
“Aim your light at that one,” Garner said, and a crosshairs pointer appeared in my in-head, indicating a long train of blue-green lights that gave the impression of a rippling chain of lighted portholes.
“No!” Dr. Rutherford’s voice said. “Intense light can kill organisms adapted to the deep sea on Earth! It might be the same here.”
“Then how the hell are we supposed to get a look at them?” Garner demanded.
“I think th
ey were avoiding the light when I had it on,” I told them. “The bioluminescence didn’t switch on until I turned the light off.”
“That could just be because your brain wasn’t registering the lower levels of light,” Rutherford told me.
“Here,” I said. “I’ll try the sub’s light, but at low intensity.”
I switched on the light again, and very gradually increased its brightness. It was harder to see the surrounding luminescence with that thing on, and some of them did appear to be moving away.
But the light illuminated a couple of critters close up, and they were startling. The first was a jelly-worm thing a meter long, transparent as glass, imbedded with glowing embers.
The second was a fish.
Correction: it was something like a fish. The need for streamlined efficiency in a marine environment had shaped the thing—flat, finned, and with jaws at the front end. But it moved in spurts, like a squid propelling itself with jets of water, and each time it slowed, its narrow scales puffed out like fur, revealing that its body was sheathed in hair-thin tentacles that formed a kind of net around it. As far as I could tell, it had no eyes.
Which made me wonder. “If these creatures use light, they must be able to see it,” I said. “I don’t see any eyes, though.”
“More to the point,” Rutherford said, “is why they would ever evolve eyes—or light-producing organs—at all.”
“Maybe they need to find mates,” I suggested. Mating strategies drove a lot of the evolutionary choices made on Earth, after all.
“Yes, yes, a very good possibility. Or possibly—”
“Hang on,” I interrupted. “What the hell is that?”
The nearby life forms were vanishing into the darkness, but there was something left behind. As I engaged my enhanced optics, a form began to take shape.
It was . . . titanic. At first, all I could see was a faint patch of hazy light, almost too dim to see, but as moment followed moment, the light became stronger, brighter, and it began to define a shape, a shape that literally filled my field of view, stretched out beneath me.
“Are you guys getting this?” I asked.
“We see it,” Garner said. “Everything’s being recorded. My God, the size of that thing!”
“How . . . how big is it?” Rutherford’s voice asked.
“Ping it, Carlyle.”
I did so. The echo told us the shape was still 800 meters beneath us. The edges, however, were out of sonar range. The thing was too big to measure, though what we could see was at least five kilometers across.
The fact that it was almost a kilometer away, though, meant an output of light that was starkly astonishing. Sea water on Earth absorbs almost all sunlight in the visible spectrum in the first ten meters, though photosynthesis can take place all the way down to about 200 meters. The regions beneath 900 meters, though, are referred to as the aphotic zone, meaning no light at all ever reaches that deep.
Something, a very large something, was glowing beneath the microsub. Individual lights seemed to pick out lines and clusters, like an aerial view of a brightly lit city at night. As I watched, the longest lines of illumination began pulsing in rhythmic waves; it took me a moment to understand that I was seeing something like the spokes of a vast wheel, picked out in blue-green radiance, and turning, moving across my field of view from right to left in an awesome and ponderous sweep.
Five hundred meters.
The thing was rising, getting closer moment by moment.
Chapter Nine
My first instinct was to turn and run. I could feel the rush of displaced water as the giant shape rose. . . .
And then there was a sharp, hard shock, and once again I was lying in the recliner back in the dome on Hymie’s surface. The control room was crowded with Marines, techs, and Corpsmen who’d come in to look over my electronic shoulder, as it were. Second Lieutenant Baumgartner was among them. “Welcome back, Petty Officer,” he told me.
“It’s . . . good to be back, sir.”
“Probe terminated,” Chief Garner said, looking up from his console. “Smashed against the ice. You okay, Carlyle?”
“I’m fine, Chief. A little shaken, is all.”
A lot of people think that if your remote dies while you’re teleoperating it, you die. I suppose they think the shock gets you, or something. The truth is a lot less exciting. It’s like waking up from a particularly intense dream, disorienting, a bit confusing, maybe, but not deadly.
“That giant life form,” Rutherford said, excited. “Did you get the idea that it was intelligent? Perhaps trying to communicate?”
I thought about it. “I really don’t know, sir. It’s possible, I guess. But . . . it was so huge! How likely is it that something that big would even notice something as small as the microsub?”
“Point. Still, I had the impression that it was reacting to you . . . to the sub’s presence, I mean. Maybe to your light, maybe to your sonar.”
“Yeah,” Baumgartner said. “But was it saying hi, or was it coming up for a snack?”
Rutherford chuckled. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? We’ll need to drop some more remote probes down the shaft, to see if we can establish meaningful contact.”
“Just so ‘meaningful contact’ doesn’t mean that thing comes up to the surface,” Baumgartner said. “If we’re going to talk to it, I’d rather it stayed put under the ice.”
“In the meantime,” Rutherford said, looking at me, “our young Corpsman here has just discovered three new species. The honor of naming them goes to him.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, surprised. “I, uh, nothing occurs to me at the moment, though.”
“No hurry, no hurry. Use the library AI to help you with the Latin, if you need to. And send your suggestions to my office, oh, in the next few days.”
The idea of getting to name the critters I’d discovered during the sub teleoperation was an exciting one, and something I’d not expected. Generally, the scientist who first describes a new life form in a formal paper is the one who names it, and that would probably be Rutherford. I figured he would probably have some ideas in reserve, just in case I dropped the ball and couldn’t come up with something suitable.
That evening, I linked in to the fraction of the Clymer’s library that had been copied and sent down aboard one of the Cutlasses. It was resident now, along with the expedition’s AI, inside the dome. I called up the recordings I’d sent back of each of the creatures, opened a Latin dictionary, and got to work.
Scientists have been giving living organism double-barreled names for genus and species since Linnaeus, in the 1700s. Binomial nomenclature, it’s called, and while Latin predominates, you’d better not call it the creature’s Latin name, or the biologists will correct you. The names can be Latin, or ancient Greek, or be a person’s name or the place where the organism was found, or even be taken from a pun or an in-joke.
The translucent tube-thing I’d seen I called Tubivitrea pellucidus, the “translucent glass tube.” The odd fish with the odd scales became Hymaeapiscis squamatopilus, the “Hymean fish with hairlike scales.”
The abyssal monster that had smashed the microsub against the ice ceiling was easy. I dubbed it Luciderm gigans, the “giant with light-emitting skin.”
I transmitted my choices to Rutherford’s mailbox, feeling somewhat fatalistic about the whole thing. I wasn’t sure my attempts at Latin—even with the AI’s help—would stand close inspection, and it was distinctly possible that the Academy of Xenobiology back on Earth would have different ideas. On the other hand, this was actually a step for me along the path of scientific recognition and legitimacy, something I knew would please my father.
One thing I did know. If we managed to straighten out the situation with the Qesh at Gliese 581, the xenobiologists would be back, and in force, to bring to the surface the secrets hidden beneath Hymie’s ice.
The next day, the Clymer and the other ships of MRF-7 returned to Niffelheim-e.
<
br /> “Callahan!”
“Yo!”
“Cameron!”
“Here.”
“Carlyle!”
“Yup.”
“Colby!”
“Yeah!”
The roll call was an old, old tradition for the military. Hell, by monitoring our implants, they knew we were all here—not to mention our vital signs, general state of health, and probably our attitude and what we’d had for breakfast as well. But the ritual of drawing us up in ranks and having us sound off as they read our names may have had a psychological aspect to it as well.
Somehow, it reminded us that we all were part of the team, that the familiar names and faces around each of us were brothers and sisters who were the real reasons we were fighting.
Not for ideology. Not to keep Earth safe for Humankind, or to rescue the Salvationists.
Brothers and sisters.
The roll call complete, we left-faced at Gunny Hancock’s barked order, and walked single file through the open lock of the Misty-D waiting in the ceramplast embrace of its launch tube. Clymer boasted ten tubes, enough to launch an entire battalion in three waves. Today, only three misties—carrying the three platoons of Bravo Company—were launching.
Inside, we squeezed into seats just barely large enough to accommodate a Marine in full Mark 7 armor. A recon platoon consists of forty-eight Marines divided into three squads, all under the command of a second lieutenant. In our case, this was Earnest Baumgartner, already aboard and wired into his command block. Packs and weapons went into the overhead gear lockers, which were sealed from the command deck—and that included our sidearms as well as our primary weapons. Gunny Hancock checked on that part personally; a bored Marine fiddling with a charged weapon in the cramped confines of a Misty could put a very sudden halt to the festivities.
I jacked in the connectors that linked me to the D/MST-22’s artificial intelligence and the platoon com channel. I could hear the Marines around me engaged in another ancient Corps tradition—griping.
“It ain’t right, is all I’m sayin’.” According to the ID, that was Corporal Randolph Gregory. “We was deployed already on Hymie! Why’re they sending us out again?”
