Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  I pulled out a biochem analyzer and pressed its business end against my patient’s tough, ropy hide. After a moment, I shifted the analyzer to a splatter of blue-green blood near the wound. The readouts downloaded straight into my in-head, giving me a more detailed understanding of the being’s biochemistry than was available on the Net. In particular, I had my AI leapfrog through the incoming data to pinpoint those biochemistries associated with the alien’s immune response.

  The immune system for any species is an enormous set of chemistries—varied, complex, and efficient. Even bacteria have their own simple immune system—secreted enzymes that protect the cell against bacteriophage infections. Life forms as complicated as humans have many, many layers of physical and biochemical defenses . . . and quite a few of those are changing all the time to react to specific threats. I couldn’t expect the M’nangat to be any different.

  Our databases on M’nangat physiology weren’t extensive—at least not the ones available to me over the Fleet channels—but I could have my AI run a series of simulations: what would happen if I shot my green patient full of nanobots? The answer came back in a few seconds. There was a solid 86 percent chance that my nano would not trigger an immune response.

  Nanobots are designed and programmed with immune responses in mind, of course. They’re coated with buckyweave carbon shells with the active molecular machinery hidden away inside a non-reactive sheath. Still, there was always a small chance—in this case 14 percent—that my nanobots might hit a biochemical trigger and sensitize the organism, telling it in effect that invaders were entering the body and it was time to call out the troops. Those percentages applied to the entire dose of ’bots, of course, and not to each nanobot individually. Otherwise, with a few hundred million foreign particles entering the alien system, sensitization would have been guaranteed.

  I looked again at the wound, and decided I would have to accept those odds. The Broc had an entry wound but no exit cavity. The projectile must still be inside.

  I felt a shudder through the deck, and then zero-gravity resumed. The meta rockets had switched off. Had the Marines gotten to the controls in time? Or had we just deorbited?

  I couldn’t tell, and I was too busy at the moment to link in and query the network. If we hit atmosphere, my work on the alien would be wasted, but if we didn’t burn up on re-entry or slam into the Earth I preferred to have a live patient to a dead one. I kept working.

  I used the injector from my M-7 kit to fire a full dose of nanobots into the alien’s hide. As I waited for them to be assimilated, I wondered why we used terms like “Broccoli” or “Stalk” with aliens like the M’nangat. I understood why Marines dehumanized their enemies—especially the human ones—but the M’nangat, as far as we could tell, had been benevolent and helpful galactic neighbors.

  The answer, I suppose, was psychological. Friendly the M’nangat may be, but they were still alien, meaning we could never really get inside their heads—or what passes for heads—and understand them nearly as well as, say, a human living in San Antonio can understand a human living in Kyoto. They had their own agenda—all intelligent beings do—and we had no idea what that agenda might be and probably never would. That’s why we were careful not to let them learn where Sol was, why trading and diplomatic exchanges took place at neutral meeting spots like Sirius, just in case.

  And that was fair enough, since we had no idea where they hailed from either, other than that their homeworld was the fourth planet of a star only slightly brighter than Sol. In a galaxy of four hundred billion stars, you can’t tell much from that.

  But maybe we called the weirdly stalked and tentacled beings Broccoli or Brocs or Stalks to make them seem a little more . . . comprehensible. Familiar. I glanced up at the sensory cluster, that cluster of orange-sized luminous eyes at one end of the body. Those quivering jelly-globe eyes had no pupils, so I couldn’t tell if it was looking at me, but then, that sphere of light-gathering organs was designed to look in every direction at once.

  What kind of brain can see through 360 degrees and straight up at all times? I wondered. What did that suggest about M’nangat psychology?

  D’DNAH CARRIES MY BUDS, the uninjured M’nangat said, the translated words typing themselves across my in-head screen. PLEASE . . .

  “I’ll do what I can,” I replied aloud, letting my AI handle the translation and transmission. “I’m just checking to see if your partner is okay on the inside.”

  The being floating next to me and my patient was showing no emotion that I could recognize, but the words on my in-head sounded like human pain. Buds . . . that would be a clutch of young. According to the downloading xeno data, fertilized eggs from the female took root inside the life carrier and grew as buds that eventually tuned into young and chewed their way to freedom.

  I tried not to think about that part. M’nangat reproduction was messy, violent, and painful . . . and the carrier usually didn’t survive. And how did that color their psychology?

  The nanobots were clustering now around the wounded being’s internal organs. I used my N-prog to program them to transmit an overlay.

  An overlay is a translucent image of a being’s internal structure projected over the image from my unaugmented eyes. I could see the Broc in front of me, but could also see its internal structure in remarkable depth and detail, picked out by hundreds of millions of cell-sized nanobots adhering to every internal surface and transmitting their relative positions to my N-prog. The Broc’s body appeared to fade away, and I could see the muscular system and, just underneath, the crisscrossing weave of cartilage running from tentacles to eyes. They didn’t have true internal skeletons, but the muscles of the body were attached to flexible, cartilaginous scaffolding that doubled as protection for the inner organs. By concentrating, I could let my viewpoint sink deeper. I linked in to the medical data feed from the Net; my AI identified various organs and threw names in so I could tell what I was looking at.

  Right away, I could see that my patient was in serious trouble. A ragged cavity extended from the wound into the central core of its body, and a pale, diffuse cloud showed massive internal bleeding. The cartilage had been torn open and several organs damaged, but what really worried me was the bullet.

  My nanobots had carefully picked it out: a glittering metal slug now resting immediately above the pulsing two-chambered muscle that was the M’nangat’s upper heart, tucked in beside the artery that corresponded to the aorta in humans. My AI identified the thing from the ’bots’ transmissions. It was an M550ND mag-accelerated nano-D round, and for some reason the thing had not gone off.

  And that made it extremely dangerous.

  I drew a deep breath, thinking fast. Nanodisassembler rounds are designed to explode on impact, flooding the target with nanobots programmed to dissolve molecular bonds—in essence reducing it to its component atoms. If the nano in that bullet was omnivorous, programmed to dissolve all bonds, it would have been an insanely dangerous round to use inside a space station. More likely, the nano had been programmed to focus on carbon bonds only: deadly for organic chemistries and most plastics, but inert if they slammed into a metal bulkhead.

  Which kind were these? I wanted to believe that the tangos hadn’t been that crazy . . . crazy enough to fire omnivorous nano-D rounds inside Zeta Capricorn’s hull . . . but their record so far didn’t exactly inspire confidence in their rationality. They’d threatened to drop a one-kilometer rock onto Earth from orbit, for God’s sake . . . and when the Marines came on board, they’d set the deadly machinery in motion. When Atun 3840 touched down, the impact quite possibly could kill billions.

  WHAT DO YOU SEE? the uninjured M’nangat asked. He . . . no, she—my data link provided that correction—wasn’t linked into my download feed, but could tell that I was peering closely at something inside her friend. She sounded as worried as any human might be.

  “Just taking a look . . .” I said. I opened a private channel to Hancock. “Hey, Gunny? Can you send
someone to get this Broc out of my hair?”

  “On the way, Doc.” There was a pause. “How’s it going in there? We have two more wounded Marines out here.”

  Damn! “Sorry. I’ve got a . . . a situation here, and it can’t wait. Put ’em on suit med-support.”

  Marine Mark 10 MMCA combat armor can provide some extremely sophisticated first aid to the wearer, including nanobot auto-injections for both pain and hemorrhage control. Trouble was, my orders for this mission said that our M’nangat guests had first claim on my professional attentions. I guess the brass was afraid of an interstellar incident if one of them bled to death.

  “Already done, Doc,” Hancock said. “But one of ’em’s in a bad way. We’ve already captured her, just in case.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  And I really didn’t want to think about that. CAPTR stands for cerebral access polytomographic reconstruction, and refers to technology that can record a living brain’s neural states and chemistries, synaptic pathways, and even its quantum spin states to provide a digital picture of brain activity. If a person suffers serious brain trauma, we can often repair the brain, then download the backup CAPTR data. I’d had it happen to me during the Gliese 581 deployment six months earlier.

  The question was . . . was I still me? Or was I a copy of me with all the same memories, so that “I,” the new “I,” didn’t know the difference?

  Marines have a name for people brought back by CAPTR technology: zombies.

  The tangled philosophies involved made my head hurt, and I hated inflicting the same emotional issues on anyone else. But orders were orders . . .

  And I had a patient to save.

  Pulling a bullet out of someone isn’t that hard. In the old days, you took a forceps and a probe and fished around in the wound until you could grab the thing and drag it out . . . though if you weren’t careful you could do more damage with the fishing than the original shot had caused. I had a better means at my disposal . . . but the danger was that if I managed to release the bullet’s charge of nano-D, I would kill the patient. I could leave the round where it was, and I seriously considered that option . . . but it was lodged in a bad place, smack between the M’nangat’s upper heart and the underside of the brain. If it shifted while we were transporting the Broc, it could kill him.

  There was also a chance that the round had a timer or a contact switch in it, set to go off when someone like me was trying to pull it out. Tangos had been known to booby-trap their victims that way sometimes.

  Wonderful. Just fricking wonderful.

  I linked in through my N-prog and began giving commands.

  Nanobots are tiny, about one micron in length . . . one-fifth the width of a human red blood cell. A human hair is anywhere from 40 to 120 times thicker. They propel themselves through blood or interstitial fluid using local magnetic fields—in this case, that of the Earth itself—and can also link themselves together magnetically in order to apply force enough to, say, set a broken bone. Could they generate enough unified force to drag a bullet out of the patient without setting it off?

  I was about to find out.

  I couldn’t know it at the time, of course, but as I studied my patient, Earth was entering a paroxysm of recriminations, verbal assaults, and counterassaults that were bringing us to the brink of a very nasty war. The Terran Commonwealth doesn’t speak for all of Earth’s teeming billions, not by a damned sight. The North Chinese Socialist Cooperative is an independent nation, for instance, as is Brazil and most of what used to be called India. Most of the Islamic states from Morocco to Indonesia are independents, as is the vast sprawl of Islamic Central Asia.

  Even the supposedly happily united nation-states of the Commonwealth have their share of rebellions, popular insurrections, and independence movements, and the neo-Ludd movement, as much religious as political, has roots in every technic society on the planet. We knew the tangos who had attacked Capricorn Zeta were neo-Ludd, but the neo-Ludds don’t have spacecraft. We knew they’d hitched a ride from the space elevator to the mining station on a Chinese tug, but that didn’t prove that North China was behind the attack. In fact, the Chinese tug argued against Beijing’s involvement. The Chinese weren’t stupid, and they knew that endangering the entire planet was certain to call down upon themselves the wrath of almighty God in the form of Commonwealth assault forces, aerospace attacks, and a barrage of orbital railgun strikes.

  Logic . . . but at the moment no one on Earth was feeling like indulging in logic. The president of Germany had just announced that the terror attack on Capricorn Zeta—and its subsequent deorbit burn—was tantamount to a declaration of war by North China. South China had launched a similar verbal assault; Canton wanted full admission to the Commonwealth, and this gave them an opportunity to settle old scores.

  And everything was happening so fast. In a global network where mind could speak to mind in an instant, news items more than fifteen minutes old were ancient history, and governments could threaten, be counterthreatened, and war be declared in the space of an hour or less.

  Below the hurtling mass of the asteroid and its attendant structures, armies were mobilizing, and everywhere, everywhere, people were waiting to see just exactly where Atun 3840 was going to fall.

  The bullet was moving. Encased in a sheath of tightly packed nanobots, it was sliding slowly up through the M’nangat’s cardiac envelope, moving back the way it had come because that path was already open. At each point where the bullet had ripped open tissue, I detailed a few tens of thousands of ’bots to stay behind and begin repairs, closing up torn tissue and, especially, closing open blood vessels. Most of them, though, kept pushing and pulling at the projectile to ease it back up the wound cavity.

  Zero-gravity made the task easier. I was holding my breath. The bullet showed no sign of being live . . . but if it exploded now my patient was dead. Nano-D works fast, eating the target from the inside out. It burns out quickly, but the nano in a half-centimeter disassembler round would create a spherical cavity inside the M’nangat a tenth of a meter across, filled with a hot chemical goo of dissociated atoms and a lot of suddenly released energy.

  I considered the possibility of using my own ’bots to encase any emerging nano-D if things did go bad, containing the release. They were packed in closely now, sealing the bullet off from its surroundings like a glistening coat of paint. Unfortunately, any nano-D inside the M550 round would be programmed to target the bonds between carbon atoms, and my ’bots were coated in nothing but carbon.

  And the energy released from broken molecular bonds . . . I didn’t have the exact figures, but the explosion would rip the wounded being in half, and might breach my own armor.

  Five centimeters to go. On a human scale—if my ’bots had been humans—that was only another one hundred kilometers. I had a momentary, surreal mental image of hundreds of millions of Egyptian laborers hauling one of the stone blocks destined for a pyramid with sledges and ropes . . . except that the bullet in this case would have been a completed pyramid one kilometer high.

  With smooth surfaces unreactive to the surrounding tissue, however, the ’bots squeezed the bullet along as if it were a watermelon seed, gathering behind it, opening the path ahead, sliding it through glistening wet tissue. I had it clear of the heart and brain, finally, but if the round detonated it would still kill my patient.

  Easy . . . easy . . .

  Dimly, I was aware of Corporal Lewis coming up behind me and saying something to the other M’nangat, something about needing her help with a report. Good. I don’t like an audience when I work, even if the audience can’t see what the hell I’m doing.

  Three more centimeters. Through my N-prog, I’d programmed the ’bots to work together as a single organism, contracting, and then expanding as it moved, clawing against the local magnetic field. I was approaching now the part of the wound that I’d already covered with skinseal. I didn’t want to disturb the congealing powder, and would have to route my microsco
pic parade around that region. That way, I decided, just beneath the M’nangat’s tough, outer layer of skin.

  I would have to slice through the skin to remove the bullet, just there, two centimeters to one side of the skinsealed wound.

  “I’m going to have to make a small cut in your skin,” I said, allowing my AI to translate for me. I touched her side. “Right about here. But I don’t have anything to keep it from hurting.”

  IT . . . HURTS . . . NOW, was the reply.

  I hated working without anesthetic, but the way a species transmits signals through its central nervous system—pain, temperature, pressure, or the more esoteric impulses for emotions or thoughts—is as unique as the way it deals with immune responses. I can block pain in a human patient easily enough because we understand how human pain works through the doloric receptors inside the thalamus and the insular cortex of the brain, but we have no idea how the analogous system works in the M’nangat. We just don’t understand their biochemistry well enough yet.

  “Okay,” I said, slipping a laser scalpel from my M-7 pack and snapping it on. “Brace yourself.”

  I made a single quick, short incision, trying to slice through just the tough and gnarled outer integument without touching the nano-clad bullet just underneath. The M’nangat tensed, and its tentacles whiplashed for an instant, threatening to put us both into a microgravity tumble.

  “Steady,” I told herm. “Hold on now . . .”

  Several tentacles flicked up and wrapped themselves around my legs, gripping me tightly. That hadn’t been what I’d meant by “hold on,” but it seemed to serve as the Broc equivalent of biting the bullet. Green blood emerged from the cut in a dense, expanding cloud . . . and the nano-D round came with it.

  I let the bullet float free as I released the scalpel and snatched another bag of skinseal, thumbing it open. Right about then, I felt another shudder and weight returned . . . again, about a tenth of a gravity.