Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  I considered linking in to the medical AI that ran sick bay. Its name was Andries, short for Andries van Wesel . . . a physician and anatomist back in the sixteenth century better known by the Latin version of his name, Andreas Vesalius. Andries would have a complete program subset for diagnosing psychiatric problems. Military units, after all, had more problems with psychological conditions—depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, suicidal ideation—than they did with sprains, strains, and broken bones.

  But . . . no. Andries worked for the medical department, and out here that meant Dr. Kirchner. I wouldn’t want him to see a report from Andries that suggested that I was checking up on his mental health. Besides, Andries was where Chief Garner had gone to find the deleted STS data. If I or he ended up in front of a court-martial board, a record of my rummaging around in the sick bay AI’s files looking for psychiatric symptoms in my department head would look uncomfortably like mutiny.

  That was what we were looking at here, right? Mutiny . . . a damned ugly word.

  There was an alternative, though, another source of information on human psychiatric disorders.

  Its name was Ludwig.

  Ludwig was named for Ludwig Wittgenstein, an early twentieth-century philosopher who’d done important work on the philosophy of language and how it intersected with the philosophy of mind—mental functions, mental properties, and consciousness itself. Language, and how we use it, affects the way we think. We take that for granted today, but it was pretty revolutionary three hundred years ago. And the idea that language affects how we think becomes vitally important when trying to establish meaningful communication with a totally alien species.

  I knew that Ludwig had a lot of data stored on human psychological or psychiatric conditions. Wiseman had been right about one thing, though he’d been having trouble expressing it: nonhumans think differently from humans, and those differences can make them seem crazy. Ludwig had to know about human mental problems in order to understand how an alien might be thinking.

  I grew a chair for myself near the viewall, dropped into it, and opened the channel, passing up-link my authorization code as I did so. “Ludwig? I need a fast consult.”

  “What is the nature of your question?”

  “Somebody on board is acting strange. I need to assess his psychological condition.”

  “Why not consult with Andreis? This would be his specialty, rather than mine.”

  “My reasons are private.”

  “Understood. Select the behaviors that are troubling you.”

  A list of symptoms ran through my in-head. Most I easily discarded. But a few . . .

  Difficulty conforming to social norms: In this case, “social norms” might mean military protocol and common courtesy.

  Acting impulsively; failing to consider the consequences of impulsive actions: Well, he’d decided not to give Pollard an STS, and hadn’t listened to my reasons for giving him one.

  Display of aggressiveness and irritability, possibly leading to physical assault: Okay, Kirchner hadn’t attacked anybody, but it sure felt like he was out to get me.

  Difficulty feeling empathy for others; an inability to consider the thoughts, feelings, or motivations of other people, sometimes leading to a disregard for others: Bingo.

  Displays no remorse for behavior that harms others: That and the lack of empathy together were beginning to sound like sociopathy, but the diagnosis Ludwig was working toward turned out to be something else—antisocial personality disorder.

  Some of the signs and symptoms were bang on. Others were borderline; Pollard’s case had resolved well, with no physical harm to him, so it was tough to judge whether Kirchner had shown any remorse or not. There simply wasn’t enough solid evidence for a diagnosis. That was the hell of psychological profiles like this one. Every person is different, and every single symptom can show up in a healthy individual. Psychiatric pathology, it turns out, is often a matter of degree.

  And if Kirchner could be clinically diagnosed as suffering from APD, it turned out there wasn’t a lot that could be done about it. Very few people with the condition ever sought treatment on their own; most ended getting treatment after some sort of altercation with the legal system. The only recognized treatment was something called cognitive-behavioral therapy, which involved teaching the person to find insights into his own behavior and to change those behaviors and thought patterns that were socially maladaptive. It took a long time—years, often—and if the person wasn’t personally convinced that he was having trouble in social situations and that he was the cause, all the therapy in the world wouldn’t help him.

  Sure, I could just see it. Excuse me, Doctor, but your bedside manner sucks and you’re making impulsive decisions without thinking through the results. I think you need to seek professional counseling. . . .

  That would go over real well.

  So . . . was it even my business at all? I mean . . . some people, some doctors are simply just assholes, and it’s not up to me to fix any of them. I was no longer on the case, in a manner of speaking; I was under orders to stay out of Kirchner’s way. Fixing him was not my job.

  But there was another side to the issue. Navy Corspmen are responsible for the health of everyone on board ship, and that includes their mental health. Much more than on Earth or at a Commonwealth Navy base somewhere, the tight little community of men and women that make up a starship’s crew and passengers depends on the medical department to keep everyone’s mental health on an even keel . . . and that means watching out for developing problems before they reach critical and someone gets killed in a fight or as a result of bad judgment.

  I couldn’t do anything, but Chief Garner was the senior medical department petty officer. Maybe he could.

  I thanked Ludwig for its help, then composed a written message in my head.

  HEY, CHIEF,

  I’M NOT TRYING TO SECOND-GUESS YOU OR DR. KIRCHNER, BUT I’VE NOTICED SOME DISTURBING BEHAVIORS AND I THOUGHT I SHOULD PASS THEM ON TO YOU. YOU MIGHT BE IN A BETTER POSITION TO JUDGE, SINCE YOU’RE SEEING HIM EVERY DAY.

  THANKS MUCH.

  ELLIOT CARLYLE, HM2

  I appended a link to the list of signs and symptoms I’d observed, and sent it off. I used a written message partly because I didn’t want to get into an argument with Garner, but mostly because I wanted him to see the whole list of signs and symptoms before he told me to shut the hell up.

  On the downside, it established a records-trail that would be most useful for the prosecution if they decided to give me a court-martial.

  I didn’t care, though. I hadn’t done anything actionable—not yet—and I really was concerned about Kirchner and the effect he might have on shipboard morale.

  I addressed it to Garner, marking it to his attention only, hesitated for a long moment, and then finally hit the SEND icon.

  Then I tried to get back to work, which meant going over the health records of the Marines in MSEP-Alpha, making sure immunizations were up to date and that nanobot counts were within acceptable limits.

  And I tried to forget about the damnable fact that, at that moment, Kirchner was the only physician within something like thirty light years.

  My note to Chief Garner turned out to be something of a mistake. He came up to the squad bay the next day, furious, and reamed me a new one for sticking my nose in where it wasn’t wanted.

  “Damn it, E-Car,” he growled, while a number of the Marines looked on in amused silence, “can’t you just leave well enough alone? I’ve got all I can handle juggling . . . problems in sick bay, hassles with the skipper, and Dr. Kirchner on the rampage. I do not need you trying to be helpful!”

  “I understand, Chief.”

  “No, I don’t think you do! Are you an expert in psychological pathology? Have you been trained in psychiatric medicine? Taken downloads teaching you intervention techniques in social path cases?”

  “No, Chief, but—”

  “ ‘No, Chief,’ ” he mimicked, then glared
at me. “But me no buts, E-Car. You wouldn’t know antisocial personality disorder if it jumped out and bit you. And linking in to a psychiatric subroutine won’t cut it.”

  “I’m sorry, Chief. I was worried and trying to help.”

  “You’ll help best by staying here, staying out of the doctor’s sight, and staying the hell out of my hair!”

  “Aye, aye, Chief.”

  There was more . . . but eventually Garner ran down and stalked off, leaving me with a bunch of grinning Marines. “Don’t take it too hard, Doc,” Colby told me. “Chiefs and gunnery sergeants—they think they’re God.”

  “Uh-uh, Colby,” Sergeant Tomacek said, shaking his head. “Captains think they’re God. Chiefs and gunnery sergeants know they’re God. Basic law of the universe, that.”

  A week and a couple of days later, we dropped out of Alcubierre Drive. GJ 1214 is a pipsqueak even compared to a red dwarf like Gliese 581. It’s sixteen-hundredths of the Sun’s mass—about half of Bloodstar’s, and our navigational program popped us into normal space less than half an AU out.

  And almost immediately, we realized that we were not alone in the system.

  Someone else had gotten there first, and was already in orbit around the planet.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kari and I stood silent on the mess deck, watching the final approach to the star and its watery world. A couple of dozen Marines were there as well, uncharacteristically silent. From a scant 2 million kilometers away, the star GJ 1214 spanned eight degrees, sixteen times the width of Sol in Earth’s sky, sullen red, glowering, a good 20 percent of its face blotched and pocked by black starspots. I could see the granulation of the photosphere, the roil and churn of the deep stellar atmosphere, the ghostly reach of prominences along far-flung lines of magnetic force.

  And the world . . . was it world or titanic comet? As the digital avatar of Dr. James Eric Murdock had showed us in the docuinteractive briefing two weeks before, the planet called Abyssworld had a misty white tail streaming out from its nightside, stretching far out into the darkness away from that cool red ember of a sun. Abyssworld’s dayside showed as a deep violet ocean beneath the hurricane swirl of clouds that covered most of the hemisphere. The nightside was made dimly visible by light reflecting from the cometary tail, and by the pale ring of aurorae around the planet’s north pole. What we could see of Abyssworld’s nightside reminded me forcibly of Europa—ice from pole to pole, streaked and webbed and crisscrossed by filamentous networks of dark lines.

  A world divided, half ice locked and frigid, half boiling, storm-tortured ocean.

  And an ocean, I reminded myself, that was ten thousand kilometers deep.

  What a world, I thought. What a world!

  Haldane’s instruments picked up the presence of the alien ship long before we were close enough to see it with our naked eyes, of course. The bridge threw an inset window up on the viewall showing the vessel, a gnarled and organic-looking shape, vaguely like an egg but with blisters and twisted surfaces that made you dizzy if you tried to follow them with your eye. The color overall was black or a very dark slate gray with sky-blue highlights or detailing; the color was a bit uncertain because we were seeing it by the ruby light of GJ 1214.

  “Do we know who builds ships like that?” I asked.

  “Maybe Haldane’s AI knows,” Gunnery Sergeant Hancock said.

  I linked through. Dozens of others were asking exactly the same question.

  “The design,” the AI’s voice replied, “is similar to Gykr vessels encountered at Xi Serpentis in 2201. I estimate the probability of identity at eighty-five percent.”

  In the 128 years since we’d made our first ET contact with the Brocs, Humankind has directly met perhaps twenty alien species, though we know of hundreds more through the Encyclopedia Galactica. I remembered something about a short war with these guys, but not the details.

  “Tell me about the Gykr,” I said. And the data cascaded through my mind.

  Encyclopedia Galactica/Xenospecies Profile

  Entry: Sentient Galactic Species 12190

  “Gykr”

  Gykr, “Guckers,” “Gucks”

  Civilization type: 1.026 G

  TL 19: FTL, Genetic/cybernetic Prostheses, Advanced nanotechnology

  Societal code: VTRB

  Dominant: close associative/predatory/pro-active—invasive/sexual

  Cultural library: 4.024 x 1016 bits

  Data Storage/Transmission DS/T: 4.01 x 1011s

  Biological code: 045.422.836

  Genome: 5.1 x 1010 bits; Coding/non-coding: 0.622.

  Biology: C, H, N, O, Cu, Mg, As, H2O, PO4, Fe

  GNA – Glycol Nucleic Acid

  Cupric hemocyanin free-floating in hemolymph as circulatory fluid.

  Mobile heterotrophs, carnivores, O2 respiration.

  Upright jointed-limb locomotion.

  Highly gregarious, Polyspecific [1 genera, 10 species]; asexual.

  Communication: modulated sound at 100 to 1000 Hz.

  Neural connection equivalence NCE = 9.3 x 1013

  T = ~240o to ~290o K; M = ~7.6 x 104 g; L: ~4.7 x 108s

  Vision: ~600 nm to 1200 nm; Hearing: 12 Hz to 7000 Hz

  Member: Galactic Polylogue

  Receipt galactic nested code: 7.22 x 109 s ago

  Locally initiated contact 0.11 x 109 s ago

  Star: Unknown.

  M = 6.2 x 1027g; R = 5.5 x 106m; G = 8.4 m/s2

  Atm: O2 10.2, N2 53.0, CO2 33.9, NH3 2.6; Patm 0.67 x 105 Pa

  Librarian’s note: EG data suggests possibility of a Steppenwolf planet. First direct human contact occurred in 2201 C.E. at Xi Serpentis. Immediate hostile response/reflex led to three-month “Guck War,” followed by the Treaty of Tanis in 2202, with no contact since. Threat level—9.

  I had to ask for the definition of “Steppenwolf planet.”

  Back at the beginning of the exoplanetary discovery period, astronomers and cosmologists began learning just how chancy the process of planetary formation truly was. Early in a planetary system’s history, newly formed planets tended to migrate in or out. Gas giants formed in the system’s cold outer reaches might find themselves as “hot Jupiters,” circling their parent sun in a matter of days, or shifting back and forth in response to orbital resonances with other worlds. In Earth’s solar system 4 billion years ago, orbital resonances moved Saturn farther out, and actually caused Uranus and Neptune to switch places. Most planetary scientists believe that the late heavy bombardment that cratered worlds throughout the inner system was generated as the gas giants shifted in or out, disturbing the orbits of countless asteroids and comets.

  One consequence of this game of planetary billiards was that some planets would be ejected from the system entirely. Deprived of their sun, they would wander the frigid wastes among the stars, orphans lost within the vast and empty night. The term “Steppenwolf planet” had been coined a couple of centuries ago by planetary scientists who described such a world as “like a lone wolf wandering the Galactic steppes.” Others had suggested that such rogue planets were simply “born to be wild,” which seems to have been a cultural reference of the period, long since lost.

  The first rogue planet ever discovered—and confirmed not to be a brown dwarf—was a world with the ungainly designation CFBDSIR 2149-0403, discovered by an infrared survey back in 2012. Current estimates suggested that there might be twice as many rogue planets as there were stars in the Galaxy, as many as 800 billion.

  What had not been expected was that some of these worlds, at least, might be abodes of life. Several mechanisms for this outlandish possibility had been proposed. All required that the planet begin with an ocean of liquid water. In one, radioactive minerals deep in the planet’s crust might keep the oceans liquid beneath a kilometer-thick crust of solid ice. Another possibility suggested that extensive volcanism could pump large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it would freeze, fall as CO2 snow, and ultimately blanket the oceans in insulating
dry ice long before they could freeze. Enough volcanic activity might create underground caverns warmed by lava flows, as well as heating the oceans enough to keep them liquid. Calculations suggested that such worlds might maintain heat enough within their cores to keep their oceans liquid for as long as 5 billion years.

  If such a world had already evolved life at the time when it was ejected from its star system, that life could be expected to adapt to slowly changing, cooling conditions. Whether that life could develop intelligence or, even more unlikely given the nature of the environment, technology, remained a hotly contested question.

  But the fact that certain key planetary stats weren’t listed in the Gykr entry in the Encylopedia Galactica—no orbital radius or length of year—suggested either that the Gykr had somehow managed to delete those from the record, for whatever reason, or that those data were not relevant—that the world didn’t have a star.

  If the Gucks had evolved within a rogue planet, they most likely would be a very different form of life. The supposition was that they did develop a technical civilization, possibly by developing metallurgy and advanced chemistry among the fiery volcanic vents in deep underground caverns; a purely marine civilization could never discover fire, could never smelt metals, could never venture into space . . . at least as we understand the processes of cultural and technic evolution and development.

  “One thing’s certain,” Hancock said, scowling, “those little bastards mean trouble.”

  “We haven’t even seen them since the Guck War,” Lance Corporal Brady said. She shook her head. “Maybe they learned their lesson?”

  “Not fucking likely,” Hancock replied. “My daddy told me about them. They’d sooner shoot than say howdy.”

  “Fight-or-fight response,” I added. “It’s built into their genetic structure.”

  The Guck War had only lasted three months, and basically consisted of two battles: the first at Xi Serpentis, the second at Tanis, where the Fifth Fleet came down on a Gucky supply depot like a hypernova. The Treaty of Tanis was established by laser com, and the two parties never met each other. All we knew about Gykr physiology came from dead and often mangled bodies found inside space armor, plus what was listed in their entry in the Encylcopedia Galactica when we finally dug it out.