Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not an electrical engineer . . . and so far as I could find through Haldane’s databases, we haven’t studied natural electricity in exotic ice at all. It’s an entirely new field.

  “But there’s more,” I went on. “That ice sample I collected is not pure. Take a closer look at the biostat imagery.” I showed them photomicrographs of the ice . . . backlit white sheets through which darker chains and blobs appeared. A lot of it was diffuse, almost not there at all, like wisps of gray smoke caught frozen in solid ice.

  “You can see here . . . and here. That spectrographic analysis I ran picked up substantial amounts of sulfur, iron, copper, carbon, potassium, manganese . . . a whole soup of elements strung through the ice matrix almost like . . . nerves? Blood vessels?”

  “Speculation, Mr. Carlyle,” Chief Garner’s voice said over the conference link. “We don’t know . . .”

  “No, Chief, I don’t. But it’s highly suggestive.”

  “But what you haven’t explained,” Walthers said, “is how a creature made of ice could be that . . . that flexible. Those things were like giant snakes! Ice would shatter if it moved like that!”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “I wondered about that too . . . but it turns out that there are different ways that ice can freeze, quite apart from the fifteen different forms of exotic ice we’ve been talking about. The variants are called amorphous ice. The ice we’re familiar with on Earth has a rigid, crystalline structure, but that’s actually rare out in space. In places like comets or in the subsurface ice of places like Europa or Pluto—throughout the universe, in fact—amorphous ice is the rule.

  “There are different types of amorphous ice. They generally require low temperatures with very sudden freezing, like ice cream. If you freeze ice cream too slowly, you get conventional ice crystals. Pressure is also important.

  “One type of amorphous ice—it’s called LDA, for low-density amorphous—has a melting point of around one hundred twenty or one hundred forty degrees Kelvin—that’s around minus one hundred fifty Celsius. Above that temperature, it’s actually an extremely viscous form of water. You might get that effect by manipulating the pressure in various ways too. A sudden lowering of pressure will cause sudden cooling, for instance.”

  “Actually, that problem is trivial,” Ortega said. “You don’t need LDAs. We’ve had pumpable ice technology for centuries, now, with tiny ice particles suspended as a slurry in brine or refrigerants. The ice flows like jelly.”

  “A gigantic worm made of ice,” Montgomery said, staring off into space. “With viscous-water-jelly muscles . . .”

  “Maybe,” I said. “This is all still guesswork. But there’s also this. . . .”

  I showed them more test results, these from samples of strands running through the Ice VII that also appeared to be water ice . . . but they were different.

  “These structures appear to be a different type of exotic ice,” I told them. “Specifically, Ice XI, running everywhere through the main body of the sample. We’ve found Ice XI on Earth—inside the Antarctic ice sheet. It’s actually a stable form of Ice Ih, with an orthorhombic structure and—here’s the important part—it’s ferroelectric.”

  That meant that the polarization of its atoms could be reversed by an external electrical field, that it could actually store electricity like a natural capacitor, and that it could carry an electrical current.

  You could actually use such a system to store electronic data.

  “We used to use ferroelectric RAM in some computers on Earth, and for memory in RFID chips,” Chief Garner pointed out. “It’s old tech, but it works. You can also use ferroelectric effects in memory materials—in a matrix that has one shape when an electrical current is running through it, and a different shape when the current is switched off.”

  I nodded. “I think that the cuttlewhales are gigantic electrical motors, using organic electricity to generate movement in their analog of musculature. I think they have a kind of built-in computer RAM, probably billions upon billions of bytes of it, probably distributed throughout their bodies. And I have the distinct feeling that a cuttlewhale isn’t so much a life form as it is a . . . a machine. Something created by, manufactured by . . . something else.”

  Consternation broke out around the table, and in the in-head connection as well. “Wait a second, Carlyle,” Walthers said. “You’re saying the cuttlewhales are machines?”

  “Robots!” Hancock said. “They’re fucking robots!”

  “Something like that,” I admitted. I held up a cautioning hand. “Look, I’m not saying they’re not the product of natural evolution. They may well be. But we shouldn’t discount the possibility that somebody else designed and assembled them. It would be very hard to explain how various ices could come together by chance in a way that worked so elegantly . . . complete with distributed natural data processing based on old AI models.”

  “Be careful, Mr. Carlyle,” Ortega told me. “That’s the argument used by the so-called Creationists of a few hundred years ago . . . that life on Earth was too complex to have been brought about by accidental, natural processes. Given enough time, natural processes can manufacture some wonderful things.”

  “Of course, sir,” I said. “But . . . there’s something else you all should consider.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sunlight, sir. On Earth, it only penetrates about one hundred fifty meters into the ocean. Actually, most light goes no deeper than the top ten meters . . . but by the time you reach one hundred fifty meters, it’s completely dark. Here, with the red sunlight, it’s probably less . . . and under the ice, on the nightside of the planet . . . well, there’s no light entering the ocean at all.”

  “So?” Walthers demanded. “What are you getting at?”

  “Eyes,” I replied. “The cuttlewhales have eyes. Six of them. If they evolved far enough down that they developed under high pressures, why do they have eyes?”

  “Those might not be eyes,” Ortega said, but he sounded unsure. “I wish you could have picked one of them up and brought it along. We might know more. . . .”

  “Sorry, sir, but I wasn’t going to wait around out there on the ice any longer than I absolutely had to. But . . . I wonder. If the cuttlewhales were designed, if they were manufactured somehow by another intelligence . . . maybe they were given eyes in order to explore the surface remotely.”

  “Huh,” Garner said. “Like our remote probes.”

  “That is an enormous leap, Carlyle,” Walthers said. “Kind of a leap of faith, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so, sir. But it’s something to think about.”

  “Over a long-enough period of time,” Ortega said, thoughtful, “a deep-benthic life form might move to the surface and evolve vision . . . then migrate back to the depths. . . .”

  I shrugged and spread my hands. “Look, all of this is pure speculation at this point. I’m just suggesting that we should keep in mind the possibility that the cuttlewhales are . . . artificial. That would certainly have an effect on our mission, wouldn’t it?”

  “To say the least,” Montgomery said. She still looked like she was in shock. “Just where would they have evolved in Abyssworld’s ocean? Or . . . where would they have been created, if that’s the right term? How far down?”

  I shook my head. I had numbers, but no proof, nothing solid. “Well, you need a water pressure of around a thousand atmospheres to turn ordinary water into Ice VII. That’s not too extreme, as exotic ices go. You find that at a depth of ten thousand meters on Earth . . . or about eleven thousand meters on Abyssworld. Eleven kilometers down . . .”

  “That’s only a thousandth of the way to the sea floor,” Walthers pointed out.

  “My God. What are the pressures like at the bottom of Abyssworld’s ocean?” Ortega asked.

  “I was wondering about that myself, sir,” I replied, “and I did some simple calcs. On Earth, water pressure increases by one atmosphere—that�
��s over a hundred thousand Pascals—for every ten meters you descend. Abyssworld’s gravity is only ninety-one percent of Earth’s, and there’s a direct one-to-one correlation between the weight of the water and the pressure it exerts, so call it nine hundred ten thousand atmospheres.

  “That’s a skull-crushing thousand tons or so pressing down on every square centimeter.”

  “What happens to water ice at that depth?” Garner asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody does. One possibility is that the bottom of Abyssworld’s ocean—maybe even the bottom three or four or five thousand kilometers of it—isn’t liquid water anymore. It might be a highly compressed slurry or ice-slush composed of several exotic ices, kind of like the jelly Dr. Ortega mentioned. Heat from the planet’s core might create convection currents, so it would be constantly circulating. It certainly would be a very strange environment. We don’t know enough, though, to know how strange.”

  “What kind of life might we find down there?” Montgomery asked.

  It was a rhetorical question, I knew, but I couldn’t resist answering. I’d been wondering a lot about the same thing.

  “Just about anything is possible, ma’am,” I told her. “With heat from the planet’s core, with water and various nutrients, salts, metals, stuff like that from sea-floor vents, there’s no telling what might have evolved down there.”

  For the first time in our discussion, one of the Brocs chimed in, its words written out by the ship’s AI within our in-heads. IT IS VITAL THAT YOU REMEMBER, D’drevah wrote, THAT MOST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE LIVES IN PLACES LIKE ABYSSWORLD’S DEPTHS, AND NOT NAKEDLY EXPOSED ON THE ROCKY SURFACES OF PLANETS LIKE M’GAT OR EARTH.

  I thought again about the Medusae of Europa.

  “Okay,” Walthers said. “That’s all well and good, but I don’t see how it will affect us. We don’t have the technology to explore such depths.”

  “We might be able to probe those depths with sonar,” Montgomery suggested.

  “I submit, madam,” Garner’s voice replied, “that it was sonar that attracted the cuttlewhales in the first place. They appeared almost immediately after the Marines began using high-power, low-frequency sonar through the ice. It’s possible that Murdock Base was destroyed when they tried the same thing. Perhaps we should leave well enough alone.”

  “I have a question,” Ortega said. “If the cuttlewhales were formed at a pressure of a thousand atmospheres, why don’t they explode on the surface? You know, like deep-sea fish brought up from extreme depths?”

  “Actually, sir, the ones we encountered on the surface were beginning to degrade,” I told him. “I don’t think they can survive very long at surface temperatures and pressures. But those fish you mention explode because gas in their swim bladders expands as they’re brought to the surface—expands a lot. I think the cuttlewhales must have some sort of internal mechanism that keeps their internal pressure balanced with what’s outside. We know they have a gullet . . . but that might close completely at high pressure. And we don’t know what they use for a heart. Not a conventional pump like ours, certainly. They’re too big. They may rely on seawater diffusing throughout their bodies.”

  “Solid-state bodies, then,” Ortega mused.

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “Robots,” Hancock said.

  “At the surface, or in warm temperatures,” I went on, “Ice VII starts to . . . unravel is the best word I can think of. It requires high pressure to keep the ice crystals in that configuration, with the interpenetrating lattices . . . but when the pressure goes away, it doesn’t explode. It just kind of oozes into the new state.”

  “The question remains,” Walthers said, “as to whether any of this helps us at all. Can we even hope to talk to these things? Or to . . . to their manufacturers?”

  “A suggestion, sir?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The cuttlewhales are . . . electrical in nature. So are we, of course, but not in the same way. Humans generate what is essentially weak electrical currents through chemistry—through exchanges of positive or negative ions at neural synapses or in muscle fibers, for instance. That’s what we’re reading with an EEG or an EKG.

  “But cuttlewhales seem to work because of actual electrical currents—moving electrons—throughout their bodies. I don’t know how that would work, but the ferroelectric effect of the Ice IX strands would support a fairly high voltage.”

  “Great,” Hancock said. “Not only can they crush us, they can electrocute us! Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Probably not that much voltage, Gunny. But enough to create a pretty strong electrical field in the water. Especially in saltwater. I haven’t analyzed it yet, but I suspect that Abyssworld’s ocean is pretty salty.”

  Salts, I thought, would be spewed into that ocean through volcanic vents. The minerals I’d detected inside the cuttlewhale sample—the sulfur and all the rest—proved that there were a lot of other elements in the ocean, even though there was so much of it.

  “What’s your point, Carlyle?” Walthers asked.

  “Our most important senses,” I replied, “are vision and hearing, okay? Cuttlewhales live in absolute darkness. They probably rely on sound—I like your idea about them being attracted by the sonar pulses, by the way, sir—but they might also rely on the electrical sense.”

  “Electrical sense?” Walthers asked. “What’s that?”

  “Some animals on Earth can sense electrical fields,” Ortega explained. “Or they can passively sense other animals moving through them. Electric eels can do this, for instance. Sharks and rays. Certain dolphins. Even a funny little animal called the platypus. It’s called electroreception, and it’s as important to those animals as any of our senses are to us.”

  “If cuttlewhales can detect electrical fields,” I added, “maybe that’s how they communicate. Not by sound . . . or not entirely, but by modulating electrical signals in the water.”

  “That,” Montgomery said with feeling, “is brilliant!”

  “I wonder if Selby and his people on Europa have thought of that,” Ortega said. He laughed. “You need to write that up in a paper, Carlyle. Publish it in the Journal of Exobiology. I think you’re onto something big here. . . .”

  “Well, we need to detect those signals first,” I said. The sudden burst of attention from the two scientists was a bit embarrassing.

  “Easy enough to do,” Ortega said. “We have a submarine . . . a means of approaching a cuttlewhale in its own environment.”

  “Dr. Ortega, you have got to be crazy!” Walthers exclaimed. “You saw what they did on the surface. . . .”

  “Our entire reason for making this journey,” Ortega said, “was threefold. We were to look for Sub-zero survivors, to rescue them if necessary, and we were to attempt communication with any intelligent Abyssworld inhabitants. At this point, I submit, we are still oh for three. Young Carlyle, here, has shown us a means of improving our score.”

  “It seems unlikely at this point that we will find survivors from the base,” Walthers pointed out. “And I have the safety of the ship and passengers to consider.”

  “Ortega’s right,” Garner’s voice said over the electronic link. “I thought Marines were supposed to fight . . . not turn tail and run!”

  “I object to that, Chief,” Kemmerer said. “We are here to provide security for the operation, not involve ourselves in pointless bloodshed.”

  “ ‘Visit exotic, distant worlds,’ ” Garner said, “ ‘meet strange, alien life forms . . .’ ” He laughed, a chilling sound.

  Visit exotic, distant worlds, meet strange alien life forms, and kill them. . . .

  I decided that the chief’s arm was hurting him. It was a joke dating back in a slightly different form to pre-spaceflight days. It did an injustice to the Corps, I thought, maintaining the ancient and vicious fiction that Marines were only interested in killing.

  It’s true that they are very, very good at killing, certainly. But anothe
r ancient adage referring to the Marines holds that while there are no worse enemies, there are no better friends.

  “Lieutenant Kemmerer?” Walthers said. “What do you think about returning to the surface? Or trying to contact cuttlewhales?”

  She shrugged. “The Marines will go where you send us, Captain,” she said. She emphasized Walther’s position as ship captain, rather than his rank of lieutenant. Until Summerlee returned to duty, he was the one with the final say. Not the Marines, not the doctors, and not the science and technical staff.

  “D’deen? D’nah?” Walthers called, raising his voice. “You are the closest we have to xenosapient experts on board. What’s your opinion?”

  THE GYKR ARE A ROGUE INTELLIGENCE, D’deen wrote, from a rogue world between the stars. THEY DO NOT FOLLOW . . . YOU WOULD CALL THEM . . . THE RULES. THEY MAY HAVE THEIR OWN MOTIVES FOR ATTEMPTING CONTACT WITH THE NATIVE ABYSSAL LIFE. WE SUBMIT THAT YOU MAY WISH TO ESTABLISH SUCH CONTACT FIRST.

  “I’m more concerned about the Gykr as a military force,” Walthers said slowly, “than I am about talking with the native life. They will be back. The question is when. What do we do about that?”

  “Not really a major problem, sir,” Garner said. “If we land at a different area . . . build a nanomatrix habitat, then we could keep Haldane in orbit. With nanoflage on the outer surface of the base, the Guckers shouldn’t see us if they do show up . . . and it is a damned big planet. If they show up, Haldane could run for Earth, maybe come back with reinforcements. And we stay on the planet and try to talk to Carlyle’s electric whales.”

  My electric whales.

  But most at the table agreed then, that trying to communicate with the beasts was vitally important. The Gykrs had turned it into a race.

  We would stay.

  And we would try to make contact with the locals.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Haldane touched down once again on the icecap about twelve kilometers from the former site of Murdock Base. We used robotic vehicles to unload about forty tons of rawmat onto the ice and spread it out in a thin layer. Rawmat—raw materials for nanotechnic construction—is a balanced mix of basic elements: iron, aluminum, silicon, copper, gold, carbon, tungsten, and a dozen other elements in powder form to give it the greatest possible surface area. The most critical problem was keeping all of that fine-grained powder from being blown away by the blustery winds gusting out of the west. We managed that by mixing the stuff with water as it came out of the robots’ hoppers. The water froze and nailed the rawmat down in a thin, black carpet over the ice. Nanobots don’t care if their raw materials are loose, or frozen inside solid water.