by Ian Douglas
Under Gina Lloyd’s skillful guidance, the Walsh twisted around sharply, killing our forward momentum against the water, then nosing over on our side into another dive. Shit! Lloyd was turning into the attacker.
“What the hell are you doing, pilot?” Ortega screamed. “You’re going toward them!”
Lloyd didn’t answer. From the seat behind hers, I could see her head turning to face the Guck vehicle, her eyes closed as she focused on her electronic in-head feed. Walsh continued her turn, her flanks folding back up as we picked up velocity once more, and now we were adding our speed to that of the oncoming, climbing Gykr submarine.
“Additional sonar contacts approaching,” the AI reported. “Six targets, various bearings, to all sides, closing slowly.”
I glanced up and saw several widely spaced targets, white stars scattered across our black sky, but I had no idea what they might be.
And there was no time to worry about them at the moment. The Guck sub was climbing to meet us. For a horrified moment, I thought we were going to collide bow-to-bow, but Lloyd swerved at the last moment, rolling to port as the enemy passed to starboard. The shock of their wake smashed against our hull, and this time we did roll through a complete and stomach-wrenching three-sixty. An alarm shrilled, and my hands clenched at my seat’s rests.
“Kill that noise!” Hancock ordered.
“Aye, aye, Gunny,” Lloyd replied, and the racket ceased.
“What was that?” Montgomery wanted to know.
“Hull stress warning,” Lloyd said.
How much, I wondered, could the compressed-matter hull take? It could handle incredible pressure, yes, but it was possible that a hard enough shock could crack it. If that happened, at a ton per square centimeter, we literally would never know what hit us. Walsh’s interior spaces would flood in an instant, or else the hull itself would collapse under millions of tons of pressure, an implosion completed so quickly that our nerves simply would not have time to react.
“Damn it, woman!” Ortega snapped at Lloyd, “you’re going to kill us!”
“Leave her alone, Doctor,” Hancock told him. “She knows what she’s doing.”
“Ten additional sonar targets,” our AI announced, “various bearings and ranges, closing slowly.”
More stars were gathering around us in the black distance. The nearest, I saw, appeared to be long and slender . . . cuttlewhales, almost certainly. Our combat with the Gykr sub appeared to have attracted an audience.
Again, the Gykr boat approached from astern, following our wake as we hurtled almost vertically into greater and yet greater depths. I linked in with the AI through my in-head, intending to learn about the expected crush depth for the Walsh, and found that the channel was already occupied. Walsh’s AI was a micro version of the far more complex and advanced artificial intelligences on the Haldane, and evidently it couldn’t handle more than one or, possibly, a very few conversations with humans at the same time. I was able to catch a bit on the fringes of the exchange; Lloyd was interrogating the system on the same topic about which I wanted to know . . . just how much stress can the vessel’s hull take?
I couldn’t hear the answer, if there was one.
“Sonar target Sierra One bearing directly astern,” the AI announced over the public channel, “range five hundred meters, closing at ninety kilometers per hour.”
Slower! Had we hurt them with that last pass? Or were they just moving a little more cautiously now? I turned in my seat, looking aft . . . but the aft bulkhead wasn’t set to show us our surroundings. I could see D’deen in his bucket-seat, apparently unperturbed by the danger . . . though how the hell could you read the emotional state of a two-meter stalk of broccoli? The rest of us were feeling very human emotions at the moment . . . terror chief among them. I found myself bracing internally against the collapse of the surrounding bulkheads, even though I knew that if they failed, I would neither feel it nor be able to hold them back as they snapped shut on extremely frail flesh and bone.
“Where are they?” Ortega demanded. “Where are they . . . ?”
“Coming down on us from directly astern,” Lloyd told him. “I think they want to nudge us with a kick in the ass.”
Made sense. If they could put us into a tumble, we’d be helpless until we could regain control.
“Sierra One closing directly astern at eighty kph,” the AI said, “range two hundred meters.”
Seconds dragged past . . . and then without warning, Walsh slewed violently to starboard. At almost the same instant, the Gykr submarine appeared directly to port, only a few meters from our hull. The turbulence of the mingling wakes set up a hellish vibration that rattled our teeth, the roar filling the cabin with rushing, pounding thunder.
Just as abruptly, Walsh slewed back to port, turning sharply and slamming nose-first into the Gykr hull.
The impact slammed me forward against my seat restraint and for a terrifying moment the interior lights winked out. That alarm was shrieking again, and when the lights came back on they were dimmer than before. The viewall projections, however, didn’t come up again. We were surrounded by the blank, gray, curving bulkheads of the cabin.
Lloyd killed the alarm, and the silence was as profound as the chaotic roar a moment before. The vibration was gone . . . as was any sensation of movement. I reached for the AI through my link and heard only silence.
“The AI is dead!” Ortega yelled.
“So’s the boat,” Lloyd said. “Power tap is down, drive down, life support . . . shit. Life support and environmental systems down too.”
I could feel her helpless despair.
“Yeah, but I don’t hear the other guy either,” I pointed out. “Maybe you got him, Gina.”
We all listened to the silence for a long moment. The whine of the other vessel’s high-speed passage through the water, a sound we’d heard clearly while it was still almost half a kilometer away, was blessedly absent.
“And our hull’s still intact,” Hancock said, looking up at the overhead.
“It . . . it feels like we’re sinking, though,” Montgomery said. “Do you feel it?”
I thought I could feel what she meant, a drifting, sinking sensation. It was tough to tell; Abyssworld’s gravity, nine-tenth’s of Earth’s, might be fooling us, but it did feel like we were descending, more or less on an even keel, but with a slight rocking motion from side to side.
“I’m sorry, guys,” Lloyd said. “I . . . I thought that might be our only chance. . . .”
“You did absolutely right,” Hancock told her. “That bastard was bound and determined to smash us. And he might have succeeded if he’d hit us a time or two more.”
“We don’t know she got him,” Ortega said. He was staring at the overhead as well, as if he could penetrate the CM hull with the sheer intensity of his gaze.
“I’ll take the silence as a vote of confidence,” Montgomery said. “I don’t hear anything. . . .”
“No.”
“Including the air,” Montgomery added. “How long can we last without air?”
“Lots of time,” Hancock told her. “Hours . . . Doc?”
I nodded. “Our problem will be the build-up of carbon dioxide. If we stay calm, we should have two or three hours before the air gets unpleasantly stale.”
But that was a WAG—a wild-assed guess. The air already felt uncomfortably close, though that could have been my anxiety speaking . . . and possibly the stink of fear as well. I was certainly more aware of the smell of human sweat, and there was an odd, cinnamon-like aroma as well that might have been D’deen.
There was another, stronger odor as well. “Is . . . is the washroom working?” Ortega asked.
“Nothing is working,” Lloyd told him. “Nothing except for the emergency lights.”
“You’ll have to hold it, Doctor.”
Ortega scowled. “Too late . . .”
“Oh, shit,” Hancock said, chuckling.
Ortega refused to rise to the bait. “S
o what the hell do we do now?” he asked.
“What we’re doing, Doctor,” Lloyd told him. “Be patient. I’m trying to restart the AI now.”
“But if the power is out,” Montgomery said. “How? . . .”
“The AI can run off just a trickle of power, ma’am,” I said. “At least part of it can . . . enough to bootstrap the other systems back on-line. It doesn’t take much. . . .”
And a few seconds later, we all felt an internal click and rising hum as Walsh’s AI came back on-line. “Rebooting,” its voice announced. Then, “Systems check . . . restoring from cache in safe mode . . . initiating damage control functions. . . .”
Static hissed across our internal windows, then cleared. . . . IS HAPPENING? appeared on my in-head. D’deen, evidently, had been silenced by the AI’s temporary downtime.
I glanced back at the M’nangat, which appeared agitated, the tips of its tentacles flickering rapidly along the edge of its bucket and turning bright lime-green. “It’s okay, D’deen,” I told it. “We lost power in the collision, but we’re working to restore it.”
THANK YOU. I WAS CONCERNED.
“So were we all,” Hancock said, but he grinned. “With the AI working again, we’ll have full repairs under way in no time.”
“Damage report,” the AI said, implacable and calm. “Power tap nonfunctioning. Magnetic drive nonfunctioning. Life support—”
“Damn it, we know!” Lloyd snapped. She sounded close to breaking. “Tell us something we don’t know . . . like maybe some good news for a change!”
“Request task hierarchy for power allocation.”
“Life support,” Hancock said. “That’s first.”
“Routing all available internal nanobots to life-support functions.”
The interior of Walsh’s cabin was coated with engineering-grade nanobots, including the ones that had grown our couches out of the deck matrix, and they would be swarming now through our life-support units beneath our feet, trying to bring them back on-line. They drew their motive power from the emergency batteries that were running our lights, now, and took their orders directly from the AI.
“Quantum power tap distributor node identified as source of electrical failure,” the AI told us. “Rerouting eighty percent of available internal nanobots to quantum power tap distribution systems.”
Most vehicles nowadays use quantum power taps—paired sub-microscopic artificial singularities orbiting one another—to pull energy from the seething foam of virtual particles appearing and vanishing at the so-called base-state of reality. If the power tap had broken down, we would have been well and totally screwed, since repairs generally meant a long stretch in spacedock for starships, and an expensive replacement unit for vehicles of Walsh’s size. Our AI had identified our problem, however, as a fault within the bundle of wires transmitting that energy to all of the vessel’s systems, not in the power plant itself. The violence of the impact, apparently, had jarred something loose.
“How long to effect repairs?” Lloyd asked it.
“One moment . . . one moment . . . current time to completion estimated at twenty-three minutes.”
That seemed like a hell of a long time, but it did take longer to nanotechnically repair gross structures like wiring, fiber-optic cable, and power-shunt transmitters than it did to call forth programmed shapes from a prepared nanomatrix.
“Twenty-three minutes!” Montgomery said.
“We should be okay for that long,” Hancock reassured her. He didn’t sound completely certain, however. Privately, I wondered if he was more concerned about CO2 levels in the compartment, or the fetid odor that seemed to be growing steadily stronger.
And we, meanwhile, continued to sink.
“Power distribution node repairs complete,” the AI said after what seemed like forever. “Testing. . . . Test satisfactory. Restoring power to all systems in sequence. . . .”
In fact, according to my in-head, only eleven minutes had passed. The lighting came up to full, and we heard again the gentle hiss of fresh air coming up through the deck. I could also feel my in-head link with the AI being fully restored, and that was a hell of a relief. I’m not as bad as some people are when it comes to losing their cybernetic connections to the local Net, but I certainly didn’t like it. I felt helpless, cut off, and vulnerable.
“Is the damned bathroom working yet?” Ortega demanded.
“Affirmative.”
“Excuse me.” His seat released him and he got up and made his way aft. The close, foul stench filling the small compartment was already clearing rapidly.
“Through-hull connectivity restored,” the AI said. “Hull matrix control systems, lighting, sonar, and imaging systems have been restored but not engaged. Awaiting pilot command.”
“No outside lights yet!” Hancock said, his voice sharp. “Let’s have a look around first.”
If the Gykr were still out there, alive and kicking, we didn’t want them to know that we were alive as well. At least, not yet.
“Good idea, Gunny,” Lloyd said. The bulkheads and overhead switched over to black.
Completely black. I’d forgotten just how dark it was down here. We appeared to be alone in a lightless void.
Gunny stared into the blackness a moment, as though trying to see what lay out there. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “I don’t like it . . . but let’s bring the outside lights up. Slowly. Don’t switch them on full yet.”
“Aye, aye, Gunny.”
Our outer hull began to glow, the light very gradually intensifying. . . .
And then we saw the Gykr submarine.
“My God,” Montgomery said. “They were disabled by the collision too!”
The Gykr vessel was a little longer than we were—perhaps twenty-five meters stem to stern—but slightly bulkier and more egg-shaped. The surface, dimly reflecting our light, had the matte-gray finish of compressed matter, and seemed partially lost in shadow.
Well, it would have to be a CM hull, wouldn’t it? “How deep are we, Gina?” I asked.
“Two hundred ninety kilometers,” she replied.
The figure startled me. We must have been diving at quite a clip during the battle, to have gotten this deep in this short a time.“The pressure on our hull,” she went on, “is roughly twenty-seven tons per square centimeter.”
I looked again at the Gykr sub. It was hanging more or less motionless in relationship to us. I noticed that there were some small fragments drifting in a thin, glittering cloud around it. Not paint, certainly. Tiny flecks of outer CM hull?
I also noticed that the Gykr vessel was not on an even keel. The broad end of the egg shape was hanging lower than the other, at an angle of more than forty-five degrees.
“Are we moving?” I asked.
“We’re descending at approximately five meters per second.”
So that uneasy, queasy feeling of descending in the pit of my stomach wasn’t due to the planet’s lower gravity after all.
“The thing is,” Hancock said after a long moment of watching the thing, “what if they’re busy getting their systems back on-line too?”
IF SO, D’deen wrote, WE MAY HAVE BUT SCANT MOMENTS BEFORE THAT VESSEL WAKES UP AND ATTACKS US AGAIN.
“Lloyd?” Hancock said. “Can you ram them again? Maybe one more good nudge would do it.”
“Gunny!” she cried. “I can’t do that!”
“Do I have to make it an order?”
“But if they’re crippled, that would be like murder!”
THE GYKR, D’deen said, WOULD NOT HESITATE TO DESTROY US.
“I don’t like it either, Lloyd,” Hancock said. “But it’s them or us.”
“Well there’s nothing I can do about it just yet anyway,” she told him. “We still don’t have maneuvering or power to the mag drive.”
“When we do,” Hancock told her, “I’m going to want you to hit them as hard as you can . . . at least, as hard as you can without sinking us as well.”
“Wha
t’s this about the Gykr destroying us?” Ortega said. He’d just stepped naked from the washroom. “Uh . . . where? . . .”
“Fresh uniforms in the aft stowage locker,” Hancock told him. “By the galley.”
“Thanks.” He opened a storage compartment, removed a utilities egg, and slapped it against his bare chest. The material activated, running out in a thin, opaque film across his body, growing him a new set of skintight shipboard utilities in a few seconds. “That feels better!”
“Smells better, too, Raúl,” Montgomery told him with a twinkle.
“Yes, well, I’m sorry about that. My God . . . is that the Guck submarine?”
“It is, Doctor,” Hancock told him. “Apparently they were damaged at least as badly as we.”
“They could be playing possum,” Montgomery pointed out, “just like us.”
“How about it, D’deen?” Hancock asked the Broc in the rear. “We don’t know a lot about Guck psychology. Are they that sneaky?”
I FEAR WE KNOW LITTLE ABOUT GYKR PSYCHOLOGY, GUNNERY SERGEANT, D’deen replied. WHAT LITTLE WE DO KNOW SUGGESTS THAT THEY WOULD ATTACK AUTOMATICALLY AS SOON AS THEY WERE PHYSICALLY CAPABLE OF DOING SO.
“Fight or fight,” I added, nodding.
THEY APPEAR TO EXHIBIT A COLONY-TYPE RESPONSE TO EXTERNAL THREATS. THE INDIVIDUAL MATTERS NOT AT ALL. WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO THEM IS THE SECURITY OF THE ENTIRE COLONY.
“Ants,” Montgomery said. “Or termites. A hive mind, maybe?”
“Not according to the EG,” Ortega told her, using a towel to wipe down his seat thoroughly, then sitting down once more. “It’s more complex than that.”
“So what do we know about them as part of the Collective?” Montgomery asked. “D’deen?”
She was referring to the R’agch’lgh Collective, the interstellar empire that had been losing its grip on this part of the Galaxy for the past few tens of thousands of years.
