Abyss Deep: Star Corpsman: Book Two

by Ian Douglas

  “Any progress, AI?” I asked, using my in-head link with the sub.

  “I am not certain that you would call it progress,” the AI replied. “However, we do seem to have found common ground with the cuttlewhales in mathematics, which has led to a further commonality within physics. I am proceeding along lines of inquiry suggested by these aspects of shared worldview.”

  Well, one plus two equals three whether you’re a surface dweller or hundreds of kilometers underwater . . . at least for certain values of three. But how useful is that, really, in a conversation? It’s all well and good to claim that mathematics is the one, true universal language, but how the hell can you take a2 + b2 = c2 and use it to get across the concept of “Good morning,” or, more to the point in this situation perhaps, “Please don’t eat me”?

  Gina was staring at those monstrous shapes hovering outside. “Are they really made of ice, Doc?”

  “They sure are. Turns out you can crystallize water in a lot of different ways. It just takes a lot of pressure . . . and sometimes a lot of cold.”

  “Only sometimes?”

  “Yeah. Ice VI forms at just three below zero, Celsius. But you need 1.1 giga-Pascals of pressure to do it. That’s over ten tons per square centimeter.” I glanced at the dark water outside. “That’s about what we’re experiencing now.”

  “So why isn’t there ice out there now?”

  “Probably too warm. AI? What’s the ambient water temperature?”

  “Outside temperature is at two degrees Celsius.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “See? It’s still too warm. This planet’s ocean gets warmed from two directions. The middle of dayside, at the surface, is close to boiling. And way down deep, a lot of heat must come up from the rocky core, either through volcanic vents, or else heat is generated by radiation emitted by uranium inside the rock. There may be some tide-flexing, too, just like in Europa, as Abyssworld goes around its sun.”

  “How were they surviving up on the ice, then? Without exploding, I mean?”

  I chuckled. “Some of us have already discussed that. They certainly don’t live very long up there. And . . . we’ve been discussing the possibility that they were . . . manufactured somehow. Maybe as probes to explore the surface.”

  “Like machines?”

  “Organic machines.” I thought about the phrase, and amended it. Organic in chemistry meant carbon-based, which the cuttlewhales decidedly were not. “Non-carbon-based organic machines. Damn, we don’t have the right language to describe this. Call them not-life-as-we-know it, and let it go at that. Artificial not-life-as-we-know-it.”

  “Artificial?” Lloyd shivered. “Made by what?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s an awfully big world down here. Plenty of room for all sorts of surprises.”

  “Maybe. It’s an awfully empty world from what I’ve seen so far.”

  “Really?” I looked at the looming monstrosities outside. “Looks kind of crowded to me.”

  She punched me in the arm. “You know what I mean!”

  “Sure. On Earth, you know, the deep oceanic abyss is like a desert. Unless you happen to find a hot oceanic vent on the seafloor—those can have astounding ecologies growing up around them—there’s very little food . . . nothing but a thin drizzle of organics sifting down from the surface and the occasional carcass of a whale or some other sea creature too big to get devoured on the way down. When the Trieste made the first dive to the Challenger Deep, Piccard and Walsh saw a new species of shrimp . . . and what they thought was a small flounder. Scientists are still arguing over whether they saw a fish or a sea cucumber.”

  “Walsh . . . as in the guy our sub is named for?”

  “The same. Lieutenant Don Walsh, U.S. Navy . . . and a Swiss scientist and engineer, Jacques Piccard. They reached the deepest point in Earth’s ocean in January of 1960.”

  “They must have been brave men.”

  “Yeah. Big-time. They made that dive just to prove it could be done. At around nine thousand meters, they heard a loud crack inside their pressure chamber, like a gunshot, but nothing appeared to be wrong so they continued their descent. Turned out a viewing window had cracked, which they didn’t know until they’d been on the bottom for twenty minutes. They . . . ah . . . decided to cut their visit sort at that point. They were that close to being killed.”

  “One hard bump . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  She sat up suddenly, and pointed. “Elliot . . . is that one getting closer?”

  I looked in the indicated direction. One of the monsters was slowly edging closer, approaching us directly from the bow.

  “I think—” I started to say.

  “Out of my way, damn it!” As I stood up, the twin seat dwindled to her single pilot’s chair once again. I stepped behind her and called up my chair, slipping into it.

  “Everybody take your seats!” I called. “We may have to maneuver!”

  Montgomery stared at the approaching mass of tentacles and puckered mouth. “God in heaven . . .”

  I didn’t think God had very much to do with this thing. That mouth was opening, the tentacles spreading wide as six weirdly stalked eyes twisted inward to keep us in sight.

  I again wondered about those eyes. What wavelengths did they see? Were they, in fact, capable of infrared vision? Infrared radiation was absorbed by seawater almost immediately—after a few centimeters, in fact, and IR wouldn’t do the creature that much good.

  But if it saw into the visible spectrum . . . why? If the things had evolved—or been created—down here in these lightless depths, what could possibly explain the fact of eyes that would be blind in all but the top hundred meters or so of the ocean?

  Babbling. I was babbling in my mind, a kind of stream-of-consciousness monologue as I tried to control my rising terror. The mouth was wide open now, and only a few tens of meters distant. With a lurch, the Walsh jerked backward away from that yawning maw, then twisted hard to port, fighting for altitude and speed. Her flanks flared out, creating lift. We were rising, flying through the water and gaining height!

  The pursuing cuttlewhale was now directly astern and below us . . . but so close that I could see eyes and tentacles extending out to all sides, reaching past us . . . enveloping us . . .

  “Give it full throttle!” Hancock ordered.

  “It’s sucking down water!” Lloyd cried. “We’re caught in the current!”

  And then a shadow passed across the Walsh, and things grew very, very dark indeed. . . .

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was a savage jolt, and the interior lights came up. I was expecting to see the interior of the cuttlewhale’s gullet, but the interior surface of its mouth or throat or whatever it was that was enclosing us was pressed so closely around our vessel that no light at all was escaping from the external nano, and no images were being returned. Outside the Walsh, once again, there was nothing to be seen but a complete and utterly impenetrable blackness.

  It had happened so quickly that no one had been able to respond. Ortega gave a low, quavering moan. Montgomery sobbed. Hancock swore.

  “Holy fucking Christ!”

  NOT CHRIST, D’deen wrote. BUT JONAH.

  “What the hell do you guys know about Jonah?” I asked.

  HE IS A CHARACTER, AS WELL AS THE NAME OF A BOOK, WITHIN THE COLLECTION YOU CALL THE BIBLE, the M’nangat said. A STORY SPEAKING OF THE NECESSITY OF OBEYING GOD’S WILL, AND POSSIBLY, TOO, ACCORDING TO LATER WRITINGS, IT IS AN ALLEGORY FOR A MESSIAH WHO RISES FROM THE DEAD AFTER THREE DAYS.

  “No, I mean how do you know about all of that?”

  HUMAN RELIGION DEFINES THE PSYCHOLOGY OF YOUR SPECIES, ELLIOT. HOW COULD WE HOPE TO LEARN ABOUT HUMANKIND WITHOUT CLOSELY STUDYING YOUR MYRIAD RELIGIOUS BELIEFS?

  That brought me up short. Human religion isn’t exactly something that might inspire confidence in an extraterrestrial observer. Thousands of years of wars, murders, massacres, torture, persecutions, forced conversions, witch hu
nts, even the doctrine of hell itself, promising torture throughout all eternity for any who did not believe . . . and all in the name of a loving God Who wants the very best for His people. Surely there was a better representative of Humanity than our religion?

  “Not . . . not everyone believes all that stuff,” I said. I hadn’t meant it to be so defensive, but that was what it sounded like to my ears.

  OF COURSE NOT. IT IS THE VERY DIVERSITY OF HUMAN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND BELIEF THAT MAKES YOUR SPECIES SO INTERESTING.

  Great. Fucking great. They were studying us because our religious tendencies were interesting.

  “None of that helps us at the moment,” Hancock said. “Lloyd . . . can you goose the sub a bit? Move us? Maybe we can give our friend out there a case of indigestion.”

  “I’ve tried, Gunny,” she said. She shook her head. “We’re being held in a non-fluid medium with a pressure exceeding forty tons per square centimeter. Trust me . . . we’re not going anywhere!”

  “Except where it wants to take us,” Montgomery said. “The deck is tilting. I think we’re going—”

  She shrieked, and Hancock swore again. The deck had suddenly tilted toward the bow until we were hanging in our seats, facing almost directly down. I could feel that stomach-twisting lightness again, too, stronger now, the feeling of a very rapid descent.

  “Is the pressure increasing?” I asked.

  Lloyd nodded. “Going up at a steady rate. We must be just past the five-hundred-kilometer mark now.”

  Hanging like that was hideously uncomfortable, with the safety arm of the seat across my stomach tightly enough that I was having trouble breathing. I toyed with the idea of reprogramming the nanomatrix to rotate my seat 180 degrees, but decided to see if I could tough it out. If the sub changed attitude again while I was trying to scramble from one configuration to another, I might end up slamming into a bulkhead.

  And then the deck began to level off again, though we were still going down at a steep angle.

  “God,” Hancock said. “Is the damned thing deliberately taking us somewhere? Or is it just looking for a quiet place to digest us?”

  “If it is,” I said, “it’s taking us down deep.” I was linked in with the AI, watching the pressure readings increase. Six hundred kilometers . . .

  The cuttlewhale was moving at an astonishing speed. It had just dived an additional hundred kilometers in something just under ten minutes . . . which worked out to six hundred kilometers per hour. I’d never heard of anything traveling at that kind of speed underwater.

  And still we were going down.

  I think all of us had our ears cocked for the warning creak or pop that might tell us that our CM hull was about to fail. I was afraid, sure . . . but the earlier, babbling panic I’d felt was gone. I think that was because some part of my brain knew and accepted the fact that no matter what happened in the next few moments, it was completely out of my control.

  Not only that, but the cuttlewhales had been attempting to communicate! Gods, but that was big! That alone suggested that they were intelligent, at least on some level, and, perhaps most important, they were not acting randomly, but according to some sort of plan. The cuttlewhale that had swallowed us could have crushed us—I was sure of that, even with our CM hull—but it had not. Instead, it was carrying us into the deeps.

  Carrying us down, perhaps, to meet its maker.

  The thought struck me funny, enough to make me chuckle out loud.

  “Enjoying yourself, Doc?” Hancock asked. He didn’t sound amused.

  “Sorry, Gunny,” I said. “I just realized we were being taken to meet whatever it was that created the cuttlewhales. Their God . . .”

  “Do you seriously think these things were manufactured?” Ortega asked.

  “It’s the only hypothesis that makes sense,” I replied. “Otherwise . . . why do they have eyes?”

  “Maybe down where they evolved, most life forms make their own light,” Montgomery suggested. “Like in Europa.”

  “Or maybe they feed at the surface,” Ortega added. “Or they evolved at the surface, and gradually migrated to the deeps.”

  “Maybe.” But I wasn’t at all convinced. I didn’t bother arguing the point, though, because I was willing to bet that, in a short time—a few hours at most—we would learn the truth firsthand.

  “Well I think Doc’s right,” Lloyd insisted. “Why else would they be taking us this deep?” She hesitated. “Past the seven-hundred-kilometer mark, now.”

  “They’re alien,” Ortega said. “Damn it, they’re going to do inexplicable things!”

  I remembered my conversation with Wiseman . . . and with others. There would still be, I was certain, points of common rationality even between species as mutually alien as humans and cuttlewhales. There had to be. Hunger . . . a need to reproduce . . . curiosity. . . . We must share some things in common, even when we live in worlds as far apart as the surface of Earth and the Abyssworld deeps.

  I was well aware that I was grasping at a rather slender hope. If cuttlewhales were created, maybe they didn’t have reproductive urges. Maybe they didn’t feel anything like hunger or curiosity if they were designed as tools and manufactured for a specific purpose. Maybe . . .

  I could speculate about it all day, I knew, and never get anywhere. All I could say with any certainty was that we were getting closer to an answer, one way or another, with every passing minute, with every passing kilometer.

  Eight hundred kilometers.

  We were aware now of a gentle rocking motion from side to side . . . as if the titanic beast enclosing us was weaving slightly back and forth, propelling itself with vast and powerful sinuous weavings of its body. The speed had picked up too. We no longer were going straight down . . . but we were descending now at a rate of about 120 kilometers per hour. The outside pressure continued to increase. I forced myself not to think about that; Walsh’s designers had been confident enough that the little submersible could go considerably deeper than this.

  I did hope that those engineers hadn’t dropped a decimal or two along the way, though.

  Nine hundred kilometers.

  Would cuttlewhale motives be any harder to understand than, say, human religious belief? If we got out of this, I was determined to have a talk with D’deen or the other M’nangat. What did they really think of us and our—what had the Broc called it?—our interesting religious thought and belief.

  And what did I believe? That I would be physically reborn some day, in a new life, like my parents had taught me? Or did life simply . . . end?

  Well, if it was the latter, I would never know anything. If the former—

  Static crashed and howled inside my head.

  I screamed, my hands going up to my ears. Dimly, I saw the others making the same, instinctive protective gesture, clapping their hands over their ears as their faces contorted. Then the static spread from my in-head windows to my normal vision. For a terrifying moment, I was blind and deaf, assaulted by the raw shriek of white noise at way too high a volume.

  The pain grew worse . . . and I thought I saw something on my in-head.

  At first I couldn’t tell what it was, what I was seeing. It looked like . . . a planet? A smooth, featureless white sphere against the blackness of space?

  I only had a glimpse of the thing, whatever it was . . . and then the static was gone.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Ortega gasped. “What the fuck was that?”

  “A hack,” Hancock said, still rubbing his ears. “Something just hacked our in-heads! God knows how!”

  Gina Lloyd was unconscious. I released myself from my chair, leaning against the back of her seat in order to reach around and check the pulse at her throat. It was running at about eighty, strong and a bit fast. I patted her cheek. “Gina! Gina! Snap out of it!”

  Her eyes opened. “Gods!” she said. “What happened?”

  “I think something tapped into our in-head circuitry. I don’t know how.”

&
nbsp; “That’s not supposed to be possible!” Montgomery said. “Shit! D’deen is out too!”

  Lloyd seemed to be okay, if a bit shaken. I left her and pulled my way up across the steeply slanted deck to reach D’deen’s bucket. I tried using my in-head to reach him, but I couldn’t pick up anything. “D’deen? D’deen! Are you okay? Write something to me!”

  No response. The M’nangat’s skin felt clammy and cold . . . but they were always a bit on the chilly side, despite having a body temperature only a degree or so lower than human. The thick, outer integument tended to insulate their body, and felt cool to the touch. The clamminess might just be from the high humidity inside the Walsh. The boat’s environmental controls appeared to be having some trouble catching up with the moisture from our breathing after having been shut down for a while.

  The truth was, I just didn’t know enough about Broc physiology to tell what might be wrong. The data Net running inside the Walsh had only the bare-bones essentials; I would need a link with Ludwig and the full medical AI complement on board Haldane before I could even make some decent guesses.

  “Leave it, Doc,” Hancock told me. “We have other things to worry about right now.”

  “At least let me know he’s stable,” I replied. I took out my N-prog and an injector, shooting a dose of medical nanobots into D’deen’s system. Moments later, I could see something of the Broc’s internal functions—both hearts beating steadily in a back-and-forth rhythm, circulatory fluid circulating . . . everything looked fine. I ordered my fleet of ’bots to highlight D’deen’s brain. The problem we’d experienced, all of us, had been a sudden burst of energy going through our cerebral prosthesis, the nano-chelated electronics grown inside our brains.

  I could see the artificial structures inside D’deen’s brain now . . . a complex web of bright metal threads, like a spider’s web, running through the equivalent of the M’nangat’s cerebral cortex. I magnified the image as much as I could, until my in-head was actually showing me strands of what looked like gold rope stretched across masses of living cells, with sub-micron filaments actually connecting the rope with the branching dendrites of alien neurons.