Abyss Deep (18 page)

“Ship's coming in,” Hancock warned.

I wiggled back out of the narrow tunnel, blinking in the glare of sunlight that was as dim and red as a sunset on Earth, but which seemed bright after the infrared dimness of the strider's interior. Hancock and Masserotti gaped at me; the arms of my suit were coated in blood.

“She's in bad shape,” I told them. “The bastards tried to cut her out of her armor, and didn't do a very neat job of it. If we can get her into an S-­tube, though, she has a chance.”

“Good job, Doc,” Hancock said.

“Don't congratulate me until we know she's going to make it,” I said. The words came out more harshly than I'd intended, but I was bitter and mad. I was also frustrated to the point of screaming. Outside of a few supportive things, there was nothing I could
do
for her. Gods, how long was it going to take to get the stabilizer canister here?

I could see the
Haldane
in the distance, slowly drifting our way. It appeared to be engaged in a running battle, however, its weapons turrets laying down a heavy fire across the distant ice. Research vessels like the
Haldane
were not heavily armed, but they did have weapons—­a ­couple of side-­mounted plasma cannon turrets, and a good thing, too. There was at least one other Guck strider, I remembered, as well as a number of ground troops still out there.

Burn them
, I thought with a white-­hot anger.
Burn them all!

Two small, black delta shapes circled, dipped, and swooped around the larger research vessel—­Marine A/S-40 Star Raiders that had been mounted on the ship's hull aft of the TMAs. I didn't know if there were any Marine pilots in the contingent on board
Haldane
, and it was possible that those two were operating under AI control. It was comforting, though, to know they were up there.

After a few more moments, the
Haldane
drifted closer, lowering its bulk gently onto the ice. A ramp came down, and more Marines emerged. Two of them double-­timed it toward the downed strider, lugging an S-­tube between them. I had to go back inside the alien machine and use my plasma cutter to get Kari out from under the body of one alien and, yeah, I took a certain amount of vicious pleasure doing that. Then, as carefully as I could, I pulled her body back out through the hatch and lowered it to the ice.

“My God,” one of the Marines said as he positioned the S-­tube next to her. “What happened to him?”

“
Her
,” I said, correcting him. I didn't bother answering his question. With the open part of her armor filled with solidified foam packing, she didn't look as gruesome as she had a moment ago, but there was still a hell of a lot of blood on her armor. Gently, I scooped her up and laid her in the open tube. Later, we would need to open it up and remove the armor and her utilities, make some tube insertions, and package her up once more, but I wasn't going to do that out here.

The two Marines picked up the tube and started back toward the
Haldane
. I followed alongside, keeping track of Kari's blood pressure and respirocyte function.

I'd been so busy for the past half hour that I'd scarcely taken note of my surroundings. The surface of GJ 1214 I looked identical to the ice cap growing over Earth's northern Atlantic, between New England and Greenland. The sky overhead was a deep violet and clear, save for isolated clouds scudding past at a fairly high rate of speed. In the west, the bloated red sun was only just visible through and above a pall of violet and orange mist. I'd expected to see the edge of the permanent storm from here, but decided that the thunderheads must be below the horizon. I could certainly feel the effects, however, in the savage wind blowing in off the dayside ocean. We had to lean into the teeth of the wind to make any progress at all. I estimated that it was blowing a full gale, with surface winds of sixty or seventy kilometers per hour. We struggled into the lee of the grounded
Haldane
and the going became easier. We made it up the ship's ramp and headed straight for sick bay.

Kirchner was there. “
You
,” he said, and I couldn't tell if the emotion behind that single word was anger or disdain.

“HM2 Harris is in a bad way, sir,” I told him.

I'd spent a fair part of the outbound voyage wondering if Kirchner was any good as a doctor.

Now I was praying that he was.

T
he second strider had been destroyed by the two Marine Star Raiders, but most of the remaining Gucks had escaped . . . into a submersible, if Dubois was to be believed.

“C'mon, Doob,” I said, shortly after I'd delivered Kari to Dr. Kirchner. We were in the mess hall. “Pull the other one. A fucking
submarine
?”

“That's what it looked like,” he told me. “A small one, maybe twenty-­five meters long, fifteen wide. Kind of egg-­shaped, like that ship of theirs we scared off. It surfaced right through the ice, close to the edge of the water, where the ice was real thin, and the Guckers just swarmed on in.”

“How many?”

“Ten or twelve. Must've been damned crowded on the sub.”

“That's also only about half of what we saw coming in. The others must have scattered across the ice.”
That
was going to be a nasty security problem while we were here.

“I understand the skipper has robots out on patrol, looking for stragglers. If they're out there, we'll find them.”

“We'd fucking better.” I was feeling grim, angry, and vindictive as hell. What had the Gucks done to the research scientists at the base . . . dissected them? Hell, what had they done to the
base
? Except for those few outlying storage sheds we'd seen from the air, not a trace was left of the main dome beyond a hundred-­meter circular patch of very thin, recently refrozen ice.

But then I began wondering . . . a submarine? What were the Gucks looking for under the water, anyway?

We know so damned little about them. We assume they're from a sunless rogue planet, and that suggests they prefer darkness. Their homeworld might be an ice-­covered abyss, like Europa or Abyssworld itself, but we're not sure.

I opened a mental channel to Chief Garner. “Hey, Chief?”

“What's up, E-­Car?”

“There are a ­couple of Guck bodies outside. It occurs to me that if we do a post, it might answer some questions about what they are, what they want.”

“Way ahead of you, son. We brought in a ­couple of bodies thirty minutes ago. You want in on the p.m.?”

“Absolutely, if you can get the authorization for me. Otherwise, I'd like to be present VR.” Normally, a post mortem—­an autopsy—­would be performed by a doctor, ideally by a ­pathologist, but we didn't have one of those available closer than forty-­two light years at the moment. If Kirchner was going to do the post, he might not want to have me on hand.

But if that was a problem, I should be able to look over the doctor's shoulder, as it were, by linking in through virtual reality—­VR—­and watching the procedure in three-­D realtime.

“Not a problem,” Garner told me. “The doctor's already delegated it to me. You can assist.”

“Excellent! Thanks, Chief!”

While a doctor would normally wield the scalpel in a post mortem, it was not unknown for the task to be delegated to competent personnel, especially when the procedure could be overseen and guided by an expert system AI.

I was really looking forward to this.

The dissection took place in the OR suite, which was a small complex of compartments opening up off the sick bay. The morgue was there in an adjoining compartment, which incuded storage for S-­tubes, and I was painfully aware that Kari was behind one of those cold, circular hatches in the bulkhead. Chief Garner was there getting set up when I entered, already wearing a biocontainment suit and helmet. On the big steel table lay a Guck, still wrapped up inside its armor. The precisely placed hole at one of the joints over the torso suggested that it might have been the one Gunny Hancock nailed, but I couldn't be sure. Our AIs would have been guiding the sighting pictures for all of the Marines.

I picked up a biosuit pack and slapped it against my chest, activating the nanomatrix, which flowed out over my body, covering everything except my head. A filtration system went on my back rather than a standard life-­support system, and a goldfish bowl sealed with the suit when I settled it over my head. The chances of an alien life form—­especially one as alien as a Gykr—­carrying biological agents that could harm us was vanishingly small, but we would take no chances. The opening in the alien's armor, I saw, had already been plugged with a sterile sealant so that the being could be brought inside. In addition, the temperature inside the morgue had been dropped to about 5ºC, low enough to inhibit most microorganisms, and the entire OR and morgue areas were sealed off to protect the rest of the ship.

“Ready, E-­Car?” Garner asked.

I nodded inside my helmet, and we began.

The dissection took three hours . . . and at that it was a quick-­and-­dirty one, something to give us a rough overview of Gykr physiology, not a detailed anatomical study. We were hampered by not knowing what we were doing
or
what we were looking at. We'd seen living Gykrs at Tanis, and there might have been a gross examination of some bodies, but I wasn't aware of any formal studies or dissections. We recorded this one, of course, through the sick bay AI, start to finish.

And I'm pleased to say I didn't even come close to throwing up.

 

Chapter Thirteen

O
f course, we ran into trouble almost from the beginning. The damned alien armor wasn't designed to come off.

The stuff was definitely organic—­long-­chain molecules of carbon and hydrogen—­and appeared to have emerged from or grown out of the Gykr's outer calcareous layers of natural armor. Did they actually breed some members of the species to have built-­in space suits or combat armor? Or was the stuff grafted or even welded on somehow, and removed later using some sort of organic solvent?

That also raised questions about what they'd been doing when they'd peeled off Kari's armor, and taken body parts with it. Had they really been trying to skin her alive? Or . . . as seemed plausible now, had they possessed only limited experience with humans, knowing that we put armor on and took it off almost as easily as we did clothing,
but they didn't know where to draw the line
?

In any case, we'd used a drill to try to sample the atmosphere inside the Guck's outer suit, but couldn't find an airspace. We did succeed in getting blood and tissue samples for analyses. As described by the Gykr entry in the Encylopedia Galactica, they used glycol nucleic acid to pass on genetic information, rather than deoxyribonucleic acid, and used cupric hemocyanin in hemolymph as their oxygen-­bearing circulatory fluid.

Humans use hemoglobin—­a porphyrin ring containing an iron atom—­to transfer oxygen through their circulatory systems, and use red blood cells drifting through the blood plasma to do so. Most terrestrial mollusks, plus a few arthropods like the horseshoe crab, use an entirely different ogygenation system—­metalloproteins containing two copper atoms suspended directly in hemolymph, which is similar to plasma or interstitial fluid. It works as well as red blood cells do, pretty much, though it's less efficient as a transport system in what we would consider normal pressures and temperatures . . . but it's far more efficient than blood at high pressures, low O
2
levels, and cold temperatures. It has one extra advantage, too. The stuff can carry certain nucleating agents that turn the hemolymph into a kind of antifreeze. That made sense if they'd evolved beneath an ice cap, on a world heated not by a star, but solely by internal geology.

“I think we need to bring in Bob,” Garner told me.

“Coming right up.” I patched a thought through to the sick bay AI, and powered up Bob.

“Bob” was our nickname for the lab's ROBERT unit—­that's RObotic Biological Examination and Remote Teleoperation, a rather contrived acronym referring to using a machine run either by AI or by a linked-­in human working in a room next door to avoid the risk of biological contamination. He came through the morgue airlock from the lab a moment later, wheeled, bulky, and sporting an impressive array of scalpels, laser cutters, syringes, and similar weapons of either healing or destruction, depending upon how he was programmed. He had the advantage of allowing an operator to see through his eyes, which could magnify down to the sub-­micron level. Usually, he worked with a human teleoperator, but he was smart enough to do simple dissections on his own.

Garner took control of Bob, and began using the machine's pinchers—­far more accurate and much stronger than human fingers—­to peel back the Gykr's armor. We were really operating in the dark, here. I became more convinced than ever that they'd cut up Kari out of ignorance, unable to tell the difference between Marine armor, her skinsuit utilities, and her skin.

Eventually, we managed to peel off the outer layers of the Guck's armor, and then began investigating the organism's gross physiology and anatomy. Depending on how you counted, the Gykr had three, four, or five pairs of legs, the longest at the rear of the torso, the shortest up by what passed for a head. Apparently, a Gykr normally walked four-­ or six-­legged, with the head end lower than the abdomen, its ass up in the air; the remaining four sets of clawed appendages could do double duty, as legs or as arms, though the uppermost set was tiny, only ten centimeters long, and probably reserved for eating or facial grooming. The hindmost legs were too long and slender for the Guck to use in order to stand upright, but they definitely were for walking, not swimming. One of my biggest questions about Gykr physiology was whether they had evolved originally as marine life forms—­either as swimmers or as bottom crawlers—­or whether they'd evolved on land, possibly in magma-­warmed underground caverns. Knowing the answer to that might give us some hints about their psychology—­about how they saw the universe around them, and how they thought.

The gross anatomy reminded both Chief Garner and myself most of terrestrial isopods. Most ­people are familiar with what are variously known as wood lice or pill bugs, those little silvery, many-­legged critters you find underneath an overturned rock in temperate climates that curl up in a ball if you disturb them. What most ­people don't know is that there are marine versions of the animal, and some of those grow to enormous size—­as much as forty centimeters and massing almost two kilos. They've been around for a long time—­more than160 million years—­and evidently have changed not at all in all that time. The biggest are found at truly impressive ocean depths—­as much as two thousand meters down or more—­where they eat pretty much anything they can find and sink their claws into, living or dead.

The Gykr were air-­breathers, though we'd known that. Their atmosphere contains oxygen—­though at a lower percentage than we favor—­so like us they employ an oxygen-­based metabolism. However, their lung—­singular—­seemed to have been adapted from a swim bladder. These guys had been marine organisms not too far back in their evolutionary history.

But the kicker came when I peeled off the last of the artificially grown armor around the creature's tail. There, tucked in on the soft underbelly beneath the overlapping dorsal strips of natural armor, were four paired structures that definitely weren't legs, but they weren't really fins, either. They reminded me of the swimmerets on terrestrial shrimp or lobster—­the technical term is
pleopods
—­which serve as swimming legs, as support structures for gills, and in some species as sex organs.

It looked to us as though the Gykrs
had
been marine organisms in the very recent evolutionary past, quite possibly as recent as just a few hundred thousand years ago.

Or—­like giant marine isopods living in Earth's oceans—­they might have been in this exact form, unchanging, for hundreds of millions of years. One theory popular among evolutionary biologists suggested that organisms living and breeding in darkness tended to change only very slowly, over long geological eras of time.

The Gykr appeared designed for a life . . . not in total darkness, perhaps, but certainly in low levels of light. They possessed a single large compound eye, arranged as a complete ring or circle around the head and below the puckered, rasping mouth, startlingly gold against the blue-­gray skin. There were two simple eyes mounted far apart, large and dark—­all pupil—­looking out to either side, plus a ­couple of pits or indentations underneath that made me think of the infrared sensors of certain poisonous terrestrial snakes.

“Ugly sucker, isn't he?” Garner asked as I pulled the front part of the body back to reveal what passed as a face.

“What are those giant bugs on Madagascar?” I asked. “They look like this thing.”

“Madagascar hissing cockroaches,” Garner said.

“Yeah, right, I replied. “This is cockroach city.”

“Okay, let's open him up. I want a look at his brain.”

“Where is it?” I asked. The segments holding the face were pretty narrow, without much room.

“About here,” Garner said, beginning the incision with a laser scalpel at just beneath the eyes and slicing down across the abdomen. “At least we think so. This is the first time anyone's had a chance to actually dissect one of these things. All of what we know about their anatomy comes from nanoscans of some rather badly smashed up bodies at Tanis. Ah! Here it is . . . you see? Just like a squid.”

I saw what he meant. The brain turned out to be a mass of whitish tissue compacted into a doughnut shape completely encircling the esophagus about where the human throat would be. Squid in Earth's ocean had a similar arrangement, though their brains are a lot smaller in proportion to the animal's mass. It wasn't encased within a protective skull like ours, but seemed to rely on the external carapace and layers of antifreeze-­saturated fat for protection.

“Fire a charge of nano into the brain,” Garner told me. “I want an estimate on size and function.”

I used an injector to squirt some millions of nanobots into the brain tissue from various angles, then used an N-­prog to tell them what to do. Brain function can be very roughly estimated by the number of neurological connections—­the gaps between individual neurons jumped by chemical sparks when we have a thought or give our body a command.

As expected from the Gykr entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica, this one had an NCE—­a neural connection equivalence—­of 8.981796 x 10
13
, or nearly 90 trillion synaptic gaps. That was an interesting number, actually, because the average human NCE is around 10
14
, or 100 trillion. Now, there's some flexibility built into those numbers; humans don't have
exactly
100 trillion synapses, but a range that can run 10 percent or more in either direction. The Encyclopedia Galactica gave the Gykr a slightly lower NCE of 9.3 x 10
13
.

But what it did suggest was that, on average, the Gykr had a bit less processing power, a bit less mental flexibility, than did humans. That wasn't necessarily a cause for celebration. I suppose you could say that if the average human IQ was 100, the average Gykr IQ was 93, but, damn it, things are
never
that simplistic. First off, intelligence is not purely a function of synaptic connections . . . and that assumes that we even know what the thing we call “intelligence” is. Gykr brains might be more efficient than ours in some ways.

We're pretty sure that they rely more on instinct than we do, for example; that fight-­or-­fight thing they have going for themselves, for instance, might be an autonomic response that bypasses the brain completely. They also appear to have a close relationship with their community. It doesn't appear to be a hive mind like that postulated for termites or bees on Earth, nor is it simply a tight, centralized government. The EG gives them a societal code that translates as “V,” representing a “close associative.” We're not entirely sure what that means; the best guess is that Gykr society is like a close family group . . . a family numbering in the billions.

The family reunions must be hell.

I was also interested in the fact that the Gykr were radially symmetrical in their recent evolutionary history. It was logical in an evolutionary sense, I suppose, if the animal's marine ancestor had been a radially symmetrical cylinder with a mouth at one end and an anus at the other, connected by the tube of a digestive tract. Gykr weren't radially symmetrical now, of course, but it looked like their ancestors had been. Its hearts, for example—­there were five of them interconnected in a chain around the esophagus farther down, just below the brain. It turns out that there are a hell of a lot of ways to put together a life form in this Galaxy, quite apart from what we know and understand on Earth.

I was almost surprised to see the Gykr skeleton as Garner opened up the wet torso, though I'd known they did have one. The creature looked so much like an oversized bug that I still expected it to have a chitinous exoskeleton. Science fiction recsims are fond of threatening their human characters with giant insects, bugs the size of e-­Cars or worse. Utter nonsense, of course. A real insect can't be larger than about the size of your fist. But the Gykrs did a good job of looking like giant cockroaches or pill bugs without violating basic physics. The internal skeleton turned out to be cartilaginous, lightweight, strong, and flexible, more like the skeletons of sharks or rays, rather than rigid, articulated bones. A kind of central support beam, like flexible plastic, ran down the middle of the body cavity, with rubbery loops alternating side to side that appeared to support the internal organs.

By the time we completed the dissection, we had a somewhat better picture of Gykr evolutionary anatomy. They definitely had evolved in deep, cold, ice-­capped water—­likely an environment very much like Europa or the deeps of Abyss­world. They'd emerged, though, into a moist but air-­filled environment . . . caves, possibly, or hollowed-­out pockets inside the ice. Somehow, they'd learned how to smelt metals, and that almost certainly meant in air rather than underwater. It's damned tough pulling iron out of ferrous ores if you can't build a fire. Garner wasn't so sure, and suggested that they might have learned some smelting skills working around hot volcanic vents or lava flows under­water. Even so, you need to
know
about stars, know they exist, before you can try to reach them.

For that kind of information, we were going to have to question a living Gucker, and that might prove difficult. There were some, evidently, hiding out among the ridges and blocks of the ice cap, and there was that submarine Doob had mentioned, somewhere underneath us.

That stirred some deep-­down fear, the more I thought about it. “Chief?”

“Yeah?”

“Doobie was telling me a bunch of Gucks escaped on board some sort of submersible.”

“Yup. We saw it from the air as we were coming in. Managed to submerge before we could target it, though.”

“So . . . what does that mean for us? Could they attack the
Haldane
through the ice?” I wasn't entirely sure what I was suggesting, what it was that had me worried . . . some kind of torpedo, maybe. Perhaps a torpedo with a nuclear warhead, fired at the underside of the ice.