Abyss Deep (19 page)

“It's possible. The LT has ordered some Marines to go out and put hydrophones and sonar transponders down through the ice—­at the edge of the ice cap, and also through the thin ice where the research base used to be.”

That made sense. Sonar meant sending sound waves down into the ocean, and when they hit something solid, like an alien submarine, the reflected sound waves picked up on the hydrophones would tell us where the sub was, how deep, and how fast it might be moving.

At the same time, though, I knew that Gykr technology wasn't all that well understood. If they had torpedoes, how powerful were they? What was their range? So many unknowns, so much that was
alien
and not understood . . .

And what about the native life forms the researchers had reported on this frozen ice ball, the cuttlewhales? It was beginning to look like it had been the Gykr, not the cuttlewhales, that were responsible for destroying our base. But we couldn't be sure of that, either. We couldn't be sure of
anything
.

“We're also going to be setting up the dome,” Garner went on. “Once we have that,
Haldane
can go back into orbit . . . just in case.”

He didn't add, of course, that
Haldane
's safety in orbit didn't guarantee
our
safety on the ice. But at least we would still have a way to get home if we survived our time on the surface.

We were still cleaning up after ourselves in the morgue when that guarantee became a lot more slender. The ship lurched, hard, as though a titanic hammerblow had struck us from underneath. In the next moment, the deck took on a distinct tilt; we were listing, perhaps ten degrees, to starboard.

Garner and I stared at each other across the morgue table. A moment later, the voice of Lieutenant Walthers, the ship's exec, sounded through our in-­heads. “All hands! Brace for immediate liftoff! We are under attack . . . repeat, we are under attack!”

We both grabbed hold of the stainless-­steel table as the ship lurched again, and we felt momentarily heavier as we accelerated straight up. Captain Summerlee had engaged the ship's quantum-­spin fields, lifting us up off the ice. By juggling the spin-­states on
Haldane
's belly, we could push against the electron spin of the ice below and even Abyssworld's magnetic field, turning us into a giant quantum-­state floater.

The ship's AI, I saw, was transmitting a situation update; we were already at red alert, of course, ever since we'd arrived on planet, but the information coming down from the bridge said that we were under attack. How . . . whether from the alien submarine beneath the surface, or by individual Gykr out on top of the ice, we didn't know.

And almost before we'd absorbed the fact that we were being attacked, the automated voice of our AI came through our in-­heads. “Emergency! Corpsman to the bridge! Emergency! Corpsman to the bridge . . . !”

“Go,” Garner told me. “I'll finish up here.”

I checked through the sick bay AI. Dubois was outside . . . shit, and so was McKean. That left me and Garner on board the
Haldane
to take care of whatever was going down.

I grabbed an M-­7 on my way up to the bridge. I queried the ship's AI, asking about what had happened, but I didn't get an immediate reply. Well, of course not. The ship's AI is good for information about the ship's condition, and where a particular person might be on board, but not so much about things like medical emergencies. Sensors on the bridge would have detected something out of the ordinary—­someone had a heart attack or had stopped breathing—­and summoned me with the AI voice in my head.

All I knew for sure was that someone up there had been hurt by the attack.

I wondered who it had been.

It was the skipper.

“What happened?” I asked as I entered the bridge and hurried across to the woman sprawled on the deck.

“She got thrown from her chair,” Lieutenant Walthers said. He pointed at a hard plastic console. “Hit her head there.”

There were eight other officers on the bridge, plus two civilians, Ortega and Montgomery. The bridge was a broad dome-­shaped compartment extending above
Haldane
's dorsal side, and with deck-­to-­overhead viewalls around all sides, giving a 360-­degree view horizontally, and a 180 vertically, creating the startling illusion that the bridge was a circular pit completely open to the sky. The captain's station was raised above and behind a crescent-­shaped bank of instrumentation and high-­tech link couches on a low dais; Captain Summerlee evidently had pitched forward off the dais and hit her head on a helm workstation. A ­couple of naval ratings were kneeling on the deck next to her. The rest were still at their stations.

“We didn't think we should move her,” one of the ratings said.

I nodded at her. “Absolutely right. You have to be careful with head injuries. Someone call for a stretcher team.”

I was already bringing the business end of my nanobot injector up under the angle of Summerlee's jaw, sending a few tens of millions of micron-­sized nanobots into her carotid artery. She was unconscious, with a five-­centimeter gash high on the side of her head, a few centimeters above her left ear. Pulling her hair aside, I could see the beginnings of an ugly, bruised lump. She was bleeding, too, as only scalp wounds can bleed. I thought about Private Pollard, and prayed there was no hematoma
inside
the skull. She obviously had one on the outside, and at least a mild concussion.

It took only seconds for the 'bots to diffuse through her brain and down her spine. I checked the image coming through on my N-­prog. No injury to the neck or thoracic spine, thank the gods, none that showed up here. I would want to do a full soft-­tissue scan in sick bay, of course. No sign of the epidural hematoma Pollard had suffered . . . and no sign of a skull fracture. I peeled back her eyelids, checking the pupils. They were both the same size, and both responded to a flash from my mini light.

Blood pressure 120 over 70. Normal. Heart rate at 85 . . . a bit elevated.

Okay. So far so good.

Along about then her eyes fluttered and she started to move. “What the hell was that?” she asked.

“Please don't move, Captain,” I told her. “You fell, hit the side of your head. I'm checking you out.”

“Go ahead and check me out all you want,” she said. “But we're
not
going to have a date. . . .”

If she could joke, she was doing well.

I went ahead and put skin sealant on the cut, closing it off, and used some nanobots to double-­check to make sure there wasn't a major bleeder in there. I reprogrammed some of them, putting them on hemostat duty—­closing off any torn blood vessels and capillaries that hadn't been reached by the foam. Two Marines with a stretcher arrived, and I supervised getting her onto it.

“Damn it, no,” she said. “We're under attack!”

“I've assumed command, Skipper,” Walthers told her. “There's been no sign of further attack since that first shock. I suggest you go with the nice Corpsman and behave yourself, ma'am.”

“We have ­people out on the surface,” she said.

“I know, Captain. I'm in communication with them now. The situation is under control.”

“If it was that Gykr submersible . . .”

“The situation is under control, Captain. Please don't worry so much!”

“It's my fucking
job
to worry!” But she relaxed then, lying back on the stretcher and closing her eyes.

“Anybody else hurt up here?” I asked.

“No,” Walthers said. “Freak accident. We were hit just as she was starting to stand up, and she got thrown forward. No reports of other injuries on the ship . . . nothing but a few bumps and bruises.”

“Okay. I'm taking her down to sick bay. Let Chief Garner know if anybody else needs help.”

“Right.”

I wondered what had hit us. Something fired from that sub? Or artillery from the Gykrs on the surface? The ­people on
Haldane
's bridge would tell us, I assumed, when they were ready. Presumably that meant when
they
knew what it was.

“Jacobs,” Walthers said. “Give us one-­eighty down on the bridge view.”

“One-­eighty down, aye, sir.”

I was starting to follow the stretcher off the bridge when the image projected on the dome overhead shifted. The ship hadn't changed attitude, but the image had been flipped to show the ice directly underneath the ship. For a moment, I felt like I was hanging vertiginously upside down. I looked up . . . at an expanse of smashed and broken ice. And there was something coming up out of the ice toward us. . . .

“My God!” someone yelled. “What the hell is
that
?”

It looked like a titanic black flower, myriad short tentacles, several longer arms uncoiling, six stalked, black eyes spaced evenly around a gaping, central maw . . .

And with the inverted display it appeared to be lunging
down
toward the open bridge.

The thing appeared to reach for us, tentacles weaving, then settled back into the frothing roil of ice chunks and black water.

“Cuttlewhale!” I said. I didn't know if the
Haldane
's bridge crew had been briefed on the things or not. I'd assumed they knew. There was, of course, an enormous gulf between seeing those graceful, far-­off serpentine forms on the horizon on the images sent back from the research base and looking down the throat of a monster that must have been nearly as wide as
Haldane
herself was long. I felt weak inside. This was the mysterious life form that
might
be intelligent . . . a creature that Commonwealth Naval HQ had sent us across forty-­two light years in the hope that we might learn to communicate with it. I looked at the two civilians, Montgomery and Ortega, seated at the rear of the bridge. They were staring up into the horror above us with expressions that could only translate as dismay.

Yeah, good luck with that xenocommunication thing
, I thought. Damn, those two
did
have their work cut out for them. How do you talk to a monster sixty or seventy meters wide and the gods alone knew how long?

I hurried out the bridge entryway after Captain Summerlee.

Chief Garner was waiting for us in sick bay . . . as was Kirchner.

“Let's get her on the scanner,” Garner told me.

“The Captain!” Kirchner said, eyes widening. “
Madre de Dios!
”

Kirchner looked . . . bad. His hair looked like Einstein's on a bad day, his face looked hollow and starved, and his eyes were bugging out like a Gyrkr's. There was something terrifying about that wild expression.

“Doctor,” I said, hesitating. “Are you all right?”

Those eyes were piercing. “Of course I'm all right! Why does everyone insist on asking me that?”

“You're looking—­”

“Just get the patient on the table, damn it!”

I caught Garner's glance, and he gave a little shake of his head. I shut up and helped him move the Captain off the stretcher and onto the STS table. At least Kirchner wasn't inclined to argue about whether or not she needed the scan. “I'm okay,” she said.

“No, Captain, you are not,” Kirchner told her. He was studying the scan results closely as they came off the machine. “Tell me, Captain,” he said after a moment. “Can you access the ship's AI?”

She closed her eyes . . . then opened them again, looking startled and slightly afraid. “I can't! I can't reach the ship's AI!”

Kirchner nodded. “You have a slight concussion . . . but the shock appears to have severed much of the microcurcuitry wiring to your parietal lobe. It's not serious . . . but you are going to be off-­line for a while.”

“
No
. . .
!
”

The look of fear deepened to terror. I put my hand on her arm. “Take it easy, Captain,” I told her. “It'll be okay. . . .”

“
I can't feel the ship!
”

It must have been horrible for her. Most ­people nowadays—­and anyone with a career in a technical, scientific, or military field, had cerebral implants, allowing direct connections to local AIs, including those resident within their own heads. We joked about how many medical personalities and expert systems were running inside a typical doctor's head . . . but it was almost as bad for a ship's captain, who had to link in with her vessel's computer Net in order to run the ship. Being cut off like that would feel like being lobotomized.

In a sense, that's exactly what had happened to Summerlee. The parietal lobe of the brain—­located above and ahead of the occipital lobe, at the back of the head, and behind the frontal lobe up at the front—­primarily integrates sensory information coming from many different sources . . . especially data involving our spatial sense, navigation, vision, touch, hearing, tactile sensations, and somatosensation, our awareness of where the different parts of our body are at any given moment. The parietal lobe is divided in two, left and right, like most other parts of the brain. The left hemisphere is involved with symbolic functions, including language and mathematics, while the right side predominantly handles spatial relationships, including images, navigation, and understanding maps.

Janice Summerlee's organic brain was undamaged, according to the scan, but in-­head circuitry feeds language and math from the implanted processors into the left parietal lobe. That's how we can hear the voice of an AI or someone we're e-­comming inside our heads, and when we talk to someone in-­head, the signals go out from the same region for processing and transmission. When a person suffers a concussion, what has happened essentially is that the brain, adrift in its cushion of cerebrospinal fluid, has been slammed against the inside of the skull. When Captain Summerlee hit that console, she'd done so hard enough to slam her brain to one side, and break the nano-­chelated wiring in her left parietal lobe—­wires that were a micron or less in thickness.