Abyss Deep (25 page)

I'd already started worrying about a court-­martial once I got home. Oh, there was no question that Kirchner was totally batshit—­another of those technical medical terms—­but a court of inquiry likely would be taking a very close look at what I'd done in the time leading up to his mental break.

“The only way to prove schizophrenia,” I told him, “is by keeping records of the patient's behavior over time . . . and putting that together with whatever he cares to tell you. At least in the absence of a brain scan. They'll need those records to legally order a deep brain scan when we get him home.”

“Carlyle,” McKean said, “they're going to hang, draw, and quarter you, and then hang you out to dry.”

“And
then
they'll keelhaul your sorry ass,” Dubois added.

“Getting keelhauled on a starship sounds pretty serious,” I told them. “I think I'll take my chances a thousand kilometers down.”

“Good luck, E-­Car,” Dubois said.

“Yeah,” McKean said. “Remember you're still needed back up here to play midwife to a stalk of broccoli.”

“How could I forget?” In fact, I
had
forgotten. The pregnant M'nangat, D'dnah, and its consorts still wanted me to deliver its buds . . . probably within the next ­couple of weeks.

I still wasn't looking forward to that.

A boarding gangway had been lowered between the ice and the deck of the Walsh. I was about to step onto it when Dubois added, over a private channel, “Hey, E-­Car?”

“Yeah?”

“Do me a favor?”

“If I can do it a thousand kilometers underwater, sure.”

“Keep a close eye on Gina, would you?”

“Gina Lloyd?” I stared at him through my visor for a second, and then realization dawned. Maybe I am slow. . . . “Not you and—­”

“Yeah. Me and Gina.”

“So
she's
your secret girlfriend?”

“Fuck. Why do you think I volunteered to come on this wild goose chase? And if you hadn't beaten me to the punch during the meeting earlier . . .”

“From the sound of it,” I told him, “she doesn't need anybody taking care of her. Certainly not me!”

“Yeah, but I'd like her to come back topside, y'know?”

I thought of Joy Leighton, waiting for me forty-­two light years away.

“I know. Don't sweat it, Doob. We'll be back. All of us.”

I almost believed that.

I clung to the safety railing as I made my way across the submersible's deck, gripping it tightly in the teeth of that unrelenting wind.
Walsh
was a simple, blunt-­ended cigar shape—­no conning tower, no control surfaces, and with only a very low swell of her dorsal surface visible above the choppy dark water. She was slightly flattened, however, with a lateral bulge that included the active nanomatrix part of her hull that allowed her to maneuver underwater. Her airlock hatch was open on the flattened portion of her deck's dorsal surface. Once I descended the ladder to her interior, the airlock wouldn't simply close, but would be completely filled in with compressed matter. As
Haldane
's chief engineer had pointed out, even the slightest weakness in
Walsh
's hull would be deadly.

The interior of the submersible was cozy, an oval space just eight meters long, three wide, and two high. They'd grown enough seats out of the deck for the six of us, including all the linkages we would need to communicate with
Walsh
's AI and direct the craft. The entire curved forward surface of the compartment was a permanent viewall, though the other surfaces could project images of our surroundings as well. There was nothing so primitive on board as
portholes
, of course. Even the strongest, thickest glasstic would shatter under the pressures we were about to encounter.

This was definitely a no-­frills cruise. We would sleep in our chairs. There was a tiny compartment aft, next to the entrance to the bail-­out sphere, that would absorb our wastes right through the deck, and which would serve as a sonoshower. Privacy? What's that? I wondered how Dr. Montgomery and ET2 Lloyd felt about being crammed into a narrow sewer pipe with three guys and a Broc for as long as this mission would require.

Thirty hours—­over a day—­to reach the mysterious Sierra Five.

And then what?

After removing our suits, we settled down in our seats and let them partially enclose us, the palms of our hands on the palmpads on either arm. D'deen, I saw, was positioned in a special seat individually programmed for him, a flat, padded board rising at a slant from a round bucket. He nestled his tentacles into the bucket and leaned back against the upright, which gently closed around his narrow torso. “Are you going to be okay there?” I asked. I was concerned about the cabin being too warm for him.

I
A
M
Q
U
I
T
E
C
O
N
T
E
N
T
,
the Broc replied. T
H
E
D
I
F
F
I
C
U
L
T
P
A
R
T
W
A
S
R
E
P
R
O
G
R
A
M
M
I
N
G
Y
O
U
R
N
A
N
O
T
E
C
H
N
I
C
M
A
T
R
I
C
E
S
T
O
G
R
O
W
M
'
N
A
N
G
A
T
F
U
R
N
I
S
H
I
N
G
S
.

The others completed securing themselves within the remaining, human-­shaped couches. Gina Lloyd was in the left-­front seat, right ahead of me, and I admired her competence as she brought up the sonar display on the main viewall, and an instrument display on the screen across her lap. “
Walsh
ready in all respects for departure,” she said aloud.

“You're clear for departure,
Walsh
,” Kemmerer's voice said in our heads. “Good luck, ­people.”

The sonar display winked out, replaced by a camera view looking forward from the submarine's nose. The camera was already under water, but I could see the dance of light from the opening in which we were floating, and the darker shapes of the surrounding ice.

“Gunny?” Lloyd asked. “Give the word.”

“Word,” Hancock said. “Let's see what this baby'll do.”

“Submerging,” Lloyd said, and the broken, jagged patterns of red-­gold light rose, replaced by a darkness so profound I almost immediately regretted my decision to volunteer. Doob was right.
Never
volunteer. . . .

But we were dropping rapidly. “Descent rate at ten meters per second,” Lloyd told us.

And our destination was waiting a mere thirty hours below. . . .

 

Chapter Seventeen

T
he darkness was absolute, an enveloping and muffling cloak, and Gina Lloyd soon switched back to the sonar imaging, turning deck, overhead, and both sides to viewall displays along with directly forward. We were deliberately pinging the surrounding waters at low power, low enough, we hoped, to not invoke the wrath of the cuttlewhales again. As a result, we were picking up targets, but they were faint. Sierra Five wasn't much more than a pinpoint directly below us, while Sierra One cruised slowly off to port and occasionally emitted sonar pings of its own.

The Gykr submarine, almost certainly, tracking us.

A small eternity passed as we dropped steadily into the depths, minute dragging after minute. After a time, Lloyd had our AI overlay the optical and sonar imaging, but the darkness was so complete we could see nothing. Even when Lloyd switched on external lighting, our external nano illuminating the surrounding gulf, there was no sign of life save for those two somewhat uncommunicative sonar targets. No fish, or whatever Abyssworld might have evolved that were like fish . . . no invertebrates . . . not even any organic “snow” sifting down from the upper layers as it did on Earth. If not for the obvious exception of the cuttlewhales, I would have guessed that this world was lifeless.

“Sixteen minutes,” Lloyd said from her control seat. “Passing the ten-­kilometer mark.

“Ten thousand meters,” I said. “That's almost as deep as the deepest spot in Earth's ocean.”

“And here we've scarcely begun the descent,” Ortega said.

In a sense, we were flying through the water, angled nose-­down about ten degrees, our flattened hull giving us some lift in order to control the descent. Eleven kilometers . . .

Twelve . . .

“Is that target closing on us?” Hancock wanted to know.

“Contact Sierra One is at a range of three kilometers,” the voice of
Walsh
's AI said in our heads, “and is closing obliquely at a rate of fifteen kilometers per hour.”

“Convergent course,” Lloyd told us. “I think they're trying to sneak in closer.”

“I wonder if they have weapons?” Ortega said.

“Unlikely,” Hancock told him. “The only reason to have a submarine on this planet would be to explore the extreme depths . . . and torpedoes or antiship lasers would mean weaknesses built into the hull. I don't think they'd risk it.”

It was a good point, I thought. I'd been assuming that the Gykr vessel had some sort of weapon—­whatever it had been that had destroyed the research station—­but the outside pressure now was somewhere around a ton on every square centimeter of our hull. Hatches or torpedo tubes would have been an invitation to disaster. Our external nano-­coating could produce outside light, of course, or pick up and transmit external images, but the signals were passed through our CM hull by electrical induction—­no openings, no wires, no weakness at any point.

“I hope you're right, Gunny,” Lloyd said. “Because that Guck boat just turned and accelerated to close the gap. It looks an awful lot like an attack run.”

On the starboard bulkhead, the patch of light representing Sierra One had just sharply narrowed, as though we were seeing it now bow-­on. “Range now two point five kilometers,” the AI told us, “and closing at thirty kph.”

Thirty kph—­half a kilometer per minute.

“Target Sierra One is accelerating,” the AI added. “Closing now at seventy kilometers per hour.”

“What are they using for motive power?” Hancock asked.

“Sierra One almost certainly is employing a magnetic drive,” the AI replied, “powered by a small quantum tap or equivalent technology.”

“Looks like the same setup we have, Gunny,” Lloyd added.

We were moving through the water under a variant of the Plottel Drive used for interplanetary travel, working against the local magnetic field in order to accelerate and maneuver. I wasn't certain what our top speed was, but it certainly was in excess of seventy kph.

“Target Sierra One now closing at ninety kilometers per hour,” the AI said. “I am detecting signs of supercavitation.”

Supercavitation
happens when an object is moving through a fluid so quickly that a bubble of gas forms around the object, greatly reducing the friction of its passage through the liquid and allowing it to reach extremely high speeds.

“Hang on!” Lloyd called. “This could get nasty!”

Walsh
's deck tilted suddenly, nose down, and I could sense our acceleration deeper into the ocean depths. To either side, visible by our external lighting, the flattened bulges in the sub's hull were pulling in and contracting, reducing our lift in the water, letting us descend faster. We weren't flying now so much as we were
plunging
, arrowing down past the fifteen kilometer mark. Our view into the surrounding darkness became misted over as we began supercavitating as well.

“Sonar target Sierra One is in pursuit,” the AI told us. Its voice was calm and rational enough for it to have been commenting on the weather. “Range one point one kilometer, closing at one hundred kph.”

Closing at that speed . . . which meant it was that much faster than we were. The thing must be pushing two hundred kilometers per hour.

“Can't this thing go any faster?” Montgomery asked.

“I've got it flat out now, ma'am,” Lloyd replied. “This thing is a civilian explorer, not a fighter.”

Which begged the question, was the Gykr machine designed for combat rather than for exploration? Or did they simply build
everything
to military specs, or with a military attitude? From the little we knew about them, the second option seemed more likely.

“Range four hundred meters, closing at one hundred fifteen kph. . . .”

We could hear it now, a high-­pitched whine transmitted through water and the compressed matter of our hull, a whine edged with a warbling, stuttering thunder that spoke of tremendous energies released in a small volume of space. Thirty-­two meters per second . . . four hundred meters . . . twelve and a half seconds . . . The numbers cascaded unbidden through my in-­head as I turned in my seat to look at the fast approaching vehicle.

It came in from the starboard side aft, angled down, and it flashed past so close that I could see our external lights gleaming from dark metal and tortured water. Its shape, an echo of the
Walsh
, was enveloped in a translucent haze, the visual equivalent of a supersonic aircraft's shock wave as it rocketed past.

That shock wave struck us broadside and jolted us hard. If our seats hadn't been gripping us, we all would have been hurled against the bulkhead; for a terrifying second, we hung on our beam, wondering if we were going to flip completely over.

Then
Walsh
righted herself, at least partway, her sides flaring out under Lloyd's direction to grab the shock wave and ride it. We turned sharply away from the Gykr vessel's wake, grabbing for open water. Ahead and below, the Gykr submarine was turning, making a broad, open half circle as it slowed . . . then began accelerating again.

In space, you're moving through hard vacuum, which means the limit to your maneuvering is the amount of acceleration the crew can stand. In a fluid medium—­in air or, even more, underwater—­you use control surfaces to react against that medium in order to maneuver . . . and the slower combatant often has the advantage in any attempt to outmaneuver the enemy. It took long seconds for the Gykr machine to complete its turn, and the radius of that turn must have been five kilometers or more.

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.