Abyss Deep (3 page)

The massive meta-­fueled thrusters mounted to the surface of Atun 3840 had just fired. The one-­kilometer asteroid and its attached mining station were decelerating . . . which meant we were now beginning to fall out of orbit and toward the Earth's surface.

And if we hit we were going to leave one hell of a big crater.

 

Chapter Two

W
e were falling out of the sky.

I knew immediately what had happened . . . and kicked myself for not picking up on it as soon as I'd seen that dead tango in the control seat. The guy might have been a neo-­Ludd . . . but if he was running the control software for Capricorn Zeta—­that's the only reason he would have been strapped into that chair with his hands on the palm interfaces—­then he
must
have had a resident AI inside his in-­head hardware, his cerebral implant. I have one; all Marines do as well, and most civilians have them too. It's how we can interface with all of the thousands of computers and control systems around us every day, from operating devices like my N-­prog to pulling down in-­head data feeds and scans and communication to telling the deck to grow a chair.

And a person doesn't have to be alive for the AI to keep working
.

Whoever had helped the neo-­Ludds take over Capricorn Zeta had had some high-­powered technology behind them, and that would include AIs carefully programmed to help carry out their mission. That meant there would have been some sort of backup electronic deadman's switch; the man controlling the station dies, and his software tells the station to destroy itself . . . taking out a big part of the planet as it does so.

I heard Thomason's shouts outside. “
Get his hands off of there! Get him out of that fucking seat!
” But moment followed moment and the deceleration continued. The neo-­Ludd software must have had run-­if-­interrupted code sequences. Someone would have to regain control of the system to stop those rockets.

That wasn't my immediate problem, however. The Marines had ­people who could regain control of the falling asteroid. I had a patient to worry about. If we re-­entered Earth's atmosphere he would die—­as would I—­but he would die anyway even if we regained a stable orbit and I didn't patch him up.

There are certain priorities in treating a wounded patient no matter what his, her, or its species might be. The M'nangat was losing blood fast, and that was my immediate priority. M'nangat blood is cupriglobin, copper-­based, rather than iron-­based as with human hemoglobin. That's why the blue-­green color of the blood. But the different blood chemistry wouldn't affect skinseal. These guys had a similar body temperature, and their skin, though thicker than in humans, was made up of the same sorts of carbon-­based keratinocytes, keratin proteins, and lipids.

I pulled a packet of skinseal from my M-­7 kit, thumbed it open, and pressed the whole pack, powder-­side-­down, over the wound. Skinseal includes both absorbents and binding nanoagents that would work on a variety of more or less similar body building blocks.

As it worked, I pulled down the species EG data from the Orbital Net.

Encyclopedia Galactica/Xenospecies Profile

Entry: Sentient Galactic Species 14566

“M'nangat”

M'nangat, “M'naggies,” “Broccolis,” “Brocs,” “Stalks”

Civilization type
: 1.042 G

TL 19
: FTL, Genetic Prostheses, Cerebral Prostheses

Societal code
: AQCB

Dominant
: loose associative/scavenger/defensive/sexual

Cultural library
: 4.11 x 10
16
bits

Data Storage/Transmission DS/T
: 3.07 x 10
11
s

Biological code
: 156.872.119

Genome
: 3.8 x 10
9
bits; Coding/non-­coding: 0.028.

Biology
: C, N, O, S, H
2
O, PO
4

DNA

Cupric metal-­chelated tetrapyroles in aqueous circulatory fluid.

Mobile heterotrophs, omnivores, O
2
respiration.

Upright tentacular locomotion.

Mildly gregarious, Polyspecific [1 genera, 12 species]; trisexual.

Communication
: modulated sound at 150 to 300 Hz.

Neural connection equivalence NCE = 1.1 x 1014

T =
~260
o
to 300
o
K;
M =
0.9 x 10
5
g;
L
: ~2.5 x 10
9
s

Vision
: ~200 nanometers to 720 nanometers;
Hearing:
12 Hz to 18,000 Hz

Member
: Galactic Polylogue

Receipt galactic nested code: 3.86 x 10
10
s ago

Locally initiated contact 0.11 x 10
9
s ago

Star G1V; Planet: Fourth; “M'gat”

a = 1.669 x 10
11
m; M = 8.5 x 10
27
g; R = 7.2 x 10
6
m; p = 3.6 x 10
7
s

P
d
= 2.3 x 10
5
s, G = 10.9 m/s
2
Atm: O
2
20.1, N
2
79.6, CO
2
0.3;

P
atm
0.97 x 10
5
Pa

Librarian's note
: First direct human contact occurred in 2119
C.E.
, the very first extraterrestrial space-­faring civilization encountered by Humankind. Threat level—­8.

I let the numbers cascade through my brain, watching for anything that was so far out of the ordinary that it would put up a red flag.
Ordinary
when discussing alien biochemistry takes in a huge chunk of territory, of course, but there were some basic rules to play by if the patient was a carbon-­based oxygen breather. Hell, compared to some of the critters we've encountered out there, methane-­breathers and gas giant floaters and fluoro-­silicate crystal autotrophs, these guys were practically next of kin.

We'd known the Brocs for over a century, now . . . since just after the discovery of the local Encylopedia Galactica Node at Sirius. They were our first ET encounter, face-­to . . . whatever it is they have in place of a face. Once we established contact with them, they helped us figure out how to extract the oceans upon oceans of data in the EG, which helped us begin to make some small bit of sense out of the bewildering forest of intelligent life we were encountering as we moved out into the Galaxy. In fact, we were reading parts of the EG only twelve or thirteen years after we logged in; that we were doing so in
only
thirteen years was due almost entirely to Broc help. They've taught us five, so far, of the major Galactic
linguae francae
, as well as giving us the inside scoop on the slow-­motion collapse of the R'agch'lgh Collective in toward the Core. In many ways, they've been Humankind's friendly native guides in our first tentative explorations into the Galaxy jungle at large.

A few have been allowed to come to the Sol System as consultants—­so long as they didn't have astrogation devices that might give away Earth's most closely guarded secret . . . exactly
where
Sol was among the four hundred billion stars of our Galaxy. It pays to be
damned
cautious in a star wilderness filled with roving predarians and the wreckage of a collapsing galactic empire. These two, according to our pre-­mission briefing, had been at Capricorn Zeta to advise us on in-­orbit mining techniques.

Unfortunately, they'd been at the wrong place at the wrong time when a Chinese tug declared an emergency and docked alongside. Twenty armed tangos had been hiding on board. As soon as the tug docked, they'd come swarming out of the tug's cargo compartment and into the mining station.

P
LEASE HELP HERM.
The words printed themselves out in my in-­head as the second, uninjured, M'nangat leaned closer.

Herm
. The M'nangat had three sexes, I saw—­male, female, and a third that received the fertilized embryo from the female and carried it to term. The wounded one, apparently, was one of those.

They were called life carriers.

I hesitated. I'd already done everything I could for the wounded Broccoli . . . everything I could, that is, without firing nano into its circulatory system to give me a look from the inside. Putting
anything
foreign into an alien body was risky, especially if you didn't know about possible antibody or immune-­system responses. The nanobots I carried in my M-­7 kit were designed to neatly bypass the human immune response . . . but how would that play out inside an alien circulatory system?

I pulled out a biochem analyzer and pressed its business end against my patient's tough, ropy hide. After a moment, I shifted the analyzer to a splatter of blue-­green blood near the wound. The readouts downloaded straight into my in-­head, giving me a more detailed understanding of the being's biochemistry than was available on the Net. In particular, I had my AI leapfrog through the incoming data to pinpoint those biochemistries associated with the alien's immune response.

The immune system for any species is an enormous set of chemistries—­varied, complex, and efficient. Even bacteria have their own simple immune system—­secreted enzymes that protect the cell against bacteriophage infections. Life forms as complicated as humans have many, many layers of physical and biochemical defenses . . . and quite a few of those are changing all the time to react to specific threats. I couldn't expect the M'nangat to be any different.

Our databases on M'nangat physiology weren't extensive—­at least not the ones available to me over the Fleet channels—­but I could have my AI run a series of simulations: what would happen if I shot my green patient full of nanobots? The answer came back in a few seconds. There was a solid 86 percent chance that my nano would
not
trigger an immune response.

Nanobots are designed and programmed with immune responses in mind, of course. They're coated with buckyweave carbon shells with the active molecular machinery hidden away inside a non-­reactive sheath. Still, there was always a small chance—­in this case 14 percent—­that my nanobots might hit a biochemical trigger and sensitize the organism, telling it in effect that invaders were entering the body and it was time to call out the troops. Those percentages applied to the entire dose of 'bots, of course, and not to each nanobot individually. Otherwise, with a few hundred million foreign particles entering the alien system, sensitization would have been guaranteed.

I looked again at the wound, and decided I would have to accept those odds. The Broc had an entry wound but no exit cavity. The projectile must still be inside.

I felt a shudder through the deck, and then zero-­gravity resumed. The meta rockets had switched off. Had the Marines gotten to the controls in time? Or had we just de­orbited?

I couldn't tell, and I was too busy at the moment to link in and query the network. If we hit atmosphere, my work on the alien would be wasted, but if we didn't burn up on re-­entry or slam into the Earth I preferred to have a live patient to a dead one. I kept working.

I used the injector from my M-­7 kit to fire a full dose of nanobots into the alien's hide. As I waited for them to be assimilated, I wondered why we used terms like “Broccoli” or “Stalk” with aliens like the M'nangat. I understood why Marines dehumanized their enemies—­especially the human ones—­but the M'nangat, as far as we could tell, had been benevolent and helpful galactic neighbors.

The answer, I suppose, was psychological. Friendly the M'nangat may be, but they were still
alien
, meaning we could never really get inside their heads—­or what passes for heads—­and understand them nearly as well as, say, a human living in San Antonio can understand a human living in Kyoto. They had their own agenda—­all intelligent beings do—­and we had no idea what that agenda might be and probably never would. That's why we were careful not to let them learn where Sol was, why trading and diplomatic exchanges took place at neutral meeting spots like Sirius, just in case.

And that was fair enough, since we had no idea where they hailed from either, other than that their homeworld was the fourth planet of a star only slightly brighter than Sol. In a galaxy of four hundred billion stars, you can't tell much from that.

But maybe we called the weirdly stalked and tentacled beings Broccoli or Brocs or Stalks to make them seem a little more . . . comprehensible.
Familiar
. I glanced up at the sensory cluster, that cluster of orange-­sized luminous eyes at one end of the body. Those quivering jelly-­globe eyes had no pupils, so I couldn't tell if it was looking at me, but then, that sphere of light-­gathering organs was designed to look in every direction at once.

What kind of brain can see through 360 degrees and straight up at all times?
I wondered. What did that suggest about M'nangat psychology?

D
'DNAH
CARRIES MY BUDS,
the uninjured M'nangat said, the translated words typing themselves across my in-­head screen.
P
LEASE . . .

“I'll do what I can,” I replied aloud, letting my AI handle the translation and transmission. “I'm just checking to see if your partner is okay on the inside.”

The being floating next to me and my patient was showing no emotion that I could recognize, but the words on my in-­head sounded like human pain. Buds . . . that would be a clutch of young. According to the downloading xeno data, fertilized eggs from the female took root inside the life carrier and grew as buds that eventually tuned into young and chewed their way to freedom.

I tried not to think about that part. M'nangat reproduction was messy, violent, and painful . . . and the carrier usually didn't survive. And how did
that
color their psychology?

The nanobots were clustering now around the wounded being's internal organs. I used my N-­prog to program them to transmit an overlay.