Abyss Deep (30 page)

He screamed and sagged to one side. I'd been looking for an opening, but the passageway was too narrow for the two of us to engage the Gucker at once. Now I was able to crowd past Hancock and grapple with the Gykr hand-­to-­hand . . . or maybe, in this case, it was more hand-­to-­hand-­to-­hand-­to-­hand. The Gykr had several limbs that could serve as legs or arms, and several small arms that were useless for heavy lifting, but which could grasp and claw at me.

“Get him up!” Hancock screamed at my side. “
Get him up!
”

I saw what he wanted. Normally, Gykrs went about like giant insects, heads low to the ground, their rounded backs well protected by bands of artificial armor grafted on over bands of natural calcareous armor or chitin. Their undersides were less well protected, especially around the face and mouth parts.

Grappling with two of the Gykr's longer arms, including the one wielding the alien weapon, I dug in and pushed, hard, lifting the creature up and back. I was aided by the gravity, 9 percent less than Earth's, and doubt that I could have lifted it in a full G or without a personal exoskeleton suit.

I managed to push it up and back, however, its legs flailing as it tried to get a grip on my body. Hancock's pistol went off right beside my ear, a painful, thundering
crack-­crack-­crack
that left my ears ringing, but the rounds slammed into the thinner armor covering the Gykr's face, ripping open its suit above its breathing flaps.

From the autopsy Chief Garner and I had performed, I knew that there were six breathing slits along its head, three to either side of the being's face behind and below the bulge of its compound eyes. Gykrs breathed oxygen, though they needed a lower partial pressure than did we—­about 10 percent.

But they also appeared to need a higher level of carbon dioxide—­over 33 percent—­a level that would have been fatal to humans without breathing gear, and they required an ambient atmospheric pressure a third lower than ours.

As I wrestled there in the dark with that armored horror, I could hear a hissing, rasping gurgle as it struggled with the tunnel's gas mix forcing its way into its suit. I freed one hand, stuck two fingers into a gaping hole opened by one of Hancock's bullets, and yanked as hard as I could, peeling open a layer of artificial outer armor as thin as paper.

The Gucker broke free from me, staggering backward, its arms flailing wildly, its weapon landing with a splash in a shallow pool of water a meter in front of me. Ducking down, I scooped up the weapon, wondering how to fire it . . . and then finding the trigger recessed into the grip. The bolt slammed into the Gykr's chest, burning open a ragged crater the size of my head and dropping the struggling creature onto its back.

I immediately turned to check on Hancock. The bolt, I saw, had burned clean through his left arm about at the level of his elbow. His lower arm and hand were lying on the deck, grotesque and steaming.

The stump of his arm appeared to have been cauterized, the flesh charred and blackened halfway to his shoulder. There was no bleeding, but when I held my small flash to his eyes, they looked glassy and unfocused.

“Did . . . we get 'im?”

“You got him, Gunny. Good shooting!”

“We—­”

And then another bolt of hot plasma seared down the tunnel, striking one bulkhead a few meters away in a blue-­white flare of light.

I spun around, raising the alien weapon again. There was another Gykr down that black passageway, perhaps forty meters away at the far end of the passage, and I couldn't see it. A second shot, this one hitting the puckered, alien door just behind us. Steadying the captured weapon in both hands, I tried to guess where the bolts had come from and began squeezing off shots one after another.

The weapon appeared to be a compact plasma weapon—­probably using either water or the local atmosphere, superheating it to an electrified plasma, and hurling the bolt down range with a magnetic accelerator.

After five or six shots, though, the weapon suddenly became hot, hot enough to burn my unprotected hands. I dropped it, and heard the sizzle as it splashed in water. Picking it up again, I hesitated a moment, then fired again.

There were no more shots returning from down range, however. I couldn't see. Had my wild fusillade hit the plasma gunner?

I returned my attention to Gunny Hancock, though I kept one eye out for movement in the darkness. I gave him a jolt of medical nano programmed to kill the pain and counteract the shock.

“That's . . . that's doing the trick, Doc,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Think you can make it back to the
Walsh
?”

“Yeah.”

“C'mon. I'll help you.”

I half carried him back through the airlock, where Ortega and Lloyd helped pull him inside. “He should be okay, at least for now,” I told them. “We'll need to get him back on board the
Haldane
to grow him a new arm, but he's not hurting much right now, and there's no bleeding.”

I put skinseal over the end of the stump, though, just to make sure he didn't start bleeding again . . . and the artificial skin would also start treating the burned tissue, getting it ready for regen.

“Okay,” I said when I was done. “I'm going back out there, and see what's at the far end of that tunnel.”

“You can't go out there alone!” Montgomery said.

“Why not? We need to make contact with the base personnel in there.”

“Suppose there are more Gucks?” Lloyd said.

“I'll go with him,” Ortega said.

“I'll be fine on my—­”

“Stop being a fucking hero,” Hancock said from his couch. Hell, I'd thought he was unconscious. He had enough 'bots both inside his skull and in what was left of his arm, all turning off pain receptors with enthusiasm enough to send him off to floaty-­floaty land. “The two of you go across and try to make contact. If you even smell another Gucker, hightail it back to the
Walsh
, we'll de­couple, and head for the surface. We might need to come back down with a real military force.”

And so, a few minutes later, I walked into the dark accessway with Ortega right behind me. I held the captured alien plasma gun, while he had Hancock's Republic-­12. We took a few moments to make sure he understood how the pistol worked, and then Gunny provided us with fresh mags loaded with AP rounds—­armor piercers, which would do a better job on Guckers than would frangibles. “I
think
the bulkheads will stand up to those,” Hancock said as we prepared to head off. “But don't test it, okay? If a round went through the accessway bulkhead, it might crack the ice on the other side, and that would likely ruin your whole day.”

Not to mention ruined days for those we were leaving behind on the
Walsh
, and the survivors inside the station. One failure, one cascade of incoming water at over a hundred tons per square centimeter, and bulkheads, airlock hatches, and the docking collar doors wouldn't be able to stop the final, complete, and absolute collapse.

Just beyond the docking-­collar door, I stooped to check on the wounded Gykr. It had curled up into a kind of fetal position, like an armadillo, so that only its segmented dorsal armor was exposed.

“Is it dead?” Ortega asked.

“I think so,” I replied. “I wish I knew more about its respiratory metabolism.”

Chief Garner and I had pulled a lot of samples from the Gucker we'd dissected, and lab tests should tell us a lot more about them.

The EG did tell us that the atmosphere they breathed was . . . unusual, with oxygen, which they appeared to use in a metabolic process similar to that of humans, but also apparently requiring a high concentration of carbon dioxide. There were ecosystems, I knew, that used carbon dioxide instead of oxygen—­not to support combustion, obviously, but through a carbolic acid cycle that did much the same thing.

But a life form that used
both
was something new.

Or . . . possibly the CO
2
was nothing more for the Gykrs than a background gas, like nitrogen is for us, unreactive and uninvolved in their metabolic processes. That seemed unlikely, because carbon dioxide is rather reactive when put into solution in water . . . though it tends to be unreactive as a gas.

Damn, we had so much to learn. . . .

Ten steps from the docking collar, and we were in pitch-­blackness. We could see the wan circle of hull lights behind us, but they didn't shed much illumination farther into the shaft. I was tempted—­very tempted—­to haul out my light so I could at least see where I was putting my feet, but if there were any more Gucks up ahead, hidden in the darkness, a light would make us perfect targets.

It was bad enough that we were partially blocking the hull lights at our backs. We must be clearly silhouetted against them for anyone waiting up ahead.

My steps slowed the farther in I got. Ortega bumped up against me. “Sorry . . .”

“S'okay,” I whispered. “But hang back a little, okay?”

Where the docking collar had still been steamy and hot, that forty-­five-­meter tunnel, low and narrow, was bone-­chillingly cold. Water dripped constantly from the walls, and in places it was freezing into sheets of ice. I felt it as I put my hand out to steady myself once. The deck underfoot was treacherous, and the curving tunnel wall was glazed over.

And then I tripped over something large and hard in the darkness.

I was sure I must be close to the end of that seemingly endless passageway, and we'd not yet been challenged. Stepping back, cautioning Ortega to stop, I decided to take a chance. I pulled my penflash out of my M-­7 and directed it at the deck ahead.

It was another Gykr, curled into that same, familiar fetal position, and quite dead. I picked up the plasma weapon lying beside it. “You want this?” I asked, offering it to Ortega.

“Hell, no,” he said. He gestured with the Republic-­12. “I barely know which end is the business end of this thing.”

“Fair enough.” At least I
had
fired one of these things before. It wasn't hard to operate—­hold
this
and press
that
—­but it was clumsy for a human hand. Gykr manipulators are combinations of one long claw and six spidery, double-­jointed fingers, and the grip is damned awkward for a human hand. I felt a bit foolish facing that last door at the end of the long tunnel with an alien plasma weapon in each hand, but I wasn't about to leave the second weapon lying on the deck.

I was staring at the door, wondering how to make it work, when it puckered suddenly and flowed open. According to our sonar scans, that door should open into the sunken base at an airlock.

Four Guckers were waiting on the other side of that door, weapons raised and pointing straight at my head. “Drop weapons!” a harsh voice clattered in my head. “Drop now!”

There was nothing Ortega or I could do but comply. . . .

 

Chapter Twenty-­One

T
he Gykrs crouched in a semicircle in front of us, heads low to the deck, threatening us with their plasma weapons. Behind them, in the near darkness of a ruined lab, I could see several humans, dirty, ragged, and unshaven . . . about what you would expect of ­people cut off from most technological amenities for several weeks.

“Do what they tell you,
please
,” one of the humans said. He was an older man . . . and I thought he looked familiar. It took me a moment to place him, though—­Dr. James Eric Murdock, the commander of the first Abyssworld research base.

“Dr. Murdock?” I said. “Are you and your ­people okay?”

“Do . . . do I know you, sir?”

“Your virtual avatar was my guide in a docuinteractive, sir,” I said.

“No speech!” the Gykr growled. The words were coming through my in-­head circuitry, which meant that the Gykrs had their own cerebral implants, along with the software that let them translate their thoughts into Gal3, which in turn could be translated into English by my own implants. That, I thought, was a considerable relief. Dealing with hostile aliens when you don't share a common language can leave you with no options at all except gunfire.

I opened a second channel back to the
Walsh
. “Trouble!” I snapped. “We have a number of human survivors, but they've been captured by Gykr—­”

“
No speech!
” The Gykr reared up on its splayed, long hind legs, its shorter forelegs weaving in an agitated manner. Apparently, it was linked in closely enough with the local communications Net that it could pick up any back-­channel chatter that might be going on in the area. Secret conversations would be impossible.

I was able to drop the security interlock on my cerebral hardware. I wouldn't be able to get a direct signal out without being detected, apparently, but perhaps the others could listen in over the local Net.

I hoped.

“Take it easy,” I thought at him. “We are not a threat to you. . . .”

It was the only approach that occurred to me. From the little we new of Gykr psychology, they were easily triggered by the perception of a threat, and their response tended to be immediate and violent.

It was easy to think of them as hostile alien monstrosities . . . or as somewhat dim-­witted sociopaths who would kill you as soon as look at you . . . but the truth, I knew, had to be considerably different. They had developed a technological civilization sophisticated enough to give them starflight . . . after evolving deep within a solitary rogue planet light years from any other world.
How had they managed to pull that off?

If what we thought we knew of their origins was accurate, they'd evolved from marine organisms deep within a lightless ocean . . . or possibly inside lightless caves warmed by upwelling magma within their dark and isolated world's crust. How long had it taken them to develop even simple tools, smelting, their equivalent of an industrial revolution, electronics? . . .

How long before Gykr explorers first tunneled up to the frozen surface of their world, wearing artificial armor to protect them from the airlessness and cold?

With eyes evolved to see the near infrared, the heat within their caverns . . . how long before they even became aware of the stars?

Humankind had gone from primitive experiments with electricity to putting men on Earth's moon in two centuries, more or less . . . and to sending ships to the nearer stars in three and a half. It might have taken the Gykr a million years to reach the stars . . . 10 million . . . or more. . . .

The fact that they had done so, to my mind, was an astonishing statement of the sheer persistent determination of life over adversity, of
intelligence
over darkness. After such a journey, I thought, they might be excused for a certain lack of social graces.

The upright Gykr appeared to be considering my words and, slowly, it dropped the forward part of its body back to the deck. That odd, golden, compound eye-­ring that encircled both the ventral and dorsal surfaces of its head gave it all-­round vision, and I knew it was still watching me closely.

But just how closely was that? According to the information I remembered from Gykr entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica, their visual range overlapped ours only slightly. They could see red and orange light, possibly the way we see blue or violet, but their visual range was actually centered down in the near infrared. That compound eye-­ring would be best for seeing movement, not sharp detail . . . and the large, dark simple eyes extending from either side of that blunt excuse for a head probably saw only heat, fuzzy and less than precise. Gykr eyes obviously were evolved for seeing in the dark or near darkness, by the wan and ruddy glow of subsurface volcanic vents, perhaps, and not in the levels of light taken for granted by humans.

Was there
anything
there I could use? I didn't see anything obvious. They would still see if I stooped for one of the plasma weapons lying on the deck at my feet.

“Your . . . underwater vessel . . . is mine . . . now,” the voice rasped.

“Mine,” not “ours.” That might be an artifact of the Gykr tendency toward a hive mentality. Did the four beings in front of us really share a hive mind? Could they even be thought of as individuals? Or did the word merely identify the speaker as the leader of this group? I didn't know.

“You're trapped down here, aren't you?” I said, looking for a way to turn a Gykr monologue into a conversation. “Just like us. . . .”

“My vessel . . . did not . . . return.”

No, I thought, it damned well hadn't. The Gykr sub must have dropped some of them off here, then returned toward the surface where it had encountered the
Walsh
coming down. These Gykr were marooned, and the only way back to the surface was on board the
Walsh
.

“We're here to rescue you,” I said. “
All
of you.”

“You are . . . here . . . to rescue you.”

“We are
not
your enemy,” I said. “We're not at war, you and I. We can help you.”

I could almost see the Gykr struggling with alien concepts. Xenosophontologists back on Earth had speculated that the Gykr had no concept for “war,” in the same way that a fish might not understand the concept of “water.” And yet they
had
accepted the treaty of Tanis, at least more or less.

Damn it, was there something
there
I could use? The Battle of Tanis had been a one-­sided affair, with the Fifth Fleet catching a much smaller Gykr squadron and supply base by surprise. And . . . when we'd arrived in the GJ 1214 system, that lone Gykr starship had run for it, rather than putting up a fight.

I would need access to a history database—­something I didn't have right now, a thousand kilometers underwater—­but I thought I remembered that in the forty-­some years since the Battle of Tanis, there'd been numerous Gykr raids and skirmishes with the bastards, but nothing like a stand-­up war. Maybe that idea of “fight-­or-­fight,” suggesting that they always attacked no matter what the tactical situation, wasn't entirely true.

Could it be true, even, for any species worthy of the term
intelligent
? There would always be situations that were simply too dire, too unbalanced in number, too hopeless to permit an attack-­at-­any-­odds response. Creatures that always attacked and never ran away when the odds were against them were unlikely to survive in the long haul. Evolution was damned efficient at culling those who were reckless.

It could be that Tanis had taught the Gykr a measure of caution.

“You would have to take our vessel by force,” I told them. “I don't think you have the numbers to do that.”

It was pure bluff. The ­people still back on board the
Walsh
were completely unarmed.

“How many . . . of you . . . on vessel?”

“Twenty,” I said. “Heavily armed.”

“You are . . . twenty?”

“Twenty-­two,” I replied. “Dr. Ortega and I didn't know there were more of you here when we left our vessel.” I wondered if I should mention it, then pushed ahead. “We killed the two Gykr we met in the passageway. They tried to kill us, so we felt . . . justified.”

The Gykr appeared to be uncertain. I couldn't read their body language, but that was okay because I was willing to bet that they couldn't read ours, either.

“The deaths . . . of two units . . . is of no consequence.”

“I repeat,” I said, “we are
not
at war. We can cooperate to get out of this.”

“You will . . . leave the vessel,” the Gykr said after a moment, as though it had just seen the perfect solution. “All but . . . the vessel's guide. You will . . . remain here with . . . the rest of you.”

The vessel's guide . . . they meant our pilot, Gina Lloyd. And the rest of us would be trapped on this ice-­bound derelict a thousand kilometers beneath the surface. That wasn't quite what I had in mind by
cooperate
.

As it spoke, I was trying to assess the Gykr's worldview, the way it saw the world around it and interacted with it. Thanks, perhaps, to an e-­entertainment industry favoring simple plots and exciting action sequences, most ­people see aliens as
­people
. . . funny-­looking, perhaps, and with some odd ideas now and again, but beings essentially the same as them, with the same values and the same ways of responding to stimuli, with reactions as varied as anger, love, hatred, or fascination. And, of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

We'd assumed the Gykrs to be a hive mentality. Their entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica had got us thinking along those lines. That did
not
mean that all Gykrs everywhere were a single vast and complex individual—­which was what most ­people thought when they considered termite mounds or bee swarms. No, what it seemed to mean in this case was that Gykrs had leaders within any given group, and those leaders did most of the thinking and communicating for the whole. I noticed that all four of the Gykrs in front of me appeared identical. Nothing marked one off as distinct or different from the others . . . but one was doing all of the talking while the others just . . . crouched there.

Well, you could say the same thing about the U.S. Marines, or of any well-­disciplined but non-­democratic organization of humans. The difference, perhaps, was that Marines had to be carefully trained to be both able and willing to set aside their personal urges and reactions—­like fear—­and accept what was necessary for the entire group. Charging an enemy plasma-­gun nest—­or, say, a space station occupied by dangerous terrorists—­was lunacy for any individual. Lunacy, however, might be necessary to prevent those terrorists from dropping a small planetoid onto a densely populated Earth.

The Gykr had evolved within an environment utterly hostile and alien to human sensibilities, and to do so they would have evolved a native sense of discipline as thorough and as rigorous as that of any human Marine. They
had
to have done so.

Marines are the way they are because of training, and that gives them a certain amount of flexibility. The Gykr are the way they are because of breeding, the way their brains are hardwired from birth or hatching or whatever it is they do.

And
that
was the tactical advantage I was looking for.

“I'm not the leader of this group,” I told the Gykr. “I'm not in charge, I don't give the orders. I
can't
order everyone off our vessel. The others would never agree.”

All of the Gykr stirred uneasily. “ ‘Leader'?” the one said. “We are having . . . trouble . . . understanding this.”

Well, of course that would be true. The concept was so deeply rooted in their evolutionary design they might not even be aware of it . . . like a fish unaware of the water within which it swam.

“Do you have a word,” I asked, treading carefully, “for the one of you who makes decisions for the group? Who speaks for the group?”

I heard a harsh
clack
in my in-­head, evidently the Gykr word itself, untranslated. “It means . . . ‘chosen.' ”

“I see.” That made sense. Not “chosen” as in democratically elected or anything so cerebral as determining who was best to lead. “Chosen” as in chosen by circumstances, or by an uncaring universe. A group of Gykr finds itself isolated, and one among them becomes the leader, making decisions for the entire group, which automatically rallies around the flag. Perhaps there were subtle biochemical cues that nudged the process along; the selection process probably wasn't due to chance.

I remembered reading of certain species of fish in Earth's oceans. Clownfish schools have a female fish at the top of the hierarchy; when she dies, the most dominant male in the school will change into a female and take over. Among wrasses, the largest female will turn into a male and take over the harem if the school's male leader dies. The choosing of a Gykr leader might be similar, although apparently the condition was temporary. A leader is needed, and one appears, with all others falling into line and following orders.

As a survival tool, the process would neatly avoid the dangers of warring tribes or egoistic posturings or the idiocy of power for power's sake alone within a deadly and unforgiving environment.

“Among humans,” I told the Gykr, “we're
all
chosen. We agree to cooperate to achieve certain goals, and we'll agree to accept orders from one trained or experienced individual . . . but if I give orders that the others disagree with, like leaving the submarine, they will not do what I say.”

“But . . . if the Akr strikes, you would be devoured!”