Abyss Deep (2 page)

My tactical in-­head showed the doughnut was almost there. A steady countdown was silently running against my field of view. We were twenty seconds now from touching down.

Thirty meters away, Lance Corporal Stalzar's armor lit up, a dazzling flare of light consuming the torso of his suit. We all heard the shriek . . .

“Sniper!” Thomason called. “Marine down!”

I was already checking Stalzar's readouts on my in-­head. There was nothing . . .
nothing
I could do. . . .

A second star appeared close to the asteroid's horizon, opposite the mining station, growing brilliant, then fading. We had countersnipers both up on Geosynch Center, halfway up the space elevator, and on board a Marine transport a few thousand kilometers above and behind us. They'd seen the pulse of the tango's laser when he'd shot Stalzar, and vaporized the chunk of asteroid terrain where he'd been hiding.

Ten seconds. What had been a bright star, then a gleaming toy in the sunlight, was expanding now into something much larger. Another silent flare of light on the asteroid marked a second countersniper shot. Maybe they'd spotted a tango's heat signature against the rock.

Five seconds. The rock drifted off to my right. Directly ahead, the silvery smooth surface of the mining facility's Hab One now filled my forward view. I could see the alphanumerics painted on the hull, and a corporate logo—­Skye Metals—­sandblasted by orbiting grit. The doughnut was affixed to the hull high and a little to my left. I shifted my vector slightly, aiming for a flat surface nearby. I gave an in-­head order, and my AI flipped me end-­for-­end. My feet were aimed at the station as my thrusters cut in, slowing me. I hit the hull two seconds later, flexing my knees to absorb the impact. Around me, Marines were raining out of the sky, touching down on the hull, then moving toward the doughnut.

I let the Marines go first, of course. As the platoon's Corpsman—­the “Doc”—­I was expected to keep up but not to engage in combat. That was the contract U.S. Navy Corpsmen had shared with the Marine Corp for the past three centuries or so: they do the fighting, and we patch 'em up.

The waiting was over. The first Marine fireteam was plunging into the doughnut, headfirst.

The VBSS Mobile Nano-­utility Lock is indispensible for Visit Board Search and Seizure ops in hard vacuum, especially when the visit is being resisted by an armed enemy. It really is a doughnut wheel some three meters across, with what looks like a black sheet stretched taut across the hole. It hits the hull of a target vessel or base, and nanodisassemblers on the business side chew through metal, plastic, and active nano sheathing with ease. The black sheet is a nanomatrix pressure shield just a few molecules thick; it holds in the target vessel's air, but molds close to a boarder's armor, letting him pass through without venting atmosphere.

“Rogers! Jorgenson!” Thomason snapped over the platoon channel. “Hold up!”

The next two Marines in line waited, clinging to handholds on the doughnut. Thomason was watching what was happening inside by means of cameras mounted on the helmets of the first four-­man fireteam.

“Okay!” Thomason said. “Fireteam two! Go!”

Rogers and Jorgenson slipped through the lock, followed by Beaudet and Tomacek. They were followed by the next fireteam . . . and the next. I wasn't tapped in to the visual channels, but I could hear the radio calls of the Marines already inside.

“
Watch it! Watch it! Tango at oh-­one-­five!
”

“
Moving! Firing!
”

“
Rogers! Morrisey! To your right!
”

“
Got him! Tango down!
”

“
Sobiesky! You and Marshall secure the hatch! The rest of you, with me!
”

More and more of the platoon's Marines vanished through the doughnut, until it was my turn. I grabbed the handholds and pulled myself forward. I could feel the nanoseal closing around me, clinging to me, sliding down my torso as I moved . . . and then I was through.

The interior was a large compartment some ten meters across, dark except for emergency lights spaced around the bulkheads. Directly ahead, my helmet light illuminated a massive tangle of pipes and conduits—­the business end of the nano-­D mining equipment eating its way into the heart of Atun 3840. A dead tango floated in the air nearby, wearing what looked like a Chinese space suit without the helmet. A MAW drifted nearby.

Magnetic accelerator weapons aren't a real good choice for close combat inside a pressurized environment. I wondered how well trained these idiots were.

A Marine fireteam on the far end of the hab module used an applicator gun to smear a two-­meter circle of nano-­D against the bulkhead, and then one of them gave the smoking ring a hard kick. Gunfire cracked and clanged as magnetic rounds snapped through the opening and punched through bulkheads, a cacophony of noise after the silence of our passage through vacuum. Corporal Tom Morrisey screamed, and I saw a flash of incoming data on my med channel.

“Corpsman!” Thomason yelled. “Marine down!”

I was also getting environmental warnings, and a station Klaxon began sounding an alert. Some of the rounds that had missed Morrisey had punched through the facility's outer hull. The station's external nanomatrix would seal the holes, but that would take a few moments, and the air pressure was dropping precipitously in the meantime.

That wouldn't hurt us, of course, but it put the station's crew in danger.

I kicked off the bulkhead and glided across the compartment to Morrisey. His right arm was missing below the elbow, the armor there was a tangled mess, and blood was spurting from the wreckage in a bright orange-­red arterial stream that was breaking off into darker gobbets as it spiraled with his rotation. I collided with him and stabilized his spin, then jacked into his armor for a direct readout.

The magnetically accelerated slug had sliced through his elbow with kinetic energy enough to shred armor and amputate the lower arm. Normally, Marine armor will guillotine shut above a serious leg or arm wound, stopping the bleeding and, more important, stopping the suit from venting its air into vacuum. That last might be a problem in another few minutes, but right now the cabin pressure was high enough that the armor's slice-­and-­seal function hadn't triggered. Morrisey's brachial artery was pumping out blood fast; he would be dead in a few minutes if I didn't stop the bleeding.

I did a quick scan to make certain he didn't have any head trauma—­it looked like it was just his arm that had been hit, but you never know—­then thoughtclicked a key directing Morrisey's suit to autoinject a jolt of anodynic recep blockers into his carotid artery. Heart rate 155 . . . BP 149 over 90, respiration 36 and gasping, rapidly elevating levels of both adrenalin and noradrenalin.

Morrisey stopped screaming as the nanoanadynes started shutting down the doloric receptors in his thalamus and the insular cortex, blocking the pain signals as they reached his brain. “Jesus, Doc!” he said. “I can still feel it! It feels . . .
weird
!”

“That's because your pressure receptors are still firing. Don't worry. You're going to be fine.”

I hoped
. His extremities were already starting to cool, which meant he was already shocky. I ordered his suit to clamp down on his upper arm to reduce the brachial artery flow, then raise its internal temp slightly and relax the external pressure on the arteries leading to his head to interrupt the shock response.

I had to make a quick decision, though. The armor clamp would slow the bleeding, but wouldn't stop it by itself. I could cram a packet of skinseal into the injury, and let that seal off the wound . . . or I could order his suit to slice off what was left of his arm well above the bleeding stump. The guillotine at his elbow, obviously, was smashed; the next working blade was eight centimeters up, midway up his humerus. The nanonarcs would block the pain, or most of it, but he would still
feel
it, and that would increase the risk of shock.

Shock or not, I elected to cut. Skinseal is great stuff, but it's better for minor bleeding. And if the mining station's outer hull didn't seal off the leaks, Morrisey would have other problems in a moment if he started losing air.

I again checked his nananodyne levels, then thoughtclicked through the link to trigger the suit's chopper. Another chunk of his arm came off, a squat cylinder encased in black armor, but the bleeding stopped at once.

“God,” he said. “I'm gonna be sick. . . .”

“No,” I told him. “You're not.”

Vomiting inside a space suit is
very
serious business, and can lead to drowning. Morrisey's armor was already firing antiemetic 'bots into his carotid artery, but it wasn't enough.

The vomiting reflex is triggered in the
area postrema
, a tiny nub on the floor of the brain's fluid-­filled fourth ventricle snugged up against the cerebellum. There are a number of different chemical pathways leading to emeses triggers, but most involve a neuropeptide called substance P, or SP, which is found in both the brain and the spinal cord and which is associated with inflammation, pain, and shock.

I pulled my N-­prog from my M-­7 medical kit and thought a quick series of commands into it. The device, in turn, reprogrammed some of the nananodyne bots now circulating through Morrisey's brain, ordering them to block out the SP . . . and also to shut down the cholinergic receptor input from his inner ears, since his vestibular system—­reacting to zero-­G—­was also screaming at him. The reprogrammed 'bots would add to the suit's antiemetic response, helping to stifle Morrisey's nausea before he vomited inside his helmet.

“Yeah,” Morrisey said. “Yeah . . . that's . . . that's better, Doc. Thanks.”

I gave his readouts a final check. His BP was stabilizing at 125 over 70, and his respiration was a bit slower now. “You'll be fine,” I told him. “Some time in sick bay, and we'll grow you a new arm, better than the old.”

He nodded inside his helmet. “I know.”

I sent him back to the doughnut to await a medevac. Now that we had our foothold on board Zeta, more Marines were on the way in, along with support vessels and transports to haul away the wounded. I made my way toward the second breach in the bulkhead, slipping through and into the compartment on the other side. The fighting appeared to be over—­here, at least. There was a seething mob of ­people in brown utilities, more spacesuited bodies, Marines, and a lot more drifting globules of blood, a tangle too confused for me to count. Marines were moving among the rescued hostages, cuffing their hands with zipstrips. Until we were absolutely sure of who was a tango and who was a hostage, we handled them
all
as potential terrorists. There was a bank of link-­in controls along one bulkhead. I saw one deeply padded seat with a dead tango strapped into it, his hands still on the palmpads on the chair's arms. He'd probably been the terrorist commander, running the station's defenses by jacking in at this secondary control center, but the ugly crater in his spacesuit's chest showed that a Marine had taken him out with a laser rifle.

“Corpsman, front!”

I homed on this new call, pushing my way through the milling civilians and Marines. Gunny Hancock was waving to me from an open hatch in the bulkhead beyond. “In here, Doc! On the double!”

Drifting through the opening, I entered a small and bare compartment—­probably a storage locker. There were two M'nangat drifting inside, and one of them looked like it was hurt. Another dead tango floated near the overhead, a MAW pistol still clutched his hand.

I drifted over to the alien. “What happened?” I asked.

“That guy shot him,” Hancock said, “just as we came through the door. Is it bad?”

“It's not good.”

The M'nangat are surprisingly like us biologically—­carbon-­based oxygen breathers, with metal-­chelated tetrapyroles pumped through an enclosed circulatory system by a pair of two-­chambered hearts working in synch. They even use DNA for genetic coding rather than one of several other xenobiological possibilities, but that's where the similarities stop. The being was a ­couple of meters long, resembling a pale, blue-­green pillar of thick, tightly twisted tentacles like a tree's trunk, which then spread out from the creature's base like the roots of a tree. At the top end was what looked like a half-­meter cluster of grapes—­though each grape was the size of an orange—­translucent, and shot through with flecks of red and gold. The wounded one had a savage puncture in one side of its leathery trunk, and blue-­green liquid was jetting in spurts from the wound with enough force to paint one bulkhead and drive the being into the other like a small rocket. Slits beneath the grape cluster representing mouths and breathing apertures gaped and pulsed, and the being uttered a startlingly human-­sounding groan.

“You'll be okay, fella,” I said. The reassurance was automatic; I didn't expect the creature to answer. But a link switched on within my in-­head, and the words “Thank you” wrote themselves out on an inner window.

I'd not realized that the M'nangat shared something else with us besides our body chemistries, that they had CNS prostheses that, among other things, could connect with an AI residing within their internal hardware and communicate with other software in the area . . . such as a translator program.

And as soon as I thought about that, something clicked into place . . . something I'd just seen and not thought about, but which represented a terrible danger to the station and to us.

“Gunny!” I yelled, turning. “That dead tango in the seat out there . . .”

“What about him, Doc?”

“If he has an AI—­”

I saw Hancock's eyes widen behind his helmet visor. It had clicked for him too. He turned to duck out of the small compartment, but in that same instant I felt a solid jolt, and the sensation of weight tugged at me with a terrifying insistence. It wasn't much—­maybe a tenth of a gravity, but it was terrifying in its implications.