Abyss Deep (31 page)

I could actually hear the emotion shaking behind the Gykr's words. Human individuality must be sheer insanity from the Gykr point of view.

“You've been a Galaxy-­faring species for a long time,” I said. “You must have encountered other species who think . . . who behave the way we do.”

“Not . . . we, personally. We have heard . . . stories . . .”

I remembered that the Gykr had something like 10 percent fewer synaptic connections within their brains. Knowledge might circulate within the entire species as hearsay or legend or be accessed, as with us, through a download from the local Net, but in general they would respond more to habit, to tradition, or to biochemical tides within their neural makeups than they did to education.

It was tempting to think of them as
stupid
, but I resisted the thought. Their system worked well enough for them, as proven by the fact that they'd not only survived the night-­shrouded world of their birth, but freed themselves from it.

The distinction was bogus in any case. One version of the IQ scale designated
normal
as anything between 85 and 115, so an average species IQ of 90 certainly qualified as human-­normal.

“Your ship abandoned you here, didn't it?” I said in what I hoped was a light and conversational tone. “You need to get back to the surface, so your ship can return and pick you up?”

“My submersible . . . has not returned . . . as expected. The . . . Akr . . . might have attacked. . . .”

That was the second time the being had used that untranslatable term. In context, I assumed that it was the Gykr name for some sort of sea monster in the ancient ocean of their world. It took me a moment longer to realize that the Gykr must be referring to the cuttlewhales.

And
that
was an entirely different piece of the puzzle. We'd battled cuttlewhales on the surface ice—­and I'd watched a Gykr devoured by one. And yet, a cuttlewhale had . . .
helped
us, if that was the word, by swallowing the
Walsh
and transporting us hundreds of kilometers deeper into the ocean, to bring us
here
.

“Then let me offer you this: Our vessel can't take all of you back to the surface at once. We can provide transport for you to the surface . . . one at a time. Each trip our submersible makes will carry one of you, plus several of the humans trapped here, to safety. Our pilot will then return for another load . . . and another, until all of us have reached safety.”

It was a monstrous gamble on several levels. By limiting each trip to one Gykr, I knew we could maintain control over them—­Gunny Hancock or Dr. Montgomery watching it with a plasma weapon in his good hand. It would also avoid letting the Gykr remaining below know that I'd exaggerated the number of armed humans on board the
Walsh
.

But each trip would take a hell of a long time unless one of the cuttlewhales decided again to intervene and shorten the passages for us. Would a lone Gykr assume the role of leader during the long voyage to the surface, and perhaps make its own decisions about whether or not to go along with the process?

I was reminded of an ancient riddle. A man reaches a ferry on a river with two chickens and a fox. The ferry will carry two at a time; if the fox is left alone with a chicken, the chicken will be killed. So how does the man get across with his livestock intact?

Obviously, you took the fox across first, went back for one chicken, carried it across, then brought the fox back with you to the near bank and left it there when you picked up the second chicken. You could then make a third crossing to retrieve the fox.

This situation wasn't quite that simple, but there were ways to guarantee the safety of the human chickens.

“You and I will remain here,” I added, “until the very last trip. So that you can trust me.”

“We do not . . . understand . . . the term . . . ‘trust.' ”

Well, that stood to reason, didn't it? “You
trust
your
chosen
to make the appropriate decisions in a group,” I suggested.

“No. We accept that . . . necessary decisions . . . are made.”

“Close enough.” The Gykr appeared to be far more passive in their relationships with one another, again, the result, I guessed, of the biochemical imperatives that had arisen through their evolutionary history. “If we're going to get out of this trap, humans and Gykr together, we're going to have to cooperate. That is a necessary decision, agreed?”

“A decision might be made . . . to kill . . . all of you here,” the Gykr replied, impassive, “and take your vessel . . . for my own use. Or . . . you all remain here . . . while we and your vessel's guide . . . make the ascent.”

The Gykr's curious, broken mode of conversation was fast becoming annoying. It was as though the being had to stop and think about each phrase before speaking it.

“We won't agree to that,” I said. “We don't
trust
you. But we have a means of working together, so that all of us can get out of this.”

I wondered, though, about that Gykr starship. On board the
Haldane
, we'd assumed that they'd be back, probably with a larger fleet. There was the distinct possibility that we would return to the surface and find
Haldane
fled, with a Gykr fleet in complete possession of the surface of GJ 1214 I.

“We could . . . kill all of you.”

“Can you?” I said. “All of us in here, yes. You have the weapons. But can you attack our submarine, and everyone on board? Without damaging the vessel so badly that it can't undock? And I promise you . . . if you kill the humans on this station, the humans on board our submarine will
never
trust you,
never
work with you,
never
agree to cooperate with you. You will be trapped down here in the darkness, at the mercy of the . . . of the
Akr
, forever. . . .”

The Gykr stirred, again uneasy. They were definitely on new and uncertain ground. The question was, Were they flexible enough to overcome hardwired evolutionary conditions and try something as alien to them as interspecies cooperation?

“Tell you what,” I added. “If your ship is waiting for us when we reach the surface, we can agree to turn control of the transfer over to one of them . . . a new chosen, one of yours.”

“Doc!” Ortega said, startled. “What are you saying?”

I shrugged. “It's a foregone conclusion, isn't it?” I asked him. “If the Gykr are in control up there, they'll take command of the
Walsh
anyway, no matter what we do. We'll be forced to trust them to come get the rest of us.”

“I don't like it . . .”

“Neither do I. You have another suggestion?”

“What you offer . . . is acceptable,” the Gykr chosen said after another long moment's pause. “I see no . . . reasonable alternative.”

“You will permit us full contact with our vessel.”

“Yes.”

“You will put down your weapons. As have we.”

“Yes.”

“And we will work together in order to survive.”

“Yes.”

As an interstellar treaty, it had a few shortcomings, but it was the best we could hope for at the moment. I exchanged thoughts with Hancock, back on board the
Walsh
. As it happened, they'd been able to follow most of the exchange, having picked up on the fact that both Ortega and I had killed our privacy interlocks.

“You done good, Doc,” Hancock said. “We'll make a Marine of you yet.”

“Thanks, Gunny. There are still twenty of you over there, heavily armed, right?”

“Right.”

That, I knew, was the weakest part of the plan. It seemed unlikely that we'd be able to get one of our weapons over to the
Walsh
without the Gykr knowing about it. Once the first Gykr came on board the
Walsh
, he would realize that things were not as I'd represented them. If he was in communication with the other three Gykr, the whole situation could change in an instant.

As it would if a landing party from the Gykr starship was waiting for us topside.

“Tell 'em, Doc,” Hancock said, “that we've removed all weapons from the
Walsh
's bridge, and that there's just four of us here, okay? And the Gykr and the base survivors can ride up with us. The armed Marines are in the main compartment aft.”

“Did you hear that, Chosen?” I asked the temporary Gykr leader.

“We . . . did.”

How long could we carry off the bluff? Well . . . once the
Walsh
de­coupled from the docking collar, submarine and base would be cut off from each other. It would be up to Hancock to continue the deception on the
Walsh
. Maybe he had a means of cobbling together something that looked like a weapon. Or maybe he actually had a holdout somewhere on board; Marines often did.

The idea was to keep the Gykr
here
calm and reasonably satisfied as we transferred them, one by one, to the surface.

One of the uncommunicative Gykrs went through the airlock into the access tunnel, along with eight human survivors and one M'nangat. I braced myself for some sort of protest or scene . . . but eventually we heard some muffled, metallic sounds and felt a distant tremor through the deck.
Walsh
had just cast off from the station and was on her way to the surface.

Unfortunately, the base did not have any outside nano to provide us with vid images of what was going on. Whatever had been out there had been encased in the ice shell deliberately woven around what was left of the base, so we were blind to everything outside the base's crumpled interior.

I would have liked to see if one of the cuttlewhales had moved in to give us another assist.

“So . . . Dr. Murdock,” I said. “What the hell happened here?”

His eyes shifted to the remaining Gykr. “We were . . . attacked,” he said. “A bombardment from orbit. The ice around and under us melted enough that the weight of the main base caused us to break through and sink.”

“But how did you end up
here
?” Ortega asked. “Floating . . . but a thousand kilometers down!”

“Our specific gravity,” Murdock said with a wan smile, “the ratio of CM hull to internal air space, was . . . low enough that we sank fairly slowly. It was a near thing, though. The pressure was seriously beginning to deform the hull before we could reprogram the external hull nano to begin adding layers of ice . . . a jury-­rigged pressure hull.”

I'd not closely examined the base interior, not with all of the back-­and-­forth with the aliens . . . but I could see now what he meant. The main lab occupied perhaps a quarter of the original dome, but the bulkheads had been crumpled inward under tremendous force, buckling and folding to give the compartment the feel of something more like a natural cavern than an architectural structure. I estimated that well over half of the original internal space had been taken over by collapsing CM hull structure.

“As for why we're motionless here,” Murdock continued, “we couldn't see out, didn't know what was happening. Before we were attacked, we'd probed as deeply as we could with sonar, and discovered what we think is a layer of exotic ice at this depth. Maybe we're aground on that.”

“That is the case,” Ortega told him. “We're hypothesizing a kind of soft slush of exotic ice in an amorphous state . . . maybe ice VII or ice VIII . . . maybe something even stranger.”

“We've learned that the cuttlewhales are made of ice VII,” I added. “Certain metals and other exotic ices mixed in . . . but it's organic ice VII. I think it likely that what the base is resting on is a layer of organic ice VII.”

“Wait-­wait,” Ortega said, startled. “
Organic
ice? Like the cuttlewhales?”

“The cuttlewhales evolved somewhere,” I said, “and some
how
. The entire substrate of compressed amorphous ice VII might actually be alive.”

“I don't think I can accept
that
,” the environmental planetologist said.

I shrugged. “It may not matter. I've just been wondering about how something as unlikely as the cuttlewhales could have come about. Dr. Murdock . . . how about your ­people? How many are there, anyway?”

He looked stricken. “Thirty-­five,” he said, “plus four of our M'nangat. “Most of the others were caught in compartments that flooded in the first few moments of the attack.”

“Are there injured?” I patted my M-­7 kit. “I'm a combat medic.”

He nodded. “Six serious ones. We put them in a berthing compartment, through here.”

“We should have evaced them first,” I said, “with the first load.”

He sighed. “We're not sure any of them are going to make it,” he said. “I thought it more important that the
living
escape this trap. . . .”

And he had a perfectly valid point. Triage—­determining who lives and who dies based on available supplies and seriousness of wounds—­can be a heartbreaking aspect of field first aid. I learned that three of the four medical doctors assigned to the base had been killed, and the fourth was one of the unconscious injured. I checked all six of them, four men, two women, and found there was little I could do for them. Automated systems had pumped them full of nano to control the pain and keep them unconscious. Three were hooked up to full life-­support units that were doing their breathing for them. Skinseal and injected nano had controlled bleeding and stabilized them all . . . for now. I could use my N-­prog to further tweak the nanobots to facilitate healing, but more than anything I could do, they all needed extensive surgical intervention . . . and that meant a sick bay at least as good as
Haldane
's, and someone with surgical training at least as good as Kirchner's, but without the insanity.