Abyss Deep (4 page)

An overlay is a translucent image of a being's internal structure projected over the image from my unaugmented eyes. I could see the Broc in front of me, but could also see its internal structure in remarkable depth and detail, picked out by hundreds of millions of cell-­sized nanobots adhering to every internal surface and transmitting their relative positions to my N-­prog. The Broc's body appeared to fade away, and I could see the muscular system and, just underneath, the crisscrossing weave of cartilage running from tentacles to eyes. They didn't have true internal skeletons, but the muscles of the body were attached to flexible, cartilaginous scaffolding that doubled as protection for the inner organs. By concentrating, I could let my viewpoint sink deeper. I linked in to the medical data feed from the Net; my AI identified various organs and threw names in so I could tell what I was looking at.

Right away, I could see that my patient was in serious trouble. A ragged cavity extended from the wound into the central core of its body, and a pale, diffuse cloud showed massive internal bleeding. The cartilage had been torn open and several organs damaged, but what really worried me was the bullet.

My nanobots had carefully picked it out: a glittering metal slug now resting immediately above the pulsing two-­chambered muscle that was the M'nangat's upper heart, tucked in beside the artery that corresponded to the aorta in humans. My AI identified the thing from the 'bots' transmissions. It was an M550ND mag-­accelerated nano-­D round, and for some reason the thing had not gone off.

And that made it
extremely
dangerous.

I drew a deep breath, thinking fast. Nanodisassembler rounds are designed to explode on impact, flooding the target with nanobots programmed to dissolve molecular bonds—­in essence reducing it to its component atoms. If the nano in that bullet was omnivorous, programmed to dissolve all bonds, it would have been an insanely dangerous round to use inside a space station. More likely, the nano had been programmed to focus on carbon bonds only: deadly for organic chemistries and most plastics, but inert if they slammed into a metal bulkhead.

Which kind were these? I wanted to believe that the tangos hadn't been
that
crazy . . . crazy enough to fire omnivorous nano-­D rounds inside Zeta Capricorn's hull . . . but their record so far didn't exactly inspire confidence in their rationality. They'd threatened to drop a one-­kilometer rock onto Earth from orbit, for God's sake . . . and when the Marines came on board, they'd set the deadly machinery in motion. When Atun 3840 touched down, the impact quite possibly could kill
billions
.

W
HAT DO YOU SEE?
the uninjured M'nangat asked. He . . . no, she—­my data link provided that correction—­wasn't linked into my download feed, but could tell that I was peering closely at something inside her friend. She sounded as worried as any human might be.

“Just taking a look . . .” I said. I opened a private channel to Hancock. “Hey, Gunny? Can you send someone to get this Broc out of my hair?”

“On the way, Doc.” There was a pause. “How's it going in there? We have two more wounded Marines out here.”

Damn!
“Sorry. I've got a . . . a situation here, and it can't wait. Put 'em on suit med-­support.”

Marine Mark 10 MMCA combat armor can provide some extremely sophisticated first aid to the wearer, including nanobot auto-­injections for both pain and hemorrhage control. Trouble was, my orders for this mission said that our M'nangat guests had first claim on my professional attentions. I guess the brass was afraid of an interstellar incident if one of them bled to death.

“Already done, Doc,” Hancock said. “But one of 'em's in a bad way. We've already captured her, just in case.”

“Acknowledged.”

And I
really
didn't want to think about
that
. CAPTR stands for cerebral access polytomographic reconstruction, and refers to technology that can record a living brain's neural states and chemistries, synaptic pathways, and even its quantum spin states to provide a digital picture of brain activity. If a person suffers serious brain trauma, we can often repair the brain, then download the backup CAPTR data. I'd had it happen to me during the Gliese 581 deployment six months earlier.

The question was . . . was I still me? Or was I a copy of me with all the same memories, so that “I,” the
new
“I,” didn't know the difference?

Marines have a name for ­people brought back by CAPTR technology:
zombies
.

The tangled philosophies involved made my head hurt, and I hated inflicting the same emotional issues on anyone else. But orders were orders . . .

And I had a patient to save.

Pulling a bullet out of someone isn't that hard. In the old days, you took a forceps and a probe and fished around in the wound until you could grab the thing and drag it out . . . though if you weren't careful you could do more damage with the fishing than the original shot had caused. I had a better means at my disposal . . . but the danger was that if I managed to release the bullet's charge of nano-­D, I would kill the patient. I could leave the round where it was, and I seriously considered that option . . . but it was lodged in a bad place, smack between the M'nangat's upper heart and the underside of the brain. If it shifted while we were transporting the Broc, it could kill him.

There was also a chance that the round had a timer or a contact switch in it, set to go off when someone like me was trying to pull it out. Tangos had been known to booby-­trap their victims that way sometimes.

Wonderful. Just fricking wonderful.

I linked in through my N-­prog and began giving commands.

Nanobots are tiny, about one micron in length . . . one-­fifth the width of a human red blood cell. A human hair is anywhere from 40 to 120 times thicker. They propel themselves through blood or interstitial fluid using local magnetic fields—­in this case, that of the Earth itself—­and can also link themselves together magnetically in order to apply force enough to, say, set a broken bone. Could they generate enough unified force to drag a bullet out of the patient without setting it off?

I was about to find out.

I
couldn't know it at the time, of course, but as I studied my patient, Earth was entering a paroxysm of recriminations, verbal assaults, and counterassaults that were bringing us to the brink of a very nasty war. The Terran Commonwealth doesn't speak for all of Earth's teeming billions, not by a damned sight. The North Chinese Socialist Cooperative is an independent nation, for instance, as is Brazil and most of what used to be called India. Most of the Islamic states from Morocco to Indonesia are independents, as is the vast sprawl of Islamic Central Asia.

Even the supposedly happily united nation-­states of the Commonwealth have their share of rebellions, popular insurrections, and independence movements, and the neo-­Ludd movement, as much religious as political, has roots in every technic society on the planet. We knew the tangos who had attacked Capricorn Zeta were neo-­Ludd, but the neo-­Ludds don't have spacecraft. We knew they'd hitched a ride from the space elevator to the mining station on a Chinese tug, but that didn't prove that North China was behind the attack. In fact, the Chinese tug argued against Beijing's involvement. The Chinese weren't stupid, and they knew that endangering the entire planet was certain to call down upon themselves the wrath of almighty God in the form of Commonwealth assault forces, aerospace attacks, and a barrage of orbital railgun strikes.

Logic . . . but at the moment no one on Earth was feeling like indulging in
logic
. The president of Germany had just announced that the terror attack on Capricorn Zeta—­and its subsequent deorbit burn—­was tantamount to a declaration of war by North China. South China had launched a similar verbal assault; Canton wanted full admission to the Commonwealth, and this gave them an opportunity to settle old scores.

And everything was happening so
fast
. In a global network where mind could speak to mind in an instant, news items more than fifteen minutes old were ancient history, and governments could threaten, be counterthreatened, and war be declared in the space of an hour or less.

Below the hurtling mass of the asteroid and its attendant structures, armies were mobilizing, and everywhere,
everywhere
, ­people were waiting to see just exactly where Atun 3840 was going to fall.

T
he bullet was moving. Encased in a sheath of tightly packed nanobots, it was sliding slowly up through the M'nangat's cardiac envelope, moving back the way it had come because that path was already open. At each point where the bullet had ripped open tissue, I detailed a few tens of thousands of 'bots to stay behind and begin repairs, closing up torn tissue and, especially, closing open blood vessels. Most of them, though, kept pushing and pulling at the projectile to ease it back up the wound cavity.

Zero-­gravity made the task easier. I was holding my breath. The bullet showed no sign of being live . . . but if it exploded now my patient was dead. Nano-­D works
fast
, eating the target from the inside out. It burns out quickly, but the nano in a half-­centimeter disassembler round would create a spherical cavity inside the M'nangat a tenth of a meter across, filled with a hot chemical goo of dissociated atoms and a
lot
of suddenly released energy.

I considered the possibility of using my own 'bots to encase any emerging nano-­D if things did go bad, containing the release. They were packed in closely now, sealing the bullet off from its surroundings like a glistening coat of paint. Unfortunately, any nano-­D inside the M550 round would be programmed to target the bonds between carbon atoms, and my 'bots were coated in nothing
but
carbon.

And the energy released from broken molecular bonds . . . I didn't have the exact figures, but the explosion would rip the wounded being in half, and might breach my own armor.

Five centimeters to go. On a human scale—­if my 'bots had been humans—­that was only another one hundred kilometers. I had a momentary, surreal mental image of hundreds of millions of Egyptian laborers hauling one of the stone blocks destined for a pyramid with sledges and ropes . . . except that the bullet in this case would have been a completed pyramid one kilometer high.

With smooth surfaces unreactive to the surrounding tissue, however, the 'bots squeezed the bullet along as if it were a watermelon seed, gathering behind it, opening the path ahead, sliding it through glistening wet tissue. I had it clear of the heart and brain, finally, but if the round detonated it would still kill my patient.

Easy . . . easy . . .

Dimly, I was aware of Corporal Lewis coming up behind me and saying something to the other M'nangat, something about needing her help with a report. Good. I don't like an audience when I work, even if the audience can't see what the hell I'm doing.

Three more centimeters. Through my N-­prog, I'd programmed the 'bots to work together as a single organism, contracting, and then expanding as it moved, clawing against the local magnetic field. I was approaching now the part of the wound that I'd already covered with skinseal. I didn't want to disturb the congealing powder, and would have to route my microscopic parade around that region.
That
way, I decided, just beneath the M'nangat's tough, outer layer of skin.

I would have to slice through the skin to remove the bullet, just
there
, two centimeters to one side of the skinsealed wound.

“I'm going to have to make a small cut in your skin,” I said, allowing my AI to translate for me. I touched her side. “Right about here. But I don't have anything to keep it from hurting.”

I
T . .
 . HURTS . . . NOW,
was the reply.

I hated working without anesthetic, but the way a species transmits signals through its central nervous system—­pain, temperature, pressure, or the more esoteric impulses for emotions or thoughts—­is as unique as the way it deals with immune responses. I can block pain in a human patient easily enough because we understand how human pain works through the doloric receptors inside the thalamus and the insular cortex of the brain, but we have no idea how the analogous system works in the M'nangat. We just don't understand their biochemistry well enough yet.

“Okay,” I said, slipping a laser scalpel from my M-­7 pack and snapping it on. “Brace yourself.”

I made a single quick, short incision, trying to slice through just the tough and gnarled outer integument without touching the nano-­clad bullet just underneath. The M'nangat tensed, and its tentacles whiplashed for an instant, threatening to put us both into a microgravity tumble.

“Steady,” I told herm. “Hold on now . . .”

Several tentacles flicked up and wrapped themselves around my legs, gripping me tightly. That hadn't been what I'd meant by “hold on,” but it seemed to serve as the Broc equivalent of biting the bullet. Green blood emerged from the cut in a dense, expanding cloud . . . and the nano-­D round came with it.

I let the bullet float free as I released the scalpel and snatched another bag of skinseal, thumbing it open. Right about then, I felt another shudder and weight returned . . . again, about a tenth of a gravity.

The meta thrusters were firing again.

 

Chapter Three

F
or a terrifying moment I was way too busy for only two hands, but I slapped the sealant in place, then pulled out a glass specimen container for the M550 round, which was now drifting toward the bulkhead at a bit less than a meter per second, reached out, and scooped it up just before it hit the wall. As I sealed the cap, the bullet abruptly dissolved, filling the vial with an inky black syrup. My breath caught in my throat; if the stuff was programmed to disassemble everything, the vial would dissolve in less than a second, and then we would have a cloud of charged nano-­D floating into the interior of Capricorn Zeta.

But . . . no. The glass contained the ink, and I let out a deep and fervent breath of relief. The stuff must have been programmed to go after carbon, and the silica molecules—­silicon dioxide—­of the glass were beyond its scope. The scalpel and the N-­prog both hit the bulkhead and clung there, and a second later my patient and I thumped against the wall as well.

W
HAT . . . IS . . . HAPPENING?

“I'm hoping the Marines managed to hack into the station's drive,” I told herm, “and are boosting us back into a stable orbit. Um . . . can you let go of my legs now?” The largest of those tentacles, as thick as my thigh and a ­couple of meters long, were
strong
.

Obligingly, they unfurled, then coiled up again into a tight ball. I picked up the N-­prog and used it to call up a scan of the being's internal systems, ordering the nanobots still inside to spread out and give me a full-­body image.

The major bleeders, I noted, had been sealed off. Good. Both hearts were throbbing in lockstep with each other, first one, then the other, and both appeared to be beating steadily. My downloaded medical data suggested that the M'nangat's temperature, respiration, and heart rate all were more or less within normal ranges. That was a damned good thing, too, since I didn't have the nano programming or drugs to change them if they were off.

Down near the creature's base I saw three small shadows.
Buds
. The growing young that in all probability would kill the M'nangat at parturition.

The shudder of the base's engines cut off, and once again, we were in microgravity. I completed my examination. What I could understand appeared to be working okay; I just wished I understood more.

“Okay, Gunny?” I called. “I've got the patient stabilized. We need a medevac, though, to someplace that understands Broc physiology.”

“We have a ­couple of medevacs inbound, Doc.” Hancock replied. “Your friend'll be heading down to San Antone.”

“Excellent.”

The San Antonio Military Medical Center—­usually abbreviated as “SAMMC” and pronounced “Sam-­sea”—­was an enormous installation located at Fort Sam Houston on the northeast edge of San Antonio, Texas. It was where I'd had my Navy Hospital Corps training and where I'd gone to Advanced Medical Technology School a few months later. The naval hospital there is our biggest and best, and if any human facility could handle M'nangat physiology, they could.

“How about our wounded?” I asked.

“Sergeant Rutherford is doing okay,” Hancock replied. “Private Donohue is tech-­dead.”

“How long?”

“Six . . . six and a half mikes.”

Fuck.

The human brain starts to break down the moment blood stops flowing through it. After three minutes, it might just be possible to bring a person back with little or no brain damage. Longer than that, though, and the damage from oxygen starvation is irreversible. The person is “tech-­dead,” technically dead, and is going to need extensive stem-­cell grafts and transplants for the brain to be brought back on-­line again.

And that's why we use CAPTR technology to try to put the patient's mind back in his brain after we've repaired it. It doesn't always work. More often than not it doesn't. If there's been too much damage and neuron replacement, the CAPTR download won't take.

And if it does, the Marine becomes a “zombie,” shunned or worse by other Marines. They're usually redeployed to a different unit after they recover, to avoid being ostracized by superstitious nonsense.

Caryl Donohue had been brain dead too long for me to be able to pull her back.

Would it have made a difference if I'd been able to treat her within a minute or two of being hit? There was no way to tell. Everything depended on the severity of the wound.

But I did know that she would have had a better chance if I'd been there, if I hadn't been trying to gentle that nano-­D round out of the M'nangat carrier's chest.

And that made me feel . . . guilty, somehow. Like I'd not been doing my job. Like I'd let down another member of the platoon.

I didn't want to think about that. “What's the situation, Gunny?” I asked, changing the topic. In any case, I wanted to know if the mission had succeeded . . . or if it had all been for nothing.

“We're in good shape,” Hancock replied. “The bastards planted a blocker virus in the thruster control system, but First Platoon touched down on the rock and took direct control of the thrusters. They hardwired a new control system into the jets, and that let us stabilize the rock's orbit.”

So, the bad guys had sabotaged Capricorn Zeta's controls so that no matter what we'd done, the station and a one-­kilometer asteroid would have burned into Earth's atmosphere and impacted somewhere on the surface moments later. First Platoon had been on an approach vector above and behind us, with the goal of landing on the asteroid itself and securing the thruster complex. Evidently, the plan had worked.

“We were thirty-­five minutes from re-­entry,” Hancock added, “and about forty from impact.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere just south of Japan.”

In many ways, an ocean impact is far worse for the planet than having an asteroid come down on solid ground. Billions of tons of water flashed into vapor . . . a thick cloud ceiling over most of the planet reflecting the heat of the sun back into space . . . and, oh yes, titanic tidal waves racing across the ocean at the speed of sound. The western coast of the Americas would have been hard hit.

But it would have been a hell of a lot worse for Japan and both Chinas. Again, it didn't seem logical that the North Chinese were behind the terror attack on Capricorn Zeta. They would have been vulnerable to an impact anywhere in the Pacific basin—­a bull's-­eye covering one-­third of the planet. But if
not
them, who?

That, however, was for the politicians to argue about. Right now, it was our job to finish securing the mining station, making sure the black hats hadn't planted any bombs or otherwise compromised the base. We also had to process the rescued hostages, still floating around with their hands zip-­tied behind them. This meant interviewing each one, comparing their story with both station computer records and records off the Net, checking their DNA to make sure each man or woman was who he or she claimed to be, and evacuating the wounded shoreside. The Marines were taking care of that part of the evolution.

My job was to prep our wounded for evac . . . and to pull suit recordings on the Marines who'd been hit. Marine combat armor has simple-­minded AIs resident within the electronics that keep a log of events in a battle. What a Marine does wrong during a firefight can be helpful as a basis for Marine training sims, a means of keeping other Marines from making the same mistakes.

Second Platoon had suffered three wounded and one dead—­not a bad casualty ratio, actually, for space combat, where even minor damage to vacuum armor can very easily mean a fast and unpleasant death. We'd lost Lance Corporal Stalzar going in; the others we'd been able to treat or stabilize. We still didn't know about Private Donohue . . .
wouldn't
know about her until we could get her to a proper med facility. I didn't have a report yet from 1st Platoon. I tagged HM2 Michael C. Dubois, the 1st Platoon Corpsman, over the company Net. If he needed help out there on the rock's surface, he could yell for me.

“Carlyle!” Lieutenant Singer called. “What are you doing?”

“Grabbing suit recordings, sir,” I replied.

“That can wait. I need you sweeping the station for goo threats.”

I sighed. No rest for the Wiccans . . .

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“That includes the prisoners.
Especially
the prisoners. We can't allow the medevacs in until the mining station is declared clean.”

Shit
. “I'm on it, sir.”

I wondered whether that order was coming down from Washington, or if it represented the technoparanoia of the local brass—­at a battalion or company level, or even of Second Lieutenant Singer himself.

No matter. Orders
were
orders. I pulled out my N-­prog and began resetting it.

G
ray goo
. That was the old and fear-­entangled term invented by Eric Drexler, one of the twentieth-­century fathers of nanotechnology—­though he'd later said he wished he'd never come up with the phrase. Back in those early days, before the first molecular disassemblers had even been brought on-­line, there'd been a widespread concern about nanomachines programmed to take apart raw materials and create more of themselves. Since human beings are as good as sources of raw materials as an ancient landfill, the fear was that nano-­D would keep on eating and eating until the entire planet was converted to so-­called gray goo.

It couldn't happen, of course.
Run until the raw material is used up
is a piss-­poor way to program molecular machines, first off. They also require energy, a lot of it, to break molecular bonds, and are generally fairly limited in range. Nanodisassemblers are designed to reach an end point and quit. They're also easily shut down by an ultraviolet radiation bath, or by transmission of a seek-­kill signal in their immediate vicinity.

But Humankind has had a love-­hate relationship with nano since the beginning. Medical nano has effectively tripled our expected life span, ended the tyranny of pain, overturned the death sentences of cancer and heart disease, and even holds out the eventual promise of . . . if not immortality, then the next best thing: lifetimes measured by millennia rather than years. Some ­people with full-­course nananagathics in their systems have been around for well over a century, now, and still look like they're in their thirties. Not only that, nanotechnology has completely transformed the way we control and interact with our material surroundings, allowing us to grow everything from a sizzling steak to a house, and pull what we need from the background matrix—­furniture, workstations, nanufactories, anything that can be stored in digital AI memory and retrieved by a thoughtclick.

But the term
gray goo
remains a bugaboo, a terror phrase for anyone nervous about the ever-­increasing pace of our technology. Washington in particular was afraid of what would happen if terrorists got hold of so-­called black nano, which when released would proceed to chow down on Earth's ecosphere.

Ecophagia
—­devouring the ecosphere.

Machines—­even very tiny ones—­only did what humans told them to do.

But then, humans were always the weak part of the equation, capable of the most incredibly stupid or irresponsible of acts.

I
started scanning the compartment with my N-­prog, looking for the telltale electronic signature of nanobots. The trouble was, there were 'bots everywhere. When my N-­prog detected active nano, it transmitted the data to my in-­head, which painted green pinpoints against my vision, marking objects that otherwise would have been invisibly small. I looked at the station bulkhead in front of me, gray-­painted and consisting entirely of massive pipes running from deck to overhead. The biggest, I knew, were sorting pipes, carrying the component elements of Atun 3840 into storage and assembly bays. The thinner tubes were nano-­D feeders, sending microscopic disassemblers into the depths of the captive asteroid. The pipes were silent at the moment, the mining process shut down. But they showed as solid masses of green, each packed with trillions upon uncountable trillions of live nanobots—­motionless, but still powered and on standby. Most of the Marines around me showed diffuse green masses within the outlines of their bodies—­the medical nano we all carried to improve our combat efficiency, react to wounds, and keep us healthy.

There was loose nano drifting in the air too. The damned things are so tiny that there's always leakage, and any environment with active nano running will have escapees. I pointed my N-­prog at several, interrogating them; a lot of the floaters actually were disassemblers—­leftovers from the rounds the tangos had used. They'd shut down but were still broadcasting. Damn, they were
everywhere
.

This was freaking
hopeless
.

“Lieutenant Singer?”

“Go ahead.”

“We've got nano soup in here. It appears inert, but there's so much it's overloading my readings. I recommend a UV bath. The whole station, top to bottom.”

Facilities like Capricorn Zeta were required by law to have ultraviolet lights installed in every compartment, a means of turning off any loose nano that leaked into the environment or came inside on workers' spacesuits. It was the simplest solution, and the only one we had time for.

“Very well,” Singer said. “But check out the tangos. One of them might be a carrier.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The prisoners were being held in the next compartment out from the rock, a common area that served as lounge and mess hall for the miners. One entire bulkhead was transplas, looking down on the cloud tops hugging the Earth. We were crossing the terminator into night, and the clouds were red and flaming orange. The planet looked fragile and terribly vulnerable.