First Published in Shorelines of Infinity #11; Reprinted in Lockdown SciFi #3.
Tom Mallory watched fear twist the rookies’ faces for an instant before the order to lock helmets. Forty-jump veteran Kessel wore a grin – he only came alive when he dove into the zone. The mission’s first-timer, Brenner, awaited the ‘go’ light wide-eyed with dread. In the halflight behind her, Hal Kramer poised, cloaked in surreal calm, an old soldier who’d seen and done it all and didn’t seem to give a cuss if he made it to the extraction or not.
Then Mallory dropped his visor along with the rest of Tango Company. Helmets locked, data immersed him like cool blue lake water while young Jo Brenner mumbled prayers. The transport wallowed over the zone now. They must jump low, hard, fall so fast through the flak, theoretically they’d bottom out with one chance in fifty of an individual taking a hit.
Forty units in Tango. Theoretically they’d plummet through with zero casualties. Mallory often wondered who these theoreticians were, how they spun the numbers to derive such bullshine. Maybe Command believed attractive odds softened the job for rookies on the ‘virgin jump.’ They could be right, but theory made the truth no prettier.
After twenty jumps, Mallory’s heart was a trip hammer. He took pity on Brenner with a gloved hand on her shoulder, but platitudes eluded him. You’ll be okay, kid, just stick close to me – more bullshine. They all knew it, including Brenner.
Spinners, sirens. Data flashed red in the helmet display. A crazy whirl of sky and water – jump!
Mallory propelled Brenner ahead of him while Kessel dove out with a whoop and the veteran Kraemer launched serenely into freefall. Mallory envied the man’s Zen, or Tao, whatever it was. He’d spent years hunting for the gift, but it might have been magic beans, or the grail. You either got it or you don’t, Master Sergeant Yip would say. And if you don’t –
Four seconds out of the transport, three of Tango became titanium shrapnel, carbon fiber confetti. For them, the Third Battle of the Murchison Deep ended in an instant. If the padres offered any more accuracy than the strategists, those kids just boarded the Valhalla Express with advance-booked tickets. Jo Brennan was one of them.
Encrypted comm from all viable Tango units thickened the air with shouting, whooping, demanding, begging, profaning, but red lights peppered Mallory’s helmet display. He swore bitterly. Brenner, Munro and Witherspoon were the lucky ones. Mallory himself was merely damaged.
He spun, tumbling after a glancing hit to the armor’s back-mounted powerpack. Data, visual and life support flatlined for several moments before the reserve cell kicked in, then his eyes raced over the display while he fell like a brick through the last thousand meters to the wind-chopped surface of Endeavor Sound. Beneath him, Murchison Deep dropped away from the sun-bright line of the continental shelf.
Three times, this damn’ battle had been fought. Five thousand servicemen and women had given their lives for this godforsaken expanse of water. Twice, Mallory had survived to reach a transport at the extraction point, and he knew the old superstition as well as anyone.
Third time’s the charm, kid, he told himself while imitating a brick, well under the flak field now. The blue-green ocean raced up. He skimmed the instruments again and swore. The powerpack was history. Backup provided just sufficient to start the beacon, in the insane hope the Corps might be victorious enough today for Recovery to launch in the cleanup.
He could be picked up in an hour or three. He repeated this as a mantra as he hit the sea. The armor absorbed most of the impact but his teeth rattled, blood’s iron tang flooded his mouth. With the speed of impact the suit plunged deep into dim green-gray and he waited for flotation to kick in. If he had enough buoyancy to reach the surface, he’d start the beacon.
But the surface – where the G4 star formed a golden halo, great armored batfish basked in its warmth and squadrons of nautiloids flitted like motes in long, milky fingers of sunrays – continued to run away. Odd chills shivered around his left leg, and another swarm of red fireflies danced in his display.
Mallory groaned, beyond even cursing. “Suit’s compromised,” he muttered, talking to himself since power was too feeble to transmit in realtime. At least one smartseal had ruptured; part of the armor was taking water. Worse, the gas-feed to the flotation jacket had failed. “Sweet Christ,” he whispered, less profanity than prayer, “I’m going down.”
He thumped his left shoulder to release the beacon. It would mark his impact point, signal the transport. The tiny pod scudded upward, flare-bright yellow and already pinging among the curious nautiloids before he lost it in sunglare. Then Mallory peered at his few functional instruments, trying to figure his rate of descent.
“Too fast,” he whispered. Sweat prickled his ribs as he ran the numbers. The armor would protect him from compression as tonnes of water buried him. Even damaged, it cushioned him against the cold as he sank, but his body heat would rapidly bleed away through the already icy leg.
If he fell into the glacial deep and Recovery took a long time coming, he could expect amputation if – an immense if – they found him at all.
“Tango three-four to Transport,” he called repeatedly, uselessly. The beacon was sending: the transport’s AI knew he was down as surely as it knew three units were reassigned to the posthumous honor roll before they dropped through the flak. “Tango three-four …” Talking to himself, perhaps in an effort to cling to sanity as the Deep took him.
Green dimness faded swiftly to black as he left behind sunlight, warmth, the welcome of surface waters where fisherfolk had encroached far enough to make Endeavor Sound seem friendly. The nearest landfall was a modest island on a chain of ancient volcanic peaks.
Ocean covered two thirds of the world, and the last century had transformed the land into an open pit mine. This planet was about resources, not real estate. Ownership depended on who one asked. Mining rights belonged to Marsik Industries, according to lawyers forty floors up in Heidelberg Towers, on Tuesday. Ask any engineer on the Hindmarsh Explorer out of Franklin’s World on Thursday. The result was war, long, bloody and bitter. Dominion over the Murchison Deep might be disputed for decades. These seas were littered with drifting hulks, the abandoned tech of forces from many corporate armies.
The futility had hit Mallory like a punch, months before. He was assigned here with a half year to serve before his compulsory enlistment was done. He would have shipped out with a fat wallet and authorization to take another crack at life back home, all debts to society paid – lesson learned: declare bankrupt, if you dare!
Now, his back pay would go home in his stead, with the official letter. Dear Mrs. Mallory, it is with deep regret that we inform you of the death in action –
He trusted the service to honor the contract, but life was a high price to pay for failure in business: a financial partner who vanished like smoke before he could be arraigned, taking two years’ profits with him. Tom Mallory took the fall alone, and was still falling –
He plunged into Stygian dark, shivering with the knowledge that the Deep formed a trench between immense mountain ranges. So many kilometers of water lay beneath him, the void between the stars seemed less overwhelming.
Surface comm traffic had faded to intermittent whispers; time was short if he intended to get any message out. Strictly, he should report to the Command AI, but he had a chance, given incredible luck, to transmit one micro-second data squirt. Nothing he knew would interest a strategist. He punched record and rasped,
“Comm for Sylvia Mallory, listed next of kin. Priority. Message follows.” He struggled his thoughts together, deliberately ignoring the dark. “Hey, Sylvie … I won’t make it back after all. You were right, always are. Should’ve kept a closer eye on Carlo. Should’ve known he couldn’t be trusted. Well, too late now.
“They’ll let me tell you, I finished my tour at Murchison – didn’t see any fighting this time. Got flakked, soon as I jumped. I’m in the water, going down, nothing under me but more water. They call it the Deep, right?”
He took a long breath. “Running outta time, can’t send much more. I miss you, Sylvie. Thinking about you. The life we won’t live together, all the things we won’t do. Damn, I’m such a fool, like you always said. Tell our folks I’m thinking about them too. Love you, Sylv – always did.”
He blinked away smarting tears and focused on the instruments. He had fallen into the realm of slow, giant creatures out of nightmare. Thank gods such monsters were comparatively rare; nothing swam within sensor range. Life support might stretch to several hours, but his leg was cold-numb and felt crushed. The smartseal at the hip had held, or he’d have died minutes before, but he guessed he was bleeding from the foot. “Blood in the water,” he whispered – in a realm of lamniformes the size of islands.
He closed his eyes, listened to the almost-inaudible comm from the battle, the closer rhythmic, hypnotic ping of his own beacon, and the …
… shushshush-barrr-shush, barrrrrr-shushshush-barrrr …
The odd sound jerked him back to awareness. His mind had begun to drift with shock and cold. The source was near, on a band close enough to his own comm for the armor’s simple AI to register it. Not a voice, Mallory decided. More like the audible-spectrum white-noise of machine language.
He scanned down the comm menu, focused on translate, blinked to select. The helmet chip was rudimentary, but anything distracting him from the dark and cold was welcome. By comparison with a dedicated AI, the system was sluggish, dumb. He waited a half minute before it said, “Segrem 44, military encryption level 2.”
What Mallory knew of machine language was scant, but he recalled Segrem Laboratories as manufacturers of the best nano for military, medical and EM services, right back to Earth. “Damnit, nano,” he muttered. “A swarm of the buggers must be viable.”
And the swarm would have been carried by the current from a wreck, or many wrecks. Suit sensors cranked to max. The exercise wasted life support potential, but he had no interest in spinning out a few gray, semi-conscious minutes at the end.
Vague forms loomed like ghosts in the murk, perhaps ships, aircraft, survival rafts, sunk, broken up and swept together like drifted snow. Murchison’s deep, lazy gyre must end here.
“Neat,” he whispered. “No strategic importance, not worth reporting even if I could, but – neat.”
Drowsiness overtook him insidiously as shock, cold and blood loss conspired. The leg hurt right to the hip, and when his thoughts began to unravel he was glad to let them.
With infinitesimal slowness he discovered he retained a thread of awareness. Some scrap of consciousness endured, enough for him to know his body thrummed, he felt sudden warmth, growing dislocation, a tingling vertigo he recalled from the hospital a year before, when bionano rebuilt his spine.
Bionano. The buggers are in my blood, brain. Must’ve gotten in through the wound. Like microbes. Coherence eluded him. He might be dreaming, hallucinating with anoxia, afloat on the brink of clinical death. For all he knew, he might be dead already.
Thoughts formed languidly, without passion. All concept of time dissolved, but surely life support must have expired. Warmth enveloped him; or was it the absence of cold, or the loss of perception of cold? A tendril of mind pondered without urgency, watching, feeling, as his lungs spasmed at last in a long deep breath.
Water flooded them with the relief of oxygen, which should have been impossible, yet –
Bionano embedded in his pulmonary alveoli fed oxygen to his starved lungs. Variants of this tech saved troops on the toxic battlefield. He drifted with fleeting awareness as bots stitched through his cells; but no Segrem engineer would have recognized this nano.
Mutated, he thought in a process of reasoning where a syllable spanned an hour. Military and medical ’bots had collided in this deep cold and, of necessity, swarmed in concert. They encountered life forms undiscovered by xenobiology. Dormant programs initialized. They multiplied, merged, labored, collaborated on independent, undocumented projects; mutated again.
Tom Mallory’s limbs tingled as, cell by cell, everything human perished and was repaired. Pain sparkled through muscle, bone, neuron, as biological molecules were painstakingly replaced with elements from the water which made the Murchison Deep so precious, lives were sacrificed by the thousand in the battles to own it.
Downstream from the smoking volcanic chain of the Hades Mountains, this sea was so mineral-rich, filter-mining ships cruised like kilometer-long basking sharks. Fuel elements, medical isotopes –industrial vessels captured new, eccentric molecules which would one day cure a disease, armor a spacecraft, power a city. The prize was worth an ocean of human blood.
Blood, Mallory wondered, investing an hour in the speculation while swarming ’bots excised useless armor segments. Do I have blood any longer?
Titanium and carbon fiber fused into his limbs. His shape spread, stretched, morphed. He was crystal, metal, plastex, rebuilt molecule by molecule as his living body failed. The pulmonary nano fed his lungs until his brain was more silicate and gold than biological.
And at last biological material was wholly absent, and Tom Mallory’s mind cleared.
He took a deep breath, another, and gazed around with eyes perfectly suited to the dark. With integrated sensors he saw much further. He felt a warm wind from Hades, which to the swarm meant nourishment, energy. He heard the shushshush-barrr-shush of the AI controlling the multitude with a muted datastream of Segrem 44 – glimpsed the phantoms of four hulks, two of which coruscated with subtle energies.
I am Tech Support Tender 5 from carrier Baranov.
I am Medevac 3 from cruiser Hobart.
Both wrecks were serviced by their own swarms, which gorged on the bounty of the Deep, Mallory realized, years after these ships fell out of the sky. “I’m 85894 Mallory, T.R.,” he sent via the chip salvaged from the armor, now fused into the back of his skull. “I’m alive.”
Retrieval and repair is our function.
The swarm misted around him, a billion billion spores, milky in the cold darkness. Mallory kicked, felt the powerful surge of fins where living feet and armored boots had once been. Heading up fast, he asked, “Hobart Medevac, what am I?”
85894 Mallory functions, Hobart Medevac 3 said succinctly.
For the moment it was enough. He took a bearing on the swarm and left it behind. A series of powerful kicks sent him into twilight waters which steadily brightened and warmed. His eyes contracted; his body adjusted to thermal and compression parameters without any conscious thought.
“Baranov Tech 5, did you install nano systems?”
Necessary for performance efficiency. Request report on function. Systems can be modified.
“I’m fine,” Mallory told it as he rose into silver-blue light. He fanned out webbed hands with elongated digits, and at last thrust his head into air and moonlight. His lungs automatically spewed water before he took a deep gasp of warm air laden with the chemical reek of the Hades chain.
Four of the six moons rode between horizon and zenith, and millpond calm blanketed Endeavor Sound. To the north sprawled a ribbon of coastline, reefs and sand cays surrounding the cratered peak of an extinct volcano. The eastern sky burned brilliantly blue-black, almost cloudless.
His rises opened wide on the west, where the brightest stars sparkled in a last hint of peacock green. He saw no aircraft. Synthetic senses, fashioned from remnants of living brain and salvageable tech from the helmet, detected no comm traffic. Even the flak battery that reduced Tango to confetti stood dormant on the high shoulder of Mount Tartarus.
He stretched further and heard only faint whispers from a weathersat at geostationary, an abandoned surveillance drone in a decaying orbit. In a week it would burn up.
The battle was so long over, the fleet had gone. Mallory couldn’t hope to guess who’d won, who might return, and when. He knew only that he was alone in an ocean stretching far beyond every horizon – and 85894 Mallory lived. Of one thing, he was certain: if R&D glimpsed him, his next assignment was the lab. He would forfeit his liberty at once. Any ambition he owned would revolve around pain, and how to evade it.
Not yet. Perhaps eventually, if ownership of the Deep were decided by one army or another, he might announce himself. Share himself with humans when the hunger for company became worth a price paid in freedom and the inevitable suffering of the lab animal.
But not soon, though he was alone in an ocean without end, under utterly alien skies, and –
“85894 Mallory, hold position.”
Signal direction was north/down. He caught his breath, spun toward the shore, where lazy combers rolled up a beach. “Who are you?”
A shape rose from the water, no larger than himself, ambient at the temperature of the surface layers, as he was. Its shape was an amalgam of helmet and head, the face silver-black, glistening with pliant synthetic tissues. “62835 Kozachik, E.H., Lima Company, 242nd Marines, from the Magellan.”
Not a voice. Comm burst in his brain, as did transmissions from Baranov and Hobart. “Like me,” Mallory murmured. Transmitted. “You were flakked out of the sky?”
“And rebuilt, like you.” Kozachik finned closer. “Welcome.”
“I … thanks, I guess.” He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. It was arrogance, egotism, to assume he was unique, or the first. He felt the synthetic muscles of his face pull into a smile. “Hey, I can still smile.”
“You can do many things.” Kozachik was close enough now to speak aloud. His voice (her voice? Impossible to tell) rasped as if he/she rarely used it. Words seemed unforgivably slow to Mallory, measured against the thought-speed of direct comm.
He might have said this, but another shape surfaced a short way off; then another, and more. Instead, he said, “What are we?”
“New. More than we were born.” Kozachik abandoned speech for comm, but a smile lifted one side of his/her mouth. “We won’t go back. Only vivisection awaits. You desire weaponization? Follow.”
Two moons were setting as Tom Mallory finned after them. More like him rose from the calm waters of the sound. How many had Hobart and Baranov salvaged and rebuilt? He’d know soon enough, he thought. Eagerly, he followed his kind into blue-green moonlit grottoes, which to his new eyes seemed a garden of the gods.
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