Abyss Deep. Ian Douglas

­couple of xeno experts. One of the other docs will be your buddy Dubois. Net media has been after him as well.”

      “They have?” It was news to me. “Why Doob?”

      Singer shrugged. “Maybe one doc is as good as another, to them. He was at Bloodworld too. And he’s your buddy.”

      “Not for long. The guy’s gonna kill me.” HM2 Michael C. Dubois had a snug and happy billet for himself in Alpha Company. He had an under-­the-­counter deal with the lab to use their assemblers to manufacture paint stripper … ah, ethanol, rather, and he was the original cumshaw artist. He wasn’t going to appreciate being yanked out of his comfortable little world because he associated with the likes of me.

      “The seven of you will be the expedition’s scientific survey team.”

      That caught my attention. “What are we surveying?”

      “Ever hear of a place called Abyss Deep?”

      I refrained from pulling down the data off the ship’s Net. “No, sir.”

      “It’s not much. GJ 1214 I. A lot like Bloodworld, so you ought to feel right at home. Just be sure you pack your long flannel undies. It’s a hundreds-­of-­kilometers-­deep ocean covered over by ice. Doc, this place is cold.”

      Great, I thought. Just what I really like. Ice …

      As soon as I left Singer’s office and got back to my quarters, I downloaded the Net information available on GJ 1214.

      I had a strong sense of déjà vu as the data scrolled through my in-­head window. GJ 1214 was another red dwarf, one even smaller and cooler than the primary of Bloodworld we’d visited the year before. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at that. In all the Galaxy, out of 400 billion stars, something like 80 percent are class-­M red dwarfs, at least out in our general stellar neighborhood. Red dwarfs range from something like half the mass of our sun down to cool, red stars of only .075 solar masses—­the cut-­off line. Any smaller and they’re not stars anymore, but brown dwarfs.

      In our galactic neighborhood, twenty of the thirty nearest stars are red dwarfs, but they’re so small and dim that we can’t see any of them with the naked eye. The closest star to us outside of the Sol System, Proxima Centauri, is a Type M5 red dwarf, and you need a pretty powerful telescope to see it from Earth at all.

      Proxima’s partners in the cosmic dance, Alpha Centauri A and B, are very much like our sun … and, damn it, someday I’d like to be deployed to an Earthlike world of that kind of star, instead of another of these dim, cool, blood-­red misers.

      This time, though, I was stuck with another tide-­locked split-­personality planet: half ice, half steam. The readout wasn’t pretty at all.

      Download

      Commonwealth Planetary Ephemeris

      Entry: GJ 1214 I

      “Abyssworld”

      Star: GJ 1214

      Type: M4.5V

      M = .157 Sol; R = 0.206 Sol; L = .0033 Sol; T = 3000oK

      Coordinates: RA 17h 15m 19s; Dec +04o 57’ 50”; D = 42 ly

      Planet I

      Name: GJ 1214 I; Gliese 1214b, Abyssworld, Abyss Deep

      Type: Terrestrial/rocky core, ocean planet; “super-­Earth”

      Mean orbital radius: 0.0143 AU; Orbital period: 1d 13h 55m 47s

      Inclination: 0.0o; Rotational period: 1d 13h 55m 47s (tide-­locked with primary)

      Mass: 3.914 x 1028 g = 6.55 Earth; Equatorial diameter: 34,160 km = 2.678 Earth

      Mean planetary density: 1.87 g/cc = 0.34 Earth

      Surface gravity: 0.91 G

      Surface temperature range: ~ -­120oC [nightside] to 220oC [dayside]

      Surface atmospheric pressure: ~0.47 x 103 kPa [0.47 Earth average]

      Percentage composition (mean): H2 54.3, CO2 20.3, H2O 11.2, CH4 9.3, CO 4.2, NH3 3.1, Ar 0.5; others < 500 ppm

      Age: 6 billion years

      Biology: H2O (exotic ices), C, N, O, H2O, S, PO4: mobile submarine heterotrophs in reducing aquatic medium in presumed symbiosis with unknown deep marine auto-­ or chemotrophs.

      Human presence: The Murdock Expedition of 2238 established the existence of large deep-­marine organisms known as cuttlewhales. Subsequent research at the colony designated Murdock Base demonstrated possible intelligent activity, and attempts were made to establish communications in 2244. Contact with the colony abruptly ended in early 2247, and there has been no futher contact since… .

      The Commonwealth government had decided that word from the research colony on the ice out there on Abyssworld was too long overdue, and they were dispatching a small Navy task force and some Marines to find out what had happened. The Marines were volunteers drawn from First, Second, and Third Platoons, plus the headquarters platoon of Bravo Company, forty-­two men and women in all, and all of them blooded both by combat and by experience on extrasolar worlds. Lieutenant Lyssa Kemmerer, Captain Reichert’s exec, would be leading us.

      The five Navy Corpsmen, however, were not volunteers. Where the Marines went, we would go as well.

      The company’s senior Corpsman was Chief Richard R. Garner, an old hand with gold hash marks running halfway up his dress uniform sleeve, each stripe showing four years of good-­conduct duty. He was a bluff, craggy, no-­nonsense sort, and when he barked at you he meant business.

      Garner called us to a briefing the next morning. There were four of us sitting in the lounge in front of Garner—­me and Dubois, plus HM1 Charlie “Machine” McKean and HM2 Kari Harris.

      There was another man present as well, a Navy lieutenant commander with the gold caduceus at his throat indicating he was Medical Corps.

      “Good morning, ­people,” Garner began. “We’ve been tapped as tech support for an important mission, and it’s important to get this off on the right foot. We’ll be transferring to the USRS Haldane tomorrow. There’s a download waiting for each of you giving billeting information and duty schedules.”

      DuBoise and McKean both groaned. Harris remained impassive.

      “Knock it off,” Garner said. “First off, it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Lyman Kirchner, fresh up-­El from Sam-­Sea. He will be our department head on this expedition.”

      I looked at Kirchner with curiosity. He was a small older man with an intense gaze that made me uncomfortable. If he was from SAMMC, though, he would be good. I wondered about his age, though. His white hair was thickly interspersed with black, and his face, with deep-­set wrinkles, was an odd mixture of weathered skin and baby-­pink new.

      Anagathic treatments. He was under treatment for that most deadly of the diseases to afflict Humankind—­old age.

      “Dr. Kirchner,” Garner continued, “was chief of the xenopathology department at Sam-­Sea, so he will be our expedition xenologist as well as ship’s doctor. We’re very lucky to have him on board.”

      And that was a relief. I’d been wondering since Singer had told me I was being assigned to this mission whether we’d have a medical officer on board. I knew that Garner was IDC, but none of the rest of us were.

      Independent-­duty Corpsmen were the medical department on ships or bases too small to have a ship’s doctor, and that was a hellacious responsibility. Oh, we operated independently in the field as often as not … but it was always good to have a real doctor backing you up.

      You know, even today, we still hear the story of an independent-­duty Corpsman during the Second World War—­we were called Pharmacy Mates in those days—­who successfully performed an appendectomy while on board a submarine, the USS Seadragon, while she was on her fourth war patrol, in 1942. He was twenty-­three-­year-­old