Abyss Deep. Ian Douglas

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.”

      IT . . . 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

      For 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.

      WHAT … 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