"What the fuck, Doc?" Hancock said, his voice acid. "Out getting your last-minute shopping done?"

"Collecting specimens, Gunny. Know your enemy."

I was still struggling up the ramp as the Haldane lifted higher, clearing the ice.

One of the other monsters reached for us, neck stretching impossibly high.

It missed. Its body stretched upright-I couldn't see its tail-and then it began to sink, falling back to the ice, which was obscured by the wind-lashed ground fog.

Spray burst up through the fog. I realized that I could no longer see any of the cuttlewhales. Had they broken back through the ice, and into the ocean beneath?

We were accelerating . . . boosting back to orbit. The two Star Raiders followed us up, pulling victory rolls as they boosted. They would dock with us in orbit.

And the rest of us would consider the failure of the mission . . . and what we could do about it.

Chapter Fifteen.

Haldane fell into orbit around the planet. I dropped my ungainly specimen into a sealer unit in the main airlock, then got some Marine help and a quantum spin-floater to haul it up to the lab. I followed as soon as I got out of my armor.

I quite literally wanted to know what a cuttlewhale was made of.

Two hours later, we remained on red alert. All of us were all too aware that the Gykr ship we'd spooked on our arrival might be back at any moment . . . and likely with friends. We thought that Guck technology was pretty close to ours, but technological development between two space-faring species is never identical and is never parallel. They had picked up tricks we didn't know. It worked the other way around, too, of course, but right now we were worried about what they could do that we couldn't. A very small difference in faster-than-light drives might mean that they could jump a thousand parsecs in a few hours, while we'd taken a leisurely couple of weeks to make it across forty-two light years.

In other words, we knew the Gykr would be back. We just didn't know when . . . or how many of them there would be when they arrived.

Walthers had called for an after-action debrief on Haldane's mess deck, which had been transformed into an ad hoc briefing room. There were twelve of us physically present, including the ship's department heads and the four most senior Marines-Lieutenant Kemmerer and Second Lieutenant Tom Regan, plus Gunny Hancock and Staff Sergeant Thomason. I was there representing the science/technical department as well as the medical department. Both Ortega and Montgomery were present, as mission specialists.

There were electronic presences as well. Chief Garner was linked in from sick bay, as department head, and both Machine McKean and Doob were there electronically. So were our three nonhuman passengers, the Broc family, D'dnah, D'drevah, and D'deen. Brocs like things a bit on the chilly side, compared to humans. A pleasant twenty degrees is sweltering to them. Our three tended to stay to themselves, in a compartment on board Haldane that could be kept at a comfortable zero to ten Celsius.

The discussion had been going on for several minutes, and so far the consensus appeared to be that we should declare defeat and go home.

"Why do we even need to stay here?" Lieutenant Walthers asked with a shrug. He was the ship's skipper now, with Summerlee still recovering in sick bay, and I think the safety of both ship and crew was weighing on him heavily. "We've confirmed that Murdock Base is gone. And those . . . those things down there are going to make it damned hard for us to look around."

Lieutenant Kemmerer agreed. "Between the Gykr and the cuttlewhales, we've had three Marines killed," she said. "A Corpsman may not recover, and Sergeant Dalton has a broken leg. There's a Gykr submersible still loose in the ocean, and there may still be Gykr stragglers on the surface. We need a bigger force to deal with the threat."

"But we can't go back!" Dr. Ortega sounded shocked. "Not yet!"

"You can't believe we actually have a chance of communicating with the goddamn cuttlewhales, do you?" Walthers asked.

"Maybe not the cuttlewhales," Dr. Montgomery said. "But there's Sierra Five to consider."

Before the cuttlewhales had made their precipitous appearance, the Marines on the surface, along with McKean and Dubois, had drilled through the ice in three places and dropped in SNR-12 units-remote autonomous sonar transponders intended to paint us a picture of what was going on beneath the ice. The results had been . . . surprising.

The three-dimensional image was projected on a mess deck viewall-an empty blue abyss with several targets showing as bright white points of light. One-identified as Sierra One, for the first sonar contact-was a hard, bright target nearly two hundred meters down and twelve kilometers away from the transponders. Three more, Sierras Two through Four, looked softer-fuzzier around the edges. They were deeper, much, much longer than they were wide, like thread-slender worms, and were almost certainly the three cuttlewhales that had attacked us on the surface.

Sierra Five was a hard target, almost directly below the transponder positions, but it was deep . . . very deep. Exact triangulation was something of a problem, since the three transponders were relatively close to one another and didn't provide much in the way of a baseline, but the best estimate suggested that the target was something like a thousand kilometers almost straight down.

Not meters down. Kilometers.

The water pressure at that depth would be . . . horrific. A hundred times the depth of the Challenger Deep on Earth, or more, something like a hundred thousand atmospheres. Even at that, a thousand kilometers is still only about 10 percent of the distance from Abyssworld's icecap to the ocean floor.

The range was too great to tell what we were looking at, but it was pretty large . . . as large, perhaps, as the Haldane.

"We need to consider the possibility," Montgomery went on, "that Sierra Five is an artificial structure of some sort. If it's artificial, then it was manufactured by intelligence. It might well be an intelligence native to Abyssworld."

"And it might also be a submerged Gykr ship," Walthers pointed out. "Or just another very big native life form, like the cuttlewhales. It might even be another cuttlewhale, though I'll admit that the sonar return looks a lot different."

"At that depth," Garner said, "we might expect cuttlewhales to look different. Harder. Firmer. More metallic, even. Carlyle here has something to say about that."

"Ah, yes," Ortega said. "Our young hero!"

"What the hell were you thinking, Carlyle?" Kemmerer said. "Running back outside to collect a piece of that thing."

"I wasn't exactly thinking," I said, and when several of the others at the table laughed, I shook my head and kept talking. "I mean . . . I fell off the ramp, okay? And a piece of a cuttlewhale was right there. I just saw an opportunity-"

"Carlyle's actions may help us actually make sense of the biology on this planet," Garner said. "I've seen the results. This is important."

"So what did you learn?" Montgomery wanted to know. "You analyzed that piece of flesh?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "I'm not sure we can call it flesh, though. . . ."

"What is it, then?" Kemmerer demanded.

"Ice," I told them. When that single word elicited a confused babble of voices and protests, I added, "Specifically, Ice Seven."

The sample I'd collected had been taken to the lab, where it had gone into the bio-secure compartment for Bob to do remote analyses on it. Since we didn't know what might be in that chunk of cuttlewhale I'd brought back, I'd coated it with sealant in the Haldane's airlock to avoid exposing the crew to any possible microorganisms, opening it up again only when it was safely inside the secure biological containment compartment in the lab. Through Bob, I'd run a standard spectrographic analysis first . . . then done a chem series. The whole process had taken me perhaps twenty minutes.

"What the devil," Second Lieutenant Regan said, "is Ice Seven?"

"It is, sir, a very, very special kind of water ice. . . ."

Dr. Montgomery nodded. "That would explain a lot."

"It's created under extremely high pressure," I went on. "Here, I pulled this down off the Haldane's Net." I showed them the chart I'd been studying before the meeting.

We're all familiar with ordinary ice, of course . . . water that freezes at zero degrees Celsius, becoming a solid. But it turns out that, depending on the temperature and on the pressure, water can freeze in a great many different ways-fifteen that we know of for sure, plus several variants, and there are almost certainly others.

Ordinary ice, which forms as hexagonal crystals, is known in exotic chemistry as Ice Ih. All the ice found within Earth's biosphere is Ice Ih, with the exception of a small amount in the upper atmosphere that occurs as a cubic crystal called Ice Ic.

But compress Ice Ih at temperatures of sixty to eighty degrees below zero and it forms a rhombohedral crystal with a tightly ordered structure known as Ice II. Heat Ice II to minus twenty-three degrees . . . or cool water to that temperature at something just over thirty atmospheres, and it becomes Ice III.

And so it goes, running up the list of exotic ices all the way to Ice XV, which forms at pressures of over 10,000 atmospheres and at temperatures of around 100 degrees Kelvin-or minus 173 degrees Celsius.

Still with me?

On Earth, the deepest point in the ocean is in the Marianas Trench, the Challenger Deep, which reaches 11 kilometers down and has a pressure of 1,100 atmospheres . . . which translates to just over one ton per square centimeter. We wouldn't hit 10,000 atmospheres until we were ten times deeper-an impossible 100 to 110 kilometers down, assuming there was a terrestrial ocean that deep.

Using the download, I gave the assembled personnel a quick overview of exotic ice chemistry. I'm not an expert, by any means, but I was drawing on research downloads from the sick bay AI, which pretty much covered the basics. I had to explain to the non-technical people present that temperatures were given in degrees Kelvin, meaning degrees Celsius above absolute zero, with 273oK marking the freezing point of water. Pressure was given in pascals, or in millions of pascals-MPa-or in billions of pascals-GPa. One atmosphere of pressure was equal to 101,325 pascals.

Download Chemical Breakdown of Exotic Ices Ice Ih:Normal crystalline ice, formed in hexagonal crystals. Formed from water at normal pressures cooled to 273K [0C.] Nearly all ice within Earth's biosphere is Ih.

Ice Ic: Metastable variant of Ih with a cubic crystalline structure, and its oxygen atoms arranged in a diamond pattern. Produced at temperatures between 130 and 220K, but is stable up to 240K. It is sometimes found in Earth's upper atmosphere.

Amorphous ice: Ordinary ice lacking a crystal structure. Formed in low-, high-, and very-high-density variants, depending on pressure and temperature. Commonly found on comets, outer-planet moons, or elsewhere in space.

Ice II: Formed from ice Ih when it undergoes pressure at 190 to 210K. Rhombohedral crystalline structure.

Ice III: Formed from Ice II when heated, or by cooling water to 250K at a pressure of 300 MPa [very approximately, 3,000 standard atmospheres]. Tetragonal crystalline structure. Denser than water, but the least dense of all high-pressure ice phases.

Ice IV: Metastable rhombohedral crystalline phase, formed by heating high-density amorphous ice at a pressure of 810 MPa [8,100 atm].

Ice V: Most complex of all exotic ice phases, with a monoclinic crystalline structure, formed by cooling water to 253K at 500 MPa [5,000 atm].

Ice VI: A tetragonal crystalline phase formed by cooling water to 290K at 500 MPa. Exhibits dielectric changes [Debye relaxation] in the presence of an alternating electrical field.

Ice VII: Cubic crystalline structure with disordered hydrogen atoms, exhibiting Debye relaxation.

Ice VIII: A more ordered cubic crystalline form with fixed hydrogen atoms, formed by cooling Ice VII to temperatures below 278K Ice IX: A tetragonal crystalline phase formed by cooling Ice III to temperatures between 208K and 165K. Remains stable at temperatures below 140oK and at pressures between 200 MPa and 400 MPa [2,000 to 4,000 atm].

Ice X: Highly symmetrical ice with ordered protons, formed at 70 GPa [700,000 atm].

Ice XI: A low-temperature form of hexagonal ice, formed at 240K and with an orthorhombic structure, sometimes considered to be the most stable form of ice Ih. It forms very slowly, and has been found within Antarctic ice up to 10,000 years old.

Ice XII: Dense, metastable, tetragonal crystalline phase formed by heating high-density amorphous ice to temperatures between 77K and 183K at 810 MPa.

Ice XIII: A proton-ordered form of monoclinic crystalline ice V, formed by cooling water to temperatures below 130K at 500 MPa.

Ice XIV: The proton-ordered form of ice XII, formed below 118K at 1.2 GPa [120,000 atm], with an orthorhombic crystalline structure.

Ice XV: The proton-ordered form of ice VI, formed by cooling water to temperatures between 80oK and 108oK at a pressure of 1.1 GPa [110,000 atm].

" 'Hexagonal crystals,' I think I understand," Ortega said with grim humor. "Some of this is pretty thick. But 'proton-ordered'?"

"Let's just say that ice comes in a lot of different forms," I said, "and those forms can have different chemical, electrical, and even nuclear effects. Here, maybe you should just see the biostats I got in the lab."

I pulled the worksheet down from the lab AI and spread it out for their in-head inspection. "This," I told them, "is the biochemistry of a cuttlewhale."

I then proceeded to explain . . . and hoped to hell that I wasn't making their eyes glaze over. I was afraid I'd already done that with the exotic ice table.

It turns out that some exotic ices are pretty weird, and appear only under extreme conditions. Ice IX, for instance, forms at pressures of around 3,000 atmospheres and temperatures around 165 degrees Kelvin. Ice X doesn't form until pressures hit 700,000 atmospheres. We're not certain, but we think that at pressures of around one and a half terapascals-that's almost 15 million atmospheres, or more than 15,500 tons per square centimeter-water actually becomes a metal. We've never worked with that kind of pressure directly. Even at the core of the Earth, pressures are estimated to reach "only" 3.5 million atmospheres; Jupiter's core may hit around seven terapascals-or 70 million atmospheres-enough to create metallic hydrogen.

But what we had in the lab was a sample of Ice VII, and compared to some of the exotic ices we knew, it was pretty tame. The stuff forms at about a thousand atmospheres, and at surprisingly high temperatures-around minus 3 degrees Centigrade. Odd things happen to the water's hydrogen molecules at that pressure, and the hydrogen bonds actually form interpenetrating lattices. That means there are unusual electrical effects in the material, though we don't understand yet what those might be.

"Electrical effects?" Haldane's chief engineering officer, Lieutenant Mikao Ishihara, sounded skeptical. "What electrical effects?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "I'm not an electrical engineer . . . and so far as I could find through Haldane's databases, we haven't studied natural electricity in exotic ice at all. It's an entirely new field.

"But there's more," I went on. "That ice sample I collected is not pure. Take a closer look at the biostat imagery." I showed them photomicrographs of the ice . . . backlit white sheets through which darker chains and blobs appeared. A lot of it was diffuse, almost not there at all, like wisps of gray smoke caught frozen in solid ice.

"You can see here . . . and here. That spectrographic analysis I ran picked up substantial amounts of sulfur, iron, copper, carbon, potassium, manganese . . . a whole soup of elements strung through the ice matrix almost like . . . nerves? Blood vessels?"

"Speculation, Mr. Carlyle," Chief Garner's voice said over the conference link. "We don't know . . ."

"No, Chief, I don't. But it's highly suggestive."

"But what you haven't explained," Walthers said, "is how a creature made of ice could be that . . . that flexible. Those things were like giant snakes! Ice would shatter if it moved like that!"

"Not necessarily," I said. "I wondered about that too . . . but it turns out that there are different ways that ice can freeze, quite apart from the fifteen different forms of exotic ice we've been talking about. The variants are called amorphous ice. The ice we're familiar with on Earth has a rigid, crystalline structure, but that's actually rare out in space. In places like comets or in the subsurface ice of places like Europa or Pluto-throughout the universe, in fact-amorphous ice is the rule.

"There are different types of amorphous ice. They generally require low temperatures with very sudden freezing, like ice cream. If you freeze ice cream too slowly, you get conventional ice crystals. Pressure is also important.

"One type of amorphous ice-it's called LDA, for low-density amorphous-has a melting point of around one hundred twenty or one hundred forty degrees Kelvin-that's around minus one hundred fifty Celsius. Above that temperature, it's actually an extremely viscous form of water. You might get that effect by manipulating the pressure in various ways too. A sudden lowering of pressure will cause sudden cooling, for instance."

"Actually, that problem is trivial," Ortega said. "You don't need LDAs. We've had pumpable ice technology for centuries, now, with tiny ice particles suspended as a slurry in brine or refrigerants. The ice flows like jelly."

"A gigantic worm made of ice," Montgomery said, staring off into space. "With viscous-water-jelly muscles . . ."

"Maybe," I said. "This is all still guesswork. But there's also this. . . ."

I showed them more test results, these from samples of strands running through the Ice VII that also appeared to be water ice . . . but they were different.

"These structures appear to be a different type of exotic ice," I told them. "Specifically, Ice XI, running everywhere through the main body of the sample. We've found Ice XI on Earth-inside the Antarctic ice sheet. It's actually a stable form of Ice Ih, with an orthorhombic structure and-here's the important part-it's ferroelectric."

That meant that the polarization of its atoms could be reversed by an external electrical field, that it could actually store electricity like a natural capacitor, and that it could carry an electrical current.

You could actually use such a system to store electronic data.

"We used to use ferroelectric RAM in some computers on Earth, and for memory in RFID chips," Chief Garner pointed out. "It's old tech, but it works. You can also use ferroelectric effects in memory materials-in a matrix that has one shape when an electrical current is running through it, and a different shape when the current is switched off."

I nodded. "I think that the cuttlewhales are gigantic electrical motors, using organic electricity to generate movement in their analog of musculature. I think they have a kind of built-in computer RAM, probably billions upon billions of bytes of it, probably distributed throughout their bodies. And I have the distinct feeling that a cuttlewhale isn't so much a life form as it is a . . . a machine. Something created by, manufactured by . . . something else."

Consternation broke out around the table, and in the in-head connection as well. "Wait a second, Carlyle," Walthers said. "You're saying the cuttlewhales are machines?"

"Robots!" Hancock said. "They're fucking robots!"

"Something like that," I admitted. I held up a cautioning hand. "Look, I'm not saying they're not the product of natural evolution. They may well be. But we shouldn't discount the possibility that somebody else designed and assembled them. It would be very hard to explain how various ices could come together by chance in a way that worked so elegantly . . . complete with distributed natural data processing based on old AI models."

"Be careful, Mr. Carlyle," Ortega told me. "That's the argument used by the so-called Creationists of a few hundred years ago . . . that life on Earth was too complex to have been brought about by accidental, natural processes. Given enough time, natural processes can manufacture some wonderful things."

"Of course, sir," I said. "But . . . there's something else you all should consider."