Ian Douglas - Abyss Deep

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.

Sergeant Aguirre and a ­couple of privates had the tangos under guard—­five of them. They’d been yanked out of their spacesuits, stripped naked, and tied hand and foot. We were taking no chances with these animals.

They watched with large, dark, and angry eyes as I scanned the first one with my N-­prog. No RFID tag, no edentity. “Name?” I asked him.

He spat at me, the shimmering glob of saliva drifting past my helmet in microgravity to splat against the transparent bulkhead at my back. I shrugged and kept scanning. There was, of course, nothing.

Neo-­Ludds. They’ve been with us forever, I think. When Tharg the caveman first discovered fire, there were probably members of the tribe who wanted to make the stuff illegal, a clear and present danger to the community. The original Luddites had been early-­nineteenth-­century textile workers who’d sabotaged the machinery introduced by the Industrial Revolution, machinery that was putting them out of work. Toward the end of the twentieth century neo-­Luddism had arisen—­a rejection of those technologies perceived as having a negative impact on both individuals and ­communities.

Nanotechnology was at the top of the neo-­Ludds’ hit list, of course, not only because of the whole “gray goo” scenario, but because it was changing the very meaning of what it meant to be human. Nano-­chelated circuitry grown inside the human brain, control contacts in the palms of our hands, genetic reconfiguration … sure, we might have cured cancer with the stuff, but was it safe?

I would have been extremely surprised if any of these ­people had nanobots in them, or any of the nanotech extensions—­cerebral implants, neural circuitry, or other internal hardware.

For neo-­Ludds, asteroid mining came right behind nanotech as a key target—­especially when that industry involved moving asteroids into Earth orbit. Proponents suggested that the technology, with massively redundant backups, was failsafe. The neo-­Ludds pointed out that sooner or later technology always fails, and that Earth could not risk even a single such failure.

But did it make sense, I wondered, for them to protest the technology by bringing about the very disaster they feared? That simply wasn’t rational.

But then, I had trouble thinking of neo-­Ludds as rational.

I went down the line, scanning each man in turn. All of them were clean—­no active nano circulating inside their bodies. Curious, I put the N-­prog away and pulled out a DNA tester. Approaching the first man, I touched it to his upper arm. He yelped when it bit him, and cut loose with a torrent of invective in a language I didn’t understand.

“You understand any of that, Sarge?” I asked Aguirre.

“Negative, Doc,” he replied. “The station translators aren’t programmed for it, whatever it is.”

Figured. The station AI could translate between us and the Brocs, but we couldn’t understand this group of humans. I studied them as my analyzer churned away. They weren’t Chinese, certainly. No epicanthic folds. Their skin was swarthy; Middle Eastern, possibly.

I took samples from the rest of them, eliciting reactions that ran the gamut from bored indifference to angry ­hostility.

A few minutes later, my analyzer started to send back data, scrolling it down through my in-­head in a sudden cascade of alphanumerics. I couldn’t follow it all; genetics is not my specialty. But I caught a ­couple of key indicators as they flicked by: macro-­haplogroup K … paragroup L … haplogroups R1a1 and R2 … mutation M198 …

The analyzer popped up a series of possible answers: a 65 percent probability of Central Asia, 22 percent South Asia, lesser percentages for portions of western China, Siberia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

I looked at the first man, who was still scowling at me. “Kazakh?” I asked.

His nostrils flared, and he barked at me in the same unknown harsh and vehement language. The others looked frightened.

“We know they speak English,” Aguirre told me. “Some of ’em, anyway.”

“Betcha that’s Turkic,” I told him. “Kazakh. Kyrgyz, Uzbek—­one of those.”

“Damned Cackies,” Aguirre said.

I looked at the sullen prisoners. “We don’t know it’s the Caliphate, Sarge.”

“Aw, c’mon, Doc! Who the fuck else would it be?”

He had a point. The Central Asian Caliphate—­the western name usually shortened to “CAC” and pronounced “cack”—­was the Islamic theocracy sprawling from Azerbaijan to Sinkiang, notoriously volatile, notoriously anti-­Western, notoriously anti-­technology. They were known to sponsor neo-­Ludd terror all over the world. Allah, after all, hates anything not found in the holy Qur’an, including nanomedical life extension, educational downloads, and anything at all that changes the eternal heavens.

I opened a channel to operations HQ back at Synchorbit. They had access to more complete haplogroup records than I did through the Net, and would be able to confirm the results. As the results came back down then link, a call came through my in-­head from Major Lansky, the Battalion CO. “This is … who? Carlyle?”

“HM2 Elliot Carlyle, sir,” I said. “Second Platoon Corpsman.”

“What’s this stuff you’re uploading?”

“DNA readouts from five prisoners, sir. They would appear to be Central Asian.”

“Shit. You’re sure of that?”

“About sixty-­five percent, sir.”

“Okay. I—­” The transmission cut off in mid-­sentence.

I waited, wondering what was going on up-­El. Abruptly, a sign popped up in my in-­head: SECURITY BREACH: CONVERSATION TERMINATED.

What the fuck? And then something queried my AI.

Normally my in-­head software handles routine e-­queries, everything from sales pitches for masculine enhancement genetic prosthetics to calls from home. It’s got a fairly comprehensive response list that lets it act as my personal secretary. It can even imitate me—­audio and video—­if need be, and most incoming traffic is either flagged for my attention or spam-­slammed.

The thing is, nothing should have queried my personal AI while I was in the middle of a mission. Bad operational security, that. The only things that should be able to get through are military traffic or …

I slapped a trace on the query. I didn’t catch it … but I did get an ID.