Abyss Deep by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780061894770
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-10-28T11:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

“Easy, now, Doctor,” Garner said, making gentle calm-down motions with his hands. “We need to talk this out. . . .”

“There is nothing to talk about!” If anything, his voice went up a notch in pitch and in decibels. “I am a lieutenant commander, and that idiot Walthers is a lieutenant! A mere lieutenant! The ship is in grave danger, and I’m in command!”

The ship chose that moment to give another lurch, and it felt as though Haldane was turning, rotating swiftly on her z-axis. There was a sensation of rapid descent, like going down in an elevator, and then a heavy jolt. Kirchner stumbled back a step, bracing himself against a bulkhead, and both Garner and I had to grab the scanner table to keep from falling. It felt as though we’d just rapidly come down out of the sky and grounded again on the ice.

“Doctor,” Garner said, his voice the calm and studied monotone of a harried parent trying to reason with a small child, “only line officers can command a ship. You’re not line, you’re a medical officer. You are not in the line of command.”

Kirchner turned away for a moment, palming open a storage locker in a bulkhead. When he turned back, he held a nasty, snub-muzzled little laser pistol in his fist. “And I say I am!” he shrieked. “Get the hell out of my way!”

Kirchner was out-and-out nut case now—a technical term. I didn’t see anything I could do to stop him . . . or . . . maybe . . .

“Put the gun down, please,” Garner said, still speaking to a child . . . a child throwing a particularly shrill tantrum. “You . . . you’re not well. . . .”

“I am perfectly cuttled!” He paused, drawing a deep breath. “We need to get us now before the ice sculpts and whale all see commanding . . . !”

Shit. Word salad. His condition was going downhill fast. In schizophrenia, certain kinds of dementia, and a few other mental conditions, the patient’s language can devolve into an incoherent babble. That babble might be grammatical, but the meaning is always confused to the point of being unintelligible. Sometimes, it can sound like stream-of-consciousness rambling, with one word or phrase triggering a new word or thought, with the meaning hopelessly scrambled. Medical people called the babble word salad.

Kirchner hadn’t shown that symptom before. I’d been listening for it, because I’d suspected schizophrenia. But the rapidly escalating situation, the Gykr attack, and now the cuttlewhale outside, could easily have pushed him over the edge.

I’d spent the last few seconds linking in through the sick bay AI and transferring the nanobot programming now running in Summerlee’s skull to Bob, the lab robot now patiently standing against the far bulkhead. One of the ROBERT’s arms ended in a nanobot pressure injector, designed to fire a few hundred million micron-sized nanobots right through the skin and into an artery.

The question was whether I could put my plan to work in time.

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