Abyss Deep by Ian Douglas Read Free Book Online Page B

They’d shut down but were still broadcasting. Damn, they were everywhere .
    This was freaking hopeless .
    â€œLieutenant Singer?”
    â€œGo ahead.”
    â€œWe’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.
    â€œVery well,” Singer said. “But check out the tangos. One of them might be a carrier.”
    â€œAye, 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.
    â€œYou understand any of that, Sarge?” I asked