Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One (14 page)

Shit. Anti-tech fundies? That could be a problem, and I said as much to Chief Garner.

“Well,” he said with a philosophical shrug, “everyone’s free to go to hell in his own way, including the crazy people.” He continued working on the debridement, deftly slicing away bits of raw tissue adhering to scraps of melted clothing with his scalpel. “We’ll just take it a step at a time.”

“Yeah, but what if what we’re doing to this guy is taboo in their culture?” I asked.

“What if it is? Our job is to save lives the best way we can,
any
way we can, and we’re not responsible for what they believe, or how they think. Or
don’t
think. . . .”

“Well, this guy doesn’t show perfluorocarbon sensitivities,” I said, studying the N-prog screen. “So, do we do it?”

“What, ’tube him with perfluoro? Of course.”

“Even though it may be against his religion? I think we need to find out more about that.”

Garner shook his head. “Uh-uh. First we save his life.
Then
we worry about his immortal soul.”

E
ventually, the debridement was done, and I went back to the barracks. The rain, sleet, and hail outside were so heavy that someone had rigged a guideline between the HQ and the barracks dome. The sea, I noticed, had come inland, and was already ankle deep around the buildings. That wasn’t a particular problem; those domes were designed to survive being completely submerged, and similar structures were used as sea-bottom research facilities. But the fury of the wind had lashed up a storm surge that had all but completely submerged the beach.

Adding insult to injury, we felt our first seismic quake during the storm. It seemed unlikely that the storm had triggered a 7.5 temblor, but it did seem as though Bloodworld was throwing everything at us that it could.

At least we were off the operational hook for the moment. Although Baumgartner fumed and fussed a bit, there was no way we were going out on our patrol in that storm. We stayed inside either the HQ dome or the barracks, getting used to the local gravity, catching up on our sleep, and having something hot to eat—a luxury we’d not been able to enjoy during the hours-long flight out from where the
Clymer
dropped us off.

And twenty hours after we’d boarded the ketch, Gunny Hancock called me back to the HQ dome, where they were bringing one of the prisoners around.

“I thought you’d like to be here for this,” he told me. “I heard you were concerned about local taboos.”

Garner must have told him. “It helps knowing what we’re up against,” I told him.

Baumgartner was there, along with Staff Sergeant Lloyd and another member of his staff. He was deep in a quiet discussion with the two of them and didn’t notice when I came in. I was amused. Second lieutenants are at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to chain-of-command among the officer types, and don’t generally have their own staff. Our little expedition boasted thirty-nine combat Marines out of a contingent of forty-eight. The leftovers included Baumgartner, four Corpsmen, and an operational staff of two communications-intelligence specialists and two tech specialists.

Baumy looked like he was in his glory.

Doob Dubois was working on the unconscious prisoner. With his goggles and respirator off, we could see that he was a young man, probably in his twenties, with dark hair and eyes and pasty white skin. That made me wonder about something right there. Was his skin so pale because he was never exposed to the local sun’s direct rays, to ultraviolet radiation especially? I made a mental note to check both his vitamin D levels and his bone density.

Dubois was using an N-prog to revive him. People who’d been swiftied could be unconscious for anything from minutes to hours; when we’d gotten them back to shore, Hancock had ordered one of the other Corpsmen to inject the prisoners with nanobots and so we could switch them unconscious, simply because we didn’t have the manpower to guard them full time.

“Why the hell is it called a swifty, anyway?” I asked. I could have downloaded the answer from the library, of course, but it was meant to be a rhetorical question. It seemed like such a strange term.

“Early twentieth century,” Hancock told me. “There was a series of kid’s books,
The Adventures of Tom Swift
, all about a genius inventor who came up with some gadgets that seemed pretty far-out for their time.
Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship
.
Tom Swift and His Bicycle
. That sort of thing.”

“Okay. . . .” I’d never cared much for twentieth-century literature in school, and gotten away with downloading as little as I could.

“Sixty or so years later,” Hancock continued, “a NASA researcher invented a non-lethal weapon that delivered an electrical charge to the target. He called it the Taser, after one of the adventures of his childhood hero—
Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle
.”

“Thomas A. Swift . . . oh, I get it.”

“Exactly.” Hancock drew his swifty from its holster, a HiVolt 3mm stun gun that fired sliverdarts built around ultra–high-density batteries carrying a charge large enough to incapacitate a man. “Tasers didn’t knock people unconscious, usually, but later weapons did. Hence, ‘swifties.’ ”

The man on the table groaned and opened his eyes. “Where in His name am I?”

“You’re safe,” Hancock told him. “We’re U.S. Marines, and we’re here to investigate reports that the Qesh have attacked your colony. Who are you?”

“Hezekiah,” the man said, sounding a little uncertain. “Hezekiah two-fifty-four of Green-two-three. My brothers . . .”

“They’re safe as well,” Baumgartner told him. “The one who was wounded . . . what is his name?”

“Ezekiel. Ezekiel oh-four-nine of Green-two-four. How is he?”

“I’m told he should pull through.”

“He lost his arm. . . .”

“Easily fixed, Hezekiah,” Dubois said. “Either regenerative therapy or biomechanical prosthesis will—”

“No!” The man looked terrified. “That’s not the Way!”

“Easy, there,” Hancock said. “You say he’s your brother?”

“All of the Temple are my brothers.”

“I see. Why did you fire at us?”

An eloquent shrug. “You obviously weren’t of the Temple Brotherhood. We thought you might be demons.”

Hancock grinned. “Not quite. We can actually be very nice folks if you don’t get on our bad side. By shooting at us, for instance.”

Hezekiah spoke English. According to the little we knew about them, the original Neoessenes had first appeared in Southern California, then spread across the Southwest—Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora. For a time they’d been based in Chihuahua, and a lot of them spoke Spanish as well.

“ ‘Demons,’ ” Baumgartner repeated. “Do you mean the Qesh?”

“Demons,” the prisoner said, speaking slowly, with great conviction, “are
any
who stand against the Way.”

“So what were you doing in that boat, anyway?” Baumgartner asked.

“The Qesh-demons came to Salvation,” he said with a shrug. “Some of us were attempting to reach Redemption . . . that’s a city south of here, on the Twilight Coast. But the
sirocco frio
was blowing up, and we needed to find shelter. And then you attacked us.”

“We weren’t
attacking
you,” Baumgartner said. “You fired on us first.”

“It looked like an attack to us.” He hesitated. “On the boat, you . . . one of you, was putting something into Ezekiel’s body.”

“That was me,” I told him, taking a step closer. “He was in a lot of pain. I gave him a nananodyne blocker.”

His face darkened. “That is . . . what?” he demanded. “A nanomedicine?”

“Yes. They’re programmed to break down into harmless constituents in—”

“Satan!”
the man howled, and he came up off that table like a rocket, his arms stretched out to grab me.

Hancock stepped in front of me, grabbed and twisted him sharply, and pinned him in a shoulder hold. “Dubois!” he shouted as the prisoner raged. “Drop him!”

Doob punched a code into his N-prog, and Ezekiel slumped into happy-happy land.

“A little touchy on the subject of intrusive nanotechnics, are we?” Baumgartner observed as Hancock and Doob hauled him back onto the table.

“At least,” Staff Sergeant Naomi Hernandez, one of Baumgartner’s technical people, said, “their lack of nanotechnics means we’ll be able to Clarke them.”

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer and a promoter of future high tech of two or three hundred years ago, had been responsible for one of human technology’s most famous aphorisms:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
. You don’t generally see the actual technology nowadays; the infrastructure is invisible behind the effect, and that certainly can look like magic—growing furniture out of a solid deck, for instance, downloading data directly off the local net into your brain, or using invisibly minute robots to clean the cholesterol out of your arteries. When you “Clarke” someone, you get the advantage on them by using technology that they don’t even know is there.

“You’re thinking of microprobes?” Baumgartner asked.

“Yes, sir. It should be easy enough to get a cloud of gnatbots in there, and have a look around. If they don’t know about nanotech, they’ll never know they’re there.”

“Put it into the operational plan, then,” Baumgartner told her.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Christ!” Baumgartner said, looking up as a deep-voiced rumble sounded, and the room began to shake. “Not again!”

It was another seismic quake, a bad one—this one shaking us at about 7.1 on the standard modified Mercalli scale.

“Earthquake,” Hancock said. “Or a Bloodworld-quake, I guess I should say.”

Well, between the flooding and the seismic events, at least Baumy would be off our cases about getting an early start.

Of course, I felt sure that Hancock already had gnatbots in mind for the patrol.

E
ventually, the storm blew itself out, though for about five hours there, we were all stuck in whichever hab dome we happened to be in at the time because the storm surge deepened the water outside to almost 4 meters.

As the storm abated, though, the water level went down, and pretty soon the beach was only a little truncated from the way we’d found it. The D/MST-22 was still there, anchored by nanograpnels to the rock. The ketch, however, was gone.

Fortunately, the Marines had brought in the quantum flitters and secured them inside the storeroom. We broke them out and saddled up in a deep, purple twilight. The sun had dropped below the eastern horizon, though the sky still carried some light.

After a final check of armor and equipment, we strapped onto our waiting flitters. Hancock gave the signal. “Okay, Marines! Route formation! Move out!”

We’d practiced this type of deployment endlessly, of course, both on Mars and through in-head sims. Corporal Masserotti and Private Hutchison were out ahead on point, with Gutierrez and Andrews on the left flank, Kilgore and Lewis on the right, and the rest of us strung out in a raggedly staggered column down the middle. I was flying just aft and to the right of Gunny Hancock and ahead of Sergeant Tomacek, who was one of Second Squad’s two plasma gunners. There were fourteen of us—a typical Marine squad of thirteen, plus me. We also had one robot, a big cargo flitter hauling expendables, sentry, and perimeter gear, and a 100-megajoule plasma cannon all disassembled and stowed inside.

“I still say it’s Alpha Company’s turn for this shit,” Randolph Gregory grumbled as we got moving.

“Can it, Orgy,” Tomacek said. “You heard the man. We’re just gonna go have a look-see. No gun play. Sweet, slick, and simple.”

“We pulled the
easy
duty for a change,” Calli Lewis added.

“Yeah, right.”

We began picking our way inland, navigating toward Salvation.

Chapter Twelve

A
ccording to the map loaded into our personal RAMs, Salvation was thirty kilometers north along the coast, while Redemption was fifty-five klicks to the south. There’d been some discussion between Hancock and Baumgartner, I knew, about switching targets, but Charlie Company was handling Redemption and our original target was still Salvation. There’d also been talk about waiting until we could get more information about the target from our nautical “guests,” but we couldn’t really afford the time to interrogate them, especially since Ezekiel had been showing little interest in cooperating with us. We set off knowing only that the Qesh were already in control there.

The trip north was uneventful. Once we got up and off the beach, we climbed onto the high plateau beyond, open, rolling ground shrouded in the rubbery, black-leaved vegetation that seemed to cover most of the open ground here. With both armor and our vehicles nanoflaged, we blended into the black background perfectly; I couldn’t even see the Marines flying closest to me, just a few dozen meters up ahead.

Our top speed in this gravity field was limited to about fifty kilometers per hour, but we often had to move much more slowly than that as we negotiated what amounted to forests of bushy, black, house-sized masses of vegetation with whip-thin tendrils ten meters high.

Eventually, though, about two hours later, we began to get close.

We
heard
it first. In Bloodworld’s dense atmosphere, sound carried very well. Even five kilometers back in the jungle, we could hear the grinding shriek and thunder of some sort of large machinery.

A short time later, we reached the tree line looking out across an open plain that I recognized from our briefings. A trail, a path beaten down into the earth, ran along the edge of the woods, where we took cover in the underbrush. From here, we could see the city wall.

Eons ago, some massive seismic event had thrust these basaltic cliffs into the sky along Bloodworld’s western twilight zone. The cliffs here rose in two sections, the first from the turbulent sea, rising perhaps fifty meters from the water to the relatively flat plain that, inland, gave way to soil and the thick growth of the forest where we were hiding.

The second section rose from this plateau another twenty or thirty meters up, creating a massive black wall off to our right and about a kilometer away. The city of Salvation appeared to be growing from the sheer face of this second black cliff. It was dark, with Bloodworld’s curious half twilight beneath a deep purple sky. There were no lights from the city itself, but a number of high masts mounted spotlights that bathed the surrounding dark rock in an intense glare.

All of us remembered the scenes in that early briefing of Qesh Rocs blowing up buildings. That had been over by the spaceport, somewhere behind those cliffs; from here, we couldn’t see much damage at all.

On top of the plateau beneath the city wall, close to the drop-off into the sea, dust or smoke boiled from what looked like a broad, open pit several hundred meters across, only to be caught and tattered away by the stiff wind blowing out of the west. The dust appeared to be illuminated from beneath, from within the pit, by a deep and flickering red glow.

With Bloodstar still below the horizon, it was too dark to see much at optical wavelengths. By low-light optics, we could see what might have been movement around the pit, including something squat, black, and enormous along one side. Under magnification, and by shifting to infrared, we could see armored vehicles or figures moving around on the ground . . . and we could see a row of humans, eight colonists, apparently tied together in a string and held motionless at gunpoint at the very edge of the crater. Armored Qesh, grotesque, centaur-shapes with hot power units glowing on their backs, patrolled the line, weapons at the ready. A number of enormous machines appeared to be devouring the ground nearby; on closer inspection, much of the dust came from these.

I increased my visor’s magnification all the way up, zooming in on the nearest machine. The thing must have been the size of a city block back home, shaped like a flattened egg with a low-arched opening across the entire front end that seemed to be devouring the ground in front of it. The machine appeared to be enlarging the open pit, grinding up rocks in a thunderous cacophony of raw and violent noise as it crawled slowly but inexorably across the ground.

There were five other similar machines—no two identical in detail, but all squat and monstrous—working around the edges of the pit.

It looked like the Qesh were strip-mining the surface.

Silently, Second Squad spread out among the trees along the edge of the plain. Sergeants Leighton and Tomacek began recording what they could see for burst-transmission back to Red Tower. I pulled out my sniffer, a palm-sized ES-80 environmental sensor, and began a sweep for radiation or other background effects.

I immediately got a ping on my IHD.

“Gunny?” I said over a private channel. “I’m picking up nano-D effects.”

“Shit. How bad?”

“Very, very low. Ten to the minus three. Our suits can handle it fine. I’m not so sure about those poor bastards beside the pit, though.”

Nano-D—short for nanotechnic deconstructors—is the basis for all modern deconstruction techniques. Nanobot machines the size of large molecules, around a hundred nanometers or so, cover a target surface or material in a thin sheen and break it apart, atom by atom. Basalt, for instance, is about fifty percent SiO
2
, with the rest made up of iron and magnesium. Depending on the precise type of basaltic rock, there might be other elements present as well, calcium, sodium, aluminum, and so on—including even traces of scandium, vanadium, and titanium, and others.

The Qesh evidently believed in going the full-scale industrial route. Those huge rock-eaters were carving or breaking off massive chunks and grinding them up first, increasing the surface area so that the nano-D could break it down faster. The pure elements would be separated out and stored, somehow, possibly in those huge canisters lined up close to the city.

From over a kilometer away, I couldn’t see the actual process, but my sniffer was reporting random hits by deconstructor nanobots. While most would be contained beneath the rock eater, a few, inevitably, would escape with the billowing dust and scattered across the landscape on the breeze. Whatever they chanced to land upon, they began eating—but doing so a molecule at a time, which was far too slow to cause any real damage. At that range, the background radiation was doing a lot more damage to us.

Closer to the mining operation, however, the concentration of deconstructor nanobots would be higher, perhaps
much
higher. Without armor, those natives standing along the edge of the pit might be taking enough hits to hurt them, even to kill them over time. What the hell was going on over there, anyway?

I tried zooming in close on the humans. I couldn’t see much detail at this range; they appeared to be wearing the same garb as our prisoners back at Red Tower; it looked like their hands were tied behind their backs, and their necks joined by three-meter lengths of rope or cable. Their guards towered over them, armored centaurs with heavy, oddly curved crests on their helmets. One of the prisoners, trembling violently, collapsed in line; one of the guards picked him up with one arm and planted him back on unsteady feet.

An alarm sounded inside my head.

“Heads up,” Hancock warned over the quantum-scrambled squad channel. “We’ve got company. From the south.”

I twisted around, trying to see into the dark forest at our backs. A moment later, I saw movement . . . and then a column of humans emerged from the shadows. They wore black cloaks and hardened leather, and their faces were concealed by that same combination of breather mask and bug-eyed goggles we’d seen on the crew of the boat. There were five of them; they carried antiquated laser rifles with heavy, external battery packs slung over their shoulders. They didn’t see the Marines nanoflaged in the underbrush, but passed us by, moving along the tree line toward the east.

“That last one in line,” Hancock’s voice said in our heads. “Masserotti! Gibbs! Get him, but
quietly
!”

Two dark, armored shapes rose from the underbrush behind the native, who was following his companions up the path. A hand closed over the man’s mouth, an arm circled his waist and dragged him backward. Masserotti pulled the laser rifle from him and tossed it aside, as Gibbs kneeled in front of the man and held a finger to the lower part of his opaque helmet visor, miming silence.

“U.S. Marines,” Sergeant Gibbs said. “We’re from Earth. We’re here to help you.”

Gibbs used audio, rather than radio or laser communications. Our squad AI hadn’t yet sorted out or analyzed the native freaks. We were using tight-burst, quantum encoded communications among ourselves, but we had no idea as to what kind of communications technologies the human colonists of Bloodworld might have. Judging by those battery packs, they were at least a century out of date in terms of general weaponry.

“Where . . . where did you come from?” The native said, his voice slightly muffled by his filter mask.

“Like I said, fella, Earth.”

“What’s your name?” Masserotti asked.

“Caleb. Caleb three-one-one of Orange-one-oh.”

“Well, Caleb, we need you to tell us what’s going on here.”

“The demons!” he spat. “They arrived a little less than a year ago! They told the elders that the Bloodworld was theirs, and that we now belong to the Qesh! Lies of Satan! We belong to God, and none other!”

“They’re coming back, Gibbs,” Leighton said.

“My brothers!” the native said.

“You want to introduce us to your . . . brothers, Caleb?” Hancock asked.

Caleb nodded, and the two Marines let him go. A moment later, the four other natives who’d passed us by a few moments earlier came up the path once more, obviously searching for their missing “brother.”

“Malachi!” Caleb called out. “Albiathar! God has sent His warrior angels!”

Then four stopped, their laser rifles raised. “Take it easy, people,” Hancock said. “We’re friends. We’re here to help you.”

“We need no help,” one of them said, “for God is with us!
He
is our help!”

“How about lowering your weapons,” Hancock told them, “and considering the possibility that God is helping you by sending
us
?”

“Matthew!” one of the others said. “It’s possible! These could be the promised angels of the Rapture!”

I’d never heard of Marines being referred to as
angels
before, but it seemed like a promising start.

The truth was, we needed a fresh start with the locals. Obviously, the colony here had some sort of religious taboo or prohibition against nanomeds, and it was possible they rejected all medicines. I knew of several sects besides the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists who’d rejected at least some medical technology; the Apostles of Light, for instance, who believed relying on mere human medicine showed a lack of proper faith.

We needed natives who could fill us in on the current tacsit, and who might be willing to get us into the city. And if we could avoid violating any of their taboos long enough to get to know them, these five might be the ones.

W
e grew a small field hut there at the edge of the woods to serve as our forward observation post, taking care to mask it with a heavy sheathing of nanoflage. The OP had a two-person airlock that meant we could at least take off our helmets inside. It was big enough for ten or twelve Marines with a bit of crowding, but at least half of the squad would be outside at all times, keeping an eye on the activity on the far side of the plain.

We also opened up the cargo flitter and broke out several robot sentries and the big plasma cannon as a support weapon. The cannon was self-assembling, and in a few moments was up and running, its muzzle aimed at the nightmare lights and noise in the distance.

Our new guests were Caleb, Albiathar, Samuel, Malachi, and Matthew, members of a patrol sent out to attempt to contact some of the other colony cities in the area. Matthew five-three-one of Orange-one-oh was the leader. He was an older man, though just how old depended a lot on Bloodworld’s medical technology, or lack of one. He
looked
like he might be around two hundred, but without cybertelomerics and other rejuve processes, he might have been only fifty.

Their names, frankly, worried me. Each had a common name apparently drawn from the Bible, but since such names were fewer than the total number of colonists, each was followed by a number and by a color plus a number, which seemed to refer to a particular district or perhaps a section of the city. The system felt dry and static, even repressive, and I was beginning to think Salvation might in fact be a theocratic dictatorship of some kind.

Those could be nasty.

I was inside the hut with Gunny Hancock, No-Joy Leighton, Orgy Gregory, and High-Mass Masserotti, and our five guests. We were off to a rocky start when we began with a very basic misunderstanding.

“You say the demons came almost half a year ago?” Hancock asked. “That doesn’t seem possible.”

“Have they been inside Salvation itself?” Leighton asked. “Have they figured out how to translate your computer files?”

I knew what was worrying her. That secondary objective to our mission—to keep the Qesh from getting navigational data that might lead them to Earth, that was on all of our minds at the moment. Earth had received word of the Qesh arrival at Gliese 581 six days later, or so we assumed. A second ship had arrived a day later with an update. Then it had taken us six days and some to get there—for a total of two weeks, max. Or so we’d assumed.

Two weeks was bad enough—plenty of time for the Jackers to take over Salvation and hijack the computer records, which just might still contain all the data necessary to lead them straight to Earth. If they’d been here six months, though, we were lucky they weren’t already in Earth orbit delivering an ultimatum.