Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One (24 page)

But we did have the three rifle-company Corpsmen, plus the lab, cryo, and MI techs. It promised to be a hell of a party.

We all wore civvies—conservatively dark, two-toned skinsuits for the gents, and formal glittersprays for the ladies. Carla was wearing blue light as well, for a formal-gown effect, but Kari had left her breasts bare, which allowed for some
very
nice things to happen to her anatomy while we were moving in zero-G.

A human hostess met us at the incline and led us to a table. Like the Earthview, this place had a
human
waitstaff, part of what made it so pricey. I honestly couldn’t tell if she was wearing a high-tech skinsuit, a light coating of programmed nano, or animated tattoos, but her skin color kept rippling and shifting through shades and dappled patterns of sunlight and green, in keeping with the rain-forest theme of the place.

A waiter in similar camouflage took our orders. “What will you ladies and gentlemen have?” he asked. The rotation of the Free Fall meant that sunlight spilled through each set of viewalls in turn, creating an ever-shifting patchwork of light and shadow, and his skin appeared to be responding to the changing light.

Remembering how good that drink at the Earthview had been, I ordered a hyperbolic trajectory.

“So,” Klinginsmith said, “you all hear the latest scuttlebutt?”

“About what?” Doob asked. Rumors were always flying on board ship, and even more so at bases like the Geosynch Starport, where you had a
lot
more input of gossip, rumor, and wild speculation.

“The Commonwealth is going to take down the Qesh at Bloodworld!”

“Says who?” I asked. I was skeptical. The Jackers had been in that system in major force,
big-time
. It was going to take a major invasion fleet to knock them loose from the place.

“Just a girl I know up in Ops,” Kling said with an affected nonchalance. “She’s on the TT.”

“The Tactical Team?” Esteban asked, and then he shrugged. “Fuck, those guys are always running sims on possible operations. Just in case, y’know? Doesn’t mean shit.”

“That’s right,” Harris said. She giggled. “They probably run sims for a Navy-Marine invasion of
Earth
every morning, just for practice!”

“Why wouldn’t we send an invasion force to the Gliese 581?” Harper asked. “I mean . . . those are
people
on Bloodworld. Humans! And the Qesh are doing
horrible
things to them!”

“I’m not so sure about that, Carla,” I said. “The Salvation government was working with the Qesh. It was the militant rebels who we saw being tortured.”

“But they
were
being tortured,” Harper insisted. “The Commonwealth
has
to go in and save them!”

“Actually, no,” Doob said. “Unless there’s some sort of treaty or agreement in place, we can’t go in unless we’re specifically invited.”

“That’s right,” Harris said. “We might
call
Bloodworld a colony, but it’s not, really—not in a political sense. It doesn’t belong to the Commonwealth, and we don’t have a say in how they choose to govern themselves.”

“The only reason we went out there at all,” Gomez added, “is because Earthport was afraid the Qesh were going to find out where Earth is.”

Earthport—better known as Porto de la Tierra—sprawled across the Andes at the bottom of the space elevator; it had been the capital of the Commonwealth government ever since New York City and the old UN had become so cold that the delegates voted to move.

“Well, I still don’t think it’s
right
,” Harper said.

I was about to say something to Harper about “right,” but changed my mind. Carla Harper was a sweet gal, full of fun and, if some of Doobie’s squad-bay anecdotes were to be believed, fun to fill. But she had some strange ideas about how the world, how the
universe
, actually worked.

“So who gives a shit about
right
?” Harris said, laughing, saying the same thing I’d almost said.

“ ‘Right’ doesn’t have anything to do with it, Carla,” Klinginsmith added. “Still, Earthport’s found
some
reason to go in.”

“Well, you know, Kling-on, I’ll believe that when I download the orders,” McKean said. “There’s just no reason for us to tangle with the bastards, y’know?”

Our waiter showed up with our drinks. Our table asked us for e-creds, and we fed it from our in-heads. The hyperbolic trajectory here didn’t have quite as much of a kick as the one at Earthview, but that was a
good
thing. I wanted to stay conscious and upright through more than three drinks tonight.

I took a sip, then heard a loud shriek and splash from twenty meters overhead and looked up. Someone had just jumped in, caroming into the water in a cannonball. Particularly spectacular splashes in the hydrosphere could send water droplets flying out toward the restaurant floor. Most were intercepted by the vegetation, but occasionally you felt a gentle mist falling at your table. It added to the tropical ambiance.

“Well, there is
one
good reason for us to go back out there,” I said, taking a second sip from my drink. I’d been thinking about it for weeks, now, and didn’t like my conclusions.

“Yeah?” Esteban said. “What’s that?”

“The Qesh are now twenty light years from Earth,” I told them. “Maybe Earthport decided they were just too damned close.”

“How do you figure that, e-Car?” Doob wanted to know.

I told them about the reconstruction I’d done with
Clymer
’s navigation software, how it looked like the Qesh had been running some sort of long-term search pattern across the sky, quite possibly looking for us. “They’ve known we were out here somewhere in this general volume of space ever since they ran into the
Zeng He
,” I concluded. “That was, what? Sixty years ago?”

“I don’t buy it,” McKean said. “You’re talking about a volume of space a hundred light years across—that’s a hundred
million
cubic light years . . . maybe, what? Two hundred thousand stars? That’s not a needle in a haystack. It’s more like a drop in the ocean.”

“What the hell’s a haystack, anyway?” Klinginsmith wanted to know.

“It’s
highstack
,” Esteban told him. “An old slang term for the space elevator.”

“Well,” I said, “they don’t have to stop and look at every star.”

“Maybe not,” Gomez said. “But sixty years to get from ninety-something light years out to twenty? That’s not a search. That’s a slow amble, slow enough to enjoy the scenery.”

“Yeah, e-Car,” Dubois said. “If they were searching for us, they would have found us a few weeks after Gamma Oph.”

“The fact remains,” I said, stubborn, “they’re only twenty lights away now. And if they decide to come in and check out the local node for the Encyclopedia Galactica . . . well, that’s at Sirius.”

“Shit, he’s right,” Gomez said. “The Sirius library node is designed to attract attention. And we have the big research complex there.”

“It’s worse than that,” I said. “Look.”

Our table had a 3-D projector built into it. I accessed the system and uploaded a small interactive graphic I’d been playing with. Stars appeared in a sphere hovering above our drinks. A red star at one side winked red.

“Gliese 581, right? Twenty point three light years away.” A straight white line connected the red star with a yellow near the center of the projection sphere. “Sirius is here.” A white star flared brightly on the opposite side of Sol from Bloodstar, slightly offset from the white-line axis. I drew a blue line from Bloodstar toward Sirius, extending it past Sol.

“See?” I went on. “To get to Sirius from Bloodworld, they’d have to pass
real
close to Sol. Five point seven light years—I did the math. Spitting distance . . . assuming Qesh spit.”

“Shit,” Dubois said, staring into the projection globe. “They’d be just about certain to pick up IR and RF leakage from our civilization.”

A couple of centuries ago, there’d been a lot of talk about the dangers of radio and television broadcasts spreading out through local space and alerting anyone out there who might be listening. The idea was that hostile aliens might pick up reruns of old-style TV and radio programs and home in on Earth. Once we started listening in on the EG and found out about all of the predarian cultures spreading out in the wake of the collapse of the R’agch’lgh Collective, the worry over hostile ETs discovering Earth became even worse.

Well, that’s the newsfeeds for you—vividly sensationalist and often inaccurate. In fact, research had already shown that modulated radio signals tend to degrade over a relatively short distance, thinning out as the volume of space they fill increases and becoming nothing more than white noise in as little as a light year or two, a fraction of the distance to the nearest star.

But that detectable distance is not a hard line.
Exactly
how far out it lies from the sun depends on the technology of the receiver. I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t willing to bet my planet on the Qesh not being able to pull
some
information out of noise at a range of, oh, six light years, say. At twenty light years, getting anything at all out of the background hash was probably impossible—which was why the pre-interstellar searches for extraterrestrial civilizations were so disappointing. At some point between about one and ten light years, any remaining data is irretrievably lost in the white-noise racket coming from the rest of the Galaxy.

But what about a distance of less than 6 light years? We couldn’t be sure about that. At certain radio wavelengths, our Solar System
shines
—not from old television transmissions, or even from modern Net communications, most of which are tight-beam anyway, but from high-energy radar—especially
military
radar—as well as asteroid trackers, navigation beacons, and the radio traffic among the system colonies. And at infrared wavelengths, our deep-space industrial complexes stand out like an anomalous cluster of tiny, hot, IR stars.

Yeah, chances were
very
good that the Qesh would spot us if they happened to be passing by on their way to the Sirius library node.

“Well, I don’t know about you guys,” Harris said as I switched off the projection, “but
I
didn’t come here to talk shop! Let’s eat!”

“Second the motion,” Gomez said, slapping his palm down on one of the table’s interface panels. “They have
real
food here!”

Genuine meat was hellishly expensive here, since it had to be shipped “up-el” from South America. Cultured meat, grown in the nanufactories there at Geosynch, was less so . . . costing only an arm instead of an arm
and
a leg. The problem was that I knew where a lot of the carbon and other organics in the growth vats came from. While I was rationally aware that the stuff was completely sterile—carbon atoms are carbon atoms no matter
where
you get them from, and we’re talking about the
complete
nanodisassembly of waste products, here—I’d always felt a bit squeamish about that sort of thing. My father always said I was atavistic—and as I think about it, I suppose my foible is as weird in its way as the Salvationists rejecting nanomeds.

The hell of it is, guess where a lot of the food we eat on board ship comes from, or the rations we carry with us in the field? I generally try not to think about that part.

But at the Free Fall, I decided I could indulge both in my foible and in a real celebration, so I ordered the unicorn filet with hydroponic tots and veggies. I’d had unicorn once in my life—when I completed my primary download series—and I’d loved it. It was just about the sweetest genengineered protein-on-the-hoof available.

The price tag made me go a bit faint as the blood drained from my brain to my eccount—eC78.90—but, hey, what the hell? I’d been living on shipboard crap for weeks, and the promotion to second class brought a nice boost in the pay. Why not?

I was about to upload my order when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Hey!” Doob said, looking past me. “Look who’s here!”

It was Sergeant Joy Leighton. She was in a dressy skintight with animated iridescence flowing up and down and around her curves, and she looked stunning. “No-Joy!”

“Not tonight, e-Car,” she told me. “Tonight it’s
Joy
.”

“When did they let you out?” I asked. She’d been transferred from
Clymer
’s cryo unit to the Naval Medical Hospital at Geosynch when we’d returned to port. I’d heard that they’d successfully regrown her spinal cord and put her ribs and vertebrae back together, but hadn’t learned anything more, save that she was “prognosis favorable.”

“Just this morning,” she said. “That’s why I couldn’t attend the ceremony. They were still checking me out in the big med scanner.”

“How are you doing?” I gave her a quick optical examination—purely professional, of course. “How’s your back?”

She turned, twisting, her movement sending a cascade of color rippling delightfully across the curves of her hips and buttocks. “Good as new!”

“Osteofusion is a
good
thing,” I said. They would have knitted the broken bones together with nanobots, then literally grown new bone over them molecule by molecule, cementing the fragments into place.

“
You’re
a good thing, Doc,” she said, twinkling. “They told me what you did. I wish I could have been there this morning when you got your medal!”

“The medal’s nothing,” I said, shrugging.

She considered me for a moment, then reached out and took my hand. “How about a swim?” she asked.

There was no possible way I could have said no.

Chapter Twenty-One

J
oy led me up the incline to the Free Fall’s north pole. At that point, we were in zero-gravity, and we had a choice. There were hand-overs along the inflow-outflow piping leading into the glistening, rippling sphere of water twenty meters away, in toward the center, but there was also a broad, round platform encircling the entrance to the rotating sphere, a kind of porch or balcony giving access to the restaurant inclines, but also allowing the more daring patrons in the place to enter the water by means of a long, high dive.

“Game for a jump?” she asked me.

“If you are,” I said. I was feeling less than certain, though. I
don’t
like heights, though I can’t say I actually fear them. From our vantage point up there on the polar porch, the inner surface of the Free Fall dropped away on all sides, with the floor at the equator thirty-five meters away and rotating fairly rapidly around the center, once in about every fifteen seconds.

Though we couldn’t feel up or down there, with our feet on the porch, the hydrosphere glowed and shimmered directly “above” us. “So what happens if we miss?” I asked.

“Nets,” she said, pointing past the hydrosphere. They were hard to see—nearly invisible above the jungle—but they’d rigged fine-mesh netting to catch jumpers whose aim was so bad that they missed the water. The target, the ten-meter rippling sphere of pink-and-green water, was actually pretty big, spanning about 23 degrees across the Free Fall’s center, but swimmers who’d had too much alcohol or were otherwise impaired might easily misjudge angles or become disoriented.

Joy touched a spot on her left wrist, and the shimmering iridescence covering her body disappeared, the minute particles going inert and drifting away in the air. It
had
been a nano coating after all. She floated there in front of me, gloriously nude, wonderfully inviting. Damn, she had to be the most gorgeous Marine I’d ever seen.

“Well?” she asked, and that twinkle returned.

I touched a pressure point on my skinsuit, up just beneath the hollow of my throat, and the fabric gently dissolved into gas and fine dust. Joy flexed her knees, placing her bare feet against the porch deck, her arms stretched taut above her head, and she kicked, hard, launching herself into space.

I followed, a bit less gracefully.

My trajectory was directly astern of Joy, sailing through 20 meters of open air, following her feet in toward the water. She hit with a splash, sharp and clean, and a couple of seconds later I hit the water as well, plunging deep into the luminous emerald depths.

The water was 3 degrees above body temperature. There was no need to breathe. The Freitas respirocytes in our systems would keep us oxygenated for a good ten minutes or so. As I moved inward, the water slowing my velocity, Joy turned, opening her arms and legs to receive me. I collided with her gently, the impact putting us into a slow and gentle tumble. We pulled in close to each other, her mouth seeking mine. . . .

Eventually, we
had
to breathe, so we disentangled and made our way to the nearest surface. How you saw the surroundings depended on how you told your mind to see them. For a dizzying moment, it felt as though I’d just poked my head out of the bottom of the hydrosphere, with the surface of the Free Fall’s interior sweeping past directly below.

My stomach gave a small lurch, and I made myself think I was looking
up
instead. The floor of the Free Fall restaurant now passed serenely overhead, the clusters of tables like stars arranged in tight little constellations. Joy surfaced beside me, holding me.

In microgravity, we didn’t have to work at staying afloat. In fact, with a little effort, we could have paddled our way out of the water entirely and hung there in midair, just “above” the water’s surface. I’m not at all shy, but I preferred to stay in the water, engulfed by the warmth. After I’d taken a breath, Joy pulled at my legs, drawing me back into the emerald glow.

The hydrosphere was thinly occupied at the moment. There were three other couples embracing within the depths, barely visible in the water, and a couple of teenagers who appeared to be racing each other back and forth across the sphere.

“I wanted to thank you, Doc.” Her words both appeared on my in-head display and sounded within my ears as she subvocalized them and sent them through her own cerebral data feed, which transmitted them to me. The system is as good as telepathy; we could talk and be understood even though we were underwater.

“For what?” I asked, playing dumb. Her eyes, centimeters from mine in the clear water, were hypnotic. Her hands were on my back, her legs wrapped around mine. Somehow, I wanted that moment to last forever, and I was afraid that if I just said, “You’re welcome,” she would let go.

“For saving my life. For fighting off the bad guys. For not leaving me there when the order came down for you to bug out.
Lots
of reasons.”

“Well we don’t leave our own behind,” I told her. “And the rest was just . . . just doing my job, y’know?”

“
Doing your job
,” she told me with a hard edge to her voice, “would have meant pulling a CAPTR on me. Turning me into a fucking zombie!”

“Yeah . . . well, that’s kind of a last resort, if there’s no other way.” I desperately wanted to change the subject. I kept seeing Kilgore in her eyes . . . and then his face was replaced by Paula’s. I ran my hand up the bare curve of her spine. “Hey, this really
does
feel good as new. They did a good job!”

“Not even any scars.”

Playfully, I let my hand move lower, well below the level where her spine had snapped. “You feel this?”

“Perfectly,” she said, laughing.

“I just want to make sure they grew your spinal cord back properly.”

She giggled in my mind. “It’s nice to have a
professional
opinion.”

Her left hand was still at the small of my back, pressing me close. Her right had moved, was moving up my thigh. I could feel myself becoming aroused, a tingling warmth, but there was a thin, reedy flutter of panic there as well. I almost pulled away. . . .

It wasn’t that I was being faithful to Paula, or any such romantic nonsense as that. I’d certainly thought about finding a fuck buddy, even just for a night—Carla Harper, for instance, if I could ever pry her away from Doob for an evening. I’d been tempted more than once by Kari Harris—smart, quick, and pretty, though the word was that she was in an exclusive relationship with a woman working in Supply. There was that waitress at the Earthview . . . what was her name? Masha, yeah. Even if she
had
expected a cred-exchange for the privilege. The point was, it had been a year since I’d lost Paula. Time to get over it and move on, right?

So why couldn’t I? . . .

Joy’s hand moved higher.

“You, ah, don’t have to do this,” I said.
God
, I felt clumsy!

“It’s not about
have
,” she said. “Maybe I want to. Maybe I just want
you
. Does this feel good?”

Yeah, it did. So far, though, my arousal was purely internal. Impulsively, I went to one of my in-head menus and switched off my CC-PDE5 inhibitors.

Oh, yeah. It started feeling
real
good. . . .

PDE5—phosphodiesterase type 5—is a naturally occurring enzyme in the human body, where it’s found especially in the retina of the eye and within the
corpus cavernosum
, the smooth muscle responsible for penile erection. By constantly breaking down the nucleotides responsible for relaxing smooth-muscle tissue and controlling certain specific blood vessels, it makes it possible for men to wear skinsuits or layers of nanoclothing without accidentally and constantly proving to the world how
manly
they are.

With shipboard skinsuits as revealingly formfitting as they are, male military personnel routinely have nanobotic CC-PDE5 inhibitors circulating within their corpus cavernosa, allowing fashion statements that have long been common in the civilian world as well. There are, of course, civilians who
do
want to make those manly statements, but on board ship such statements can too easily get in the way or get caught on something.

Centuries ago, they used chemical PDE5 inhibitors like sildenafil to treat erectile dysfunction. Nowadays, it’s easier and surer to use nanobots to suppress the local effects of PDE5 while selectively enhancing the effects of those vasodilatory nucleotides at will. Whenever the man decides to hell with fashion, that he
wants
extra blood flowing to certain parts of his anatomy . . .

Which was precisely where I found myself at that moment. The actual biochemistry takes only a few seconds to complete. Within moments, I was ready for her.

And, oh, yes, Joy was ready for me.

Like nudity, sex in public wasn’t the social taboo it once was. Most parties and cocktail gatherings nowadays involved orgies, at least in a back room, and it wasn’t unusual to see couples making love on the beach or in a public park. Why should there be taboos over something so completely natural, so essentially
human
?

Human or not, it’s interesting to see how modern technology has crept into this most basic of human pastimes. I found myself thinking again of Private Howell. And there were men, I knew, who used nanotechnology to put that manliness I mentioned on deliberate display, either to advertise for a willing partner or just to show off. There was one group, the “Pole Vaulters,” who went around sporting public erections all the time.

Quite apart from what the military had to say about such demonstrations, that sort of thing wasn’t for me. Like I said, I wasn’t shy, but I found I
was
a bit reluctant about showing off my passion to the whole restaurant as it circled around the two of us. Under the water, though, the two of us were simply shadows entwined with each other. We could see those three other couples in the distance—no, one of them was a ménage à trois, it looked like, not a couple—but in any case they weren’t paying any attention to us, any more than we were watching them.

For a long time, all I could look at were the depths of Joy’s eyes. Once in a while we would surface for air, then drift again deeper into the glowing depths.

Gods! Was Private Howell’s o-looping better than
this
?

I lost all track of time, lost all track of others in the water with us, lost all track of
everything
except her.

L
ater, she joined us at the table for dinner and then drinks. “Hey, No-Joy,” Doob said as she took a seat. “Thanks for joining us!”

I read his grin, and the laughter in his eyes. “You son-of-a-bitch,” I said. “You invited her, didn’t you?”

“You have a problem with that?”

“Hell, no! I just feel ambushed, is all.”

We’d picked up skinsuit patches at the Free Fall’s pole after we used the axis handholds to pull ourselves out of the water. You transferred a few e-creds through a palm contact and picked up a fist-sized ball of goo that spread out over your body when you slapped it against your chest. I used my in-head to program mine in the same conservative two-tone pattern I’d been wearing before, black and maroon, with a gold filigree design over my left shoulder and down my arm. Joy programmed hers differently, though—nothing but bare skin on the right side of her body, but with rainbows of liquid light swirling up from left ankle to the top of her head.
Damn
, she was beautiful!

“That’s the Marines for ya,” Harris said, laughing. “You never know when they’re going to strike!”

“They’re always alert for targets of opportunity,” Klinginsmith added.

“Fuck
that
,” Joy said, growing another seat out of the deck and sitting down. “This ambush was deliberate, well planned, and with malice aforethought. Hey, that looks good.”

In our absence, the others had gone ahead and ordered their meals. Carla Harper had ordered the silversweet, a genengineered delicacy, part meat, part fruit, grown here in orbit, and Joy decided she would have some as well. I stuck with the unicorn, and called up another trajectory.

“So Doobie tells me you’ve been accepted for FMF,” Joy told me.

“That’s right. Don’t tell anyone I dragged your ass out of a firefight under false pretenses, okay?”

“Don’t worry, Doc. You can drag
my
ass any day!”

I laughed. I was curious about my own feelings at that point, and probed at them a bit, half expecting to get pain reflecting back. There was a twinge . . . but maybe I was finally accepting that I’d done the best I could for Paula, that sometimes there was
nothing
you could do, that your best simply wasn’t good enough. I’d done my best for Joy
and
for Dave Kilgore. Both of them were alive, and that counted as a success in anyone’s book. One of them was a zombie—like Paula—and nothing I could have done in the sailboat’s well deck or beside the Qesh pit on the Bloodworld could have made a difference there.

So far as the two of them were concerned, each was the same person as before the CAPTR, whatever the hell that actually meant.

And I was now HM2 Elliot Carlyle (FMF), and officially a part of the team. It felt damned good.

“Here,” Doob said, extending his hand. I took it, and felt the flow of incoming data, palm to palm. “You kids enjoy this.”

“Kids?”
I said. “You’re younger than I am, youngster.” He was, too, by six months.

Then I opened his electronic package. It was two nights’ stay for two at the Rabu Hoteru, a high-end Japanese Geosynch orbital hotel complex catering to newlyweds and sex tourists. It was Friday night, shipboard time, and weekend liberty didn’t expire until 0800 Monday morning. Joy and I had until then to . . . get better acquainted.

Most hotels in zero-gravity catered to people who wanted to try out sex in microgravity, but the Japanese had pioneered the field a couple of centuries ago, and the Rabu Hoteru was supposed to be something special. Among other things they offered was a shared sensual net that let you feel what your partner was feeling in addition to your own sensations,
and
you could edit them on the fly, as it were.