Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One (12 page)

But the
Clymer
, escorted by the two destroyers, had slipped through interplanetary space, closing with Bloodworld. Now, just half a million kilometers from the planet, we’d packed ourselves into the Misty-Ds, ready for drop and the last leg of our voyage. The
Clymer
would return to Hymie and await our call for pickup.

Jacked into the Misty’s intel system, I could see a graphic representation of Bloodworld, circled by the bright red pinpoints marking the Qesh warships, each with an identifying block of text. We were reading forty-four ships at the moment, although one of them, the Jotun-class monster, was more like a ten-kilometer asteroid than a starship. We couldn’t see it from half a million kilometers out, but the mass and energy readings were literally astronomical, and the light reflected from it at optical wavelengths was irregular and shifting, as if from a rocky surface.

An interesting coincidence, that. The Jotuns were the ice-giants of Norse mythology, which meant this one fit right in with the planet names suggested by the
Human Endeavor
survey.

Bloodstar glowed with sullen intensity ahead, its face mottled by black starspots. The nightside of Bloodworld loomed close by, a slender crescent of red-hued light bowed away from the sun.

The entire region around Bloodworld was blanketed by radar and lidar searching for intruders like us. The outer skins of our Misty-Ds, however, were coated in reactive nano, stealth screens that literally absorbed all incoming radiation just like the larger ships, and if we weren’t reflecting any of that energy, we were effectively invisible. We had to keep the Plottel Drive idling at very low power, however, to avoid giving ourselves away by the wake the drive dimpled into spacetime. As we drew within 100,000 kilometers or so, our AIs cut the drives and we drifted in, silent and powerless.

The chatter in the compartment died away with the drive. There was no way the enemy could actually hear us, of course. Sound doesn’t travel through hard vacuum, and our com channels were shielded, isolated form the rest of the universe. Maybe we were all following genetic programming laid down a few million years ago, when our ancestors stopped their screeches and calls as they hid in the foliage and watched the big hunter cats pad silently past in the night.

As hour followed hour, it started getting hot inside the Misty. If we’re absorbing incoming radiation
and
keeping our own heat from radiating into space . . . well, there’s only so much we can store up in the shipboard heat sinks or convert to electricity. After a while, the cabin temperature began climbing rapidly. We had our armor set to cool us, of course, but after about six hours, our suits were dumping so much excess heat into the crowded cabin that it became a vicious circle—our armor pumping out more heat into our surroundings to protect us against the increasing heat around us—and before long the heat sinks in our armor were maxed out and we were sweltering, stewing in our own juices. I used the platoon data channel to keep track of everyone’s core temperatures, including my own. If
those
started climbing, we would have to start taking exceptional measures to avoid heat exhaustion or, far worse, heat stroke.

“Listen up, everybody,” I said over the platoon channel. “Everyone set your autoinjects for a fifty milligram shot of ’lyte balance.”

I punched in my own dosage on my armor’s wrist control pad. In the old days, troops swallowed salt tablets to replace electrolytes lost to sweat. This was better—an injection of electrolytes plus nano, programmed to maintain a tailored isotonic balance. I felt the sharp sting beneath the angle of my jaw as the hypo fired the cocktail into my carotid.

Invisible, we drifted past the nearest of the orbiting Qesh giants, a Titan-class, as large as one of our battleships, at a range of just 500 kilometers. It was invisible to the unaided eye, of course, but through enhanced optics, we could see it as a flattened dagger shape with flaring aft sponsons, painted in the distinctive red-and-white livery of the Qesh warships we’d encountered in the past. I don’t know why they didn’t bother with nanoflage hull coatings. They certainly must have had the technology to employ them.

Possibly they just figured they were the biggest and meanest kids on the block, and didn’t need to sneak. That, or the warrior tag on their cultural profile meant that sneaking, for them, was the same as cowardice.

That’s okay. I was happy to play coward if it meant we didn’t get noticed by those bad boys. The Titan gave no notice of our presence as we glided past, entering the upper shreds of Bloodworld’s atmosphere.

I imagined that we’d already inserted some spy-probes into orbit to get close-up imaging on whatever it was they were doing there, but the higher-ups hadn’t told us anything about what they might have found. It did look like there was a lot of activity, though, with small ships—corvette sized or smaller—shuttling back and forth among the larger vessels, or in transit through the atmosphere, between surface and orbit.

The glaring red eye of Bloodstar dropped beneath the planetary limb, plunging us into darkness.

The nightside of Bloodworld, turned eternally away from the sun, was completely black and featureless to the naked eye. Under enhanced optics, though, we could see the ice sheets below, ragged, broken by mountain ranges and following the twists and curves of broad plains and valleys. For some reason, I’d been expecting the ice cap to cover the nightside of Bloodworld neatly and completely. In fact, ice covered only about two thirds of the dark-side hemisphere, giving way in places to empty tundra, in others to open ocean. Several hundred pinpoints of red-orange light glowed against the surface, especially in a broad ring near the edge of the planet’s disk.

Volcanoes. Hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. The eons-long gravitational tug-of-war between Bloodworld, its sun, and the nearest giant planets kept them erupting on a fairly regular basis. I could see storms below, too, vast spiraling swirls of clouds hugging the dark surface. Most of the clouds were gathered around the periphery between day and night.

We felt a sudden shock . . . and then another, followed by the steadily increasing sensation of weight as we decelerated. We continued our descent over Bloodworld’s nightside, doing our best imitation of a large meteor as friction ionized the thin air around us. We were certainly showing up on their sensors
now
, but hours ago our AI had nudged us into a path that let us enter the atmosphere at a flat angle, using aerobraking to sharply reduce our velocity.

The nearest Qesh warship, a cruiser-sized Leviathan, was now 900 kilometers distant, and didn’t appear to be paying us any attention whatsoever.

We passed low above the vast sweep of a coriolis storm. In my in-head, I could see the clouds seemingly close enough to touch, illuminated from within, from moment to moment, by the silent pulses of lightning. Seconds later, we slid into the clouds, then punched through above open water and a deep purple sky. At the last possible moment, our AI kicked in the Plottel Drive and slowed us to a few hundred kilometers per hour, lowering us into the black water below.

The added weight first felt during deceleration continued to drag at us. Bloodworld had a surface gravity of almost twice Earth’s. I weighed eighty-three kilos on Earth; here I weighed 153.

“Systems check, people,” Gunny Hancock called. “Suit power!”

The order startled us, pulling us up out of a kind of waking sleep as we began running through our pre-debarkation checklist. Power. Life support. Communications. Suit AIs. Suit nanotechnics and fabricators. Exowalker. Jumpjet systems and meta tank. Weapon links. Even though our weapons were all safely stored in the lockers above our heads, we could activate the targeting links to make sure we could connect through our CDF links.

In my in-head display, I could see nothing but blackness outside, the watery depths of Bloodworld’s major ocean. According to the data feed, we were under open water rather than ice, traveling at nearly 200 kph at a depth of 500 meters. This was a calculated risk, of course; the Plottel Drive created a kind of energy bubble around us that let us zip through deep water at high speeds, but we were still putting out a lot of noise from the interface—sound energy that could be picked up by underwater receivers hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers away.

But we were gambling that the Qesh couldn’t think of everything, wouldn’t cover every approach, and especially wouldn’t think about an enemy coming in through space, then making the final approach under water. The Qesh might be advanced, but they weren’t
gods
.

At least, that was the assumption being made by the planning staff for Operation Bloodworld Salvation. The alternative was to spend a few days or even weeks maneuvering in close, and we didn’t have that kind of time available to us.

Two hours after entering the water, then, we surfaced. Every Marine inside that Misty-D was tuned in and watching, the stress inside that compartment palpable. We were all remembering that last training exercise.

“Thank God!” Gabrielle Latimer said. “No fucking Daityas!”

Several Marines laughed, and someone called out, “
Boo!
Got ya!”

Our D/MST-22 hovered, dripping, above the ocean swell, then drifted in slowly above a rocky beach. A volcano erupted noisily to the south. The wind shrieked outside, buffeting our craft.

“Debarkation in two minutes!” Gunny snapped. “Marines! Stand up!”

A bustle of noise sounded through the compartment as almost forty armored shapes unbuckled and de-linked, then stood up in the narrow central passageway. Our seats melted away, returning to the deck from which they’d been summoned.

“Marines! Break out packs and weapons!”

With more space in which to maneuver, we turned and opened the lockers, retrieving our weapons and our backpacks.

There’s still a popular fiction out there that says that Navy Corpsmen never carry weapons. Once upon a time, two or three centuries ago, before we entered space, combat medics actually weren’t allowed to carry weapons. A series of international agreements jointly called the Geneva Convention laid out what nations could and could not do in warfare, according to the ideas of international humanitarian law at the time. Among other things, combat medics couldn’t carry weapons, and they were required to wear helmets and armbands marked with large and prominent red crosses.

The trouble, of course, was that not every nation was a signatory to the Geneva Convention, and even some that were didn’t always play by the rules. During the series of small wars, “police actions,” and wars against terrorism that flared up during the last half of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first, most of the rules went out the window. The United States Marines often found themselves fighting opponents who would deliberately target the Corpsmen who were trying to save Marine lives. It became common knowledge that a lot of combat Corpsmen, as soon as they entered the war zone, removed the red crosses and acquired their own weapons; the records listing Corpsmen who won the Medal of Honor and other medals for heroism include quite a few who protected a fallen Marine by using weapons—either their own or their patient’s—to hold off approaching enemy troops.

Once we entered the interstellar arena, “the enemy” tended to be individuals and governments who had never heard of the Geneva Convention, and who wouldn’t understand it if they had. Every species has its own idea of what war is, what constitutes decency, fair play, or war crimes, and whether or not such attitudes are even sane in armed conflict. When you think about it, the idea of “playing fair” in a war where the survival of your species is at stake is sheer lunacy. That idea has always caused problems for proponents of the Geneva Convention; the accords say you never target civilian populations, that to do so constitutes a war crime, a crime against humanity—and yet from the mid-twentieth century until well into the twenty-first, nations routinely held vast civilian populations in the crosshairs of their nuclear weapons. An all-out nuclear war would have killed tens or hundreds of millions of innocents, perhaps more. But for any one nation to risk unilaterally disarming on humanitarian or moral grounds would have been tantamount to suicide.

Nowadays, and facing nonhuman foes, Corpsmen
always
go into combat armed.

My weapon was a lightweight laser carbine, a Sunbeam-Sony half-megajoule-pulse Mk. 30 officer’s model, accurate to line-of-sight horizon and massing just 4 kilos. My sidearm, of course, was a Browning Five, the 5-millimeter automatic magnetic slug-slinger that’s been standard issue for the Marines for the past eighty years. The carbine went over my right shoulder, clicking home in the snap catches on my backpack. The Browning went into a thigh holster, right next to my M-7.

A moment later, we touched down with the crunch of hull on gravel, rocked slightly as the landing jacks extended and the bulkheads to either side began morphing open, as ramps extended from the deck down to the black stones of the beach.

“Second Platoon,
go
!” Gunny Hancock yelled, and thirty-nine Marines pounded down the ramps.

My first non-simmed footsteps on an extrasolar world.

Ooh
-ra!

Chapter Ten

T
he local star was hanging above the eastern horizon, four times bigger than Sol as viewed from Earth. It was hard to remember that Bloodworld was a third the distance from its primary as Mercury was from Sol. A third the distance . . . but Bloodstar itself was less than three tenths the diameter of Sol, so that red sun actually appeared to be a bit smaller in the sky than Sol as seen from Mercury.

I saw why the mission planners had decided to call this LZ “Red Tower,” though. Off to the north of the beach, a spire of rock, needle slim and at least a kilometer high, caught the perpetual late-afternoon sunlight, which gave it the appearance of being drenched in blood. A lot of the nearby rock formations had the look of the badlands geology of the American Southwest, iron-stained and rugged. The landscape was harsh, heavily eroded, with spires, pinnacles, and mesas of rock. Toward the south, I could see a sawtooth line of mountains, one of them beneath a mushroom pall of dark gray cloud.

“First Squad!” Hancock yelled. “Put up the perimeter! Second Squad! I want the HQ right over there, beside those boulders. Amphibious green blurs, people! Move it! Move it! Move it!”

We were using quantum-encrypted comms on low power, with thousands of frequency shifts per second spread over a fair part of the frequencies; we
should
be safe enough from high-tech eavesdroppers, though it was never a good idea to assume too much in that department. First Squad spread out into the surrounding rocks, setting up a defensive perimeter, including robotic gun positions and sentries, and sensor arrays. The rest of us started building the Red Tower headquarters.

“Headquarters” was contained in a five-kilo box the size of a large briefcase, which Sergeant Leighton set on a large, flat, bare expanse of basaltic rock fifty meters up from the water. The rest of us did a sweep across the rock, side by side, picking up loose rocks and tossing them away, clearing a work area ten meters across.

Working in the local gravity was a strain. I picked up one loose chunk of rock the size of my fist and it felt as heavy as a lump of gold. All of us were working in strap-on exowalkers, of course, frameworks embracing our armor that supported our legs, torsos, and backs, amplifying each move we made and taking some of the gravitational strain off. Still, 1.85 G made for slow and heavy going.

With the growing area cleared, Gunny Hancock triggered the box, which began releasing a steady stream of nanoconstructors onto the rock. It was a similar process to what we’d done on Hymie, except that here we were using local materials entirely—the basaltic rock, plus carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a long list of other elements drawn straight from the atmosphere. A few more necessary elements not available in the air were provided by a hose with an attached pump strung across the rock shelf and down to the water. Seawater on Earth has an amazing supply of elements—various salts, of course, but also gold, silver, copper, iron, tungsten, magnesium, even traces of platinum, iridium, and uranium. The seawater here on Bloodworld was richer in metals than Earth’s oceans by far. The planet, remember, was 8.3 billion years old, almost twice Earth’s age, and the constant internal stresses caused by tidal forces guaranteed that everything from hydrogen and helium to the heaviest natural elements were constantly getting squeezed up out of the planet’s crust and churned into the sea. Bloodworld’s seas were a thick, mineral-rich soup, heated from within and constantly stirred by fierce storms and savage tides.

Once the area was clear and the HQ dome was growing, I got to work on my planetfall to-do list, hauling out my sniffer and pulling in microsamples of the atmosphere. As expected, the oxygen here was running at just under twenty percent, with nitrogen at 75.5 percent. There were two red flags, however, again as expected. Carbon dioxide was showing 1.01 percent, while sulfur dioxide was a whopping .69 percent.

The CO
2
was actually fairly low and not immediately lethal. Normal levels on Earth average about 300 parts per million, or .03 percent. We could breathe this stuff for short periods, though some people experienced drowsiness at those levels. The SO
2
, however, was deadly at over .5 percent. Five parts per million—that’s 0.0005 of one percent—is the PEL, the permissible exposure limit, for even short-term exposure to the stuff. More than that causes respiratory difficulties and can result in death.

Appropriately charged filter masks would take care of that easily enough. Nanodisassemblers in the air intake break it into oxygen, a gas, and sulfur, which is stored in the mask’s rejection bin as the familiar yellow powder. It’s funny, though, how very close the atmosphere of Bloodworld is to being breathable by humans; that’s the story on so many worlds throughout the Galaxy, even those generally considered “Earthlike.” It doesn’t take much to make the place unhealthy. I looked up toward the south and the distant, erupting volcano. Both sulfur dioxide and CO
2
are outgassed by volcanic activity, and there were thousands of volcanoes on the planet. It was pretty obvious where the high levels of poisonous gas were coming from.

The temperature here was an invigorating four degrees Celsius, the wind, relatively mild for Bloodworld, coming out of the nightside in blustery gusts of forty or fifty kilometers per hour. The deep purple thunderheads gathering offshore suggested that rain was on the way. A beautiful spring morning on Bloodworld. . . .

Except that there were no seasons here. Trapped in a tidal lock with its nearby star, Bloodworld had no axial tilt at all. Both planetary climate and local weather were driven by the dayside-nightside atmospheric convection currents. Subsolar temperatures dayside ranged as high as fifty Celsius—close to the hottest it ever gets on Earth. Hot dayside air rises and expands outward—a perpetual high-pressure system—sending currents of hot air streaming out toward the nightside at high altitudes.

Over the glaciers of the nightside, the air cools rapidly, the temperature dropping to around eighty below—close to winter in Antarctica. Cold air then moves back to the dayside, traveling a bit slower and at lower altitudes, and carrying with it moisture picked up over the night-side oceans and ice fields.

Most of that moisture precipitates out at the twilight band, which was why the heaviest concentrations of clouds gathered there in the swirls and streams visible from space. The circulation makes sure that the day-to-night temperature differences don’t get too extreme, but it guarantees hellish storms and constant high winds. Air pressure, I noticed as I changed the settings on my sniffer, was falling quickly. A storm was on the way.

By the time I finished taking my readings and getting test samples of air and water, the HQ dome was nearly complete, rising swiftly as though being inflated from within. The base of the HQ dome had eaten nearly eight meters down into the solid rock, and its outer surface rippled and gleamed with an iridescent sheen as the external nano set into place. Like our ships and armor, the reactive nanoflage would closely imitate the surrounding light and tone. From the air, even from the ground just a few tens of meters away, it would look like an irregularly shaped mass of igneous rock.

I saw Baumgartner and the HQ staff making their way from the grounded D/MST, and gathering near what would soon be the HQ dome’s airlock. A second dome was being set up a little farther to the south; that would become barracks and supply building for the enlisted personnel.

Chief Garner was with Baumgartner. So were Doobie Dubois and Machine McKean, Gunny Hancock and several others. I joined them.

My suit clicked me into their private channel as I approached. “ . . . and I want you to be damned sure you keep your people in hand, Chief,” Baumgartner was saying. “No free-wheeling, no scrounging, no black marketeering, you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.” Garner’s voice sounded carefully neutral.

Baumgartner saw me. “Carlyle. Did you get your readings?”

“Yes, sir. The numbers are exactly what we thought they’d be.”

“Well, it’s a relief to know the planet’s basic chemistry hasn’t changed in the past sixty-four years. Lloyd? Did you pick up anything?”

Staff Sergeant Arnold Lloyd was one of Carter’s people, a communications expert from Company S2.

“Negative, sir. I did a complete freak sweep. There’s lots of radio noise from the local sun, of course, but nothing that sounds artificial. Of course, both the locals and the Qesh have quantum encoding. Anything they broadcast
will
sound like noise.”

“I am aware of quantum communications technology, Staff Sergeant. What I need from you is results.”

Second Lieutenant Baumgartner had something of a reputation in Bravo Company. Some of the Marines called him “Mommy” behind his back. He was fussy, a worrier, and something of a prima donna.

He was, frankly, the kind who doesn’t last long in the Corps. You either learn to work
with
your NCOs, or you find yourself transferred to permanent desk duty Earthside, a sure-fire killer of any officer’s career.

“Hancock? I want the first recon squad deployed in thirty mikes.”

“I would suggest waiting twenty-four hours, sir,” Hancock said, his voice dead level. “That’ll give my people time to acclimate to the higher gravity.”

“I will remind you, Gunnery Sergeant, that they are not
your
people. They are
my
people,
my
assets, and I will determine how best to utilize them.” He turned back to me. “Carlyle!”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will break out your bag of tricks and shoot up Second Platoon with G-boost. Supercharge ’em.”

I hesitated for an uncomfortable moment. Had Dr. Francis given me that order—or even Chief Garner—I would not have had a problem. Second Lieutenant Baumgartner, though, was not medically trained, and could not prescribe medications.

“You have a problem with that, Carlyle?” Baumgartner demanded.

“Sir—”

“We’ll take care of it, sir,” Garner said, interrupting.

“Good. Gunny Hancock, you will take Second Platoon across country to the city of Salvation. Set up an advance OP, establish QB contact with Red Tower, and coordinate the approach of the rest of the company.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“You will not, repeat
not
, initiate contact with either the Qesh or the locals. You will wait for the approach of the main force. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

And that seemed to be that.

But I couldn’t help thinking about the old von Moltke adage:
no plan survives contact with the enemy
.

T
wenty minutes later, Second Platoon’s Second Squad was forming up for the patrol, a total of thirteen Marines plus one Navy puke—me. Gunny Hancock was in command. They were breaking out the quantum flitters from the D/MST’s cargo compartment and lining them up on the beach.

But I was having a few final words on a private channel with Chief Garner before we left. “Are you saying I just ignore a direct order?” I asked.

“Not ignore,” Garner said, “so much as bend it, just a little. You don’t want your Marines coming down with a crash.”

“And
I
don’t want to end up in the brig,” I told him. “Baumgartner’s been known to do that, y’know?”

I was thinking about that incident back at Lejeune, when an overstressed kid tagged by a training laser had lost his temper and snapped off something about “fuck the fucking ossifers” over an open channel, not even knowing he was on the air. Most officers would have ignored it; at most they would have had his platoon sergeant have a private word with him later about communications security. Not Mommy Baumy, though.

“You won’t end up in the brig,” Chief Garner told me. “I’ll back you. Just hold off on the G-B injections until your people really need them. And you’ll know when
that
is, believe me.”

“E-Car!” Hancock bellowed over the platoon frequency. “Get your Navy ass over here!”

“On my way, Gunny!” I replied. I looked at Garner. “Thanks, Chief. Just keep the Man off my neck, okay?”

All Marines carry a few million Frietas respirocytes circulating through their bloodstreams—artificial one-micron cells that work like the body’s own red blood cells, only far more efficiently. Natural systems that have evolved hit or miss over hundreds of millions of years tend to be pretty clunky compared to human engineering. Respirocytes are a lot better at carrying oxygen and removing waste metabolytes than RBCs; though they’re one fifth the diameter, they can store and transport 236 times as much oxygen as a red cell, and deliver it to specific cell groups—in the brain, in the heart, in key muscle groups—with targeted precision.

It’s been estimated that if the red blood cells in a human’s circulatory system were completely replaced by respiroctes, that person would be able to hold his breath for over an hour—or sprint at top speed for fifteen minutes and never take a breath. We haven’t reached that point yet—it brings us smack up against the Transhuman Debate and the Hopkins Declaration. But injecting Marines with respirocytes dramatically improves their endurance and physical performance, and we’ve been doing it routinely since the late twenty-first century.

G-boost, though, is different. It’s a complex artificial protein that bonds with respirocytes already in the blood and jacks them up to a whole new operational level. Boosted respirocytes circulate through muscle tissue and suck up lactic acid and other metabolytes, supercharge the muscles with O
2
-rich blood, and fine-tune the nervous system to improve the person’s reaction time. The person becomes faster,
much
stronger, immune to exhaustion, and able to function in a relatively high-G environment for hours on end. Supercharging, it’s called. Supercharged Marines no longer need to sleep, and they can carry two to three times more weight than before, going on for hour after hour without tiring. The stuff is illegal for civilians, but has been available for military use for about thirty years.