Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One (3 page)

But even more it was to protect
us
. We were just at the very beginning of our explorations into the Galaxy, and there were Things out there we didn’t understand and which didn’t understand us—or they didn’t care, or they simply saw us as a convenient source of raw materials. Over the course of the past fifty years, we’d taken special steps to screen our civilization’s background noise, and the AI navigators in our starships were designed to purge all data that might give a clue to the existence and location of Earth or Earth’s colonies if they encountered an alien ship or world.

A Qesh relativistic impactor, it was believed, could turn Earth’s entire crust molten. We did
not
want to have them or their Imperial buddies showing up on our doorstep in a bad mood.

The problem was, the barn door had been open for a bunch of years, and the horses had long since gotten loose. Radio and television signals were expanding into interstellar space at the rate of one light year per year, in a bubble now something like six hundred light years across. Technology researchers liked to insist that the useful information/noise ratio drops off to damned near zero only a couple of light years out; anyone out there listening for a juicy young pre-spaceflight civilization probably wouldn’t be able to pick our twentieth-century transmissions out of the interstellar white noise—but the kicker was the word
probably
. We just don’t know what’s possible; the EG mentions galactic civilizations out there that are on the order of 5 × 10
16
seconds old—that’s longer than Earth has been around as a planet. I don’t think it’s possible for us to say what such a civilization could or could not do.

But things get uglier when it comes to our pre-Protocol colonies. There are a lot of them out there, scattered across the sky from Sagittarius to Orion. The earliest was Chiron, of course, at Alpha Centauri A IV, founded in 2109. They’re all close enough to Earth to have signed the Protocol shortly after it was written, but there are plenty of colonies out there that for one reason or another have nothing to do with Earth or the Commonwealth. Many of them we don’t even have listed, and if we don’t know they exist, we can’t police them.

But if they were established before the year 2194, they probably still have navigational coordinates for Earth somewhere in their computer network. And someone with the technology to figure out how our computers work, sooner or later, would break the code and they might come hunting for us.

Our only recourse in that case was to go looking for them. If we could contact them and get them to agree to abide by the Protocol, great.

But if they didn’t . . . well, as Lewis had so eloquently put it,
Send in the Marines
.

“Now hear this, now hear this,” a voice said from the squad bay’s intercom speaker. “All hands prepare for one gravity acceleration in ten minutes, repeat, ten minutes. Secure all loose gear and reconfigure hab module spaces. That is all.”

“That was fast,” Dubois said.

“Yeah, but where the hell are we going?” I wanted to know. I looked at Lewis. “Your friend have any word on that?”

“Actually,” she said, “from what he said, hell is a pretty good description.”

In fact, though, our destination turned out to be Earth.

Most of the hab space on board an attack transport like the
Clymer
is dedicated to living space. She carries 1,300 Marines besides her normal complement of 210 officers and crew, and all of that humanity is packed into the rotating ring around her central spine, along with the galleys and mess halls, sick bay, lab spaces, rec and VR bays, life-support nanufactories, and gear lockers.

They didn’t tell us, of course. After doing a quick check to make sure anything loose was tied down or put away—Doobie’s hooch went into a refrigerated storage tank in an equipment locker forward—we strapped ourselves standing against the acceleration couches growing out of the aft bulkhead. Ten minutes later, we felt the hab wheel spinning down, and for a few moments we were in microgravity. I could hear a Marine down the line being noisily sick—there’s
always
at least one—but I stayed put until the
Clymer
lit her main torch.

There was an odd moment of disorientation, because where “down”
had
been along the curving outer floor of the hab wheel, now it was toward the aft bulkhead. The bulkhead had become the deck, and instead of standing up against our acceleration couches, now we were lying in them flat. The viewall was reprogrammed to show on what had been the deck. Under Plottel Drive, we were accelerating at a steady one gravity, but “down” was now
aft
, not out toward the rim of the wheel.

They let us get up, then, and we spent the next hour learning to walk again. We’d been at .38 Gs for two weeks.

I was half expecting Alcubierre Drive to kick in at any time, but hour followed hour and we continued our steady acceleration. Thirty-four hours later we were ordered to the couches once more, and again there was a brief period of microgravity as the
Clymer
ponderously turned end for end.

That gave us an idea of where we were headed, though. There’d still been a good chance that we were headed for Europa, as originally planned. At the moment, however, Jupiter and its moons were a good six astronomical units from Mars—call it 900 million kilometers. Accelerate at one gravity halfway from Mars to Europa, and we’d have reached the turnover point in something over forty-two hours. A thirty-four-hour turnover—I ran the numbers through my Cerebral Data Feed in-head processors a second time to be sure—meant we’d covered half the current distance to Earth.

Which meant we were on our way home, to Starport One.

Once we were backing down, thirty hours out from Earth, though, we received a download over the shipnet on a planet none of us had ever heard of.

Download

Commonwealth Planetary Ephemeris

Entry: Gliese 581 IV

“Bloodstar”

Star:
Gliese 581, Bloodstar, Hell’s Star

Type M3V

M = .31 Sol; R = 0.29 Sol; L = .013 Sol; T = 3480ºK

Coordinates
: RA 15
h
19
m
26
s
; Dec -07º 43′ 20″; D = 20.3 ly

Planet:
Gliese 581 IV

Name:
Gliese 581 IV, Gliese 581 g, Bloodworld, Salvation, Midgard

Type:
Terrestrial/rocky; “superearth”

Mean orbital radius
: 0.14601 AU;
Orbital period
: 36
d
13
h
29
m
17
s

Inclination:
0.0º;
Rotational period
: 36
d
13.56
h
(tide-locked with primary)

Mass
: 2.488 x 10
28
g = 4.17 Earth;
Equatorial Diameter:
28,444 km = 2.3 Earth

Mean planetary density
: 5.372 g/cc = .973 Earth

Surface Gravity
: 1.85 G

Surface temperature range:
~ -60ºC [Nightside] to 50ºC [Dayside]

Surface atmospheric pressure:
~152 x 10
3
kPa [1.52 Earth average]

Percentage atmospheric composition
: O
2
19.6, N
2
75.5, Ne 1.15, Ar 0.58, CO 1.42; CO
2
1.01, SO
2
0.69; others <500 ppm

Age:
8.3 billion years

Biology:
C, N, H, Na, S
8
, O, Br, H
2
O; mobile photolithoautotrophs in oxygenating atmosphere symbiotic with sessile chemoorganoheterotrophs and chemosynthetic lithovores in librational twilight zones.

Human Presence:
The Salvation of Man colony established in 2181 in the west planetary librational zone. Salvation was founded by a Rejectionist offshoot of the Neoessene Messianist Temple as a literal purgatory for the cleansing of human sin. There has been no contact with the colony since its founding.

“Jesus Christ!” Lance Corporal Ron Kukowicz said, shaking his head as he got up out of his download couch. “Another bunch of fucking God-shouters.”

“Shit. You have something against God, Kook?” Sergeant Joy Leighton said, sneering.

“Not with God,” Kukowicz replied. “Just with God’s more fervent followers.”

“The download said they’re Rejectionists,” I pointed out. “Probably a bunch of aging neo-Luddites. No artificial lights. No AI. No nanufactories. No weapons. That’s about as harmless as you can get.”

“Don’t count on that harmless thing, Doc,” Staff Sergeant Larrold Thomason said. “If they’re living
there
they’ve got technology. And they know how to use it.”

“Yeah,” Private Gutierrez said. “You can tell ’cause they’re still alive!”

Thomason had a point. The planet variously called Salvation and Hell was a thoroughly nasty place, hot as blazes and with air that would poison you if you went outside without a mask.

We’d been lying inside our rack-tubes as we took the download feed—“racked out” as military slang puts it. That allowed for full immersion; the virtual reality feed that had come with the ephemeris data suggested that the numbers didn’t begin to do justice to the place. The recordings had been made by the colonizing expedition sixty-four years ago, so the only surface structures we’d seen had been some temporary habitat domes raised on a parched and rocky plateau. Bloodstar, the local sun, was a red hemisphere peeking above the horizon, swollen and red, with an apparent diameter over three times that of Sol seen from Earth. Everything was tinged with red—the sky, the clouds, and an oily-looking sea surging at the base of the plateau cliffs.

And the native life.

With the download complete, we were up and moving around the squad bay again. My legs and back were sore from yesterday, but I no longer felt like I was carrying an adult plus a large child on my back. Private Gerald Colby, at my orders, was wearing an exo-frame; they’d fused his broken tibia in sick bay an hour after his return from the Martian surface, but Dr. Francis had wanted him to go easy on the leg for a week or so to make sure the fix was good. That meant he wore the frame, a mobile exoskeleton of slender, jointed carbon-weave titaniplas rods strapped to the backs of his legs and up his spine—basically a stripped-down version of the heavier walker units we use for excursions on the surfaces of high-gravity worlds.

The rest of us had been working out in the bay’s small gym space, getting our full-gravity legs back, and taking g-shift converters, nanobots programmed to maintain bone calcium in low-G, and blood pressure in high-G. Marines on board an attack transport like the
Clymer
had a rigidly fixed daily routine which included a
lot
of exercise time on the Universals.

I shared the daily routine to a certain extent—they had me billeted with Second Platoon—but today I had the duty running sick call. It was nearly 0800, time for me to get my ass up there.

I rode the hab-ring car around the circumference to the
Clymer
’s med unit and checked in with Dr. Francis.

Clymer
sported a ten-bed hospital and a fairly well appointed sick bay. In an emergency, we could grow new beds, of course, but the hospital only had one patient at the moment, a Navy rating from the
Clymer
’s engineering department with thermal burns from a blown plasma-fusion unit.

“Morning, Carlyle,” Dr. Francis said as I walked in. “You ready for Earthside liberty?”

“Sure am, sir. If we’re there long enough.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “Scuttlebutt says we’re headed out-system. And they just gave us a download on a colony world out in Libra.”

He laughed. “You know better than to believe scuttlebutt.”

“Yes, sir.” But why had they given us the feed on Bloodworld?

The doctor vanished into a back compartment, and I began seeing patients. Sick call was the time-honored practice where people on board ship lined up outside of sick bay to tell us their ills: colds and flu, sprains and strains, occasional hangovers and STDs. Once in a long while there was something interesting, but the Marines were by definition an insufferably healthy lot, and the real challenge of holding sick call was separating the rare genuine ailments from the smattering of crocs and malingerers.

My very first patient gave me pause, though. Roger Howell was a private from 3rd Platoon. His staff sergeant had sent him up. Symptoms were general listlessness, headache, mild nausea, low-grade fever of 38.2, lack of appetite, and a cough with nasal congestion.

It sounded like a cold. When I pinched the skin on his arm, the fold didn’t pop back, which suggested dehydration. “You been vomiting?” I asked. “Diarrhea?”

“No, Doc,” he replied. “But my head is really killing me.”

“You been hitting the hooch?” Those symptoms might also point to a hangover.

He managed a weak grin. “I wish!”

When I shined a light in his eyes, trying to look at his pupils, he flinched away. “What’s the matter?”

“Light hurts my head, Doc.”

I didn’t press it. Photophobia with a headache isn’t unusual. “You get migraines?”

“What’s that?”

“Really, really bad headaches. Maybe on just one side of your head, behind the eye. You might see flashes of light, and the pain can make you sick to your stomach.”

“Nah. Nothing like that. Look, I just thought you’d shoot me up with some nanomeds, y’know?”

I had a choice. I could call it a mild cold and have him force fluids to take care of the dehydration, or I could look deeper. There was a long list of more serious ailments that could cause those kinds of low-grade symptoms.

I pulled a hematocrit on him and got a 54. That’s right on the high edge of normal for males—again, consistent with mild dehydration. I took a throat swab for a culture, checked his blood pressure and heart rate—both normal—and decided on option one.