Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One (9 page)

“That’s right,” Staff Sergeant Thomason added. “This is MDR. We go in quiet. We go in lethal.”

“Recon rules the night!” several voices chorused.

“
Ooh-rah!
” chorused some others.

I wondered how “rule the night” would apply to the Bloodworld’s twilight zone. I didn’t say anything, though. The Marines were cruising just then on pure, raw emotion.

From the look of those animated graphics on the squad bay viewall, we were hurtling tail first into a nest of hornets. The situation wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed, though, because the chances were good that they couldn’t see us. Under Plottel Drive, we were warping our own little patch of space to kill our velocity, but the effect couldn’t be detected—at least, we were pretty sure it couldn’t be detected—across more than a few tens of thousands of kilometers. Our ships had deployed their stealth screens as soon as they entered normal space. Stealth screens didn’t render a ship optically invisible, but they did drink up radar, microwave, and even long infrared. As for optical wavelengths, it’s amazing how
tiny
a starship is, even a ship as large as the
Clymer
, within a given volume of interplanetary space. The outer hull is a deep, light-drinking black, and you practically have to be on top of the ship to see her. Unless she closed to within a very few kilometers of an enemy vessel, or by very bad luck the enemy happened to notice when she occulted a star, the
Clymer
was damned near invisible to begin with.

So how were we able to see all of those Qesh vessels? Well, they weren’t trying to be inconspicuous, for one thing. Each one was cheerfully emitting a cacophony of microwave and infrared wavelengths, pinging one another with radar and lidar, and generally doing just about everything short of hanging out the “Welcome Earth Commonwealth” signs and setting off fireworks. Our AIs could take that data from long-range sensor scans, work out the enemy vessels’ sizes and masses, and display the distillate on the graphic projection.

In fact, I had the distinct impression that they were deliberately showing off.

“So how come the bad guys aren’t playing it safe and putting out their stealth screens?” Corporal Latimer asked. She shook her head, as if exasperated. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense. Why show us their numbers like that?”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Gibbs added. “It’s pretty freakin’ stupid if you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you, asshole,” Tomacek told him.

“It’s a fair question,” Hancock said. “And we might have a fair answer if we knew more about the bastards. Best guess is, the Jackers are supposed to be a warrior culture. Think seventeenth-century Samurai in Japan, or maybe ancient Visigoths or Huns. Hiding, sneaking around, that’s for cowards. Their culture demands that they show themselves to the enemy.”

“The art of intimidation,” I suggested.

“It’s
still
freakin’ stupid!”

“Uh-huh,” Hancock agreed. “But there’s something else to consider, too.”

“What’s that, Gunny?”

“What makes you think we’re seeing
all
of them right now?”

We all grew a bit more quiet at that as we studied the graphic.

Maybe that massive fleet we could see orbiting Gliese 581 IV was the bait.

“So,” Andrews said, “we’re outnumbered
and
out-teched.”

“Maybe so,” Hancock said. “But we do have one important advantage.”

“Yeah, Gunny? What’s that?”

“We’re
Marines
.”

“That’s ay-ffirmative.” Thomason laughed. “The poor bastards’ll never know what hit ’em.”

Sometimes the sheer arrogance of the Marines amazes me.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not arrogance when it’s true.

Since Captain Samuel Nicholas recruited the first Continental Marines at Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern in 1775, the Corps has been America’s first and best line of defense. Are American interests at risk? Are American citizens threatened? Does the Army need a beachhead?
Send in the Marines
has been the confident response across the past five hundred years. Now that the United States has become a part of the Terran Commonwealth, there’ve been frequent calls for the Corps to join with the marine forces of other nations and reorganize as the Commonwealth Marines.

You’ll notice that despite the ebb and flow of politics over the years, they are still the United States Marine Corps.

Unyielding, uncompromising, never swayed by fad or fashion, utterly and sincerely certain of themselves, of their esprit, of their essential nature and reason for being, the U.S. Marines remain what is perhaps
the
preeminent elite fighting force of Humankind.

After training with them, after serving with them, I love them. Every last damned one of them.

Even the assholes.

“Enough lollygagging,” Hancock growled at us. “If you ladies and gentlemen will remember, we have a training schedule to keep. So all of you amphibious green rabbits pop back into your holes and jack in!”

An hour later, I was packed into a D/MST-22 Manta Ray TMV with forty-seven battle-armored Marines . . . or so it seemed, as the
Clymer
’s training AI fed images, sensations, and BTL impressions into my quivering gray matter.

I say “BTL,” meaning “better than life,” in the popular lexicon, but “better,” here, is a subjective term wide open to debate.

It certainly looked and felt like the real thing.

The Cutlass I’d ridden down to the surface of Mars the week before was a TAV, a trans-atmospheric vehicle, meaning it could travel from the surface of a planet to orbit and back, passing through the planet’s atmosphere to do so. A D/MST-22 TMV was a bit more sophisticated, a trans-
media
vehicle, capable of operating in any of several environments—in vacuum, in atmosphere, or under water. Shaped vaguely like its extinct namesake, the Manta Ray had a flattened body and large, triangular wings curving downward at the tips. It carried one full Marine platoon packed into its payload deck—forty-eight men and women with armor, exos, and weapons. Somewhere out there in the watery darkness around us were three more Mantas, carrying the rest of Bravo Company—First and Third Platoons, plus the HQ element.

It wasn’t like the Black Wizards were traveling in comfort.

We’d inserted on Bloodworld’s nightside, 2,000 kilometers from the twilight zone. Using the laser cutters on the Mantas’ bows, we’d melted down through a thin patch of the ice covering Bloodworld’s ocean, and were traveling now 100 meters beneath the ice, through a realm of absolute and frigid darkness. According to my in-head, almost ten hours had passed.

I was wondering how much time had
really
passed.

You see, a virtual reality simulation will override your own timekeepers. Sitting there in my armor, wedged in shoulder to shoulder between Sergeant Leighton and Private Marshall, I could remember climbing into the Misty in orbit, remember the meteoric descent across the planet’s nightside, remember the ice-melting op and the descent, remember every damned, cramped, claustrophobic minute of the ten-hour passage through the dark.

In fact, the chances were good that the AI program had simply slipped in every couple of simulated hours or so and updated our memories. We
remembered
all of that time having passed, but memories are as easy to create as are the illusions of reality. Easier, even. It’s possible to use ’bots to manufacture the appropriate neuropeptides, possible to implant long memory sequences, even to include remembered conversations and cognition.

This is especially true if the memories happen to be of a time when nothing much is happening. It’s amazing how hours of thumb-twiddling boredom collapse into a few discrete image sequences. Think about it. A typical period of dreaming lasts a few seconds, and yet when we wake up, we remember, or
think
we remember, long and complicated sequences of dream imagery.

The brain sucks when it comes to keeping accurate track of time.

What all of this meant was that my back and legs ached from being wedged into one position for too long, and I could look back in my mind to what seemed like an eternity of just sitting there. I could remember playing some in-head games, pulling a couple of articles on nanomedicine from my RAM, and engaging in a long conversation with Sergeant Leighton on our private channels, wandering from philosophy to combat to emotional trauma to Marine training and back to philosophy again.

“Hang on, back there,” a voice called in my head, interrupting the memories. “We’re going up on the roof.”

The deck tilted beneath our feet, and I could feel the surge of acceleration. It didn’t feel like they were stopping to melt a hole through the ice sheet, so they must have found a patch of ice-free ocean or a polinya, and were heading up to grab atmosphere.

I clicked in to the Misty-D’s bow camera for a look outside. We had that option, of course, when the tactical situation permitted it, but for the past ten hours there’d been nothing to see but blackness.

Now, though, I could see a wavering patch of blood-red light up ahead. It expanded rapidly . . . and then light exploded around me as the Manta broke through the surface and emerged into the open air.

The light wasn’t all that was exploding. The Qesh were waiting for us.

Freaking great
, I thought.
A doomsday scenario
.

They threw those at us in training every once in a while, simulating a battle or a situation that was impossible to survive. They called it a
Kobayashi Maru
, though the origin of that term was lost—probably in the pre-computer confusion of World War II. The theory behind it was simple enough; if we’d already struggled through the worst possible scenario, anything else would be tame by comparison when we faced it for real.

We emerged from the ocean close to a black, rocky beach. We were well into the twilight zone here. The bloody sun was hanging just above the horizon directly ahead, and deep purple clouds boiled across an emerald sky. A quintet of immense, bronze-colored Daitya weapons platforms hovered above the higher ground to the east, spread out to embrace that ragged patch of beach.

The Manta carrying First Platoon was hit almost the instant it clawed into the air, the fireball smearing across the sky in a spray of white-hot fragments. The Mantas carrying Third Platoon and our HQ were hit two seconds later, almost simultaneously.

Then we were hit, but not badly enough to knock us down. Our AI pilot kept us airborne long enough for us to reach the beach, though we covered the last fifty meters in a couple of skips across the dark water.

The Manta’s hull rippled open while we were still ten meters in the air. We dropped a couple of meters before our jets kicked in and gave us a semblance of a soft landing, scattered along that beach. I landed in ankle-deep water just short of the shoreline, dropping to my hands and knees as a pressure wave thundered through thick atmosphere. Our Manta had just exploded almost directly above and ahead of us.

Second Platoon Marines were all around me, struggling to get to their feet after their unceremonious ejection and drop. Fire swept across the beach; someone was shrieking in agony, the scream going on and on and on.

“Corpsman!” someone yelled, and I slogged forward out of the water, already reaching for my M-7 kit. “Corpsman front!”

A lot of Marines were down already. I couldn’t see the energy bolts from those hovering weapons platforms, of course, but arcs of molten rock and vitrified sand crisscrossed the beach already. A Marine thrashed and scrabbled ten meters ahead . . . correction, it was
half
of a Marine. His legs were gone, burned away at the hips.

I moved toward him, hunching over as if I were pushing ahead into a savage wind. The surface gravity was almost twice Earth-standard. My exoskeleton compensated, but I could still feel the drag of the extra weight on my torso and head. I felt sluggish.

I could see Qesh infantry ahead, like giant caterpillars in segmented armor, rippling across the beach toward my position.

White flame engulfed me. . . .

Chapter Seven

I
woke up within the narrow, cylindrical confines of my tube-rack, heart pounding, palms sweaty, and scared out of my mind. I took a long moment to get my breathing under control, and bring down that shrieking flight-or-fight urgency that was permeating my brain, throat, and gut.

It was all a dream
. . . .

“Jesus Freaking Christ!”

When my heart rate was under control again, I dilated my tube open and hauled myself out. I fumbled for a suitpatch in my locker, slapped it against my bare chest, and let the Marine utilities flow into place over my body. I then made my way a bit unsteadily out to the squad bay.

The viewall was displaying Bloodstar, still shrunken, smaller, more distant than what I’d seen in the sim. Several Marines were there already, the ones designated as KIA in the disastrous landing scenario. As each man was “killed,” he awoke in his tube and, eventually, wandered out here.

“Hey, Doc!” Tomacek called. “Don’t you know it’s against regs for the Corpsman to get himself killed?”

“Someone forgot to tell the Qesh,” I replied.

“ViRsim Qesh don’t count,” Masserotti said.

“Fuck,” Andrews said, laughing. “Sims’re BTL, right? Better than the real thing!”

“S’right!” Gibbs added. “You’re in big trouble now, Doc!”

Dubois wandered into the squad bay, looking as rattled as I felt. “Someone get the number of that Daitya,” he said.

“How’d they nail you, Doob?” I asked.

“We were hit just coming in over the beach. The Misty spilled us, and exploded a moment later. I was still in the water when a bunch of Qesh infantry came storming in.”

Oh, right. I should have realized. Dubois was the Corpsman for First Platoon, I was in Second. His experience had been exactly the same as mine, because the AI running that little horror show was doing some clever editing to conserve bandwidth. I’d seen the other three Mantas get scratched, then experienced having mine shot out from under me. But First and Third Platoons, plus the HQ element, all had experienced the same point of view, the same tailor-made nightmare. Everyone in four mantas had felt what it was like to be on board the last surviving Manta, to emerge from the sea in a firestorm of high-energy weaponry, to face armored Qesh warriors descending onto the beach beneath that bloody, blotch-faced sun.

“Shit, I got zapped before I could get to my first patient!” Dubois complained.

“Same here,” I said. “Damn it, it wasn’t
fair
.”

I knew how stupid that sounded as soon as the words were out. Chief Garner was sitting in a recliner in front of the viewall display, and he turned at that.

“Jesus, Carlyle! You think it’s supposed to be
fair
?”

Each platoon had one Corpsman assigned to it. Chief Garner was our senior Corpsman, assigned to the company’s headquarters platoon.

“No, Chief. I’ve learned a
few
things since I was sworn in.”

“That particular skull-fuck is a worst-case
Kobayashi Maru
,” Garner told me. “They want to know how well our Marines can get on without us.”

“And we’re supposed to learn something from that?” I asked.

“You’re supposed to learn that in combat
nothing
ever goes down like it’s supposed to. It’s all blood and noise and terror, and you have to slog ahead and do the best you can, no matter what.”

“But they
killed
me five seconds after I hit the beach!”

“So maybe it’s not about you for a change.”

I suppose it made sense. Corpsmen have been the medics for the Marines for centuries now, at least since World War I. Marines do receive training in basic first aid, though, for those times when a Corpsman’s not available.

“So . . . hey! Who was the Marine who had both of his legs shot off?” I asked the compartment at large.

No one admitted to the fact right away. Corporal Gregory raised his hand. “I was hit in one leg,” he said. “Wasn’t too bad, but I yelled for you, and I saw you coming toward me. Then we both got flamed by one of those Jack-bastards.”

And that, of course, was an important distinguishing feature of ViRsims.
I’d
seen a Marine thrashing around on the beach with both legs completely gone, his combat armor guillotined shut across his thighs to maintain internal atmosphere.
He’d
experienced a minor wound, nothing serious at all.

They say that none of the witnesses to an accident ever remember the same events the same way. Maybe so, but that’s nothing compared to what you get in a group-training sim download. There’s literally no way to line up the facts about what actually happened, because everyone is getting a different feed.

Well, hey. Maybe that’s not so different from real life after all, but it sure can be freaking confusing when a bunch of you are dissecting it later.

“What’s the problem, Carlyle?”

It was Chief Garner. He’d walked up behind me and put a beefy hand on my shoulder.

“Nothing, Chief. Well . . . not really.”

“Spit it out, son.”

I glanced around the compartment, making sure no one else was close enough to overhear. “Shit, Chief. I’m
scared
.”

“Glad to hear it. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t.”

“No . . . I mean I’m scared of fucking up.”

“Doc Francis put the fear of God in you?”

I blinked. “You
know
about that?”

“What do
you
think?”

He would have downloaded the report, yeah. And of
course
he would have been following Howell’s case. Chief Garner was the enlisted department head for the whole company. Hell, there were probably AI recordings of the whole emergency up on B Deck. Garner had downloaded them, allowing him to literally watch over my shoulder the whole time.

I nodded. “I know. Look, Chief, I’m not FMF yet, y’know? I’m not sure I have what it takes.”

“You’ve been through most of the training, Carlyle. You’ve missed, what? A training deployment to Europa, and your final boards. If you don’t have what you need now, you
ain’t
gonna find it.”

“That’s just it. What if I don’t?”

Garner sighed. “And I don’t have any answers for you.” He got a kind of faraway look in his eyes for a moment, and I knew he was accessing records from somewhere.
My
records.

“You’ve been consistently top ten percent in your class,” he said. “First in A and P. Third in exoenvironmentals. Fourth in nanotech applications.” He pursed his lips. “Twenty-first out of forty in S and T. You could use some work there. You want to go greenside, you need to be up on your Strategy and Tactics. Third in biochem, though. That’s
good
.”

“Yeah. Like my head is so damned stuffed with crap it’s going to explode. But my anatomy and physiology scores didn’t help when I saw Howell at sick call. I gave him
aspirin
.”

“I know,” he told me. “There’s a
big
difference between head knowledge and gut knowledge.” He held up his hands, one forefinger pointed at his forehead, the other at his stomach. “That much, and it might as well be a hundred light years. But it’ll come together for you, once you deploy for real.”

I must not have looked like I was convinced. He grinned. “Put it this way, Carlyle. We’ve taught you everything you need to know for you to swim. Now we’re going to toss you into the deep end, kerplunk. It’s scary as hell, yeah. But the training
is
there, you
do
know what you need to know. You’ll be fine.”

I wasn’t so sure. His analogy wasn’t very comforting, because knowing how to swim isn’t about knowing how to do the strokes or knowing that most people tend to float naturally. It’s about knowing in your
muscles
, knowing in the autonomous portions of the brain. I knew what he was saying—that once I was on that fire-swept beach for real, the training—all of those sims and all of those hours of downloads—it would kick in and I’d find myself doing what I’d been trained to do.

But why the hell did I keep seeing Paula lying on the well deck of that sailboat in Maine, staring up at the unforgiving sky?

W
e weren’t heading for Bloodworld. Our first stop would be Gliese 581 VI.

In the earliest days of the great extrasolar planet hunt, back when we were just learning how to detect the planets circling other suns by their gravitational effects on their primaries, the International Astronomical Union had laid down the rules for cataloguing and naming new planets as they were discovered. Astronomers gave newfound planets lowercase letters to identify them, and did so
in the order in which they were discovered
. The star itself—in this case, Gliese 581—was listed as
a
; the first planet discovered in the system was Gliese 581 b; the second planet c, and so on.

I suppose it made sense to the astronomers of the IAU, but eventually, this led to an ungodly tangle that made no sense at all, especially once we began actually physically exploring those planetary systems closest to us. For Gliese 581, for instance, the discovery of its first planet, b, was followed by c and then d, all in nice, neat order from innermost to outermost . . . but then planet e was detected with an orbit
inside
that of b. Not long after that, planet g was picked up orbiting between c and d, and planet f was found well outside of d, so the planetary order ran, from innermost to outermost, e, b, c, g, d, and f.

It didn’t help that planets g and f were, for several decades, unconfirmed, and official lists of the Gliese 581 planetary system kept losing one or both planets, then regaining them, and the whole issue wasn’t settled once and for all until the first interstellar survey actually reached the star, early in the twenty-second century.

What made the old system even more confusing was the fact that the stars in multiple star systems were
also
given letter IDs. You might have a multiple star system, like Alpha Centauri, with the three stellar members designated as A, B, and C, and so the first planet to be discovered there would be labeled with a lowercase
d
. And when astronomers began detecting
moons
around all of those new planets, things
really
got twisted.

Which is why, by the time the survey ship
Human Endeavor
reached Gliese 581, planets were given
numbers
—expressed as Roman numerals—showing their order out from their primary rather than their order of discovery. The three suns of Alpha Centauri are A, B, and C, while Chiron is designated
Alpha Centauri A II
and
not
as
d
. Lowercase letters are reserved for the moons: Chiron’s three satellites, Hippe, Chariclo, and Carystus, are therefore designated as
Alpha Centauri A II a
,
b
, and
c
.

Much
simpler, and much more usefully practical. I understand that the IAU still protests the change from time to time, but then, that august body was the obsessive-compulsive bunch that raised such a furor three and a half centuries ago by declaring that Sol IX was
not
a planet. They’re hardcore traditionalists, and the old naming scheme goes back to the letter IDs given to the individual rings of Saturn as they were discovered, a mishmash that puts the E ring innermost, the D ring outermost, and the C, B, A, F, and G rings in between, an order that hasn’t been changed in three hundred years because no one but the astronomers have to keep track of them.

And so MRF-7 slipped silently into orbit around Gliese 581
VI
rather than f, a frozen ice giant the
Human Endeavor
Expedition had named Niffelheim.

At about 108 million kilometers from Sol, the planet Venus has been trapped in a runaway greenhouse effect that has resulted in a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and with a surface pressure of around 91 atmospheres. Gliese 581 VI is less than six million kilometers farther out from its primary than is Venus—for all intents and purposes the same distance—but its climate is startlingly different. Its primary has a luminosity of just 0.013 of Sol, that’s a bit over one percent. As a result, Niffelheim is an ice giant, a smaller version of Neptune with about eight times the mass of Earth, with a solid rock core smothered beneath 1,000 kilometers of ice and ice slush, and a dense and frigid soup of methane and ammonia for an atmosphere above that. Its primary is a sullen, ruby disk slightly smaller than the sun seen from Earth.

Niffelheim has rings, though the light level is so low it’s tough to see them, and it possesses a small coterie of moons; Niffelheim-e is as large as the planet Mercury back home, ice sheathed and big enough to hold an atmosphere, mostly of nitrogen and methane. The surface temperature stands at around minus 200 degrees Celsius.

Of particular interest is the fact that tidal forces between Niffelheim and Niffelheim-e keep the moon’s deep interior hot. The heat works its way up out of the core, and warms the surface a bit more than would be the case otherwise. According to the initial surveys, there’s an ocean down there, liquid water maybe 100 kilometers deep, more water than is contained in all of the oceans of Earth, locked away beneath an ice cap ten kilometers thick.

It turns out that Niffelheim-e, which we of course began calling “Hymie” before we even dropped into orbit, is a large version of Europa, one of the Jovian satellites back in the Sol system.

I wondered if there were local equivalents to the Europan Medusae undulating beneath the ice.

T
he fleet stayed in orbit around Hymie while the suface exploration team shuttled down to the surface in a Cutlass. Interstellar transports like the
Clymer
and the
Puller
and heavy cruisers like the
Tikki
are strictly orbit-to-orbit vessels, too clumsy and too massive to maneuver inside a planetary atmosphere. A second Cutlass carried forty tons of rawmat from the
Clymer
’s stores. We needed to grow a base on the surface, but the only building materials present were water ice, nitrogen, methane, and a few organics. We dumped the rawmat onto the icy surface and turned loose a few trillion nanocon ’bots; within a couple of hours, the ’bots had pulled carbon, iron, aluminum, and silica from the pile and grown them into a dome thirty meters across, complete with furnished interior compartments, including the lab, personal quarters and rec area, a heavily shielded power plant, and the big central moon pool. A portable nano air factory began pulling oxygen from water ice and nitrogen from the local atmosphere, until the dome was pressurized at one standard atmosphere.