Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One (18 page)

Worse, microbots were subject to the wind. You can release a cloud of them over an enemy encampment, but if there’s any wind at all, the cloud will be dispersed to hell and gone before you can get much in the way of recon data. And the wind on Bloodworld was fiercely unrelenting, gusting constantly from dayside around to night, except when thermal storms happened to send countercurrents from the wintry night across to the day.

This wasn’t a major limitation for simple surveillance; out of some hundreds of millions of ’bots released into the wind, a few could be expected to hit convenient rocks or other structures, and most were designed with nano-reactive pads that let them adhere to convenient surfaces. With enough samples to draw upon, our AI could usually pick up images of what we were interested in, selecting them from the flood of data coming back from the relay.

“That,” I told Hancock, using the AI program to isolate and zoom in on the interesting part of the picture, “looks like the bad guys’ head honch.”

We were looking down at an oblique angle on a procession of Qesh warriors. Most were encased in heavy armor and carried weapons that looked big enough to take on a Commonwealth Mk. 4 hovertank. Their armor showed scuffs, dents, and dings as though it all had seen long and rough usage.

One of the Qesh below, however, was wearing what could only be called
elegant
armor. We couldn’t guess at the color in those images, of course, but this one individual’s armor looked like it was richly engraved, with a mirrored polish that gleamed in the glare from the mast-mounted spotlights. If the battle armor of the average Qesh troopers was utilitarian and well-used,
this
guy’s armor was strictly ceremonial. It looked lightweight, not much heavier than the Qesh’s own exoskeletal plates.

“That Jacker,” I told Hancock, “is either a general or a politician. And maybe both.”

The chasing on the Qesh leader’s armor reminded me of the ornate engraving on some samples of medieval parade armor—the sort worn by kings and dukes and the wealthiest of knights, gear far too precious to be worn into actual battle.

I was particularly interested in the fact that the Qesh seemed to go in for this sort of thing. Marine combat armor shows absolutely no difference between that worn by a general and that worn by a private; emblems of rank, of combat distinction, and of tradition—like the centuries-old eagle-globe-anchor device—are displayed only during full-dress parade. In combat, you don’t want the enemy to be able to pick out your officers for special consideration.

A warrior culture might be expected to have lead-from-the-front officers with highly visible regalia. That sort of thing doesn’t make much sense in modern combat, at least not as humans understand it now, but the Qesh weren’t remotely human, and their society and history might have emphasized a markedly different set of traditions.

This particular Qesh leader was approaching a small structure built into the rock of the city wall, surrounded by a retinue of more conventionally armored soldiers. The structure opened in front of them—it appeared to be a doorway into a large airlock—and the group filed inside.

“Interesting,” Hancock said. “I wonder if they’ll come out again later with a new bunch of hostages?”

“I was thinking, Gunny . . .”

“What?”

“We might be able to use Jackers to get a look at the inside of the city. Maybe we could see what’s going on in there.”

“Hitch a ride, you mean? Instead of gnatbots?”

“Exactly.”

“It’s certainly worth a try,” Hancock told me. “Do it.”

So I did.

We had a supply of gnatbots with us, of course, but they would be all but useless over Bloodworld’s windy surface. To deploy them effectively, we would have to get inside the city ourselves. Until we heard back from Matthew and his people, we were stuck outside.

Gnatbots are, literally, the size of gnats—perhaps a tenth of a millimeter long and just barely visible to the human eye
if
you’re focused right on them. They dance through the air on tiny wings and can be directed either by a human controller or by a simple on-board program. The police use them a lot for general surveillance on Earth—and especially for security surveillance inside sealed structures on Earth, the moon, and Mars. In the wind-gusted environment of Bloodworld’s twilight zone, though, those wings were next to useless. We needed to find another way of getting camera-carrying ’bots inside the city gates.

What I had in mind was using standard microbots attached to an individual Jacker’s armor, and letting
him
carry the surveillance drone inside. A gram or so of programmed nano could assemble itself at the scene into a camera and transmitter too small to see without optical magnification.

The problem was finding a way of safely putting the microbots on the armor. We didn’t have any special-grown nanobots like that on hand, and would have to program our own. I plugged my N-org into a console, brought up the programming base chart on-screen, and then asked Kookie to join me.

This would be a job for a Marine sniper.

“Y
ou should have bugged that Qesh pilot, e-Car,” Sergeant Leighton told me. “Would’ve been more certain.”

“Not really,” I told her. “Chances are he got shipped back up to orbit as soon as his friends picked him up. No reason to think they would have dragged him inside the city.”

“I guess that’s true.”

I’d actually considered at the time bugging my alien patient, but had decided against it. It might have been useful having a spy-cam on board one of the Qesh capital ships up in orbit, but there were some major disadvantages as well. For one thing, if the Qesh were the suspicious sort, they would assume that one of their troops given medical treatment by the enemy would carry bugging devices of some sort, and so would screen him extra closely. In fact, I fully expected that as soon as they got the Qesh pilot back to one of their medical facilities, they would deprogram the nano I’d put into him, and shoot him up with their own, including something to wipe out any enemy alien nano that might still be in his body.

And for another, I’d not had the appropriate base nano on hand. The medical ’bots I carried with me in my M-7 needed substantially different programming than I could normally provide through my N-prog, with most of the code written by an AI. I could have managed something, but it would have taken longer than I’d cared to remain out there in the open, with bad guys closing in.

We were in the OP dome with two viewall displays above us, one showing the view from the microbot glued to the spotlight mast outside the city gate, the other giving us a vid feed from Lance Corporal Ron Kukowicz’s M-440 accelerator rifle.

Kookie had slipped out of the OP encampment and stealthily made his way back to the edge of the forest overlooking the plain beneath the Salvationist city. The camera mounted on his MAR was zoomed in on several Qesh warriors; they appeared to be making their way toward the gate.

“Try for that one,” I said, indicating one of the Qesh warriors in front of the others with a red dot. A crosshair reticle appeared against the Jacker’s side.

“Range one-one-four-five meters,” Kukowicz said over the squad channel. “Wind, variable at two-eight-five degrees, at my back with a slight drift to the right, between thirty and fifty kph, gusts to eighty-five. Selecting for twelve thousand Gs of acceleration.”

I watched the data dropping into a column on the right side of the display. The paintball-bullet could steer itself to a certain extent, but needed input on windspeed, acceleration, and direction.

“You’re cleared for the shot,” Hancock told him.

“Roger. On the way.”

I’d programmed a “paintball,” a term that once referred to a marker used in target practice and a non-lethal combat sport but that now referred to a useful means of inserting nano cameras into hostile territory. The round consisted of a tiny slug of programmed ’bots packed into a steel jacket so that it could be gripped by the magnetic field of a gauss accelerator weapon and launched at extremely high velocity. Boosted at 12,000 gravities down the one-meter-long barrel of Kukowicz’s accelerator weapon, the round would exit with a muzzle velocity of 490 meters per second, giving it a flight time of 2.337 seconds. The projectile was designed to hold an aerodynamic form briefly, and to use lift and steering to actively compensate both for wind and for the better than 43-meter drop between the time it left the muzzle and the instant it struck the target two and a third seconds later in this gravity. Just before impact, it would shed the steel jacket and the round’s inner packing firing it forward, in order to kill its speed an instant before it struck the target, with as small a projectile as possible.

What actually struck home massed less than a gram. The Jacker probably didn’t even feel the impact or, if it did, it would assume that its armor had been hit by a bit of windblown debris. From Kookie’s vantage point back at the edge of the woods, it didn’t look as though the Qesh we’d targeted had noticed anything.

Good.

There was a nervous silence for several seconds, as we waited to acquire the probe’s transmission. A lot could go wrong with a mag-inducted round; a miss was possible despite the high-tech gimmickry, and too hard of an impact could damage the microbots to uselessness.

But within a few seconds, a new image came up on the monitor, transmitted from the newly grown nano camera now riding on the Jacker’s side just above its right middle leg.

“Good picture,” Leighton said.

“And a very nice shot, Kook,” I added. “Bang on.”

“Thanks. RTB.”

Returning to base. “Come on in,” Hancock told him.

I watched the show on the main monitor. After a few flashes and pixilation blizzards, the image from our paintball grew sharp and clear, rocking from side to side with the pace of the Qesh warrior it was riding on. This transmission, unlike the mass generic broadcasts of the gnatbots, was in full color, and included a sound feed as well.

We heard something like rumbling drums—an exchange of speech among several of the Qesh. Ahead, past the armored being’s front shoulder, I could see a white door dilating open, leading into the side of the city cliff.

A number of Qesh filed into the airlock; it was crowded inside, with at least twenty of them packed in flank to flank as the outer door irised shut, the local air pressure bled off to Earth-normal, blower-filters pulled out the last of any toxic gasses, and an inner door opened up.

We’d been wondering if this was a Qesh assault team, moving into the city to seize more hostages or to otherwise punish the locals for the attack of a few hours before.

We were quite unprepared for what we actually saw and heard.

Chapter Sixteen

T
he Qesh troopers entered a large, well-lit chamber beyond the airlock door, a chamber large enough to have served as a concourse for some thousands of people. I’m not sure what I expected the interior of the city of Salvation to look like. I
did
know that, whatever the Salvationists might think about nanotechnology in general, the city itself—the buildings and the infrastructure, including air purifiers, life support, power generators, and everything else that went into making a city live—would have been created through applied nanotechnic engineering.

When the Salvation of Man colony had been put down on Bloodstar’s World in 2181, the engineering department of the Commonwealth Colony Ship
Outward Venture
would have employed large-scale nanotech to tunnel out vast caverns going deep into the rock, and to have used native materials to create the life-support infrastructure, everything from power generators to furnishings in the living quarters. An entire city grown from native rock, using the techniques we’d pioneered back when the summers had stopped coming and the glaciers of the New Ice Age had begun their southward march. The hall we were looking at now had the look of nanarchitecture, with highly polished stone walls and a mirror-bright reflective floor of a deep, lustrous, semitransparent green stone. One far wall was dominated by an immense floor-to-ceiling portrait of a bearded man in black robes, though I couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to be Jesus or some other, more modern, religious leader or guru. Oddly out of place, something like a shallow swimming pool occupied the center of the room.

Waiting for the newly arriving Qesh were a number of other Qesh, including the one we’d seen earlier with the richly engraved ceremonial armor. With them were perhaps a hundred humans, those in the forefront wearing ornate red robes with rich and elegantly detailed silver and gold embroidery. The fanciest robes belonged to a white-bearded man who looked like he was well past two hundred, though again, without anti-aging treatments he might have been only seventy or so.

And that whole thronging crowd appeared to be the best of buddies. The humans, many of them, were sipping from spherical drink containers. The head-honch Jacker held a mug of something steaming with his top arm, and sipped at it from time to time with what might have been a mouth, a puckered, upside-down
Y
located well down below the upper arm. His helmet was off, his armor open in the front, and he wasn’t armed. Lots of the Qesh behind him had their helmets off as well. It was impossible to read expressions behind those flicking, turreted chameleon eyes, but they didn’t appear to be particularly anxious or on guard.

And neither did the humans.

“What the shit?” Hancock asked. “They’re having a fucking
cocktail
party in there!”

We heard a drumming sound, as the Qesh carrying our camera-and-microphone combo said something to Head Honch. The richly armored Qesh drummed something back, then turned to the white-bearded human. “My subordinate tells me that my troops have not found the bandits as yet. They will do so, however. Of this I promise you.”

The Jacker’s voice was pitched in a deep and rumbling bass register, but it had a flat affect to it, sounding almost mechanical. He must have been wearing some sort of electronic translator.

That was disturbing on several levels. For a Qesh translator to work, they would have to have access to English and, possibly, to other human languages. I strongly doubted that they could come up with the means for a running Qesh-English translation in less than two weeks.

And conquerors rarely troubled to learn the speech of subject peoples. Usually, at least as it had played out countless times on Earth, they made conquered populations learn the masters’ tongue.

What the hell was going on?

“You have my assurance,” the human said, “that the raiders will be rooted out. If they’re in this city, we’ll find them. And when we do, we will hand them over to you.”

“It is important,” the Qesh said, “to present the . . . how do you say . . . the
people
with an object lesson immediately, to prevent similar banditry in future.”

“Of course, Lord.”

Lord. So this was a conversation between the conqueror and his subject after all.

I made sure everything was being recorded. Several of the Qesh were not wearing armor at all, and this was a good opportunity to glimpse something of their physiology. Their mouths appeared to be slits shaped like an inverted
Y
located between the uppermost paired legs. More slits—two pairs on either side partially concealed by leathery flaps of carapace—were probably for breathing. I could see them rippling open and shut every few seconds. The rattling and booming speech of the Qesh appeared to be generated by a pair of large tympani on the upper part of the body, and they appeared to add emphasis to their speech both with color changes to the gray, blank area of leathery skin between their four eyes, and by clicking and grinding the tips of their two enormous horn-claws together.

Qesh speech, I decided, must be extraordinarily complex, combining fast-shifting color patterns with the sounds made by two plate-sized drum heads and the screech and clack of rubbing claws. No human could reproduce that blend of voiceless sounds, to say nothing of the colors. Maybe they spoke English with the Salvationists because the humans were simply incapable of reproducing “spoken” Qesh—not without a kettle drum and a few other instruments in an orchestral percussion section.

We all wanted to hear more of the conversation between Head Honch and the bearded human, but the Qesh carrying our spy-cam boomed something at the leader, then turned and walked off with several of his fellows.

Over the next several hours, we saw a number of the rooms and underground spaces that made up the city, and glimpsed lots of the inhabitants, but it was difficult to attach any sense to what we could see.

Our overall impression, however, was that the Qesh were solidly in control. There were armed guards standing at several busy intersections, and small groups of them patrolled the corridors like cops on a beat. The humans we saw watched the patrolling Qesh with expressions ranging from boredom to terror; no one tried to talk with the invaders, and for their part, the invaders didn’t seem predisposed to interfere with the human crowd.

About ten minutes passed before we started getting signal breakup, and then the image dissolved into pixels and winked out. The transmission, shifting around randomly across tens of thousands of frequencies each second, probably couldn’t be monitored by the Qesh, but it
could
be blocked, by tens of meters of solid rock if nothing else. True quantum communications would use quantum entanglement to connect sender and receiver without passing a signal in between; such a signal could not be intercepted and it could not be blocked, because the signal exists only in the transmitter and in the receiver, not in the space in between. We haven’t figured out that trick, however, and so thick basalt walls still serve as a barrier.

What we received before that happened, though, had been useful.

And disturbing. If the human leaders of Salvation were cooperating with the Qesh, had they already given the invaders access to their computer records?

Had the Qesh already learned the location of Earth?

And how could we find out if they had?

S
econd Lieutenant Baumgartner showed up with the rest of the platoon a few hours later. As expected, he was furious that Hancock had gone ahead and carried out a raid on the Qesh landing force.

“You’ve exceeded your authority, Gunnery Sergeant,” he told Hancock, “and jeopardized the entire operation!”

The two of them were in an office space just across from the compartment we’d set up as a small sick bay. I was in there with Dubois, Garner, Masserotti, and a still comatose Kilgore, and we could all hear Mommy Baumy shouting next door. Those quick-grown habitats are pretty good, but they can’t provide a hell of privacy.

The soundproofing
was
good enough that we couldn’t hear Hancock’s answer, if he gave one.

“Do you realize,” Baumgartner continued after a moment, “that the Qesh could have figured out that we were on this planet? If nothing else, they might have run into Marines on other planets they’ve already attacked. There were Marines at Cernunnos
and
at Athirat! If the Qesh had seen Marine armor at either of those places, they might make a connection if they saw it again here!”

“I saw an opportunity, sir,” Hancock said, his voice rising just enough that we could hear his reply in sick bay, “to make a solid connection with the local humans. We were careful not to let the bad guys get a good look at us.”

“And you know as well as I do that things
always
go wrong in combat! Your orders were to set up an OP and observe,
not
to get involved in a firefight!”

I was pretty sure that Baumgartner was just pissed because Hancock had spotted that opportunity and taken advantage of it without deferring to him. Not that Hancock could have asked for permission. Quantum-scrambled radio or laser communications can work over long distances but is strictly line-of-sight, though the lowest frequencies can penetrate obstacles to some degree. We didn’t have any communications satellites up, for very obvious reasons, so we really had been totally on our own until Baumgartner showed up with the rest of our people.

“You are skating on damned thin ice!” Baumgartner went on. “I am
not
going to tolerate any more of your gung-ho old-breed nonsense! Do you understand?”

We couldn’t hear Hancock’s answer, but I assume it was a precise and clipped “Yes, sir.”

So . . . Baumgartner didn’t want any more gung-ho old-breed nonsense, did he? I’d heard about things like this, how every so often young, up-and-coming Marine officers somehow got the idea that this was a
new
Marine Corps, a
modern
Corps, and all concerned would be well advised to adopt the new and modern ways. The “old breed,” originally referring to the old China Marines of the 1930s and later a nickname for the 1
st
Marine Division, unaccountably became a term of derision or even contempt.

Somehow, fortunately, the twisted attitude never lasts.

Don’t get me wrong! Marines
do
change, adapt, and evolve. They hardly ever board and storm sailing vessels nowadays. Ah, well, maybe once in a while they do, but the capture of that Bloodworlder ketch a couple of days ago was decidedly an exception to the rule. Marines no longer use muskets or bayonets, or wear the high, stiff, sword-deflecting leather collars that gave them the name “Leathernecks” four and a half centuries ago.

But “gung-ho” has been a tradition with the Corps long before the phrase entered the lexicon during WWII. It was an Anglicized term, from the Mandarin
gong he
, and meant “work together.” Somehow, “gung-ho” had become a battle cry for the Marines, an expression of Marine determination, dedication, camaraderie, and esprit.

The up-and-comers tampered with such time-hallowed institutions at their peril.

“Baumgartner,” Masserotti said quietly, with grim emphasis, “is cruisin’ for a bruisin’.” He was lying on a treatment table, as I adjusted the framework of the EM cage embracing his arm.

“Belay that, Marine,” Garner told him. “He’ll learn.”

“He’d fuckin’ well better!”

“I think he’s feeling his oats out here on his own, out from under Captain Reichert’s thumb,” I observed. “He’ll learn, or he’ll screw up . . . and then heaven help him!”

“The problem,” Doob said, “is that if he screws up, we’re
all
screwed! So heaven help
us
!”

I suspected that Hancock would have disagreed, that had he been a part of the conversation he would have pointed out that survival in the Corps doesn’t depend on any one man, but on everyone working together.

Gung-ho.

I was getting ready to go inside Masserotti, so I quietly dropped out of the discussion. Once the EM cage was functioning, I settled back in a neurolink recliner and checked the connections. I’d already injected him with the necessary nano. All that remained was letting our AI make the final link that would take my virtual point of view down to the micrometer scale.

“You’re all hooked up, e-Car,” Garner told me. “You’re good to go.”

“Roger that,” I said, closing my eyes. I brought my hand down on the contact plate, connecting the chair’s electronics with the neuroimplants in my palm. “I’m going inside. . . .”

There was a brief, all-consuming instant of static . . . and then I was rushing through Masserotti’s right thoracoacromial artery, a blood vessel branching off from the larger axillary artery high in the Marine’s right shoulder, just above his collarbone. From my new perspective, I seemed to be drifting at high speed through a vast, dimly illuminated tunnel filled with myriad tumbling shapes. The tunnel walls, their glistening surface divided into irregular polygons, flashed past, but slowly enough that I could make out details of cell nuclei and organelles.

Much of the view was blocked by the red cells all but filling the murky fluid through which I was moving. The RBCs surged past me in pulses, each surge marking one beat of Masserotti’s heart.

My point of view was now being relayed directly into my brain from an NV-340 microbot, a streamlined robotic vehicle some fifty microns long—ten times the width of the flattened, disk-shaped red blood cells drifting through the plasma. Light from the microbot’s prow provided illumination, a blue-violet haze casting weirdly tumbling shadows from the translucent cells around me. In the distance, several large and amorphous masses appeared to be seeping into the arterial wall, passing among the cells—granulocytes, or white blood cells, each two or three times larger than the RBCs around them.

The cells were slowing, and I reduced the microbot’s velocity. Blood flows at various speeds through the body—fastest as it emerges from the left side of the heart and into the aorta, slowest within the fine web of capillaries connecting arteries with veins, where red cells nudge and jostle along in single file, like dancers in a conga line. Here in Masserotti’s shoulder, the typical speed of the blood flow was around fifty centimeters per second—a blisteringly fast pace for cells just five millionths of a meter across. The microbot was actually traveling considerably slower than the blood through which it moved; the electromagnetic cage around Masserotti’s shoulder provided the microbot’s motive power, as well as power for the light and for the high-energy laser built into the hull.