As always, now and forever, Brea

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

The Qesh were solidly in control.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue

Star Corpsman Timeline

Star Corpsman Glossary

By Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

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

And disturbing. If the humans 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?

Chapter One

I’M JUST GLAD I’M NOT AFRAID OF HEIGHTS.

Well, at least not much.

Our Cutlass hit atmosphere at something like 8 kilometers per second, bleeding off velocity in a blaze of heat and ionization, the sharp deceleration clamping down on my chest like a boa constrictor with a really bad attitude. I hadn’t been able to see much at that point, and most of my attention was focused simply on breathing.

But then the twelve-pack cut loose, and my insert pod went into free fall. I was thirty kilometers up, high enough that I could see the curve of the planet on my optical feed: a sharp-edged slice of gold-ocher at the horizon, with a deep, seemingly bottomless purple void directly below. We were skimming in toward the dawn with all of the aerodynamic efficiency of falling bricks. The Cutlass scratched a ruler-straight contrail through the black above our heads, scattering chaff to help conceal our drop from enemy radar and lidar assets on the ground.

The problem with a covert insertion is that the covert part is really, really hard to pull off. The bad guys can see you coming from the gods know how far away, and you tend to make a lot of noise, figuratively speaking, when you hit atmosphere.

But that’s what the U.S. Marines—and specifically Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, the Black Wizards—do best.

“Deploying airfoil,” a woman’s voice, a very sexy woman’s voice, whispered in my head, “in three … two … one …”

Why do they make our AIs sound like walking wet dreams?

My insertion pod had been a blunt, dead-black bullet shape until now, three meters long and just barely wide enough to accommodate my combat-armored body. The shell began unfolding now, growing a set of sharply back angled delta wings. The air outside was still achingly thin, but the airfoil grabbed hold with a shock akin to slamming into a brick wall. Deceleration clamped down on me once more—that damned boa constrictor looking for breakfast again—this time with a shuddering jolt that felt like my pod was shredding itself to bits.

The external sensor feeds didn’t show anything wrong, nor did my in-head readout. I was dropping through twenty-two kilometers now, and everything was going strictly according to … what the hell is that?

Red-gold ruggedness seemed to pop up directly ahead of me, looming, night-shrouded, below—and huge, and I stifled a shrieking instant of sheer panic. It was the crest of Olympus Mons, the very highest, most easterly slopes catching the rays of the Martian dawn long before sunrise reaches the huge mountain’s base. That twenty-two kilometers, I realized with a shudder, was measured from the areodetic datum, the point that would mark sea level on Mars if the planet actually had seas.

Olympus Mons, the biggest volcano in the solar system, rises twenty-one kilometers from the datum, three times the elevation of Everest, on Earth, and fully twice the height of the volcano Mauna Kea as measured from the ocean floor. I was skimming across the six nested calderas at the summit now, the rocky crater floor a scant couple of kilometers beneath my fast-falling pod. The calderas’ interior deeps were still lost in midnight shadow, but the eastern escarpment, seemingly suspended in a mass of wispy white clouds, caught the light of the shrunken rising sun, and from my vantage point it looked like those vertical rock cliffs were about to scrape the nanomatrix from my pod’s belly. In another moment, however, the escarpment was past, the 80-kilometer-wide caldera dropping behind with startling speed.

The plan, I’d known all along, was to skim just above the volcanic summit, a simple means of foxing enemy radar, but I’d not been ready for the visual reality of that near miss. My pod was totally under AI control, of course, the sentient software flexing my delta wings in rapid shifts far too fast for a mere human brain to follow. The pilot was taking me lower still, until the escarpments behind loomed above, rather than below.

Olympus Mons is huge, covering an area about the size of the state of Arizona, and that means it’s also flat, despite the summit’s dizzying altitude. The average slope is only about five degrees, and you can be standing halfway up the side of the mountain and not even be aware of it.

The slope was enough, though, that it put the bulk of Mount Olympus behind us, helping to shield us from enemy sensors ahead as we glided into the final phase of our descent. The active nano coating on the hulls of our pods drank radar, visible light—everything up through hard X-rays—giving us what amounted to invisibility. But no defense is perfect. If the enemy had known what he was doing, he’d have had whole sensory array farms across the mountain’s broad summit—not to mention point-defense lasers and antiship CPB batteries.

Hell, maybe they did and we were already dead in their crosshairs. My sensors weren’t picking up any hostile interest, though. I wished I could talk to the others, compare technical notes, but Captain Reichert would have burned me out of the sky himself for breaking comm silence.

Follow the download. Ride your pod down. Leave the thinking to the AIs. They know a hell of a lot more about it than you do.

Two hundred kilometers farther, and the base escarpment of Olympus Mons, a sheer five-kilometer cliff, slipped past in the darkness. Across the Tharsis bulge now, still descending, beginning a shuddering weave through the predawn sky to bleed off my remaining speed. The three-in-a-row volcanoes of the Tharsis Montes complex slid past. Then the Tharsis highlands gave way to the broken and chaotic terrain of the Noctis Labyrinthus, a twelve-hundred-kilometer stretch of badlands where we did not want to touch down under any stretch of the imagination. I swept into the local dawn, the sun coming up directly ahead with the abruptness of a thermonuclear blast, but in total silence.

“Landing deployment in twenty seconds,” the sexy voice told me.

“Great. Any sign of bad guys picking us up?”

“Negative on hostile activity. Military frequency signals from objective appear to be normal traffic.”

“That,” I told her, “is the sweetest news I’ve heard all morning.”

Download

Mission Profile: Ocher Sands

Operation Damascus Steel/OPPLAN#5735/15NOV2245

[extract]

… while Second Platoon will deploy by squad via Cutlass TAV/AIP to LZ Damascus Blue, location 12o 26’ S, 87o 55’ W, in the Sinai Planum. Upon landing, squads will form up individually and move on assigned objectives utilizing jumpjets. Units will be under Level-3 communications silence, and will if possible avoid enemy surveillance.

Second Platoon Objective is Base Schiaparelli, located on the Ius Chasma, coordinates 7o 19’ 30.66”, 87o 50’ 46.40” W …

The Black Wizards’ LZ was on the Sinai Planum, south of Ius Chasma, some 3,500 kilometers southeast of the summit of Olympus Mons. This was the scary part, the part where everything could go pear-shaped in a big hurry if the bastard god Murphy decided to favor me with His omnipotent and manifold blessings. “Double-check me,” I told her as I ran through the final checklist.

I saw green across the board projected in my mind.

“All CA systems appear functional,” the voice told me. She hesitated, then added, “Good luck, Petty Officer Carlyle.”

And what, I wondered, did an AI know about luck? “Thanks, girlfriend,” I muttered out loud. “Whatcha doing after the war, anyway?”

“I do not understand your question.”

“Ah, it would never work anyway, you and me,” I told her, and I waited for her to dump me.

Half a kilometer above the red-ocher desert floor, my AIP-81 insertion pod peeled open beneath and around me as if at the tug of a giant zipper, and abruptly I was in the open air and falling toward the Martian surface.

But not far. The delta-winged pod continued to open somewhere above me, unfolding into an improbably large triangular airfoil attached by buckyweave rigging and harness to my combat armor. The jolt when the wing deployed fully felt like it was going to yank me back into orbit. The ground was rushing past, and up, at a sickening pace, and I resisted the urge to crawl up the rigging to escape the blur of rock and sand.

Then the autorelease fired and the harness evaporated. My backpack jets kicked in, the blast shrill and almost inaudible in the thin atmosphere, kicking up a swirl of pale dust beneath my boots as they dropped to meet their up-rushing shadows.

I hit as I’d been trained, letting the armor take the jolt, relaxing my knees, letting myself crumple with the impact.

And I was down.

Down and safe, at least for the moment. My suit showed full airtight integrity, I couldn’t feel any pain, no broken bones or sprains or strains from an awkward landing. I stood up, just a little shaky on my feet, and took in the broad expanse of the Martian landscape, brown and rust-ocher sand and gravel beneath a vast and deep mid-morning sky, ultramarine above, pink toward the horizon.

I was alone. Even my girlfriend was gone, the circuitry that had maintained her abbreviated personality nano-D’ed into microscopic dust.

Well, not entirely alone. Somewhere out there in all that emptiness were forty-seven men and women, the rest of my Marine insertion platoon.

First things first. Navy Hospital Corpsmen are the combat medics of the Marine Corps, but our technical training makes us the sci-techs of Marine advance ops as well. Planetology, local biology and ecosphere dynamics, atmosphere chemistry—I was responsible for all of it on this mission, at least so far as Squad Bravo was concerned.

I knew what the answers would be. This was Mars, after all, and humans had been living here for a couple of centuries, now. But I drew a test sample into my ES-80 sniffer and ran the numbers anyway. Do it by the download.

Carbon dioxide, 95 percent, with 2.7 percent nitrogen, 1.6 percent argon, and a smattering of other molecular components, all at 600 pascals, which is less than one percent of the surface atmospheric pressure on Earth. Temperature a brisk minus 60 degrees Celsius. Exotic parabiochemistries powered by the unfiltered UV from the distant sun. Thirty parts per billion of methane and 130 ppb of formaldehyde—that was from the microscopic native critters living at the lower permafrost boundaries underground, the reason we’d abandoned plans to terraform the place. Gotta keep Mars safe and pristine for the alien wee beasties, after all.

I recorded the data, exactly as if we had no idea what was on Mars, and uploaded it to the squadnet. I also needed to—

“Corpsman, front!” The voice of Corporal Lewis came over my com link. “Marine down!”

Shit! “Moving,” I said, my voice sounding uncomfortably loud within the confines of my helmet. I called up the tacsit display on my in-head, getting my bearings. There were ten green dots—the one at dead center was me—and one off to the side flashing red. I turned, getting a bearing. Private Colby was that way, 2 kilometers away. Corporal Lewis was with him.

“I’ve got you on my display,” I told Colby. Under a Level-3 comm silence, we were using secure channels—tightly beamed IR laser-com signals relayed both line of sight and through our constellation of micro comsats in orbit. The setup allowed short-range communications with little chance of the enemy tapping in unless he was directly in the path of one of our beams, but we were still supposed to keep long-range chatter to an absolute minimum.

I took a short and lumbering run, kicked in my jets, and flew.

Service Manual Download

Standard-Issue Military Equipment

MMCA Combat Armor, Mk. 10

[extract]

… including alternating ultra-light layers of carbon buckyweave fiber and titanium-ceramic composite with an active-nano surface programmable by the wearer for either high or low visibility, or for albedo adjustments for thermal control. Power is provided by high-density lutetium-polonium batteries, allowing approximately 300 hours service with normal usage depending upon local incident thermal radiation.

Internally accessible stores carry up to three days’ rations of air, water, and food, which can be extended using onboard extractors and nanassemblers. Service stores of cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen [crH₂/crO₂] can be carried to further extend extraction/assembled expendables.

Combat armor mass averages 20–25 kg, though with full expendables load-out this may increase to as much as 50 kilos …

Flight Mode

Mk. 10 units are capable of short periods of flight depending on local gravity, or of jet-assisted maneuvers in a microgravity environment. The M287 dorsal-mounted jumpjet unit uses metastable N-He₆₄, commonly called meta, as propellant, stored in crogenically inert high-pressure backpack tanks.

Proper maintenance of meta HP fuel tanks is vital for safe storage, transport, and operation of jumpjet units …

Marine combat armor isn’t really designed for flight, especially in-atmosphere, but the Martian air is thin enough that it’s close to hard vacuum, and my “flight” was more a series of long, low bounds across the rocky, dark red-brown terrain, aided by the low gravity—about .38 of Earth normal. That meant I got more boost for my buck, and just a few quick thruster bursts brought me down in the boulder-strewn field where Private Colby was curled up on the sand, his arms wrapped around his left shin, with Corporal Lewis at his side.

I’d checked his readouts during my flight, of course—at least when I wasn’t watching my landings to avoid doing what I suspected Colby had just done to himself—landing like shit and breaking something. Just because you weigh less than half what you do on Earth here doesn’t mean you don’t still have your normal mass, plus the mass of your combat armor. Bones can only take so much stress, and a misstep can snap one. Colby’s data feed showed he was conscious and in pain, respiration and heart rate high, suit intact. Thank the gods for that much, anyway. A breach in the suit brings with it its own list of headaches.

“He hit a rock, Doc!” Lewis said, looking up as I slid to a halt in loose sand. “He hit a rock coming down!”

“So I see. How you doing, Colby?”

“How do you fucking goddamn think I’m fucking feeling goddamned stupid-ass bullshit questions—”

I had already popped the cover on Colby’s armor control panel, located high on his left shoulder, and was punching in my code. Before I hit the SEND key, though, I hit the transparency control for his visor, then rolled him enough that I could peer through his visor and into his eyes. “Look at me, Colby!” I called. “Open your eyes!”

His eyes opened, and I looked at his pupils, comparing one with the other. They were the same size. “Your head hurt at all?” I asked.

“Goddamn it’s my fucking leg not my head Doc will you fucking do something fer chrissakes—”

Good enough. I hit the SEND key, and Colby’s suit auto-injected a jolt of anodynic recep blockers into his carotid artery. Nananodyne can screw you up royally if you have a head injury, which was why I’d checked his pupils and questioned him first.

“Can we get him up on his feet, Doc?” Lewis asked.

“Don’t know yet” I said. “Gimme a sec, okay?”

I jacked into Colby’s armor and instituted a full scan. Infrared sensors woven into his skinsuit picked up areas of heat at various wavelengths and zipped a picture of his body into my head. The data confirmed no pressure leaks—those would have shown up as cold—but there was plenty of bright yellow inflammation around his left shin. No sign of bleeding; that would have appeared as a hot spot, spreading out and cooling to blue inside the greave. Colby was relaxing moment by moment. Those nanonarcs target the thalamus and the insular cortex of the brain, switching off the doloric receptors and blocking incoming pain messages.

Heart rate 140 and thready, BP 130 over 80, respiration 28 and shallow, and elevating adrenaline and noradrenaline, which meant an onset of the Cushing reflex. His body temp was cooling at the extremities which meant he was on the verge of going shocky as blood started pooling in his core. I told his suit to manage that—boosting the heat a bit and gently relaxing the constriction in the arteries leading to the head to keep his brain fed.

That would hold him until I could take a close-up look at his leg.

In the old days, there wouldn’t have been much I could have done except locking his combat armor, turning his left greave into an emergency splint. If the patient wasn’t wearing full armor, you used whatever was available, from a ready-made medical wrap that hardens into a splint when you run an electric current through it, to simply tying the bad leg to the good, immobilizing it. By keying a command into Colby’s mobility circuits, the armor itself would clamp down and hold the broken bones in place, but there was one more thing I could try in order to get him up and mobile.

I reached into my M-7 kit and removed a small hypo filled with 1 cc of dark gray liquid. The tip fit neatly into a valve located beside his left knee, opening it while maintaining the suit’s internal pressure, and when I touched the button, a burst of high-pressure nitrogen gas fired the concoction through both his inner suit and his skin. Nanobots entered his bloodstream at the popliteal artery, activating with Colby’s body heat and transmitting a flood of data over my suit channels. I thoughtclicked several internal icons, deactivating all of the ’bots that were either going the wrong way or were adhering to Colby’s skinsuit or his skin, and focused on the several thousand that were flowing now through the anterior and posterior tibial arteries toward the injury.

I wanted to go inside … but that would have given me a bit too intimate of a view, too close and too narrow to do me any good. What I needed to see was the entire internal structure of the lower leg—tibia and fibula; the gastrocnemius, soleus, and tibialis anterior muscles; the tibialis anterior and posterior tibial arteries; and the epifascial venous system. I sent Program 1 to the active ’bots, and they began diffusing through capillaries and tissue, adhering to the two bones, the larger tibia and the more slender fibula off to the side, plating out throughout the soft tissue, and transmitting a 3-D graphic to my in-head that showed me exactly what I was dealing with.

I rotated the graphic in my mind, checking it from all angles. We were in luck. I was looking at a greenstick fracture of the tibia—the major bone that runs down the front of the shin, knee to ankle. The bone had partially broken, but was still intact on the dorsal surface, literally like a stick half broken and bent back. The jagged edges had caused some internal bleeding, but no major arteries had been torn and the ends weren’t poking through the skin. The fibula, the smaller bone running down the outside of the lower leg, appeared to be intact. The periosteum, the thin sheath of blood vessel- and nerve-rich tissue covering the bone, had been torn around the break of course, which was why Colby had been hurting so much.

“How’s he doing, Doc?”

The voice startled me. Gunny Hancock had come up out of nowhere and was looking over my shoulder. I’d had no idea that he was there.

“Greenstick fracture of the left tibia, Gunny,” I told him. “Shinbone. I have him on pain blockers.”

“Can he walk?”

“Not yet. He should be medevaced. But I can get him walking if you want.”

“I want. The LT wants to finish the mission.”

“Okay. Ten minutes.”

“Shit, Gunny,” Colby said. “You heard Doc. I need a medevac!”

“You’ll have one. Later.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Later, Marine! Now seal your nip-sucker and do what Doc tells ya!”

“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant.”

I ignored the byplay, focusing on my in-head and a sequence of thoughtclicks routing a new set of orders to the ’bots in Colby’s leg. Program 5 ought to do the trick.

“How you feeling, Colby?” I asked.

“The pain’s gone,” he said. “The leg feels a bit weak, though.” He flexed it.

“Don’t move,” I told him. “I’m going to do some manipulation. It’ll feel funny.”

“Okay …” He didn’t sound too sure of things.

Guided by the new program download, some hundreds of thousands of ’bots, each one about a micron long—a fifth the size of a red blood cell—began migrating through soft tissue and capillaries, closing in around the broken bone until it was completely coated above and below the break. In my in-head, the muscles and blood vessels disappeared, leaving only the central portion of the tibia itself visible. I punched in a code on Colby’s armor alphanumeric, telling it to begin feeding a low-voltage current through the left greave.

Something smaller than a red blood cell can’t exert much in the way of traction unless it’s magnetically locked in with a few hundred thousand of its brothers, and they’re all pulling together. In the open window in my head, I could see the section of bone slowly bending back into a straight line, the jagged edges nesting into place. The movement would cause a little more periosteal damage—there was no way to avoid that—but the break closed up neatly.

“Doc,” Colby said, “that feels weird as hell.”

“Be glad I doped you up,” I told him. “If I had to set your leg without the anodyne, you’d be calling me all sorts of nasty things right now.”

I locked the nano sleeve down, holding the break rigid. I sent some loose nanobots through the surrounding tissue, turning it ghostly visible on the screen just to double-check. There was a little low-level internal bleeding—Colby would have a hell of a bruise on his shin later—but nothing serious. I diverted some anodynes to the tibial and common fibular nerves at the level of his knee with a backup at the lumbosacral plexus, shutting down the pain receptors only.

“Right,” I told him. “Let me know if this hurts.” Gingerly, I switched off the receptor blocks in his brain.

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It just got … sore, a little. Not too bad.”

“I put a pain block at your knee, but your brain is functioning again. At least as well as it did before I doped you.”

“You’re a real comedian, Doc.”

I told his armor to lock down around his calf and shin, providing an external splint to back up the one inside. I wished I could check the field medicine database, but the chance of the enemy picking up the transmission was too great. I just had to hope I’d remembered everything important, and let the rest slide until we could get Colby back to sick bay.

“Okay, Gunny,” I said. “He’s good to go.”

I know it seemed callous, but a tibia greenstick is no big deal. If it had been his femur, now, the big bone running from hip to knee, I might have had to call for an immediate medevac. The muscles pulling the two ends of the femur together are so strong that the nano I had on hand might not have been enough. I would have had to completely immobilize the whole leg and keep him off of it, or risk doing some really serious damage if things let go.

The truth of the matter is that they pay us corpsmen for two jobs, really. We’re here to take care of our Marines, the equivalent of medics in the Army, but in the field our first priority is the mission. They hammer that into us in training from day one: provide emergency medical aid to the Marines so that they can complete their mission.

“How about it, Colby. Can you get up?”

The Marine stood—with an assist from Lewis and the Gunny. “Feels pretty good,” he said, stamping the foot experimentally.

“Don’t do that,” I told him. “We’ll still need to get you to sick bay, where they can do a proper osteofuse.”

“Good job, Doc,” Gunny told me. “Now pack up your shit and let’s hump it.”

I closed up my M-7 and dropped both the hypo and the sterile plastic shell it had come in into a receptacle on my thigh. They’d drilled it into us in FMF training: never leave anything behind that will give the enemy a clue that you’ve been there.

While I’d been working on Colby, the rest of the recon squad had joined up about a kilometer to the north and started marching. Gunny, Lewis, Colby, and I were playing catch-up now, moving across that cold and rock-strewn desert at double-time.

According to our tacsit displays, we were 362 kilometers and a bit directly south of our objective, a collection of pressurized Mars huts called Schiaparelli Base. If we hiked it on foot, it would take us the better part of ten days to make it all the way.

Not good. Our combat armor could manufacture a lot of our logistical needs from our surroundings, at least to a certain extent. It’s called living off the air, but certain elements—hydrogen and oxygen, especially—are in very short supply on Mars. Oxygen runs to about 0.13 percent in that near-vacuum excuse for an atmosphere, and free molecular hydrogen is worse—about fifteen parts per billion. You can actually get more by breaking down the hints of formaldehyde and methane released by the Martian subsurface biota, but it’s still too little to live on. The extractors and assemblers in your combat armor have to run for days just to get you one drink of water. The units recycle wastes, of course; with trace additives, a Marine can live on shit and piss if he has to, but the process yields diminishing returns and you can’t keep it up for more than a few days.

So Lewis and I doubled up with Colby. There was a risk of him coming down hard and screwing the leg repairs, but with me on his right arm and Lewis on his left, we could reduce the stress of landing on each bound. We taclinked our armor so that the jets would fire in perfect unison, and put ourselves into a long, flat trajectory skimming across the desert. Gunny paced us, keeping a 360-eye out for the enemy, but we still seemed to have the desert to ourselves.

And four hours later we reached the Calydon Fossa, a straight-line ditch eroded through the desert, half a kilometer deep and six wide. It took another hour to get across that—the canyon was too wide for us to jet-jump it, and the chasma slopes were loose and crumbling. But we slogged down and we slogged up and eight kilometers more brought us to the Ius Chasma.

It’s not the deepest or the most spectacular of the interlaced canyons making up the Valles Marineris, but it’ll do: Five and a half kilometers deep and almost sixty kilometers across at that point, it’s deep enough to take in Earth’s Grand Canyon as a minor tributary. The whole Valles Marineris is almost as long as the continental United States is wide back home—two hundred kilometers wide and ten kilometers deep at its deepest—where the Grand Canyon runs a paltry 1,600 meters deep.

The view from the south rim was spectacular.

But we weren’t there for sightseeing. We rendezvoused with First Squad and made the final approach to Schiaparelli Base. I stayed back with Colby while the others made the assault, but everything went down smooth as hyperlube. The whole sequence would have been a lot more exciting if this had been a real op, but the bad guys were U.S. Aerospace Force security troops, and Ocher Sands is the annual service-wide training exercise designed to work out the bugs and accustom our combat troops to operating in hostile environments against a high-tech enemy.

I can’t speak for the USAF bluesuits, but we had a good day. Despite Colby’s injury and a bad case of the scatters coming down—someone was going to get chewed a new one for that little SNAFU—all eight squads pulled it together, deployed without being spotted, and took down their assigned objectives, on sched and by the download. An hour later we had a Hog vectoring in for medevac.

I rode back up to orbit with Colby.

And it was just about then that the fecal matter intercepted the rotational arc of the high-speed turbine blades.

Chapter Two

FOR A CENTURY NOW WE HUMANS HAVE BEEN LURKERS ON THE GALACTIC Internet, listening and learning but not saying a word. We’re terrified, you see, that they might find us.

The EG-Net, as near as we can tell, embraces a fair portion of the entire Galaxy, a flat, hundred-thousand-light-year spiral made of four hundred billion suns and an estimated couple of trillion planets. The Net uses modulated gamma-ray lasers, which means, thanks to the snail’s-pace crawl of light, that all of the news is out of date to one degree or another by the time we get it. Fortunately, most of what’s on there doesn’t have an expiration date. The Starlord Empire has been collapsing for the past twenty thousand years, and the chances are good that it’ll still be collapsing twenty thousand years from now.

The Galaxy is a big place. Events big enough to tear it apart take a long time to unfold.

The closest EG transmission beam to Sol passes through the EG Relay at Sirius, where we discovered it during our first expedition to that system 128 years ago. The Sirius Orbital Complex was constructed just to eavesdrop on the Galactics—there’s nothing else worthwhile in the system—and most of what we know about Deep Galactic history comes from there. We call it the EG, the Encyclopedia Galactica, because it appears to be a data repository. Nested within the transmission beams crisscrossing the Galaxy like the web of a drunken spider are data describing hundreds of millions of cultures across at least six billion years, since long before Sol was born or the Earth was even a gleam in an interstellar nebula’s eye. It took us twenty years just to crack the outer codes to learn how to read what we were seeing. And what we’ve learned since represents, we think, something less than 0.01 percent of all of the information available.

But even that microscopic drop within the cosmic ocean is enough to prove just how tiny, how utterly insignificant, we humans are in the cosmic scheme of things.

The revelation shook humankind to its metaphorical core, an earthquake bigger than Copernicus and Galileo, deeper than Darwin, more far-reaching than Hubbell, more astonishing than Randall, Sundrum, and Witten.

And the revelation damn near destroyed us.

“HEY, E-CAR!” HM3 MICHAEL C. DUBOIS HELD UP A LAB FLASK AND swirled the pale orange liquid within. “Wanna hit?”

I was just finishing a cup of coffee as I wandered into the squad bay, and still had my mug in hand. I sucked down the dregs and raised the empty cup. “What the hell are you pedaling this time, Doob?” I asked him.

“Nothing but the best for the Black Wizard heroes!”

“Paint stripper,” Corporal Calli Lewis told me, and she made a bitter face. I noticed that she took another swig from her mug, however, before adding, “The bastard’s trying to poison us.”

Doobie Dubois laughed. “Uh-uh. It’s methanol that’ll kill you … or maybe make you blind, paralyzed, or impotent. Wood alcohol, CH₃OH. This here is guaranteed gen-u-wine ethanol, C₂H₅OH, straight out of the lab assemblers and mixed with orange juice I shagged from a buddy in the galley. It’ll put hair on your chest.”

“Not necessarily a good thing, at least where Calli’s concerned,” I said as he poured me half a mug.

“Yeah?” he said, and gave Calli a wink. “How do you know? Might be an improvement!”

“Fuck you, squid,” she replied.

“Any time you want, jarhead.”

I took a sip of the stuff and winced. “Good galloping gods, that’s awful!”

“Doc can’t hold his ’shine,” Sergeant Tomacek said, and the others laughed. A half dozen Marines were hanging out in the squad bay, and it looked like Doob had shared his talent for applied nanufactory chemistry with all of them. Highly contra-regs, of course. The Clymer, like all U.S. starships, is strictly dry. I suspected that Captain Reichert knew but chose not to know officially, so long as we kept the party to a dull roar and no one showed up drunk on duty.

The viewall was set to show an optical feed from outside, a deck-to-overhead window looking out over Mars, 9,300 kilometers below. The planet showed a vast red-orange disk with darker mottling; I could see the pimples of the Tharsis bulge volcanoes easily, with the east-to-west slash of the Valles Marineris just to the east. Phobos hung in the lower-right foreground, a lumpy and dark-gray potato, vaguely spherical but pocked and pitted with celestial acne. The big crater on one end—Stickney—and the Mars Orbital Research Station, rising from the crater floor, were hidden behind the moonlet’s mass, on the side facing the planet. The image, I decided, was being relayed from the non-rotating portion of the George Clymer. The Clymer’s habitation module was a fifty-meter rotating ring amidships, spinning six and a half times per minute to provide a modest four tenths of a gravity, the same as we’d experienced down on Mars.

“So what’s the celebration?” I asked Dubois. He always had a reason for breaking out the lab-nanufactured drinkables.

“The end of FMF training, of course! What’d you think?”

I took another cautious sip. It actually wasn’t too bad. Maybe that first swig had killed off the nerve endings.

“You’re one-eighty off course, Doob,” I told him. “We still have Europa, remember?”

FMF—the Fleet Marine Force—was arguably the most coveted billet in the entire U.S. Navy Hospital Corps. To win that silver insignia for your collar, you needed to go through three months of Marine training at Lejeune or Pendleton, then serve with the Marines for one year, pass their physical, demonstrate a daunting list of Marine combat and navigation skills, and pass a battery of tests, both written and in front of a senior enlisted board.

I’d been in FMF training since I’d made Third Class a year ago; our assignment on board the Clymer was the final phase of our training, culminating in the Ocher Sands fun and games that had us performing a live insertion and taking part in a Marine planetary assault. After this, we were supposed to deploy to Europa for three weeks of practical xenosophontology, swimming with the Medusae. After that, those of us still with the program would take our boards, and if we were lucky, only then would we get to append the letters FMF after our name and rank.

“Not the way I heard it, e-Car,” he said. He took a swig of his product straight from the flask. “Scuttlebutt has it we’re deploying I-S.”

I ignored use of the disliked handle. My name, Elliot Carlyle, had somehow been twisted into “e-Car.” Apparently there was a law of the Corps that said everyone had to have a nickname. Doob. Lewis was “Louie.” I’d spent the past year trying to get myself accepted as “Hawkeye,” a nod both to James Fenimore Cooper and to a twentieth-century entertainment series about military medical personnel in the field from which I’d downloaded a few low-res 2-D episodes years ago.

“Interstellar?” I said. “You’re full of shit. This stuff’s rotting your gray cells.”

“Don’t be so sure about your diagnosis, Doc,” Lewis told me. “I heard the same thing from a buddy in Personnel.”

“You’re both full of it,” I said. “Why would they send us?”

“Our dashing good looks and high intelligence?”

“In your case, Doob, it probably has to do with a punishment detail. You on the Old Man’s shit list?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“So what’s supposed to be going down?”

Dubois grew serious, which was damned unusual for him. “The Qesh,” he said.

Download

Encyclopedia Galactica/Xenospecies Profile

Entry: Sentient Galactic Species 23931

“Qesh”

Qesh, Qesh’a, Imperial Qesh, Los Imperiales, “Jackers,” “Imps”

Civilization Type: 1.165 G

TL 20: FTL, Genetic Prostheses, Quantum Taps, Relativistic Kinetic Conversion

Societal Code: JKRS

Dominant: clan/hunter/warrior/survival

Cultural library: 5.45 x 10¹⁶ bits

Data Storage/Transmission DS/T: 2.91 x 10¹¹s

Biological Code: 786.985.965

Genome: 4.2 x 10⁹ bits; Coding/non-coding: 0.019.

Biology: C, N, O, S, S₈, Ca, Cu, Se, H₂O, PO₄

TNA

Diferrous hemerythrin proteins in C₁₇H₂₉COOH circulatory fluid.

Mobile heterotrophs, carnivores, O₂ respiration.

Septopedal, quad- or sextopedal locomotion.

Mildly gregarious, polygeneric [2 genera, 5 species]; trisexual.

Communication: modulated sound at 5 to 2000 Hz and changing color patterns.

Neural connection equivalence NCE = 1.2 x 10¹⁴

T = ~300o to 470o K; M = 4.3 x 10⁵ g; L: ~5.5 x 10⁹s

Vision: ~5 micrometers to 520 nanometers, Hearing: 2 to 6000 Hz

Member: Galactic Polylogue

Receipt galactic nested code: 1.61 x 10¹² s ago

Member: R’agch’lgh Collective

Locally initiated contact 1.58 x 10¹² s ago

Star F1V; Planet: Sixth

a = 2.4 x 10¹¹m; M = 2.9 x 10¹⁹g; R = 2.1 x 10⁷m; p = 2.7 x 10⁶s

Pd = 3.2 x 10⁷s, G = 25.81 m/s²

Atm: O₂ 26.4, N₂ 69.2, CO₂ 2.5, CO 2.1, SO₂ 0.7, at 2.5 x 10⁵ Pa

Librarian’s note: First direct human contact occurred in 2188 C.E. at Gamma Ophiuchi. Primary culture now appears to be nomadic predarian, and is extremely dangerous. Threat level = 1.

We’d all downloaded the data on the Qesh, of course, as part of our Marine training. Know your enemy and all of that. Humans had first run into them fifty-nine years ago, when the Zeng He, a Chinese exploration vessel, encountered them while investigating a star system ninety-some light years from Sol. The Zeng He’s AI managed to get off a microburst transmission an instant before the ship was reduced to its component atoms. The signal was picked up a few years later by a Commonwealth vessel in the area and taken back to Earth, where it was studied by the Encyclopedian Library at the Mare Crisium facility on the moon. The Zeng He’s microburst had contained enough data to let us find the Qesh in the ocean of information within the Encylopedia Galactica and learn a bit about them.

We knew they were part of the R’agch’lgh Collective, the Galactic Empire, as the news media insisted on calling it. We knew they were from a high-gravity world, that they were big, fast, and mean.

And with the ongoing collapse of the Collective, we knew they’d become predarians.

The net media had come up with that word, a blending of the words predators and barbarians. That was unfortunate, since in our culture barbarian implies a relatively low technology; you expect them to be wearing shaggy skins, horned helmets, and carrying whopping big swords in their primary manipulators, looking for someone to pillage.

As near as we could tell, they were predators, both genetically and by psychological inclination. Their societal code, JKRS—which is where “Jackers,” one of their popular nicknames, had come from—suggested that their dominant culture was organized along clan/family lines, that they’d evolved from carnivorous hunters, that they considered themselves to be warriors and possessed what might be called a warrior ethos, and, perhaps the most chilling, that they possessed an essentially Darwinian worldview—survival of the fittest, the strong deserve to live. The fact that their technological level allowed them to accelerate asteroid-sized rocks to near-c and slam them into a planet was a complementary extra.

These guys had planet-killers.

The Crisium librarians thought—guessed would be the more accurate term—that the Qesh constituted some sort of military elite within the R’agch’lgh Collective, a kind of palace guard or special assault unit used to take out worlds or entire species that the Collective found to be obstreperous or inconvenient. But with the fall of the Collective, the Qesh were thought to have gone freelance, wandering the Galaxy in large war fleets taking what they wanted and generally trying to prove that they were the best, the strongest, the fittest—something like a really sadistic playground bully without adult supervision.

That change of status must have been fairly recent—within the last couple of thousand years or so. According to the EG, they were still working for the Collective.

And for all we knew maybe some of them were, way off, deep in toward the Galactic Core, where the R’agch’lgh might still be calling the shots. Our local branch of the EG Library hadn’t been updated for five thousand years, however, and evidently a lot had happened in the meantime.

The Galaxy was going through a period of cataclysmic change, but from our limited perspective, it was all taking place in super-slow motion.

“What,” I said. “The Qesh are coming here?”

“My friend in Personnel,” Lewis said, “told me there’d been a call for help from one of our colonies. The colony is supposed to be pre-Protocol, so …” She shrugged. “Send in the Marines.”

It made sense, in a horrific kind of way. Commonwealth Contact Protocol had been developed in 2194, and it laid out very strict rules and regs governing contact with new species. Partially, that was to protect the new species, of course. Human history has a long and bloody tradition of one culture stumbling into a new and eradicating it, through disease, through greed, through conquest, through sheer, bloody-minded stupidity.

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 prespaceflight 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 × 10¹⁶ 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 15h 19m 26s; 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: 36d 13h 29m 17s

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

Mass: 2.488 x 10²⁸ 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 10³ kPa [1.52 Earth average]

Percentage atmospheric composition: O₂ 19.6, N₂ 75.5, Ne 1.15, Ar 0.58, CO 1.42; CO₂ 1.01, SO₂ 0.69; others<500 ppm

Age: 8.3 billion years

Biology: C, N, H, Na, S₈, O, Br, H₂O; 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.

“You might be coming down with something,” I told him. I reached up on the shelf behind me and took down a bottle with eight small, white pills. “Take these for your head. Two every four hours, as needed.”

“Yeah? What are they?”

“APCs,” I told him. “Aspirin.”

“Shit. What about nanomeds?”

“Try these first. If you’re still hurting tomorrow, come to sick call again and maybe we can give you something stronger. In the meantime, I want you to drink a lot of water. Not coffee. Not soda. Water.”

“Shit, Doc! Aspirin?”

Yeah, aspirin. Corpsmen have been handing out APCs since the early twentieth century, when we didn’t even know why it worked; the stuff inhibits the body’s production of prostaglandins, among other things, which means it helps block pain transmission to the hypothalamus and switches off inflammation.

And the “something stronger” would be a concoction of acetaminophen, chlorpheniramine maleate, dextromethorphan, and phenylephrine hydrochloride—a pain reliever, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, and a decongestant. Nanomedications can do a lot, but in the case of the old-fashioned common cold, the old-fashioned symptom-treating remedies do just as well and maybe better. We don’t automatically hand out the cold pills, though, because there are just too many creative things bored sailors and Marines can do to turn them into recreational drugs. You can’t get high on aspirin.

Howell looked disappointed, but he took the bottle and wandered out.

Next up was a Marine who was having trouble sleeping, even with VR sleep-feeds in his rack-tube.

Four hours later, I was getting ready to go to chow when a call came over the intercom. “Duty Corpsman to B Deck, eleven two. Duty Corpsman to B deck, eleven two. Emergency.”

I grabbed my kit and hightailed it. And I knew I had big trouble as soon as I walked into the berthing compartment.

It was Private Howell, screaming and in convulsions.

Chapter Three

DAMN IT! WHAT THE HELL HAD I MISSED?

Howell was on the deck in front of his rack-tube; the convulsions were hitting him in waves, and each time his muscles contracted he let loose a bellow that rang off the bulkheads. His face was bright red and sweating, his eyes wide open but apparently staring at nothing. A dozen Marines were gathered around him, trying to hold him down, trying to keep him from slamming his head against the deck. Someone had thought fast and jammed a rag into his mouth to keep him from biting through his own tongue.

I knelt beside him and felt for a pulse. Faster than two a second, and pounding.

The fastest way to derail convulsions is a shot of nano programmed to hit the brain’s limbic system and decouple the spasmodic neuronic output, a nanoneural suppression, or NNS. That’s the way we treat epileptic seizures. The trouble was, this wasn’t necessarily epilepsy, and messing with the brain, outside of relatively straightforward pain control, is not business as usual for a Corpsman.

I opened an in-head CDF channel. “Dr. Francis? I need you up here. B Deck, berthing compartment eleven two.”

“Already on my way, Carlyle. What do we have?”

“Twenty-year-old male in convulsions. Elevated heart and BP.” I hesitated. “He was at sick call this morning with symptoms of the flu.”

“Go ahead and initiate an NNS.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

I pulled a spray injector from my kit and clicked in a plastic capsule of gray liquid, held the tip against Howell’s carotid, and fired it into his bloodstream. Elsewhere in my kit was an N-prog, a handheld device that used magnetic induction to program nanobots after they were inside the body. I switched it on and glanced at the screen.

What the hell? The device was picking up easily twice the dosage of ’bots, and they were already running a program. Not only that, they were recruiting the new ’bots, passing on their programming as the new ’bots flooded into Howell’s brain. On-screen, I could see a graphic representation of the nanotech war going on inside his brain—a haze of red dots and gray dots, with more and more of the gray switching to red as I watched.

And the seizures became more violent, horrifically so. Howell’s back arched so sharply, his hips thrust forward, I was afraid his spine was going to snap. With each thrust, he gave another bellow. The muscles were standing out on his neck like steel bars, his mouth wide open, and blood was streaming from his nose. This was not good. If I didn’t get the convulsions under control soon, he would have a massive stroke or a heart attack on the spot.

I punched in my code, then entered Program 9, holding the N-prog close to the side of his head. The remaining gray dots turned green and, slowly, slowly, the red dots began switching to green as well.

“C’mon! C’mon!” I breathed, watching the slow change in colors. Green ’bots meant they’d accepted the new program, which would guide them through the brain tissues to the limbic system and to the motor-control areas and the cerebellum, where they should start damping out the neural storm that was wracking Howell’s brain.

Damn it. I wanted to call it epilepsy, but it wasn’t, though it showed some of the same signs and symptoms. It looked as though Howell’s limbic system had just started firing off high-energy signals. The red nano was behind it, I suspected. Somehow, they appeared to be programmed to enter the limbic system and stimulate the neuron firings that had resulted in Howell’s bizarre seizure. I could see that the red ’bots were clustered in several particular spots deep within Howell’s brain—a region called the ventral tegemental area, or VTA, and another called the substantia nigra. I didn’t know what that meant; Corpsmen are given basic familiarization in brain anatomy, of course, but detailed brain chemistry is definitely a subject for specialists and expert AIs.

I needed to know what was going on in there chemically. I tapped out a new program code, setting it to affect just ten percent of the nanobots I’d just put into Howell’s brain.

Interstitial fluid—the liquid that fills the spaces between the body’s cells—is a witches’ brew of water filled with salts, amino acids and peptides, sugars, fatty acids, coenzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters, and waste products dumped by the cells. It’s not the same as blood or blood plasma; red cells, platelets, and plasma proteins can’t pass through the capillary walls, though certain kinds of white blood cells can squeeze through to fight infection. The exact composition depends on where in the body you’re measuring, but with nerve cells the interstitial fluid is where the chemical exchange takes place across a synapse, the gap between one nerve cell and another. I was telling the ’bots to begin directly sampling the mix of complex molecules floating among Howell’s neurons.

The answer came back as a long scrolling list of substances, but one formula by far outweighed all of the others: C₈H₁₁NO₂. I had to look it up in my in-head reference library, and when I saw what it was I could have kicked myself.

Dopamine.

About then is when Dr. Francis arrived. “Make a hole!” one of the Marines barked, and the cluster of people around me and Howell scattered apart. I handed him my N-prog with the formula still showing on the screen.

“Shit,” was all he said when he read it.

Using my N-prog, he took over the programming of the nanobots, checking the progress of Program 9 first. There were definitely fewer of the red specks now, and a lot more of the green. In addition, some had switched over to orange, the ’bots engaged in sampling Howell’s cranial interstitial fluid.

The nanoneural suppression routine appeared to be working, once the green ’bots got a substantial upper hand over the red ’bots in numbers. Howell’s back was still arched, the muscular contractions were continuing, but they were decidedly weaker now, and expressing themselves as a long, steady quiver rather than the violent thrusting motions of a moment ago.

Dr. Francis was tapping in a new program code. “Neuroleptic intervention at the D2 receptors,” he told me. “It blocks dopamine.”

The ’bots clustered in Howell’s VTA were almost all green now, and the effect was spreading out through the motor region of his cerebral cortex and his cerebellum as well. The motor cortex is what plans and controls voluntary motor functions of the body—muscular movements, in other words. The cerebellum is the part of the brain at the very back and bottom of the organ that regulates the body’s muscular movements. It doesn’t initiate them, but it does help control them to fine-tune motor activity, timing, and coordination. Those parts of Howell’s brain had been completely out of control, causing all of his muscles to lock up in an involuntary, spasmodic seizure. As the motor-control regions relaxed, Howell’s body relaxed. His face sagged out of its rigid, openmouthed grimace, his fists unclenched, his spine eased into a more normal posture. Howell was panting now, but his eyes blinked, and he seemed to be aware of us now.

His eyes looked unusually dark.

“What happened, Private?” I asked him.

“I … dunno, Doc. I was just relaxing in my bunk, and wham! I don’t know what hit me.”

“How long have you been doing onan?” Dr. Francis asked, his voice level and matter-of-fact.

“Onan? I … ah … don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Sure you do, son,” Francis replied. “You have enough dopamine in your system to trigger a hundred sexual orgasms. You were onanning and o-looping. Feels better than the real thing, eh?”

Of course, when the doctor said that it was all obvious. “Shit!” I said. “He’s addicted?”

“That’s one word for it,” Francis replied, studying the N-prog’s screen. “Ah. The dopamine levels are coming down. I think we’ve broken the monkey’s back.”

I only half heard him. I was in-head, opening up my personal library and downloading the entry on onan. I’d known this stuff, once, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you worked with every day, and I never thought about it.

Download, Ship’s Medical Library

“Onan,” “onanning”

From “O-nano,” a contraction for “orgasmic nano.”

Slang term referring to the use of programmed medical nano to affect the pleasure center of the brain directly in order to generate sexual orgasm. Nanobot programs can be directed to effect the release of massive amounts of dopamine in the brain, or to trigger spasmodic muscle contractions, or, more usually, both.

The term “onan” is a play on Onan, the name of a minor character in the Book of Genesis (q.v.).

Cute. I remembered it now. In the Jewish-Christian Bible, there’s the story of Onan, who dumped his semen on the floor rather than impregnate his dead brother’s wife, which apparently pissed Yahweh off so badly he struck Onan dead on the spot. For years, onanism was a synonym for masturbation, and carried with it the idea that God was going to throw a lightning bolt at you if you jacked or jilled off. What generation upon generation of relaxed but guilt-ridden teenagers afterward managed to miss was that the sin of Onan lay in his disobeying God—according to Jewish law he was supposed to father a son by his sister-in-law to preserve his brother’s bloodline. It had nothing to do with masturbation.

Today, of course, the so-called sin of Onan is long forgotten, but orgasmic nanotechnics are very much with us. You can program one-micron nanobots, you see, to go into the brain’s limbic system and trigger the neurochemical processes that result in sexual orgasm. Sometimes we do this deliberately, as a treatment for certain types of sexual dysfunction, but there’s also a thriving underground business in providing doses of sex-programmed nanobots that can go into the brain and stimulate an orgasm, and then do it again, and again, and again …

That part, programming the ’bots to give you one orgasm after another every second or two is known as o-looping, and it can be addictive—very highly so.

Not to mention dangerous.

It turns out that drugs like cocaine and amphetamines either trigger or mimic the release of dopamine, and they affect the same areas of the limbic system that light up during an orgasm—the VTA and the brain’s mesolimbic reward pathway. In fact, a brain scan taken during an orgasm shows a process ninety-five percent identical to a heroin rush. Drugs and orgasms hit the same part of the brain, and that’s what makes cocaine and other such drugs addictive.

That doesn’t mean sex is bad, of course. It’s natural, normal, and healthy. But deliberately and artificially overstimulating dopamine production can lead to an addiction requiring higher and higher dopamine levels to get the same kick as the dopamine receptors begin closing down. And the program Howell had been running, evidently, had involved overstimulation of the parts of the brain responsible for muscular contraction as well. It was a way to boost the orgasmic feeling, yeah, but it could have killed him too.

The curious thing is that dopamine doesn’t give you the feel-good kick itself. Dopamine is the hormone that makes you want—it’s the craving.

But it’s the flood of dopamine that makes a heroin addict want another hit.

And it drives our orgasmic cravings as well.

“I take it,” Dr. Francis said quietly, “that you didn’t check him for dope levels at sick call this morning.”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t see any need. It looked like a cold or maybe flu.”

“Did you look at his eyes?”

I glanced down at Howell’s face. In the harsh light from the overhead, his pupils were so widely dilated that his eyes looked unusually dark.

“No, sir. He was complaining that the light hurt his eyes.”

“Uh-huh. Addicts will do that, to hide their pupils. They’ll look everywhere except right at you. Did you notice that he happened to have a monster hard-on?”

“No, sir.” The long bulge at the crotch of Howell’s skinsuit was fading, but still hard to miss. Marines shipboard tend to wear nano-grown skinsuits like work utilities, since they’re disposable and Marines wear them under combat armor anyway. The things are pretty revealing, which doesn’t matter since the old American nudity taboos have pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur, and service men and women sleep and shower communally anyway.

His erection was painfully evident, even now. But, no, I hadn’t noticed. There’d been other things on my mind at the time besides Howell’s crotch.

“Get a stretcher team and get him down to sick bay,” Francis told me. “He should be okay, but we’ll need to follow up the neuroleptics, and he’ll need a complete scan to check for internal injury, electrolyte balance, and lactic-acid buildup. Once things are back in balance, we’ll do a flush on the ’bots, get them out of there.” He pinched Howell’s arm as I had earlier. “Dehydrated. When you get him to sick bay, put him on IV fluids. Think you can manage that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hey, Doc?” Howell said. His voice was weak, and it trembled a bit. “Am I in trouble?”

“You’re on report,” Dr. Francis told him, “if that’s what you mean. Misuse of nanomedical technology is damned dangerous. I imagine Captain Reichert is going to have words with you about damaging government property.”

“What government property?”

“You. Your body.”

I’d already used my in-head com link to call for a stretcher team. In the meantime, I helped Howell get up and into his bunk. The other Marines began dispersing, a little reluctantly. It had been quite a show.

And by the time we had him in sick bay, with an IV dripping Ringer’s lactate into his arm, we were sliding into Earth orbit, the tugs on their way out to haul us in and dock us with the Supra-Cayambe Starport Facility.

Later that afternoon, Lieutenant Commander Francis called me into his office. “Have a seat, Carlyle.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You missed some important shit with Howell, son.” He didn’t sound angry. He sounded disappointed, which was worse.

“I know that, sir.”

“Why?”

“I … no excuse, sir.”

“On board ship, our patients tend to be young and very, very healthy. Oh, you’ll get the occasional case of appendicitis or a sprained ankle or even a cold, but when one comes to you with vague symptoms like that, you need to consider the possibility that he did something to himself.

“Because our patients on board ship also tend to be very bored. They tend to be good at figuring out ways to subvert the system and apply technology to alleviate that boredom.”

I thought about Doobie and his lab-brewed hooch. “Yes, sir.”

“That’s especially true if he comes to you asking for a dose of nanomeds. Every technology can be misused in one way or another. It’s ridiculously easy for these kids to go on liberty and buy a handheld unit that can program ’bots to do damned near anything, just about. Onans are probably the most common. But they have them for programming a heroin rush, which is pretty much the same thing. Or cocaine. Or even, believe it or not, the feeling of contentment after a good meal.”

“Is that addictive, Doctor?”

“Can be. I saw one young enlisted woman a few years ago who was anorexic. She used an N-prog to feel full, like she’d just had a good meal, and stopped eating. We almost didn’t save her.”

“That’s just nuts, sir.”

“No, it’s just human. Humans do stupid things, or humans get screwed up in the head and that makes them to do stupid things.”

“Yes, sir.” I hesitated. “But—”

“But what?”

“I’m curious about Howell, sir. If he programmed the ’bots in his system to stimulate dopamine production … that’s just the craving, isn’t it? How did that cause the muscle spasms? And why did he go into convulsions? I didn’t give him any nanomeds this morning. Just aspirin.”

“Hm.” For a moment, he got a faraway look in his eyes, as though he were listening to something. “Do you know the term synaptic plasticity?”

“No, sir. I know what a synapse is.”

“The gap between one nerve cell and the next, yes. Synaptic plasticity is the tendency of the connection across the synapses to change in strength, either with use or with disuse. Among other things, it means the ability to change the quantity of neurotransmitters released into a synapse, and how well the next neuron in the chain responds to them. It’s an important factor in learning.”

“Okay …”

“Aspirin can affect synaptic plasticity. One of aspirin’s metabolic by-products, salicylate, acts on the NMDA receptors in cells, and that affects the flow of calcium ions across a neural synapse.”

At this point, Dr. Francis was way over my head. I had absolutely no idea what an NMDA receptor might be.

He must have sensed my confusion. “Don’t worry about it. My guess is Howell had a resident population of nanobots in his brain, programmed to give him an orgasm anytime he wanted, okay?”

I nodded.

“Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. One of the characteristics of neurotransmitters is you get a weakening effect each time you fire them.” He waved his hand in a descending series of peaks to illustrate. “You get this much of a jolt, then a little less, and a little less, like this. In an addiction, you need to boost the dosage of your drug of choice to get the same bang for your buck, right?”

“Yes, sir.” This was more familiar territory.

“Well, the same thing happens with dopamine. He might even have been going into withdrawal. Dopamine affects the same parts of the limbic system that heroin and cocaine hits.”

“Yeah. Headache. Runny nose. General aches and pains.”

“Symptoms like the flu,” Francis said. “Exactly. So he came to you to get you to prescribe a shot of nano, with the idea that more is better. He could reprogram what you gave him … or it looks like the nanobots he already had were set to reprogram anything new. You gave him aspirin instead. Maybe he took them back to the berthing compartment and downed them all, just hoping something would happen. The full chem workup we pulled on him this afternoon showed elevated salicylate levels.

“He might have boosted the programming on his nanobots, too. Upped the power, and maybe set them to deliberately give him an hour of multiple orgasms. We’ll know that if we find his N-prog in his locker. One way or another, though, the aspirin increased the efficiency of neurotransmitter uptake—specifically of dopamine. It also might have increased the triggering receptivity of his muscles. Aspirin is a decent muscle relaxant.”

The realization of what he was saying had just hit me, bam. “You’re saying I … I poisoned Howell, sir. I gave him that aspirin, and that’s what triggered the convulsions.”

“Not at all. I’m saying that when you’re working with these people, you need to be suspicious. Paranoid, even. What are they trying to put over on you?” He scowled. “It’s ridiculous. Most of them have fuck buddies in the squad bay, for God’s sake. Virtual reality feeds from the ship’s library let them have sex in their heads with all the hottest erotic stars on the Net. And still they screw with illegal nano programmers, trying to get a bigger kick, or they o-loop them to get a whole lot of them in a row.

“What happened wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know he was doing an onan, or that he was o-looping. But, damn it, be suspicious! If they’re showing fuzzy symptoms, or symptoms that don’t really make sense, do a scan and check for resident nano! If Howell had access to the stuff, it’s a sure bet that a dozen others on the Clymer are using, too. I’m going to need to take this to the skipper.”

“Yes, sir. Uh …”

“What?”

“What about me, sir? Am I on report?”

“Why would you be on report?”

“I screwed up. I missed the nano, I didn’t think of addiction when I saw him at sick call this morning, and I gave him enough aspirin to trigger those convulsions.”

Francis sighed. He raised his hand and began ticking points off on his fingers. “One, you didn’t ‘screw up.’ You could have been a little more persistent, a little more observant. But his symptoms looked like a clear call. The flu.

“Two. You’re not a doctor, nor do you have training in neurophysiology. At sick call, you screen the patients so that I don’t have to see all of them, and sort out the malingerers from the ones who are really sick. You’re trained to handle routine stuff. Colds and STDs and stubbed toes. Nanogenic dopamine addictive response is not routine.

“Three. One of the most complicated and difficult aspects of medicine is understanding how drugs or nano programs can interact or interfere with one another. It’s amazing how complicated things can get, with different drugs either reinforcing one another, or cancelling each other out—and with illegal nano, all bets are off!

“Four. Aspirin has been around since the late nineteenth century, unless you count shamans prescribing willow bark for pain, which is where the stuff came from. We’ve understood in general how it works since the late twentieth. But, believe me, even something that’s been around as long as aspirin can still surprise you. People have unusual sensitivities, or allergies, or they’re on drugs or nano treatments, or they’re shooting themselves full of crap that could kill them.

“And no one can keep up with all of the possibilities. That’s why we have expert systems, AIs with medical databases that let them guide us through the jungle of drug interactions. When in doubt, use them.”

I sagged a bit inside. “I do, when there’s a question,” I said. “But I didn’t have a question this time. I really thought Howell had a cold.”

“It happens to all of us, Carlyle. We make mistakes, we’re not perfect. Things could have turned out a lot worse for Private Howell, believe me. They didn’t. So … you made a mistake. Learn from it. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Questions?”

“Just … is this going to affect my FMF training?”

“Hell, no. You’re a good Corpsman, and I want you on my team. So as far as I’m concerned, you’re in.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You want liberty tonight?”

I thought about it. Right then, I really wanted to get off the ship. There was this bar in Supra-Cayambe I really liked: the Earthview.

“Yes, sir. If that’s okay …”

“Absolutely. Give me your hand.”

I extended my left hand, and he passed a wand over it. All military personnel have a programmable chip implanted in their left wrist and another in the back of their head. They serve as ID—what the military used to call dog tags—and can also carry orders and authorizations. My CDF in-head hardware—my Cerebral Data Feed implants—could also carry orders, of course, but the Navy takes a dim view of enlisted personnel writing or rewriting their own.

What Dr. Francis had just done was give me an authorization, signed by him, my department head, to leave the ship for twelve hours, what both the Navy and the Marine Corps refer to as liberty.

I was free for the evening, unless, of course, we had an emergency recall.

“Have you heard anything about when we’re shipping out again, sir?” I asked.

“Not a word. I wouldn’t worry about it. If they’re putting together an out-system expeditionary force, it’s going to take them a while to assemble all the ships. So enjoy your time ashore.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

As an ass-chewing, Dr. Francis’s lecture wasn’t bad at all. In fact, I think he was trying to encourage me. But the talk hadn’t made me feel better. If anything, I felt worse.

“Hey, e-Car! You going ashore?”

It was Dubois. I’d just walked into the squad bay, on my way to my compartment to change into civvies.

“I guess so,” I told him. “I need a drink, or ten.”

“Yeah. Francis chewed you a new one, huh?”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“It’s all over the ship, you know, that he had you on the carpet for dropping the ball with Howell.”

“Great,” I told him. “Exactly what I needed to hear.”

I was really looking forward to that drink.

Chapter Four

THE EARTHVIEW LOUNGE IS LOCATED AT THE TOP OF THE CAYAMBE Space Elevator, and the place is well named. The view from up there is spectacular.

The Space Elevator went into operation in 2095, a 71,000-kilometer-high woven buckycarb tether stretching from Earthport, atop the third-highest mountain in Ecuador, all the way up to Starport. The other two elevators, at Mount Kenya and Pulau Lingga/Singapore, came on-line later, but Cayambe was the first. A cartel of banking and space-industry businesses built the elevator, and it was run as an international megacorporation until the Commonwealth officially took it over in 2115.

Halfway up, just below the 36,000-kilometer level, is the Geosynch Center, which is a major node of communications and industrial facilities clustered around the elevator, both in free orbit and attached to the cable. It’s also the location of the big solar reflector arrays. Starport, however, is all the way up at the top, built into and around the surface of the five-kilometer asteroid used to anchor the elevator and keep it stretched out taut—a stone tied to the end of a whirling string. Ships launching from Starport picked up a small but free boost from the centrifugal force of the elevator’s once-per-day rotation.

I went ashore with Doob and HM3 Charlie “Machine” McKean, flashing our electronic passes at the AI of the watch and riding the transparent docking tube from Clymer’s quarterdeck up to the planetoid in a transport capsule.

It was quite a view. The George Clymer was nestled into the space dock facility on the planetoid’s far side, the location of Starport’s Commonwealth naval base. A dozen other ships were there as well, including the assault carrier Lewis B. Puller, three times the Clymer’s length, ten times her mass, and carrying four squadrons of A/S-60 and A/S-104 Marine planetary assault fighters, plus numerous reconnaissance and support spacecraft. There were civilian ships as well, including a couple of deep interstellar research vessels, the Stephen Hawking and the Edward Witten.

Most of the Starport planetoid is in microgravity. The rock itself doesn’t have enough mass for more than a whisper of gravity of its own, and this far out from Earth, the centrifugal force created by its rotation amounts to about 0.0017 of a G.

That means that if you drop a wineglass, after the first second it’s fallen one and a half centimeters—a smitch more than half an inch—and there’s plenty of time to catch it before it hits the deck.

But, of course, you don’t want to be drinking out of a wineglass in the first place. Things still have their normal mass in microgravity, if not their weight, and once the wine gets to swirling in the glass it will keep moving up and out and all over you and the deck in shimmying slow-motion spheres.

Which was why we were headed for the Starport Nearside Complex, the small space city constructed on the Earth-facing side of the planetoid, better known as the Wheel. It’s a kilometer-wide wheel encircling the up-tether from Earth, and rotating once a minute to create an out-is-down spin gravity of about half a G.

We caught the thru-tube that whisked us from the Starport Terminal through the core of the planetoid and deposited us at the hub of Wheel City. From there, we floated our way into the rotating entryway and rose through one of the spokes, the sensation of gravity steadily increasing as we rose farther out from the hub.

The Wheel holds the heart of the Commonwealth Starport Naval Base, including the headquarters and communications center, support facilities, and a Marine training module, but over half of the huge structure is civilian territory, a free port administered directly by the Commonwealth. The Earthview was a bar-restaurant combo located in one of the Wheel segments, and it came by its name honestly.

The entryway checked our passes as we walked in. One entire wall, from floor to ceiling, was a viewall looking down-tether at Earth.

The disk appeared about thirty times larger than a full moon from Earth, a dazzlingly brilliant swirl of azure seas and intensely white clouds and polar caps. The planet was in half-phase at the moment, with the sunset terminator passing through Ecuador and down the South American spine of the Andes Mountains. It was late summer in the northern hemisphere, so the terminator ran almost straight north up the Atlantic seaboard. South, the bulge of Brazil was picked out by the massed city lights of the megapolis stretching from Montevideo to Belém.

North, of course, the New Ice Age still held northern New England and much of Canada in a midwinter’s death’s grip, despite all the efforts of the mirror array at Geosynch. The Canadian ice sheets, especially, were blinding in the afternoon sunlight.

At the moment, the viewall image was coming through an external camera somewhere on the planetoid; the Earth and the starfield behind it weren’t rotating with the Wheel’s stately spin. I could see one of the elevator capsules on its way up-tether, gleaming bright silver in the sunlight.

“You been here before, e-Car?” Machine asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I admitted. “I like the view.”

Doob cackled a nasty laugh. “View is right! The girls here are spectacular!”

Which wasn’t what I meant, of course, but, hey, when the man’s right, he’s right. The Earthview was actually divided into halves, separated by a soundproof bulkhead. The side reserved for civilians was rather genteel, I’d heard—fine dining at exorbitant prices, the food delivered by robotic waitstaff indistinguishable from FAB (flesh and blood). They even served real beef there, shipped up-tether for the financial equivalent of two arms, a leg, and the promised delivery of your firstborn.

The Earthview Lounge next door, however, was a bit … livelier. Naked FAB waitresses, live sex shows on the black, fur-padded central stage, and throbbing, full-sensory music fed directly through the patrons’ implants and going straight to those parts of the brain responsible for hearing and feeling. And the girls were gorgeous, ranging from exotic genies to BTL sexbots to winsome girl-next-door types. The joint wasn’t reserved for the military, not officially, anyway, but I doubt that most civilians were all that comfortable there. The fleet was in, and enlisted personnel tended to get a bit territorial with their liberty hot spots.

Doob and Machine and I let the door deduct the cover charge from our eccounts and we wandered in, looking for good seats. An enthusiastic ménage-à-quatre was writhing away on the stage, backlit by the half-full Earth, and the place was flooded with blue-silver earthlight. A hostess wearing a plastic smile and some luminous animated tattoos showed us to a table close to the entertainment and took our drink orders. The mood music, a piece I half recognized by Apokyleptos, literally felt like hands running over my body; the audible part was too damned loud, but I dialed my reception down a bit and it was okay after that.

A waitress brought us our drinks and one of those smiles, and we leaned back in the chairs to enjoy the show. I’d ordered a hyperbolic trajectory—vodka, white rum, metafuel, and blue incandescence. I tossed it back, shuddered through the burn, and after that I didn’t care quite so much about screwing up with Howell. After my second glass, I didn’t care at all about Howell, and after the third I didn’t care much about anything.

“So I hear you didn’t get booted from the program,” Machine said. “Lucky.”

“I guess,” I said, but without much enthusiasm. “I’ve been having second thoughts, y’know?”

“What, about going FMF?” Doob asked. “Shit, every Corpsman wants to go FMF! Best of the best, right?”

“S’okay,” I said, shrugging, “if you like jarheads.” My lips felt numb and I was having some trouble shaping the words.

“Don’t you?” McKean asked.

“Sure, when the bastards aren’t trying to put something over on you.” I was still feeling burned by Howell’s attempt to get another shot of nano.

“So why did you volunteer for FMF in the first place?” Dubois asked. “You coulda put in your four and gotten out.”

Four years was the minimum enlistment period for the Navy. To get FMF, I’d had to “ship for six,” as we say, extending my enlistment to ten years, total.

I shrugged. “I wanted to get rich, of course.”

NO ONE JOINS THE NAVY TO GET RICH, OF COURSE. YOU GET ROOM and board and some great opportunities to travel, sure, but base pay is about a twelfth what a good systems programmer gets on the outside, and maybe a quarter of the take-home pay of a ’bot director at an e-car manufactory. No one, unless you take the long view, and have a father who’s senior vice president of research and development for General Nanodynamics.

Lots of medical doctors get their start in the Hospital Corps. It offers a good, basic education in general medicine and applied nano, and universities with medical programs smile on ex-corpsmen looking for grants or scholarships. But the economic rewards can be even bigger when what you bring home is a cool and useful bit of xenotech.

That’s because, anymore, Navy Corpsmen aren’t just the enlisted medics for the Marines and Navy. Because of their technical training, and the fact that in the field and they’re already lugging around a fair amount of specialized gear, they’re also the science technicians for any military field op. Sampling the local atmosphere, studying the biosphere and reporting on what might bite, and even establishing first contact with the locals all fall into a Corpsman’s MOS, his military occupational specialty—his job description, if you like.

And that means that Corpsmen are perfectly placed to pick up alien technologies when they make first contact, or to bring home innovative ways of utilizing human nanotech. They even get to keep the military-issued CDF hardware that allows in-head linking, and that can provide a hell of a competitive advantage in the civilian world.

So when I finished the series on my basic education downloads, my father, Spencer Carlyle, suggested that I might want to join the Navy—specifically the Hospital Corps—in order to learn skills that would benefit both me and the family.

My grandfather went to work for General Nanodynamics sixty-three years ago when it was a data-mining start-up, wading through the Encyclopedia Galactica’s hundreds of millions of hours of data, finding the codes that would unlock its secrets and release untold alien secrets of science, technology, and art that we could apply here on Earth. Better, though, is to go straight to the source, to actually learn new methods of materials manufacturing or chemistry or medicine directly from a living xenoculture. It’s one thing to pull off the EG’s stats on the X’ghr and learn that they’re very good at biochemistry. It’s something quite else to visit the aliens in person and pick their brains.

In 2212, my father led the General Nanodynamics team that developed cybertelomeric engineering from the data brought back from direct contact with the X’ghr eight years earlier.

Telomeres are the end-caps that keep chromosomes from unraveling, but they grow shorter with each division of the cell. When the telomeres wear away after forty or fifty divisions, the cell dies and aging sets in. Cybertelomerics refers to various means of controlling or guiding telomere replication inside cells without generating the out-of-control cell growth and immortality known as a cancer. As a result, humans alive today can expect to live two or three hundred years or more, rejuve treatments can have an eighty-year-old looking like forty, and clinical immortality might be just around the corner. Whether or not human immortality is a good thing is beside the point; the biochemical data brought back from the X’ghr homeworld by the crew of the Hippocrates promises to utterly transform what it means to be human.

That one bit of xenotech should have made my family quite wealthy.

It didn’t. That was because the government stepped in and declared telomere therapy a national asset, with patents owned and controlled by the Commonwealth Institute of Health. Dad got a pat on the back and a nice bonus, but do you have any idea how much rich old people would pay for treatments that would keep them going for another couple of centuries? Or keep them looking and performing like VR sex stars?

But the government wants to maintain control of who gets rejuve treatments, at least for now. They say it’s to prevent runaway overpopulation; Dad was convinced that we’re going to have a lot of very young-looking senators, presidents, and wealthy campaign contributors over the next few centuries.

Cynical? Sure. And he managed to infect me with his bitterness as well. Government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich: it’s a system that’s been around for an obscenely long time, and one that’s very hard to fight. So Dad set out not to fight the system so much as to work with it. If we could nail down another big advance in medicine, materials processing, or chemistry from an untapped xenotech source, we might be able to exploit it off-world—at one of the free-market colonies, maybe—and do it in such a way that the Commonwealth couldn’t touch it.

That was the plan, at any rate. Nanotechnics is highly competitive, and new developments and techniques are coming along every day. The field is dominated by three or four big megacorporations and a dozen smaller ones, and the company that doesn’t keep up is going to find itself sidelined and forgotten in very short order. General Nanodynamics is about nine or ten in the hierarchy, but it’s well-placed to go multi-world and even give IBN and Raytheon-Mitsubishi a run for their e-creds.

My dad got into the field the old-fashioned way, going the route of AI development, but he thought having a Corpsman in the family might increase the chances of landing something big … a new technology, a new means of controlling or programming nanobots, a new approach to an old problem, like what the X’ghr did for telomere research.

And I was pretty excited about the idea myself. It wasn’t like I was letting my Dad do my thinking for me. I’d wanted to join the Navy anyway, the Hospital Corps in particular, because I had my eye on going to a school like Johns Hopkins or Bethesda University, one with a good medical download program, with an eye to becoming a doctor. I’d never been much interested in following in my father’s footsteps … or the footsteps of my grandfather and great grandfather. A century of Carlyles in General Nanodynamics, I thought, was quite enough.

Besides, to make money, real money, we needed to break free of the pack. As an employee of General Nanodynamics, with all of his ideas becoming the intellectual property of the corporation, my dad could manage a living that was comfortable enough, sure, but there is well-off rich, and there is filthy rich with a private Earth-to-orbit shuttle, your own synchorbital private mansion, and maybe a shot at some telomeric genengineering.

If I found myself in a position to bring back some exploitable xenotech, something Dad and his contacts could turn into a few hundred billion creds and a high-living lifestyle … hey, why not? I was in.

But I needed to go Fleet Marine Force to make it Out There, to give myself even a chance of being on a first contact team or encountering a new technic species not described in the EG.

And after my encounter with Private Howell that morning, I thought that my chances of that were becoming somewhat bleak. If I got dropped from FMF, I was looking at six more years of routine duty—working on the wards of a naval hospital somewhere, or serving as staff at a research station in Outer God-knows-where.

I was wondering if I’d just managed to deep-six my entire future.

“YOU JOINED THE FUCKING NAVY TO GET RICH?” MACHINE SAID, laughing. “My God, man, what planet are you from?”

“My man,” Doob added, “we need to run an EG xenospecies profile on you, stat! Lessee … ‘e-Car: civilization type zero-point-zero-weird. Biological code: really weird.’?”

“Weird squared,” Machine suggested.

The plan to score on xenotech was something I never talked about with anyone, of course. I shrugged off the teasing. “Hey, I’m tracking to become a med doctor, okay? Doctors can bring in the creds same as nanoware specialists.”

“Sure, and they work their asses off getting there,” Doob said.

Machine tossed off the rest of his drink—something called a “weightless slam,” and nodded. “Shit, you know how much ghost-mass doctors carry with them all the time? Ghost in the machine, dude. Ghost in the machine.”

Most doctors are connected on a semi-permanent basis to expert AI systems running on the local Net, often with ten or twelve load-links going at a time. That’s because no one person can possibly keep all of the data necessary in his memory—even in their plug-in cerebral RAM—to maintain a smoothly working knowledge of the pharmacology, anatomy, pathology, biochemistry, nanotechnic programming, holistics, cybernetics, and psychology needed to treat patients, and that’s just to name just a few. Doctors aren’t necessarily running all of those channels all the time, but it is, I’d been told, like having ten other people with you all the time, whispering, guiding, making suggestions, kibitzing, whether you are performing surgery or simply sitting down to dinner.

Some, like Dr. Francis, seemed to handle it pretty well. Sometimes, he would get a faraway look in his eyes, like he was listening to someone else while he’s talking to you, but usually you knew it was him behind that fresh-out-of-med-school face. In some cases, though, it became a kind of high-tech multiple-personality syndrome, where your original self tended to fade into the background as one or another of your resident AIs took over for you. I was thinking of Dr. Burchalter, on board the Puller, who often didn’t seem to be there when you talked to him. You knew you were taking orders from an expert AI who was running the show.

Ghost in the machine indeed. The term was invented a few centuries ago by a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle to describe conceptual problems with Descarte’s ideas of mind as distinct from body. Later, it described the neuro-evolutionary idea that human brains are grown atop mammalian brains grown atop reptilian brains, and that destructive impulses like hate, anger, or fear arise from those deeper, more primitive systems we still carry with us.

Nowadays, however, it means losing yourself in a multiple-AI system, and your “ghost-mass” refers to the number of active AIs you have resident on your in-head CDF hardware at any given time.

“I know, I know,” I told him. “But I can handle it. I don’t think …”

I broke off what I was going to say. Machine was getting into the music.

It was deeper now, more insistent, more sex-heavy sensuous. The touch-sensie sidebands were creating the feeling of a naked woman giving me a lap dance—I could feel her weight, feel her squirming against my thighs, feel her hands stroking my chest and face, all in time to the throb of the music. I had the vid bands turned way down, so the dancer’s image overlying my vision was ghosted to nearly nothing, a barely sensed shadow, but with three trajectories still burning in my gut it was getting a little hard to focus on the conversation and the lap-dancing distraction as well.

It looked like Machine had blissed out completely to the entertainment channel. His head was back, with a silly half smile on his face, and his hands were in front of his chest, running up and down across something we couldn’t see.

I glanced at Doob. “I think we just lost Machine,” I told him.

“Yeah, looks like he’s got a ghost in his machine!”

“You look like you’re getting into it, too.” He had the same silly grin as McKean, and his eyes were starting to go glassy.

“Oh, yeah, baby!” At that point, I couldn’t tell if Doob was talking to me or to the ViR-gal invisibly grinding on his lap.

I brought the vid up on my implant for a look. She was a virtual-reality genie—the image of a genetically enhanced young woman with impossibly long, silky white hair and an overdeveloped upper chassis. I didn’t care much for that phenotype myself; they always looked so damned top-heavy that I kept thinking they were going to fall over. This one was well done, though. The program had her looking deep into my eyes and not blankly staring off into space somewhere. Her eyes were too large for an unmodified human, revealing her look’s descent from the conventions of an old Japanese artform called anime, but she seemed to be focused totally on me. I could even smell her perfume.

Of course, if I wanted things to get even more personal, I would have to let them deduct ten creds from my eccount. I was kind of hoping for a real-world encounter with a woman tonight, though, and, after a moment or two, I thoughtclicked a refusal to the offer.

But what the music was giving me was just crotch-teasing, and I found the sensation annoying. So I switched off the vid and the genie’s eyes and other oversized assets vanished. I switched off the tactile and olfactory sensations as well, and was left with the music coming over my audio channels alone. Funny. The music seemed a lot flatter and less interesting without the accompaniment of those other rhythmic, layered sensations.

Machine gave a strangled groan, and his hips started to jerk suggestively on the chair, his arms held tightly around the emptiness in front of him. It looked like he’d decided to pay the extra ten creds.

The sight bothered me, somehow. How, I wondered, was what he was doing any different from Private Howell’s o-looping? I mean, obviously Howell had been risking serious physical injury with his stunt, and he’d taken things to the point of cataleptic rigidity. He’d lost control on several levels, in fact. The compulsion that led him to risk medical intervention, court martial, and an end to his military career—to say nothing of death from a stroke or a heart attack—suggested that he was addicted.

But addicted to what, exactly? The dopamine and the feel-good endorphins associated with sex, obviously, but the technologies being used to generate those feelings were different in Howell than in Dubois and McKean. Howell had used nanobots programmed to manipulate dopamine levels directly in order to trigger a succession of closely looped orgasms. My two companions were letting music sidebands feed their in-head hardware with the virtual reality illusion of a gene-altered woman having sex with them.

Howell’s experience had been more intense, sure, and thanks to the aspirin he’d managed to get his switch stuck in the on position, but in terms of the outcome it was damned hard to see the line between one set of behaviors and the other.

“Hey, sailor,” a sultry voice said behind me. “You switched off your sensies. Don’t you like the music?”

I turned to face one of the Earthview’s waitresses. She was short and cute and her upper chassis didn’t look like it was going to pull her over. She wore a sweet smile and a wispy nimbus of blue-white light that didn’t do a whole lot to cover what was underneath. The ID projected by her personal circuitry said “Masha,” but there wasn’t any other information in the broadcast.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I was kind of hoping for some real action, maybe later.”

She laughed, an entrancing sound, and moved just a little closer. “You seen anything around here that you like?”

I gave her a stereotypically lecherous up and down. “Absolutely. What time do you get off?”

She leaned even closer. “Me getting off kind of depends on you, doesn’t it?”

“I’m Elliot,” I told her. I thoughtclicked my personal ID, which broadcast my name, where I was from, the fact that I was U.S. Navy, all the basic, introductory stuff.

“Hi, Elliot. I’m Masha.”

She didn’t transmit anything from her ID except her name. “Masha” suggested that she likely was from Russia, Ukraine, or the Yakutsk Republic. Her English was perfect, though, so for all I knew she could have been North American, maybe from a Russian immigrant family. It was hard to know these days, with basic language downloads as good as they were.

So why didn’t I ask her? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that she hadn’t sent more of her own personal data was putting me off. It suggested that she was keeping this on a strictly waitress-customer basis, and I felt as though asking her where she was from would come across as a really lame attempt to chat her up. I was feeling awkward and embarrassed and somewhat torn. Part of me wanted to talk her into bed, but as we bantered more, a larger part of me became convinced that she was more interested in my e-cred balance than in me.

And what was so wrong with that? The flesh-and-blood waitstaff in places like the Earthview aren’t paid all that well, even when you add in their tips, and the cost of workers’ quarters at Starport can eat up your e-cred balance real fast. What they do with their off hours is their business, so why not?

I was tempted, I really was. Masha looked like fun, and I certainly wasn’t in the market for a long-term relationship. After Paula? Hell, no. I was through with long-term hearts-and-flowers, long romantic interludes, and deeply intimate relationships.

But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that what I wanted was something more than the clinical workings of a commercial transaction.

We talked a few more moments, and then she left to get me another drink—a zero-G floater this time. The trajectory had blasted me pretty heavily; was that why I suddenly wasn’t interested in sex? Anyway, I was pretty sure another trajectory was going to set me hard on my ass. The floater was milder, would be easier on my system, with a lower percentage of C₂H₆O and less of a kick.

I looked across at Doob and Machine. They both were totally off planet—approaching the inevitable climax of their links in perfect time with the ménage up on the furry stage.

Masha returned with my drink a moment later, then wandered off to check on her other customers. I looked past the writhing ménage on stage at the image of Earth suspended against the stars. Maybe a part of my inability to join in had to do with how unsettled I was feeling just then. Until recently, I’d thought I’d known exactly what I was and where I was going. If I didn’t make FMF, though, all of that was called into question.

Oh, the next seven years would be spent in the Navy, there was no question about that; I couldn’t shout “I changed my mind!” and take back my signature on my re-up agreement. But holding sick call for service personnel and their dependents at some naval base Earthside, or maybe getting to work at an outpost off planet somewhere, holding sick call, running lab tests, performing medscans.

The alert went off inside my skull.

It started as a long, piercing, two-pitch whistle, like the old-fashioned boatswain’s whistles of the old-time surface Navy.

“Attention, Clymer personnel,” a voice said in my head after the whistle died away. “Attention Clymer personnel. Now recall, recall, recall. All hands report back aboard ship immediately. This is an embarkation order. Repeat …”

I gulped down the remaining half of my floater, hesitated, then put an extra-big tip on the table account for Masha. Across the table, Doob and Machine were blinking their eyes, looking around in a somewhat dazed manner. Recall alerts came through whether your channels were switched off, like mine, or even if they were fully engaged in other activities. I was suddenly delighted that I’d decided not to take the music’s genie up on her offer to take things further.

Talk about rude interruptions!

Somehow, they managed to pay their tabs, and we made our way out of the Earthview.

A lot of other men and women were doing the same thing.

Chapter Five

WE EMBARKED FROM STARPORT A FEW HOURS AFTER OUR RETURN to the Clymer.

All three of us hit the sober-up in sick bay, a heavy dose of nanobots programmed to break down the ethanol and release oxygen into the blood. The effect is kind of like going from pleasant free-fall sensations to slamming face-first into the deck, but you’re thinking more clearly when the shock wears off, and there’s no hangover.

Much of the conversation in the squad bay was centered on our precipitous recall. “Damn,” Doob said, shaking his head. “I was just about to make it with that genie, too!”

“You do know it was all in your head, right?” I asked him.

“What’s your point? You make it with FAB, that’s all in your head too.”

I shrugged. He had a point. Sex was sex, whether you got it on with a virtual reality program downloaded into your brain’s sensory centers, or had an orgasm with flesh and blood. In fact, brain scans had pointed out three centuries ago that when it came to a cerebral download of a recorded event, to a remembered event, or to an actual event taking place in physical reality, the brain can’t tell the difference.

The Clymer, with twelve hundred Marines of MRF-7 embarked on board, accelerated under Plottel Drive out-system at 1 full gravity, seeking the flat metric required by the astrogation department, where local space carried only a minimum curvature from gravity. Flat gravitometrics allowed us to switch on the Alcubierre Drive, which would let us cruise out-system faster than light, and in the case of Sol, could be found about ten astronomical units out, a little farther than the orbit of Saturn. We were accompanied by the Marine assault carrier Lewis B. Puller, the heavy cruiser Ticonderoga, and two destroyers, the Fife and the Decatur.

They say that the one form of FTL even faster than Alcubierre Drive is shipboard scuttlebutt. We all were wondering what had happened up in officers’ country. They’d sent down the briefing on Bloodworld before we’d reached Earth, granted us liberty, and only then suddenly called us back. There’s a technical term for that—“situation normal, all fucked up,” popularly shortened to SNAFU. Global comments, cerebral implants, direct-data downloads, AI intelligences a thousand times more powerful than human brains, and still the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

At 0930 hours the next morning after our departure, an announcement came through for all hands not on duty to rack out. That meant another full-immersion briefing, one with all of us lying down as the command constellation piped in the data. I wasn’t scheduled for the sick bay watch until 1600 hours, so I found a free recliner in the squad bay rather than going back to my berthing compartment and my tube, and strapped myself in. I closed my eyes, opened the main channel, and a moment later I was standing once again on Bloodworld.

I say “once again” in a purely virtual sense, of course, since I’d never been there physically. In the previous briefing, the download had let me virtually stand on the tortured planet’s surface as the basic ephemeris data scrolled through my skull, and the downloaded simulation unfolded a 360-degree world around me, one that I could, within fairly free limits, explore. This time, though, I was a bit more restricted in what I could look at, and the briefing officer was there as well.

“Good morning, Marines,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Carter. We have some updated intelligence on the Bloodstar situation.”

Carter was our company S2, the unit intelligence officer and the guy in charge of operational security. He was short, freckled, and red haired, with a boyish look about him that didn’t inspire all that much confidence.

But he generally seemed to know what he was talking about.

“Yesterday,” he said, “we briefed you on our destination, Bloodworld. We had received an alert by way of a message drone from naval assets at Gliese 581 telling us that ships believed to be operated by the Qesh had entered the system.

“Since that time, a second message drone has arrived from Salvation. Colonel Corcoran felt it important to fill you in on the latest.”

We stood on a plain of black, rugged basalt at the edge of a cliff above a seething ocean. The city of Salvation, the Neoessenist capital, seemed to grow from the rocks a kilometer in the distance, a collection of white domes and truncated pyramids emerging from a cliff face beyond the sprawl of a small spaceport. The red dwarf sun hung low in a deep green sky, partially obscured by the scudding purple cloud wrack. Even at this distance from the star—just twenty-two million kilometers—you could look straight into its ruddy face without discomfort and count the mottled black-on-red splotches of its starspots. Sky color depended on the angle of the incoming sunlight, and on this world it could be anything from sunset red to a deeply contrasting green.

A furious wind was blowing, so powerful that had I been there physically, it would have been difficult to stand. I was aware of it in sim because the viewpoint camera was trembling slightly as spray from the ocean whipped past, and the vegetation nearby—short, scrubby growths with feathery black leaves and rubbery stalks—was whipping back and forth, and, during the strongest gusts, lay flat against the ground.

Bloodworld, you see, is tidally locked with its primary, always turning the same side to face the sun, one hemisphere forever in daylight, the other in darkness. The colony had been established here in the so-called twilight band between day and night; as it circled its star, Bloodworld rocked back and forth, a nodding movement called libration, which resulted in the sun appearing to rise above the horizon for a few days, then setting, the landscape eternally balanced between fire and ice. The planet’s atmosphere—one and half times denser than that at Earth’s surface—expanded rapidly in the middle of the dayside, creating powerful winds blowing from day to night, winds that served to even out the planet’s temperature extremes and keep all of the water and carbon dioxide from freezing out permanently over the nightside.

The image we were watching this time appeared to be from a handheld recorder, unsteady and with a slightly grainy resolution. Possibly it was from a suitcam, or it could have been an upload from someone’s CDF RAM if they were equipped with the appropriate imaging hardware. There were data overlays at the upper right, green alphanumerics giving range and positional data, speed, temperature, and other information. Unlike three-sixty sims created by VR AIs, you could only look in the direction the camera was aimed, and the view wobbled and bounced as though the person carrying the camera was jogging over uneven ground toward the city, clearly pausing to lean into the wind with the strongest gusts.

“This vid,” Carter said, “was taken by a Marine Specter probe inserted near the Salvation colony. It subsequently uploaded to an RS-90 off world, which in turn sent a message drone back to Earth. We only received the transmission last night. When the Command Constellation saw it, they ordered the recall.”

The RS-90 Nightwraith was the Marine Corps’ premiere reconnaissance platform, stealthy, fast, and capable. It would have gone in carrying a number of Specters, robotic recon probes, designed to carry out extensive ground surveillance and transmit data back from the planet’s surface. That explained the data overlays, which weren’t usually a part of civilian vid feeds. They were giving a weather report at the moment—forty-five Celsius—a bit on the warm side—with a wind speed of ninety-two kilometers per hour.

And then the camera panned to the left, looking out across the seething ocean, then angled up, aiming into the sky, and all I could see was the incoming alien ships.

There were three of them, polished silver reflecting the bloody light, essentially flattened disks with a central bulge and a bite taken out of the trailing edge. The sides curved downward, like small wings or auxiliary stabilizers. I could only guess at the size, but they looked big for atmospheric vessels—maybe 100 meters or more across. They were using plasma thrusters to lower themselves gently toward the ground, as clouds of tiny glittering craft spilled from vents or ports along their undersides; I could see the swirling clouds of dust being raised by their jet wash as they settled down one after another on the spaceport in the distance. Human figures were running in confusion among the buildings, looking slow and clumsy in heavy environmental suits. The buildings of the colony began exploding one after another, with sharp flashes and fast-expanding pressure waves clearly defined by the thick, wet air. Each blast geysered a cloud of smoke and debris hurtling into the red sky, clouds that then tattered away with the wind.

The camera jerked and spun; the landscape blurred for an instant with the movement. In another direction, more of the disk vessels were settling to the ground.

An armored figure appeared: gleaming overlapping segments covering a body several meters long. It might have been as big as an extinct Terran rhinoceros, but with a longer body and six legs. The upper body, like the forequarters of the mythical centaur, weaved back and forth, displaying a single centrally positioned arm. The grippers at the end were holding a weapon of some sort.

What sort we couldn’t tell. An instant after seeing it, the scene dissolved into white static.

“The earlier reports,” Captain Carter said, “have been confirmed with this transmission.”

The static gave way to a VR simulation of the colony, fully interactive, the city domes and towers gleaming undamaged beneath the red sun.

“The armored figure you just saw was a Qesh warrior,” Carter went on, “and the ships appear identical to the vessels designated as ‘Rocs’ encountered during our first contact with that species fifty-nine years ago. Clearly, the Qesh have entered the Gliese 581 system and landed a raiding party, at the very least … and possibly they have arrived with a full invasion force.

“Commonwealth Military Command is taking this very seriously. Our first contact with Qesh raiders took place at a star system ninety-four light years from Earth. Gliese 581, however, is just twenty light years from Sol, a near neighbor as interstellar distances go. Only eighty-eight other stars are closer. CMC is concerned that the human colony on Bloodworld, a network of cities and bases established pre-Protocol, might have navigational data that could lead the Qesh to Earth.

“Marine Deep Recon Force 7 is being deployed to Bloodworld for covert insertion and detailed surveillance in advance of a joint Navy-Marine operation to stabilize the situation.”

An invasion, then. Stabilize, in mil-speak, would in this instance mean throwing the Qesh off of Bloodworld, or at the very least making certain they didn’t pick up any clues to Earth’s location.

“Questions?” Carter demanded. “Yes. Abrams.”

From my vantage point, it looked like just me and Lieutenant Carter were standing on that rugged, basaltic plain, but his audience included all twelve hundred Marines and naval personnel on board the Clymer.

“Sir,” the voice of Staff Sergeant Abrams said. “Are the locals white hats? Or black?”

“At this point, Staff Sergeant,” Carter replied, “we have no idea. In fact, that’s probably the main reason MRF-7 is going in first. Any planetary invasion force will have to know if we can count on the local population for logistical support and intelligence.”

It seemed like kind of a dumb question at first. Bloodworld was a human colony; that colony had been attacked by Imperial aliens, so of course they were on our side, “white hats,” in Marine parlance. Right?

But as I thought about it, well, no question is truly dumb, and this one was smarter than most. Those colonists were members of a small and closely knit religious sect, and that fact alone threw the usual rules right out the airlock.

History is filled with examples of small religious groups that went against the mainstream, and which were willing to die for the privilege. Hell, Christianity started off as a Jewish splinter group with some strange ideas about the expected Messiah. The Essene community—after which the Neoessenes had patterned themselves—we think was another Jewish schismatic group that had moved out to the desert to live in communes rather than follow the dictates of the Jewish Temple priesthood.

And more recently you have the messianic cults of Jim Jones and David Koresh, the jihadists of the more extremist versions of Islam, and the Aum Shinrikyo, the crazies in Japan who tried to usher in global Armageddon with a home-brewed nerve gas attack on five Tokyo subway trains. A century and a half later you have the neo-Luddie White Seraphim incident on Chiron. Human beings appear to be hardwired for an us-against-them religious mentality, which can be expressed as a fanaticism as destructive as any political movement.

I suddenly realized that the Commonwealth government must be having convulsions right now about whether those colonists could be trusted. Religious fanaticism by definition is irrational. If some of them thought God had told them to hand Earth’s galactic coordinates over to the Qesh, what would they do?

Marine Recon 7 would be going in at least partly to determine whose side the locals were on. A secondary aspect to the op would be to try to convince them that their best bet lay in helping us if they seemed undecided.

A hearts-and-minds mission, then. Just freaking great.

“Training sims will begin tomorrow at 0900,” Carter said.

The landscape receded suddenly, the surface of the planet dropping away to merge with a planetary graphic, a computer-generated map of Bloodworld showing terrain features crossed by lines of longitude and latitude. I was looking down on the planet’s nightside, at a vast splash of glaciers radiating from the midnight area, amid ocean, bare rock, and ice-sheathed mountains.

“At this point in the planning process,” Carter continued, as a green, curving line arced down across the glacier, approaching the planet’s surface close to the horizon, “we are assuming a landing by D-Mist on the planet’s nightside, with a combat skimmer approach to the twilight band.”

The planet graphic rotated to show the narrow band circling the world from pole to pole, the narrow strip of approximately temperate surface between the heat of the daytime desert and the frozen ice of the night. Several cities were located there, balanced between light and the darkness.

“Enemy numbers and compositions are as yet unknown,” Carter added. “The training sims will cover a variety of possible mission encounters and circumstances. Expect the sessions to continue until we’re on our final approach. Other questions? Good. Carry on.”

So that was it, then. My first combat insertion, and none of us had a clue as to what we would be up against. The Qesh would be bad enough; not knowing the human reaction to our arrival made the whole situation just a bit unnerving.

The Misty was a smaller cousin of the Cutlass TAV, a trans-atmospheric lander designed to carry combat-ready troops from orbit to ground quickly and, so far as it was possible, invisibly. The name came from the craft’s designation, D/MST-22, which stood for deployment/maneuver skimmer transport. Judging from what little we actually knew about the locals’ technology, we should be able to slip through their detector net easily enough.

It was the Qesh we’d have to worry about during the approach.

The briefing feed released its hold on my brain, and I blinked, stretched, and sat up. Marines around me were sitting up as well. Sergeant Tomacek looked around and growled, “Where the fuck’s Doc Doobie and his hooch?”

“Fuckin’ A,” Corporal Gregory agreed. “If the aye-ayes’re gonna curdle my brain for the next twelve days, I want some anesthetic, know what I mean?”

“How about it, Doc?” a private named Kilgore asked, looking at me. “Where’s your buddy?”

I checked my in-head tracker. Doob and the other Corpsmen on board the Clymer were all listed there, and a mental glance showed me the current location of each. Shit. The blip representing Dubois was inside his rack-tube in 3/19, snuggled up very close alongside the blip representing HM3 Carla Harper, the cute little pearl diver from Clymer’s lab.

Looked like he’d scored after all, and with a FAB, this time, honest-to-God flesh-and-blood, instead of a ViRsim lover.

“He’s … busy,” I told the Marines. “But I’m sure he’ll be glad to break out the good stuff a little later.”

Seeing those two green blips together bordered on TMI—too much information. I wasn’t jealous … exactly. Carla was a cute little armful who definitely knew her Bac-T and cell chemistries, fun to talk to, easy on the optical nerves, and I imagine she’d be a bunch of fun to cuddle with in the rack. But I’d never tried to find out for myself, I suppose because I was still getting over Paula.

Damn, damn, damn. Here I was accelerating out beyond the orbit of Mars, headed for the interstellar abyss and a deployment twenty light years from home, and I was still dragging that around.

GOD, HAD IT REALLY BEEN A WHOLE YEAR AGO THAT I LOST HER?

I’d joined the Navy early in 2241. Three months of Navy basic in San Diego, followed by six months of near-constant downloading at Corps School in San Antonio. I’d met Paula one afternoon shortly after starting Corps School. She was an AI programmer, a civilian G-7 working on-base with a love of history and an enchanting sense of fun. I was on liberty in downtown San Antonio—at the Alamo, in fact, the site of a famous last stand four centuries ago—when I bumped into her, literally, in the snack shop, and started discussing Davy Crockett and last stands and the park’s ViR download recreations of the battle. We’d ended up in bed at a little park’n’fuck outside of SAMMC’s main gate for what I’d thought at the time was just going to be a one-night stand.

Three years later—three fantastic years that had me thinking I was head-over-heels in love—she was dead.

I’d long since graduated from Corps School by then, but I was still stationed at SAMMC—the San Antonio Military Medical Center, located at Fort Sam Houston on the northeast edge of the city. I’d gone straight from Hospital Corps “A” school to hospital duty at the Navy Orbital Medical Facility in low Earth orbit for microgravity training, then back to SAMMC for Advanced Medical Technology School. Both NOM duty and AMT were “C” schools, and absolutely necessary if I was going to go FMF, and my download schedule was insane.

Busy? My God, I was taking so many training downloads and ViRsim feeds I didn’t know who I was half the time. I was getting, I thought, just a taste of what physicians experience when they’re running a half dozen live-in expert AIs. But Paula Barton was still with me despite the hours and the week-long stretch while I was in orbit. We were even talking about getting married, though marriage was considered to be a bit on the old-fashioned side, something for love-struck fluffies with big red hearts in their eyes.

I don’t know about the hearts, but I was certainly love struck. My caudate nuclei were so saturated with dopamine my brain sloshed when I walked, and I had all the signs and symptoms that dreaded mental illness commonly called Being In Love.

So in the spring of ’44 I was working at the SAMMC base dispensary, still assimilating those gigabytes of AMT data and waiting for my orders for Camp Lejeune. I had a weekend free and we decided to run up to Glacier’s Edge on the Maine coast.

We caught the sub-O out of San Antonio for the twenty-minute flight to Boston. I had an electric eccount, of course, so I checked out the free e-car at the oport for the last leg of the trip up to Acadia. We oohed and ahhed at the 100-meter ice cliffs, of course, and did all the usual touristy things. Sunday morning, we drove out to the dometown of New Bar Harbor and rented a sailboat for a close-in run along the glacier coming down off Schooner Head and Mount Champlain.

She was a four-meter day sailor, sloop-rigged, and with a level-two AI smart enough to take over the sail-handling if the human passengers didn’t know what they were doing. I’d had some sailing experience already, so the AI was on standby and we were catching a gentle, cold breeze off the ice, making our way south along the ice-cloaked Mount Desert coast.

And Paula dropped her sandwich.

She had a puzzled look on her face. “I can’t feel my right hand,” she said, and when she tried to pick her sandwich up off the deck, her fingers refused to cooperate.

It took me a moment, though, to catch on that something was really wrong … but when she slumped over on the seat next to me, a shock ran through me that I will never, ever forget.

Oh, God, no! No! No! …

I dropped the tiller and scooped her up in my arms. Her eyes were glassy, and the right pupil was enormous, the left one small, giving her face an oddly lopsided look. Then I realized that half of her face was drooping, that she was trying to say something out of the left side of her mouth while the right side hung dead and useless.

I couldn’t understand the words, but I finally caught on to what was happening.

“AI!” I screamed. “Connect with Emergency Services!”

“I’m taking control of sails and helm, Mr. Carlyle,” the boat told me.

“Damn it, I need a link to Emergency Services!”

My in-head circuitry had various radio channels, including communication. It even gave me a navigational fix off of the space elevator, but I was out of range for voice communications.

“What course would you like me to set?” the oat asked me.

“Emergency! Voice! Channel!”

“Do you wish a voice channel with New Bar Harbor?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“Who would you like to speak with?”

“Emergency Medical, damn it!”

“Connecting with Emergency Medical Services.”

At last!

“This is Emergency Medical Services, Portsmouth,” a voice said in my head at last. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

“I’ve got a twenty-five-year-old female!” I screamed. “She’s having a stroke!”

It took almost twelve minutes for a med-rescue lifter out of Portland Medical to home in on us. During that time, I’d pawed through the on-board medikit—which turned out to be stocked with preprogrammed nano set to close wounds, stop bleeding, and treat sunburn, frostbite, and headaches.

I didn’t even have a CAPTR. I had nothing, could do nothing. The feeling of helplessness was overwhelming, terrifying, and savage.

The med-rescue lifter homed in on our sailboat, coming in 10 meters above the chop. Under the lifter’s control, the boat’s AI retracted the sail and lowered the mast so that the lifter could glide in and hover directly overhead. A grapple frame came down, closed in around and under the sailboat, and hauled us aboard right out of the water.

But by the time they had Paula hooked up to life support, there was no life left to support.

And they didn’t have a CAPTR either. Not too surprising, I suppose; that technology is still pretty new, and the frontier along the edge of the ice sheet can be decades out of date. But I was left grasping for a reason, any reason for what happened, like a fish trying to breath air.

For a long time, I blamed the North Hemisphere Reclamation Project.

I know, I know, it’s all perfectly safe. But there’ve been stories around for centuries about how HFMR—high-frequency microwave radiation—can harm people, causing everything from cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart attacks, learning disabilities, and high blood pressure to, well, TIAs and massive cerebral hemorrhage—strokes, in other words. The earliest studies go back to the early twenty-first century, maybe earlier, when technologies like cell phone towers were first coming on-line. In four centuries, there’s never been a solid, proven link, but there was a lot of controversy on the topic when they started beaming both optical and microwave wavelengths down from the Geosynch solar reflector arrays.

For a century, now, we’ve slowly been winning the global climate battle against the New Ice Age, partly by warming the waters of the North Atlantic, and partly by focusing heat on the edge of the ice sheets, from Vancouver to Maine. Paula and I both were picking up some microwaves as we toured the edge of the ice cliffs, of course. That second sun in the southern sky, forty or so degrees above the horizon, marked the reflector array at Geosynch halfway up the space elevator, but any harmful microwave component was supposed to be so diffuse it shouldn’t have caused a problem. The nasty high-energy stuff is all focused farther north, and we should have been getting only a little of the halo fringe off the Mount Desert ice sheet.

And maybe it wasn’t microwaves at all. Maybe it just happened … which somehow was far more terrifying. If the dearest person in your life is going to die in your arms, you want there to be a reason.

I came real close to dropping out of FMF after that.

Hell, I came pretty close to dying myself.

Chapter Six

I’D BEEN LIVING WITH PAULA’S MEANINGLESS DEATH FOR THE NEXT year, which I suppose was better than the alternative, which was not living with her death. There was a time, there, after I got back to SAMMC, when I was thinking seriously of checking myself out. It’s simple enough to disable the safeguards in an N-prog, and custom-tailor a few billion nanobots to take you down into coma-level sleep before quietly shutting down all your CNS and cardiac functions. No pain, no awareness, nothing. You just go to sleep and never wake up. After about five minutes with no blood flow, your brain starts dying, degrading to the point where you can’t even capture the cerebral pattern any longer.

God, I wanted to die.

The problem was that I was afraid I would wake up.

I’d never been very religious. My parents were Reformed Gardnerians, which meant they believed in reincarnation, among other things. I’d never thought that much about it one way or another. So far as I was concerned, I’d live the usual three or four hundred years, then die, and then I’d find out what happened next, assuming that new medical advances hadn’t extended the expected human life span even further. No problem either way.

But I did start thinking about it after I lost Paula, thinking about it a lot, usually when I was alone in my rack-tube back at SAMMC, lying there in the claustrophobic dark thinking through, step by step, how I could reprogram my N-prog to let me kill myself. What if my folks were right? I’d slip off into a coma, the ’bots would shut me down … only that wouldn’t be the end. I’d wake up on the Other Side, realizing that whatever lessons I’d been supposed to face in this life were still there waiting for me. Shit, I might have to go through the whole thing all over again. You know what they say about reincarnation. It’s the belief that you keep coming back again and again and again until you get it right.

Worse than that, though: What if the pain didn’t go away?

The fact that Paula might be waiting for me on the Other Side did occur to me, of course, and for a while, there, it made the nanobot option damned attractive, let me tell you. I got as far as actually working out the program algorithms for my N-prog and assembling the hardware I would need.

But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. I was afraid of the pain that went on and on, but I was afraid of the idea of dying, too. I didn’t want to live without her, but I didn’t want to die, either.

It didn’t help that I knew exactly where those feelings of loss and emptiness were coming from physically. We’ve known for several centuries now about the role played by the caudate nuclei—there are two of them, in either half of the brain—in the messy addiction we commonly refer to as being in love. Dopamine—that same neurotransmitter that Howell used to o-loop himself into convulsions—is emitted by the VTA and other areas of the brain and floods the caudal regions, which are tied in with the VTA circuit. Under the dopamine’s influence, we’re filled with an intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and the motivation to win awards in the form of attention and approval from our love interest. We’re able to stay up all night, to be bolder than usual, even to run insane risks when we’re showing off … all for the sake of love. Being in love, it turns out, actually is closely related to being addicted to drugs—and the withdrawal when the love interest drops you or dies can be as painful and drawn out as going cold turkey on a physical addiction.

The first week, I was numb. They gave me ten days’ compassionate leave. The funeral was there in San Antonio; after that, I went home to Ohio. I don’t remember a whole lot about that time, to tell the truth.

By the time I got back, my orders for North Carolina were in. Still feeling numb, but no longer thinking of ways to turn off the pain, I hopped the sub-O for Wilmington, and a billet with FMF Training Command.

And after that, I was way too busy to think that much about what had happened in Maine.

But one thing stayed with me, and continued to gnaw at me throughout the course. I’d come up short when Paula got hit with the stroke. Yeah, there’d been technical difficulties with a poorly programmed AI on the boat, and, yeah, there’s not a lot I could have done, even if we’d been shoreside in a hospital. But Gods, that feeling of abject helplessness …

It had me wondering if I was cut out at all for FMF.

SIX DAYS AFTER LEAVING STARPORT, WE WERE TEN ASTRONOMICAL units out from the sun, beyond the orbit of Saturn and traveling at better than 5,000 kilometers per second. The VR sim downloads were relentless and demanding, one possible scenario following the next as the training AIs hammered us with tactics while at the same time probing for weakness.

I think I did okay on the general stuff, treating Marines for a variety of wounds or other injuries while going on simulated patrols across simulated landscapes and encountering simulated ambushes. We must have approached the city of Salvation in fifty different situations—with the inhabitants welcoming us, with the inhabitants opening fire as we drew near, with the Qesh already in possession of the city and the sky patrolled by armored Qesh fliers. In fact, most of the ViRsims had the Qesh already in the city and waiting for us. By the time we made the transition to Alcubierre warp, after all, they’d already been on the planet for a couple of weeks.

One and a half billion kilometers from Sol, the local metric of space was flat enough that the Clymer could gather her figurative skirts up around her and slip into her own private universe. Nothing in the universe, neither material nor energy, can travel faster than light, but there’s nothing in the universal rules and regs that prevents space from doing so. In fact, we know that the fabric of space expanded far faster than c during the fraction of a second of universal inflation immediately after the big bang. The Alcubierre Drive, named for the Mexican physicist who first outlined the concept late in the twentieth century, enveloped the starship in tightly folded space. The ship is not moving at all relative to the space within which it’s resting; the bubble around it, however, slides through normal space at high multiples of the speed of light, and just happens to carry the motionless starship with it.

The idea is so weirdly counter-intuitive it makes my brain hurt. Fortunately, I just had to worry about field medicine, first aid, and the occasional dopamine cascade, not advanced gravitational topology or torsion-field manipulation.

On the sixth day, we folded into our Alcubierre bubble; on the seventh, we arrived at Bloodstar, 20.3 light years away.

IT LOOKS,” PRIVATE HUTCHISON SAID, “LIKE A BIG RED EYE. STARING at us.”

We were in the squad bay, looking at the image projected on the viewall bulkhead. Gliese 581, the Bloodstar, hung there in the middle of emptiness, a black-mottled orb the exact hue of arterial blood. The corona was easily visible as a pale haze surrounding the disk, as were the jets and loops of prominences extending above the rim. The surface of the disk appeared grainy, like it was made up of low-res pixels, and the starspots covered perhaps 10 percent of its face. A particularly large starspot grouping close to the center gave the impression of the jet-black pupil of a titanic, bloody eye.

And it was watching us, or so it seemed.

“This is the magnified view from the bridge, Hutch,” Gunnery Sergeant Hancock told him. “We’re still a long way out—over three AUs. Our naked eyes would see it from here as just a bright red speck.”

Gliese 581 only possessed about three tenths of Sol’s mass, so the flat metric the astrogators were always looking for went all the way in almost to the three-AU mark—3.1 to be exact—or about 464 million kilometers. The small Navy-Marine task force had emerged back into normal space hours ago, the ships shedding their excess velocity with the dissipation of the spacial torsion field. They retained a velocity of some hundreds of kilometers per second, however, as they hurtled in toward the red dwarf star. Falling tail first, they switched on their Plottel space drives and decelerated, backing down the descending slope at a steady 1 G.

Gunny Hancock thoughtclicked a display icon, and the looming image of the red dwarf dwindled into a graphic of the Gliese 581 system, the planetary orbits marked by red circles with the star at the center. Bloodstar has six planets, all of them tucked in next to their primary so tightly that the fifth planet out has an orbit closer to its sun than Mercury’s is from Earth’s, and even Niffelheim, the frigid outermost planet, is as far from Gliese 581 as Venus is from Sol.

Even from three AUs out, it was clear that the Qesh were in the Gliese 581 system in force. I could see a swarm of white points around the fourth planet out, each tagged by alphanumerics giving the object’s mass, vector, and probable identification.

I looked at the faces of the Marines around me. Most of Bravo Company was there, I thought.

The compartment was crowded. Living space on board an interstellar transport like the Clymer is pretty cramped—witness the rank upon rank of rack-tubes in the berthing compartments—but the squad bays are a lot more spacious. Well, we still call them squad bays, for tradition’s sake, but each is actually an open recreational compartment big enough to accommodate physically an entire Marine rifle company, and that’s fifty or sixty men and women. The deck can grow that many chairs for flesh-and-blood briefings, when we need them, and the viewall can project the skipper’s face for inspiring speeches, or show the tactical situation, as now, as we dropped into the Bloodstar’s inner system.

Some of those faces showed fear, some curiosity, a few a kind of smirking disdain. Most, though, had that matter-of-fact aura of professionalism I’d come to associate with the Marine Corps during the past year.

But damn, there were a lot of Qesh super-ships gathered around Salvation.

“Just how good are the Jackers, anyway?” Corporal Masserotti asked. He was one of the smirking ones.

“Good enough,” Hancock replied. “The EG puts them at type 1.165 G, with an estimated tech level twenty, and that data is from a long time ago.”

Humankind was thought to be a type 1.012 C on the Encyclopedia Galactica’s version of the Kardashev scale, with a TL of around eighteen. In other words, we had FTL and quantum power taps too, but theirs were quite a bit ahead of ours, the equivalent, possibly, of a couple of centuries. Estimating the relative technological capabilities of two mutually alien civilizations was always more guesswork than not. Differences in culture, language, and even biology could either mask or exaggerate differences. Take the T-Cets, who evolved just a few light years from Earth within the deep abyss of their world ocean. No fire, and apparently no nuts-and-bolts engineering, but they’re so far ahead of us in chemistry and biological technology that we still don’t understand more than ten percent of what we see in the Encylopedia Galactica, and attempts to communicate with them directly have consistently failed.

In warfare, a difference of only one on the tech level scale can mean a lot; think about what would happen if the atmospheric fighters from the mid-twentieth century tangled with the wood-and-fabric biplanes of just thirty years earlier.

We knew damned little about the Qesh or the nature of their technology. Their warships, though, were big, sleek, smooth-surfaced, flattened cigars comprised of domes, flutings, sponsons, and blisters that could be as much as five kilometers in length. Even the smallest were longer and more massive than the Clymer, and our intelligence people believed that all of their warships were built around powerful mass drivers that could slam twelve-ton masses into their targets with a kinetic yield equivalent to a small nuclear warhead. We didn’t know what the Qesh called their own starships. Our intel people had given them designations taken from human mythology, names like Behemoth and Leviathan, to classify them roughly by their sizes.

The graphic was totaling up the types of ships present around Bloodworld—fourteen Leviathans, eight Behemoths, twenty-one Titans, and even one Jotun.

It was a full-strength predarian warfleet.

They appeared to be dismantling the planet’s moons.

“Hawking Raiders,” Lance Corporal Benjamin Andrews said. There was just the slightest tremor behind his words. “How are we supposed to face them?”

More than two hundred years ago, no less an authority than Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant physicists ever to delve into cosmology, had suggested that humans might not want to make themselves known to the universe at large. According to him, an alien interstellar civilization might very well care nothing for other sapient species, but travel from star to star stripping worlds of their resources, perhaps preying on less-advanced beings. More primitive races would be unable to stand up to a sufficiently advanced technology, would be unable to stop them from extinguishing all life on the target planet.

Hawking’s warning had largely been ignored. After all, a sufficiently advanced species ought to be advanced ethically as well as technologically, right? But then we learned how to read the EG, and we started encountering some of the myriad races scattered across our part of the galaxy. We learned that each species out there was ethical within its own framework, and that those frameworks might not have room for other civilizations, or for competition. There were, we learned, entire cultures Out There that roamed the Galaxy in monster fleets, taking apart worlds for whatever they needed. Predarians, we called them. Predator barbarians.

And the name, along with “Hawking Raiders,” stuck.

“We’re not going to face them,” Hancock replied. “At least, not right away. And not directly.”

“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 outteched.”

“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

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