Bloodstar

by Ian Douglas

  “Our government is the Church in its holy union with God,” Matthew replied, as if talking to a six-year-old. “But the Elder Council speaks for the Lord, yes.”

  “We would like to talk to this Council,” Hancock said. “Are they in Salvation? Or have they gone elsewhere?”

  “Where would they go? They are in Salvation, yes.”

  “And the demons?” I asked. “Are they in Salvation as well?”

  “Sadly, yes.” Caleb shook his head. “A few of us got out before they forced their way in. We’ve been trying to contact the other cities, to organize a defense, a resistance. We’ve not had much luck so far.”

  “Hush, Caleb,” Matthew ordered the younger man. “Until we know these . . . these newcomers better, it’s best not to say too much.”

  “Will you take us to see your Elders, then?” Hancock asked.

  “No,” Matthew said, with an abrupt shake of his head. “No, it’s too dangerous.”

  “So,” Hancock said, thoughtful, “why are you five out here? To contact those other cities?”

  Matthew looked at him for a long moment before replying. “No. The nearest city is many kilometers to the south, and it’s safer to send our messengers there by boat. We came out of the dome to see if we could find a way to rescue the prisoners.”

  “The prisoners,” I repeated. “That line of people in front of the pit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hostages for your good behavior?”

  “Those eight, and others, resisted the demons when they first arrived,” Samuel told us. “They are to be held there until they die of the poison from those machines. As they die, one by one, other . . . resisters are dragged out to take their place.”

  “My daughter is among them,” Matthew said. The pain behind those words dragged at his face, his bearing.

  “So, if you succeed in rescuing them,” Hancock said, “what happens then? The demons take more resisters?”

  “The demons know some of us are out here,” Caleb said. “They’ve been hunting us. If we can free the prisoners, others may be staked out there to die, but at least some will have been saved.”

  “We might be able to help you,” Hancock said.

  That startled me. Our orders were not to get involved, not to risk having the Jackers find out Marine Recon Seven was on the planet.

  Matthew looked at Hancock sharply. “Could you? Can you?”

  “Possibly. We’ll need your help to plan it, though.”

  “Perhaps,” Matthew said. There was a new light behind his eyes, though, a look of hope. “We will need to talk with them first, to see if we can get you inside.”

  “That,” Hancock said, “will have to do.”

  “How can you help us free the prisoners?”

  “By answering a few questions for us,” Hancock said. “We’ll start by finding out about the demons’ numbers. . . .”

  “Good call, e-Car,” Leighton told me later. I was outside on the perimeter, looking toward the construction—the deconstruction, I should say—taking place in front of the city of Salvation. In the past couple of hours, the six huge rock eaters had widened the pit considerably, taking the edge close to the foot of the cliffs upon which the city of Salvation uncomfortably rested. Another seismic tremor had struck about an hour before. It looked like all work had stopped for a time until the dust had settled once more.

  “What call was that?”

  “Picking up on their year being only five weeks long or so. That was pretty sharp.”

  “Pretty obvious, you mean. It’s interesting that they still measure out twenty-four-hour periods so they can keep the seventh day holy—but for them a ‘day’ is the rising and setting of the sun above the eastern horizon every two weeks or so.”

  “I imagine they had to make a lot of adjustments when they migrated out here.”

  In the distance, one of the prisoners, silhouetted against the glare from the pit, collapsed. A centaur standing close by picked the figure up with its single upper arm, shook it once, tried to set it back on its feet. The bound human collapsed again. Using its upper arm together with the next two in line, the Qesh centaur detached the human from the cable binding it to the prisoners to either side, then picked up the body and without ceremony flung it into the pit.

  I stifled a shudder. It was damned hard not to think of those alien things as evil, deliberately torturing those prisoners to death by forcing them to stand in the deadly wash of nanodisassemblers.

  We were going to go in there and rescue them soon. I knew Gunny Hancock was working out a plan now as he and the squad’s sergeants questioned the Salvation colonists. The question was how we were going to pull such a raid off without alerting the Jackers to our presence on Bloodworld? I could see three . . . four . . . no, five of the centaur shapes near the line of prisoners, two of them carrying what looked like weapons.

  As I watched, a sixth centaur led another human out from a small, squat polygon near the base of the cliffs beneath the city and forced him—no, her—into the place in line recently vacated.

  I thought about Matthew five-three-one, and his evident pain at the death sentence placed on his daughter.

  Gunny Hancock materialized out of the darkness behind us. “You two ready for a bit of an outing?”

  “I thought we were already having one, Gunny,” Leighton said.

  “Maybe, but this one’s about to get interesting.”

  I pointed. “Gunny, you see that small building to the right? Below the city cliffs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They just now brought another prisoner out of there. Either that structure is a gate leading into the underground part of the city, or it’s what the Jackers are using for a holding cell for the prisoners.”

  “You think there are more prisoners there, Doc?”

  “Either there, or that’s where they’re bringing them outside from the city. From here, though, it looks like a building.”

  “It’s a building,” Hancock said. “Our guests drew a map.”

  “If we’re going to rescue those eight there beside the pit,” I said, “we should at least make a try at releasing the prisoners inside the jailhouse.”

  “That about cubes the difficulty of the original assault. You sure there are prisoners in there?”

  I pointed to one of the robotic scanners we’d set up on the perimeter, aimed at the city. “It’s probably recorded. Check it and see.”

  Hancock stood motionless for a moment as he accessed and downloaded the video from the scanner collected over the past few minutes. I did the same, fast-forwarding to the part where you could just make out a centaur walking up to the building. “File seven, frame nine-eight-two-eight,” I told him. The time stamp showed about three minutes earlier.

  “I see it.”

  Together, we watched the Qesh go inside the building, and emerge a moment later half dragging, half carrying a struggling female figure.

  “Shit,” Hancock said at last, as the woman was secured to the cable between two other prisoners. “I think you’re right.”

  “Just how are we going to get in there and do this without tipping the Qesh to our being on the planet?” I asked.

  “A little thing Marines call strategy and tactics, Doc.”

  “I know, I know. I was twenty-first in my class of forty. I’m working on it, Gunny, okay?”

  “Well, you’re about to have a remedial class, Doc. Check out the boys and girls for combat. Full stim.”

  “Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant. G-boost too?”

  “Do it.”

  There have been a number of drugs and, later, nanomeds in the military’s arsenal, some going back to the turbulent years of the twenty-first century that have been used to fine-tune the warrior’s P and P, his psychology and physiology. The oldest and most basic obviated the need for sleep
. More modern nanomeds, like stim, let a Marine go without sleep for seventy-two hours or more with no adverse effects, while G-boost actually improves human reaction times, tunes up the body’s ability to transport oxygen and carry away metabolites, strengthens muscular response, and allows the brain to think faster and more clearly.

  One by one, I visited each of the Marines in the squad, snapping vials of stim and G-boost into the drug locks in their armor, and keying in the appropriate codes. It would take about ten minutes for the new nanobots to link up with the Freitas respirocytes already in each Marine’s circulatory system and begin boosting their performance.

  Last of all, I gave myself the injections, feeling the sharp but momentary sting as my armor’s injectors fired a thin spray of nanobots through my skin and into my blood.

  “All squared away, Doc?” Gunny Hancock asked me.

  “They’re good to go,” I told him.

  “Okay, Marines, listen up!” Hancock said over the squad channel. “Here’s the plan. . . .”

  Chapter Thirteen

  We made our approach on our quantum flitters, our nanoflage reproducing the blacks and dark grays of the rocky plain between the woods and the mining pit as black dirt and vegetation gave way to bare rock. We went in slow, painstakingly slow. Nanoflage can’t provide true invisibility; if you’re a sentry and know what you’re looking for, you can see movement, a kind of ripple against the background as the nanoflaged Marine approaches your position.

  We got around this in two different ways. Move slowly enough, and you won’t trigger the motion-sensing program of any watching AI. And if you move directly toward your objective, there’s less of a side-to-side ripple effect to catch the eye or the electronic sensor.

  The closer we got to the pit, though, the greater the chances for discovery.

  Our biggest problems were the six Qesh rock eaters below the city. Each one appeared to have several weapons turrets mounted on its upper deck and flanks, and the Salvationists assured us that they were heavily armed with heavy beam weapons. At least there were no Rocs or Daityas overhead. Gunny’s plan would have been impossible if any of those monsters had been about.

  As it was, with only a poor understanding of Qesh sensor capabilities, we were taking a horrendous chance. There are times, though, when you have to realize that the enemy is only human—even if he, she, or it has seven limbs and looks like a cross between a Greek centaur and a rhinoceros on steroids. Organic beings get tired, they get bored, they get distracted. At night, their optics are adapted to the pool of light within which they work, not to the purple darkness surrounding them.

  Machines—artificial intelligences—have the potential of doing a lot better as watchmen than do organic species. We had no idea as to how sharp Qesh computers or AIs might be. We weren’t even sure they had computers, as we understood the term, though their Encylcopedia Galactica entry gave them a data storage/transmission history, a DS/T, of more than nine thousand years, which pretty much guaranteed that they had the technology.

  That didn’t tell us whether or not they’d created their own AIs, however. Some species—hell, some humans—preferred not to create machines that could think for themselves.

  Well, perhaps we were about to find out.

  We’d left the five Salvationists behind in our forward OP, and Kookie, Lance Corporal Kukowicz, was with them, partly to keep an eye on them and partly to serve as overwatch with his accelerator rifle. Through our robot scanners on the perimeter, he could keep an eye on activities in and around the pit that we might not notice once we got in close. He could also relay warnings, if any, from our guests, and serve as sniper, if need be, from more than a kilometer away.

  The flit from our OP to the pit seemed to take forever. Our brains, under the influence of the combat nanomeds, were receiving and processing data at something like five times the normal rate, at the very peak of electrochemical efficiency. I felt cool, collected, and sharply focused, but the ten minutes or so it took our flitters to make that crossing passed in what felt like almost an hour.

  That pit was enormous. It stretched more than a kilometer across, from just in front of the city cliffs to a point less than a kilometer from the tree line, and the six rock eaters were busily enlarging it as we watched. There was activity in the depths of the pit as well, though we couldn’t see down inside as yet. Whatever was down there was illuminating the belly of the rising dust clouds with deep, ruby light, giving the hole the look of a broad, gaping gateway into hell.

  What, I wondered, did the hyper-religious Salvationists think of that sight?

  For that matter, why were the Qesh carrying out their strip-mining operation here? The city appeared to be undamaged, at least so far, despite the images we’d downloaded days before suggesting the contrary; with the vast majority of Bloodworld’s surface uninhabited, why were the Jackers digging here, within full view of the captured city?

  Was the city captured? The Salvationists back at the OP said it had been, but there were still too many questions about what the Qesh were doing here, and why.

  As we approached the area lit from overhead by the mast-mounted spotlights, we began to disperse into two assault teams. I stayed with Colby, Masserotti, Kilgore, Lewis, Gregory, with Sergeant Leighton in charge, maintaining a slow but steady creep toward the line of prisoners by the pit. Gunny Hancock took the remaining five Marines with him off to the right, circling around the enemy perimeter, closing on the small building where more prisoners were being held.

  In a sense, there was an additional, unseen, Marine with us—the squad AI, which was resident within all of our in-head CDF circuitry, coordinating our movements, guarding our quantum-scrambled communications channels, and scanning our surroundings through the sensors in our armor and within our skimmers. So far as we could tell, there were no Qesh sentries, no perimeter defenses, no force fields or other barriers around the area. We had to assume, at the very least, that they’d deployed microsensors of some sort. If they had nanodisassemblers, they had the technology to build microscopic sensors that could detect movement, magnetic moment, or even the air displaced by our silent passage. We had such devices, and the Qesh were nine millennia beyond us in terms of electronic wizardry.

  “I am detecting comnet transmissions,” our AI’s voice said, speaking to all of us at once. “Activity suggests a full alert.”

  “Right!” Hancock’s voice added. “Gun it! Go to the assault!”

  I gunned it.

  A comnet is the many-node communications network linking a sensory net. Our AI had just picked up the telltale surge of energy through the Qesh perimeter that said the enemy’s sensors had detected something and were sounding the alert. At that point, a stealthy approach becomes more or less useless; we went from what the Marines refer to as “sneak and peek” straight to “shoot and scoot,” springing our attack.

  I covered the last hundred meters of open ground in seconds, my skimmer sliding centimeters above the bare rock in a programmed zigzag designed to confuse enemy sensors and to avoid the zigzags of my companions. I’d already unshipped my carbine and mounted it to the prow of my skimmer, though my primary focus was not going to be on combat. Calli Lewis fired first, her Mk. 24, sending a megajoule pulse of coherent light into one of the armed Qesh guards.

  One megajoule represents about the same energy as two hundred grams of exploding TNT. The intense bolt of energy causes such sudden temperature change in the target that it will gouge out a double-fist-sized chunk of solid steel. Part of the target will vaporize, and what’s left will suffer massive shock damage.

  And when that bolt hits organic tissue, the results can be even more spectacular.

  The side of the Jacker guard’s helmet flared a dazzling white, erupting in a sudden, expanding cloud of mist. The figure reared up on its hind legs, turning, and then two more laser bolts caught it with explosive bursts side by side on its upper, ven
tral, surface. Its weapon spun away through the night as the Qesh toppled over backward, vanishing into the open pit behind it.

  Contrary to most entertainment downloads and VR interactives, you can’t actually see a laser pulse, even when there’s lots of dust and smoke in the air, as now. It’s light, after all, traveling at the speed of light, and a pulse with a duration of a hundredth of a second is just too brief to register on human vision. What I could see were more and more explosive bursts scoring against the armored giants standing around the line of human prisoners. Two were down . . . then three. A fourth opened fire, but wildly, sweeping a long-duration beam, slicing through the dust cloud in a brilliant thread of green. The shot was high and well off to the left; an instant later, the Qesh gunner collapsed as its chest armor exploded in a gout of white light and molten metal.

  The firefight erupted with what seemed to be a surreal unfolding of events in slow motion. I angled my flitter toward the line of prisoners, leaping off the machine as I approached, shouting, “Down! Down! Everyone get down!”

  Gregory cut down another Qesh guard with a burst from his laser, then dropped to one knee, mounting guard. “Get the civilians outta here, Doc!” he yelled.

  I pulled my cutter from its sheath—a Marine-issue nanoknife. The active surface was coated with disassemblers that sliced through damned near anything, and it snicked through the heavy cables strung from collar to collar of the prisoners, then cut the shackles binding their wrists.

  “Who are you?” one bearded man cried as I freed him.

  “Marines,” I told him. “From Earth! We’re here to get you out, okay?”

  He nodded through his terror. “Thank God!”

  I pointed back across the rocky plain toward the distant forest. “You have some friends waiting for you in that direction,” I told him. “Can you make it on your own?”

  “I . . . I think so.”

  “I can’t walk,” a young man nearby said. He was barefoot, his pants torn off at the knee, his feet and legs showing horrible sores and ulcerations. High concentrations of nano-D in the air can do terrible things to unprotected skin.