by Ian Douglas
“Three microns,” I said. “That’s three millionths of a meter. Typical nanobots run anywhere from one micron in diameter down to, oh, a hundred nanometers or so. That’s one thousand times smaller than one micron. I don’t know yet what the Qesh are using for their disassembler technology, but it’s a good bet that your filter masks don’t even slow them down.”
While I was talking, Miriam took a hit on the inhaler. She coughed, once, and handed it back to me.
“How do you feel?”
She nodded. “Okay. My legs are still burning, though.”
“I’ve got something for that, too.”
“No more!” Matthew said. “You . . . you’ve done enough!”
I held up another vial, and shook it. “Skinseal,” I told him. “It will stop the bleeding, and keep the wounds from becoming infected. It’s just a spray-on bandage.” I glanced at him. “You do use bandages, don’t you? If someone is bleeding?”
He refused to rise to my gibe. “What’s in it?”
“CHON.”
“What is that?”
“Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. A few other things, like phosphorous and calcium. Exactly the same stuff God turned into you.”
“It’s . . . natural?”
God preserve me from fanatics who think something is “unnatural” just because we can grow it in a lab, or produce it commercially in a nanufactory.
“As natural as you are.”
He was still reluctant, but he gave me permission. I thought that if I could win this crowd over with a practical demonstration of medical technology, it might stand us in good stead with their leaders when we met them later on. I carefully didn’t tell him that there were local nananodynes mixed in with the skinseal, to block pain-receptor nerve endings and lessen the pain, plus an antibacterial agent to kill any organic infection.
I sprayed a light layer over the sores on Miriam’s legs. She smiled. “It feels good. Kind of cold.”
“Is the pain gone?”
“Most of it.”
“Good. That layer will be absorbed by your body after a week or so. Just leave it alone, and it’ll be fine.” I looked up at the other Salvationists, who were sitting around us in a tight, intently focused circle. “Okay, who’s next?”
I treated two more of the rescued locals, as Miriam, Matthew, and Ezekiel looked on. Neither of them was anywhere close to being as badly burned as Miriam, but I dusted them with neutranan anyway, and made them both take a hit from the inhaler, just in case.
As I finished the last one, I looked at Matthew. “Thanks for understanding what I’m trying to do,” I told him. These people made me furious with their dark-ages attitude toward technology, but I knew that the only way I was going to get them to cooperate was to be as diplomatic as possible. I would have to get them to work with me, not challenge their beliefs, not get into arguments, and not make fun of them. If I had to, I would lie through my teeth in the name of a higher and greater good.
“I could use your help in the other domes,” I went on. “Will you come with me, explain what I’m doing?”
“Are . . . are you sure you’re not releasing a gray goo plague?”
I had to think about that one. At first, I wasn’t sure what he meant, but a quick check of my CDF RAM turned up the phrase, something from back in the twentieth century.
One of the early pioneers of nanotech thinking back then had been John von Neumann, who hypothesized the use of self-replicating robots that might land on a planet and begin using local materials to manufacture exact copies of themselves. If the process were to run out of control, more and more replicators would devour more and more raw materials until all that was left would be a swarm of hungry replicators.
It’s the nightmare scenario of exponential growth. Start with one replicator the size of a large protein molecule. It pulls in atoms from its environment and is able to make an exact duplicate of itself, right down to its programming, in one thousand seconds. Those two build two more in another thousand seconds, those four build four, those eight build eight. After ten hours, one replicator has become 68 billion. In less than a day, the mass of replicators weighs about one ton; in less than two days, they outweigh the Earth—or would, if they’d not used up Earth’s entire mass some hours before.
Another early nanotech pioneer, Eric Drexler, had coined the phrase “gray goo,” though he later regretted ever having done so. Somehow, the public became focused on the idea, and the development of nanotech was held back for years by the doomsayers.
In fact, von Neumann’s replicators were not at all a realistic scenario. True, nanodisassemblers and other nanotechnic tools were designed to manufacture copies of themselves, but they had to be programmed to do what they did, and an integral part of that programming was the endpoint, the line of code that read “Stop! Don’t make any more!” Most nano-D was designed with a fairly short life span; an internal clock within each quantum-state computer ticked off the milliseconds until the nanobot ran out of time, then quietly disassembled itself into its component atoms.
“Gray goo” would not necessarily be gray, nor, most likely, would it be gooey. The term was meant to refer to anything artificial that might out-compete organic life forms. A better term was ecophage—something that devoured the local ecosystem.
But the captivatingly alliterative term remained fixed in the public consciousness for the next couple of centuries. There was some major social disruption back in the early 2100s, when the Luddies tried to turn back Humankind’s technological clock. The Neoessene Messianists, I knew, were the philosophical offspring of the neo-Luddite movement.
If they thought that nanotech might result in that kind of runaway doomsday scenario, hell, no wonder they were afraid of the stuff.
I chuckled. “I promise, no gray goo.”
Yeah, I was going to have to be careful and keep my technological bag of tricks well hidden while I was on planet.
If I didn’t, we could be facing a whole new Luddie revolution.
Chapter Fifteen
“What the fuck were you thinking, e-Car?”
Gunny Hancock didn’t sound angry, exactly. It sounded more like exasperation, the frustration of having an already difficult task made unbearably complicated. We were in armor, standing outside of the cluster of nanoflaged domes where we could have a private conversation beneath the black canopy of the forest. It was windy, with the promise of another storm.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time, Gunny,” I told him. “Look, if I hadn’t treated those people, they would have died.”
“They’ve got their own medical facilities inside their city.”
“I don’t think they do. Matthew told me they don’t.”
“Shit.”
“They certainly don’t have the medical technology to deal with a nanotech infection.”
“So what kind of time frame were you looking at with the nano-D? How long before things got serious?”
“They already were serious. That girl, Miriam, she would have been dead in a few hours if the Qesh nano had anything like the turn-over rate for replication that we have. Even if it wasn’t replicating, the nano-D infestation on her legs would have started opening major blood vessels in another hour or so.”
“You were careful about contamination?”
I nodded. “I sprayed down everyone when I was done. Including myself. And the dome interiors.”
“Did you get samples?”
“Oh, yeah. I was able to pull some out of the air here.” A close examination of the Qesh nanobots would tell us a lot about their technology, though we didn’t have the equipment to do a work-up here. That would have to wait until we got back to the Clymer.
“Okay. So far as the locals are concerned, I guess we’ll just have to hope for the best.”
“What’s the problem, anyway?” I aske
d. “Like I said, I told them I wasn’t using nanotech on them. Yeah, it was a lie, but—”
“It was a damned transparent lie, and their Elder Council is probably going to be more savvy about things like that than these yahoos. And more suspicious. We know they have some kind of governing computer. If they suddenly realize you fibbed, there could be hell to pay.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Getting eaten alive a molecule at a time is no fun at all. You’d think they’d be grateful!”
“Doc, people are never grateful when you challenge their religious assumptions. You can’t convince them with logic. You can’t convince them with emotion. And if you convince them by tricking them, they tend to get upset as hell when they learn the truth.”
“So was I supposed to just let those people die?”
He sighed. “No. You did what you had to do. But, damn it, we have enough on our plates right now without inviting a new round of Luddie riots. From now on, leave the locals to the care of whatever they have in the way of their own doctors.”
I wondered if Gunny Hancock could possibly be serious. If the locals didn’t use nanotech, how were their doctors—assuming they even had any—going to deal with nano-D infections?
“I’ll try to keep that in mind, Gunny,” I told him. “I’m sure prayer is an extremely effective antidote for nano-D.”
“Shit-can the sarcasm, Carlyle.”
“Sorry, Gunny.”
“How’s Kilgore?”
“Bad. I don’t think he’s going to make it.”
“Okay.” Hancock nodded, accepting my prognosis. “Matthew is getting ready to take his people back to Salvation,” he said. “If there’s any final scan or check you need to do with any of them, now’s your time.”
“Aren’t we going with them?”
“We’re following orders and waiting for the rest of the platoon. They should be here in a few hours, though. Then we’ll see. The thing is . . . we need to be prepared in case there’s some sort of backlash over your . . . medical philanthropy. We’ll have to move the OP again, just in case.”
“Gunny, you have a nasty, suspicious mind.”
“Out here, Doc, it’s the only way to go.”
The Salvationists we’d rescued and treated departed a short time after that, returning to the city. According to them, there were ways into the city the Qesh didn’t know about—though so far, they’d refused to share them with us.
The Qesh started looking for us a few hours later.
We’d expected some sort of backlash, of course, and I gathered that Gunny had gone over the possibilities with Matthew and the others before we staged our raid to free the prisoners above the pit.
The chances were good that Baumgartner was going to be royally pissed that we’d gotten involved—hell, that we’d gone in and actually attacked the Qesh mining operation in front of the city. Too damned bad. The fact of the matter was that there’d been precious little we could learn from the OP. The only way to get hard intel had been to talk to the locals. Matthew and those with him had seemed suspicious and divided about us, and rescuing the prisoners had seemed a reasonable way to get into their good graces.
It had been a calculated risk—but Matthew and the others had indicated to Hancock that there was at least a low-level military resistance to the Qesh, despite the enemy’s hostage-taking and terror-murder of civilians. The Salvationists, we’d learned, did have a military, at least at a low and fairly basic level, that was probably more for self-policing than for beating off a Jacker invasion. While their laser weaponry was more primitive than front-line gear currently used by Earth forces, a laser is a laser, and we knew that the Qesh wouldn’t be able to tell from the traces we left behind whether the raid had been carried out by us or by renegade natives, like Matthew and the others. Even if they spotted our armor, dramatically different in design from the leather and lightweight ceramic the locals used, they’d be more likely to assume we were natives with previously unseen equipment than Marine recon.
The important thing was for us not to get captured. That wasn’t as big a risk as you might think. Marines do not leave their own behind.
So now the Qesh had their Rocs crisscrossing the night sky above the forest near Salvation. They would not be looking for sophisticated nanoflage shielding, though. Probably the biggest problem raised by our attack was the possibility that the Qesh would retaliate, hard, against the civilians in the city. They had foot patrols out too, groups of seven armed Jacker centaurs in heavy armor obviously searching for some sign of the hostage-freeing raiders—us. We watched one patrol pass within ten meters of our OP domes, but they never saw us or the Marines we had on sentry duty hidden in the forest outside.
I spent the next several hours going over the electronic data I’d collected during my examination of the Qesh pilot.
All of it tended to support and confirm the Qesh entry in the Encylcopedia Galactia. The nano I’d shot into the two of them had transmitted details of their biochemistry to me. They were actually fairly close to humans in most ways, though they required more sulfur than we do in their metabolic processes. Humans utilize sulfur in two amino acids—cysteine and methionine—and it’s also found in hair, connective tissue, veins, and as a part of the chemistry of insulin, but the Qesh appeared to use it in their basic metabolism. One interesting point: the air of Bloodworld turned out to be almost identical to what we knew of their homeworld’s atmosphere. It raised a possible motive for what they were doing here.
It was just possible that this was a Qesh colonizing expedition.
What didn’t fit were the eyes. The small, upper-turret eyes appeared to be perfectly adapted for the world of a white F1V star, heavily armored against the ultraviolet radiation released by such suns. The lower eyes, though, were adapted for life beneath a cooler, redder sun—a red dwarf like Gliese 581, for example.
There was a problem with stellar age, too. If the Qesh home star was a type F1V, it seemed unlikely that any planets would have had time to develop life as highly evolved as the Jackers. F-class stars aren’t on the main sequence for long. They’re so bright and so massive that they burn through their stores of nuclear fuel quickly—a billion years for type F0, a bit longer, maybe two billion years at the absolute outside for an F1, and that was stretching things.
And I had the idea that the Qesh might be very highly evolved indeed.
It was that set of horns or claws they had on their heads, and the fact that they seemed to have started off as bilaterally symmetrical and then gone in a different direction entirely, when their ancestors developed seven limbs instead of six or eight. While it was always hazardous to speculate too far about species as alien as the Qesh, their appearance had me wondering if their ancestors had been octopods—eight legs—but that somewhere along their evolutionary path one arm had fused with the body, vanishing except for the remnant of two massive claws that became the ornamentation atop their heads. There are species on Earth that have evolved in a lopsided fashion like that. Look at the fiddler crab, with one massively outsized claw for fighting rivals and attracting the ladies, and a smaller one for eating. Imagine if the larger arm had been absorbed into the body, with only the massive claw remaining as part of the crab’s body, while the lesser arm migrated to a more central position.
But that kind of evolution takes a long, long time—hundreds of millions of years. And I was suspicious of even such ordinary bilateral critters as humans evolving from the planetary ecosystem powered by a star less than a couple of billion years old.
I could only think of a couple of possible ways around the discrepancy.
First off, there was a theory that said that hotter stars, emitting higher levels of background radiation, kicked the evolution taking place on any of their planets into high gear, accomplishing in ten million years what might have required a hundred million years on Earth. So maybe the Qesh had leaped up ou
t of the primal soup in the time it had taken Earth’s biome to figure out how to go from single-cell loners to multi-celled communities.
Alternatively, the Qesh might be examples of deliberately directed evolution. They, or the Galactic overlords whom they worked for, could have tinkered with the original Qesh genome for God alone knew what aesthetic or practical reasons in order to create the modern Qesh artificially. Very little was known yet about the R’agch’lgh Collective and less still about their motives, their ethics, or their worldview, but there were whispers within the EG suggesting that they liked to play God with the species they thought of as their inferiors—rumors of entire sapient species having been bioengineered for unknown purposes.
There’s so damned much we didn’t understand. So far as the Qesh were concerned, I was up against a major mystery about their biology and their origins, and I didn’t have the data necessary to solve it.
I was inside one of the domes, the one we’d set up as an operational HQ. The grow-program that created them had included a set of big viewall screens, and these were displaying images transmitted back from a variety of microbots inserted into the area around the city of Salvation. During our raid to free the hostages, Gunny Hancock had released a small cloud of surveillance drone floaters close to the city wall. They had me riding the board because Corpsmen are trained in the use of microprobes.
At least a thousand times larger than nanobots, microbots are tiny, autonomous machines ranging in size from the thickness of a human hair—say, around 100 microns—up to a millimeter or so, which is about the size of a grain of sand. Microscopic charged-couple devices—CCDs—can record light at optical wavelengths and transmit images with a maximum range of several hundred meters; a larger field robot, about the size of my fist, collects these transmissions, recompiles them, and sends them along as quantum-state scrambled bursts. Without the necessary keys, the enemy wouldn’t pick up anything but noise.
