Bloodstar

by Ian Douglas

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Had the Qesh already learned the location of Earth?

  And how could we find out if they had?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Somehow, fortunately, the twisted attitude never lasts.

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

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

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

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

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

  “He’d fuckin’ well better!”

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

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

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

  Gung-ho.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I was approaching the damaged area of Masserotti’s shoulder, however, and the blood flow was slowing sharply. Ahead, red cells were piling up into a vast, dark red mass, a shadowy, hazy mountain of darkness as platelets reacted to the injury and began causing the red cells to clump—a blood clot. I could see numerous platelets along the red cells around me; red cells were flattened disks with depressed centers; platelets were spherical, roughly half the size of an RBC, but when they were activated by a nearby injury, they formed pseudopods over their outer surfaces, becoming stellate, and began clumping together to begin clot formation.

  I wasn’t here to interfere with the clotting, however. The clot had stopped the bleeding in and around Masserotti’s wound, as it was supposed to do, and was by now releasing various chemicals to encourage the formation of fibroblasts from the surrounding tissue to promote healing. Instead, I was interested in a particular patch of endothelial tissue, the inner lining of the blood vessel, and I guided the ’bot through the surging red cell tides toward the arterial wall.

  “I think I’m just about in position,” I said, adjusting the craft’s drive to hold its place against the current. Red cells thumped and rumbled against the craft’s hull, generating a steady, agitated trembling. “Check me, please.”

  Words appeared in my in-head display. “The tracker shows that you’re in the right place. Go for it, e-Car.”

  Conversations with the outside world were moderated through our AI. I was working on A-Time, now, accelerated time; my time sense had been boosted in order to slow the rapid pace of events around me to a manageable—and comprehensible—rate. A-Time was generated by initiating software resident in our CDF implants and speeding up our brain chemistry. It was like G-boost, no, better than G-boost; it was like stepping into a whole new world, a world slowed down to a crawl, at least from my skewed perspective. Had we been using ordinary radio for communications, the voices of the others would have seemed ponderously slow and dragged out to my ears, while my replies would have sounded like a rapid, high-pitched buzz or chirp to them. So the AI ran interference, letting me read their statements rather than hearing them.

  “Initiating program,” I said.

  Turning the ’bot to face the arterial wall, I triggered a millisecond pulse from my laser, punching a tiny hole between two of the epithelial cells a few microns in front of me. Next I used the microsub’s manipulator arm to insert a canister in the puncture. This done, I adjusted my ’bot’s position, and punched another hole a couple of microns above the first.

  I continued working in a circle, creating a pattern of punctures perhaps 200 microns across. The punctures, together with the canisters containing an MMP precursor, would tell Masserotti’s body exactly where to begin angiogenesis—the formation of new blood vessels. MMP—matrix metalloproteinase—degrades the proteins that keep blood vessel walls solid, allowing endothelial cells to escape into the interstitial matrix for sprouting angiogenesis. By choosing precisely where to start the new arterial branch, we could both hasten and control the growth of new blood vessels, bypassing the clot and ensuring that healing nutrients reached the wound area.

  The work could have been done by robots, sure, but every human body—and every network of blood vessels—while similar to one another in gross detail, is uniquely individual in the fine. That’s why you can use mapping software of the human retina as a means for identification; no two networks of vessels are precisely the same. Robots need a lot of autonomy and very good AI to handle that sort of work, and while the platoon AI we had was adequate, its medical coding was fairly rudimentary. Most times, it’s actually safer and surer to have a human teleoperator make the decisions and manage the operation.

  I completed three more circles, marking the beginning points for three more blood vessels, before I decided I was getting tired and needed to pull out. I thoughtclicked the bail-out icon on my in-head, and woke up in my recliner.

  “How you doin’, e-Car?” Garner’s face leaned over mine, his voice low and slow paced.

  “Everythingwentfinenoproblems,” I chirped. I stopped, took a deep breath, and tried again. “Everything went fine,” I repeated. “No problems.” It sometimes took a few moments for the synapses associated with speech and thought to readjust back down to a slower level after kicking out of A-Time mode. My body was sore all over, like someone had worked me over with a ball bat. Accelerated mode also speeds up the natural pace of random muscular contractions, and can feel like the equivalent of running a 100-meter dash.

  I glanced over at Masserotti. “How you doing, Marine?”

  “No problems, Doc. My shoulder got kind of warm there for a while. Uh . . . what happens to the submarine?”

  “The microbot? It’ll break down into component parts, just like the smaller nanobots you have in your system. Basically, it’ll dissolve into your blood, and either get filtered out or metabolized. There’s nothing in it that can harm you in microscopic doses.”

  “I just want to make sure you guys clean up after yourselves in there, know what I mean?”

  I grinned at him. “Your insides are already a mess, High-Mass. Nothing we could do could possibly make them any worse.”

  I climbed off the chair and hit the STOW key, folding it into a small, flat package that merged once again with the deck. Its pattern was stored in the hut’s memory for recall whenever it might be needed again, but usually free space was more important.

  “Can I get up yet?”

  “Stay put for another hour or so, Mass,” Garner told him. “The EM field is pulling in more ’bots to work on growing arteries. Let’s leave the cage where it is for now.”

  Baumgartner chose that moment to walk into the room, along with Staff Sergeant Lloyd. “We’re officially on full alert, people,” he told us. “We’re moving out in two hours.”

  “What’s going down, sir?” I asked. “We get an invitation to meet with the Salvationists?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  What the hell did that mean?

  “What we need,” Garner said, “is the opportunity to plug into the Salvation computer network.”

  “Exactly,” Baumgartner said. “And that’s why we’re going in by the back door.”

  It took less than an hour to return the domes back to rock and dirt by reprogramming the nanoconstructors in the walls and decks to debond and go inert. The rest of the two hours allotted by Baumgartner was spent getting the flitters packed up and ready to go. We strapped both Kilgore and Masserotti to the deck of the big cargo flitter; the rest of us mounted our personal quantum flitters and began filing out of the clearing that once had been our camp.

  We circled west, then south, skirting a region of open pools of lava steaming and thundering in the semidarkness. Twice, we went to cover, hiding beneath our nanoflage under the breeze-rippled cover of Bloodworld’s forest canopy of tendrils and feathery branches as Qesh Rocs passed in the distance. We still couldn’t be sure how good Qesh
technology was when it came to detecting quantum-pulsed communications, so we maintained radio silence throughout the entire journey, using direct line-of-sight laser-com transmissions for any necessary exchanges.

  Eventually, we got clear of the lava pits and began moving east, then north. We had to ground again when another severe seismic disturbance set the ground beneath our skimmers to jolting and rippling. In the distance, a vast chunk of ice calved off of a nightside glacier and thundered into an arm of the sea.

  By the time we once again approached the city of Salvation, the sky was definitely lighter, taking on an emerald-green glow at the eastern horizon beneath a turbulent wrack of storm clouds. Bloodworld’s ponderous nodding back and forth was bringing it to forth, and soon, we knew, the red sun would again rise above the horizon.

  I’d recognized the basalt plain in front of the northern side of the city we’d seen before, but this view of Salvation was familiar as well. Ahead was the colony’s small spaceport in front of the southern side of the city. As on the far side, mountains rose precipitously above plain and surging ocean, but there were many more buildings scattered out across the bare rock bordering on the spaceport.

  A number of the buildings were blackened ruins; this was the vantage point, I realized, of the vid from the Marine Specter probe they’d showed us during the briefing on board the Clymer shortly after we’d left Earth orbit. A Roc hovered above the port, and we could see several armored Qesh in the distance, moving among the buildings and wreckage. This appeared to be the focus of the Qesh attack.

  “This way,” Hancock told us. The laser-com units in our suits linked all of us together, a transmission from one of us automatically relayed across our network to all nearby receivers, with the signal strength deliberately kept so low that the Qesh couldn’t pick up any stray IR laser flashes—we hoped.