by Ian Douglas
“Damn it, e-Car! Move it!”
“I’m scanning the systems in the other cities, Gunny. I can’t rush it. . . .”
ENTERING MARTYRDOM LOCAL NETWORK.
SEARCHING TARGET SYSTEM.
I tried to remember how many separate colony cities there were on Bloodworld. About twenty, I thought, though there might be several that were missed by the earlier probes. If we did find and delete information about Sol’s location in the Salvation database, how could we be sure it wasn’t also on some of the other computers on the planet?
ENTERING RESURRECTION LOCAL NETWORK.
SEARCHING TARGET SYSTEM.
TARGET FILE STRINGS NOT LOCATED IN MARTYRDOM LOCAL NETWORK.
The colony city of Salvation had been established first. As secondary colonies had been built, the programmers had either copied the first set of files in their entirety and installed them on the new systems, or they’d copied just what was needed and installed that. The first method was lazy but common, the second more efficient, especially when the local systems didn’t appear to have AIs to manage the data.
The disadvantage of the second method was that there were no off-site backups, so if something happened to Salvation, the data might be irretrievably lost.
TARGET FILE STRINGS NOT LOCATED IN RESURRECTION LOCAL NETWORK.
It was beginning to look like the Salvationists had done things efficiently, but without worrying about backups.
Excellent.
Whoever had been coming up the passageway appeared to have backed off.
I kept working, directing the stripped-down specialist AI to keep searching. The negative results kept coming back, and I directed my agents to do a second full sweep, just to make sure. As nearly as I could tell, the system was clean. The Qesh would not learn Sol’s location here.
Of course, there was always the chance that someone had backups of the data on a separate drive, or in an inaccessible data vault someplace. But for that matter, the Qesh might learn where Earth was by any of a number of other possible means. Hell, all it would take would be for one Salvationist to tell one of his Qesh pals that humans had come to Bloodworld from right there, a dim yellow star in Bloodworld’s sky when the sun was below the horizon, located in the constellation of Taurus, a few degrees south of the Pleiades, just twenty light years distant.
But our mission here had been to eliminate any reference to Sol’s position in the Bloodworld computers, and we’d just accomplished exactly that. I spent another few moments uploading some additional virus-agents to the system, downloaded some additional records that looked interesting, and then unjacked from the box.
“We’re good to go,” I told Hancock.
“Right. Everyone, fall back to the airlock.”
We began retreating up the corridor.
I wondered if the Qesh ship parked overhead was watching for us.
The problem, it turned out, wasn’t the Roc so much as the squad of Qesh. They were waiting for us as we emerged from the Salvationist building, guns leveled. One boomed out a drumroll, and we heard the translation behind it. “Rebels! Stop! Under authority of your God!”
“Not my God!” Leighton shouted. “Back off!” No-Joy, I recalled, was Reformed Gardnerian, just like my parents, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her go public with her faith in a firefight.
I don’t know if the Qesh understood her reply or not. They opened fire in the next instant, shooting wildly. No-Joy triggered her plasma weapon with deadly accuracy, burning through the armor of one of the Qesh warriors outside.
Hutchison stood in the doorway beside her, firing his laser, and then a Qesh energy bolt slammed into the building close beside the door, buckling the wall in a hot wash of white flame.
Mark 7 armor runs an electrical field over its outer surface, a charge designed to deflect incoming plasma bolts. The Qesh handheld weaponry fired bolts of positively charged plasma similar to our M4-A2 squad heavy weapons, but they had a lot more punch behind them. The kinetic impact of the incoming round picked up both Leighton and Hutchison and slammed them back into the airlock.
I ducked forward, kneeling next to Hutch. “You okay?”
“I’m okay! I’m okay!” He was scrambling back to his feet, scooping up his weapon. We were in fearfully tight quarters, an airlock filled with bound prisoners, and it was impossible to move without tripping over them. Part of me was yelling at myself that I needed to move the prisoners back into the building, get them out of the firefight, but my first concern was for my Marines. Leighton waved me off as I turned to check on her. Her armor was scorched, the nanoflage burned clean off in a crinkled gray swath across her side and upper torso, but she appeared to be otherwise intact. Leaning around the shattered outer door of the airlock, she began pumping bolts into the Qesh outside. I saw one rear up on its hindmost legs, its upper five limbs pinwheeling wildly as the heavy helmet covering its crest disintegrated in hot metal and bone. Qesh armor appeared to be less effective than ours at turning aside charged rounds.
The other Qesh scattered for cover. I saw another one go down, and realized they were taking heavy fire from their rear, from up on the ridge where we’d left Baumgartner and the others. The rest of the platoon was pouring it on, catching the Qesh in a deadly enfilade.
“We can’t let ourselves be trapped here!” Hancock shouted, firing his laser through the door. “C’mon! Before they get themselves squared away!”
Hancock led the way through the door, bent low and running as fast as his exoskeleton-braced armor could drive him, firing his weapon as he ran. Hutchison followed, the two of them zigzagging across the plain, making their way toward the gully in the ridge perhaps fifty meters away. I heard a loud clank behind us. The inner airlock hatch was closed, but someone was hammering at the other side. More Salvationists, probably.
Gregory exchanged a look with me and Leighton. “Who’s next?” he asked.
“You,” Leighton told him. “Then you, Doc. I’ll bring up the rear.”
“Now wait a minute—” I began, but No-Joy cut me off.
“Just shut the fuck up and do it, e-Car!” she yelled. “You have the stuff you downloaded off the Bloodworld system!” She patted her plasma weapon. “And I have Betsy! So I bring up the rear!”
I’d never known she’d named her weapon. “Yes, Sergeant,” I said, angry. Women have been serving with the Corps since Nancy Brewer on the U.S.S. Constitution in the War of 1812, though no one at the time realized it. I was well aware that chivalry has no place in the military, that I was supposed to see Joy Leighton as a Marine, not a woman. But, damn it, I didn’t want to run and leave her behind.
Another explosion rattled the building, bringing down a section of the overhead and eliciting yells and screams from the bound prisoners. Someone was still hammering on the inner hatch; they would have to take care of their own people.
I gave my Mk. 30 carbine a quick check, gripped it in both gloves, and ducked through the outer hatch and into the open. The sky was almost at full light now, though the sun wasn’t visible yet. Or maybe it was being blocked by the wreckage around the Salvation starport. The Roc still hung in the sky overhead, looming and terrifying, and I could see three tiny turrets in its belly tracking back and forth as they poured fire out against the ridge and the building both. A brilliant flash lit up the craft’s belly, followed closely by a second; those had been 100-megajoule plasma cannon rounds. The Qesh had destroyed the one we’d brought to the OP on the other side of the mountain, but Baumgartner had two more. He must have set them up on the ridge, and was using them to engage the Roc. I could see some gaping holes in the Roc’s belly now, and one of the weapons turrets had been knocked out of action.
I stopped watching the sky and focused on running. I ducked around the corner of a ruined starport structure—a wrecked crane, I think it was—and came face-to-face with a Qesh warrior.<
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It was one of those frozen-time moments—like being on G-boost and A-Time together, with your thoughts racing like lightning while your body was frozen by the chains of physics. I brought my carbine up, trying to aim, but my arms were moving so slowly. The Qesh was moving too, trying to twist its torso around, trying to bring its own weapon to bear. . . .
I started snapping off rounds even before I had the carbine lined up with the Jacker, but I continued dragging the weapon up and over, trying to aim for the helmet. I’m not sure I was thinking things through at that point, but I knew on an instinctive level that the helmet was vulnerable. Qesh helmets, like ours, didn’t have visors that were always transparent, but they did have a black strip that was probably an optical sensor of some sort. A half-meg pulse might not pierce that body armor, but burn out its optics and it would be blind.
The Qesh triggered a round. It missed, slamming into something at my back, the blast propelling me up off my feet and to one side as I continued to mash down the firing stud on my carbine, continued trying to align my weapon with the armored monster’s helmet. I landed on my side in the dirt at the same instant that the Qesh’s helmet flashed, the optical strip exploding with the thermal shock of my last laser pulse.
I scrambled to my feet. The Qesh, holding its weapon with its upper arm, used its front two leg-hands to reach up and pull off the blinded helmet. Maybe it thought I was dead. I wasn’t, and my next shot burned through the Jacker’s unprotected face between its two upper eye turrets.
“Come on, Doc!” Hancock yelled. “Quit playing with the neighbor kids and get your ass up here!”
I stood, looked around for Sergeant Leighton . . . and saw her armor crumpled on the ground halfway between me and the airlock, perhaps ten meters away.
“Marine down!” I yelled. And then the world around me exploded in nova light and raw noise.
Chapter Eighteen
The Roc was falling.
Its two remaining belly turrets continued firing, plasma bolts slashing across the ruin of the starport and up the face of the ridge. That last blast had been a round meant for me, but it had hit the wrecked crane instead, toppling the length of metal struts and girders, sending them crashing to the ground. A beam struck me as I tried to get up, knocking me onto my back. From that vantage point, I watched the Roc sliding past overhead, one wingtip dipping low . . . and then it slammed into the center of the port’s landing field a few hundred meters away, erupting into white flame, burning fiercely in Bloodworld’s oxygen-rich atmosphere.
I was pinned. I had to get up. I planted my hands beneath the girder and pushed, but couldn’t budge it. I wasn’t hurt, but the high gravity was working against me.
Adjusting my position, I managed to reach down and trip the release contacts for the exoskeleton embracing my right leg. It was awkward, working in a tight space like that, but I managed to pull the part free, then wedge it in between the ground next to my hip and the underside of the girder holding me down. I checked to make sure the power feed was still connected. Normally, the exoskeleton operated automatically, picking up my natural movements and amplifying them, but this time I thoughtclicked an icon in my in-head, switching the right leg to manual, then ordered it to flex and straighten.
I kept it braced with both hands, feeding extra power to the unit. I heard the servomotors shrilling, and then, as I flexed it once more, felt the girder shift slightly to one side.
That left me just enough time to edge out from underneath. Free!
The exoskeleton servos in the knee appeared to be blown, but I didn’t care. I could manage to move around in the higher gravity without having both legs braced, so long as I was careful not to come down hard on the unprotected side.
Joy Leighton was lying nearby, unmoving. Picking up my carbine, I jogged toward her immobile form, my gait thrown into an unsteady limp. My right leg hurt with the effort, and I had to be careful not to tear something in my knee, but I made it to her side, dropping flat. “No-Joy!” I yelled. “Hey, Marine! Can you hear me?”
No response.
I switched her opaqued visor to see-through. She looked like she was asleep—deeply unconscious. I fired a jolt of nananodyne pain blockers into her carotid artery just in case, though, followed that with a large dose of nanobots, then began checking her suit.
Not good. There was a ragged tear in her armor, on her right side just above her waist, and the edges were still hot. There was a hole the size of my fist there, and fragments from her armor had sprayed through, burning into her flesh. There wasn’t a lot of blood; the wound had been cauterized by the white-hot plasma. But just looking at it I knew there was bad damage inside.
How bad? I jacked into her armor and called up a full scan. CDF windows opened in my in-head, showing a thermal image of her entire body.
She had a reverse pressure leak going, of course, the thicker atmosphere outside seeping into her holed suit. The higher O2 in the atmosphere was good, the CO2 and sulfur compounds not so much. I checked to make sure her neck seal had triggered and that nothing was forcing its way up into her helmet. Good.
She was bleeding from a deep, incised wound in her side and back, the hot spot stark on the thermal image. Heart rate 168, thready and very weak, BP 96 over 44 and falling, respiration 35, quick and shallow, with elevating adrenaline and noradrenaline. Cooling at the extremities as blood started pooling in her core; she was already deep in shock. I told her suit to manage that—kicking on the internal heaters. The fact that the seal was closed at her neck might restrict the blood flow to her brain slightly—not a good thing. I decided that she could handle a little sulfur dioxide and elevated CO2 in her breathing mix, that good circulation in her brain was the more critical factor of the two.
Pulling out my N-prog, I ordered the nanobots in her system to diffuse through her torso. I needed to see the deep extent of her injury. Within a few seconds, shadows began to form, then to solidify, outlining her bones, internal organs, and major muscle goups.
Oh . . . shit!
Her spine was broken, snapped clean through between T11 and T12—the eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebrae, both of which were cracked and broken, and with the four floating ribs dislocated. There was a hell of a lot of internal damage. Her right XI rib had been snapped in two, and half of it driven down into her liver, and there was extensive bleeding—probably from the hepatic portal vein, though it looked like one or more of the major hepatic veins had been severed as well.
I had a few minutes at most to save her life.
The internal bleeding was the most immediate problem. The hepatic portal system isn’t a true vein, because it doesn’t carry blood directly to the heart. Instead, it drains blood from the whole gastrointestinal tract and from the spleen into the liver. The hepatic veins, by contrast, drain from the liver into the inferior vena cava, which takes the blood straight back to the heart. You can bleed out faster if you take damage to a major artery like the aorta or the femoral, but not by much.
Using my N-prog, I began programming the diagnostic nano in her torso, switching it to radical emergency hemostasis. It was her only chance.
“Doc!” Hancock’s voice called. “How is she?”
He would have seen on his in-head display that she’d been hit.
“Not good!” I called back.
“Can you get her up here?”
“Not without fucking killing her!”
Some millions of nanobots were converging on No-Joy’s liver now, riding the currents of blood feeding into her hepatic portal system. When they hit the ruptured area, they found intact blood vessel walls and latched on, forming a lattice framework upon which more ’bots could latch on. I could see the framework growing, thickening, strengthening, on the N-prog screen. The question was whether the microscopic robots could fight the current of blood rushing into her abdominal cavity, and find the other end of the vein in order to join t
he two severed ends together.
The ’bots were having trouble getting around the fragment of floating rib still lodged in her liver.
Once, battlefield emergency first aid was enormously simpler. You stopped a major bleed-out by applying pressure, lots of it. If you could see the bleeder you could pinch it off with a hemostat, or between your thumb and forefinger if you had to. There’s a story on record of one Army medic who closed up a spurting femoral artery with safety pins.
And if the bleeding was completely internal, like this, you applied pressure to the abdomen, treated for shock, and hoped for the best. Whether or not the patient survived depended mostly on how quickly they could be transported to a well-equipped field surgical unit, and then back to a hospital stateside.
Nowadays, we had a lot more tools at our disposal. The bad news was that the line between emergency first aid and surgery was now very fuzzy, bewilderingly so. Medical technicians had lots more ways to save a wounded Marine’s life than in the old days, when their medical kit held some gauze, a few lengths of roller bandages, morphine and antibiotic powder, some pins and hemostats, and not a hell of a lot else. Corpsmen then, as now, still had to balance their available tools against the situation. Could you physically transport the patient back to a safe area in the rear? Would the patient survive the trip? Were you actually under fire while you tried to save the Marine’s life? How quickly could you stabilize the wounded Marine’s medical situation?
One fact had not changed between the old days and now.
Time was everything.
I kept following the progress of my nanotechnic surrogates. I had two options that I could see. I could order the ’bots already attached to the ends of the veins to link together and close off, essentially sealing the bleeders shut. Joy would probably lose her liver, but she could grow a new one easily enough once we had her back in civilization, and the endcaps on her vessels would stop her from bleeding out. The other option was what I was trying to do now—to actually reconnect the severed ends, creating an artificial bypass across the damaged area.
