by Ian Douglas
But my exo-unit was useless, the right side removed to jack up the wreckage that had landed on me earlier, the left side shredded by a Qesh plasma bolt. There was no way in hell I could carry Joy out of there, not on my own legs. I needed a quantum flitter . . . or a spin-repulsor sled or stretcher. I had neither.
Briefly, I considered removing her exoskeletal unit—the legs, at least—and putting them on me, but that wasn’t an option, not a good one. It would take time I didn’t have, and those units are carefully balanced to provide a constant overall support, with feedback from the armor itself. That kind of gear wizardry was a job for a Marine armorer or a Navy roboticist, not for a simple Corpsman.
Even so, I had to try.
Simplest would have been just to drag her—preferably feetfirst, which would have put less pressure on her injured spine. The ground was rough enough, however, that I wouldn’t be able to drag her far, and once I started trying to make it up the rough and stone-strewn gully, it would be hopeless.
Joy was on her back; I stretched her arms out to the sides, then lay down beside her, on my back, on top of her left arm. Grabbing her left hand in my left, I reached across her chest and grabbed her right wrist with my right hand, then rolled to the left, coming to my knees as I did so. Once I was on my knees, I held her wrists at my throat with my left hand, supporting myself on my right. Her weight was draped over my back, her legs hanging down limp over mine.
I started to crawl.
I wouldn’t have been able to make it ten meters if it hadn’t been for the armor. Even without the exoskeletal support, the armor on my legs adjusted to the stress and the pressure, and helped brace me—but each meter forward was a slow agony, the pain shrieking in my lower back and shoulders.
Each breath came as a gasp. My arm was trembling with the effort of supporting myself and the Marine on my back. I wasn’t going to make it. . . . I wasn’t going to make it. . . .
And then I glimpsed movement to one side, and froze. God, freaking no! I’d left both weapons behind—there was no way in hell I could have carried them and Joy—and if those Salvationist bastards were closing in on me now, it was pretty much up. I had a pistol and a knife.
“Let her down, e-Car,” Colby’s voice said. “We’ve got her!”
“You okay, Doc?” Hancock asked. “You look a little shot up.”
Half a dozen Marines dropped into firing stances around me, facing outward, as Colby and Hancock took the weight from my back.
I dropped full-length on the ground for a moment, sobbing with relief.
Chapter Nineteen
We got the recall order less than an hour later.
We were on top of the ridge overlooking the Salvationist spaceport, waiting out the heaviest, most savage seismic quake yet. The ground trembled and bucked, sending numerous landslides clattering down the slope, and several of the wrecked buildings below collapsed. The enemy troops—both the Qesh and the Salvationists—seemed to have abandoned the chase. We weren’t sure yet whether that was because of the ongoing seismic quake, or because they simply weren’t that interested in us.
They seemed to think we were rebels, rather than a Marine recon force, a mistake very much in our favor.
Lance Corporal Andrews had just pointed out something unusual against the glowing, ruby face of Bloodstar. From the top of the ridge, we could see about three quarters of the slow-rising sun, hanging against the horizon. Among the chains of black starspots, the ragged patchwork of stellar storms that covered a good ten percent of the star’s visible surface, was a single, perfectly round, black disk. At first, some of us had been wondering if it was a large Qesh spacecraft approaching out of the sunrise, but as minute followed minute, it didn’t move.
What the hell was that?
Calli Lewis finally hit upon the explanation.
“It’s a planet!” she cried. “It’s a planetary transit!”
Damn. I should have spotted that. I was still pretty shaken by my near escape down at the starport, though, and wasn’t thinking clearly yet. I knew at once that she was right, however, as soon as she pointed it out.
“Muspelheim,” I said. “It’s Planet III, the next planet in from Bloodworld.”
Gliese 581 III—formally Gliese 581 c—orbited its star at a distance of .073 AUs, almost exactly half of the distance of Bloodworld from its star. At its closest, Muspelheim passed within 11 million kilometers of Bloodworld. That’s almost thirty times the distance between the Earth and the moon, but with six times the mass of Earth, Muspelheim could still give Bloodworld a serious nudge when it passed the outer world, about once every twenty days or so. Even at 11 million kilometers, the giant inner planet was large enough to appear as a visible disk as it slid across the face of Gliese 581.
The seismic thunders rolled on and on, as the orange glare of distant volcanoes lit the western horizon, off toward the nightside. The recall order came in from the Clymer, but it had taken a while to reach us.
The only way to be certain that the enemy wasn’t picking up our communications was to use lasers. The Clymer and her escorts were waiting out the mission in orbit around Gliese 581 V—Nidavellir—currently 22 million kilometers outside of Bloodworld’s orbit, and about 30 million kilometers ahead of Bloodworld’s current orbital position—a straight-line distance of some 37 million kilometers. If they knew our precise location, they could send a modulated laser beam to us in a direct line-of-sight transmission.
The problem with this was that they couldn’t know the platoon’s exact location unless we sent up a transmission of our own. Worse, when we were as close to the enemy as we were now, well . . . laser beams tend to spread out a little with distance. At a range of 37 million kilometers, it was more than likely that the Qesh in and around Salvation would pick up at least the fringes of that incoming beam, and know that someone was carrying out high-tech interplanetary telecommunications in the area. Coherent light is not normally a natural phenomenon; it’s kind of a dead giveaway that there’s some high technology operating close by.
That was one reason we’d established Red Tower as a secure advance base some distance from our objective. From Nidavellir, the Clymer could pinpoint the location of Red Tower and send a laser-com beam there with little chance of interception. The Clymer could also communicate with the Misty-Ds, which were submerged offshore at three different sites along the Twilight Coast. On a regular timetable, the landing ships were supposed to extend an antenna mast above the surface, listening for messages from the Clymer.
Of course, that still left the problem of getting the message out to the Marine recon forces in the field. Quantum-burst transmission were fairly safe—at least we’d seen no evidence yet that the Qesh could detect the ultra-fast pulses of channel-shifting data—but Red Tower was below the horizon for us, meaning the transmissions had to bounce off the local ionosphere to reach us. That was okay much of the time, but the charged particles streaming in from the nearby star could play havoc with the Heaviside layer. Especially during daylight hours over the Twilight Zone, the stellar wind pressed the Heaviside layer close to the planet’s surface, rendering over-the-horizon signal reflections difficult or impossible.
It was a lot more certain sending a robotic messenger.
Once again, we employed the spidery-looking RV-90 robots, the same devices we’d used to track Matthew and his friends back to Salvation’s back door. Stilting along at a steady ten to twelve kilometers per hour, never needing rest and recharging from their environment as they moved, they could cover the thirty kilometers between Red Tower and Salvation in a little under three hours.
The robot had arrived while we were inside the starport building, bringing word from Colonel Corcoran.
Download
Mission Recall Order
Operation Blood Salvation/ OPPLAN#5735/28NOV2245
[extract]
. . . All platoons will break o
ff immediately from current operations and fall back to the advance bases at Red Tower and Red Sky. MST/D retrievals will take place at advance bases Red Tower and Red Sky, initiating redeployment to Clymer and rendezvous prepatatory for return to Earth. . . .
There was more. Evidently, First Platoon had run afoul of Qesh and local human forces at Martyrdom, in the north, and were fighting to break free. Third Platoon, in reserve, had already deployed to help them.
So much for avoiding contact with the enemy.
We didn’t yet know, however, if the Qesh had twigged to the fact that warships from Earth were in-system. They might still think we were “rebels” and planet-bound, though we couldn’t count on that fiction holding for very much longer. The fact that the Salvationist government, at the very least, was collaborating with the Qesh vastly complicated things, and made it certain that sooner or later the Qesh and the Council of Elders would compare notes . . . that, or the Qesh would learn the truth from rebel prisoners.
I assumed that Colonel Corcoran had issued the recall because the Qesh fleet might know human ships were in-system now, and might even be searching for them. He would want to pull the Marine Recon forces off-world as quickly as possible, and then get the hell out of Dodge. Or perhaps it was simply that Baumgartner had flashed the word back to the fleet that it was mission complete, that we’d penetrated the Salvation computer files and deleted any and all navigational data pertaining to Sol.
I didn’t know and didn’t much care. The most important thing for me was knowing that we might have a chance of getting both Kilgore and Leighton back to the Clymer’s surgery suite.
And the platoon had been running for a good forty hours now on G-boost. In another ten or twenty hours, we would crash—and we did not want to be anywhere within reach of the Qesh when that happened. I was glad when Hancock passed the order down.
We did take some time to pull Kilgore’s exoskeleton out of a storage locker and adjust it to my armor. By that time, I could barely walk in Bloodworld’s gravity; doing so was begging for a serious knee or ankle injury, and I would never be able to keep up with the others if we had to go any distance at all on foot.
That last, long seismic disturbance gradually faded away at last, and we started our trek back to Red Tower.
Our Misty-D was waiting for us on the beach when we got there.
Kilgore died on the way up to the Clymer.
There wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. He’d been slipping away the entire time, going deeper into shock, and hemostatin foam could only do so much. Once on board the Misty, I tried giving him both BVEs and perfluorocarbon-based artificial blood from the ship’s med locker, and I started trying to use medical nano to seal off more of the mesentery leakers, but the damage simply was too extensive, too deep, too serious.
Maybe if I’d been able to get him medevaced sooner . . .
Well, we had his CAPTR data, for whatever that was worth.
Joy Leighton was in medical stasis—a deep, nano-induced coma—and appeared stable, however. So was Hugh Masserotti, though his condition never came close to being as critical as the other two.
I was thinking a lot about the ethical problems of modern medical technology. It was the Book of Salvation that got me looking at that.
The Book of Salvation was one of the religious works that defined the Neoessene Temple movement. It had been written by the group’s founder, Yehoshua Michelson, in the 2120s—though, like Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon three centuries earlier, it was now accepted as divinely inspired scripture, at least among believers. A copy was on file in the Salvation computer records, and I snuck a look at it after we reached the Clymer.
Gods. How can people believe such crap?
When Michelson wrote the thing in its really bad imitation of King James English, replete with all of those “thees” and “thous” and “verilies,” claiming the thing to be a translation of a lost Greek text, the New Ice Age had been under way for just about a century, and glaciers were starting to form in Maine, Canada, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.
I say “New Ice Age,” of course, because that’s what the newsfeeds all call it. In fact, the climate change was pretty much localized to eastern Canada, New England, and northwestern Europe, because of the failure of the North Atlantic Conveyor. At the time, there’d been a lot of talk about the imminent extinction of the human race. At the same time, however, there was a countercurrent to the discussion, which held that technology was going to see us through. The Cayambe Space Elevator had been up and running for a couple of decades by then, and numerous plans to push back the ice—by covering it with black powder, by beaming microwaves at it from space, by turning specialized nanodisassemblers loose on it, by pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—were being enthusiastically discussed and massively underfunded. There were also calls for the wholesale abandonment of Earth. The Plottel-Alcubierre Drive had been demonstrated in the first decade of the twenty-second century, and the Chiron colony had been established soon after. If Earth became uninhabitable, why not just migrate to other worlds?
But by 2100, there’d been a savage backlash against technology, at least within some religious sects and political minorities. Neo-Luddite philosophies were popping up everywhere, especially as reactions against nanotechnology and genetic engineering. Michelson had been neck-deep in the Luddie movement; he’d been imprisoned for a time for his role in the attempted bombing of Cayambe.
According to him, Humankind was doomed.
The Book of Salvation had predicted the end of human civilization in ice, you see, and it was all our own fault. Neoessenes pointed to 2018 and the collapse of the North Atlantic Conveyor—a current bringing warm water into the North Atlantic—as the human-caused beginning of it all. Believe it or not, 250 years ago, most people were convinced that we were entering a period of what was called global warming, and that the warming trend had been caused by human industrial activity dumping high levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. By warming the planet enough to melt the Arctic ice sheet, they claimed, humans had catastrophically tipped the balance. Cold, fresh water from the melting ice had derailed the Conveyor current, causing mean temperatures in North America and Europe to plummet. That, coupled with a new cycle of low solar activity—a new Maunder Minimum—had resulted in the Century Without a Summer, and the inexorable growth of the ice sheets.
Humankind, then, was doomed, at least according to the Neoessenes. Our attempts to control our environment, to rebuild ourselves, to conquer even death itself all had merely hastened God’s final judgment.
Of course, the Neoessenes themselves were special.
The original Essenes were a Jewish sect dedicated to daily baptisms and communal living in ancient Israel. The Neoessenes had started off as a fundamentalist Christian cult, and were still at least nominally Christian, believing that God had called them out from the “Breakers of the Covenant,” the fallen, apostate Church. According to Neoessenist doctrine, it was they, the elect of God, who had the privilege to suffer the fires of hell in order to redeem the rest of a doomed humanity.
That, it seemed, was why the Elders Bryce and Pierson had chartered the Outward Venture, packed a few thousand Neoessenes on board, and headed for the planetary system circling Gliese 581. The Commonwealth Colonization Bureau had made it relatively easy and inexpensive for distinct social groups to plant colonies on other worlds, in the name of social and cultural diversity. But so far as the Neoessene colonists were concerned, they were embarking for a literal hell—a marginally habitable world right out of the pages of Christian mythology, a place where their sufferings somehow could save a portion of the human population left behind on Earth.
The joke, of course, was that they’d just wanted to go somewhere where it was warm.
Pretty much the whole idea was laid out in another of the documents I pulled from the Salvation files—something called the Cov
enant with Hell. By voluntarily living in hell, the sinless believers of the Temple could redeem an apostate Christian Church. It sounded screwy to me, but no worse, I suppose, than some of the stuff in the traditional Bible about blood sacrifice and redemption. Why anyone would volunteer to live in hell to save others was beyond me, though, in fact, Bloodworld wasn’t that bad. You couldn’t breathe the air, the storms were horrific, the volcanoes and seismic quakes were nearly constant, the gravity dragged at you like the weight of a large child constantly riding on your shoulders, and the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere gnawed at everything constantly, but you could live there with only minor technological help. From the little we’d seen from our robot camera, people inside the cities had a pretty good life; it was only when they ventured outside that they needed technological help.
And that, I gathered, was important. The Neoessenes hadn’t been able to discard all technology, but they were doing their best to banish what they could.
The Book of Salvation had a lot to say about nanotech and genetic engineering, especially when they trespassed on what it meant to be human, the “image of God,” as the Salvationists liked to say. Reading the passages about “medical abominations” brought me a little closer to understanding why the Bloodworlders were so fanatically opposed to nanomedicine. Tinkering with God’s original design, clearly, was arrogance in the highest degree—and that included everything from artificial blood to nananodyne pain relief to synthetic bone replacement. Same for CAPTR technology, of course, but it also extended even to nanotechnically chelated brain enhancements and implants. The Neoessenes wanted to draw a sharp, absolute dividing line between Mark I Mod. 0 organic humans and machines.
The trouble is, the line between humans and machines is already fuzzy, and it’s getting fuzzier every day. If you reject Freitas respirocytes, do you also reject old-fashioned blood transfusions as well? If you refuse to accept an injection of nananodyne ’bots, do you also refuse aspirin or other drugs? Do no cranial implants also mean no cochlear implants to correct deafness? How about eyeglasses instead of retinal transplants? Where do you draw the line?
