by Ian Douglas
Theoretically, the Salvationists accepted technology in other, non-medical areas. They used nanotech to grow their breather masks, and to treat their leather survival suits and boots. Their cities had been grown with nanoconstructors brought from Earth. The trouble is, once you accept one technological aid to life, it’s damned hard to reject others as they come along. And once you ban one type of technology, you tend to become suspicious of all technology, rejecting more and more until you no longer use electricity, Net access, or e-cars. The Salvationists appeared to be in an awkward trap between high tech and low, needing the high tech to survive on Bloodworld, while desperately clinging to what they thought made them human.
Things had really gotten strange when the Qesh showed up.
The records I’d pulled off the computer net confirmed that there were two factions now—the Acquiescenists and the Militants. Acquiescenists believed that the Qesh were literal demons newly arrived to take over this particular corner of hell. As demons, they belonged here—they were part of the package. The Acquiescenist Council of Elders had surrendered moments after the Jackers had opened fire on the spaceport two weeks before, creating the Covenant with Hell to explain and justify the decision. If the demons belonged here, the Salvationists had to deal with them—ideally, in such a way that the Qesh didn’t obliterate them.
The Militants, on the other hand, felt that demons were still demons, and it was the Neoessenes’ duty to fight Satan’s kingdom in every way that they could.
Both groups appeared to believe in divine beings called “the warrior angels of the Rapture,” angelic creatures who would arrive to rescue the Salvationists and destroy hell at the very end of all things. “The Rapture” was an old idea, apparently first expressed by Puritan preachers in the seventeenth century, an interpretation of several verses in the New Testament suggesting that Christian believers would be caught up into the air before a final, terrible judgment on Earth. Since the Salvationists—this group, at any rate—was no longer on Earth, the doctrine had changed somewhat, applying now to the faithful who’d entered the tribulation of hell. According to some rather fuzzy prophecies from the Book of Salvation, warrior angels would arrive in the nick of time to save the faithful and transform hell into paradise.
The documents I saw didn’t mention how the Acquiescenists expected to obey God by negotiating their survival with invading demons, and they didn’t mention how the Militants expected to survive if the Qesh decided to drop relativistic projectiles on the human cities.
Nor was there any clue as to what the Qesh thought about all of this.
I turned all of the information over to the company’s S2. Let the spooks figure out what it all meant. I was just happy that we’d made it off of that miserable hellworld, and were on our way back to Earth.
Two days later, we were accelerating out-system, heading in a direction well off from the actual direction of Earth, in Taurus. If the Qesh were tracking us, we didn’t want to draw a line for them pointed straight back to Sol.
The Qesh certainly knew we were there, but they were . . . busy. While we’d been playing our sneak-and-peek games outside of the city of Salvation, the Commonwealth 3rd Interstellar Fleet had arrived in the Gliese 581 system, and was now engaging Qesh naval forces. The battle was still going on four days later, though the combatants now were spread out across a vast volume of space. When we linked into the Clymer’s external cameras, though, we could still see occasional silent, brilliant flares of light as nuclear weapons detonated, or as relativistic projectiles packing the same destructive energy as a nuke slammed home.
I was in the squad bay with a couple of dozen Marines and Corpsmen, watching the show, a little awed to realize that with each flash, men, women, and Qesh were dying out there. The larger ships had shields strong enough to absorb or deflect the energy of a megaton nuke or a mass driver projectile moving at near-c, but the smaller vessels could only rely on their speed and maneuverability to avoid being hit. My God, thousands must be dying out there.
I wondered who was winning.
“So why,” I wondered out loud after a time, “did the government decide to send in a fleet? I thought they were trying to avoid a confrontation.”
“They were,” Chief Garner said. “But I think it’s just hit home how close the Impies have gotten.”
“That’s right,” Hancock said. “Take a look at the history of our engagements with the Qesh.”
I’d downloaded that file during the trip out from Earth. There’d been that first disastrous encounter with them at Gamma Ophiuchi. After Gamma Oph, there’d been four more encounters with the Qesh before they’d turned up on our front porch, so to speak, at Gliese 581. I’d used Clymer’s navigation AI to plot the positions of all those stars, and the distances between them.
Gamma Ophiuchi was eighty-four light years from Earth. Our next encounter with them was at Psi Serpentis, and that’s the one everyone remembers, of course. An Earthlike world around a Sol-like star seventy-one light years away. Cernunnos, a joint European-American colony at Psi Serp III had been established there in 2198, and just seven years later, the place got smacked by a near-c planet killer. Fifteen thousand people incinerated in an instant, and a world—so much like Earth, it ached—was transformed into lava fields and glaciers.
That’s when we began to realize just what it was we were up against.
The next encounter came in 2220, when the Commonwealth’s 5th Fleet bumped into Qesh raiders at Eta Ophiuchi, sixty-three light years from Earth. Twelve of our ships were vaporized before the rest could disengage. We ran into them again two years later at another sunlike star, HD 147513, when they destroyed the research colony on Athirat, sixty light years from Sol. Once again, a relativistic projectile whipped in at near-c and took out damned near half the planet. Seven years later they showed up at Gamma Serpentis, where a Commonwealth deep-space recon base managed to get off a message drone an instant before it was annihilated.
That last brought them to within just 47 light years of Earth, and the Commonwealth military was becoming deeply concerned. The guess was that all of those incidents involved the same Qesh warfleet, and that over the past fifty-nine years they’d been getting closer and closer to Earth.
Notice the star groupings in which those stars appear as seen from Earth: the constellations of Ophiuchus and Serpens, along with HD 147513 in Scorpius, and Gliese 581 in Libra . . . all four constellations are tucked in right next to one another in Earth’s summer-night sky.
I ran a plot on those six stars in order, and calculated the jumps from system to system. Gamma Ophiuchi to Psi Serpentis: 45 light years. Psi Serp to Eta Oph: 33 light years. Eta Ophiuchi to Athirat: 29 light years. Athirat to Gamma Serpentis: 49 light years. Gamma Serp to Gliese 581: 29 light years. The bastards were zigzagging back and forth across the sky, but every jump brought them a little closer to Sol.
The pattern raised two big questions. First: what was taking them so long between jumps? It took them nineteen years to get from Gamma Ophiuchi to Psi Serpentis, and fifteen to get from there to Eta Ophiuchi. What were they doing in all those years? Admiring their handiwork, maybe?
It only took them two years to cross almost thirty light years to Athirat, but then seven years for the forty-nine lights to Gamma Serpentis.
And that had been sixteen years ago. Had it really taken them that long to make the twenty-nine light-year passage from Gamma Serp to Gliese 581?
Surely, the Commonwealth, which could cover the twenty light years from Sol to Gliese 581 in six days, didn’t have better starship technology than the Imperial Qesh. Our fastest warships could manage to peg something like four or five light years a day, and transports like the Clymer and the Puller were only a bit slower. At that rate, the Qesh could have jumped from Gamma Ophiuchi to Sol in sixteen days. It didn’t make sense.
The second question was even more urgent, but required some serious guesswo
rk on our part. Those zigzags through three-dimensional space looked for all the world like a search pattern, Ophiuchi to Serpentis to Ophiuchi to Scorpio to Serpentis to Libra.
If so, what were they searching for?
Us, perhaps?
A few days later, we dropped back into the Sol system, and I was surprised at how good it was to see that familiar, brilliant, and above all yellow sun gleaming against the endless black of space.
The scattering of sunspots across the solar disk was reassuring. For four centuries, now, Earth’s daystar had been in an extended solar minimum, like the Spörer and Maunder Minima that had ushered in the Little Ice Age of the Renaissance. For the past century or so, sunspot activity had been on the increase once more, raising hopes that the grip of the New Ice Age might be about to be broken at last.
It was still an open question as to whether Humankind’s technological efforts were accelerating the warming, and I wondered about the Salvationist disdain for high tech. Humans are characterized by two apparently opposing characteristics. We are supremely adaptable; witness the Salvationists turning life on Bloodworld, even life under the invading Qesh, into a moral imperative, a duty for their God. And at the same time, we are supremely technic, remaking our environment to suit our needs, even our whims. We don’t like the shifting climate on Earth? Change it. . . .
It was a matter of making the best of things versus making things better, a choice that shadowed so much of modern medicine. Where should the line be drawn between saving life and saving dignity—preserving the essence of what it means to be human?
I didn’t know. I didn’t even know where to begin.
But apparently I’d made some fair guesses on the op we’d just completed, because Colonel Corcoran called me into his office a day before we arrived at Geosynch Starport.
It seemed they wanted to give me a medal.
Chapter Twenty
Download
Ward Citation: HM3 Elliot Carlyle (FMF)
Operation Blood Salvation/ OPPLAN#5735/28NOV2245
For extraordinary heroism on 2 through 3 December, 2245, in performance of his duties as a Medical Corpsman, Bravo Company, First Reconnaissance Regiment, First Marine Division, Fleet Marine Force, Petty Officer Third Class Elliot Carlyle is hereby awarded the Silver Star.
During a reconnaissance in force of the target area on Bloodworld, Gliese 581 IV, Petty Officer Carlyle was instrumental in rescuing a number of human colonists captured by Imperial Qesh troopers and arranging for their evacuation from the combat area. During the firefight, one Marine was seriously wounded, and Carlyle managed to render first aid despite heavy fire from the enemy. When a second Marine was wounded, Carlyle directed another Marine to render aid to the new casualty while continuing to give aid to the first patient. He managed to stabilize both casualties, and proceeded to evacuate them from the fire zone. During the evacuation, he additionally rendered aid to the injured pilot of an enemy combat flier, uncovering as he did so information about Qesh biology previously unknown to Commonwealth Intelligence.
Later in the operation, Petty Officer Carlyle participated in the infiltration of a human colony facility, extracting important intelligence from a hostile computer network. During the extraction at the conclusion of this raid, a third Marine was seriously wounded. Petty Officer Carlyle again rendered first aid, stabilizing the wounded Marine’s condition. Despite being wounded himself, when hostile forces, both Qesh and human, attempted to overrun his position, he held them off with accurate fire, killing several of the enemy and saving the life of his patient.
Petty Officer Carlyle’s actions were in the highest tradition both of the Navy Hospital Corps and of the Fleet Marine Force.
That was what the official citation download said, anyway. Not a word about how half the time I’d been scared witless—and how the rest of the time I’d been furious at the locals for their technophobic nonsense.
And there was not a word in that citation about me getting stuck out there, unable to drag Joy to safety, or about our having to get our asses freaking rescued by a detachment of Marines.
Medals, I’d long ago become convinced, were nice as an official acknowledgment by the brass that you’d done what you were supposed to do without screwing up too badly, or that you’d been lucky—but their importance didn’t come close to the acceptance of your brothers and sisters, the people you actually worked with day to day.
Four weeks had passed since our return from Gliese 581. The Solstice Festival had come and gone, as had the changing of the year. They gave me the medal at the Geosynch Military Assembly Hall, located within the Synchorbital Wheel, which was turning at twice per minute to provide spin gravity. The assembly hall could physically seat a thousand people. According to the records, something like five times that number were linked in virtually, through electronic implants, and that didn’t include coverage by the various news media. There were some civilian VIPs there—a congresswoman from Virginia and the director of the FMF. The medal was given to me by Captain Victor Schmidt, commanding officer of the Fleet Marine Force Training Center—FMFTC Camp Lejeune. That was the real thrill of the full-dress ritual at Synchorbit that morning.
You see, besides giving me the medal and confirming my immediate promotion to Hospitalman Second Class, they also graduated me from the Fleet Marine Force training program.
I was no longer under probation. I could now include those three cherished letters—FMF—in parentheses after my name, rank, and rate.
And . . . okay. So I hadn’t come back with that next big bit of xenotechnology that was going to put General Nanodynamics on the map. Right then, I didn’t care about that at all. . . .
An entire bulkhead in the Geosynch Military Assembly Hall was set to show Earth, gleaming a dazzling white with ice sheets and continent-spanning loops and whorls of cloud. It was winter in the northern hemisphere—or nearly so . . . not that those regions north of Chicago had much in the way of any other season. The image was slowly rotating as the Wheel turned, a quietly hypnotic effect. Four Marines got medals as well—two Bronze Stars, another Silver, and the Navy Cross to Staff Sergeant Carolyn Hayes, for holding off a Qesh charge at Martyrdom long enough for the rest of her unit to withdraw. Her medal was awarded posthumously, and her image was thrown up on the big display screen while Captain Schmidt read off the citation.
And when the ceremony was over, Gunny Hancock was there to say “Congratulations, Doc,” and shake my hand.
Doc. To the Marines, all Corpsmen are “Doc,” but this time there was something special in the way Gunny Hancock said it. I’m not sure what the difference was . . . except, possibly, that now I knew I belonged, a proven part of the team. It felt damned good.
Masserotti was right behind him, his shoulder as good as new. He used his newly grown right arm to shake my hand. “Good job, Doc!”
My face fell just a bit when I saw who was with him.
David Kilgore.
“I know, Doc,” Kilgore said, shaking my hand as well. “It’s weird for me, too. All I can say is . . . yeah, it’s really me in here.”
“Of course it is,” I managed to say through a plastic grin.
But I didn’t believe it, not for a moment. They’d repaired Kilgore’s shattered body at GNMC, Geosynch Naval Medical Center, including growing a new brain and installing a whole new CDF suite, and then they’d installed the CAPTR data I’d recorded on Bloodworld. It was just like downloading and running new software on a refurbished computer.
Was it really Kilgore? I decided I didn’t even want to think about it.
Had the newly revived Paula Barton been the same person as the Paula I’d loved? Still loved?
Well, the critical difference was that Paula’s brain had deteriorated pretty far before they’d pulled a CAPTR on her in Portland. Kilgore’s brain had still been alive when I’d copied it. But where do you draw the fucking line?
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I noticed that Kilgore was wearing civvies, rather than class-A full dress. There was a reason for that. Marines who’d been CAPTR-revived were never returned to their original units. Instead, they were integrated into other units, usually into a completely different division, one where no one knew them. It had to be that way. Marines could be superstitious, especially about death. And they had a word for CAPTR-revived Marines.
Zombies.
It was completely unfair, of course. The Kilgore standing there in front of me was as human and as alive as I was—and so far as his memories were concerned, he was the same Marine who’d been burned down by a Qesh particle beam beside the mining pit on Bloodworld, the same Marine whose life I’d tried to save. Tried and failed.
“They assign you to a new duty station yet?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice light.
“Not yet,” he admitted, shrugging. “I’m still in limbo.”
It was some time later that I realized that it had been a joke: “limbo”—for most Catholics a kind of in-between holding area after death, neither heaven nor hell.
I wished him well, and wandered off in search of the buffet table. Doobie was there. “What we’re gonna do, my man,” he said with a shit-eating grin, “is go celebrate by getting ourselves drunk!”
“None of your damned hooch,” I told him. “I kind of want to keep my eyesight!”
“Hey, I told you, I only nanufacture the very best pure C2H5OH, right?”
“So you say. But I’ve heard your stuff is on the list of internationally banned weapons of mass destruction, right up there along with nerve agents, planet busters, and nano-D anti-organics.”
