by Ian Douglas
So far, all I felt was a dull, heavy, throbbing sensation in my leg . . . and I needed to take care of St. Croix. When I’d fallen, his stretcher had skittered away, and was drifting free now, ten meters away.
I started crawling.
Okay, okay, so I wasn’t thinking real straight just then. The iris valve that had cut off my leg wasn’t pressed as tightly against the stump as it could have been, and blood was still pouring into my armor. I tried to tighten the tourniquet by telling my armor over my in-head to constrict, but I was having trouble bringing up the right menu.
It felt as though the damned planet was dragging at me, pinning me to the broken tarmac. I raised my head, trying to spot the drifting stretcher.
There . . .
It might as well have been on the other side of the planet, so far as I was concerned. The in-head menu connecting me to the stretcher’s engine was still open, at least. Somehow, I managed to use it to engage the engine, and set the stretcher moving toward the crater I’d spotted a moment before. “Logistics!” I called. “Take control of the stretcher! I’m hit!”
“Copy that, Doc. How bad is it?”
“Sucking chest wound,” I told them. “His chest’s open. I’ve packed it and—”
“Not him, Doc. You!”
About then was when the pain hit, searing, shrieking, excruciating.
Gasping, I rolled over onto my back. I used my in-head to access my suit controls and trigger an injection of nanobots, half earmarked for pain control, half to travel to my leg and start sealing off blood vessels.
“Not . . . good.”
My big problem at the moment was the common femoral artery, or CFA. One branches off from each of the iliac arteries in the abdomen, one entering each leg at the groin, moving down to divide above the knee into the deep and the superficial femoral arteries. They were big and they carried a lot of blood, at high pressure. I could easily exsanguinate—bleed to death—in just another few minutes if I didn’t get the damned bleeding under control. I was feeling dizzy and nauseated, my blood pressure was dropping past 90 over 40, and my vision was starting to blur. God, had I lost that much blood already?
The injury was similar to Bennie Andrews’ wound.
I’d patched him up in a couple of minutes, no sweat.
I was having trouble doing the same to myself.
The pain began to fade somewhat. At least, the screaming agony in my leg was losing some of its edge as the nananodynes began shutting down nociceptors in my leg—the neural receptors responsible for transmitting pain. I could have done a better job at pain management if I’d begun diverting nano to my brain, but I didn’t trust myself to do it right. I was feeling very fuzzy.
I used my N-prog to follow and to control the repair efforts in the stump of my leg. A cloud of nano was moving down the left femoral artery, the individual bots linking physically one to another in order to form a tightly woven net spanning the lumen—the interior diameter—of the artery. The problem was that the pressure of the blood flow there was so great, carried along in massive spurts, that there was a danger that any patch was going to tear free before it could slow the bleeding.
The guillotine blade, though, was pressed up hard against the severed end of my leg, applying pressure, and the wall of the armor around my thigh had automatically constricted, tightening to form a tourniquet. That’s what had saved Andrews’ life a few minutes ago. His wound, however, had been cauterized to begin with, so he hadn’t bled out as much as I had when the guillotine blade irised shut. I had already lost a lot of blood by the time my suit amputated my leg, and quite a bit more had seeped into the armor enclosing my thigh afterward.
So my attempts to staunch Andrews’ bleeding had been pretty straightforward and quickly successful; I was still bleeding despite the tourniquet, proof that no two first-aid procedures ever work out quite the same way. No two people are precisely the same anatomically or in the way that they respond to drugs or programmed nano.
I fumbled with my N-prog. I needed to increase the amount of nano trying to close off my left femoral artery.
I couldn’t see the screen. . . .
“Take it easy, e-Car. I’ve got you.”
It was Dubois.
I tried to follow what he was doing on my in-head, but I was having trouble focusing on the windows open in my mind. Numbers and words jittered and flickered there, at the very edge of my comprehension, but I couldn’t make them snap onto focus.
Blood. I’d lost too much. My brain wasn’t getting enough of the stuff.
I mumbled something incoherent at him, felt him jacking into my armor.
They say that Hospital Corpsmen make the very worst medical patients in the cosmos, although I suppose the same thing could be said about doctors, nurses, or civilian emergency trauma techs. I was trying to tell Doob that I needed BVEs, that I was still bleeding, that my BP was dangerously low—all stuff that he already knew.
“Nothing wrong with you, my friend,” I heard him say. His voice sounded like it was coming from very far off. “You’ve just been at my hooch supply again, is all.”
The pain was starting to return. Possibly Doob had redeployed some of the nananodyne ’bots to other duties, like stabilizing my BP or helping to tie off my femoral artery. Or maybe the pain signals were finding other ways past the blocks and into my brain. Funny. I could still feel my left leg, which was hurting like hell all the way down to my toes.
“I’m sending you off to sleepy land,” Doob told me. The words were faint, far-off and coming at me out of a vast, roaring cloud of static.
And Paula was there, looking up at me in the well deck of our sailboat. I could feel the bite of the cold wind off the glacier, feel the pitch and roll of the boat. Her eyes were going glassy. Damn, I was losing her! Losing her!
Paula’s face faded, replaced by . . . what the hell? I was looking down on someone in Mk. 10 Marine armor, lying flat on the ground. Another armored figure lay next to the first, jacked in through a couple of slender cables connecting helmet to helmet. The first figure’s left leg was gone from just above the knee.
With a heart-stopping jolt, I realized that I was looking down at me.
You know, my family had always been pretty serious about the Gardnerian stuff. Reincarnation, the migration of the soul from body to body, hell, the existence of the soul . . . something, some noncorporeal part of us that is more than and distinct from the mere chemical and biological machinery that we call us.
So I’d heard all about NDEs—near death experiences—growing up. My medical training had mentioned the phenomenon, but relegated it to the realm of the psychochemical and the hallucinatory. Blood loss, neural shut-down, anoxia, and other stimuli—or perhaps the failure of neural stimuli—could create hallucinations that were remarkably similar across thousands of case histories. There was the sensation of leaving the body, of looking down on your own body from a vantage point somewhere overhead, of feeling peaceful and happy. There was the iconic tunnel of light, the experience of moving toward the light, of joining loved ones long dead somewhere up there, of meeting beings or a Being that the mind interpreted as the departed or as angels or gods or a divine and immortal part of the Self.
And there are arguments, based on the records of thousands of personal near death experiences, that what happens is not hallucination. There are so many stories of non-medical people who were able to describe in detail medical procedures on their own bodies after they were revived, procedures that they couldn’t possibly have seen except from a vantage point located somewhere outside their own bodies.
The problem is that those are all just stories—purely anecdotal. People undergo surgery or traumatic medical procedures, they wake up, they talk about a tunnel of light or of listening in on the surgical team’s conversation, but where is the proof? We know that people often hear things even when the bedside instrumentat
ion says they’re in deep coma, and possibly the descriptions of surgical procedures is something similar.
If what I was seeing was hallucination, it was a damned convincing one.
Dubois had picked up my N-prog. I could peer down at the screen, watch him keying in an operational code.
He was setting the device to run a CAPTR.
I tried to tell him please not to do that.
I’d had my brain CAPTRed before, of course. All military personnel have their brain patterns backed up, just in case. It’s routine for personnel about to deploy into combat. My own was already in electronic storage on board the Clymer, and there was an earlier version back at Starport as well.
A lot of people don’t like the idea of being backed up, however. The Marines, with their half-superstitious prejudice against zombies, are a case in point. I didn’t think of myself as superstitious, but the idea of dying, then waking up with all of my memories intact only up to some earlier part of my life seemed horrible. Creepy.
The issue opened some fascinating aspects of philosophy, not to mention medical ethics. For a start: is there such a thing as a soul?
If there is, is the soul the same as the personality? The ego? Or perhaps the mind?
They used to think that mind was what they called an epiphenomenon of the brain, that it was a sense, even an illusion of being that arose from the electrochemical processes taking place within the lump of gray jelly medical science knows as the physical brain. According to this model, when the brain dies, when the neurons stop firing, the illusion we call “mind” ceases to be.
If that’s true, then there is no such thing as “soul,” no noncorporeal part of the self that survives death. No afterlife, no reincarnation. Sorry, Mom . . . Dad . . . but dead is dead.
But here I was, floating above the battlefield, hovering above my own dead body watching my best friend trying to bring me back. It didn’t feel like a hallucination. It felt . . . well, it was what I wasn’t feeling that was important. There was no pain, none at all. Oddly, I was no longer afraid. I was simply detached. Quite literally detached, in fact. No longer connected with my broken body. Interested . . . even intrigued.
There was some resistance. A part of me still didn’t want Doob to CAPTR my brain pattern, but I was having some trouble now remembering why. Was it because I didn’t want to come back as a zombie? Or was it something simpler than that?
Did I simply not want to come back at all?
I was still skeptical enough to at least consider the possibility that when Doob had hit my brain centers with anesthetic nano—sent me to sleepy land, as he’d put it—I’d managed a dissociation somehow. That still begged certain key questions. How was I seeing what I was looking at now? How was I aware of anything at all?
I suppose I could have accepted that it was simply an elaborate dream based on what I knew must be happening, but the evidence I was getting now, hallucinatory or not, was so damned vivid I didn’t have much choice but to go along with it.
I watched Doob hit the ENTER key, initiating the CAPTR program.
Something went SLAM behind my conscious awareness.
And I tumbled back into my body.
I was asleep for a long time.
When I blinked out of it, I was in a microgravity tube on board the Navy hospital ship Consolation, looking into the face of a ward nurse.
“How long was I out, sir?” I asked him.
“Five days, and a bit,” he replied. He grinned at me as he floated closer and peeled the stick-tight cuff from my arm, through which they would have been feeding me both respirocytes and BVEs.
I wondered what my ratio of respirocytes to red cells was now. I glanced down at my leg, and was not surprised to see a stump capped off by a plastic and metal hemisphere. There was no pain but, curiously, my missing leg itched, right about where the ankle and the top of the foot should have been.
Then more memories came flooding in: the pain, the fear. They seemed remote, however, held at bay, their sting blunted. My brain probably was still riding nanomeds that kept my emotions in check.
“Am I . . . am I . . . ?”
Shit. I didn’t know how to ask it.
“Are you a zombie?” he asked, and gave me another quick grin. “Does it matter?”
“Hell, yeah, it matters!” Then I remembered I was talking to an officer. “Sir.”
“You have all your memories? You remember yourself as a kid? Boot camp? Corps School?”
I remembered floating off the ice-locked Maine coast, cradling Paula’s head in my lap. “Yeah . . .”
“Then you’re the same person you were. It took—I think they said three hours to get you back up to the Clymer. They had a heartkeeper in you sooner than that, though. Maybe ten minutes after you died.”
Heartkeepers were inserts that kept the heart beating and the blood flowing. Once they managed to get BVEs and a load of Freitas respirocytes into my . . . corpse, the heartkeeper would have kept me alive.
It really depended on how much brain damage there’d been when the blood had not been circulating.
I did still feel like “me.”
“Your medical report says there was some minor brain damage, easily corrected in surgery,” the nurse went on. “I’m no philosopher and I don’t know what the theologians would say, but I’d say you’re the same person.”
“That’s . . . good.”
“Whoever you are, you’ve become something of a celebrity, you know.”
It took a moment for the nurse’s words to sink in. “Wait a minute. Celebrity? What do you mean?”
“Once the Marines seized the planet and grew a couple of planetary batteries, the Qesh fleet pulled back out of range, then asked to parlay. They wanted to know who the human was who saved the life of their lord high muckety-muck when he got shot down on Bloodworld. Admiral Talbot ran through the computer records for the op so far, and your name popped up.”
That Qesh pilot I’d pulled out of the downed Roc. He’d been some sort of Jacker big shot? It was news to me.
“We were going to let you sleep until we could grow your new leg,” the nurse went on, “but we’ve had a formal request from the Qesh.”
What the hell? “A formal request?”
“We’ve been negotiating with them for four days, now. And they insist they want to meet you.”
This was all going a bit too fast for me. “Wait, because I rescued one of their warriors?”
“Don’t ask me.” The nurse shrugged. “I just work here. But you seem to have impressed someone.”
I wondered if that meant another damned medal.
I’d spent a lot of time thinking about the Qesh.
The Encylopedia Galactica entry on them lists their dominant culture as “clan/hunter/warrior/survival.” That means, as I understand the JKRS classification code, something like this:
J: The dominant society arose out of clan relationships, family groupings built around interrelated reproductive groups. Clans, in turn, built networks of alliances and political support groups supporting a dominant clan or family.
K: The species arose from more primitive hunter cultures, meaning they were organized around clan collectives working together to bring down and kill prey animals to feed the social group. The skill of individual hunters almost certainly served to enhance the political status of the clan leaders.
R: The dominant culture has survived through or has encouraged participation in warfare. Concepts such as honor, courage, and duty might well play an important part in clan focus and standing.
S: A key concept within the cultural mindset is survival, which could mean that they felt threatened by other cultures, or simply that other cultures that might pose a threat should be eliminated in the name of societal survival.
At least that was our best guess. It’s always difficult to translate ali
en experiences, alien emotions, alien evolution into terms understandable by humans—and for “difficult” read “damned near impossible.” Popular fiction sims and downloads are filled with characters who supposedly hail from “alien warrior cultures,” and these generally turn out to be thinly disguised Celts or Romans or Vikings or similar human civilizations, cultures pulled out of Earth’s history, and have little to do with societies that have evolved elsewhere, on alien worlds, and beneath alien suns very, very different from ours.
Ever since we first met the Qesh back in 2186, we’ve been trying to get a handle on them, trying to figure out what makes them tick. Calling them a “warrior culture” might help us understand their obvious militancy, their warlike nature, their love of titanic warships, their willingness to turn the surface of once-habitable worlds into glass.
But we don’t really understand them.
I think that point really drove itself home for me when I saw those human prisoners on Bloodworld, tied together and lined up at the rim of the crater the Qesh were nano-devouring into the rock. At first, I tried to work it through by thinking in terms of warriors and hunters, but somehow that approach just didn’t work. For humans, warrior generally carries the connotations of honor and duty, the image, perhaps, of Rousseau’s noble savage. Deliberately torturing prisoners to death has more in common with Attila’s Huns—or Torquemada’s Inquisition—than with noble savages. In the same fashion, hunter generally assumes sportsmanship, patience, and skill, or the sleek beauty of a leaping jaguar—not the bleak institutional horror of Hitler’s death camps.
