by Ian Douglas
I wanted to go inside . . . but that would have given me a bit too intimate of a view, too close and too narrow to do me any good. What I needed to see was the entire internal structure of the lower leg—tibia and fibula; the gastrocnemius, soleus, and tibialis anterior muscles; the tibialis anterior and posterior tibial arteries; and the epifascial venous system. I sent Program 1 to the active ’bots, and they began diffusing through capillaries and tissue, adhering to the two bones, the larger tibia and the more slender fibula off to the side, plating out throughout the soft tissue, and transmitting a 3-D graphic to my in-head that showed me exactly what I was dealing with.
I rotated the graphic in my mind, checking it from all angles. We were in luck. I was looking at a greenstick fracture of the tibia—the major bone that runs down the front of the shin, knee to ankle. The bone had partially broken, but was still intact on the dorsal surface, literally like a stick half broken and bent back. The jagged edges had caused some internal bleeding, but no major arteries had been torn and the ends weren’t poking through the skin. The fibula, the smaller bone running down the outside of the lower leg, appeared to be intact. The periosteum, the thin sheath of blood vessel- and nerve-rich tissue covering the bone, had been torn around the break of course, which was why Colby had been hurting so much.
“How’s he doing, Doc?”
The voice startled me. Gunny Hancock had come up out of nowhere and was looking over my shoulder. I’d had no idea that he was there.
“Greenstick fracture of the left tibia, Gunny,” I told him. “Shinbone. I have him on pain blockers.”
“Can he walk?”
“Not yet. He should be medevaced. But I can get him walking if you want.”
“I want. The LT wants to finish the mission.”
“Okay. Ten minutes.”
“Shit, Gunny,” Colby said. “You heard Doc. I need a medevac!”
“You’ll have one. Later.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Later, Marine! Now seal your nip-sucker and do what Doc tells ya!”
“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant.”
I ignored the byplay, focusing on my in-head and a sequence of thoughtclicks routing a new set of orders to the ’bots in Colby’s leg. Program 5 ought to do the trick.
“How you feeling, Colby?” I asked.
“The pain’s gone,” he said. “The leg feels a bit weak, though.” He flexed it.
“Don’t move,” I told him. “I’m going to do some manipulation. It’ll feel funny.”
“Okay . . .” He didn’t sound too sure of things.
Guided by the new program download, some hundreds of thousands of ’bots, each one about a micron long—a fifth the size of a red blood cell—began migrating through soft tissue and capillaries, closing in around the broken bone until it was completely coated above and below the break. In my in-head, the muscles and blood vessels disappeared, leaving only the central portion of the tibia itself visible. I punched in a code on Colby’s armor alphanumeric, telling it to begin feeding a low-voltage current through the left greave.
Something smaller than a red blood cell can’t exert much in the way of traction unless it’s magnetically locked in with a few hundred thousand of its brothers, and they’re all pulling together. In the open window in my head, I could see the section of bone slowly bending back into a straight line, the jagged edges nesting into place. The movement would cause a little more periosteal damage—there was no way to avoid that—but the break closed up neatly.
“Doc,” Colby said, “that feels weird as hell.”
“Be glad I doped you up,” I told him. “If I had to set your leg without the anodyne, you’d be calling me all sorts of nasty things right now.”
I locked the nano sleeve down, holding the break rigid. I sent some loose nanobots through the surrounding tissue, turning it ghostly visible on the screen just to double-check. There was a little low-level internal bleeding—Colby would have a hell of a bruise on his shin later—but nothing serious. I diverted some anodynes to the tibial and common fibular nerves at the level of his knee with a backup at the lumbosacral plexus, shutting down the pain receptors only.
“Right,” I told him. “Let me know if this hurts.” Gingerly, I switched off the receptor blocks in his brain.
“Okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It just got . . . sore, a little. Not too bad.”
“I put a pain block at your knee, but your brain is functioning again. At least as well as it did before I doped you.”
“You’re a real comedian, Doc.”
I told his armor to lock down around his calf and shin, providing an external splint to back up the one inside. I wished I could check the field medicine database, but the chance of the enemy picking up the transmission was too great. I just had to hope I’d remembered everything important, and let the rest slide until we could get Colby back to sick bay.
“Okay, Gunny,” I said. “He’s good to go.”
I know it seemed callous, but a tibia greenstick is no big deal. If it had been his femur, now, the big bone running from hip to knee, I might have had to call for an immediate medevac. The muscles pulling the two ends of the femur together are so strong that the nano I had on hand might not have been enough. I would have had to completely immobilize the whole leg and keep him off of it, or risk doing some really serious damage if things let go.
The truth of the matter is that they pay us corpsmen for two jobs, really. We’re here to take care of our Marines, the equivalent of medics in the Army, but in the field our first priority is the mission. They hammer that into us in training from day one: provide emergency medical aid to the Marines so that they can complete their mission.
“How about it, Colby. Can you get up?”
The Marine stood—with an assist from Lewis and the Gunny. “Feels pretty good,” he said, stamping the foot experimentally.
“Don’t do that,” I told him. “We’ll still need to get you to sick bay, where they can do a proper osteofuse.”
“Good job, Doc,” Gunny told me. “Now pack up your shit and let’s hump it.”
I closed up my M-7 and dropped both the hypo and the sterile plastic shell it had come in into a receptacle on my thigh. They’d drilled it into us in FMF training: never leave anything behind that will give the enemy a clue that you’ve been there.
While I’d been working on Colby, the rest of the recon squad had joined up about a kilometer to the north and started marching. Gunny, Lewis, Colby, and I were playing catch-up now, moving across that cold and rock-strewn desert at double-time.
According to our tacsit displays, we were 362 kilometers and a bit directly south of our objective, a collection of pressurized Mars huts called Schiaparelli Base. If we hiked it on foot, it would take us the better part of ten days to make it all the way.
Not good. Our combat armor could manufacture a lot of our logistical needs from our surroundings, at least to a certain extent. It’s called living off the air, but certain elements—hydrogen and oxygen, especially—are in very short supply on Mars. Oxygen runs to about 0.13 percent in that near-vacuum excuse for an atmosphere, and free molecular hydrogen is worse—about fifteen parts per billion. You can actually get more by breaking down the hints of formaldehyde and methane released by the Martian subsurface biota, but it’s still too little to live on. The extractors and assemblers in your combat armor have to run for days just to get you one drink of water. The units recycle wastes, of course; with trace additives, a Marine can live on shit and piss if he has to, but the process yields diminishing returns and you can’t keep it up for more than a few days.
So Lewis and I doubled up with Colby. There was a risk of him coming down hard and screwing the leg repairs, but with me on his right arm and Lewis on his left, we could reduce the stress of landing on each bound. We taclinked our armor so that the jets would fire in perfect unison, and put ourselves into a long, flat trajectory skimming across the desert. Gunny paced us, keeping a 360-e
ye out for the enemy, but we still seemed to have the desert to ourselves.
And four hours later we reached the Calydon Fossa, a straight-line ditch eroded through the desert, half a kilometer deep and six wide. It took another hour to get across that—the canyon was too wide for us to jet-jump it, and the chasma slopes were loose and crumbling. But we slogged down and we slogged up and eight kilometers more brought us to the Ius Chasma.
It’s not the deepest or the most spectacular of the interlaced canyons making up the Valles Marineris, but it’ll do: Five and a half kilometers deep and almost sixty kilometers across at that point, it’s deep enough to take in Earth’s Grand Canyon as a minor tributary. The whole Valles Marineris is almost as long as the continental United States is wide back home—two hundred kilometers wide and ten kilometers deep at its deepest—where the Grand Canyon runs a paltry 1,600 meters deep.
The view from the south rim was spectacular.
But we weren’t there for sightseeing. We rendezvoused with First Squad and made the final approach to Schiaparelli Base. I stayed back with Colby while the others made the assault, but everything went down smooth as hyperlube. The whole sequence would have been a lot more exciting if this had been a real op, but the bad guys were U.S. Aerospace Force security troops, and Ocher Sands is the annual service-wide training exercise designed to work out the bugs and accustom our combat troops to operating in hostile environments against a high-tech enemy.
I can’t speak for the USAF bluesuits, but we had a good day. Despite Colby’s injury and a bad case of the scatters coming down—someone was going to get chewed a new one for that little SNAFU—all eight squads pulled it together, deployed without being spotted, and took down their assigned objectives, on sched and by the download. An hour later we had a Hog vectoring in for medevac.
I rode back up to orbit with Colby.
And it was just about then that the fecal matter intercepted the rotational arc of the high-speed turbine blades.
Chapter Two
For a century now we humans have been lurkers on the Galactic Internet, listening and learning but not saying a word. We’re terrified, you see, that they might find us.
The EG-Net, as near as we can tell, embraces a fair portion of the entire Galaxy, a flat, hundred-thousand-light-year spiral made of four hundred billion suns and an estimated couple of trillion planets. The Net uses modulated gamma-ray lasers, which means, thanks to the snail’s-pace crawl of light, that all of the news is out of date to one degree or another by the time we get it. Fortunately, most of what’s on there doesn’t have an expiration date. The Starlord Empire has been collapsing for the past twenty thousand years, and the chances are good that it’ll still be collapsing twenty thousand years from now.
The Galaxy is a big place. Events big enough to tear it apart take a long time to unfold.
The closest EG transmission beam to Sol passes through the EG Relay at Sirius, where we discovered it during our first expedition to that system 128 years ago. The Sirius Orbital Complex was constructed just to eavesdrop on the Galactics—there’s nothing else worthwhile in the system—and most of what we know about Deep Galactic history comes from there. We call it the EG, the Encyclopedia Galactica, because it appears to be a data repository. Nested within the transmission beams crisscrossing the Galaxy like the web of a drunken spider are data describing hundreds of millions of cultures across at least six billion years, since long before Sol was born or the Earth was even a gleam in an interstellar nebula’s eye. It took us twenty years just to crack the outer codes to learn how to read what we were seeing. And what we’ve learned since represents, we think, something less than 0.01 percent of all of the information available.
But even that microscopic drop within the cosmic ocean is enough to prove just how tiny, how utterly insignificant, we humans are in the cosmic scheme of things.
The revelation shook humankind to its metaphorical core, an earthquake bigger than Copernicus and Galileo, deeper than Darwin, more far-reaching than Hubbell, more astonishing than Randall, Sundrum, and Witten.
And the revelation damn near destroyed us.
“Hey, e-Car!” HM3 Michael C. Dubois held up a lab flask and swirled the pale orange liquid within. “Wanna hit?”
I was just finishing a cup of coffee as I wandered into the squad bay, and still had my mug in hand. I sucked down the dregs and raised the empty cup. “What the hell are you pedaling this time, Doob?” I asked him.
“Nothing but the best for the Black Wizard heroes!”
“Paint stripper,” Corporal Calli Lewis told me, and she made a bitter face. I noticed that she took another swig from her mug, however, before adding, “The bastard’s trying to poison us.”
Doobie Dubois laughed. “Uh-uh. It’s methanol that’ll kill you . . . or maybe make you blind, paralyzed, or impotent. Wood alcohol, CH3OH. This here is guaranteed gen-u-wine ethanol, C2H5OH, straight out of the lab assemblers and mixed with orange juice I shagged from a buddy in the galley. It’ll put hair on your chest.”
“Not necessarily a good thing, at least where Calli’s concerned,” I said as he poured me half a mug.
“Yeah?” he said, and gave Calli a wink. “How do you know? Might be an improvement!”
“Fuck you, squid,” she replied.
“Any time you want, jarhead.”
I took a sip of the stuff and winced. “Good galloping gods, that’s awful!”
“Doc can’t hold his ’shine,” Sergeant Tomacek said, and the others laughed. A half dozen Marines were hanging out in the squad bay, and it looked like Doob had shared his talent for applied nanufactory chemistry with all of them. Highly contra-regs, of course. The Clymer, like all U.S. starships, is strictly dry. I suspected that Captain Reichert knew but chose not to know officially, so long as we kept the party to a dull roar and no one showed up drunk on duty.
The viewall was set to show an optical feed from outside, a deck-to-overhead window looking out over Mars, 9,300 kilometers below. The planet showed a vast red-orange disk with darker mottling; I could see the pimples of the Tharsis bulge volcanoes easily, with the east-to-west slash of the Valles Marineris just to the east. Phobos hung in the lower-right foreground, a lumpy and dark-gray potato, vaguely spherical but pocked and pitted with celestial acne. The big crater on one end—Stickney—and the Mars Orbital Research Station, rising from the crater floor, were hidden behind the moonlet’s mass, on the side facing the planet. The image, I decided, was being relayed from the non-rotating portion of the George Clymer. The Clymer’s habitation module was a fifty-meter rotating ring amidships, spinning six and a half times per minute to provide a modest four tenths of a gravity, the same as we’d experienced down on Mars.
“So what’s the celebration?” I asked Dubois. He always had a reason for breaking out the lab-nanufactured drinkables.
“The end of FMF training, of course! What’d you think?”
I took another cautious sip. It actually wasn’t too bad. Maybe that first swig had killed off the nerve endings.
“You’re one-eighty off course, Doob,” I told him. “We still have Europa, remember?”
FMF—the Fleet Marine Force—was arguably the most coveted billet in the entire U.S. Navy Hospital Corps. To win that silver insignia for your collar, you needed to go through three months of Marine training at Lejeune or Pendleton, then serve with the Marines for one year, pass their physical, demonstrate a daunting list of Marine combat and navigation skills, and pass a battery of tests, both written and in front of a senior enlisted board.
I’d been in FMF training since I’d made Third Class a year ago; our assignment on board the Clymer was the final phase of our training, culminating in the Ocher Sands fun and games that had us performing a live insertion and taking part in a Marine planetary assault. After this, we were supposed to deploy to Europa for three weeks of practical xenosophontology, swimming with the Medusae. After that, those of us still with the program would take our boards, and if we were luck
y, only then would we get to append the letters FMF after our name and rank.
“Not the way I heard it, e-Car,” he said. He took a swig of his product straight from the flask. “Scuttlebutt has it we’re deploying I-S.”
I ignored use of the disliked handle. My name, Elliot Carlyle, had somehow been twisted into “e-Car.” Apparently there was a law of the Corps that said everyone had to have a nickname. Doob. Lewis was “Louie.” I’d spent the past year trying to get myself accepted as “Hawkeye,” a nod both to James Fenimore Cooper and to a twentieth-century entertainment series about military medical personnel in the field from which I’d downloaded a few low-res 2-D episodes years ago.
“Interstellar?” I said. “You’re full of shit. This stuff’s rotting your gray cells.”
“Don’t be so sure about your diagnosis, Doc,” Lewis told me. “I heard the same thing from a buddy in Personnel.”
“You’re both full of it,” I said. “Why would they send us?”
“Our dashing good looks and high intelligence?”
“In your case, Doob, it probably has to do with a punishment detail. You on the Old Man’s shit list?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“So what’s supposed to be going down?”
Dubois grew serious, which was damned unusual for him. “The Qesh,” he said.
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Encyclopedia Galactica/Xenospecies Profile
Entry: Sentient Galactic Species 23931
