by Ian Douglas
Red Tower had been set up above a shallow bay, and the HQ team had deployed robot guns and sensor arrays on both headlands, looking out to sea. The platoon channel was transmitting an image, now, of what looked for all the world like a sailing vessel of some sort, a low, lean hull with two sharply canted masts angled aft, with triangular sails. The boat was running ahead of the gusting, westerly wind. The horizon behind it was a purple-black wall of clouds, moving in swiftly toward the shore.
“Second Squad!” Hancock bellowed, taking the initiative. “Deploy to the beach!”
A thoughtclick on the control link, and I was in motion, gliding half a meter above the ground as we swung around and slid down the rock shelf toward the beach. We didn’t stop at the water’s edge, but kept on going, skimming above the water as the repulsor effect threw up roostertails of spray behind us. Quantum flitters can only skim above water if they’re moving fast; if they try to hover in one place, the spin-repulsor effect starts pushing the water aside and the craft begins to sink into a hole of its own making. If it’s moving, though, its flat body creates a bit of lift, and the spin-push can be directed slightly aft, allowing it to skitter above the water in a precarious balance between flying and drowning.
The critical speed necessary to stay up depends on the local atmospheric pressure, but on Bloodworld it worked out to about twenty-five kilometers per hour. I gunned it up to forty, following Tomacek’s and Gunny Hancock’s machines. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing in the deployment, to tell the truth. My laser carbine was clipped to my back, of course, but that wasn’t supposed to be the reason I was attached to the squad. I was a Corpsman, not combat infantry . . . but if any of the squad’s Marines was hit in a firefight, his or her flitter would sink, and I’d have a hell of a time getting to him to render first aid.
The bay was quite shallow, west to east, more of a curved crescent anchored between two low cliffs than an enclosure. I could see the native boat up ahead now, in between incoming ocean swells. Two masts—main and mizzen, with the mizzenmast ahead of the con. That made it a ketch rig. The hull was about eight meters long; there was no way to tell how many people might be on board—or if it was, in fact, an AI craft of some sort. Colonies short on manpower often deployed robotic sailing craft to patrol nearby bodies of water, for fishing, or for the automated coastal transport of cargo.
I hit one of those swells. My flitter bucked up as it climbed the moving mound of water, but I still punched through the top, emerging in an explosion of spray. My first thought was a feeling of sheer exuberance; I loved being on the water again.
My second was an emotional supercrash; I could see Paula’s face in my lap as I drifted off the ice cliffs of Maine, helpless, terrified, waiting for the med-rescue lifter to arrive as her life slipped away from me.
Angry, I focused on conning the flitter. The ocean swells grew a bit lower as we got away from the shore, farther out into deep water. I could see someone moving on the deck of the ketch, now, a ragged-looking figure with a cloak flapping in the wind.
“Second squad is under attack,” the AI announced. What the hell? I hadn’t seen or heard—
A geyser of water exploded from the dark surface to my left, five meters away. Damn it, they were shooting at us! I leaned right and skittered my flier to the side, then angled back the other way. If I zigzagged enough, maybe I could throw off their aim.
High-Mass and Hutch—Masserotti and Hutchison—were out at the head of our impromptu flying column, swinging now around to the far side of the ketch. A hole appeared low in one of the sharply laid-back sails.
“U.S. Marines!” Hancock’s vastly amplified voice boomed across the water. “Put down your weapons and prepare to be boarded!”
Several more geysers of water appeared. I could see one of the people on the boat aiming something that looked like a snub-barreled plasma weapon . . . and then his arms flailed, the weapon went flying, and the man dropped back out of sight behind the gunwale. I couldn’t tell which Marine got him. It was a hell of a shot, though, from the back of a bucking, skittering quantum flitter. I hadn’t even bothered unshipping my laser carbine; I didn’t see how I could keep steering the flitter and get off an accurate shot.
“U.S. Marines!” Gunny Hancock boomed again. “Cease fire! Drop your weapons and prepare to be boarded!”
There was some more confusion on board the ketch, and then I saw three men in the aft part of the boat holding up their hands. The sails above them were shortening, too, and the ketch slowed a bit, though it continued bearing down on the shore behind us.
“Tomacek, Colby, Gutierrez!” Hancock called over the squad channel. “With me! The rest of you keep circling!”
The four flitters slowed to just above the minimum velocity needed to stay aloft, edging in alongside the moving ketch. Nano-grapnels snapped out, fused with the hull, and pulled the flitters in tight to the boat’s freeboard. Hancock went aboard first, scrambling up and over the gunwale and onto the deck.
“Drop it!” Hancock yelled, his voice carrying both on the squad channel and through the atmosphere. “I said drop it! All of you! Down on the deck! Move!”
There were a few seconds of silence as I continued to follow with the Marines circling the ketch. Then, “Corpsman! Come on board!”
That was my cue. I cut out of the formation and came up on the ketch from astern, cutting my speed back . . . back . . . and then firing my grapnels when I was just a meter or so off the ketch’s starboard side. I released my safety harness and scrambled up on board.
The ketch looked like a fishing boat. There were piles of nets amidships, along with coiled lengths of cable and neon-green buoys. Four crewmen were flat on the deck—three getting their hands tied behind their backs by Colby and Gutierrez, with Hancock and Tomacek keeping them all covered. A fourth lay nearby, screaming, writhing in pain, his right arm, shoulder, and part of his right torso badly burned. It looked like he’d taken the fringe effect from a plasma bolt, which meant he’d been tagged either by Tomacek or by Leighton.
“We have a patient for you, Doc,” Hancock said.
“Right.”
I kneeled next to the man, pulling out my M-7. Like the others, he was wearing what looked like brightly dyed leather—all oranges, browns, and reds—with a filter mask and a set of goggles that gave him an odd, bug-eyed look. “Take it easy, fella,” I told him. He wasn’t wearing combat armor, so I plugged ten ccs of anodynic recep blockers into my hypo’s receiver and dialed up its regular head. I pressed it against his carotid artery under his jaw and fired in the nananodyne.
“What are you doing!” one of the prisoners called out. Flat on his stomach, he was arching his back, trying to see. “What is that man doing?”
“Take it easy,” Hancock said. “That man’s a medic. He’ll take good—”
“No! No! What is he doing to him?”
I ignored the outburst and kept working on the wounded man, pulling out my N-prog and monitoring the migration of nanobots to his brain. Within a few seconds, the nananodyne started taking hold, blocking out the pain receptors in the man’s brain. He relaxed, sagging back to the deck with a sigh as he released a pent-up breath.
“Thank you, brother,” he said. “Thank you!” Then he seemed to realize what was going on. “Wait, what did you just do? The pain is gone!”
“Shot you with nananodyne pain-blockers,” I told him, studying the N-prog’s screen. “They’ll hold you until you can get to . . .”
He tried to grab me with his left hand. “Satan! What did you put into my temple?”
He couldn’t get much of a purchase on my throat with my combat armor in the way, and his clawed fingers scrabbled ineffectively at my helmet. I punched in Program 2 through my N-prog. Half of the nanobots in the man’s brains reprogrammed themselves and began shifting from the thalamus and the insular cortex to the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, binding with the NMDA receptors and taking the patient down into a drowsy, half-aware state. He was s
till trying to fight me, though, so I injected another ten ccs of nanobots, programming them to join with the others in shutting down his consciousness. In another few moments, he slumped into coma, his eyes still open but his body completely anaesthetized.
I monitored his state for another moment through the N-prog, making sure his breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and other vitals were sustainable. They weren’t good; he was shocking fast. But at least they were holding stable.
The other three prisoners were screaming, raging against their bonds, and Gunny Hancock told the others to put them down with swifties.
And I focused all my attention on my patient.
Chapter Eleven
The fringe effect of Tomacek’s plasma bolt had nearly burned through the wounded guy’s right arm completely. Most of his humerus, between shoulder and elbow, was gone, and what was left was hanging on by straps of muscle charred to the consistency of hardened leather. His right torso, from armpit to hip, was deeply blistered. I estimated fifteen to twenty percent second-degree burns, with another five to ten percent third-degree. There was a very good chance that my patient would die within the next few hours if I couldn’t treat him successfully.
First up was stabilizing him. His blood pressure was dropping as his heartbeat became weaker, fast, and thready. He’d lost a tremendous amount of blood and tissue fluids in an instant, which had put him into shock almost immediately. The nano I’d sent to his brain included some that was monitoring his cerebellum and medulla, but there was only so much they could do to control his BP. His arm had been cauterized at the shoulder, but he was leaking fluid, a lot of fluid, from the raw, blistered skin along his side. I pulled a packet of skinseal from my M-7, thumbed it open, and dusted the man’s side with it. Skinseal is a type of first-aid nano used for superficial wounds, and also for wounds covering a large area of the body—scrapes and large burns. The nanobots link together to form a strictly temporary artificial skin, holding in whatever is trying to get out, and also acting as a local anesthetic. My patient didn’t need further anesthesia, obviously, but the skinseal would stop the ooze of blood and interstitial fluid.
Another check on his respiration and pulse. Still falling. I gave him another shot of nanobots, these programmed to target his medulla and cerebellum to further stabilize his autonomic processes. What he needed most at the moment was intravenous fluids to replace the massive blood volume loss, but I didn’t have any with me. We’d have to get him to our rough-and-ready sick bay on shore to deal with that.
“Okay, people,” I heard Gunny Hancock call from farther aft. “Who knows how to steer this thing?”
I glanced up. I’d been so involved with the injured man that I’d momentarily forgotten just where we were: on board a two-masted sailing vessel running before an oncoming storm, with rocks and a rugged coastline a few hundred meters ahead.
“I do!” I called. “But I’m a little busy right now. Talk to the boat’s AI.”
“It doesn’t have one, Doc.”
I blinked. That was just crazy. Sailboats on Earth always had an artificial intelligence as pilot, able to step in and take over control of the craft if the pilot was disabled or found himself out of his depth.
But, then, this wasn’t Earth, and we knew so damned little about the native human culture here.
“There still should be some kind of interface with the craft,” I told him.
“If there is, I don’t see it.”
I looked aft. There was a wheel mounted on a post behind the mizzenmast, lashed tight with a line thrown around one of the handles extending from the rim. I pointed. “Unship that line on the helm. Then take the wheel and turn . . .”
I glanced up at the sails, then aft at the wall of purple clouds on the horizon behind us, then at the angle the ketch was pursuing across the water. There were three sails up, the jib all the way forward, and the main and mizzen, both billowing from multiple yardarms angled across masts canted so far back they were very nearly horizontal to the water, like wings. With no one at the helm, the ketch was angling more and more toward starboard—to the right—which was causing us to heel farther and farther to port as the wind gusted in from the open sea. At the moment, the boulders and sheer cliffs along the southern headland of the bay were directly ahead. If we kept turning into the wind, we might miss them—or we might slam into those rocks and all of us would end up in the drink.
“Take the wheel and turn it to port, to the left,” I continued. “Keep turning until we’re pointed at the beach again and hold it there.”
Tomacek took the helm, releasing the wheel and grabbing the archaic handles. I was a long-time bedsheet sailor—I used to sail a little four-meter sloop all the time in the Chesapeake when I was a kid—but I was used to automated controls, with an AI constantly adjusting the sails and running rigging. This ketch was like something out of the days of Nelson and Decatur. From the look of it, you had to actually adjust the sails by hand, by hauling in or releasing the lines running between sails and deck.
As Tomacek hauled the wheel over, our bow began once again swinging away from the wind and toward the rocky beach where the Marine encampment was located.
“What the hell are you trying to do, Doc?” Hancock asked, the words quiet, mildly curious. “Run us aground?”
“Exactly,” I told him. “We don’t know enough about this kind of boat to actually sail her, especially with a squall coming in astern. I figure if we can beach her, we can get off okay.” I shrugged. “It’ll be better than slamming into those rocks on the headland, or maybe capsizing when that squall hits us.”
I was pretty sure that the crew of the ketch had been planning just that. They’d been at sea when they’d seen the storm moving in, and had turned in toward the shore to find a bay offering at least a little shelter from the blow. Given the high winds on this planet, I was amazed that the locals engaged in old-style bedsheet sailing at all. A submarine would have been more appropriate.
The ketch kept swinging toward the left until the beach was dead ahead. To either side, the Second Squad Marines still on their flitters paced us like dolphins, skipping along the swells as we barreled in toward the beach.
We were moving fast, too damned fast. “Gunny!” I yelled, and pointed. “Use your lasers to cut away the mizzen and the mains’l!”
Gunny Hancock gave orders to Colby and Gutierrez, who both were armed with standard Corps-issue megajoule-pulse Mk. 24 laser rifles. Calling those things rifles was a bit of a misnomer, of course; they fired bolts of coherent light, and so didn’t have the grooved rifling that gave the old slug-poppers their name. They identified the points on the yards and the sail itself where the running rigging held the mainsail down against the mainmast, and began firing with careful precision. There was a crack, followed by a sudden thunderous flapping as the mainsail boomed and fluttered wildly on the wind. A moment later, the mizzen sail did the same, fluttering hard as the ketch shuddered.
The two Marines fired again, and both sails parted from the yards, snapping and twisting in the wind as they flew forward and into the water. We were now being carried along solely by the jib, a small, triangular sail stretched from the top of the mainmast to the end of the bowsprit forward. It continued to draw wind from astern, but the sail area was so reduced, now, that the ketch slowed from a headlong race before the wind to a lumbering, shuddering plod.
I focused on my patient for another moment; pieces of his leather costume—and there was a lot of plastic in there as well—had melted in ragged patches to his skin. I couldn’t pull them free without opening fresh wounds, but they would also be a major source of infection in this guy if I couldn’t get them out. Debriding the wound, it’s called.
I used a surgical laser scalpel to first cut through the charred tissue that still connected his right arm to his shoulder. The charring and bone loss was far too great for any hope of it healing. I cut the arm away, used more skinseal to stop a few small, leaking blood vessels at the shoulder, th
en began concentrating on the patches of melted plastic and charred leather imbedded in his side.
“Hang on, people!” Hancock yelled. “We’re coming up on the beach!”
An instant later I both heard and felt the vessel’s keel grind along the bottom. I snapped off the laser to avoid cutting too deeply, and then the deck lurched beneath me with a long and drawn-out rumbling crunch. The mainmast swayed alarmingly, and for a moment I thought it was going to fall, but the standing rigging held. The deck canted slightly to starboard, as incoming swells rolled and broke past her bulwarks.
“Masserotti! Kukowicz! Andrews! Gregory!” Hancock snapped off the names of four more Marines who were still skimming above the water on their flitters. “Get your asses up here and give a hand with these prisoners! Doc? How’s the patient?”
“Not as bad as he could be,” I said. “We need to get him to sick bay stat.”
I packed up my med gear as the other Marines swarmed on board. The ketch had come to rest about a hundred meters offshore. The water was waist-deep, perhaps a little more. Two Marines each took an unconscious prisoner, lifting him between them in a two-handed seat-carry, hands joined behind shoulders and beneath knees. Thank God for the exoskeletal walkers strapped to our armor; they would have been hard-pressed to carry those men in Bloodworld’s 1.85 G.
My patient was a different matter. We might have killed him, trying to lift and awkwardly manhandle him down the side of the boat. Hancock called to the Marines ashore and had them bring a stokes out on a floater pad.
The floater was a quantum-lift device like the flitters, but with lateral pontoons so that it floated on water. Staff Sergeant Abrams and Sergeant Gibbs brought it out, along with the wire-basket stretcher known as the stokes. Hancock helped me get the patient into the wire basket and strapped down, and together we lowered him over the side to the waiting Marines below.
I left his severed arm on the deck.
Golfball-sized hail began rattling around us—a few stones at first, followed by an avalanche of hard, icy projectiles snapping out of the purple sky and smashing against the deck, or lashing the water around us into a white torrent of spray. Mixed with the hail came torrential rain, huge drops plummeting with twice the speed they would have had on Earth, and the wind began gusting so hard it was difficult to stand.
