Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One

by Ian Douglas

  Our armor kept us dry and breathing, but it was still a long and difficult wade through surf and storm back to the beach. Somehow, we made it with all four locals up the beach and into the HQ dome. Chief Garner led Hancock and me through the freshly grown corridors and into the compartment designated as the sick bay.

  You can only program so much into nanoconstructors when you build a facility like this one, and the sick bay was little more at the moment than walls, lights, tables, and ten bare-pad beds. The banks of diagnostic equipment, sensors, and medical gear would have to be brought in later. At Chief Garner’s order, Leighton made the trip through the storm out to the D/MST and brought back a case of artificial blood, BVEs, and IV gear. Together, we got the patient onto a bed and hung a bag of BVE solution from the frame overhead. A BVE—blood volume expander—was essentially a colloidal-salt-and-protein solution that would help stabilize the guy’s falling blood pressure, quick and dirty. The artificial blood was a perfluorocarbon-based emulsion that mimicked blood in transporting oxygen through the circulatory system. We needed to test the patient for perfluorocarbon sensitivity first, though, and that meant reprogramming some of the ’bots in his system.

  I did that while Garner began working at debriding the burns again. I transmitted the program, then studied my N-prog’s screen for a few moments. “Huh,” I said.

  “What’s ‘huh’?”

  “The nanobots I shot into this guy out there?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Those are the only ones in his system. He’s not carrying any artificial biologicals at all.”

  Garner shrugged. “Not all civilians have internal prostheses,” he said. “He’s obviously not military.”

  “Yeah . . . but a civilian living on a planet like this one? I’d think they’d be bioteched to the gills.”

  Back on Earth, of course, there’s a broad mix of biotech usage, everything from nothing at all—natural biology—to the tech-savvies who’ve replaced their blood cells with respirocytes and gone the cyborg route with artificial limbs, eyes, cerebral implants, and advanced genetic prostheses. Nanomedicines routinely cure everything from cancer and coronary artery disease to colds and old age, and most people have a population of programmable ’bots patrolling their bloodstream, watching, diagnosing, cleaning, and healing.

  And colony planets tend to be high tech. It stands to reason, since none of the worlds we’ve colonized is a perfect double for Earth. Here on Bloodworld, I would have expected to see fairly elaborate nanomedical systems in use to filter sulfur dioxide and heavy metals out of the lungs, nasal passageways, and circulatory systems, to protect the eyes from radiation and atmospheric contaminants, even to help them digest native-grown foods. But this man was a natural, meaning no nanotechnic or genetic prostheses at all.

  What was it he’d yelled at me, before I put him under? What did you put into my temple? Yeah, that was it.

  Curious, I ran “body as temple” through the base library, and got back a Bible reference, something in I Corinthians 6.

  19. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price.

  20. Therefore glorify God in your body.

  It seemed a strange sentiment, but so damned little was known about the Neoessenes, especially the bunch that had left Earth to build a God-centered theocracy at the Bloodstar. I did seem to remember something about them being Luddies, opposed to high-tech, although getting on board a starship to make the move to a new planet twenty light years away seemed to be about as tech-intensive as you could get.

  Did the Neoessies forbid the use of nanomedical technology? It wouldn’t be the first time religions had rejected medical technology. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, I knew, refused blood transfusions because, for them, that was the same as “eating blood,” something forbidden by the Laws of Moses. And the Christian Scientists and some of the more extreme Christian fundamentalist sects rejected all medical treatments, on the grounds that only God could heal.

  Shit. Anti-tech fundies? That could be a problem, and I said as much to Chief Garner.

  “Well,” he said with a philosophical shrug, “everyone’s free to go to hell in his own way, including the crazy people.” He continued working on the debridement, deftly slicing away bits of raw tissue adhering to scraps of melted clothing with his scalpel. “We’ll just take it a step at a time.”

  “Yeah, but what if what we’re doing to this guy is taboo in their culture?” I asked.

  “What if it is? Our job is to save lives the best way we can, any way we can, and we’re not responsible for what they believe, or how they think. Or don’t think. . . .”

  “Well, this guy doesn’t show perfluorocarbon sensitivities,” I said, studying the N-prog screen. “So, do we do it?”

  “What, ’tube him with perfluoro? Of course.”

  “Even though it may be against his religion? I think we need to find out more about that.”

  Garner shook his head. “Uh-uh. First we save his life. Then we worry about his immortal soul.”

  Eventually, the debridement was done, and I went back to the barracks. The rain, sleet, and hail outside were so heavy that someone had rigged a guideline between the HQ and the barracks dome. The sea, I noticed, had come inland, and was already ankle deep around the buildings. That wasn’t a particular problem; those domes were designed to survive being completely submerged, and similar structures were used as sea-bottom research facilities. But the fury of the wind had lashed up a storm surge that had all but completely submerged the beach.

  Adding insult to injury, we felt our first seismic quake during the storm. It seemed unlikely that the storm had triggered a 7.5 temblor, but it did seem as though Bloodworld was throwing everything at us that it could.

  At least we were off the operational hook for the moment. Although Baumgartner fumed and fussed a bit, there was no way we were going out on our patrol in that storm. We stayed inside either the HQ dome or the barracks, getting used to the local gravity, catching up on our sleep, and having something hot to eat—a luxury we’d not been able to enjoy during the hours-long flight out from where the Clymer dropped us off.

  And twenty hours after we’d boarded the ketch, Gunny Hancock called me back to the HQ dome, where they were bringing one of the prisoners around.

  “I thought you’d like to be here for this,” he told me. “I heard you were concerned about local taboos.”

  Garner must have told him. “It helps knowing what we’re up against,” I told him.

  Baumgartner was there, along with Staff Sergeant Lloyd and another member of his staff. He was deep in a quiet discussion with the two of them and didn’t notice when I came in. I was amused. Second lieutenants are at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to chain-of-command among the officer types, and don’t generally have their own staff. Our little expedition boasted thirty-nine combat Marines out of a contingent of forty-eight. The leftovers included Baumgartner, four Corpsmen, and an operational staff of two communications-intelligence specialists and two tech specialists.

  Baumy looked like he was in his glory.

  Doob Dubois was working on the unconscious prisoner. With his goggles and respirator off, we could see that he was a young man, probably in his twenties, with dark hair and eyes and pasty white skin. That made me wonder about something right there. Was his skin so pale because he was never exposed to the local sun’s direct rays, to ultraviolet radiation especially? I made a mental note to check both his vitamin D levels and his bone density.

  Dubois was using an N-prog to revive him. People who’d been swiftied could be unconscious for anything from minutes to hours; when we’d gotten them back to shore, Hancock had ordered one of the other Corpsmen to inject the prisoners with nanobots and so we could switch them unconscious, simply because we didn’t have the manpower to guard them full time.

  “Why the hell is it called a sw
ifty, anyway?” I asked. I could have downloaded the answer from the library, of course, but it was meant to be a rhetorical question. It seemed like such a strange term.

  “Early twentieth century,” Hancock told me. “There was a series of kid’s books, The Adventures of Tom Swift, all about a genius inventor who came up with some gadgets that seemed pretty far-out for their time. Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship. Tom Swift and His Bicycle. That sort of thing.”

  “Okay. . . .” I’d never cared much for twentieth-century literature in school, and gotten away with downloading as little as I could.

  “Sixty or so years later,” Hancock continued, “a NASA researcher invented a non-lethal weapon that delivered an electrical charge to the target. He called it the Taser, after one of the adventures of his childhood hero—Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.”

  “Thomas A. Swift . . . oh, I get it.”

  “Exactly.” Hancock drew his swifty from its holster, a HiVolt 3mm stun gun that fired sliverdarts built around ultra–high-density batteries carrying a charge large enough to incapacitate a man. “Tasers didn’t knock people unconscious, usually, but later weapons did. Hence, ‘swifties.’ ”

  The man on the table groaned and opened his eyes. “Where in His name am I?”

  “You’re safe,” Hancock told him. “We’re U.S. Marines, and we’re here to investigate reports that the Qesh have attacked your colony. Who are you?”

  “Hezekiah,” the man said, sounding a little uncertain. “Hezekiah two-fifty-four of Green-two-three. My brothers . . .”

  “They’re safe as well,” Baumgartner told him. “The one who was wounded . . . what is his name?”

  “Ezekiel. Ezekiel oh-four-nine of Green-two-four. How is he?”

  “I’m told he should pull through.”

  “He lost his arm. . . .”

  “Easily fixed, Hezekiah,” Dubois said. “Either regenerative therapy or biomechanical prosthesis will—”

  “No!” The man looked terrified. “That’s not the Way!”

  “Easy, there,” Hancock said. “You say he’s your brother?”

  “All of the Temple are my brothers.”

  “I see. Why did you fire at us?”

  An eloquent shrug. “You obviously weren’t of the Temple Brotherhood. We thought you might be demons.”

  Hancock grinned. “Not quite. We can actually be very nice folks if you don’t get on our bad side. By shooting at us, for instance.”

  Hezekiah spoke English. According to the little we knew about them, the original Neoessenes had first appeared in Southern California, then spread across the Southwest—Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora. For a time they’d been based in Chihuahua, and a lot of them spoke Spanish as well.

  “ ‘Demons,’ ” Baumgartner repeated. “Do you mean the Qesh?”

  “Demons,” the prisoner said, speaking slowly, with great conviction, “are any who stand against the Way.”

  “So what were you doing in that boat, anyway?” Baumgartner asked.

  “The Qesh-demons came to Salvation,” he said with a shrug. “Some of us were attempting to reach Redemption . . . that’s a city south of here, on the Twilight Coast. But the sirocco frio was blowing up, and we needed to find shelter. And then you attacked us.”

  “We weren’t attacking you,” Baumgartner said. “You fired on us first.”

  “It looked like an attack to us.” He hesitated. “On the boat, you . . . one of you, was putting something into Ezekiel’s body.”

  “That was me,” I told him, taking a step closer. “He was in a lot of pain. I gave him a nananodyne blocker.”

  His face darkened. “That is . . . what?” he demanded. “A nanomedicine?”

  “Yes. They’re programmed to break down into harmless constituents in—”

  “Satan!” the man howled, and he came up off that table like a rocket, his arms stretched out to grab me.

  Hancock stepped in front of me, grabbed and twisted him sharply, and pinned him in a shoulder hold. “Dubois!” he shouted as the prisoner raged. “Drop him!”

  Doob punched a code into his N-prog, and Ezekiel slumped into happy-happy land.

  “A little touchy on the subject of intrusive nanotechnics, are we?” Baumgartner observed as Hancock and Doob hauled him back onto the table.

  “At least,” Staff Sergeant Naomi Hernandez, one of Baumgartner’s technical people, said, “their lack of nanotechnics means we’ll be able to Clarke them.”

  Arthur C. Clarke, a writer and a promoter of future high tech of two or three hundred years ago, had been responsible for one of human technology’s most famous aphorisms: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. You don’t generally see the actual technology nowadays; the infrastructure is invisible behind the effect, and that certainly can look like magic—growing furniture out of a solid deck, for instance, downloading data directly off the local net into your brain, or using invisibly minute robots to clean the cholesterol out of your arteries. When you “Clarke” someone, you get the advantage on them by using technology that they don’t even know is there.

  “You’re thinking of microprobes?” Baumgartner asked.

  “Yes, sir. It should be easy enough to get a cloud of gnatbots in there, and have a look around. If they don’t know about nanotech, they’ll never know they’re there.”

  “Put it into the operational plan, then,” Baumgartner told her.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Christ!” Baumgartner said, looking up as a deep-voiced rumble sounded, and the room began to shake. “Not again!”

  It was another seismic quake, a bad one—this one shaking us at about 7.1 on the standard modified Mercalli scale.

  “Earthquake,” Hancock said. “Or a Bloodworld-quake, I guess I should say.”

  Well, between the flooding and the seismic events, at least Baumy would be off our cases about getting an early start.

  Of course, I felt sure that Hancock already had gnatbots in mind for the patrol.

  Eventually, the storm blew itself out, though for about five hours there, we were all stuck in whichever hab dome we happened to be in at the time because the storm surge deepened the water outside to almost 4 meters.

  As the storm abated, though, the water level went down, and pretty soon the beach was only a little truncated from the way we’d found it. The D/MST-22 was still there, anchored by nanograpnels to the rock. The ketch, however, was gone.

  Fortunately, the Marines had brought in the quantum flitters and secured them inside the storeroom. We broke them out and saddled up in a deep, purple twilight. The sun had dropped below the eastern horizon, though the sky still carried some light.

  After a final check of armor and equipment, we strapped onto our waiting flitters. Hancock gave the signal. “Okay, Marines! Route formation! Move out!”

  We’d practiced this type of deployment endlessly, of course, both on Mars and through in-head sims. Corporal Masserotti and Private Hutchison were out ahead on point, with Gutierrez and Andrews on the left flank, Kilgore and Lewis on the right, and the rest of us strung out in a raggedly staggered column down the middle. I was flying just aft and to the right of Gunny Hancock and ahead of Sergeant Tomacek, who was one of Second Squad’s two plasma gunners. There were fourteen of us—a typical Marine squad of thirteen, plus me. We also had one robot, a big cargo flitter hauling expendables, sentry, and perimeter gear, and a 100-megajoule plasma cannon all disassembled and stowed inside.

  “I still say it’s Alpha Company’s turn for this shit,” Randolph Gregory grumbled as we got moving.

  “Can it, Orgy,” Tomacek said. “You heard the man. We’re just gonna go have a look-see. No gun play. Sweet, slick, and simple.”

  “We pulled the easy duty for a change,” Calli Lewis added.

  “Yeah, right.”

  We began picking our way inland, navigating toward Salvation.

  Chapter Twelve

  According to the map loaded into our perso
nal RAMs, Salvation was thirty kilometers north along the coast, while Redemption was fifty-five klicks to the south. There’d been some discussion between Hancock and Baumgartner, I knew, about switching targets, but Charlie Company was handling Redemption and our original target was still Salvation. There’d also been talk about waiting until we could get more information about the target from our nautical “guests,” but we couldn’t really afford the time to interrogate them, especially since Ezekiel had been showing little interest in cooperating with us. We set off knowing only that the Qesh were already in control there.

  The trip north was uneventful. Once we got up and off the beach, we climbed onto the high plateau beyond, open, rolling ground shrouded in the rubbery, black-leaved vegetation that seemed to cover most of the open ground here. With both armor and our vehicles nanoflaged, we blended into the black background perfectly; I couldn’t even see the Marines flying closest to me, just a few dozen meters up ahead.

  Our top speed in this gravity field was limited to about fifty kilometers per hour, but we often had to move much more slowly than that as we negotiated what amounted to forests of bushy, black, house-sized masses of vegetation with whip-thin tendrils ten meters high.

  Eventually, though, about two hours later, we began to get close.

  We heard it first. In Bloodworld’s dense atmosphere, sound carried very well. Even five kilometers back in the jungle, we could hear the grinding shriek and thunder of some sort of large machinery.

  A short time later, we reached the tree line looking out across an open plain that I recognized from our briefings. A trail, a path beaten down into the earth, ran along the edge of the woods, where we took cover in the underbrush. From here, we could see the city wall.