Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One

by Ian Douglas

  The up-and-comers tampered with such time-hallowed institutions at their peril.

  “Baumgartner,” Masserotti said quietly, with grim emphasis, “is cruisin’ for a bruisin’.” He was lying on a treatment table, as I adjusted the framework of the EM cage embracing his arm.

  “Belay that, Marine,” Garner told him. “He’ll learn.”

  “He’d fuckin’ well better!”

  “I think he’s feeling his oats out here on his own, out from under Captain Reichert’s thumb,” I observed. “He’ll learn, or he’ll screw up . . . and then heaven help him!”

  “The problem,” Doob said, “is that if he screws up, we’re all screwed! So heaven help us!”

  I suspected that Hancock would have disagreed, that had he been a part of the conversation he would have pointed out that survival in the Corps doesn’t depend on any one man, but on everyone working together.

  Gung-ho.

  I was getting ready to go inside Masserotti, so I quietly dropped out of the discussion. Once the EM cage was functioning, I settled back in a neurolink recliner and checked the connections. I’d already injected him with the necessary nano. All that remained was letting our AI make the final link that would take my virtual point of view down to the micrometer scale.

  “You’re all hooked up, e-Car,” Garner told me. “You’re good to go.”

  “Roger that,” I said, closing my eyes. I brought my hand down on the contact plate, connecting the chair’s electronics with the neuroimplants in my palm. “I’m going inside. . . .”

  There was a brief, all-consuming instant of static . . . and then I was rushing through Masserotti’s right thoracoacromial artery, a blood vessel branching off from the larger axillary artery high in the Marine’s right shoulder, just above his collarbone. From my new perspective, I seemed to be drifting at high speed through a vast, dimly illuminated tunnel filled with myriad tumbling shapes. The tunnel walls, their glistening surface divided into irregular polygons, flashed past, but slowly enough that I could make out details of cell nuclei and organelles.

  Much of the view was blocked by the red cells all but filling the murky fluid through which I was moving. The RBCs surged past me in pulses, each surge marking one beat of Masserotti’s heart.

  My point of view was now being relayed directly into my brain from an NV-340 microbot, a streamlined robotic vehicle some fifty microns long—ten times the width of the flattened, disk-shaped red blood cells drifting through the plasma. Light from the microbot’s prow provided illumination, a blue-violet haze casting weirdly tumbling shadows from the translucent cells around me. In the distance, several large and amorphous masses appeared to be seeping into the arterial wall, passing among the cells—granulocytes, or white blood cells, each two or three times larger than the RBCs around them.

  The cells were slowing, and I reduced the microbot’s velocity. Blood flows at various speeds through the body—fastest as it emerges from the left side of the heart and into the aorta, slowest within the fine web of capillaries connecting arteries with veins, where red cells nudge and jostle along in single file, like dancers in a conga line. Here in Masserotti’s shoulder, the typical speed of the blood flow was around fifty centimeters per second—a blisteringly fast pace for cells just five millionths of a meter across. The microbot was actually traveling considerably slower than the blood through which it moved; the electromagnetic cage around Masserotti’s shoulder provided the microbot’s motive power, as well as power for the light and for the high-energy laser built into the hull.

  I was approaching the damaged area of Masserotti’s shoulder, however, and the blood flow was slowing sharply. Ahead, red cells were piling up into a vast, dark red mass, a shadowy, hazy mountain of darkness as platelets reacted to the injury and began causing the red cells to clump—a blood clot. I could see numerous platelets along the red cells around me; red cells were flattened disks with depressed centers; platelets were spherical, roughly half the size of an RBC, but when they were activated by a nearby injury, they formed pseudopods over their outer surfaces, becoming stellate, and began clumping together to begin clot formation.

  I wasn’t here to interfere with the clotting, however. The clot had stopped the bleeding in and around Masserotti’s wound, as it was supposed to do, and was by now releasing various chemicals to encourage the formation of fibroblasts from the surrounding tissue to promote healing. Instead, I was interested in a particular patch of endothelial tissue, the inner lining of the blood vessel, and I guided the ’bot through the surging red cell tides toward the arterial wall.

  “I think I’m just about in position,” I said, adjusting the craft’s drive to hold its place against the current. Red cells thumped and rumbled against the craft’s hull, generating a steady, agitated trembling. “Check me, please.”

  Words appeared in my in-head display. “The tracker shows that you’re in the right place. Go for it, e-Car.”

  Conversations with the outside world were moderated through our AI. I was working on A-Time, now, accelerated time; my time sense had been boosted in order to slow the rapid pace of events around me to a manageable—and comprehensible—rate. A-Time was generated by initiating software resident in our CDF implants and speeding up our brain chemistry. It was like G-boost, no, better than G-boost; it was like stepping into a whole new world, a world slowed down to a crawl, at least from my skewed perspective. Had we been using ordinary radio for communications, the voices of the others would have seemed ponderously slow and dragged out to my ears, while my replies would have sounded like a rapid, high-pitched buzz or chirp to them. So the AI ran interference, letting me read their statements rather than hearing them.

  “Initiating program,” I said.

  Turning the ’bot to face the arterial wall, I triggered a millisecond pulse from my laser, punching a tiny hole between two of the epithelial cells a few microns in front of me. Next I used the microsub’s manipulator arm to insert a canister in the puncture. This done, I adjusted my ’bot’s position, and punched another hole a couple of microns above the first.

  I continued working in a circle, creating a pattern of punctures perhaps 200 microns across. The punctures, together with the canisters containing an MMP precursor, would tell Masserotti’s body exactly where to begin angiogenesis—the formation of new blood vessels. MMP—matrix metalloproteinase—degrades the proteins that keep blood vessel walls solid, allowing endothelial cells to escape into the interstitial matrix for sprouting angiogenesis. By choosing precisely where to start the new arterial branch, we could both hasten and control the growth of new blood vessels, bypassing the clot and ensuring that healing nutrients reached the wound area.

  The work could have been done by robots, sure, but every human body—and every network of blood vessels—while similar to one another in gross detail, is uniquely individual in the fine. That’s why you can use mapping software of the human retina as a means for identification; no two networks of vessels are precisely the same. Robots need a lot of autonomy and very good AI to handle that sort of work, and while the platoon AI we had was adequate, its medical coding was fairly rudimentary. Most times, it’s actually safer and surer to have a human teleoperator make the decisions and manage the operation.

  I completed three more circles, marking the beginning points for three more blood vessels, before I decided I was getting tired and needed to pull out. I thoughtclicked the bail-out icon on my in-head, and woke up in my recliner.

  “How you doin’, e-Car?” Garner’s face leaned over mine, his voice low and slow paced.

  “Everythingwentfinenoproblems,” I chirped. I stopped, took a deep breath, and tried again. “Everything went fine,” I repeated. “No problems.” It sometimes took a few moments for the synapses associated with speech and thought to readjust back down to a slower level after kicking out of A-Time mode. My body was sore all over, like someone had worked me over with a ball bat. Accelerated mode also speeds up the natural pace of random muscular contra
ctions, and can feel like the equivalent of running a 100-meter dash.

  I glanced over at Masserotti. “How you doing, Marine?”

  “No problems, Doc. My shoulder got kind of warm there for a while. Uh . . . what happens to the submarine?”

  “The microbot? It’ll break down into component parts, just like the smaller nanobots you have in your system. Basically, it’ll dissolve into your blood, and either get filtered out or metabolized. There’s nothing in it that can harm you in microscopic doses.”

  “I just want to make sure you guys clean up after yourselves in there, know what I mean?”

  I grinned at him. “Your insides are already a mess, High-Mass. Nothing we could do could possibly make them any worse.”

  I climbed off the chair and hit the STOW key, folding it into a small, flat package that merged once again with the deck. Its pattern was stored in the hut’s memory for recall whenever it might be needed again, but usually free space was more important.

  “Can I get up yet?”

  “Stay put for another hour or so, Mass,” Garner told him. “The EM field is pulling in more ’bots to work on growing arteries. Let’s leave the cage where it is for now.”

  Baumgartner chose that moment to walk into the room, along with Staff Sergeant Lloyd. “We’re officially on full alert, people,” he told us. “We’re moving out in two hours.”

  “What’s going down, sir?” I asked. “We get an invitation to meet with the Salvationists?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  What the hell did that mean?

  “What we need,” Garner said, “is the opportunity to plug into the Salvation computer network.”

  “Exactly,” Baumgartner said. “And that’s why we’re going in by the back door.”

  It took less than an hour to return the domes back to rock and dirt by reprogramming the nanoconstructors in the walls and decks to debond and go inert. The rest of the two hours allotted by Baumgartner was spent getting the flitters packed up and ready to go. We strapped both Kilgore and Masserotti to the deck of the big cargo flitter; the rest of us mounted our personal quantum flitters and began filing out of the clearing that once had been our camp.

  We circled west, then south, skirting a region of open pools of lava steaming and thundering in the semidarkness. Twice, we went to cover, hiding beneath our nanoflage under the breeze-rippled cover of Bloodworld’s forest canopy of tendrils and feathery branches as Qesh Rocs passed in the distance. We still couldn’t be sure how good Qesh technology was when it came to detecting quantum-pulsed communications, so we maintained radio silence throughout the entire journey, using direct line-of-sight laser-com transmissions for any necessary exchanges.

  Eventually, we got clear of the lava pits and began moving east, then north. We had to ground again when another severe seismic disturbance set the ground beneath our skimmers to jolting and rippling. In the distance, a vast chunk of ice calved off of a nightside glacier and thundered into an arm of the sea.

  By the time we once again approached the city of Salvation, the sky was definitely lighter, taking on an emerald-green glow at the eastern horizon beneath a turbulent wrack of storm clouds. Bloodworld’s ponderous nodding back and forth was bringing it to forth, and soon, we knew, the red sun would again rise above the horizon.

  I’d recognized the basalt plain in front of the northern side of the city we’d seen before, but this view of Salvation was familiar as well. Ahead was the colony’s small spaceport in front of the southern side of the city. As on the far side, mountains rose precipitously above plain and surging ocean, but there were many more buildings scattered out across the bare rock bordering on the spaceport.

  A number of the buildings were blackened ruins; this was the vantage point, I realized, of the vid from the Marine Specter probe they’d showed us during the briefing on board the Clymer shortly after we’d left Earth orbit. A Roc hovered above the port, and we could see several armored Qesh in the distance, moving among the buildings and wreckage. This appeared to be the focus of the Qesh attack.

  “This way,” Hancock told us. The laser-com units in our suits linked all of us together, a transmission from one of us automatically relayed across our network to all nearby receivers, with the signal strength deliberately kept so low that the Qesh couldn’t pick up any stray IR laser flashes—we hoped.

  “Where the hell are we going, Gunny?” Lewis asked.

  “That way,” Hancock replied, pointing. “To the left, down that rill and in among those buildings. That damaged pyramid there is our way in.”

  “And how do we know that?” Gregory asked.

  “We bugged one of the natives,” Baumgartner said. His use of the word “we” was a little self-important, since he hadn’t even arrived yet when Matthew and his people had left our camp. “Now shut up, all of you. Necessary comm only.”

  That made sense. It would have been easy enough to tag one or several of our guests with gnatbots or other microscopic hitchhikers, and track their movements back into the city. Such devices would not have been able to maintain radio or laser contact with our base, of course, but Hancock likely had dispatched a robot relay to follow them. We had several such devices in our arsenal, including the spider-legged RV-90, which is a nanoflage-black sphere about the size of my fist, striding along on slender legs that hold it perhaps thirty centimeters off the ground. The spider would have followed the short-range pulses from the gnatbots, recorded the path by which our guests had entered their city, then skittered back to base, where the entire path could be downloaded and analyzed by our command team.

  Of course, no one had bothered to tell the rest of us what we were doing. No matter. We were here now, and it looked like we had a means of getting into the city . . . if we could slip past those patrolling Qesh.

  Five of us would make the descent—Hancock, Hutchison, Leighton, and Gregory, with me along as tech support. The rest would stay with our wounded and equipment at the top of a barren ridge overlooking the spaceport.

  Using an eroded gully for cover, we edged our way down the hill and into the wreckage bordering the port field, achingly aware of the disk-shape with the bite taken out of it hovering 100 meters overhead. We moved slowly, to avoid tripping any motion sensors they might have up there, focused on the ground below. We knew the Salvationists had made the same trip, however, and they didn’t have nanoflage to cover their movements. Either the Qesh weren’t keeping an especially close lookout for trespassers, or the Salvationists had figured out just how slowly to move to avoid being picked up by their automated scanners.

  Possibly, the Qesh simply didn’t care. The Roc might be parked up there simply to intimidate the local population, or to declare their spaceport off-limits. The port didn’t have much in the way of space-capable assets; I could see the wreckage of two orbital craft, possibly there to service the communications satellites that would be vital for a terrain-divided colony like Bloodworld, but nothing larger, and certainly nothing interstellar, of course. Ships capable of star travel are big—bigger than that whole starport—and usually weren’t designed to set down on planetary surfaces. Besides, the Salvationists appeared to be an insular, isolationist bunch, utterly disinterested in contact with anyone else. I wondered what could drive a community to embrace that level of isolation, on a world of storms, temperature extremes, and rumbling volcanoes.

  Once among the buildings, we froze in place, as three Qesh walked past, fifty meters away. They were carrying what were obviously weapons. Again, though, their search didn’t appear to be terribly focused or intense. I was becoming more and more concerned about what we’d seen so far—an apparent collaboration between the Qesh invaders and the ruling faction of the human colonists.

  The fact that the humans were divided into factions at all was also worrying. Until we knew more about the local politics, we would have to proceed very carefully indeed.

  The pyramid-shaped building, a squat, truncated structure about ten meters high,
rose from the debris and rubble a few meters ahead, its upper surface blackened by a Qesh energy bolt.

  We were halfway to the door when it irised open directly in front of us, and leather-clad humans began filing out. The one in the lead spotted us almost at once.

  “Halt!” he called, his old-fashioned laser rifle snapping up to cover us. “Fallen ones! Drop your weapons!”

  For a horrible moment, the five of us stood facing ten of them, our weapons trained on one another. Hancock took the initiative.

  “Hold your fire, Marines,” he said over our private laser-net channel. “Put your weapons on the ground . . . slowly. Then raise your hands.”

  “Hancock!” Baumgartner snapped at us from his vantage point on the ridge behind us. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Getting into the city,” Hancock replied. “Trust me, sir. . . .”

  Chapter Seventeen

  As we laid our weapons down, the Salvationist soldiers crowded around us, poking at us with the muzzles of their rifles. I actually doubt that those obsolete lasers could have burned through our Mk. 10 combat armor—not unless they were able to hold a steady beam on one spot for several seconds. I glanced up at the Roc overhead, but they didn’t seem to be taking notice of us.

  Or had they seen us in our approach down the gully, and dispatched a Salvationist patrol to pick us up?

  Too many unknowns. We would have to play this one damned carefully.

  “Inside,” the presumed leader of the native patrol barked, gesturing sharply. All of them were thickly swaddled in the local equivalent of environmental gear—breather masks, heavy goggles, and brown and gray leather outerwear and boots. I wondered if the leather was synthetic—did their dislike for industrial chemistry extend to clothing? And if it was real, what kinds of animals did they have, to provide the hides? There might be native animals capable of providing skins that could be tanned by traditional techniques, but more likely they’d brought the fertilized ova of various species from Earth. Somewhere beneath that mountain there must be grazing areas large enough to accommodate herds of gene-tailored neocattle or measts.