by Ian Douglas
That last brought them to within just 47 light years of Earth, and the Commonwealth military was becoming deeply concerned. The guess was that all of those incidents involved the same Qesh warfleet, and that over the past fifty-nine years they’d been getting closer and closer to Earth.
Notice the star groupings in which those stars appear as seen from Earth: the constellations of Ophiuchus and Serpens, along with HD 147513 in Scorpius, and Gliese 581 in Libra . . . all four constellations are tucked in right next to one another in Earth’s summer-night sky.
I ran a plot on those six stars in order, and calculated the jumps from system to system. Gamma Ophiuchi to Psi Serpentis: 45 light years. Psi Serp to Eta Oph: 33 light years. Eta Ophiuchi to Athirat: 29 light years. Athirat to Gamma Serpentis: 49 light years. Gamma Serp to Gliese 581: 29 light years. The bastards were zigzagging back and forth across the sky, but every jump brought them a little closer to Sol.
The pattern raised two big questions. First: what was taking them so long between jumps? It took them nineteen years to get from Gamma Ophiuchi to Psi Serpentis, and fifteen to get from there to Eta Ophiuchi. What were they doing in all those years? Admiring their handiwork, maybe?
It only took them two years to cross almost thirty light years to Athirat, but then seven years for the forty-nine lights to Gamma Serpentis.
And that had been sixteen years ago. Had it really taken them that long to make the twenty-nine light-year passage from Gamma Serp to Gliese 581?
Surely, the Commonwealth, which could cover the twenty light years from Sol to Gliese 581 in six days, didn’t have better starship technology than the Imperial Qesh. Our fastest warships could manage to peg something like four or five light years a day, and transports like the Clymer and the Puller were only a bit slower. At that rate, the Qesh could have jumped from Gamma Ophiuchi to Sol in sixteen days. It didn’t make sense.
The second question was even more urgent, but required some serious guesswork on our part. Those zigzags through three-dimensional space looked for all the world like a search pattern, Ophiuchi to Serpentis to Ophiuchi to Scorpio to Serpentis to Libra.
If so, what were they searching for?
Us, perhaps?
A few days later, we dropped back into the Sol system, and I was surprised at how good it was to see that familiar, brilliant, and above all yellow sun gleaming against the endless black of space.
The scattering of sunspots across the solar disk was reassuring. For four centuries, now, Earth’s daystar had been in an extended solar minimum, like the Spörer and Maunder Minima that had ushered in the Little Ice Age of the Renaissance. For the past century or so, sunspot activity had been on the increase once more, raising hopes that the grip of the New Ice Age might be about to be broken at last.
It was still an open question as to whether Humankind’s technological efforts were accelerating the warming, and I wondered about the Salvationist disdain for high tech. Humans are characterized by two apparently opposing characteristics. We are supremely adaptable; witness the Salvationists turning life on Bloodworld, even life under the invading Qesh, into a moral imperative, a duty for their God. And at the same time, we are supremely technic, remaking our environment to suit our needs, even our whims. We don’t like the shifting climate on Earth? Change it. . . .
It was a matter of making the best of things versus making things better, a choice that shadowed so much of modern medicine. Where should the line be drawn between saving life and saving dignity—preserving the essence of what it means to be human?
I didn’t know. I didn’t even know where to begin.
But apparently I’d made some fair guesses on the op we’d just completed, because Colonel Corcoran called me into his office a day before we arrived at Geosynch Starport.
It seemed they wanted to give me a medal.
Chapter Twenty
Download
Ward Citation: HM3 Elliot Carlyle (FMF)
Operation Blood Salvation/ OPPLAN#5735/28NOV2245
For extraordinary heroism on 2 through 3 December, 2245, in performance of his duties as a Medical Corpsman, Bravo Company, First Reconnaissance Regiment, First Marine Division, Fleet Marine Force, Petty Officer Third Class Elliot Carlyle is hereby awarded the Silver Star.
During a reconnaissance in force of the target area on Bloodworld, Gliese 581 IV, Petty Officer Carlyle was instrumental in rescuing a number of human colonists captured by Imperial Qesh troopers and arranging for their evacuation from the combat area. During the firefight, one Marine was seriously wounded, and Carlyle managed to render first aid despite heavy fire from the enemy. When a second Marine was wounded, Carlyle directed another Marine to render aid to the new casualty while continuing to give aid to the first patient. He managed to stabilize both casualties, and proceeded to evacuate them from the fire zone. During the evacuation, he additionally rendered aid to the injured pilot of an enemy combat flier, uncovering as he did so information about Qesh biology previously unknown to Commonwealth Intelligence.
Later in the operation, Petty Officer Carlyle participated in the infiltration of a human colony facility, extracting important intelligence from a hostile computer network. During the extraction at the conclusion of this raid, a third Marine was seriously wounded. Petty Officer Carlyle again rendered first aid, stabilizing the wounded Marine’s condition. Despite being wounded himself, when hostile forces, both Qesh and human, attempted to overrun his position, he held them off with accurate fire, killing several of the enemy and saving the life of his patient.
Petty Officer Carlyle’s actions were in the highest tradition both of the Navy Hospital Corps and of the Fleet Marine Force.
That was what the official citation download said, anyway. Not a word about how half the time I’d been scared witless—and how the rest of the time I’d been furious at the locals for their technophobic nonsense.
And there was not a word in that citation about me getting stuck out there, unable to drag Joy to safety, or about our having to get our asses freaking rescued by a detachment of Marines.
Medals, I’d long ago become convinced, were nice as an official acknowledgment by the brass that you’d done what you were supposed to do without screwing up too badly, or that you’d been lucky—but their importance didn’t come close to the acceptance of your brothers and sisters, the people you actually worked with day to day.
Four weeks had passed since our return from Gliese 581. The Solstice Festival had come and gone, as had the changing of the year. They gave me the medal at the Geosynch Military Assembly Hall, located within the Synchorbital Wheel, which was turning at twice per minute to provide spin gravity. The assembly hall could physically seat a thousand people. According to the records, something like five times that number were linked in virtually, through electronic implants, and that didn’t include coverage by the various news media. There were some civilian VIPs there—a congresswoman from Virginia and the director of the FMF. The medal was given to me by Captain Victor Schmidt, commanding officer of the Fleet Marine Force Training Center—FMFTC Camp Lejeune. That was the real thrill of the full-dress ritual at Synchorbit that morning.
You see, besides giving me the medal and confirming my immediate promotion to Hospitalman Second Class, they also graduated me from the Fleet Marine Force training program.
I was no longer under probation. I could now include those three cherished letters—FMF—in parentheses after my name, rank, and rate.
And . . . okay. So I hadn’t come back with that next big bit of xenotechnology that was going to put General Nanodynamics on the map. Right then, I didn’t care about that at all. . . .
An entire bulkhead in the Geosynch Military Assembly Hall was set to show Earth, gleaming a dazzling white with ice sheets and continent-spanning loops and whorls of cloud. It was winter in the northern hemisphere—or nearly so . . . not that those regions north of Chicago had much in the way of any other season. The image was slowly rotating as the Wheel turned, a quietly h
ypnotic effect. Four Marines got medals as well—two Bronze Stars, another Silver, and the Navy Cross to Staff Sergeant Carolyn Hayes, for holding off a Qesh charge at Martyrdom long enough for the rest of her unit to withdraw. Her medal was awarded posthumously, and her image was thrown up on the big display screen while Captain Schmidt read off the citation.
And when the ceremony was over, Gunny Hancock was there to say “Congratulations, Doc,” and shake my hand.
Doc. To the Marines, all Corpsmen are “Doc,” but this time there was something special in the way Gunny Hancock said it. I’m not sure what the difference was . . . except, possibly, that now I knew I belonged, a proven part of the team. It felt damned good.
Masserotti was right behind him, his shoulder as good as new. He used his newly grown right arm to shake my hand. “Good job, Doc!”
My face fell just a bit when I saw who was with him.
David Kilgore.
“I know, Doc,” Kilgore said, shaking my hand as well. “It’s weird for me, too. All I can say is . . . yeah, it’s really me in here.”
“Of course it is,” I managed to say through a plastic grin.
But I didn’t believe it, not for a moment. They’d repaired Kilgore’s shattered body at GNMC, Geosynch Naval Medical Center, including growing a new brain and installing a whole new CDF suite, and then they’d installed the CAPTR data I’d recorded on Bloodworld. It was just like downloading and running new software on a refurbished computer.
Was it really Kilgore? I decided I didn’t even want to think about it.
Had the newly revived Paula Barton been the same person as the Paula I’d loved? Still loved?
Well, the critical difference was that Paula’s brain had deteriorated pretty far before they’d pulled a CAPTR on her in Portland. Kilgore’s brain had still been alive when I’d copied it. But where do you draw the fucking line?
I noticed that Kilgore was wearing civvies, rather than class-A full dress. There was a reason for that. Marines who’d been CAPTR-revived were never returned to their original units. Instead, they were integrated into other units, usually into a completely different division, one where no one knew them. It had to be that way. Marines could be superstitious, especially about death. And they had a word for CAPTR-revived Marines.
Zombies.
It was completely unfair, of course. The Kilgore standing there in front of me was as human and as alive as I was—and so far as his memories were concerned, he was the same Marine who’d been burned down by a Qesh particle beam beside the mining pit on Bloodworld, the same Marine whose life I’d tried to save. Tried and failed.
“They assign you to a new duty station yet?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice light.
“Not yet,” he admitted, shrugging. “I’m still in limbo.”
It was some time later that I realized that it had been a joke: “limbo”—for most Catholics a kind of in-between holding area after death, neither heaven nor hell.
I wished him well, and wandered off in search of the buffet table. Doobie was there. “What we’re gonna do, my man,” he said with a shit-eating grin, “is go celebrate by getting ourselves drunk!”
“None of your damned hooch,” I told him. “I kind of want to keep my eyesight!”
“Hey, I told you, I only nanufacture the very best pure C2H5OH, right?”
“So you say. But I’ve heard your stuff is on the list of internationally banned weapons of mass destruction, right up there along with nerve agents, planet busters, and nano-D anti-organics.”
“Lies! Lies and slander! But actually, I had something a little different in mind . . . something along the lines of the Free Fall.”
My eyebrows went up. “I dunno, Doob. That’s pretty rich for my blood.”
The Free Fall Lounge was definitely a half dozen points higher on the classy-meter than the Earthview . . . an exotic play-lounge more for Geosynch’s rich civilian tourists up from Earth than for the likes of us. It costs ten e-creds just to walk in the main access hatch, fifteen for a cheap drink, and some of the meals on the menu would cost a third class most of a week’s pay. If you’ve got a hot date along, though, there’s nothing like the hydrosphere.
At least, that’s what I’d heard. I’d never been to the place, and never expected to go.
“Aw, c’mon, e-Car! You deserve it! We all do! I’ll round up some of the other guys, and we’ll have a real hyperbolic blowout to celebrate.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you’ll have to treat me with more respect, Doob. I outrank you now.”
In fact, Doobie had passed his test for HM2 and was on the promotions list, but it wouldn’t take effect until next February. They’d made my promotion effective as of that day, as a part of the medal ceremony. I had that long to lord it over Doob before his promotion took effect.
“Sir, yes, sir!” Doob replied, and I realized I also had that long to endure his sarcasm. “Treat the newbie petty officer second class with all due courtesy and respect, sir!”
“Right,” I said. “So . . . we’ve got three months of this nonsense to go through, huh?”
The Free Fall wasn’t a part of the Wheel, which used the Space Elevator as its rotational axis, but was part of an independent orbital facility—the Hilton Synchorbital. You got there by boarding a fling pod on the rim of the main wheel, which cut you loose with a tangential velocity of just less than 47 meters per second at precisely the right instant so that you drifted into the embrace of a rotating catcher at your destination twenty minutes later in free orbit, 940 meters distant. The receiving catcher snagged the fling pod in a magnetic field, brought it to rest, then maneuvered it into the Hilton’s receiving lock, which provided transport cars up to the zero-gravity lobby.
You entered the Free Fall through the hotel lobby, moving hand over hand out into the sphere at one pole of its axis. The Free Fall was an immense globe, fifty meters across and rotating once every fifteen seconds to provide a respectable four tenths of a G around its equator—a shade more than the surface gravity of Mars. The sphere’s poles, of course, remained in zero-G, but your weight slowly climbed as you rode one of the inclines down the inside curve toward the equator. The equatorial region, from about latitude 30˚ north to 30˚ south on the sphere’s inside surface, was where the chairs and tables were, with one part closed off to hide the kitchen and other support facilities. There was a nicely appointed bar as well, and a lot of soft lighting and lush tropical vegetation that gave it the look of a magical jungle, a green maze within which groups of tables were nestled, with flowing streams and small ponds and waterfalls. Genengineered koi swam in the larger ponds, their scales shimmering with constantly changing iridescence. At the higher latitudes, large viewall panels looked out into space and the spinning moon, sun, stars, and Earth, and you could look “up” across the sphere’s interior to the other side, to see diners calmly enjoying their drinks or diners upside down relative to you.
But the big attraction, of course, was the hydrosphere.
The hub of the Free Fall sphere is in zero-gravity—well, microgravity is the correct term, but everything at Geosynch is in free fall around the Earth, completing one orbit in twenty-four hours. Farther down the space elevator, you actually feel weight, because you’re moving slower than is necessary to stay in orbit. If you were to step out of an airlock you would take a very long fall straight down to the Earth. Above Synchorbit, on the other hand, the centripetal force of the elevator is trying to throw everything out into space, since the upper half of the structure is traveling faster than it needs to move in order to stay in orbit, and is, therefore, whipping around the Earth like a ball on the end of a whirling string. The ball, in this case, is a small asteroid anchored 35,000 kilometers farther out, providing the dynamic tension that locks the elevator system in place and keeps it stretched out taut. Geosynch, orbiting at exactly 35,786 kilometers above Mount Cayambe, in Ecuador, is at the halfway point, balanced between falling down and falling up, and so remains at zero-G.
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Which is what made the Free Fall’s hydrosphere possible. It was about ten meters across, a bubble of water floating at the exact center of the larger sphere which rotated around it four times a minute. The water, warmed to 40˚C, was kept hot, fresh and circulating by inflow and outflow piping coming into it along the larger sphere’s axis. Internal lighting gave it a shifting, constantly changing illumination—pink mingled with an emerald green. Waves and ripples constantly spread across its surface, adding to the exotic and ever-changing lighting patterns across the larger sphere’s inner surfaces.
And people were swimming in it. Swimming, and . . . other things.
There were eight of us in the liberty party—me, Doobie, and Machine McKean; Carla Harper and HM3 George Gomez, both from Clymer’s medlab; HM2 Kari Harris and HM3 Tomas Esteban, from Clymer’s medical cryo unit; and HN Ken Klinginsmith, from Medical Imaging. Doob said he’d also invited Chief Garner, but the company’s senior Corpsman had pled more pressing duties.
That was just as well; even within the Hospital Corps, which tends not to be as formally rank conscious as the rest of the Navy, chief petty officers are both a law and a social order unto themselves. A chief, not to put too fine a point on it, is God—exactly the same as a gunnery sergeant in the Marines. We would all be a little freer, a little more comfortable, if Garner wasn’t there with us.
But we did have the three rifle-company Corpsmen, plus the lab, cryo, and MI techs. It promised to be a hell of a party.
We all wore civvies—conservatively dark, two-toned skinsuits for the gents, and formal glittersprays for the ladies. Carla was wearing blue light as well, for a formal-gown effect, but Kari had left her breasts bare, which allowed for some very nice things to happen to her anatomy while we were moving in zero-G.
A human hostess met us at the incline and led us to a table. Like the Earthview, this place had a human waitstaff, part of what made it so pricey. I honestly couldn’t tell if she was wearing a high-tech skinsuit, a light coating of programmed nano, or animated tattoos, but her skin color kept rippling and shifting through shades and dappled patterns of sunlight and green, in keeping with the rain-forest theme of the place.
