Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One

by Ian Douglas

  And there are arguments, based on the records of thousands of personal near death experiences, that what happens is not hallucination. There are so many stories of non-medical people who were able to describe in detail medical procedures on their own bodies after they were revived, procedures that they couldn’t possibly have seen except from a vantage point located somewhere outside their own bodies.

  The problem is that those are all just stories—purely anecdotal. People undergo surgery or traumatic medical procedures, they wake up, they talk about a tunnel of light or of listening in on the surgical team’s conversation, but where is the proof? We know that people often hear things even when the bedside instrumentation says they’re in deep coma, and possibly the descriptions of surgical procedures is something similar.

  If what I was seeing was hallucination, it was a damned convincing one.

  Dubois had picked up my N-prog. I could peer down at the screen, watch him keying in an operational code.

  He was setting the device to run a CAPTR.

  I tried to tell him please not to do that.

  I’d had my brain CAPTRed before, of course. All military personnel have their brain patterns backed up, just in case. It’s routine for personnel about to deploy into combat. My own was already in electronic storage on board the Clymer, and there was an earlier version back at Starport as well.

  A lot of people don’t like the idea of being backed up, however. The Marines, with their half-superstitious prejudice against zombies, are a case in point. I didn’t think of myself as superstitious, but the idea of dying, then waking up with all of my memories intact only up to some earlier part of my life seemed horrible. Creepy.

  The issue opened some fascinating aspects of philosophy, not to mention medical ethics. For a start: is there such a thing as a soul?

  If there is, is the soul the same as the personality? The ego? Or perhaps the mind?

  They used to think that mind was what they called an epiphenomenon of the brain, that it was a sense, even an illusion of being that arose from the electrochemical processes taking place within the lump of gray jelly medical science knows as the physical brain. According to this model, when the brain dies, when the neurons stop firing, the illusion we call “mind” ceases to be.

  If that’s true, then there is no such thing as “soul,” no noncorporeal part of the self that survives death. No afterlife, no reincarnation. Sorry, Mom . . . Dad . . . but dead is dead.

  But here I was, floating above the battlefield, hovering above my own dead body watching my best friend trying to bring me back. It didn’t feel like a hallucination. It felt . . . well, it was what I wasn’t feeling that was important. There was no pain, none at all. Oddly, I was no longer afraid. I was simply detached. Quite literally detached, in fact. No longer connected with my broken body. Interested . . . even intrigued.

  There was some resistance. A part of me still didn’t want Doob to CAPTR my brain pattern, but I was having some trouble now remembering why. Was it because I didn’t want to come back as a zombie? Or was it something simpler than that?

  Did I simply not want to come back at all?

  I was still skeptical enough to at least consider the possibility that when Doob had hit my brain centers with anesthetic nano—sent me to sleepy land, as he’d put it—I’d managed a dissociation somehow. That still begged certain key questions. How was I seeing what I was looking at now? How was I aware of anything at all?

  I suppose I could have accepted that it was simply an elaborate dream based on what I knew must be happening, but the evidence I was getting now, hallucinatory or not, was so damned vivid I didn’t have much choice but to go along with it.

  I watched Doob hit the ENTER key, initiating the CAPTR program.

  Something went SLAM behind my conscious awareness.

  And I tumbled back into my body.

  I was asleep for a long time.

  When I blinked out of it, I was in a microgravity tube on board the Navy hospital ship Consolation, looking into the face of a ward nurse.

  “How long was I out, sir?” I asked him.

  “Five days, and a bit,” he replied. He grinned at me as he floated closer and peeled the stick-tight cuff from my arm, through which they would have been feeding me both respirocytes and BVEs.

  I wondered what my ratio of respirocytes to red cells was now. I glanced down at my leg, and was not surprised to see a stump capped off by a plastic and metal hemisphere. There was no pain but, curiously, my missing leg itched, right about where the ankle and the top of the foot should have been.

  Then more memories came flooding in: the pain, the fear. They seemed remote, however, held at bay, their sting blunted. My brain probably was still riding nanomeds that kept my emotions in check.

  “Am I . . . am I . . . ?”

  Shit. I didn’t know how to ask it.

  “Are you a zombie?” he asked, and gave me another quick grin. “Does it matter?”

  “Hell, yeah, it matters!” Then I remembered I was talking to an officer. “Sir.”

  “You have all your memories? You remember yourself as a kid? Boot camp? Corps School?”

  I remembered floating off the ice-locked Maine coast, cradling Paula’s head in my lap. “Yeah . . .”

  “Then you’re the same person you were. It took—I think they said three hours to get you back up to the Clymer. They had a heartkeeper in you sooner than that, though. Maybe ten minutes after you died.”

  Heartkeepers were inserts that kept the heart beating and the blood flowing. Once they managed to get BVEs and a load of Freitas respirocytes into my . . . corpse, the heartkeeper would have kept me alive.

  It really depended on how much brain damage there’d been when the blood had not been circulating.

  I did still feel like “me.”

  “Your medical report says there was some minor brain damage, easily corrected in surgery,” the nurse went on. “I’m no philosopher and I don’t know what the theologians would say, but I’d say you’re the same person.”

  “That’s . . . good.”

  “Whoever you are, you’ve become something of a celebrity, you know.”

  It took a moment for the nurse’s words to sink in. “Wait a minute. Celebrity? What do you mean?”

  “Once the Marines seized the planet and grew a couple of planetary batteries, the Qesh fleet pulled back out of range, then asked to parlay. They wanted to know who the human was who saved the life of their lord high muckety-muck when he got shot down on Bloodworld. Admiral Talbot ran through the computer records for the op so far, and your name popped up.”

  That Qesh pilot I’d pulled out of the downed Roc. He’d been some sort of Jacker big shot? It was news to me.

  “We were going to let you sleep until we could grow your new leg,” the nurse went on, “but we’ve had a formal request from the Qesh.”

  What the hell? “A formal request?”

  “We’ve been negotiating with them for four days, now. And they insist they want to meet you.”

  This was all going a bit too fast for me. “Wait, because I rescued one of their warriors?”

  “Don’t ask me.” The nurse shrugged. “I just work here. But you seem to have impressed someone.”

  I wondered if that meant another damned medal.

  I’d spent a lot of time thinking about the Qesh.

  The Encylopedia Galactica entry on them lists their dominant culture as “clan/hunter/warrior/survival.” That means, as I understand the JKRS classification code, something like this:

  J: The dominant society arose out of clan relationships, family groupings built around interrelated reproductive groups. Clans, in turn, built networks of alliances and political support groups supporting a dominant clan or family.

  K: The species arose from more primitive hunter cultures, meaning they were organized around clan collectives working together to bring down and kill prey animals to feed the social group. The skill of individual hunters almost certain
ly served to enhance the political status of the clan leaders.

  R: The dominant culture has survived through or has encouraged participation in warfare. Concepts such as honor, courage, and duty might well play an important part in clan focus and standing.

  S: A key concept within the cultural mindset is survival, which could mean that they felt threatened by other cultures, or simply that other cultures that might pose a threat should be eliminated in the name of societal survival.

  At least that was our best guess. It’s always difficult to translate alien experiences, alien emotions, alien evolution into terms understandable by humans—and for “difficult” read “damned near impossible.” Popular fiction sims and downloads are filled with characters who supposedly hail from “alien warrior cultures,” and these generally turn out to be thinly disguised Celts or Romans or Vikings or similar human civilizations, cultures pulled out of Earth’s history, and have little to do with societies that have evolved elsewhere, on alien worlds, and beneath alien suns very, very different from ours.

  Ever since we first met the Qesh back in 2186, we’ve been trying to get a handle on them, trying to figure out what makes them tick. Calling them a “warrior culture” might help us understand their obvious militancy, their warlike nature, their love of titanic warships, their willingness to turn the surface of once-habitable worlds into glass.

  But we don’t really understand them.

  I think that point really drove itself home for me when I saw those human prisoners on Bloodworld, tied together and lined up at the rim of the crater the Qesh were nano-devouring into the rock. At first, I tried to work it through by thinking in terms of warriors and hunters, but somehow that approach just didn’t work. For humans, warrior generally carries the connotations of honor and duty, the image, perhaps, of Rousseau’s noble savage. Deliberately torturing prisoners to death has more in common with Attila’s Huns—or Torquemada’s Inquisition—than with noble savages. In the same fashion, hunter generally assumes sportsmanship, patience, and skill, or the sleek beauty of a leaping jaguar—not the bleak institutional horror of Hitler’s death camps.

  What made the Qesh tick? The question was gnawing at me there on the ward—had been gnawing at the back of my brain since that first battle outside Salvation.

  I was beginning to think that I might see a little of the pattern.

  Suppose the Qesh saw themselves as superior to other species, superior to humans, in the same way that humans saw themselves compared to dogs—and that, in turn, meant that human worlds and humans themselves belonged to them, that they could do to us what they wanted. From the Qesh perspective, we would have no rights.

  Hell . . . the concept of rights is purely human, a holdover from a simpler time when a beneficent deity bestowed unalienable rights upon His creation. Why would a species as alien as the Qesh think in terms of rights?

  Especially for the likes of us?

  I remembered what one of the human natives, Caleb, had told us. “They told the elders that the Bloodworld was theirs, and that we now belong to the Qesh! Lies of Satan! We belong to God, and none other!”

  But I retained in my mind two contradictory images of the Qesh—the Qesh herding helpless human prisoners into line above the nano-D pit, allowing them to be slowly and horribly dissolved, and the Qesh I’d seen inside the city of Salvation—one of them even speaking English. The first were treating human prisoners like animals, worse than animals. The second group had been mingling with humans, talking with the Salvation rulers with the help of an electronic translator, evidently helping the human government put down “banditry.”

  In human history, hunters started off as nomadic clans following the herds, but eventually they settled down. And they learned to domesticate livestock.

  No, I didn’t think that the Qesh were domesticating humans as food animals. Again, that’s one of the sillier tropes of popular download fiction—that and alien-human hybrid babies. Qesh and humans are just too different biochemically. The fact that they incorporated so much copper in their bone and muscle chemistries certainly meant that their flesh would be highly poisonous to us; I would need to do a full biochemical workup on them to be sure, but the chances were good that humans would be toxic to them as well.

  But suppose that the migratory Qesh had simply been looking for a pliable population that could be coerced into subservience?

  The Salvationists were convinced that they were living in the mythical Christian hell, serving time for the sins of Humankind. When the Qesh turned up, they proved to be reasonable stand-ins for demons or devils—whatever the ancient Christians thought were supposed to populate such a place.

  I remembered those spy-cam views of the interior of Salvation, of Qesh in battle armor patrolling passageways, of humans off to the side, some looking bored, some looking scared. Curious, I sent a search query through my in-head RAM, and brought back a snippet of overheard conversation—one of the Qesh invaders speaking with a human who obviously was some sort of leader in his community.

  “It is important”—the artificial voice of the Qesh—“to present the . . . how do you say . . . the people with an object lesson immediately, to prevent similar banditry in future.”

  And the human leader replied, “Of course, Lord.”

  Perhaps the situation on Bloodworld wasn’t as much about predarion invaders as it was about the human colonists and the struggle for power.

  Think about it. Humans had been on Bloodworld for sixty-five years. There might yet be a few geriatrics still alive who’d come to Gliese 581 IV on board the Outward Venture, but the vast majority would be second, third, and even fourth-generation natives of the planet. Conceived, born, and raised on Bloodworld, they would see that hell of storms and tidal waves and volcanic eruptions as home. Dangerous, perhaps, uncomfortable at times, but quite normal.

  The first generation had come with the common goal of escaping what they saw as a corrupt world, settling in hell to save humanity—or at least that’s what the rank-and-file colonists had been told, what they believed. They must have believed passionately, because nothing else would explain their willingness to carve out a new life in that almost literal hell. That kind of zeal and dedication, that closely bonding enthusiasm of what amounted to a group mind, would have kept the original colonists going—and perhaps their children as well.

  But what about the children’s children? And their children? None of them had ever seen Earth, save for through the records the colony elders had brought with them. Earth and its doomed, sinful billions meant nothing to them. Within four or five decades, the colony must have begun losing its focus, its purpose.

  The colony’s leaders might still believe the myth that had landed the group on Bloodworld, but it was also possible that a certain amount of cynicism had begun creeping into their worldview. The original leaders would be dead, probably, given their mistrust of modern medical technology, so the current rulers would be less interested in the colony’s “mission” to save Humankind than they would be in simply maintaining control, in staying in power. In the early stages of the colony’s growth, simply struggling to survive in that environment would have been challenge enough to keep the colony united.

  But humans are incredibly adaptable critters. Look at us! Even with paleolithic technology—tools of wood, bone, and stone—we worked our way into Earth’s environmental niches with astonishing adaptability, living, thriving, everywhere, from the edge of the polar icepack to the now-vanished jungles of Amazonia; from the Sahara Desert, before it was turned into a sea, to the Tibetan Plateau; from the Ethiopian Rift Valley to the gaspingly thin air of the Andes—before we had respirocytes.

  And once we developed some decent technology, my gods! From sea-floor habitats and ocean-surface megapoli to Geosynch, the Lunar caverns, Ice Station Pluto and the Oort Collectives, we built them all in the blink of an eye. The technology improved a bit more, and suddenly we were spilling out across interstellar space to Chiron, to Valhal, to Mo
rrigen, to Nubes de Cielo, all environments as different from Earth—and each other—as Earth is from Bloodworld.

  And back on Earth we were daring to battle the advance of the New Ice Age with microwaves beamed from orbit. Until we discovered the Arean permafrost biota, we’d seriously considered terraforming Mars. Now there are corporations back there planning the transformation of Luna from barren and airless waste to living world.

  The Bloodworld’s environment, to the third-generation colonists, would be as much home now as the icepack is to the Inuit, as the Alto Plano is to the Inca, or as the Kalahari is to the !Kung.

  People being people, once they became adapted to life on Bloodworld, the colonists must have begun losing some of their tightly focused discipline, their sense of purpose, their willingness to endure hardship or privation for the sake of religious dogma. There would have been dissension, even rebellion. Within a religious context, there would have been new doctrines, new ideas, break-away sects. Heresies.

  Acquiescenists and Militants.

  As I thought about it, I decided that the colony’s leadership must have seen the arrival of the Qesh as . . . dare I say it, even to myself? Heaven-sent.

  Organized religion is always about control—the most serious form of control of all, the control of belief. If the rank-and-file Bloodworlders had been showing dissension—and Matthew and the Militants proved that they were—the Qesh-as-demons would have allowed the colony leaders to blame hardships on them, and to provide tangible proof that the myths that had brought humans to Gliese 581 IV were true.

  That seemed a good fit for what we knew so far about the worldview of the Bloodworld humans. What about the Qesh? They would know—or care—little to nothing about human religious beliefs. What was their take on things?