by Ian Douglas
There was a flash, and Kari was pitched backward. The two armored Gykr rushed forward out from under the loom of the ice strider, gathering her up.
“Fire!” Hancock yelled. “Commence fire! Aim for the strider’s legs!”
Beside me, Tomacek triggered his plasma weapon, slamming bolts of super-heated plasma into the war machine’s dark armor. A pair of bolts snapped from the TMV behind us, searing through the air above our heads. I saw a hit on the strider . . . and then another. . . .
But the armored Gucks were already dragging Kari Harris inside the machine, and in another moment, it had turned and was picking its way across the icescape, moving back toward the Gykr encampment.
A few seconds had passed . . . and we were now at Delta-Romeo One.
Chapter Twelve
So just why is it that Navy Corpsmen are expected to take point in First Contact situations with the Marines? I suppose it’s the technical focus. Time was, a few centuries ago, when Corpsmen were the medics for both the U.S. Marines and the Navy—the water Navy, before we got into space in a big way. Corpsmen were the natural ones to become the technical assistants when the Marines deployed to an alien world, taking care of the environmental scans and exobiological workups so that the Marines could concentrate on what they were best at—combat. They’re fiercely proud of the old saying, Every Marine a rifleman.
So wherever the Marines go, the Navy Hospital Corps goes, too, providing medical support, handling the planetary environmental studies, and, for the past century or so, doing First Contact work as well.
Normally, First Contact was the job of highly trained specialists—folks like Dr. Montgomery and Dr. Ortega—but the reality of the matter was that specialists like that rarely are in the right place at the right time. A Marine combat team pulling a recon on an alien planet was a lot more likely to encounter local intelligent life than the xenosophontological personnel and linguistic experts on a research starship.
So . . . okay, I understood the why. I still wished Montgomery and Ortega were here.
“Ship!” Hancock yelled. “Block them! Don’t let that strider rejoin the others!” Behind us, the TMV stirred, then lifted into the air. “Marines! By squads, low-level overleap, Squad One, now!”
We were going after Kari. Good enough. The Marines never leave anyone behind. But we were badly outnumbered, and this was one time when those proud words just might not be possible.
The TMV contingent had been broken into two squads—each with six Marines plus a Corpsman—and I was in First Squad. I triggered my M287 meta-thrusters, sailing into the violet sky in a long, low leap.
Controlling those damned things in flight is hard. You have to hold your body just so to keep your center of mass centered, and to avoid going into a nasty airborne tumble. I left the details to my armor’s AI, which juggled micro-bursts from my backpack to keep me on course, and warned me to shift my legs under me as I started to come down. I hit the ice with a jolt, but the M287 had already fired again, sending me off on another long, low-altitude flight. Around me, the rest of First Squad sailed through the thin air like manic, oversized locusts, closing on the fleeing Gykr ice strider.
The Misty Junior accelerated, passing overhead after the alien combat machine. Another bound . . . and another. We could see the strider ahead as the Misty overflew it, spun about, then drifted toward the ice, its dorsal turret snapping off shots at the Gykr machine. The strider took a direct hit forward and staggered back a step, taking the shock by flexing its jointed legs.
I took a final leap, cutting in my meta-thrusters for an extra boost that carried me in an arc that came down squarely on the strider’s back. I hit, bounced, and slid . . . scrabbling to maintain my balance and my hold on the curving, segmented dorsal armor of the thing. The entire body was only perhaps five meters long, the aft end curving down to point at the snow below. I grabbed hold of one of the starboard leg joints with one hand, using the other to swing my carbine around and aim the muzzle at the joint point-blank. The armor—some kind of extremely tough plastic, I thought, rather than metal—absorbed the laser pulse and didn’t even seem to get warm.
“Outta the way, Doc!” Masserotti said, crouching beside me. “Let the professionals do the job!”
Masserotti slapped a small nano-D charge against a starboard-side leg joint. Aguirre landed on the torso next, slapping down a second charge. The strider lurched then, taking another step, and I lost my balance. I fell three meters and landed in the snow with a jolt hard enough to hurt.
The Misty Junior had ceased its frantic barrage from ahead as armored Marines descended now on the back of the lurching Gykr machine. The strider opened up at the TMV with a triplet of bolts from its jutting mandibles, scoring two direct hits. The Misty drifted unsteadily toward the ice, smoke billowing from a hole in its flank. “Shit!” Hutchison yelled over the tactical channel. “That’s our ride home!”
“I’m monitoring the ship telemetry!” Hancock yelled. “It’s repairable! Keep on that strider!”
I opened fire with my carbine, but my half-megajoule pulses didn’t appear to be doing much good. Lasers do damage in two ways—through sheer heat, cutting molecular bonds, and through thermal shock, causing the target to explode as it heats suddenly and unevenly. Whatever the material that was sheathing that six-legged walker actually was, it appeared to be good at sucking in heat and distributing it evenly and efficiently, essentially drinking incoming coherent light and rendering it harmless.
Nano-D, though, was different. The charges planted against the leg joints went off along the strider’s starboard side in unison, each releasing a small black cloud of soot that clung to the machine’s side and leg mechanisms, clung and gnawed hungrily, dissolving armor, exposing inner workings . . . and then each of the three starboard legs began collapsing one by one. The strider tried taking another step, found no support as the last starboard leg snapped loose in a spray of parts and fragments.
“Ooh-rah! Take that you ugly sucker!” Tomacek yelled, as the machine arced over, falling forward and to the side, hitting with a thud against the ice and sending the Marines on its back tumbling. Hancock bounded up to the exposed underbelly of the thing, waving to me. “Carlyle! Get your PC over here!”
I triggered my thrusters for a short jump, landing next to him as I pulled my hand plasma cutter from my equipment belt. The device was just big enough to fit in my gauntleted hand, and was designed to free people trapped inside tangled wreckage. I pressed the back-spray shield against the smooth surface of the strider’s belly and triggered it. That armor might dissipate the heat from a laser pulse—but where a laser could flash-heat the target to a few thousand degrees, a plasma torch achieved and held a temperature of almost fifty thousand degrees. If we’d been in vacuum, I would have had to use a tank of inert gas to do the actual cutting, but the Mk. 80 plasma cutter could work with local atmosphere just fine, thank you. The small, attached tank of pressurized liquid O2 would feed the fire for the necessary few minutes.
And as I dragged the shield across the armor, a white-hot crevice opened in its track.
It wasn’t quite like cutting through butter, but I kept at it, lengthening the gash that was opening slowly in the heavy armor. Then, abruptly, the hatch popped open, the hatch through which the bastards had dragged Kari a few moments before. I jumped back as a massively armored thing leaped out of the opening.
I had a blurred impression of dark gray armor, of a hunched-over torso shorter and squatter than I was, of a stubby looking weapon swinging up to aim at my chest . . .
. . . and then three Marines with lasers plus Tomacek and his plasma gun were all firing together from near point-blank range, slamming energy bolts into the alien as it twisted and jittered in the crossfire. A second alien appeared behind the first, blundering into it from behind and going down in a thrashing tangle of limbs.
I saw a joint in the second alien’s torso armor flashing red in my in-head imaging. The AIs resident within the Marines�
�� armor were analyzing the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and painting their in-heads with targeting suggestions. I raised my carbine to take a shot, but Hancock put a laser bolt through the joint in the Gykr’s before I could react.
A third Gykr was scrambling out of a hatch in the strider’s head; Colby and Hutchison took care of that one. I was already going through the rear hatch calling for Kari.
“Kari! Kari, do you copy?”
The interior of the strider was pitch-black, though there was low-level illumination at IR wavelengths. I remembered the EG entry, which suggested that they could see into the near infrared. The interior compartment was more like a tunnel than anything else, narrow and insanely twisted. I had the unsettling feeling of crawling up into the intestinal tract of a giant dead spider.
I didn’t have far to go, fortunately. Kari was lying just behind the entry hatch, partly covered by one of the massively armored Gykr bodies. She’d been peeled open like an orange.
I gagged inside my helmet, struggling to keep the vomit down. Gods . . . what had they done to her in the few moments since her abduction? There was so much blood. . . .
The Gykr had used something—possibly their version of a cutting torch—to slice open Kari’s combat armor, though I saw no signs of burning or charring. Maybe they’d just been trying to remove her armor, but they’d gouged out chunks of her torso as well, and her right arm had been sliced off. I felt hot red fury rising with my gorge; the filthy Guck bastards . . .
“Is she okay?” Hancock asked from somewhere behind me. I was blocking his view in the narrow tunnel. “I’m not getting a readout.”
“She’s p-dead,” I told him. It was hard even to speak. “We need an S-tube, stat!”
P-dead—provisionally dead. One step shy of the real thing. Her body was a hacked-open mess and she’d lost a hell of a lot of blood, but if I could stabilize her brain there was still a chance, a small one, that we would have something to resuss later. I fired a shot of nano into her open torso, then began spraying in layer upon layer of skinseal. The sealant foam would harden to a rubbery consistency that would hold her exposed internal organs in place as well as close off leaking blood vessels. The damage was too massive for me to do much about it here, but if I could keep her condition from deteriorating any more, we had a slender chance. The nano I sent to her brain, with N-prog orders to begin stabilizing it and to make certain she stayed unconscious. That was one mercy; she appeared to have been unconscious, and hadn’t seen, hadn’t felt what the monsters had been doing to her.
“The Haldane is inbound,” Hancock told me. “Ten minutes.”
“Right.”
Another mercy. There were S-tubes on board the Haldane, and we wouldn’t need to risk transporting Kari up to orbit on a shuttle. With serious combat medical casualties, everything depends on how quickly you can get the patient into an operating room . . . and how well you can manage their condition while you’re getting them there.
Stabilizing canisters—we called them S-tubes—were designed to hold really serious casualties in medical stasis for as long as was necessary. Swarms of medical nanobots kept the patient in a deep coma, kept the circulatory system working, and repaired critical injuries in the brain or heart. It would boost the performance of her respirocytes too.
Freitas respiroctes are artificial blood cells—specialized nanobots designed to carry oxygen through the body and remove waste products, just like natural red cells. They’re one micron across and extremely efficient, each carrying 236 times as much oxygen as an organic red cell, and delivering it to straight to where it’s most needed—to heart muscle or the brain. All Marines carry several million of them circulating through their circulatory systems; with Freitas cells doing the heavy lifting, you can hold your breath for ten minutes or run a marathon without getting winded. Completely replace someone’s blood cells with the things, and that person could hold their breath for over an hour, or run at top speed for fifteen minutes without ever taking a breath.
And what’s most critical in serious battlefield trauma is protecting the brain. If the blood flow stops—as Kari’s had—you’ve got about four or five minutes before the brain becomes starved for oxygen, and individual neurons start to die. Kari’s brain functioning had been CAPTRed before the mission . . . but that wouldn’t do a damn thing if her brain had deteriorated to the point that it couldn’t receive a polytomographic download.
I used my N-prog to tell the newly injected nano to hook up with her respirocytes and increase their functional efficiency. I checked on her pain levels—there were some receptors firing, but she wasn’t feeling any of it, which was what was important. And I took a chance and dialed down her reticular activating system, her RAS, located in her brainstem. That would take Kari into a deeper coma . . . and make certain that she stayed there.
After that I applied more sealant to close off the remaining breaks in her armor—around her abdomen and her right shoulder. We weren’t in vacuum, thank God, so there’d been no explosive decompression. The planet’s atmosphere was about at half a bar, and composed mostly of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. I would need to be careful if I decided to boost her oxygen levels at all, and the CO2 hadn’t done her any favors in the time she’d been exposed to it, but there was nothing immediately corrosive in the gas mix to cause her serious harm. Her blood oxygen saturation level, as reported by the nano inside her body, was at 91 percent, a little on the low side, but nothing to worry about immediately. I would have to keep monitoring it. Blood pressure was 80 over 30, heart rate at 110. That was more worrying, a result of her having lost so much blood. I directed a few thousand nanobots already in her brainstem to increase her blood pressure by increasing her heart rate. That was another risk, but a calculated one. Her heart was already in tachycardia; having it pump faster was dangerous, but necessary to get her falling BP under control.
And after that all I could do was sit back on my heels and watch her . . . that and hate the monstrous little aliens who’d callously sliced her open like this. What had they been doing . . . a quick vivisection to learn about human anatomy? Or just curiosity about what we looked like and carelessness with a cutting tool? Jesus!
“Ship’s coming in,” Hancock warned.
I wiggled back out of the narrow tunnel, blinking in the glare of sunlight that was as dim and red as a sunset on Earth, but which seemed bright after the infrared dimness of the strider’s interior. Hancock and Masserotti gaped at me; the arms of my suit were coated in blood.
“She’s in bad shape,” I told them. “The bastards tried to cut her out of her armor, and didn’t do a very neat job of it. If we can get her into an S-tube, though, she has a chance.”
“Good job, Doc,” Hancock said.
“Don’t congratulate me until we know she’s going to make it,” I said. The words came out more harshly than I’d intended, but I was bitter and mad. I was also frustrated to the point of screaming. Outside of a few supportive things, there was nothing I could do for her. Gods, how long was it going to take to get the stabilizer canister here?
I could see the Haldane in the distance, slowly drifting our way. It appeared to be engaged in a running battle, however, its weapons turrets laying down a heavy fire across the distant ice. Research vessels like the Haldane were not heavily armed, but they did have weapons—a couple of side-mounted plasma cannon turrets, and a good thing, too. There was at least one other Guck strider, I remembered, as well as a number of ground troops still out there.
Burn them, I thought with a white-hot anger. Burn them all!
Two small, black delta shapes circled, dipped, and swooped around the larger research vessel—Marine A/S-40 Star Raiders that had been mounted on the ship’s hull aft of the TMAs. I didn’t know if there were any Marine pilots in the contingent on board Haldane, and it was possible that those two were operating under AI control. It was comforting, though, to know they were up there.
After a few more moments, the Haldane dr
ifted closer, lowering its bulk gently onto the ice. A ramp came down, and more Marines emerged. Two of them double-timed it toward the downed strider, lugging an S-tube between them. I had to go back inside the alien machine and use my plasma cutter to get Kari out from under the body of one alien and, yeah, I took a certain amount of vicious pleasure doing that. Then, as carefully as I could, I pulled her body back out through the hatch and lowered it to the ice.
“My God,” one of the Marines said as he positioned the S-tube next to her. “What happened to him?”
“Her,” I said, correcting him. I didn’t bother answering his question. With the open part of her armor filled with solidified foam packing, she didn’t look as gruesome as she had a moment ago, but there was still a hell of a lot of blood on her armor. Gently, I scooped her up and laid her in the open tube. Later, we would need to open it up and remove the armor and her utilities, make some tube insertions, and package her up once more, but I wasn’t going to do that out here.
The two Marines picked up the tube and started back toward the Haldane. I followed alongside, keeping track of Kari’s blood pressure and respirocyte function.
I’d been so busy for the past half hour that I’d scarcely taken note of my surroundings. The surface of GJ 1214 I looked identical to the ice cap growing over Earth’s northern Atlantic, between New England and Greenland. The sky overhead was a deep violet and clear, save for isolated clouds scudding past at a fairly high rate of speed. In the west, the bloated red sun was only just visible through and above a pall of violet and orange mist. I’d expected to see the edge of the permanent storm from here, but decided that the thunderheads must be below the horizon. I could certainly feel the effects, however, in the savage wind blowing in off the dayside ocean. We had to lean into the teeth of the wind to make any progress at all. I estimated that it was blowing a full gale, with surface winds of sixty or seventy kilometers per hour. We struggled into the lee of the grounded Haldane and the going became easier. We made it up the ship’s ramp and headed straight for sick bay.
