Battlespace

by Ian Douglas

  For a moment, he wondered if they would get into trouble—fighting in a civilian establishment. Fuck it! They started it!…

  But then a sharp, hissing static filled Garroway’s ears…his mind and thoughts. Staggered, he raised his hands to his ears, trying unsuccessfully to block the literally painful noise. His vision began to fuzz out as well, blurring and filling with dancing, staticky motes of light.

  An implant malfunction? That was nearly unthinkable, but he didn’t know what the civilian techelms might have done to his Marine system.

  “What’s…happening?…” he heard Eagleton say. The other Marines, too, had been stricken. That elevated the static from malfunction to enemy action.

  But who was the enemy? The civilians surrounding them? That didn’t seem likely.

  “You are in violation of programmed operational parameters. Hostile thought and/or action against civilians is not permitted. Desist immediately.”

  The voice, gender-neutral and chillingly penetrating, rose above the static.

  “Huh? Who’s that?”

  “This is the social monitor AI currently resident within your cereblink. Hostile thought and/or action against civilians is not permitted. Desist immediately.”

  “What AI?” Womicki demanded loudly. “What’s goin’ on?”

  The shrill hiss grew louder and louder, driving Garroway to his knees. Anna Garcia collapsed beside him, unconscious.

  And a moment later he joined her….

  Police Holding Cell

  Precinct 915

  East Los Angeles, California

  2312 hours, PST

  It had been, Captain Martin Warhurst thought, inevitable. Marines back from a deployment—especially one as long and as rugged as the mission to Lalande 21185—needed to go ashore and let off some steam. His people had fought damned hard and damned well on Ishtar; they deserved a bit of downtime.

  But downtime too often turned to fighting, chemical or nanoincapacitation, and rowdy behavior frowned upon by the civilian establishment.

  The guard led him down a curving passageway to one of a number of holding cells, bare rooms walled off by thick transplas barriers. This one was occupied by twenty or thirty men, with expressions ranging from dazed to sullen. Four, however, recognized him immediately and came to their feet.

  “Captain Warhurst!”

  “You boys okay?”

  “A little fuzzy yet, sir,” Garroway said.

  “Yeah,” Womicki added. “Sir, you gotta get us out of here. These civilians are freakin’ crazy!”

  “What happened?”

  Garroway tapped the side of his head. “Not sure, sir. Things got a little tight at a party we were at. Next thing I know, a voice in my head is telling me I’m in violation. And then…lights out.”

  Warhurst nodded. “Social monitor.”

  “Yeah, but what is it, sir?” Eagleton wanted to know. “I don’t remember giving permission to have anyone tamper with my ’link!”

  “It was part of your agreement when you got to leave the base. Remember thumbing a nonaggressive clause?”

  “Sure,” Lobowski said, leaning up against the transparency. The plastic was several centimeters thick, but the speaker system let them talk and be heard. “It said to stay out of trouble. We figured, ‘Hey, no sweat. We’re not lookin’ for trouble.’”

  “Did you read the fine print?”

  “What fine print?” Womicki said. “It was a download.”

  “Well, you should have heard someone telling you that you were being given Class 5 nanoingests.”

  “You mean when they gave us something to drink?” Garroway asked. “I didn’t hear anything about nano in the stuff.”

  “Mm. Well, we’ll check that out later.”

  “What kind of nano, sir?” Womicki asked.

  “Short-term autodegradable. Chelates with your current implant and creates a temporary low-grade AI that acts as a kind of watchdog. You get out of line, it puts you to sleep.”

  “Shit!”

  “Things have changed a bit since we were out on Ishtar,” Warhurst told them. “The brass is concerned about how we behave in public.”

  “So they feed us monitor nano?” Garroway said, bitter. “Such a splendid reflection of civilian respect for us. Sir.”

  “Like I said, things have changed.”

  “There were two women with us, sir,” Garroway said. “Vinton and Garcia.”

  “Staff Sergeant Dunne is springing them, Garroway. I’m here for you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me. You’ll be facing a mast for disorderly conduct.”

  “But sir, they started it!”

  “Freeze it down, Garroway. You boys put your foot in it. Part of my agreement with the authorities is that you go up before the Man. Copy?”

  “Yes, sir. Copy.” He swallowed. “Sir?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did they make you take that monitor nano for you to come down here?”

  Warhurst grinned. “What do you think, Marine?”

  “I don’t know, sir. You’re an officer and a gentleman and all that.”

  “I had to take it, son. No exceptions. If the Marine Commandant was coming down here, they’d make him take a drink of the stuff. I don’t think they trust the devil dogs out of the kennel without a leash.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll dissolve and be out of your system within forty-eight hours.”

  “I’m very glad to hear that, sir.”

  “Open it up,” Warhurst growled at the guard.

  The guard touched a control at his belt, and a panel in the transparency slid aside. Garroway, Womicki, Lobowski, and Eagleton all walked out of the cell.

  The Marines were wearing bright lime-green prison utilities, unlike the civilians in the holding cell. “Sir, about our uniforms….” Womicki began.

  “I know. They told me at the front desk.”

  “Sir, we were robbed!”

  According to the report he’d seen coming in, Raphael security forces had arrived at the Starstruck to find all six Marines unconscious and naked. There was nothing unusual in that, perhaps, so far as the condecology police were concerned, and they’d turned them over to the East LA police without comment. The Marines had regained consciousness an hour later in the police infirmary, insisting that someone at the party had taken their things, including their asset cards.

  The police had already put a stop on the cards. As for the uniforms, there wasn’t much that could be done. Warhurst shook his head. What the hell did civilians want with Marine Class A’s? Costumes for a costume ball?

  Or maybe it had just been a damned prank.

  The guards led them back to the front receiving area, where a clerk offered a screen panel for Warhurst’s thumbprint. “Thumb here, sir. And here.”

  “I’ll have someone return the prison uniforms later.”

  “Don’t bother,” a beefy police sergeant said. “They’re disposables.”

  “Okay. These people have any effects to sign out?”

  “No, sir, They came in stripped bare.” The man smirked. “You Marines really like to party, huh?”

  “These Marines were robbed, Sergeant. I will be filing a report to that effect.”

  The man shrugged massive shoulders. “Suit yourself. But maybe next time your boys and girls won’t come where they’re not wanted, tendo?”

  “Yeah.” Warhurst said, his voice tight. “We tendo.”

  He’d been warned. Things had changed in the twenty years they’d been away.

  And in some ways, things hadn’t changed much at all.

  4

  7 NOVEMBER 2159

  Navy/Marine XT Training Facility

  Fra Mauro, Mare Imbrium, Luna

  0920 hours GMT

  Hospitalman Second Class Phillip K. Lee was trying to run, but he was having a bit of trouble. His feet kept leaving the ground, turning him into a small low-altitude spacecraft, and h
e was having a hard time controlling his vector.

  Overhead, Earth hung half-full in a midnight sky, an achingly beautiful glory of blue and white; the sun was just above the horizon at Lee’s back, and the shadows he and the dust cloud cast stretched for long meters across a flat and barren plain.

  “Slow down, damn it!” he heard over his helmet headphones. “What are ya tryin’ to do, bounce into orbit?”

  His feet hit powdery gray dust, kicking up a spray of the stuff. He tried to stop, overbalanced, and tumbled onto the ground. For a moment, he lay there, listening to the rasp of his own breathing. Readouts beneath his visor showed the workings of both his suit and his body. His heart rate and respiration were up, but otherwise he was okay. His armored suit, built to take rough usage in the field, was intact.

  Good. Because if it wasn’t, he was in deep trouble.

  Awkwardly, he tried to roll over. He was wearing Mark VIII vac armor, bulky and massive. In some ways, it was a self-contained spacecraft. And he was having some trouble developing the coordination and skills he needed to fly the damned thing.

  “Lee, you fucking idiot!”

  “Sorry, Gunnery Sergeant,” he said. “Got a bit carried away there.”

  “You get carried away in this environment, sailor,” the voice told him with a growl, “and you are dead. Move slow. Move deliberate. Move methodical. Know what the fuck you’re doing, and why.”

  Well, he knew what he was doing. He was trying to reach the form of a space-suited Marine sprawled in the dust eighty meters ahead. And why?

  Well, he was a Navy hospital corpsman. And that’s what corpsmen did, even if this was a particularly realistic bit of training, rather than a real combat deployment.

  Carefully, he rose on unsteady feet and began moving forward again, more cautiously this time. Under lunar gravity, his body weight plus his armored suit and equipment weighed less than 24 kilos…but it still massed 144, which meant that once he got himself moving in any direction, stopping or turning could be a bit tricky. He’d done this sort of thing plenty of times in simulation…but this was his first time in a suit working in hard vacuum.

  It was tough to see his target. Marine chamelearmor responded to ambient lighting and reflected the colors and forms of the environment, allowing it to blend in with the background to an amazing degree. The effect wasn’t perfect in a complicated environment like a city or forest, but the surroundings here were simple: stark black sky and gray powder dust. At this range, Lee couldn’t see his target at all with his own eyes; his helmet display, responding to a suit transponder, threw a bright green reticule onto his visor to mark the target’s position.

  Moving more deliberately now, he crossed the gently rolling regolith, following his own leaping shadow. Ahead, a featureless mound, one among many, resolved itself into a space-suited male figure, lying on his side.

  He put on the metaphorical brakes before he reached the body, dropping to a kneeling position as he came to a halt in a spray of powder-fine dust. The patient had his back to Lee. He pulled the man over, peering down into the helmet visor. A fist-sized hole high in the right shoulder was leaking air; Lee could see the sparkle of ice crystals dancing above the tear and see crimson blood bubble as it welled up into a vacuum and froze. An ugly mass of frozen blood partly filled the wound.

  “You’re gonna be okay, mac,” he called over the combat frequency. “Hang on and we’ll get you patched right up!” There was no response—not that he was really expecting one. The patient’s suit display on his chest showed winking patterns of red, green, and yellow. The suit breach was sealed around the wound, but the heaters were out, commo was out, and O2 partial pressure was dropping fast.

  The suit’s AI was still working, though. Lee pulled a cable connect from the left sleeve of his own armor and snicked it home in the receptacle at the side of the patient’s helmet. A second later, a full readout on the patient’s condition was scrolling down through his awareness, the words overlaid on the lower-right side of his visual field. The wound, he learned, had been caused by a probable laser hit estimated at 0.8 megajoule. The bolt had burned through his shoulder armor, which had scattered much of the energy. There was no exit hole, so the energy that had not been dispersed by armor or the explosive release of fluid from superheated tissue had stayed put, cooking muscle and bone. Nasty.

  Lee began going through the oft-practiced checklist. The challenge with giving combat field first-aid to someone in a vacuum was that you had to work through the guy’s suit. On Earth—or in an Earthlike environment—the order of medical priorities was fairly straightforward: restore breathing, stop catastrophic bleeding, treat for shock…and only then tend to such lesser concerns as immobilizing broken bones or bandaging wounds. The old mnemonic “ABC” established the order of treatment: airway, breathing, circulation. First establish an open airway, then restore breathing, and finally stop the bleeding and treat the shock caused by blood loss and trauma.

  That order held true in space as well, but things became a lot more complicated. Suit integrity was the first concern; the larger the hole in a Marine’s vac armor, the faster and more explosive the loss of air. In space combat, a corpsman also had to be part suit mechanic. Keeping a Marine’s space armor alive was vital to keeping the Marine inside alive as well.

  Mark VIII vac armor was smart enough to seal off a hole to prevent pressure loss. A spongy, inner layer of the armor laminate was a memory plastic designed to press tightly around the man’s body at the point of a leak, serving both as tourniquet and as a seal against further air loss. Sometimes, though, a complete seal just wasn’t possible. This one, for instance. The suit had formed a seal around the hole in order to maintain internal pressure, but the laser burst had punctured the Marine’s thoracic cavity…and penetrated the left lung as well. Air was spilling from the Marine’s bronchial tubes into his chest cavity—a condition called pneumothorax—and the air, mixed with blood, was bubbling away into space through the punctured suit. As the air drained away, the condition became the opposite of pneumothorax—vacuthorax—and massive lung tissue trauma.

  And suddenly, things were getting much worse very quickly. As Lee rolled the armored form over, a crusty, glittering patch of frozen blood and water clinging to the wound suddenly dissolved in a spray of red vapor. He caught his mistake immediately. When he’d changed the Marine’s position, he’d moved the wound from shade into direct sunlight. The wound had been partly plugged with blood-ice, but in the harsh light of the sun just above the eastern lunar horizon, the temperature on that part of the armor soared from around -80° Celsius to almost boiling. In seconds, the ice plug had vaporized, reopening both the wound and the partly plugged hole in the armor.

  There was no time for anything but plugging that leak. Reaching into the case mounted on his right thigh, he pulled out a loaded sealant gun, pressed the muzzle up against the hole, and squeezed the trigger. Gray goo, a quick-setting polymer heavily laced with programmed nano, squirted over the hole and wound together, almost instantly firming to a claylike consistency, then hardening solid. He checked the Marine’s suit readout again. Internal pressure was low, but steady.

  But the guy was still bleeding internally—probably hemorrhaging into his thoracic cavity—and his heart was fluttering, atrial fibrillation. The patient was on the verge of going into arrest.

  Lee reached for another tool, a Frahlich Probe, and slammed the needle down against the armor, directly above the heart. The probe’s tip was housed in a nano sheath, which literally slipped between the molecules of the man’s vac armor, then through skin, muscle, and bone to penetrate the patient’s chest while maintaining an almost perfect airtight seal. Leaving the needle in place, he pulled off the injector, then attached a reader. The device fed his implant a noumenal image of a glistening red, pulsating mass—the beating heart—and let him position the tip of the needle more precisely, at the sinus node at the top of the right atrium. Easy…easy…there!

  Now he could pr
ogram the probe to administer a rapid-fire series of minute electric shocks directly into the sinus node, regularizing the beat. He watched the readout a moment longer as the probe’s computer continued to feed electrical impulses into the patient’s heart. The fibrillation ceased, the heartbeat slowing to a fast but acceptable 112 beats per minute.

  The patient’s breathing was labored. He couldn’t tell, but he suspected that the left lung had collapsed. Certainly, it had been badly damaged by both wound and vacuum trauma. With the wound sealed over, the best Lee could do for the patient now was evacuate him.

  “Nightingale, Nightingale,” he called. “This is Fox-Sierra One-niner. I need an emergency evac. Patient has suffered massive internal vacuum trauma. Suit leak is plugged and wound is stable. Heart monitor in place and operational. Over!”

  A voice came back through his implant a moment later. “Copy that, Fox-Sierra. This is Alpha Three-One, inbound to your position, ETA two-point-five mikes. Ready your patient for pickup, and transmit suit data, over.”

  “We’re ready to go at this end. Uploading data now.”

  He spent the time checking for other wounds, monitoring the patient’s heart and vitals, and entering the computer code that caused the man’s armor to go rigid, locking him immobile against the chance of further injury. The patient’s condition continued to deteriorate, and Lee was beginning to guess that he’d made a wrong choice, a wrong guess somewhere along the line.

  His patient was dying.

  Two and a half minutes later, a silent swirl of lunar dust marked the arrival of Alpha 3/1, a UT-40 battlefield transport converted to use as a medevac flier. Bulbous and insect-faced, it settled to the lunar regolith on spindly legs. A pair of space-suited men dropped from the cargo deck and jogged over to Lee and the patient.

  Lee stepped back as they attached a harness to the rigid armor. He was already scanning for another casualty. His suit scanners were giving him another target, bearing one-one-seven, range two kilometers….