by Ian Douglas
Figured. The station AI could translate between us and the Brocs, but we couldn’t understand this group of humans. I studied them as my analyzer churned away. They weren’t Chinese, certainly. No epicanthic folds. Their skin was swarthy; Middle Eastern, possibly.
I took samples from the rest of them, eliciting reactions that ran the gamut from bored indifference to angry hostility.
A few minutes later, my analyzer started to send back data, scrolling it down through my in-head in a sudden cascade of alphanumerics. I couldn’t follow it all; genetics is not my specialty. But I caught a couple of key indicators as they flicked by: macro-haplogroup K . . . paragroup L . . . haplogroups R1a1 and R2 . . . mutation M198 . . .
The analyzer popped up a series of possible answers: a 65 percent probability of Central Asia, 22 percent South Asia, lesser percentages for portions of western China, Siberia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
I looked at the first man, who was still scowling at me. “Kazakh?” I asked.
His nostrils flared, and he barked at me in the same unknown harsh and vehement language. The others looked frightened.
“We know they speak English,” Aguirre told me. “Some of ’em, anyway.”
“Betcha that’s Turkic,” I told him. “Kazakh. Kyrgyz, Uzbek—one of those.”
“Damned Cackies,” Aguirre said.
I looked at the sullen prisoners. “We don’t know it’s the Caliphate, Sarge.”
“Aw, c’mon, Doc! Who the fuck else would it be?”
He had a point. The Central Asian Caliphate—the western name usually shortened to “CAC” and pronounced “cack”—was the Islamic theocracy sprawling from Azerbaijan to Sinkiang, notoriously volatile, notoriously anti-Western, notoriously anti-technology. They were known to sponsor neo-Ludd terror all over the world. Allah, after all, hates anything not found in the holy Qur’an, including nanomedical life extension, educational downloads, and anything at all that changes the eternal heavens.
I opened a channel to operations HQ back at Synchorbit. They had access to more complete haplogroup records than I did through the Net, and would be able to confirm the results. As the results came back down then link, a call came through my in-head from Major Lansky, the Battalion CO. “This is . . . who? Carlyle?”
“HM2 Elliot Carlyle, sir,” I said. “Second Platoon Corpsman.”
“What’s this stuff you’re uploading?”
“DNA readouts from five prisoners, sir. They would appear to be Central Asian.”
“Shit. You’re sure of that?”
“About sixty-five percent, sir.”
“Okay. I—” The transmission cut off in mid-sentence.
I waited, wondering what was going on up-El. Abruptly, a sign popped up in my in-head: SECURITY BREACH: CONVERSATION TERMINATED.
What the fuck? And then something queried my AI.
Normally my in-head software handles routine e-queries, everything from sales pitches for masculine enhancement genetic prosthetics to calls from home. It’s got a fairly comprehensive response list that lets it act as my personal secretary. It can even imitate me—audio and video—if need be, and most incoming traffic is either flagged for my attention or spam-slammed.
The thing is, nothing should have queried my personal AI while I was in the middle of a mission. Bad operational security, that. The only things that should be able to get through are military traffic or . . .
I slapped a trace on the query. I didn’t catch it . . . but I did get an ID.
GNN.
The Global News Network would have a particular interest in this mission, I imagined. Though we certainly hadn’t told them we were going in—why tip off the tangos who had access to GNN feeds on Capricorn Zeta?—the newsies knew about the station’s takeover, of course, and would have been flooding local virtual space with netbots and snoopers. There were reporters embedded with the unit, I knew, and—shit. They were up-El, up in Synchorbit with Major Lansky.
I felt a sinking feeling in my gut, something like a realization of impending doom.
“Carlyle!”
It was Singer. “Yes, sir.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m with the prisoners, sir. They’re clean. I, ah, went ahead and pulled a DNA analysis on them. They’re Central Asian . . . probably CAC.”
There was a long pause. “I ordered you to sweep them for nanobots, Carlyle, not play geneticist!”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“No buts. Get your ass in here!”
I looked at Aguirre. He wouldn’t have heard the conversation going on in my head, but the glazed look in my eyes would have told him I was talking with someone. “Gotta go,” I told him.
“Keep your ass covered, Doc,” he said. I wondered how he knew, or if that was just a lucky guess.
“In here” turned out to be Capricorn Zeta’s primary command center, two levels farther out from the rock. It was cramped and high tech, filled with microgravity consoles, bulkhead vidscreens, and couches with palmlinks on the armrests, so that mining personnel could connect directly with the facility’s computers and operational controls. A smaller version of the transplas window on the lounge deck looked down on Earth’s nightside. Glowing cities drifted past as the station orbited above them. A soft-glowing mass of cloud flickered and pulsed with lightning deep inside.
Singer was floating beside the main console, talking with a man in corporate utilities bearing the rank tabs of a senior administrator. A couple of command staff people floated nearby, obviously just released.
I thumped the side of the hatch. “HM2 Carlyle reporting as ordered, sir.”
Singer ignored me for a long moment, continuing his conversation. Then the admin guy nodded, said, “You’re the boss,” and pushed off for the hatch, followed by his staff. Singer turned then, glaring.
“Why did you link through to Synchorbit?” he demanded.
“I needed access to a better DNA library,” I told him. “The ones we have in-head aren’t that comprehensive.”
“What the hell were you doing running a DNA scan? That’s a job for our S-2.”
I started to reply, then stopped myself. Singer was furious, and if I said anything, anything at all, I was just going to make things worse.
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it, Doc! You broke SCP and got tagged by a fucking newsie!”
It was worse than I’d imagined. Secure Communications Protocol is like radio silence, but more flexible. It allows us to talk to others on our command Net, and query local, secure subnets, but not link in to unsecured networks or AIs. Breaking SCP during combat was serious, a potential court-martial offense.
“Sir, I thought Ops Command was secure.”
Singer started to give a sharp retort, then softened a bit. The scowl didn’t leave his face, though. “Normally it would be, Doc. But those damned embeds are up there now, following the hijacking. And they obviously had netbots on the prowl. You understand? You bypassed the chain of command, you idiot, and you told Major Lansky we had CAC prisoners on an open channel. Don’t you think GNN would be all over that?”
“Yes, sir.”
I could just imagine. As soon as the neo-Ludd ultimatum had hit the GNN newsfeeds hours before, the whole world would have been wondering who was behind it, what government. Neo-Ludds couldn’t get to orbit without help. Who had helped them?
There were probably netbots—electronic agents on the Net programmed to listen for certain key words and phrases. Hijack. Marines. Terrorists. DNA. That kind of thing. When they picked up something of interest, they would start probing, looking for more information. That tag I’d sensed had been a netbot shooting down the open radio channel and into my in-head, copying my personal contact data, and s
lipping away again. With my name, rate, rank, and number, they would be able to figure out who I was, know I was with Deep Recon 7, the Black Wizards . . . 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 1MARDIV, and that was news. It would be all over the Net; hell, it was probably all over the Net already.
And Deep Recon really hates that kind of publicity.
In short, I was now in a world of shit.
Chapter Four
At least I wasn’t under arrest, or even restricted to base. Twenty-four hours later I was up-El, 35,800 kilometers above Earth’s equator at the Cayambe Space Elevator’s Geosynch Center. The place is a bustling hive of space industry, communications, orbital hotels, and offices. From the Universe View of the sprawling Hilton Orbital Wheel, I could look down at the shrunken Earth with the nearby elevator cable vanishing with perspective into the blue planet’s center. She was a little past full at the moment, spanning just twenty degrees. If I held up both hands side by side at arm’s length with fingers outstretched, I could just about block half of her from view. Off to one side, several of the big, free-orbiting solar reflector mirrors and microwave antenna arrays hung in open space, angled to reflect sunlight onto Earth’s northern hemisphere. Bit by bit, in tiny steps, we were winning against the grinding southward advance of the ice sheets.
At least that’s what the newsnets told us. Sometimes I wasn’t sure I believed them. A good third of the planet’s northern hemisphere was locked in ice, gleaming in the glare of daylight. I stifled a small, cold shudder.
“What is it, E-Car?” Leighton asked, looking at me askance. “You okay?”
Sergeant Joy Leighton, U.S. Marines, was a friend . . . a very dear friend. Military regulations frowned on enlisted personnel becoming sexually involved, but military regulations rarely acknowledged that personnel are human, not machines. Joy and I had been in combat together, out on Bloodworld, and that counts for a lot. I’d patched her up and dragged her ass out of a firefight. That counted for more. And as long as we didn’t go around flaunting the relationship, rubbing it in the brass’s collective face, no one was going to say a word.
“I’m fine, No-Joy,” I told her, lying through my teeth. “Just fine.”
“I think they’re going to let that whole security-breach thing drop,” she said, knowing I was lying, but misunderstanding the reason for it. “Everything is too public now. They don’t want to be seen as punishing a genu-wine hero.”
I didn’t answer right away, watching the Earth instead. The Hilton’s viewing lounge counter-rotated to the rest of the habitat, providing a half-G of spin gravity but cancelling the dizzying spin of the rest of the universe.
“What hero?” I asked after a moment. “Taking down Capricorn Zeta? We all did that.”
“Actually, I was thinking about the Hero of Bloodworld, the doc who brokered peace with the Qesh. You’re still a highly newsworthy commodity, you know. GNN probably had a whole army of newsbots programmed to follow you, sniff you out as soon as you popped onto an unsecure channel. In any case . . .” She leaned over and kissed me. “You’re still my hero.”
“Ooh-rah,” I said quietly, a lackluster rendition of the old Marine battle cry.
“That’s not what’s bugging you, is it?” she asked. “It’s Paula again.”
No-Joy is sharp. Paula Barton was the woman I almost married back in ’forty-four when I was still in Hospital Corps training . . . until she had a stroke while we were in a robot-skippered day sailer off the Maine Glacier. The boat’s first-aid suite didn’t include a CAPTR device—most civilians don’t have access to that technology on a routine basis—and by the time the EMTs got to her, I’d lost her.
I always thought of her when I looked down the North American ice sheet like that. Paula’s death and the ice—the two were inextricably locked together for me now. I hated the ice now, as if it were a living, despicable thing.
“I suppose it is,” I admitted. “Damn it, I just felt so fucking helpless.”
I don’t think Joy resented Paula, the fact of her. I’d been able to talk to her about what had happened off the Maine coast, about what I still felt.
Or didn’t feel. Often all I felt was numb, even yet, three years later.
“There was nothing you could have done, Elliot.” She’d only said those words a few thousand times since I’d met her.
“I know. I know.” I managed a grin. “It’ll be better when they finally manage to melt the damned ice.”
The New Ice Age got its official start in the late twenty-first century as a result of—of all things—what used to be called global warming. Rising temperatures all over the planet—but especially in the polar regions—began melting the polar ice caps, especially the one that covered the Arctic Ocean. Cold, fresh water poured out through the Davis Strait into the North Atlantic, short-circuiting the Atlantic Conveyor—that part of the globe-circulating currents that brought warm water north from the tropics, keeping New England and Northern Europe livable.
The last time that happened was twelve thousand years ago. The planet was warming, the ice sheets of the Pleistocene were retreating, and suddenly the ice collapsed—quite possibly as the result of a small asteroid impact—and fresh water poured into the Atlantic. The Earth plunged back into a short-lived ice age known today as the Younger Dryas. The megafauna of North America—mammoth and mastodon and short-faced bear and countless other species—abruptly went extinct. Human communities known as the Clovis people, who’d crossed in skin boats along the edge of the ice from Europe hunting seals, were wiped out as well, or forced to migrate to the American Southwest. The renewed cold and drought may well have stimulated the growth of agriculture in the near East when climactic change led to starvation among hunter-gatherer cultures.
The same thing was happening today. This time, however, instead of Clovis spear points and skin boats, we had the space elevator and orbital solar arrays. The North Hemisphere Reclamation Project had been reflecting sunlight and beaming high-energy microwaves onto the ice for well over a century now, but carefully. The Commonwealth didn’t want to eliminate the ice entirely; that would toss us back into the bad old days of the pre-ice twenty-first century, when cities like Miami, D.C., New York, and London all were in danger of being swallowed up entirely or in part by the rising sea levels. The idea was to gradually increase the temperatures of both the ice sheets and the cold North Atlantic until a comfortable balance was struck, a balance that could be indefinitely maintained by the Commonwealth’s NHRP and applied global climate engineering. It was the biggest-scale piece of applied engineering ever attempted, and the one that promises to affect a larger percentage of Earth’s population than any other by far.
And there’s just a chance that it killed Paula.
Oh, the theory is largely discredited now after some four centuries of study—the idea that high-frequency microwaves can cause everything from cancer and Alzheimer’s to high blood pressure and stroke. There’s never been a provable link, but the neo-Ludds and other anti-space groups often trot out various statistics that show increases in those conditions when they started beaming microwaves down from Geosynch along with reflected visible light. Paula and I were out on the fringes of the beam, which should have been diffuse enough not to cause a problem.
Still, sometimes I wonder how much I have in common with some of the neo-Luddite crazies. It would be so easy to blame the NHRP and its synchorbital microwave arrays for my pain.
“You know, Doc,” Joy said gently, emphasizing the title, “there’s stuff you can do for that. Nanomeds and neuroengineering and all of that.”
I nodded, but said nothing. Of course there’s stuff that can be done, just as we can block the doloric receptors in the brain and switch off physical pain. Grief is just chemicals in the system, same as love and anger and any other emotion you care to name. You lose a loved
one, and the pituitary gland at the base of the brain secretes adrenocorticotrophin hormone—ACTH—which is part of the fight-or-flight response. Among other things, ACTH acts on the adrenal glands, perched on top of the kidneys, to release a cascade of reactions that lead to the production of a steroid hormone called cortisone.
Normally, cortisone switches off the production of ACTH, but if the stress, the grief, continues, cortisone levels rise . . . and rise . . . and rise, eventually reaching ten or twenty times their normal levels.
And that does all sorts of nasty things, among them shutting down our thalamus and switching off the production of leukocytes. No white blood cells, no way to fight bacteria, viruses, and even precancerous cells.
There’s also CRF—corticotrophin releasing factor. That is a stress-related neurotransmitter and peptide hormone that shoots sky high with the loss of a loved one. It stimulates the production of ACTH, and can lead to a number of truly nasty conditions, including major depression. You find elevated levels of CRFs in the spinal fluid of most suicides.
I’d gone through therapy after Paula’s death—been required to do it, I should say. They’d given me the option of nanomeds—including CRF nanoblockers—to kill the emotional pain associated with my memories of Paula. Problem was, I didn’t want to lose Paula. I know it sounds crazy, but the memories, and the emotional pain connected with them, were all I had left, and I didn’t want to give them up.
So I went on a nanomed routine aimed at boosting my immune response, circulatory support, and anticarcinogen ’bots. Treating the symptoms rather than the cause, yeah, but at least I wouldn’t die of grief, as a lot of other people still do. As for the grief itself, well, lots of other people were able to get through it, had been getting through it since long before nanomeds and thalamic receptor blocking. I would get over it. Eventually.
In the meantime, I had my career in the Hospital Corps, and I had Joy, and if I occasionally felt overwhelmed by grief or by those nightmare memories of helplessness when Paula had her stroke, well, that was all part of the territory, as my father likes to say. He’s senior VP of research and development for General Nanodynamics, and he’s the one who suggested I go into the Hospital Corps in the first place. Out on the frontier, interacting with newfound cultures and civilizations, that’s where Humankind will learn new technologies, develop new nanopharmaceuticals, and make new fortunes.