by Ian Douglas
“Interstellar?” I said. “You’re full of shit. This stuff’s rotting your gray cells.”
“Don’t be so sure about your diagnosis, Doc,” Lewis told me. “I heard the same thing from a buddy in Personnel.”
“You’re both full of it,” I said. “Why would they send us?”
“Our dashing good looks and high intelligence?”
“In your case, Doob, it probably has to do with a punishment detail. You on the Old Man’s shit list?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“So what’s supposed to be going down?”
Dubois grew serious, which was damned unusual for him. “The Qesh,” he said.
Download
Encyclopedia Galactica/Xenospecies Profile
Entry: Sentient Galactic Species 23931
“Qesh”
Qesh, Qesh’a, Imperial Qesh, Los Imperiales, “Jackers,” “Imps”
Civilization Type: 1.165 G
TL 20: FTL, Genetic Prostheses, Quantum Taps, Relativistic Kinetic Conversion
Societal Code: JKRS
Dominant: clan/hunter/warrior/survival
Cultural library: 5.45 x 1016 bits
Data Storage/Transmission DS/T: 2.91 x 1011s
Biological Code: 786.985.965
Genome: 4.2 x 109 bits; Coding/non-coding: 0.019.
Biology: C, N, O, S, S8, Ca, Cu, Se, H2O, PO4
TNA
Diferrous hemerythrin proteins in C17H29COOH circulatory fluid.
Mobile heterotrophs, carnivores, O2 respiration.
Septopedal, quad- or sextopedal locomotion.
Mildly gregarious, polygeneric [2 genera, 5 species]; trisexual.
Communication: modulated sound at 5 to 2000 Hz and changing color patterns.
Neural connection equivalence NCE = 1.2 x 1014
T = ~300º to 470º K; M = 4.3 x 105 g; L: ~5.5 x 109s
Vision: ~5 micrometers to 520 nanometers, Hearing: 2 to 6000 Hz
Member: Galactic Polylogue
Receipt galactic nested code: 1.61 x 1012 s ago
Member: R’agch’lgh Collective
Locally initiated contact 1.58 x 1012 s ago
Star F1V; Planet: Sixth
a = 2.4 x 1011m; M = 2.9 x 1019g; R = 2.1 x 107m; p = 2.7 x 106s
Pd = 3.2 x 107s, G = 25.81 m/s2
Atm: O2 26.4, N2 69.2, CO2 2.5, CO 2.1, SO2 0.7, at 2.5 x 105 Pa
Librarian’s note: First direct human contact occurred in 2188 C.E. at Gamma Ophiuchi. Primary culture now appears to be nomadic predarian, and is extremely dangerous. Threat level = 1.
We’d all downloaded the data on the Qesh, of course, as part of our Marine training. Know your enemy and all of that. Humans had first run into them fifty-nine years ago, when the Zeng He, a Chinese exploration vessel, encountered them while investigating a star system ninety-some light years from Sol. The Zeng He’s AI managed to get off a microburst transmission an instant before the ship was reduced to its component atoms. The signal was picked up a few years later by a Commonwealth vessel in the area and taken back to Earth, where it was studied by the Encyclopedian Library at the Mare Crisium facility on the moon. The Zeng He’s microburst had contained enough data to let us find the Qesh in the ocean of information within the Encylopedia Galactica and learn a bit about them.
We knew they were part of the R’agch’lgh Collective, the Galactic Empire, as the news media insisted on calling it. We knew they were from a high-gravity world, that they were big, fast, and mean.
And with the ongoing collapse of the Collective, we knew they’d become predarians.
The net media had come up with that word, a blending of the words predators and barbarians. That was unfortunate, since in our culture barbarian implies a relatively low technology; you expect them to be wearing shaggy skins, horned helmets, and carrying whopping big swords in their primary manipulators, looking for someone to pillage.
As near as we could tell, they were predators, both genetically and by psychological inclination. Their societal code, JKRS—which is where “Jackers,” one of their popular nicknames, had come from—suggested that their dominant culture was organized along clan/family lines, that they’d evolved from carnivorous hunters, that they considered themselves to be warriors and possessed what might be called a warrior ethos, and, perhaps the most chilling, that they possessed an essentially Darwinian worldview—survival of the fittest, the strong deserve to live. The fact that their technological level allowed them to accelerate asteroid-sized rocks to near-c and slam them into a planet was a complementary extra.
These guys had planet-killers.
The Crisium librarians thought—guessed would be the more accurate term—that the Qesh constituted some sort of military elite within the R’agch’lgh Collective, a kind of palace guard or special assault unit used to take out worlds or entire species that the Collective found to be obstreperous or inconvenient. But with the fall of the Collective, the Qesh were thought to have gone freelance, wandering the Galaxy in large war fleets taking what they wanted and generally trying to prove that they were the best, the strongest, the fittest—something like a really sadistic playground bully without adult supervision.
That change of status must have been fairly recent—within the last couple of thousand years or so. According to the EG, they were still working for the Collective.
And for all we knew maybe some of them were, way off, deep in toward the Galactic Core, where the R’agch’lgh might still be calling the shots. Our local branch of the EG Library hadn’t been updated for five thousand years, however, and evidently a lot had happened in the meantime.
The Galaxy was going through a period of cataclysmic change, but from our limited perspective, it was all taking place in super-slow motion.
“What,” I said. “The Qesh are coming here?”
“My friend in Personnel,” Lewis said, “told me there’d been a call for help from one of our colonies. The colony is supposed to be pre-Protocol, so . . .” She shrugged. “Send in the Marines.”
It made sense, in a horrific kind of way. Commonwealth Contact Protocol had been developed in 2194, and it laid out very strict rules and regs governing contact with new species. Partially, that was to protect the new species, of course. Human history has a long and bloody tradition of one culture stumbling into a new and eradicating it, through disease, through greed, through conquest, through sheer, bloody-minded stupidity.
But even more it was to protect us. We were just at the very beginning of our explorations into the Galaxy, and there were Things out there we didn’t understand and which didn’t understand us—or they didn’t care, or they simply saw us as a convenient source of raw materials. Over the course of the past fifty years, we’d taken special steps to screen our civilization’s background noise, and the AI navigators in our starships were designed to purge all data that might give a clue to the existence and location of Earth or Earth’s colonies if they encountered an alien ship or world.
A Qesh relativistic impactor, it was believed, could turn Earth’s entire crust molten. We did not want to have them or their Imperial buddies showing up on our doorstep in a bad mood.
The problem was, the barn door had been open for a bunch of years, and the horses had long since gotten loose. Radio and television signals were expanding into interstellar space at the rate of one light year per year, in a bubble now something like six hundred light years across. Technology researchers liked to insist that the useful information/noise ratio drops off to damned near zero only a couple of light years out; anyone out there listening for a juicy young pre-spaceflight civilization probably wouldn’t be able to pick our twentieth-century transmissions out of the interstellar white noise—but the kicker was the word probably. We just don’t know what’s possible; the EG mentions galactic civilizations out there that are on the order o
f 5 × 1016 seconds old—that’s longer than Earth has been around as a planet. I don’t think it’s possible for us to say what such a civilization could or could not do.
But things get uglier when it comes to our pre-Protocol colonies. There are a lot of them out there, scattered across the sky from Sagittarius to Orion. The earliest was Chiron, of course, at Alpha Centauri A IV, founded in 2109. They’re all close enough to Earth to have signed the Protocol shortly after it was written, but there are plenty of colonies out there that for one reason or another have nothing to do with Earth or the Commonwealth. Many of them we don’t even have listed, and if we don’t know they exist, we can’t police them.
But if they were established before the year 2194, they probably still have navigational coordinates for Earth somewhere in their computer network. And someone with the technology to figure out how our computers work, sooner or later, would break the code and they might come hunting for us.
Our only recourse in that case was to go looking for them. If we could contact them and get them to agree to abide by the Protocol, great.
But if they didn’t . . . well, as Lewis had so eloquently put it, Send in the Marines.
“Now hear this, now hear this,” a voice said from the squad bay’s intercom speaker. “All hands prepare for one gravity acceleration in ten minutes, repeat, ten minutes. Secure all loose gear and reconfigure hab module spaces. That is all.”
“That was fast,” Dubois said.
“Yeah, but where the hell are we going?” I wanted to know. I looked at Lewis. “Your friend have any word on that?”
“Actually,” she said, “from what he said, hell is a pretty good description.”
In fact, though, our destination turned out to be Earth.
Most of the hab space on board an attack transport like the Clymer is dedicated to living space. She carries 1,300 Marines besides her normal complement of 210 officers and crew, and all of that humanity is packed into the rotating ring around her central spine, along with the galleys and mess halls, sick bay, lab spaces, rec and VR bays, life-support nanufactories, and gear lockers.
They didn’t tell us, of course. After doing a quick check to make sure anything loose was tied down or put away—Doobie’s hooch went into a refrigerated storage tank in an equipment locker forward—we strapped ourselves standing against the acceleration couches growing out of the aft bulkhead. Ten minutes later, we felt the hab wheel spinning down, and for a few moments we were in microgravity. I could hear a Marine down the line being noisily sick—there’s always at least one—but I stayed put until the Clymer lit her main torch.
There was an odd moment of disorientation, because where “down” had been along the curving outer floor of the hab wheel, now it was toward the aft bulkhead. The bulkhead had become the deck, and instead of standing up against our acceleration couches, now we were lying in them flat. The viewall was reprogrammed to show on what had been the deck. Under Plottel Drive, we were accelerating at a steady one gravity, but “down” was now aft, not out toward the rim of the wheel.
They let us get up, then, and we spent the next hour learning to walk again. We’d been at .38 Gs for two weeks.
I was half expecting Alcubierre Drive to kick in at any time, but hour followed hour and we continued our steady acceleration. Thirty-four hours later we were ordered to the couches once more, and again there was a brief period of microgravity as the Clymer ponderously turned end for end.
That gave us an idea of where we were headed, though. There’d still been a good chance that we were headed for Europa, as originally planned. At the moment, however, Jupiter and its moons were a good six astronomical units from Mars—call it 900 million kilometers. Accelerate at one gravity halfway from Mars to Europa, and we’d have reached the turnover point in something over forty-two hours. A thirty-four-hour turnover—I ran the numbers through my Cerebral Data Feed in-head processors a second time to be sure—meant we’d covered half the current distance to Earth.
Which meant we were on our way home, to Starport One.
Once we were backing down, thirty hours out from Earth, though, we received a download over the shipnet on a planet none of us had ever heard of.
Download
Commonwealth Planetary Ephemeris
Entry: Gliese 581 IV
“Bloodstar”
Star: Gliese 581, Bloodstar, Hell’s Star
Type M3V
M = .31 Sol; R = 0.29 Sol; L = .013 Sol; T = 3480ºK
Coordinates: RA 15h 19m 26s; Dec -07º 43′ 20″; D = 20.3 ly
Planet: Gliese 581 IV
Name: Gliese 581 IV, Gliese 581 g, Bloodworld, Salvation, Midgard
Type: Terrestrial/rocky; “superearth”
Mean orbital radius: 0.14601 AU; Orbital period: 36d 13h 29m 17s
Inclination: 0.0º; Rotational period: 36d 13.56h (tide-locked with primary)
Mass: 2.488 x 1028 g = 4.17 Earth; Equatorial Diameter: 28,444 km = 2.3 Earth
Mean planetary density: 5.372 g/cc = .973 Earth
Surface Gravity: 1.85 G
Surface temperature range: ~ -60ºC [Nightside] to 50ºC [Dayside]
Surface atmospheric pressure: ~152 x 103 kPa [1.52 Earth average]
Percentage atmospheric composition: O2 19.6, N2 75.5, Ne 1.15, Ar 0.58, CO 1.42; CO2 1.01, SO2 0.69; others <500 ppm
Age: 8.3 billion years
Biology: C, N, H, Na, S8, O, Br, H2O; mobile photolithoautotrophs in oxygenating atmosphere symbiotic with sessile chemoorganoheterotrophs and chemosynthetic lithovores in librational twilight zones.
Human Presence: The Salvation of Man colony established in 2181 in the west planetary librational zone. Salvation was founded by a Rejectionist offshoot of the Neoessene Messianist Temple as a literal purgatory for the cleansing of human sin. There has been no contact with the colony since its founding.
“Jesus Christ!” Lance Corporal Ron Kukowicz said, shaking his head as he got up out of his download couch. “Another bunch of fucking God-shouters.”
“Shit. You have something against God, Kook?” Sergeant Joy Leighton said, sneering.
“Not with God,” Kukowicz replied. “Just with God’s more fervent followers.”
“The download said they’re Rejectionists,” I pointed out. “Probably a bunch of aging neo-Luddites. No artificial lights. No AI. No nanufactories. No weapons. That’s about as harmless as you can get.”
“Don’t count on that harmless thing, Doc,” Staff Sergeant Larrold Thomason said. “If they’re living there they’ve got technology. And they know how to use it.”
“Yeah,” Private Gutierrez said. “You can tell ’cause they’re still alive!”
Thomason had a point. The planet variously called Salvation and Hell was a thoroughly nasty place, hot as blazes and with air that would poison you if you went outside without a mask.
We’d been lying inside our rack-tubes as we took the download feed—“racked out” as military slang puts it. That allowed for full immersion; the virtual reality feed that had come with the ephemeris data suggested that the numbers didn’t begin to do justice to the place. The recordings had been made by the colonizing expedition sixty-four years ago, so the only surface structures we’d seen had been some temporary habitat domes raised on a parched and rocky plateau. Bloodstar, the local sun, was a red hemisphere peeking above the horizon, swollen and red, with an apparent diameter over three times that of Sol seen from Earth. Everything was tinged with red—the sky, the clouds, and an oily-looking sea surging at the base of the plateau cliffs.
And the native life.
With the download complete, we were up and moving around the squad bay again. My legs and back were sore from yesterday, but I no longer felt like I was carrying an adult plus a large child on my back. Private Gerald Colby, at my orders, was wearing an exo-frame; they’d fused his broken tibia in sick
bay an hour after his return from the Martian surface, but Dr. Francis had wanted him to go easy on the leg for a week or so to make sure the fix was good. That meant he wore the frame, a mobile exoskeleton of slender, jointed carbon-weave titaniplas rods strapped to the backs of his legs and up his spine—basically a stripped-down version of the heavier walker units we use for excursions on the surfaces of high-gravity worlds.
The rest of us had been working out in the bay’s small gym space, getting our full-gravity legs back, and taking g-shift converters, nanobots programmed to maintain bone calcium in low-G, and blood pressure in high-G. Marines on board an attack transport like the Clymer had a rigidly fixed daily routine which included a lot of exercise time on the Universals.
I shared the daily routine to a certain extent—they had me billeted with Second Platoon—but today I had the duty running sick call. It was nearly 0800, time for me to get my ass up there.
I rode the hab-ring car around the circumference to the Clymer’s med unit and checked in with Dr. Francis.
Clymer sported a ten-bed hospital and a fairly well appointed sick bay. In an emergency, we could grow new beds, of course, but the hospital only had one patient at the moment, a Navy rating from the Clymer’s engineering department with thermal burns from a blown plasma-fusion unit.
“Morning, Carlyle,” Dr. Francis said as I walked in. “You ready for Earthside liberty?”
“Sure am, sir. If we’re there long enough.”
“What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “Scuttlebutt says we’re headed out-system. And they just gave us a download on a colony world out in Libra.”
He laughed. “You know better than to believe scuttlebutt.”
“Yes, sir.” But why had they given us the feed on Bloodworld?
The doctor vanished into a back compartment, and I began seeing patients. Sick call was the time-honored practice where people on board ship lined up outside of sick bay to tell us their ills: colds and flu, sprains and strains, occasional hangovers and STDs. Once in a long while there was something interesting, but the Marines were by definition an insufferably healthy lot, and the real challenge of holding sick call was separating the rare genuine ailments from the smattering of crocs and malingerers.