by Ian Douglas
Of course, I felt sure that Hancock already had gnatbots in mind for the patrol.
Eventually, the storm blew itself out, though for about five hours there, we were all stuck in whichever hab dome we happened to be in at the time because the storm surge deepened the water outside to almost 4 meters.
As the storm abated, though, the water level went down, and pretty soon the beach was only a little truncated from the way we’d found it. The D/MST-22 was still there, anchored by nanograpnels to the rock. The ketch, however, was gone.
Fortunately, the Marines had brought in the quantum flitters and secured them inside the storeroom. We broke them out and saddled up in a deep, purple twilight. The sun had dropped below the eastern horizon, though the sky still carried some light.
After a final check of armor and equipment, we strapped onto our waiting flitters. Hancock gave the signal. “Okay, Marines! Route formation! Move out!”
We’d practiced this type of deployment endlessly, of course, both on Mars and through in-head sims. Corporal Masserotti and Private Hutchison were out ahead on point, with Gutierrez and Andrews on the left flank, Kilgore and Lewis on the right, and the rest of us strung out in a raggedly staggered column down the middle. I was flying just aft and to the right of Gunny Hancock and ahead of Sergeant Tomacek, who was one of Second Squad’s two plasma gunners. There were fourteen of us—a typical Marine squad of thirteen, plus me. We also had one robot, a big cargo flitter hauling expendables, sentry, and perimeter gear, and a 100-megajoule plasma cannon all disassembled and stowed inside.
“I still say it’s Alpha Company’s turn for this shit,” Randolph Gregory grumbled as we got moving.
“Can it, Orgy,” Tomacek said. “You heard the man. We’re just gonna go have a look-see. No gun play. Sweet, slick, and simple.”
“We pulled the easy duty for a change,” Calli Lewis added.
“Yeah, right.”
We began picking our way inland, navigating toward Salvation.
Chapter Twelve
According to the map loaded into our personal RAMs, Salvation was thirty kilometers north along the coast, while Redemption was fifty-five klicks to the south. There’d been some discussion between Hancock and Baumgartner, I knew, about switching targets, but Charlie Company was handling Redemption and our original target was still Salvation. There’d also been talk about waiting until we could get more information about the target from our nautical “guests,” but we couldn’t really afford the time to interrogate them, especially since Ezekiel had been showing little interest in cooperating with us. We set off knowing only that the Qesh were already in control there.
The trip north was uneventful. Once we got up and off the beach, we climbed onto the high plateau beyond, open, rolling ground shrouded in the rubbery, black-leaved vegetation that seemed to cover most of the open ground here. With both armor and our vehicles nanoflaged, we blended into the black background perfectly; I couldn’t even see the Marines flying closest to me, just a few dozen meters up ahead.
Our top speed in this gravity field was limited to about fifty kilometers per hour, but we often had to move much more slowly than that as we negotiated what amounted to forests of bushy, black, house-sized masses of vegetation with whip-thin tendrils ten meters high.
Eventually, though, about two hours later, we began to get close.
We heard it first. In Bloodworld’s dense atmosphere, sound carried very well. Even five kilometers back in the jungle, we could hear the grinding shriek and thunder of some sort of large machinery.
A short time later, we reached the tree line looking out across an open plain that I recognized from our briefings. A trail, a path beaten down into the earth, ran along the edge of the woods, where we took cover in the underbrush. From here, we could see the city wall.
Eons ago, some massive seismic event had thrust these basaltic cliffs into the sky along Bloodworld’s western twilight zone. The cliffs here rose in two sections, the first from the turbulent sea, rising perhaps fifty meters from the water to the relatively flat plain that, inland, gave way to soil and the thick growth of the forest where we were hiding.
The second section rose from this plateau another twenty or thirty meters up, creating a massive black wall off to our right and about a kilometer away. The city of Salvation appeared to be growing from the sheer face of this second black cliff. It was dark, with Bloodworld’s curious half twilight beneath a deep purple sky. There were no lights from the city itself, but a number of high masts mounted spotlights that bathed the surrounding dark rock in an intense glare.
All of us remembered the scenes in that early briefing of Qesh Rocs blowing up buildings. That had been over by the spaceport, somewhere behind those cliffs; from here, we couldn’t see much damage at all.
On top of the plateau beneath the city wall, close to the drop-off into the sea, dust or smoke boiled from what looked like a broad, open pit several hundred meters across, only to be caught and tattered away by the stiff wind blowing out of the west. The dust appeared to be illuminated from beneath, from within the pit, by a deep and flickering red glow.
With Bloodstar still below the horizon, it was too dark to see much at optical wavelengths. By low-light optics, we could see what might have been movement around the pit, including something squat, black, and enormous along one side. Under magnification, and by shifting to infrared, we could see armored vehicles or figures moving around on the ground . . . and we could see a row of humans, eight colonists, apparently tied together in a string and held motionless at gunpoint at the very edge of the crater. Armored Qesh, grotesque, centaur-shapes with hot power units glowing on their backs, patrolled the line, weapons at the ready. A number of enormous machines appeared to be devouring the ground nearby; on closer inspection, much of the dust came from these.
I increased my visor’s magnification all the way up, zooming in on the nearest machine. The thing must have been the size of a city block back home, shaped like a flattened egg with a low-arched opening across the entire front end that seemed to be devouring the ground in front of it. The machine appeared to be enlarging the open pit, grinding up rocks in a thunderous cacophony of raw and violent noise as it crawled slowly but inexorably across the ground.
There were five other similar machines—no two identical in detail, but all squat and monstrous—working around the edges of the pit.
It looked like the Qesh were strip-mining the surface.
Silently, Second Squad spread out among the trees along the edge of the plain. Sergeants Leighton and Tomacek began recording what they could see for burst-transmission back to Red Tower. I pulled out my sniffer, a palm-sized ES-80 environmental sensor, and began a sweep for radiation or other background effects.
I immediately got a ping on my IHD.
“Gunny?” I said over a private channel. “I’m picking up nano-D effects.”
“Shit. How bad?”
“Very, very low. Ten to the minus three. Our suits can handle it fine. I’m not so sure about those poor bastards beside the pit, though.”
Nano-D—short for nanotechnic deconstructors—is the basis for all modern deconstruction techniques. Nanobot machines the size of large molecules, around a hundred nanometers or so, cover a target surface or material in a thin sheen and break it apart, atom by atom. Basalt, for instance, is about fifty percent SiO2, with the rest made up of iron and magnesium. Depending on the precise type of basaltic rock, there might be other elements present as well, calcium, sodium, aluminum, and so on—including even traces of scandium, vanadium, and titanium, and others.
The Qesh evidently believed in going the full-scale industrial route. Those huge rock-eaters were carving or breaking off massive chunks and grinding them up first, increasing the surface area so that the nano-D could break it down faster. The pure elements would be separated out and stored, somehow, possibly in those huge canisters lined up clo
se to the city.
From over a kilometer away, I couldn’t see the actual process, but my sniffer was reporting random hits by deconstructor nanobots. While most would be contained beneath the rock eater, a few, inevitably, would escape with the billowing dust and scattered across the landscape on the breeze. Whatever they chanced to land upon, they began eating—but doing so a molecule at a time, which was far too slow to cause any real damage. At that range, the background radiation was doing a lot more damage to us.
Closer to the mining operation, however, the concentration of deconstructor nanobots would be higher, perhaps much higher. Without armor, those natives standing along the edge of the pit might be taking enough hits to hurt them, even to kill them over time. What the hell was going on over there, anyway?
I tried zooming in close on the humans. I couldn’t see much detail at this range; they appeared to be wearing the same garb as our prisoners back at Red Tower; it looked like their hands were tied behind their backs, and their necks joined by three-meter lengths of rope or cable. Their guards towered over them, armored centaurs with heavy, oddly curved crests on their helmets. One of the prisoners, trembling violently, collapsed in line; one of the guards picked him up with one arm and planted him back on unsteady feet.
An alarm sounded inside my head.
“Heads up,” Hancock warned over the quantum-scrambled squad channel. “We’ve got company. From the south.”
I twisted around, trying to see into the dark forest at our backs. A moment later, I saw movement . . . and then a column of humans emerged from the shadows. They wore black cloaks and hardened leather, and their faces were concealed by that same combination of breather mask and bug-eyed goggles we’d seen on the crew of the boat. There were five of them; they carried antiquated laser rifles with heavy, external battery packs slung over their shoulders. They didn’t see the Marines nanoflaged in the underbrush, but passed us by, moving along the tree line toward the east.
“That last one in line,” Hancock’s voice said in our heads. “Masserotti! Gibbs! Get him, but quietly!”
Two dark, armored shapes rose from the underbrush behind the native, who was following his companions up the path. A hand closed over the man’s mouth, an arm circled his waist and dragged him backward. Masserotti pulled the laser rifle from him and tossed it aside, as Gibbs kneeled in front of the man and held a finger to the lower part of his opaque helmet visor, miming silence.
“U.S. Marines,” Sergeant Gibbs said. “We’re from Earth. We’re here to help you.”
Gibbs used audio, rather than radio or laser communications. Our squad AI hadn’t yet sorted out or analyzed the native freaks. We were using tight-burst, quantum encoded communications among ourselves, but we had no idea as to what kind of communications technologies the human colonists of Bloodworld might have. Judging by those battery packs, they were at least a century out of date in terms of general weaponry.
“Where . . . where did you come from?” The native said, his voice slightly muffled by his filter mask.
“Like I said, fella, Earth.”
“What’s your name?” Masserotti asked.
“Caleb. Caleb three-one-one of Orange-one-oh.”
“Well, Caleb, we need you to tell us what’s going on here.”
“The demons!” he spat. “They arrived a little less than a year ago! 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!”
“They’re coming back, Gibbs,” Leighton said.
“My brothers!” the native said.
“You want to introduce us to your . . . brothers, Caleb?” Hancock asked.
Caleb nodded, and the two Marines let him go. A moment later, the four other natives who’d passed us by a few moments earlier came up the path once more, obviously searching for their missing “brother.”
“Malachi!” Caleb called out. “Albiathar! God has sent His warrior angels!”
Then four stopped, their laser rifles raised. “Take it easy, people,” Hancock said. “We’re friends. We’re here to help you.”
“We need no help,” one of them said, “for God is with us! He is our help!”
“How about lowering your weapons,” Hancock told them, “and considering the possibility that God is helping you by sending us?”
“Matthew!” one of the others said. “It’s possible! These could be the promised angels of the Rapture!”
I’d never heard of Marines being referred to as angels before, but it seemed like a promising start.
The truth was, we needed a fresh start with the locals. Obviously, the colony here had some sort of religious taboo or prohibition against nanomeds, and it was possible they rejected all medicines. I knew of several sects besides the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists who’d rejected at least some medical technology; the Apostles of Light, for instance, who believed relying on mere human medicine showed a lack of proper faith.
We needed natives who could fill us in on the current tacsit, and who might be willing to get us into the city. And if we could avoid violating any of their taboos long enough to get to know them, these five might be the ones.
We grew a small field hut there at the edge of the woods to serve as our forward observation post, taking care to mask it with a heavy sheathing of nanoflage. The OP had a two-person airlock that meant we could at least take off our helmets inside. It was big enough for ten or twelve Marines with a bit of crowding, but at least half of the squad would be outside at all times, keeping an eye on the activity on the far side of the plain.
We also opened up the cargo flitter and broke out several robot sentries and the big plasma cannon as a support weapon. The cannon was self-assembling, and in a few moments was up and running, its muzzle aimed at the nightmare lights and noise in the distance.
Our new guests were Caleb, Albiathar, Samuel, Malachi, and Matthew, members of a patrol sent out to attempt to contact some of the other colony cities in the area. Matthew five-three-one of Orange-one-oh was the leader. He was an older man, though just how old depended a lot on Bloodworld’s medical technology, or lack of one. He looked like he might be around two hundred, but without cybertelomerics and other rejuve processes, he might have been only fifty.
Their names, frankly, worried me. Each had a common name apparently drawn from the Bible, but since such names were fewer than the total number of colonists, each was followed by a number and by a color plus a number, which seemed to refer to a particular district or perhaps a section of the city. The system felt dry and static, even repressive, and I was beginning to think Salvation might in fact be a theocratic dictatorship of some kind.
Those could be nasty.
I was inside the hut with Gunny Hancock, No-Joy Leighton, Orgy Gregory, and High-Mass Masserotti, and our five guests. We were off to a rocky start when we began with a very basic misunderstanding.
“You say the demons came almost half a year ago?” Hancock asked. “That doesn’t seem possible.”
“Have they been inside Salvation itself?” Leighton asked. “Have they figured out how to translate your computer files?”
I knew what was worrying her. That secondary objective to our mission—to keep the Qesh from getting navigational data that might lead them to Earth, that was on all of our minds at the moment. Earth had received word of the Qesh arrival at Gliese 581 six days later, or so we assumed. A second ship had arrived a day later with an update. Then it had taken us six days and some to get there—for a total of two weeks, max. Or so we’d assumed.
Two weeks was bad enough—plenty of time for the Jackers to take over Salvation and hijack the computer records, which just might still contain all the data necessary to lead them straight to Earth. If they’d been here six months, though, we were lucky they weren’t already in Earth orbit delivering an ultimatum.
“Ju
st a minute,” I said. “Matthew, how many days ago did they arrive?”
“Do you mean lights? One.”
“Do you still measure time with weeks?”
“Of course,” Albiathar said. “But only for sacred time, to remember the Sabbath.”
“The Elder Council computer measures sacred time by hours and seconds,” Matthew said. “There are one hundred sixty-eight hours to the week, the first twenty-four of which—”
“Right, right. So the Qesh, the demons, have only been here about two weeks, then?”
Matthew nodded. “Yes.”
I nodded at Hancock. “Local terminology, Gunny,” I said. “Bloodstar’s year is thirty-six and a half days long. Our days. Since the planet is tidally locked to its star, one ‘day’ here, one ‘light’ or one diurnal period, would be one libration cycle. The sun rises and sets two or three times in one local year, depending on the orbits of the nearby planets.”
“Thank God,” Hancock said. “I thought—”
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!” Matthew snapped, pointing a finger at Hancock. “It was the wholesale breaking of the Commandments that led to the Sacrifice!”
“If the demons hear,” the one called Albiathar said, “they will come!”
“They are drawn by evil,” Caleb added. “By Commandment-breaking, by evil thoughts!”
“Take it easy, brothers,” Hancock told them. “I’m sorry if I offended you, but—”
“You are not our ‘brothers,’ ” Samuel pointed out. “You are from the Evil World, which means you are evil yourselves! Fallen creatures in league with the demons!”
“No!” Malachi said. “They are Angels of the Rapture!”
“Of that,” Matthew said, eyeing Hancock coldly, “I am not so sure. We need the discernment of the Elders on this.”
“The Elders,” Massarotti repeated. “Is that like your government?”