Bloodstar

by Ian Douglas

  “Kookie!” I called over the squad channel. “Send me the cargo flit!”

  “On the way, e-Car.”

  The cargo flitter was four meters long and one wide, with spin-reversal lift enough to haul several tons.

  “You people!” I yelled at the civilians. “Get down and stay down! We’re going to get you out of here!”

  The civilians sat or lay in a small huddle, as the Marines around them continued to blaze away at Qesh warriors whenever they showed themselves. Laser fire snapped from the nearest of the titanic rock eaters, exploding against black rock. Joy Leighton raised her plasma gun and triggered a bolt at the huge machine’s right-flank turret.

  The man-portable M4-A2 plasma gun uses a high-energy laser to excite a tiny mass of highly compressed hydrogen gas into a plasma state. At the moment it fires, a laser beam drills a straight-line tunnel through the air, through which a magnetic field accelerates the plasma bolt to high velocities. Whatever that bolt hits suffers serious thermal shock and vaporization plus the kinetic impact of the fast-moving plasma mass, making the weapons far more destructive—and heavy—than lasers. Every Marine squad has two plasma gunners; they’re the equivalent of squad machine guns back in the old Corps.

  The M4-A3 packs a five-MJ punch—the equivalent of one kilogram of TNT. The explosion shredded the rock eater’s turret and left a crater in the metal, white-hot and furiously steaming. Leighton slammed several more rounds into the machine’s tower, which loomed ten meters above the vehicle’s broad deck, then shifted targets to the next-closest machine, which was slewing about on its tracks, now, to bring its own turrets to bear.

  A beam struck Private Kilgore, kneeling near the edge of the pit. I saw him twist and flop over backward, heard Gregory’s shrill yell of “Corpsman!”

  Reaching for my M-7, I jumped up and ran.

  Dave Kilgore was dying.

  I knew it as soon as I saw the front of his combat armor. The enemy beam had struck him low on his torso and to his left. A twenty-centimeter chunk of armor from his hip to his waist was gone, vaporized, and much of what was left was half melted. Skin and muscle had burned away above the lower left quadrant of his abdomen, releasing a mass of intestines and mesentery tissue that had spilled onto the ground, some charred black, some blood-wet and glistening.

  There was a lot of blood, bright red and pulsing with the rapid beat of his heart.

  I cleared his visor so I could see his face. His eyes were wide open, glassy, unseeing. Thank God he wasn’t feeling it, but I suspected he’d already lost so much blood he’d gone deep into shock.

  “Hang on, buddy!” I told him. There was a chance that he was aware behind that glazed-over stare. If he was, I didn’t want him to slip away on me—and I wanted him to know he wasn’t alone. I keyed in a jolt of nananodynes through his armor, just to make dead certain he wasn’t feeling it.

  The actual wound was borderline for field first aid. Under different circumstances, I would have been able to pack his belly with an instant dressing, stabilize his blood pressure, and call in an emergency medevac. In a hospital, even in the Clymer’s sick bay, he would have had a good chance—say ninety-five percent—of coming back.

  But there were two major problems here. First of all, he was bleeding badly—badly enough for him to exsanguinate in the next handful of minutes. Worse, though, was the medevac problem. The Clymer was some tens of millions of kilometers away, and with the Qesh in control of local space around Bloodworld, there was simply no way we were going to be able to get him to a decent medical facility.

  I wondered what might be available inside the city of Salvation. They would have hospitals there, but if the locals didn’t go in for nanomeds or microintervention, I didn’t think the chances of helping him would be very good.

  And if we couldn’t get him to a decent medical facility within the next few hours, he had no chance at all.

  First things first. I needed to stop that bleeding or he wouldn’t survive the next five minutes.

  No time to inject nanobots or attempt to track them on my N-prog. My gloved fingers probed through the intestinal spill, moving the mass aside as I tried to see. There, just visible as a pool of blood drained away, I could see the throb of an artery—the left external iliac, I thought—a severed end pulsing bright arterial blood.

  I reached in and pinched the end between my left thumb and forefinger. It’s damned tough doing that in combat armor, because the pressure receptors in those gloves aren’t really as good as what we have in our fingertips. Besides, what I was trying to grab was slippery, and it had a life of its own as Kilgore’s heart kept beating.

  With my right hand I fumbled in my M-7 for my hemostatin foam. The stuff comes from a push-nozzle applicator the size of a pencil, and when it meets blood it gels into an inert plastic that binds with living tissue. It’s way better than a clamp for sealing off leakers.

  Kilgore’s external iliac was no longer bleeding, but there was still blood coming out of his belly, a lot of it. In school, you download hundreds of millions of bytes describing and showing every vein and artery in the body, but somehow the reality never looks like the textbook images. Hell, even if it did, the Qesh weapon had done a hell of a lot of damage. The heat had cauterized a lot of blood vessels, but others had simply torn. I kept probing, trying to find where the fresh blood was coming from. The abdominal descending aorta appeared to be intact, thank God, but there was a lot of bleeding coming from higher up in the body cavity, possibly the superior mesenteric.

  “Corpsman!”

  The new shout brought my head up. I’d been so involved with Kilgore that I hadn’t been watching what was going on nearby. Corporal Hugh Masserotti had been hit.

  I opened a med channel from Masserotti as I kept working on Kilgore. One of the worst nightmares a Corpsman can experience is having multiple casualties going down when there’s only one of him. Triage is a term we all hate. It means having to make a judgment—often a snap judgment—as to who we can help and who we’re gong to have to let die.

  Okay. Masserotti had taken an energy bolt of some kind in his right shoulder. It looked bad, but not immediately fatal.

  The key word there was immediately. Any wound can turn critical on the battlefield in moments. What I was facing now was the realization that no matter what I did, Kilgore’s chances were slim, while Masserotti had a good chance of pulling through if I took care of him now.

  I still couldn’t find that second bleeder.

  “Who’s with Masserotti?” I called.

  “I am!” That was Colby.

  “Make sure his suit medsupport is triggered!”

  “It is!”

  Good. Marine armor has a lot of built-in first aid technology. Besides monitoring your pulse, respiration, BP, and other stats, it can constrict certain parts to restrict blood flow. By tightening on legs and belly, it can help prevent shock. With bleeding from an arm or a leg it can close down tight enough to serve as a tourniquet, or in extreme circumstances—like a mangled limb in hard vacuum—it can cut off the limb and cauterize the stump, saving both blood and air supplies. It wouldn’t work with severe damage, like what had happened to poor Kilgore, but it should keep High-Mass alive until I could get to him.

  Damn it, I still couldn’t find that bleeder! I was pretty sure now it was up under the part of Kilgore’s armor that had only partly melted, tucked away inside the more-or-less intact part of his left abdominal cavity. The superior mesenteric supplies blood to the head of the pancreas and the transverse colon . . . but I couldn’t reach it to find out if that was the source of the blood, not without nano probes and more time than I had right now.

  The vitals feed from Masserotti was showing in the upper right corner of my in-head display—heart rate 150 and BP at 190 over 105—both elevated but steady.

  “High-Mass!” I called over a private channel. “How you holdi
ng out?”

  “It goddamn fuckin’ hurts, Doc! . . .”

  “Colby!” I said. “Open High-Mass’s ACP!”

  “Got it!”

  “Punch in one . . . five . . . seven . . . three . . . enter!”

  “Got it!”

  Entering that code into Masserotti’s armor control panel, mounted behind his left shoulder, would direct his suit to autoinject a dose of nananodyne into his carotid artery. The nanobots would converge in the cingulate cortex of his brain and shut down key pain receptors.

  While Colby was doing this, I was working quickly to seal off Kilgore. I fired enough hemostatin foam into the gaping body cavity to close up whatever was still bleeding, scooped up the mass of spilled intestines and mesentery and packed it back into Kilgore’s body, then squirted a generous blast of skinseal across the wound. That would hold him together until we could get him into surgery, whenever that might be.

  And there was one thing more.

  Jacking into his armor, I opened up the CAPTR application resident within his helmet. I noted the last backup time stamp—three days ago, while we were still at Niffelheim-e—and engaged the CAPTR software.

  We call it the life preserver, or LP, after the old flotation rings they used to throw to people who were drowning. CAPTR stands for cerebral access polytomographic reconstruction, a mouthful that means that a living brain—together with neural states, synaptic pathways, chemical equilibria, even quantum spin states—can be recorded in a kind of electronic snapshot of brain activity.

  With that recording, it’s sometimes possible to pull off a reboot and bring a person back.

  It doesn’t always work. There are those who argue that the original person is still dead, that a CAPTR implant at best provides a kind of sad, pale imitation of the original, that within a few minutes of clinical death, the brain tissue deteriorates enough that it can no longer hold the implant data.

  Others see CAPTR technology as the golden promise of immortality.

  Whatever you believe, the technology isn’t quite there yet, but the military has been working on it. Some day, we might have backups on file for every person, the way we do for AI personalities now. By using the CAPTR software on Kilgore, we were in essence preserving his training and recent experience, a record for debriefing later, and, just possibly, a means of providing closure for his family.

  I tried not to think about Paula.

  With Kilgore packed up and brain-recorded, I hurried across open rock to Masserotti. He was lying propped up on his bad arm, holding his laser rifle with the other. The firefight was petering out now, with all of the Qesh in the area dead or out of the fight. The six rock eaters had pulled back and were no longer trading shots with us; either Leighton’s covering plasma fire had knocked out their weapons or they’d elected to disengage. Leighton, Colby, Gregory, and Lewis all were keeping up a fairly steady volume of fire, however, snapping away at the huge machines to keep them at a distance.

  A hundred meters away, Gunny Hancock and the other Marines of the second assault group were filing out of the small building and heading our way with a ragged group of perhaps twenty civilians.

  Masserotti’s arm didn’t need a lot of additional treatment. The nananoynes had switched off the pain, and his suit was both controlling bleeding and keeping the slightly toxic Bloodworld atmosphere out. I took a look at the wound; the Qesh beam or energy bolt had grazed his shoulder, vaporizing some of his pauldron and melting about half of the rest of his armor. It didn’t look like the beam had actually touched him, but droplets of the molten titanium-ceramic composite had melted through the underlying buckyweave layer and burned into the flesh. The outer part of his shoulder was charred black and interlaced with blobs of cooling alloy. The inner part of the wound was raw and bleeding; I could see part of the glenohumeral joint beneath burned flesh.

  I checked High-Mass’s nananodyne level, sealed off the bleeding, and sliced away the worst of the half-molten blobs of composite before they could burn their way deeper into bone and soft tissue. After that, I packed Masserotti’s shoulder with skinseal and coded his armor to immobilize his right arm.

  “Damn it, Doc!” Masserotti said. “I can’t move my arm!”

  “That’s right, Marine. I don’t want you doing more damage trying to use it.”

  He gestured with the weapon in his left hand. “Just so I can still pop the bastards!”

  The cargo flitter drew up to our perimeter. Lewis began waving to the waiting civilians, getting them to clamber on board.

  “How’s Kilgore?” Hancock asked on a private channel. He would, of course, have been following the biofeeds from the entire squad.

  “If we could get him back to the Clymer,” I said, “maybe . . .”

  “Do what you can for him.”

  “A lot of the prisoners are hurt,” I told him. “Nano-D concentrations here are pretty high.”

  “That will have to wait. I—”

  And then the alarms went off.

  A Qesh Roc drifted in out of the east, huge and black and dimly seen against the night sky, but our AI illuminated it on our combat displays. An instant later, beams from the winged disk drifting 30 meters above shot across the ground in coruscating bursts of raw light, as the civilians screamed and scattered.

  Masserotti snapped off a number of shots one-handed, without any effect that I could see. Leighton stood almost beneath the thing, firing her plasma gun straight up into its belly. Two of the prisoners freed by Hancock’s team were caught in a high-energy blast that vaporized them both.

  Then the prow of the drifting Qesh craft exploded, sending a shower of white-hot fragments scattering across the landscape. The flier lurched, listing heavily to one side; a second blast savaged its smooth ventral surface. The fire, I was pretty sure, was coming from our OP—from the portable robot plasma cannon we’d set up there. The stricken aircraft kept drifting across our position, nosing down. High-energy beams lanced out toward our OP, and then the craft slammed wing-tip first into the rock, cartwheeling slowly, coming apart in flame and ragged debris.

  “Everyone saddle up!” Hancock shouted. “We’re getting the hell out of Dodge!”

  I helped several of the injured prisoners clamber up onto the cargo flitter, and made sure that Kilgore was strapped down safely on the deck. Kilgore’s flitter folded up and went into the cargo compartment; Masserotti was stubborn and insisted on riding out on his. Since you can control the things through your in-head, and don’t need physical strength or a good right arm, I let him. Our AI was warning of more Qesh aircraft approaching from the south, so we hightailed it, moving fast to clear out of the combat zone before bad-guy reinforcements arrived.

  I did take a look inside that infernal pit before mounting up, though, because I was wondering what the hell the Qesh were doing in there. The pit, I saw, was about 50 meters deep, and there was something like a building growing down there in the center, dome-shaped and squat. There were more machines eating away at the rock, but much of the floor of that pit was seething, molten lava—liquid rock with a black, crusty surface and with hot orange light gleaming from underneath. That was the source, I saw, of the eerie, shifting glow on the dust clouds rising above. On the far side of the pit, the curtain of rock separating the pit from the cliffs dropping to the ocean had been eaten through, and streams of lava were oozing out, falling into the ocean, where fire and water exploded into billowing clouds of steam.

  I recorded the whole scene with my armor, then hopped onto my flitter and arrowed away after the rest. The downed Qesh flier lay halfway between the pit and the tree line where our OP was located.

  And that’s where we found the Qesh pilots.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Qesh flier had a cockpit section that had broken free from the wreckage. As we steered past, I could see two Qesh strapped belly-down to what looked like narrow benches. One wa
s motionless, but the other was thrashing about, trying to get free. The main body of wreckage was on fire close by, burning fiercely in the planet’s high-oxygen atmosphere.

  “Gunny!” I called. “I’m going to help them out!”

  “Colby!” Hancock said. “Give Doc a hand!”

  “Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”

  I hadn’t really thought about the pros and cons of helping the aliens. Corpsmen have a long tradition, though, of helping anyone who’s hurt in a war zone, even the enemy. Your own people come first, of course, and you’re not supposed to jeopardize the mission with heroic gestures—but damn it, I didn’t want to see those Qesh burn.

  “Watch for boobies, Doc,” Hancock warned me.

  “Roger that.”

  Boobies—booby traps—were always a threat. In this case, the danger went a bit deeper. We knew pathetically little about the Qesh, and there was every possibility that they wouldn’t mind triggering an explosion and killing themselves if it meant taking a couple of us with them. Marines—and the Corpsmen who were with them—have faced that kind of insanity before, and not always with alien species on alien worlds.

  I let the AI probe the cockpit wreckage before I got close. It reported no electrical activity, which wasn’t a sure-fire guarantee, but it reassured me a little bit. I jumped off my flitter and jogged up to the wreck.

  Neither Qesh was wearing much in the way of armor, and this was the first time I’d seen one in the flesh, as it were.

  I’d assumed, based on the armored Jackers I’d seen already, that they had huge heads. That wasn’t quite true. Rising from the anterior end of each of their bodies was a pair of massive horns, one curving up to meet the other, which curved out and forward. The structure looked vaguely like an immense claw, a meter or more across. Below and to either side were armored turrets like those possessed by African chameleons on Earth; there were two eyes to a side, four in all, each of them large, deeply set, and jet-black. And as with the chameleon, they appeared to track separately. The thrashing one settled down and watched me as I approached, but there was no way to read the emotion behind that gaze.