by Ian Douglas
“Take it easy there,” I said. I had no way of knowing if they understood English, nor did I know whether what for me was a soothing tone of voice would be soothing or calming to them. I got close enough that I could reach the leg of the motionless one and slap on a blank nano patch. Then I stepped back and pulled out my N-prog. There was a lot of blood around the motionless one, pale-green but turning darker.
After studying the readouts for a long time, I slapped a second nano patch on the active one.
Okay. This was more like it. The first one, I was fairly sure, was dead.
The thing is, we knew nothing about the Qesh except for what was listed on their EG entry—cold and emotionless facts that said little about what these creatures truly were. I knew their vision extended a lot further into the red end of the spectrum than did ours—well into the infrared, in fact, but they couldn’t see the colors blue, blue-green, or violet. Their hearing was better than ours at the low end of the registry, but they couldn’t hear higher-pitched sounds that were easy for us. Humans can hear up to around 10,000 Hertz; Qesh can only hear up to about 6,000 Hz. Instead of DNA, they use TNA for genetic encoding—threose nucleic acid, which on Earth is a precursor of RNA. For blood they have copper-based hemerytherin proteins circulating in something like polyunsaturated vegetable oil.
None of which helped me when the injured Qesh waved its top arm at me and gave vent to something that sounded like a kettle drum solo.
I used a laser scalpel to snick through the restraint harness holding the Qesh to its padded platform. I would have liked to have studied it more, but the fire was spreading and the idea here was to keep it from being incinerated. I stepped well back, watching as it shrugged out of the harness and crawled clear of the wreck.
It didn’t seem badly hurt. Through my N-prog, the nanobots circulating through its body were giving me an interesting look at what appeared to be two massive hearts, a brain considerably larger than a human’s, and a number of organs whose purpose was utterly beyond me. Since I had no idea what readings were normal for a Qesh, there was nothing I could do for it. For blood pressure, I was getting alternating values of 200 and 300 for the systole, but nothing at all for a diastole, and what the hell did that mean? No readings for pain at all, but we measure pain by taking a reading of cortisol, norepinephrine, and other stress hormones in the blood; this critter didn’t have cortisol, or any other stress hormone I recognized.
And even if I’d gotten a reading, I knew zero about a Jacker’s central nervous system, about pain receptors, or about how it registered pain; I could as easily kill the being as cure it if I interfered.
It tried to rise up on its rearmost set of legs, and collapsed.
Ah. There was something I could recognize. As the nanobots spread through its circulatory fluid, they were showing me more and more of the being’s internal structure on the N-prog, including its skeleton, massive and alien.
But not that alien. If you have an internal skeleton and you have legs, there are only so many ways the bones can grow, only so many body plans that work. This guy’s legs were digitigrade—meaning the Qesh essentially was standing on its toes, that its lower leg was actually an elongated foot. Lots of non-primate mammals on Earth—dogs, for instance—have the same arrangement. So do birds. I could see the shadows of bones in the Jacker’s legs, and the long one in its upper right leg, just above the rear-pointing “knee”—the equivalent of the tibia in a human—was broken clean through.
“Give me a hand, Colb,” I told the Marine. “We need to get him away from that fire.”
“Right. Damn it, Doc. He’s heavy!”
Heavy was right. The Qesh massed between 400 and 450 kilos. On Bloodworld, that translated to nearly 800 kilos—a good four fifths of a ton.
Colby and I could get a fair amount of leverage with our suit walkers, letting the servo motors do the work, but there was no way we could drag such a weight across the broken and uneven ground. Fortunately, the Jacker itself was able to get its good legs under it and, with our help, hobble clear of the fire. We managed to get it fifty meters from the blaze and the three of us collapsed in a heap, the Qesh thundering a string of bass drum rattles. The skin of its face beneath that massive, double horn, I saw, was true skin rather than leathery plate exoskeletal armor. It had appeared dark gray at first, but I noticed now that it was flushed a deep, rust red, and that in places it was flaring bright orange in complex, rippling patterns. Jackers, I remembered from the EG download I’d seen, communicated both by sound and by changing color patterns. This one obviously was trying to say something important to us, but I had no idea what that might be.
“Doc!” Hancock’s voice sounded in my ears. “Hurry it up! We got incoming!”
“Just a sec.” I looked at Colby. “Get back to the others,” I told him.
“Negative, Doc. I’ll cover you.”
I didn’t argue. Using my N-prog, I zeroed in on the Jacker’s broken leg, then punched in a series of commands. The two ends of the bone shifted, then slowly began moving together.
I was working almost completely in the dark. The Jacker wasn’t wearing combat armor, so I couldn’t use it to generate an electrical field either to promote healing or to aid the ’bots swarming around the two broken ends of the bone. And since I couldn’t give the being a jolt of nananodyne, if the thing’s pain physiology was anything like ours it would be in agony now.
“What the hell is taking so long, Doc?” Colby asked. “What are you doing, anyway?”
“Our friend here broke his leg. Just like you on Mars, except that he snapped his clean through. I’m setting it the same way I set yours, but the nanobots only have muscle to push against, and the muscles have pulled the ends of the bone past each other.”
Guided by the program from my N-prog, the nanobots inside the Jacker’s leg were linking to one another, creating a kind of thin scaffolding around both ends of the bone. More nanobots flooded into the area, connecting the two end caps, and applying force to first push the ends apart, then to bring them together in line with each other.
Qesh were powerfully muscled—so much so that I suspected they were from a high-gravity planet. Curious, I pulled up the Encyclopedia Galactica entry for the Qesh and glanced at the published planetary parameters.
Sure enough. The EG listing showed G = 25.81 m/s2, which translated to about 2.6 times Earth’s gravity. Evolution on their home planet had favored heavily muscled beings that could walk against a surface gravity that would cripple a human in moments.
Two—no, three—of the being’s four eyes had swiveled to stare at me. They really did remind me of a chameleon as they flicked back and forth, glancing now and again at Colby or our surroundings, but always snapping back to focus on me. The EG data said that the Qesh homeworld had been the sixth planet of an F1 star. F1 meant young and hot.
It was odd, though. The upper eyes on either side were small, about the size of a marble; the lower eyes, however, were deeply recessed inside a kind of pit within each turret and were much larger—the size, apparently, of a baseball. Both sets, large and small, were a deep and lustrous black, suggesting that I was seeing only the equivalent of the pupil.
A life form evolving beneath an F1 star, I thought, would have vision that took advantage of the shorter wavelengths of the spectrum—blue and violet and even ultraviolet. The smaller eyes seemed designed for that type of environment.
And yet the EG entry suggested that the Jackers’ visual range was in the longer wavelengths, from what humans see as green all the way down well into the infrared. Larger eyes would have evolved for capturing long-wavelength radiation.
Curious. Was the EG entry for the Qesh incomplete? Or was there something else going on here that we just didn’t understand?
My patient rumbled another drum solo, the skin on its face flaring orange and yellow now. I was beginning to think that the color show might pr
ovide an emotional content to its speech—or it might be the Jacker equivalent of a groan of pain.
But slowly, and with great deliberation, the major muscles bundled around the broken bone were relaxing. The Qesh was actually helping me, somehow sensing what I was doing inside its leg and isolating the muscles, relaxing them in a manner that would have been impossible for a pain-wracked human.
And the nanobots began pulling the broken ends of the bone together.
The break, I was glad to see, was relatively clean. The bones appeared to be made of calcium within a kind of interwoven mesh of copper, an arrangement that seemed to give them tremendous strength.
I tapped a final command into my N-prog, sealing the nano sleeve around the broken area of the bone.
“Okay, big fella,” I told it, knowing the sounds I was making were meaningless. “You’re good to go.” The Qesh gently flexed its leg.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here, Doc,” Colby told me. “This thing’s friends are on the way.”
“Right.”
I packed away my N-prog and dropped back onto my flitter. The massive Qesh watched me without anything I could identify as emotion as the two of us slid away toward the woods.
“You know, e-Car,” Colby told me, “that if that thing tries to follow us, we’re gonna have to kill it.”
“Maybe. But I wasn’t going to let it burn.”
“Sure, but you didn’t have to patch its leg, either.”
“So maybe it’ll tell its friends humans aren’t so bad.”
I wanted to review the recordings I’d made through the N-prog of Qesh anatomy. There were several things about it that were puzzling me.
Above the city in the distance, three more Rocs had just appeared, drifting slowly in from the sea as if they were surveying the damage.
Colby and I got under cover just in time.
“We don’t want your demon-spawn medicine!”
We’d folded up our dome and moved several kilometers back into the forest. The Qesh didn’t appear to be searching for us aggressively at the moment, but we wanted to be well hidden from any of their sensors that might pick us up through the thick masses of black vegetation. So we dismantled the OP—what was left of it. The plasma cannon had been smashed to hell by the fire from the Roc before it had crashed. We grew five new nanoflaged domes. Which provided space enough for us, and all twenty-six of the rescued Salvation prisoners—plus the five we’d left at the OP—to squeeze inside, until we could be sure any search by the Jacker forces had ended.
The dome I was in was crowded—four Marines and six Salvationists, plus me. Hancock had ordered two Marines to stay outside and watch for any enemy activity, and told the rest of us to take it easy and get some rest.
I took the opportunity to check both Kilgore and Masserotti. High-Mass seemed to be doing okay, but Kilgore was in a very deep coma, showing very little brainwave activity. That was okay. I could keep him on nanosuppression for a long time, so long as I could keep some high-O2 circulation going to his brain.
When I started trying to treat one of the wounded Salvationists, though, it elicited a major problem.
“Look,” I told them, trying to be reasonable, “do you know about nanobots? Nanodeconstructors? The Qesh were using clouds of them to deconstruct the rock, and those of you who were being held beside the pit got a lot of them—on your feet and legs, and I think they may have slipped through your filters, too. If they did, you’ve got some in your lungs, and they’re eating away at you from the inside! Now will you let me—”
“We are human!” one of the former prisoners yelled, “and made in God’s image!”
“We will not be defiled!” a woman added.
Their response was both bizarre and unsettling, and I had to think about it for a moment. There had to be a way. . . .
“Look, you people are already defiled,” I told them. “You’ve all picked up a dose of Qesh nano-D, and if you don’t let me do something about it, it’s going to kill you!”
“We will not take more nanotech evil into our bodies!”
I pulled a small spray nozzle from my M-7, clipped on a vial of dark liquid, and held it up. “This,” I told them, is not nanotech.”
I was lying of course.
Neutranan is an aerosol propelled by nitrogen gas. The active ingredient is nothing more than carbon atoms arranged in C60 spheres—buckyballs, as they’re popularly known—but with a Cruz impeller and a quantum-state computer encapsulated inside the structure. The nanocomputer and the microdrive make it just smart enough to let it track the by-product signatures of nano-D ’bots. The buckyball fullerenes home in on individual D-’bots and surround them, acting like antibodies with outer surfaces too smooth to eat. The end effect of the stuff is to instantly disable nano dissassemblers. While buckyballs are found in nature, QS computers and microdrives most assuredly are not; they’re assembled atom by atom, and that makes them nanotechnology of the first order.
It was also the only thing that would save these people from being very slowly eaten alive.
One of them was a young woman, probably in her mid-teens, who said her name was Miriam two-nine-two of Orange-one-oh. “If it’s not nanotechnology,” she said, “it should be safe enough. . . .”
Matthew was there with her. “Is this your daughter?” I asked him.
He nodded, and put his arm around her shoulder. Miriam’s feet and lower legs were a mass of red, oozing sores. If you looked closely, you could see the inflammation steadily growing worse.
“If you don’t let me treat her,” I told him, “you are condemning her to a very nasty death.”
“That can you’re holding . . . it does not have nanotech?” he asked. His voice broke on the final word.
“I promise. It’s a very, very fine aerosol powder that will kill the nanobots infecting her.”
“Please, Father!” The girl looked terrified. She couldn’t have been older than fifteen.
Reluctantly, he nodded. “Perhaps God has brought these people to us.” He said. “Praise and glory to His name!”
“Praise and glory to His name,” the other locals echoed.
Quickly, before any of them had time to change their minds, I sprayed the girl’s feet and calves with the neutranan, coating them with a dark powder that rapidly vanished as it melted into her skin. Then I had had her stand up, turn about for me, and finally lift the tattered hem of her skirt high enough that I could be certain to get all the sores.
“Why are you people so set against nanotechnology?” I asked as I applied the spray.
“Our people,” Matthew told me, “are against anything that defaces the divinity of the human form. We are, all of us, created in the image of God. To change it, to corrupt it with machines made by the hand of man . . .”
“There is no sin greater than defiling the image of God!” one of the others said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I could think of quite a few “sins” that were worse, but I wasn’t about to get into a theological debate with these people. Sometimes all you can do is smile and nod and agree with the crazy people. “Can you lift your skirt a little more, miss? I need to get a spot on your hip. Like that. Good.”
“Miriam!” her father warned. “Decency!”
“Sir, I am a medical professional and I am trying to save your daughter’s life,” I told him. “Let me see your hands, now. Good. Spread your fingers . . . now turn your hands over. . . .”
A proper job would require putting her through a full-body scan. Many nano-D types are self-replicating and will keep on multiplying and spreading until they reach their program endpoint. And with Qesh technology, we didn’t know yet how their programs were organized, or if they had an endpoint.
“Okay,” I told the girl. “That should do you. If you notice any sores or redness, though, you tell me or one of the other Corpsmen, okay? It�
�s important.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you noticed any problems breathing? A cough? Pain in your face, your throat or your chest?”
“A little pain here when I breath,” she told me, laying her hand at the base of her throat.
“Okay.” I broke out an inhaler, charging it with neutranan.
“What is that?” Matthew asked, instantly suspicious.
“Exactly the same stuff I sprayed on her legs,” I told him. “I’m going to have her breathe some of it to neutralize any nanobots that might have gotten past the filters in her breathing mask.” I saw him hesitate, and added, “Don’t your doctors use inhalers for patients with asthma?”
“We don’t have doctors,” he said.
Ah. Nothing to deface the image of God, which at its worst included pain, disease, and death.
I handed Miriam the inhaler. “Breathe out as completely as you can,” I told her. “Then put that opening in your mouth, squeeze this button, and take a deep breath. Okay?”
Matthew was not convinced. “I’m not sure about . . .”
“Look, Matthew!” I said, angry. “Those masks you wear. They have, what? Five-micron filters?”
“Three.”
I nodded, privately amused. The main purpose of their masks would be to separate out certain toxic gasses in the atmosphere like sulfur dioxide, and that wasn’t done with a mechanical filter. Instead, it used some rather sophisticated nanotechnology that identified molecules by their mass, popped an electron off of each to give it a charge, then shunted it back into the atmosphere. In other words, these people depended on nanotechnology just to live and work on the surface of this hellhole planet—but evidently, they either deliberately overlooked that part, or they flat-out didn’t know. Such masks could also filter out things much larger than molecules of SO2—from dust and allergenic grains of pollen all the way down to large bacteria.