Bloodstar

by Ian Douglas

  The Misty-D shuddered again, harder this time. I’d already checked both my Mk. 30 and my Browning Five as well as my M-7, and knew I was as ready as I would ever be. The platoon tactical feed was showing a detailed graphic of the planet’s surface ahead and below. We were coming in low above the Twilight Ocean. A chain of volcanoes was erupting to the south; the city of Salvation emerged from solid rock above the black, basaltic cliffs directly ahead.

  The area around the city had been smashed moments before by a heavy railgun bombardment by the Ceres and the Juno; Navy trans-atmospheric strike fighters off the carriers Spirit of Earth and Constitution had followed up with low-altitude passes, loosing cluster-D munitions and volleys of laser and missile fire. Our Misty was vectoring in toward the wrecked spaceport, just to the left of the main city.

  There were no Qesh Rocs or other heavies that we could see, thank God. Maybe the bombardment had swept them out of the sky.

  “Ten seconds, Marines!” Hancock barked. “Stand ready!”

  The Misty swooped in, nose going high, and we felt the sudden, hard deceleration as the landing craft bellied down, jacks extended, egress hatches already swinging up and open as the debarkation ramps came down. I was a little surprised to see that it was dark out, the sun having dropped below the eastern horizon. The data feed had been enhanced, and looked like broad daylight. I turned up the illumination in my in-head, and daylight returned.

  Hancock was screaming at us. “Go! Go! Go!”

  I pounded down the starboard ramp and out onto the ruin of old tarmac. My platoon data feed was throwing graphics up against my vision—identifying buildings and showing a path, picked out in green, toward a city entrance. I took a closer look, then nodded to myself. The entrance was the same one we’d visited before, where we’d found the computer interface and downloaded the goods. Wreckage was strewn everywhere, and the spaceport surface was heavily cratered; some of the pits were twenty meters across and four deep.

  We spread out across the ruined tarmac, getting clear of the grounded Misty. The landing craft had been configured for gunship mode, with a couple of turrets on its dorsal hull that were whipping back and forth, seeking targets. As the last Marine came off the cargo deck, the craft lifted into the air once more, drifting clear of the LZ to provide covering fire over the whole area. Fighters howled low overhead as well, Marine A/S-40 Star Raiders off the Spirit of Earth, the Constitution, and the Tarawa, providing close ground support.

  Above the fighters, where clear sky peeked through patchy clouds, brilliant pulses of light flared and faded—nuclear detonations strobing among the desperately battling fleets out in space.

  I ignored the far larger battle going on overhead. There was nothing I could do about that, and my attention was completely focused on what was going on immediately around me. We were taking fire from the city itself—energy weapons of some sort, firing from turrets or open ports high up among the cliffs from which the city of Salvation grew—and the Marines of Second Platoon, Bravo Company, were going to ground, taking cover behind tangles of wreckage or inside the rims of craters punched into the tarmac.

  I couldn’t tell if the fire was coming from Qesh inside the city, or from the city’s human defenders. It hardly mattered. Ten seconds after my boots hit pavement, Sergeant Tomacek yelled “Corpsman!”

  It was Lance Corporal Andrews, sprawled on his back in the bottom of a crater. A beam had sliced into his right leg just below the knee, melting armor and severing the limb; I saw it, his foot and lower leg, still encased in armor, the knee-end still smoking and molten, lying a few meters away.

  He was shrieking, rolling on the crater floor, hands gripping his right thigh.

  “Easy there, Bennie,” I said, linking in for a diagnostic. “Let me see whatcha got.”

  In fact, his armor had already done a lot of my work. A guillotine seal had come down just above his ruined knee, amputating the damaged part cleanly while firing a high dose of nananodynes into his carotid, sending them flooding through his system and blocking key nerve bundles. His screaming was probably less from actual pain at this point than it was from realization: the sheer, mind-ripping horror of seeing a piece of yourself burned away.

  Sure, we can grow new arms and legs and graft them into place, no problem—assuming you don’t want a better-than-human prosthetic instead—but the more primitive parts of our brain tend to lose it when we take that kind of damage. For the better part of half a million years, almost the entire span of Homo sapiens’ existence, that kind of injury had meant crippling deformity at best, a horrible death by gangrene at worst, assuming you didn’t just bleed out and die on the spot. The reassuring knowledge that we can grow a new leg when we need one hasn’t filtered down and through to the brain stem yet.

  His blood pressure was 190 over 110, almost certainly a fear response.

  I sent a second jolt of nanobots into Andrews’ brain, programming them to move into his limbic system and, especially, to a tiny lump at the end of his caudate nucleus called the amygdala. It actually looks something like an almond, which is what amygdala means in Greek, and is the center of the fear network that connects key parts of the brain—the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex, especially. The nanobots began dialing down Andrews’ level of fear by damping out some of the chemoelectrical activity within the amygdala, and also began working to interrupt his epinephrine response, slowing his breathing and relaxing his blood vessels, which, in turn, would bring his blood pressure down. I also told his suit to treat him for shock, but with an override to keep his diastole below 130.

  “Man, Doc . . . what the hell hit me?” Andrews asked.

  “Fear,” I told him.

  “What the fuck? That’s not in the Corps’ job description!”

  “No, it’s part of being human. Don’t sweat it, Bennie. You’re going to be fine.”

  I checked his vitals again, then tagged him for medevac. The nano I’d given him ought to hold him until we could get him back to the Clymer. The wound appeared to have been sealed both by the suit’s guillotine valve and by the beam’s cautery effects; no need to peel him open and use skinseal.

  “Corpsman! Corpsman front!”

  “They’re calling me, Bennie,” I told him. “Gotta run.”

  “I’m doing . . . okay, Doc. Thanks.”

  “Sure you are. Just hang tight and pretty soon you’ll be asking Ms. Wojo for a date.”

  An OR nurse on Clymer’s surgical ward, Lieutenant Andrea Wojowicz was a stunning woman who served as inspiration for a lot of the Marine shipboard bull sessions and shared fantasies. Scuttlebutt had it that she’d provided the personality matrix for a popular ViRSex model, though I tended to believe that that was wishful thinking on the part of some sex-starved Marines.

  Bennie Andrews just gave me a thumbs-up. “She’s a class-A babe. Be sure to introduce me to her when I’m awake, Doc.”

  “Absolutely.” I was already scrambling out of the crater and getting a line on my next patient. Gunnery Sergeant Roger St. Croix was the senior NCO in Third Platoon. I’d seen him around a lot, but didn’t know him well. It didn’t look like I was going to get a chance to, either; he’d taken a plasma bolt square in the chest.

  His Mk. 10 armor had taken the brunt of the impact, bleeding off both heat and kinetic energy. The overload had managed to burn through, however. I could see charred tissue and burnt ribs behind a hole in his plastron the size of my fist. Not good, not good at all. My God, I could see his heart beating in there, a rapid, quivering pulse beneath sheets of translucent red tissue.

  I thought at first he was unconscious, but as I sprawled out flat next to him, his left arm reached over, his glove closing tight on my wrist. “Take it easy, Gunny,” I told him. “I’ve got you!”

  There was no verbal reply, not by audio, not through my in-head. I didn’t know if that was because his transmitter was dead, or because he
couldn’t say anything. He was shaking, though, trying to writhe against my touch when I laid my hand on his chest, and his breath was coming in short, hard, paroxysms, like hiccoughs.

  Damn. He was in agony.

  Corpsmen aren’t generally called upon to handle open-chest surgery, but I didn’t have much in the way of options. St. Croix’s chest was wide open already.

  His armor had already fired nano into his system to counter the pain, but right now his brain was getting so many major pain messages from so many sources that the nananodyne blocks were being overloaded or bypassed.

  A plasma burst howled past, detonating against tarmac a few meters away. There wasn’t a lot I could do about that right at the moment; St. Croix was in a very bad way, so bad I couldn’t take the time to move him, not without stabilizing him first.

  I linked into his suit diagnostics. His BP was low—80 over 30—and his heart rate fast and weak. Pain readings off the scale. Those spasmodic hiccoughs suggested a problem with his phrenic nerves—the nerves supplying his diaphragm. His thoracic mesothelium and endothoracic fascia, the thin sheets of tissue shrouding the cavernous space containing his lungs and heart, had been burned through in places. I guessed that droplets of molten armor had spalled off the inside of his suit and were lodged, now, somewhere deeper in his thoracic cavity.

  It was only a guess—the hole was rapidly filling with blood and I couldn’t see—but I was pretty sure that most of the pain must be coming from his parietal pleura. The lungs, you see, are surrounded by two membranous sheaths collectively called the pleura. The inner layer is the pulmonary pleura, the outer the parietal pleura. That inner layer doesn’t have much in the way of nerve endings, but the parietal pleura is innervated by both the intercostal and the phrenic nerves. I double-checked my stores of data on the central nervous system—the intercostal nerves arise from the thoracic spinal nerves, which emerge through the vertebrae all the way from T1 through T11, while the two phrenic nerves come in from higher up, from C4, though in humans they’re also fed from the 5th and 3rd cervical nerves, at C3 and C5. Got it.

  Another burst of high-energy plasma shrieked through the air above me. I ignored it.

  I sent a massive dose of nano into St. Croix’s carotid, programming it to shut down sensory input all the way from C3 down to T11. I had to be especially careful to target only sensory nerves. His diaphragm was entirely run by motor impulses from his phrenic nerves, and if I shut those down he would stop breathing.

  I followed through with a second jolt of nananodynes targeting the cingulate cortex of his brain, to shut down his major pain receptors. After a few more seconds, he shouldn’t have been feeling anything at all, but anodyne blocking is not as precise a science as we would like to believe. I redirected a portion of the intracranial nanobots to his hippocampus and prefrontal cortex with orders to shut down his NMDA receptors. St. Croix’s struggles grew weaker . . . weaker . . . then dropped away as he slipped into deep anesthesia.

  I hated doing that. A battlefield, in the middle of a firefight, is not the best place to take a patient into anesthesia, but I had no choice at the moment. Pain management was critical, but by dealing with that by knocking St. Croix out, I had new and urgent problems to deal with.

  For one thing, he stopped breathing.

  For another, his left lung was collapsing.

  I’d tried to be careful with the phrenic nerves, hoping to keep his diaphragm working, but when the hiccoughing stopped, so did his breathing. The lung collapse was pneumothorax—what happens when the pleura are pierced and air gets into the pleural cavity. This was especially serious with the Marine’s chest open to the Bloodworld’s atmosphere; with a surface pressure more than one and a half times greater than Earth’s, the local air was forcing its way into St. Croix’s lungs through his chest wound, forcing his left lung into a smaller and smaller volume.

  The injury is sometimes called a “sucking chest wound,” and it’s serious. In the old days, battlefield medicine took a brutally pragmatic approach: Navy Corpsmen would slap the cellophane wrapper from a pack of cigarettes over the wound, and the suction would hold it in place, preventing further air from getting inside. I had to look up “cigarettes” when I first downloaded that bit of history; it’s astonishing what people used to do to themselves.

  On second thought, I suppose it was no worse than o-looping.

  I didn’t happen to have a cigarette wrapper handy, and it wouldn’t have been big enough to seal the hole in St. Croix’s chest in any case. I pulled a cylinder of hemostatin foam from my M-7 and squirted it directly into St. Croix’s chest. The stuff hit the blood and congealed, sealing over the wound.

  “Corpsman!” someone yelled. “Corpsman front!”

  “Wait one!” I yelled back. Damn it, I couldn’t leave St. Croix now.

  “I’ve got it, e-Car!” That was Dubois. Bless him.

  St. Croix was bleeding, but not too badly, not as much as you might think with his chest torn open. The major blood vessels emerging from his heart—the aorta, the pulmonary veins and arteries, the venae cavae—none of them had been nicked, thank God. All of the blood appeared to be seeping from ruptured vessels in the layers of skin and muscle over his burned-open sternum and ribs, and the hemostatin sealed them off at once. It would also provide an airtight seal over his chest.

  Through my link, I ordered his suit to up the pressure on his air feed, and also to dial up the O2 mix to 50 percent. That would help force the Bloodworld air out of his pleural cavity and into the surrounding thoracic cavity, would stop the lung from collapsing further, and if I got lucky, might even partially re-inflate it. The richer gas mix would help his respirocytes do their thing even though he wasn’t actively breathing, and help boost the efficiency of his lungs if I could get him breathing again.

  For that, I needed to take some of the nanobots on analgesic duty and redirect them to St. Croix’s medulla—his brain stem, the portion at the very base of the brain leading to the spinal cord—which was what controlled his breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure, among other things. There was a column of neurons tucked away inside the medulla called the dorsal respiratory group, or DRG, and they were the primary center in the brain for initiating respiration. The nanobots entering his brain stem began infiltrating the DRG, feeding them a trickle charge that mimicked the neurochemical impulses from his apneustic center, the part of his brain that told him to breathe. At first, nothing happened . . . and then St. Croix’s chest jerked up off the ground, and he drew a tremulous breath.

  Next I had to get him out of there. We were out on a relatively flat and open part of the spaceport field, nakedly exposed. Enemy plasma gun and laser fire continued to snap around us, kicking up bursts of flame and spinning fragments as they struck the tarmac. A larger explosion—an incoming rocket, I think—detonated five meters off to my left and showered me with rock.

  Ten meters behind me, a crater gaped in the field, three meters wide. Several Marines were already crouched inside, taking shelter from the storm of high-energy bolts sleeting overhead. I grabbed a handhold on St. Croix’s backpack, directly beneath his helmet, and started crawling in that direction. I couldn’t stand up. The incoming fire was too heavy, and once I started moving, I seemed to be attracting a lot more of the stuff. An explosion went off three meters to my right, slamming me to the side, spraying my armor with chunks of tarmac. St. Croix plus his armor massed about 110 kilos, but on Bloodworld they weighed closer to 200, damned close to a quarter of a ton. The ground was rough and hard, and the friction from trying to drag him over the tarmac wasn’t helping.

  I was in the same situation I’d been in with Joy at a spot just a hundred meters or so from here, needing a quantum spin-floater of some sort. “Logistics!” I called.

  “We hear you,” a voice came back. “Whatcha need, Doc?”

  The logistics staff consisted of three Marines in the Company HQ platoon
tasked with getting combat expendables and other supplies to the Marines and Corpsmen who needed them—fresh battery packs and recharges, ammunition for the slug throwers and plasma guns, and spin-floater stretchers for casualties. “I need a stretcher out here! Stat!”

  I started broadcasting a homing signal. The logistics people were somewhere back there, on the other side of a tumbledown spaceport structure. They generally debarked inside an armored supply vehicle, which gave them some maneuverability, but usually they stayed hunkered down in a firefight, doing their best to stay inconspicuous under a layer of nanoflage.

  The stretcher arrived about ninety seconds later, skimming in a few centimeters above the ground on its spin-repulsors, guided by an onboard robot and propelled by a miniature jet engine strapped to its underside. I caught it as it drifted up, keyed the control that dropped it to the ground, and proceeded to get it underneath St. Croix.

  That’s not as easy as it sounds, especially in a surface gravity of 1.85 Gs. I had to tell St. Croix’s armor to go stiff, then lever the Marine like a flat, heavy log over onto his left side, nudge the stretcher into place, then let him, rigid armor and all, roll back onto the floater’s surface. I keyed the controls again, and the stretcher levitated; frictionless, the stretcher could be guided with one hand. I could give him a shove and get him started moving in the right direction.

  But not easily when I was lying down flat. I rose to my knees to give him a shove.

  That’s when I got hit.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Something struck me in the back of my left leg, struck me hard and knocked me down. It didn’t hurt, but the shock jarred me, smashing me forward, and an instant later I was sprawled facedown on the tarmac, with red warning icons flashing across my in-head.

  I rolled over and looked at myself. The walker framework and the armor encasing my lower left leg was a tangle of half-melted ceramic, plastic, and titanium, and appeared to be attached above my knee by a ragged twist of metal as thick as my finger. There was a lot of blood, and it was still spurting, bright arterial orange-red, all over the pavement; as I lay there, staring at the damage, something went snick inside my leg, a few centimeters up from my thigh, and the lower leg and what was left of my knee dropped off. My armor, sensing both the loss of blood and the inflow of higher-pressure air from outside, had decided to guillotine me, amputating my leg.