What People Are Saying About The Cunning Blood:
“The book is absolutely au courant, and actually extends the Great Work of SF in several unexpected directions. Like most ambitiously sprawling sui generis books, this one delivers the sense—as with the work of the recently departed Charles Harness—that the author has chucked every idea he had during the writing of the novel into the pot." —Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction Weekly
“[Jeff Duntemann] returns with an ambitious, polished tale of intrigue, nanotechnology, and something that sounds a lot like mysticism...This one has a decent chance of ending up on award ballots." —Tom Easton, Analog (June, 2006)
“Jeff Duntemann's debut novel is a wildly inventive technofest that then morphs into something more: an examination of what it means that man is irrevocably a social animal. The Cunning Blood confounds all the standard expectations for "prison planets." Whatever you imagine Hell to be, you are certain to be wrong—and certain to be entertained.” —Nancy Kress
“Whether your interest is in scientific ideas, widescreen action, or sheer flights of imagination, you will find much to enjoy in The Cunning Blood. I look forward eagerly to Duntemann's future work.” —David Hebblethwaite, SFSite
“Everything you want in a hard SF novel.” —Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography, Beyond Fear, Secrets & Lies, Data and Goliath, and more.
These quotes are in response to the 2005 first-edition hardcover of this novel.
The Cunning Blood
By Jeff Duntemann
Table of Contents
What People Are Saying About The Cunning Blood
Title Page
Copyright/Indicia
Dedication
Cast Mnemonics
Part I. The Road to Hell
0. Covert Contact
1. In the Diamond Necropolis
2. Blood Brothers
3. A Ticket Back
4. Joyride
5. Descent Into Hell
Part II. Wrought in Deepest Hell
6. The Ralpha Dogs
7. Social Integrator
8. Agonil
9. A Terrible Secret
10. Devil's Waltz
Part III. All the Powers of Hell
11. Filer Fitzgerald
12. Eigen's Wager
13. The Elusive Enemy
14. Nemo Station
15. Skyhook
Part IV. Hell Hath No Fury...
16. The Assault on the Hans Moravec
17. A Bucket of Fear
18. Divide and Conquer
19. Blood Feud
20. Longshadow Twilight
21. The Final Release
About the Author
Also by Jeff Duntemann
The Cunning Blood
© Copyright 2005, 2015 by Jeff Duntemann
All Rights Reserved
Revised edition, 2015. This novel was originally published in hardcover in 2005 by ISFiC Press, Deerfield, Illinois.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written consent from the copyright holder, except by a reviewers, who are permitted to quote brief passages in review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters, locales, or situations in this work to those in the real world are purely coincidental or in the service of fictitious context.
ISBN10: 1-932084-06-1
ISBN13: 978-1-932084-06-1
Copperwood Media, LLC
Colorado Springs, Colorado
For Carol,
Celebrating 46 years of best friendship.
I remain in awe of us!
Cast Mnemonics
PETER NOVILIO: Aerospace engineer and pilot, age 31. Served in Earth's Special Implementer Service (SIS); discharged for taking unwarranted risks with aircraft. Initiated into the secret society called Sangruse at age 26. Carries the Sangruse Device, Version 9, in his bloodstream.
JAMIE EIGEN: Actuary, age 44. Sentenced to Hell for spitting on a government official while infected with HRIS-26, an autoimmune deficiency virus.
GEYL SHREVE: Field Intelligence Agent for the SIS North American Division. Age 36.
SOPHIA GORGANIS: Governor General of America, age 51. Had been an aircraft pilot, starcraft captain, and Director of the SIS.
BILENDA PATON: Senior director of Rho Alpha Delta's Social Integrators. Age 46.
TOFIR SNITZIUS: Abbott of Rho Alpha Delta, Hell's order devoted to research and development. Age 87.
NUTMEG: Born Margaret Mae Hughes. Age 25. A sicaria (assassin) for Rho Alpha Delta.
FILER FITZGERALD: Age 29. Wilderness copper and lead prospector, adventurer, smuggler.
MAGIC MIKEY: Savant, age 15. Found by 1 Earth authorities as a toddler wandering through the ruins of an industrial building west of Chicago after a nanotechnology bust. Has had nanomachinery in his bloodstream all his life, possibly before birth, apparently part of an effort to create a transhuman being.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Throughout this story, the speech of nanodevices is presented in italics, and the subvocalized responses of their human operators are enclosed in vertical bar characters rather than quotation marks. This was done for clarity in complex scenes where two levels of conversation are occurring simultaneously but independently:
“You can’t prove that!” yelled a human being to another human being in the room.
|He can’t prove it, can he?| the human being subvocalized to the nanodevice inside him/her.
Much depends on what you mean by proof, and how hard you try, replied the nanodevice.
Part I. The Road to Hell
Hell had been silent for over two hundred years. No one knew what the prison world had become. No one had left its surface since Earth had abandoned it, leaving behind a self-replicating bacterium-sized nanodevice in the ecosphere that destroyed all electrical conductors. No radio signals could tell its story. The soft glow of its city lights held the spectrographic signature of natural gas flame, and that alone spoke volumes: There was no technology there. No technology, at least, that would break its silence and its isolation. Or so Earth thought.
But Earth was wrong.
0. Covert Contact
Hell, July 16, 2372
Starship Yellowknife's shuttlecraft Greased Pig screamed toward the low point of its power dive through Zeta Tucanae 2's upper atmosphere. From there, the planet didn't look like hell at all. To the contrary: Hell was the most Earthlike of any Gaian world yet discovered. Twenty klicks below, a frontal system was moving across the vast scrub grasslands of the planet's single immense continent. The pod would be down long before the front swept through the primitives' camp that they had spotted from orbit.
"You ready, Joop?" J. J. Rafferty asked from the Pig's controls.
"Sure," the Dutchman answered from the pod in the cargo bay. "Open the door and let's do it!"
Rafferty tapped an icon on his command stone. The panels covering the Pig's cargo bay crept backwards into the hull. The thin air tore into the empty space, blowing scraps of paper and lunch bags in dervish dances before tossing them into the deep blue nothingness. The pod's skeletal magnesium frame glinted in the afternoon sun. Joop Verdaam checked everything one last time. Some food, enough oxygen to get him down to the surface, some deadly presents for the natives (including Magic Mikey's crazy chemical laser teletype), six inflation canisters and balloons to carry more reliable messages back to the upper atmosphere, and one bigger canister and balloon to get his own carcass back to power-dive altitude if the plan were to fail.
The Greased Pig couldn't land. Earth had infected Hell with a nasty nanobug that ate el
ectrical conductors carrying current. That was why it was Hell—abandon hope and all that. Nothing electrical lasted longer than a few hours—which meant, pretty much, that nothing technological lasted longer than a few hours. Drop prisoners down in one-way lifting-body landers, and they can't get out.
Not yet, at least. Joop grinned. This was going to be fun, if it didn't kill him first—and things like that were generally the most fun of all.
"So to Hell with you, man!" Rafferty called with a grin, and hit the eject switch.
Joop's pod roared out of the bay end of the Greased Pig on four solid-fuel ejection rockets. He was a kilometer east before Rafferty pulled back on the stick and let the Pig's four big zerospike engines have their noisy way again.
How fast Hell's nanouglies worked was a big unknown—but Rafferty didn't intend for his shuttle's electronics to become a test case. Beyond Hell's magnetopause the nanobugs self-destructed, so he was heading for the magnetopause at just under three Gs. Hell, four: A guy's only got one life to live.
Joop fell freely for several minutes. He was lashed into the pod like a cripple into a dogsled, which the pod roughly resembled. In addition to conventional electronic instruments, he had several purely mechanical items made especially for the occasion: An aneroid altimeter, a thermometer, and magnetic compass. Velcroed to the pod wall near his left shoulder was perhaps the most intriguing item of all: An experiment intended to measure the destructive speed of Hell's MGIDs, the Magnetotropic Geospecific Internment Device, a nanotechnological mechanism dispersed in its atmosphere two hundred years before. Pronounce the acronym and you get maggots, which was as good a nickname as any.
So far it was the same as home: The little color screen at his elbow showed him where he was and how high. At ten klicks the altimeter started feeping, so Joop reached up and yanked down hard on the drogue release handle. The drogue chute deployed with a gut-wrenching jerk, slowed and stabilized the pod's free fall, and then pulled out the Rogallo wing.
The fabric wing unfolded and filled as in the test runs over Columbia in the 109 Piscium system. Joop broke loose the mechanical stick—it steered by pulling on the wing with cables, yike!—and banked this way and that to be sure all was well. So far, so good. He snapped the stick into its wide loop position, and sat back to ride out the long, slow spiral to the surface.
Eight klicks now. The MGID experiment on his left was an open wireframe box the size of a long lunch bucket. Built into the top was a binocular magnifier. He leaned forward and took a look. The leftmost experiment was a simple coil of naked copper wire carrying a current from a battery to a cesium pinlight. Behind it was a stop button tenth-second mechanical timer, its dial whirling. The four other experiments were the same, but had greater and greater degrees of insulation and encapsulation against the maggots. Joop realized somewhat grimly that his avionics were the sixth experiment. So be it: He was an ancient aviator now, flying like aviators flew before, well, before they had invented avionics.
Experiment 1 was indeed active. The copper wire was growing hair! Greenish fuzz was forming on the coil of wire, and a whitish powder could be seen gathering on the battery and the plastic housing of the pinlight. As Joop watched, the wire broke and the pinlight went out. He reached forward and tapped the stop button on Experiment 1's timer. Thirty-eight minutes, thirty six and six tenths seconds. And that was starting from the high stratosphere! Joop gulped and began watching Experiment 2. Nineteen minutes later, thick flakes of Teflon insulation were falling from the wire, and moments after that, the pinlight went out.
Scarcely ten minutes more elapsed before Experiment 3 failed—and the whole works had been dipped in a mil-spec epoxy coating, which was now cracked and abraded as though it had sat in Saharan sun and wind for fifty years.
The ominous white powder was thick on the ice-cube sized block that contained the wire in Experiment 4. Black dust was blowing off of the block. Those things were chewing the epoxy! It took another sixteen minutes, but after only an hour and change, the little monsters had destroyed the circuit there as well.
Something by his elbow chirruped briefly and was silent. Joop looked up and realized his avionics screen was now dark, the whole works covered by a sinister coating of white powder.
He fought down the dread of a pilot who lived by his instruments. The aneroid altimeter showed him at scarcely five klicks. The dark blotch of the encampment was clearly visible to the unaided eye. Something odd, though: It now seemed a different shape.
Don't borrow trouble, Joop told himself. His unpowered rig would be there soon enough. Life's sole mystery lay in staying alive. All the rest was simply entertainment.
He took another look through the wire box's magnifier. Experiment 5 was different: The whole circuit—battery, coil, and pinlight—had been sealed in a thin transparent cylinder of fused quartz. The pinlight still shone, but it was hard to see through the coating of white that seemed to grow thicker by the second. Joop rubbed the quartz vessel with gloved fingers so that he could see the pinlight more clearly—and realized that the quartz was already etched a milky white. Quartz! The little monsters were chewing through quartz to get at the wires!
Three klicks. Now the mystery below was resolving. Smoke! And in the thick of the smoke, flame. A sour taste seeped into his mouth. It had all appeared so serene from orbit through Yellowknife's big scope: just haphazard circles of tents and large animals that looked like elephants.
With every banking circle that took him closer to ground, the situation below came clearer. Out of the indistinct curdle of smoke and flame he could now see motion. Large objects were moving, alone and in loose formation. He held his fingers in front of his ears to keep the breeze from obscuring sounds, and heard the distinct crack of gunfire.
Joop groaned. He was doing a dead-stick glide into the middle of a battle.
It was late afternoon, and the best heat of the day was hours past. On Columbia he had practiced seeking out thermals to keep altitude and allow him to maneuver. Alas, thermals would be unlikely so late in the day.
Delta-v was the better part of twenty-fifth century valor, but lacking that, discretion would have to do. Joop broke out of his circular descent. A light wind was carrying the smoke eastward, making it hard to tell where the combatants were. He set the Rogallo wing straight cross-wind and headed south.
He was now barely a klick above the chaos below, and it was quite possible that the red-and-white Rogallo wing had already been seen. The wind shifted to the northwest. Some of the gunfire was automatic. Machine guns? Those guys were riding elephants! He thought Hell had been frozen in the year 1800. Or was it 1900?
The Missus had warned him: People in the past were ignorant. People on Hell are handicapped. Neither is a reflection of stupidity. Duh. And you could turn machine-guns parts on a pedal-driven lathe. Gunpowder predated electricity by a thousand years. Back on Yellowknife he remembered thinking with a smirk: How hard could this be? Joop cursed his naivete.
Banking south had been a mistake. If he turned into the wind he would land in the thick of the battle, but the battle seemed to be following the smoke.
Smoke, on the other hand, was cover. Joop slipped his oxygen mask back over his face and flipped down his goggles. He thumbed the levers and felt positive suction adhere them lightly around his eyes. The tank was slung beside one arm, strapped loosely around his waist. He banked east.
Half a klick, and going down fast. If they couldn't see him now they were blind, and he could smell both smoke and gunfire. And something else, a familiar chemical he couldn't place right away…a stink like rot, and eggs, and fertilizer.
Something exploded beneath him. Something big. He saw the raw yellow-white flash and felt the concussion shake the pod's thin frame. The grass and trees were on fire everywhere he looked, and he felt the heat from the flames on the skin of his hands. The familiar stink redoubled. He recognized it now: ethyl mercaptan. Men had added the telltale scent marker to natural gas for four hundred y
ears.
Natural gas?
Smoke had risen high on the force of the flames. He was in the thick of it now, watching men on huge animals casting surreal shadows through the smoke in the near-horizontal rays of the setting sun. Some of the animals ran like elephants. Some were like nothing he had ever seen, leaping and stumbling as on two legs, though he could no longer see clearly enough in the smoke-obscured gloom to be sure.
He had only minutes left in the air, maybe less. Below, a man on an elephant was chasing a thing like a…dinosaur. The dinosaur had a rider too, and live fire was being exchanged. The dinosaur stopped and turned in a strange stiff pirouette, and leaped on two legs toward the elephant. The elephant reared, tusks flashing with an incongruous metallic glint.
The man on the elephant fired something toward the dinosaur, something that rode a dazzle of fire and left behind a line of gray smoke. It looked like a pocket missile. But…could they have missiles? Surely the maggots would prevent them from having missiles.
Quartz. Maybe the maggots couldn't chew through quartz. Maybe Hell encased everything in quartz. Joop stole a quick glance at Experiment 5. The thin quartz vessel had crumbled to round-edged shards.
Not quartz.
The missile reached its target. Almost directly beneath him, the dinosaur exploded.
The concussion knocked Joop forward in the pod. Something ripped through the fabric of the Rogallo wing. The wing was now smoking. Something else clanged against the pod's frame and ricocheted away, tumbling and flashing as it caught the last of the sunlight.
Metal. And the stink of mercaptan was palpable.
Joop yelled. A bolt had given way, and one of the pod's wing-mount arms was flapping free, clanging against the pod's side scant centimeters from his left arm. The wing had collapsed. The pod was plunging to ground.
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