by Ian Douglas
Much of the conversation in the squad bay was centered on our precipitous recall. “Damn,” Doob said, shaking his head. “I was just about to make it with that genie, too!”
“You do know it was all in your head, right?” I asked him.
“What’s your point? You make it with FAB, that’s all in your head too.”
I shrugged. He had a point. Sex was sex, whether you got it on with a virtual reality program downloaded into your brain’s sensory centers, or had an orgasm with flesh and blood. In fact, brain scans had pointed out three centuries ago that when it came to a cerebral download of a recorded event, to a remembered event, or to an actual event taking place in physical reality, the brain can’t tell the difference.
The Clymer, with twelve hundred Marines of MRF-7 embarked on board, accelerated under Plottel Drive out-system at 1 full gravity, seeking the flat metric required by the astrogation department, where local space carried only a minimum curvature from gravity. Flat gravitometrics allowed us to switch on the Alcubierre Drive, which would let us cruise out-system faster than light, and in the case of Sol, could be found about ten astronomical units out, a little farther than the orbit of Saturn. We were accompanied by the Marine assault carrier Lewis B. Puller, the heavy cruiser Ticonderoga, and two destroyers, the Fife and the Decatur.
They say that the one form of FTL even faster than Alcubierre Drive is shipboard scuttlebutt. We all were wondering what had happened up in officers’ country. They’d sent down the briefing on Bloodworld before we’d reached Earth, granted us liberty, and only then suddenly called us back. There’s a technical term for that—“situation normal, all fucked up,” popularly shortened to SNAFU. Global comments, cerebral implants, direct-data downloads, AI intelligences a thousand times more powerful than human brains, and still the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
At 0930 hours the next morning after our departure, an announcement came through for all hands not on duty to rack out. That meant another full-immersion briefing, one with all of us lying down as the command constellation piped in the data. I wasn’t scheduled for the sick bay watch until 1600 hours, so I found a free recliner in the squad bay rather than going back to my berthing compartment and my tube, and strapped myself in. I closed my eyes, opened the main channel, and a moment later I was standing once again on Bloodworld.
I say “once again” in a purely virtual sense, of course, since I’d never been there physically. In the previous briefing, the download had let me virtually stand on the tortured planet’s surface as the basic ephemeris data scrolled through my skull, and the downloaded simulation unfolded a 360-degree world around me, one that I could, within fairly free limits, explore. This time, though, I was a bit more restricted in what I could look at, and the briefing officer was there as well.
“Good morning, Marines,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Carter. We have some updated intelligence on the Bloodstar situation.”
Carter was our company S2, the unit intelligence officer and the guy in charge of operational security. He was short, freckled, and red haired, with a boyish look about him that didn’t inspire all that much confidence.
But he generally seemed to know what he was talking about.
“Yesterday,” he said, “we briefed you on our destination, Bloodworld. We had received an alert by way of a message drone from naval assets at Gliese 581 telling us that ships believed to be operated by the Qesh had entered the system.
“Since that time, a second message drone has arrived from Salvation. Colonel Corcoran felt it important to fill you in on the latest.”
We stood on a plain of black, rugged basalt at the edge of a cliff above a seething ocean. The city of Salvation, the Neoessenist capital, seemed to grow from the rocks a kilometer in the distance, a collection of white domes and truncated pyramids emerging from a cliff face beyond the sprawl of a small spaceport. The red dwarf sun hung low in a deep green sky, partially obscured by the scudding purple cloud wrack. Even at this distance from the star—just twenty-two million kilometers—you could look straight into its ruddy face without discomfort and count the mottled black-on-red splotches of its starspots. Sky color depended on the angle of the incoming sunlight, and on this world it could be anything from sunset red to a deeply contrasting green.
A furious wind was blowing, so powerful that had I been there physically, it would have been difficult to stand. I was aware of it in sim because the viewpoint camera was trembling slightly as spray from the ocean whipped past, and the vegetation nearby—short, scrubby growths with feathery black leaves and rubbery stalks—was whipping back and forth, and, during the strongest gusts, lay flat against the ground.
Bloodworld, you see, is tidally locked with its primary, always turning the same side to face the sun, one hemisphere forever in daylight, the other in darkness. The colony had been established here in the so-called twilight band between day and night; as it circled its star, Bloodworld rocked back and forth, a nodding movement called libration, which resulted in the sun appearing to rise above the horizon for a few days, then setting, the landscape eternally balanced between fire and ice. The planet’s atmosphere—one and half times denser than that at Earth’s surface—expanded rapidly in the middle of the dayside, creating powerful winds blowing from day to night, winds that served to even out the planet’s temperature extremes and keep all of the water and carbon dioxide from freezing out permanently over the nightside.
The image we were watching this time appeared to be from a handheld recorder, unsteady and with a slightly grainy resolution. Possibly it was from a suitcam, or it could have been an upload from someone’s CDF RAM if they were equipped with the appropriate imaging hardware. There were data overlays at the upper right, green alphanumerics giving range and positional data, speed, temperature, and other information. Unlike three-sixty sims created by VR AIs, you could only look in the direction the camera was aimed, and the view wobbled and bounced as though the person carrying the camera was jogging over uneven ground toward the city, clearly pausing to lean into the wind with the strongest gusts.
“This vid,” Carter said, “was taken by a Marine Specter probe inserted near the Salvation colony. It subsequently uploaded to an RS-90 off world, which in turn sent a message drone back to Earth. We only received the transmission last night. When the Command Constellation saw it, they ordered the recall.”
The RS-90 Nightwraith was the Marine Corps’ premiere reconnaissance platform, stealthy, fast, and capable. It would have gone in carrying a number of Specters, robotic recon probes, designed to carry out extensive ground surveillance and transmit data back from the planet’s surface. That explained the data overlays, which weren’t usually a part of civilian vid feeds. They were giving a weather report at the moment—forty-five Celsius—a bit on the warm side—with a wind speed of ninety-two kilometers per hour.
And then the camera panned to the left, looking out across the seething ocean, then angled up, aiming into the sky, and all I could see was the incoming alien ships.
There were three of them, polished silver reflecting the bloody light, essentially flattened disks with a central bulge and a bite taken out of the trailing edge. The sides curved downward, like small wings or auxiliary stabilizers. I could only guess at the size, but they looked big for atmospheric vessels—maybe 100 meters or more across. They were using plasma thrusters to lower themselves gently toward the ground, as clouds of tiny glittering craft spilled from vents or ports along their undersides; I could see the swirling clouds of dust being raised by their jet wash as they settled down one after another on the spaceport in the distance. Human figures were running in confusion among the buildings, looking slow and clumsy in heavy environmental suits. The buildings of the colony began exploding one after another, with sharp flashes and fast-expanding pressure waves clearly defined by the thick, wet air. Each blast geysered a cloud of smoke and debris hurtling into the red sky, clouds that then tattered away with the wind.
&nbs
p; The camera jerked and spun; the landscape blurred for an instant with the movement. In another direction, more of the disk vessels were settling to the ground.
An armored figure appeared: gleaming overlapping segments covering a body several meters long. It might have been as big as an extinct Terran rhinoceros, but with a longer body and six legs. The upper body, like the forequarters of the mythical centaur, weaved back and forth, displaying a single centrally positioned arm. The grippers at the end were holding a weapon of some sort.
What sort we couldn’t tell. An instant after seeing it, the scene dissolved into white static.
“The earlier reports,” Captain Carter said, “have been confirmed with this transmission.”
The static gave way to a VR simulation of the colony, fully interactive, the city domes and towers gleaming undamaged beneath the red sun.
“The armored figure you just saw was a Qesh warrior,” Carter went on, “and the ships appear identical to the vessels designated as ‘Rocs’ encountered during our first contact with that species fifty-nine years ago. Clearly, the Qesh have entered the Gliese 581 system and landed a raiding party, at the very least . . . and possibly they have arrived with a full invasion force.
“Commonwealth Military Command is taking this very seriously. Our first contact with Qesh raiders took place at a star system ninety-four light years from Earth. Gliese 581, however, is just twenty light years from Sol, a near neighbor as interstellar distances go. Only eighty-eight other stars are closer. CMC is concerned that the human colony on Bloodworld, a network of cities and bases established pre-Protocol, might have navigational data that could lead the Qesh to Earth.
“Marine Deep Recon Force 7 is being deployed to Bloodworld for covert insertion and detailed surveillance in advance of a joint Navy-Marine operation to stabilize the situation.”
An invasion, then. Stabilize, in mil-speak, would in this instance mean throwing the Qesh off of Bloodworld, or at the very least making certain they didn’t pick up any clues to Earth’s location.
“Questions?” Carter demanded. “Yes. Abrams.”
From my vantage point, it looked like just me and Lieutenant Carter were standing on that rugged, basaltic plain, but his audience included all twelve hundred Marines and naval personnel on board the Clymer.
“Sir,” the voice of Staff Sergeant Abrams said. “Are the locals white hats? Or black?”
“At this point, Staff Sergeant,” Carter replied, “we have no idea. In fact, that’s probably the main reason MRF-7 is going in first. Any planetary invasion force will have to know if we can count on the local population for logistical support and intelligence.”
It seemed like kind of a dumb question at first. Bloodworld was a human colony; that colony had been attacked by Imperial aliens, so of course they were on our side, “white hats,” in Marine parlance. Right?
But as I thought about it, well, no question is truly dumb, and this one was smarter than most. Those colonists were members of a small and closely knit religious sect, and that fact alone threw the usual rules right out the airlock.
History is filled with examples of small religious groups that went against the mainstream, and which were willing to die for the privilege. Hell, Christianity started off as a Jewish splinter group with some strange ideas about the expected Messiah. The Essene community—after which the Neoessenes had patterned themselves—we think was another Jewish schismatic group that had moved out to the desert to live in communes rather than follow the dictates of the Jewish Temple priesthood.
And more recently you have the messianic cults of Jim Jones and David Koresh, the jihadists of the more extremist versions of Islam, and the Aum Shinrikyo, the crazies in Japan who tried to usher in global Armageddon with a home-brewed nerve gas attack on five Tokyo subway trains. A century and a half later you have the neo-Luddie White Seraphim incident on Chiron. Human beings appear to be hardwired for an us-against-them religious mentality, which can be expressed as a fanaticism as destructive as any political movement.
I suddenly realized that the Commonwealth government must be having convulsions right now about whether those colonists could be trusted. Religious fanaticism by definition is irrational. If some of them thought God had told them to hand Earth’s galactic coordinates over to the Qesh, what would they do?
Marine Recon 7 would be going in at least partly to determine whose side the locals were on. A secondary aspect to the op would be to try to convince them that their best bet lay in helping us if they seemed undecided.
A hearts-and-minds mission, then. Just freaking great.
“Training sims will begin tomorrow at 0900,” Carter said.
The landscape receded suddenly, the surface of the planet dropping away to merge with a planetary graphic, a computer-generated map of Bloodworld showing terrain features crossed by lines of longitude and latitude. I was looking down on the planet’s nightside, at a vast splash of glaciers radiating from the midnight area, amid ocean, bare rock, and ice-sheathed mountains.
“At this point in the planning process,” Carter continued, as a green, curving line arced down across the glacier, approaching the planet’s surface close to the horizon, “we are assuming a landing by D-Mist on the planet’s nightside, with a combat skimmer approach to the twilight band.”
The planet graphic rotated to show the narrow band circling the world from pole to pole, the narrow strip of approximately temperate surface between the heat of the daytime desert and the frozen ice of the night. Several cities were located there, balanced between light and the darkness.
“Enemy numbers and compositions are as yet unknown,” Carter added. “The training sims will cover a variety of possible mission encounters and circumstances. Expect the sessions to continue until we’re on our final approach. Other questions? Good. Carry on.”
So that was it, then. My first combat insertion, and none of us had a clue as to what we would be up against. The Qesh would be bad enough; not knowing the human reaction to our arrival made the whole situation just a bit unnerving.
The Misty was a smaller cousin of the Cutlass TAV, a trans-atmospheric lander designed to carry combat-ready troops from orbit to ground quickly and, so far as it was possible, invisibly. The name came from the craft’s designation, D/MST-22, which stood for deployment/maneuver skimmer transport. Judging from what little we actually knew about the locals’ technology, we should be able to slip through their detector net easily enough.
It was the Qesh we’d have to worry about during the approach.
The briefing feed released its hold on my brain, and I blinked, stretched, and sat up. Marines around me were sitting up as well. Sergeant Tomacek looked around and growled, “Where the fuck’s Doc Doobie and his hooch?”
“Fuckin’ A,” Corporal Gregory agreed. “If the aye-ayes’re gonna curdle my brain for the next twelve days, I want some anesthetic, know what I mean?”
“How about it, Doc?” a private named Kilgore asked, looking at me. “Where’s your buddy?”
I checked my in-head tracker. Doob and the other Corpsmen on board the Clymer were all listed there, and a mental glance showed me the current location of each. Shit. The blip representing Dubois was inside his rack-tube in 3/19, snuggled up very close alongside the blip representing HM3 Carla Harper, the cute little pearl diver from Clymer’s lab.
Looked like he’d scored after all, and with a FAB, this time, honest-to-God flesh-and-blood, instead of a ViRsim lover.
“He’s . . . busy,” I told the Marines. “But I’m sure he’ll be glad to break out the good stuff a little later.”
Seeing those two green blips together bordered on TMI—too much information. I wasn’t jealous . . . exactly. Carla was a cute little armful who definitely knew her Bac-T and cell chemistries, fun to talk to, easy on the optical nerves, and I imagine she’d be a bunch of fun to cuddle with in the rack. But I’d never tried to find out for myself, I suppose because I was still getting over Paula.
Dam
n, damn, damn. Here I was accelerating out beyond the orbit of Mars, headed for the interstellar abyss and a deployment twenty light years from home, and I was still dragging that around.
God, had it really been a whole year ago that I lost her?
I’d joined the Navy early in 2241. Three months of Navy basic in San Diego, followed by six months of near-constant downloading at Corps School in San Antonio. I’d met Paula one afternoon shortly after starting Corps School. She was an AI programmer, a civilian G-7 working on-base with a love of history and an enchanting sense of fun. I was on liberty in downtown San Antonio—at the Alamo, in fact, the site of a famous last stand four centuries ago—when I bumped into her, literally, in the snack shop, and started discussing Davy Crockett and last stands and the park’s ViR download recreations of the battle. We’d ended up in bed at a little park’n’fuck outside of SAMMC’s main gate for what I’d thought at the time was just going to be a one-night stand.
Three years later—three fantastic years that had me thinking I was head-over-heels in love—she was dead.
I’d long since graduated from Corps School by then, but I was still stationed at SAMMC—the San Antonio Military Medical Center, located at Fort Sam Houston on the northeast edge of the city. I’d gone straight from Hospital Corps “A” school to hospital duty at the Navy Orbital Medical Facility in low Earth orbit for microgravity training, then back to SAMMC for Advanced Medical Technology School. Both NOM duty and AMT were “C” schools, and absolutely necessary if I was going to go FMF, and my download schedule was insane.
Busy? My God, I was taking so many training downloads and ViRsim feeds I didn’t know who I was half the time. I was getting, I thought, just a taste of what physicians experience when they’re running a half dozen live-in expert AIs. But Paula Barton was still with me despite the hours and the week-long stretch while I was in orbit. We were even talking about getting married, though marriage was considered to be a bit on the old-fashioned side, something for love-struck fluffies with big red hearts in their eyes.