Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One

by Ian Douglas

  Nowadays, and facing nonhuman foes, Corpsmen always go into combat armed.

  My weapon was a lightweight laser carbine, a Sunbeam-Sony half-megajoule-pulse Mk. 30 officer’s model, accurate to line-of-sight horizon and massing just 4 kilos. My sidearm, of course, was a Browning Five, the 5-millimeter automatic magnetic slug-slinger that’s been standard issue for the Marines for the past eighty years. The carbine went over my right shoulder, clicking home in the snap catches on my backpack. The Browning went into a thigh holster, right next to my M-7.

  A moment later, we touched down with the crunch of hull on gravel, rocked slightly as the landing jacks extended and the bulkheads to either side began morphing open, as ramps extended from the deck down to the black stones of the beach.

  “Second Platoon, go!” Gunny Hancock yelled, and thirty-nine Marines pounded down the ramps.

  My first non-simmed footsteps on an extrasolar world.

  Ooh-ra!

  Chapter Ten

  The local star was hanging above the eastern horizon, four times bigger than Sol as viewed from Earth. It was hard to remember that Bloodworld was a third the distance from its primary as Mercury was from Sol. A third the distance . . . but Bloodstar itself was less than three tenths the diameter of Sol, so that red sun actually appeared to be a bit smaller in the sky than Sol as seen from Mercury.

  I saw why the mission planners had decided to call this LZ “Red Tower,” though. Off to the north of the beach, a spire of rock, needle slim and at least a kilometer high, caught the perpetual late-afternoon sunlight, which gave it the appearance of being drenched in blood. A lot of the nearby rock formations had the look of the badlands geology of the American Southwest, iron-stained and rugged. The landscape was harsh, heavily eroded, with spires, pinnacles, and mesas of rock. Toward the south, I could see a sawtooth line of mountains, one of them beneath a mushroom pall of dark gray cloud.

  “First Squad!” Hancock yelled. “Put up the perimeter! Second Squad! I want the HQ right over there, beside those boulders. Amphibious green blurs, people! Move it! Move it! Move it!”

  We were using quantum-encrypted comms on low power, with thousands of frequency shifts per second spread over a fair part of the frequencies; we should be safe enough from high-tech eavesdroppers, though it was never a good idea to assume too much in that department. First Squad spread out into the surrounding rocks, setting up a defensive perimeter, including robotic gun positions and sentries, and sensor arrays. The rest of us started building the Red Tower headquarters.

  “Headquarters” was contained in a five-kilo box the size of a large briefcase, which Sergeant Leighton set on a large, flat, bare expanse of basaltic rock fifty meters up from the water. The rest of us did a sweep across the rock, side by side, picking up loose rocks and tossing them away, clearing a work area ten meters across.

  Working in the local gravity was a strain. I picked up one loose chunk of rock the size of my fist and it felt as heavy as a lump of gold. All of us were working in strap-on exowalkers, of course, frameworks embracing our armor that supported our legs, torsos, and backs, amplifying each move we made and taking some of the gravitational strain off. Still, 1.85 G made for slow and heavy going.

  With the growing area cleared, Gunny Hancock triggered the box, which began releasing a steady stream of nanoconstructors onto the rock. It was a similar process to what we’d done on Hymie, except that here we were using local materials entirely—the basaltic rock, plus carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a long list of other elements drawn straight from the atmosphere. A few more necessary elements not available in the air were provided by a hose with an attached pump strung across the rock shelf and down to the water. Seawater on Earth has an amazing supply of elements—various salts, of course, but also gold, silver, copper, iron, tungsten, magnesium, even traces of platinum, iridium, and uranium. The seawater here on Bloodworld was richer in metals than Earth’s oceans by far. The planet, remember, was 8.3 billion years old, almost twice Earth’s age, and the constant internal stresses caused by tidal forces guaranteed that everything from hydrogen and helium to the heaviest natural elements were constantly getting squeezed up out of the planet’s crust and churned into the sea. Bloodworld’s seas were a thick, mineral-rich soup, heated from within and constantly stirred by fierce storms and savage tides.

  Once the area was clear and the HQ dome was growing, I got to work on my planetfall to-do list, hauling out my sniffer and pulling in microsamples of the atmosphere. As expected, the oxygen here was running at just under twenty percent, with nitrogen at 75.5 percent. There were two red flags, however, again as expected. Carbon dioxide was showing 1.01 percent, while sulfur dioxide was a whopping .69 percent.

  The CO2 was actually fairly low and not immediately lethal. Normal levels on Earth average about 300 parts per million, or .03 percent. We could breathe this stuff for short periods, though some people experienced drowsiness at those levels. The SO2, however, was deadly at over .5 percent. Five parts per million—that’s 0.0005 of one percent—is the PEL, the permissible exposure limit, for even short-term exposure to the stuff. More than that causes respiratory difficulties and can result in death.

  Appropriately charged filter masks would take care of that easily enough. Nanodisassemblers in the air intake break it into oxygen, a gas, and sulfur, which is stored in the mask’s rejection bin as the familiar yellow powder. It’s funny, though, how very close the atmosphere of Bloodworld is to being breathable by humans; that’s the story on so many worlds throughout the Galaxy, even those generally considered “Earthlike.” It doesn’t take much to make the place unhealthy. I looked up toward the south and the distant, erupting volcano. Both sulfur dioxide and CO2 are outgassed by volcanic activity, and there were thousands of volcanoes on the planet. It was pretty obvious where the high levels of poisonous gas were coming from.

  The temperature here was an invigorating four degrees Celsius, the wind, relatively mild for Bloodworld, coming out of the nightside in blustery gusts of forty or fifty kilometers per hour. The deep purple thunderheads gathering offshore suggested that rain was on the way. A beautiful spring morning on Bloodworld. . . .

  Except that there were no seasons here. Trapped in a tidal lock with its nearby star, Bloodworld had no axial tilt at all. Both planetary climate and local weather were driven by the dayside-nightside atmospheric convection currents. Subsolar temperatures dayside ranged as high as fifty Celsius—close to the hottest it ever gets on Earth. Hot dayside air rises and expands outward—a perpetual high-pressure system—sending currents of hot air streaming out toward the nightside at high altitudes.

  Over the glaciers of the nightside, the air cools rapidly, the temperature dropping to around eighty below—close to winter in Antarctica. Cold air then moves back to the dayside, traveling a bit slower and at lower altitudes, and carrying with it moisture picked up over the night-side oceans and ice fields.

  Most of that moisture precipitates out at the twilight band, which was why the heaviest concentrations of clouds gathered there in the swirls and streams visible from space. The circulation makes sure that the day-to-night temperature differences don’t get too extreme, but it guarantees hellish storms and constant high winds. Air pressure, I noticed as I changed the settings on my sniffer, was falling quickly. A storm was on the way.

  By the time I finished taking my readings and getting test samples of air and water, the HQ dome was nearly complete, rising swiftly as though being inflated from within. The base of the HQ dome had eaten nearly eight meters down into the solid rock, and its outer surface rippled and gleamed with an iridescent sheen as the external nano set into place. Like our ships and armor, the reactive nanoflage would closely imitate the surrounding light and tone. From the air, even from the ground just a few tens of meters away, it would look like an irregularly shaped mass of igneous rock.

  I saw Baumgartner and the HQ staff making their way from the grounded D/MST, and gathering near what would soon be the
HQ dome’s airlock. A second dome was being set up a little farther to the south; that would become barracks and supply building for the enlisted personnel.

  Chief Garner was with Baumgartner. So were Doobie Dubois and Machine McKean, Gunny Hancock and several others. I joined them.

  My suit clicked me into their private channel as I approached. “ . . . and I want you to be damned sure you keep your people in hand, Chief,” Baumgartner was saying. “No free-wheeling, no scrounging, no black marketeering, you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.” Garner’s voice sounded carefully neutral.

  Baumgartner saw me. “Carlyle. Did you get your readings?”

  “Yes, sir. The numbers are exactly what we thought they’d be.”

  “Well, it’s a relief to know the planet’s basic chemistry hasn’t changed in the past sixty-four years. Lloyd? Did you pick up anything?”

  Staff Sergeant Arnold Lloyd was one of Carter’s people, a communications expert from Company S2.

  “Negative, sir. I did a complete freak sweep. There’s lots of radio noise from the local sun, of course, but nothing that sounds artificial. Of course, both the locals and the Qesh have quantum encoding. Anything they broadcast will sound like noise.”

  “I am aware of quantum communications technology, Staff Sergeant. What I need from you is results.”

  Second Lieutenant Baumgartner had something of a reputation in Bravo Company. Some of the Marines called him “Mommy” behind his back. He was fussy, a worrier, and something of a prima donna.

  He was, frankly, the kind who doesn’t last long in the Corps. You either learn to work with your NCOs, or you find yourself transferred to permanent desk duty Earthside, a sure-fire killer of any officer’s career.

  “Hancock? I want the first recon squad deployed in thirty mikes.”

  “I would suggest waiting twenty-four hours, sir,” Hancock said, his voice dead level. “That’ll give my people time to acclimate to the higher gravity.”

  “I will remind you, Gunnery Sergeant, that they are not your people. They are my people, my assets, and I will determine how best to utilize them.” He turned back to me. “Carlyle!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You will break out your bag of tricks and shoot up Second Platoon with G-boost. Supercharge ’em.”

  I hesitated for an uncomfortable moment. Had Dr. Francis given me that order—or even Chief Garner—I would not have had a problem. Second Lieutenant Baumgartner, though, was not medically trained, and could not prescribe medications.

  “You have a problem with that, Carlyle?” Baumgartner demanded.

  “Sir—”

  “We’ll take care of it, sir,” Garner said, interrupting.

  “Good. Gunny Hancock, you will take Second Platoon across country to the city of Salvation. Set up an advance OP, establish QB contact with Red Tower, and coordinate the approach of the rest of the company.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “You will not, repeat not, initiate contact with either the Qesh or the locals. You will wait for the approach of the main force. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And that seemed to be that.

  But I couldn’t help thinking about the old von Moltke adage: no plan survives contact with the enemy.

  Twenty minutes later, Second Platoon’s Second Squad was forming up for the patrol, a total of thirteen Marines plus one Navy puke—me. Gunny Hancock was in command. They were breaking out the quantum flitters from the D/MST’s cargo compartment and lining them up on the beach.

  But I was having a few final words on a private channel with Chief Garner before we left. “Are you saying I just ignore a direct order?” I asked.

  “Not ignore,” Garner said, “so much as bend it, just a little. You don’t want your Marines coming down with a crash.”

  “And I don’t want to end up in the brig,” I told him. “Baumgartner’s been known to do that, y’know?”

  I was thinking about that incident back at Lejeune, when an overstressed kid tagged by a training laser had lost his temper and snapped off something about “fuck the fucking ossifers” over an open channel, not even knowing he was on the air. Most officers would have ignored it; at most they would have had his platoon sergeant have a private word with him later about communications security. Not Mommy Baumy, though.

  “You won’t end up in the brig,” Chief Garner told me. “I’ll back you. Just hold off on the G-B injections until your people really need them. And you’ll know when that is, believe me.”

  “E-Car!” Hancock bellowed over the platoon frequency. “Get your Navy ass over here!”

  “On my way, Gunny!” I replied. I looked at Garner. “Thanks, Chief. Just keep the Man off my neck, okay?”

  All Marines carry a few million Frietas respirocytes circulating through their bloodstreams—artificial one-micron cells that work like the body’s own red blood cells, only far more efficiently. Natural systems that have evolved hit or miss over hundreds of millions of years tend to be pretty clunky compared to human engineering. Respirocytes are a lot better at carrying oxygen and removing waste metabolytes than RBCs; though they’re one fifth the diameter, they can store and transport 236 times as much oxygen as a red cell, and deliver it to specific cell groups—in the brain, in the heart, in key muscle groups—with targeted precision.

  It’s been estimated that if the red blood cells in a human’s circulatory system were completely replaced by respiroctes, that person would be able to hold his breath for over an hour—or sprint at top speed for fifteen minutes and never take a breath. We haven’t reached that point yet—it brings us smack up against the Transhuman Debate and the Hopkins Declaration. But injecting Marines with respirocytes dramatically improves their endurance and physical performance, and we’ve been doing it routinely since the late twenty-first century.

  G-boost, though, is different. It’s a complex artificial protein that bonds with respirocytes already in the blood and jacks them up to a whole new operational level. Boosted respirocytes circulate through muscle tissue and suck up lactic acid and other metabolytes, supercharge the muscles with O2-rich blood, and fine-tune the nervous system to improve the person’s reaction time. The person becomes faster, much stronger, immune to exhaustion, and able to function in a relatively high-G environment for hours on end. Supercharging, it’s called. Supercharged Marines no longer need to sleep, and they can carry two to three times more weight than before, going on for hour after hour without tiring. The stuff is illegal for civilians, but has been available for military use for about thirty years.

  But the boost in performance comes with a price. We call it “G-crash,” and it happens when the respirocyte add-ons begin denaturing after fifty or sixty hours. The person comes out of the boost phase exhausted, all but incapacitated, and there can be some nasty side effects to the nervous system as well. Even before the crash, some users can suffer from confused thinking; the Marine feels so great he can misjudge his actual condition—or try to do something stupid like fly.

  Because of the potential side effects, G-boost is not a part of the Marine armor pharmacopeia, and can only be administered by doctors or Corpsmen. Technically, Baumgartner didn’t have the authority to order those injections, though he could have discussed the possibility with competent medical personnel. I’d been about to tell him I needed Dr. Francis’s say-so before I could carry out his order. Had I done so, I would have ended up on Baumgartner’s shit list; enlisted personnel do not second-guess officers, even when they’re right. Garner had stepped in and saved my ass.

  Taking care not to fall in the high gravity, I did a slow and cautious jog across the beach to join Gunny Hancock and the others beside the flitters. Each was a flattened, nanoflaged, torpedo-shaped flyer with a kind of elongated dorsal saddle and grip-handles, and they hovered silently half a meter above the rock. Quantum flitters, like the various commercial fliers back home, adjusted the electron spin within the material of the ventral surf
ace, allowing the device to react against the spin states of electrons in the ground as well as any local magnetic field. They didn’t really fly, but they had enough lift to support an armored Marine and his equipment, they were silent, and they were fast.

  And they would be getting us as close as possible to the colony dome of Salvation.

  Private Colby helped me clamber onto my flitter, holding the machine as it bobbed beneath my weight. “Thanks,” I said, and then gave him a searching look. “How’s the leg, Colby?”

  “All better, Doc,” he said. “Good patch-up.”

  “Just be careful in this gravity,” I told him, settling myself belly down into the saddle. “Don’t go breaking it on me again.”

  He laughed and strapped me down. “Not a problem, Doc.” He slapped my armored shoulder. “You’re good to ride.”

  I linked into the controls; you steer a flitter through your in-head display, moving a cursor with your eyes to steer. That makes them highly maneuverable, but it takes a lot of practice getting used to them. They can be almost too responsive, especially at high speed.

  “Okay, Marines,” Hancock transmitted over the platoon channel. “Sound off! Andrews!”

  “Yo!”

  “Carlyle!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Colby!”

  “Ooh-rah!”

  He ran down the alphabetical list, and had gotten as far as Kukowicz when a piercing in-head alarm went off. “Native surface craft approaching perimeter,” the platoon AI announced. “Repeat, native surface craft approaching perimeter, bearing two-six-five, range five hundred meters. . . .”