by Ian Douglas
Eons ago, some massive seismic event had thrust these basaltic cliffs into the sky along Bloodworld’s western twilight zone. The cliffs here rose in two sections, the first from the turbulent sea, rising perhaps fifty meters from the water to the relatively flat plain that, inland, gave way to soil and the thick growth of the forest where we were hiding.
The second section rose from this plateau another twenty or thirty meters up, creating a massive black wall off to our right and about a kilometer away. The city of Salvation appeared to be growing from the sheer face of this second black cliff. It was dark, with Bloodworld’s curious half twilight beneath a deep purple sky. There were no lights from the city itself, but a number of high masts mounted spotlights that bathed the surrounding dark rock in an intense glare.
All of us remembered the scenes in that early briefing of Qesh Rocs blowing up buildings. That had been over by the spaceport, somewhere behind those cliffs; from here, we couldn’t see much damage at all.
On top of the plateau beneath the city wall, close to the drop-off into the sea, dust or smoke boiled from what looked like a broad, open pit several hundred meters across, only to be caught and tattered away by the stiff wind blowing out of the west. The dust appeared to be illuminated from beneath, from within the pit, by a deep and flickering red glow.
With Bloodstar still below the horizon, it was too dark to see much at optical wavelengths. By low-light optics, we could see what might have been movement around the pit, including something squat, black, and enormous along one side. Under magnification, and by shifting to infrared, we could see armored vehicles or figures moving around on the ground . . . and we could see a row of humans, eight colonists, apparently tied together in a string and held motionless at gunpoint at the very edge of the crater. Armored Qesh, grotesque, centaur-shapes with hot power units glowing on their backs, patrolled the line, weapons at the ready. A number of enormous machines appeared to be devouring the ground nearby; on closer inspection, much of the dust came from these.
I increased my visor’s magnification all the way up, zooming in on the nearest machine. The thing must have been the size of a city block back home, shaped like a flattened egg with a low-arched opening across the entire front end that seemed to be devouring the ground in front of it. The machine appeared to be enlarging the open pit, grinding up rocks in a thunderous cacophony of raw and violent noise as it crawled slowly but inexorably across the ground.
There were five other similar machines—no two identical in detail, but all squat and monstrous—working around the edges of the pit.
It looked like the Qesh were strip-mining the surface.
Silently, Second Squad spread out among the trees along the edge of the plain. Sergeants Leighton and Tomacek began recording what they could see for burst-transmission back to Red Tower. I pulled out my sniffer, a palm-sized ES-80 environmental sensor, and began a sweep for radiation or other background effects.
I immediately got a ping on my IHD.
“Gunny?” I said over a private channel. “I’m picking up nano-D effects.”
“Shit. How bad?”
“Very, very low. Ten to the minus three. Our suits can handle it fine. I’m not so sure about those poor bastards beside the pit, though.”
Nano-D—short for nanotechnic deconstructors—is the basis for all modern deconstruction techniques. Nanobot machines the size of large molecules, around a hundred nanometers or so, cover a target surface or material in a thin sheen and break it apart, atom by atom. Basalt, for instance, is about fifty percent SiO2, with the rest made up of iron and magnesium. Depending on the precise type of basaltic rock, there might be other elements present as well, calcium, sodium, aluminum, and so on—including even traces of scandium, vanadium, and titanium, and others.
The Qesh evidently believed in going the full-scale industrial route. Those huge rock-eaters were carving or breaking off massive chunks and grinding them up first, increasing the surface area so that the nano-D could break it down faster. The pure elements would be separated out and stored, somehow, possibly in those huge canisters lined up close to the city.
From over a kilometer away, I couldn’t see the actual process, but my sniffer was reporting random hits by deconstructor nanobots. While most would be contained beneath the rock eater, a few, inevitably, would escape with the billowing dust and scattered across the landscape on the breeze. Whatever they chanced to land upon, they began eating—but doing so a molecule at a time, which was far too slow to cause any real damage. At that range, the background radiation was doing a lot more damage to us.
Closer to the mining operation, however, the concentration of deconstructor nanobots would be higher, perhaps much higher. Without armor, those natives standing along the edge of the pit might be taking enough hits to hurt them, even to kill them over time. What the hell was going on over there, anyway?
I tried zooming in close on the humans. I couldn’t see much detail at this range; they appeared to be wearing the same garb as our prisoners back at Red Tower; it looked like their hands were tied behind their backs, and their necks joined by three-meter lengths of rope or cable. Their guards towered over them, armored centaurs with heavy, oddly curved crests on their helmets. One of the prisoners, trembling violently, collapsed in line; one of the guards picked him up with one arm and planted him back on unsteady feet.
An alarm sounded inside my head.
“Heads up,” Hancock warned over the quantum-scrambled squad channel. “We’ve got company. From the south.”
I twisted around, trying to see into the dark forest at our backs. A moment later, I saw movement . . . and then a column of humans emerged from the shadows. They wore black cloaks and hardened leather, and their faces were concealed by that same combination of breather mask and bug-eyed goggles we’d seen on the crew of the boat. There were five of them; they carried antiquated laser rifles with heavy, external battery packs slung over their shoulders. They didn’t see the Marines nanoflaged in the underbrush, but passed us by, moving along the tree line toward the east.
“That last one in line,” Hancock’s voice said in our heads. “Masserotti! Gibbs! Get him, but quietly!”
Two dark, armored shapes rose from the underbrush behind the native, who was following his companions up the path. A hand closed over the man’s mouth, an arm circled his waist and dragged him backward. Masserotti pulled the laser rifle from him and tossed it aside, as Gibbs kneeled in front of the man and held a finger to the lower part of his opaque helmet visor, miming silence.
“U.S. Marines,” Sergeant Gibbs said. “We’re from Earth. We’re here to help you.”
Gibbs used audio, rather than radio or laser communications. Our squad AI hadn’t yet sorted out or analyzed the native freaks. We were using tight-burst, quantum encoded communications among ourselves, but we had no idea as to what kind of communications technologies the human colonists of Bloodworld might have. Judging by those battery packs, they were at least a century out of date in terms of general weaponry.
“Where . . . where did you come from?” The native said, his voice slightly muffled by his filter mask.
“Like I said, fella, Earth.”
“What’s your name?” Masserotti asked.
“Caleb. Caleb three-one-one of Orange-one-oh.”
“Well, Caleb, we need you to tell us what’s going on here.”
“The demons!” he spat. “They arrived a little less than a year ago! They told the elders that the Bloodworld was theirs, and that we now belong to the Qesh! Lies of Satan! We belong to God, and none other!”
“They’re coming back, Gibbs,” Leighton said.
“My brothers!” the native said.
“You want to introduce us to your . . . brothers, Caleb?” Hancock asked.
Caleb nodded, and the two Marines let him go. A moment later, the four other natives who’d passed us by a few moments earlier came up the path once more, obviously searching for their missing “brother.”
/> “Malachi!” Caleb called out. “Albiathar! God has sent His warrior angels!”
Then four stopped, their laser rifles raised. “Take it easy, people,” Hancock said. “We’re friends. We’re here to help you.”
“We need no help,” one of them said, “for God is with us! He is our help!”
“How about lowering your weapons,” Hancock told them, “and considering the possibility that God is helping you by sending us?”
“Matthew!” one of the others said. “It’s possible! These could be the promised angels of the Rapture!”
I’d never heard of Marines being referred to as angels before, but it seemed like a promising start.
The truth was, we needed a fresh start with the locals. Obviously, the colony here had some sort of religious taboo or prohibition against nanomeds, and it was possible they rejected all medicines. I knew of several sects besides the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists who’d rejected at least some medical technology; the Apostles of Light, for instance, who believed relying on mere human medicine showed a lack of proper faith.
We needed natives who could fill us in on the current tacsit, and who might be willing to get us into the city. And if we could avoid violating any of their taboos long enough to get to know them, these five might be the ones.
We grew a small field hut there at the edge of the woods to serve as our forward observation post, taking care to mask it with a heavy sheathing of nanoflage. The OP had a two-person airlock that meant we could at least take off our helmets inside. It was big enough for ten or twelve Marines with a bit of crowding, but at least half of the squad would be outside at all times, keeping an eye on the activity on the far side of the plain.
We also opened up the cargo flitter and broke out several robot sentries and the big plasma cannon as a support weapon. The cannon was self-assembling, and in a few moments was up and running, its muzzle aimed at the nightmare lights and noise in the distance.
Our new guests were Caleb, Albiathar, Samuel, Malachi, and Matthew, members of a patrol sent out to attempt to contact some of the other colony cities in the area. Matthew five-three-one of Orange-one-oh was the leader. He was an older man, though just how old depended a lot on Bloodworld’s medical technology, or lack of one. He looked like he might be around two hundred, but without cybertelomerics and other rejuve processes, he might have been only fifty.
Their names, frankly, worried me. Each had a common name apparently drawn from the Bible, but since such names were fewer than the total number of colonists, each was followed by a number and by a color plus a number, which seemed to refer to a particular district or perhaps a section of the city. The system felt dry and static, even repressive, and I was beginning to think Salvation might in fact be a theocratic dictatorship of some kind.
Those could be nasty.
I was inside the hut with Gunny Hancock, No-Joy Leighton, Orgy Gregory, and High-Mass Masserotti, and our five guests. We were off to a rocky start when we began with a very basic misunderstanding.
“You say the demons came almost half a year ago?” Hancock asked. “That doesn’t seem possible.”
“Have they been inside Salvation itself?” Leighton asked. “Have they figured out how to translate your computer files?”
I knew what was worrying her. That secondary objective to our mission—to keep the Qesh from getting navigational data that might lead them to Earth, that was on all of our minds at the moment. Earth had received word of the Qesh arrival at Gliese 581 six days later, or so we assumed. A second ship had arrived a day later with an update. Then it had taken us six days and some to get there—for a total of two weeks, max. Or so we’d assumed.
Two weeks was bad enough—plenty of time for the Jackers to take over Salvation and hijack the computer records, which just might still contain all the data necessary to lead them straight to Earth. If they’d been here six months, though, we were lucky they weren’t already in Earth orbit delivering an ultimatum.
“Just a minute,” I said. “Matthew, how many days ago did they arrive?”
“Do you mean lights? One.”
“Do you still measure time with weeks?”
“Of course,” Albiathar said. “But only for sacred time, to remember the Sabbath.”
“The Elder Council computer measures sacred time by hours and seconds,” Matthew said. “There are one hundred sixty-eight hours to the week, the first twenty-four of which—”
“Right, right. So the Qesh, the demons, have only been here about two weeks, then?”
Matthew nodded. “Yes.”
I nodded at Hancock. “Local terminology, Gunny,” I said. “Bloodstar’s year is thirty-six and a half days long. Our days. Since the planet is tidally locked to its star, one ‘day’ here, one ‘light’ or one diurnal period, would be one libration cycle. The sun rises and sets two or three times in one local year, depending on the orbits of the nearby planets.”
“Thank God,” Hancock said. “I thought—”
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!” Matthew snapped, pointing a finger at Hancock. “It was the wholesale breaking of the Commandments that led to the Sacrifice!”
“If the demons hear,” the one called Albiathar said, “they will come!”
“They are drawn by evil,” Caleb added. “By Commandment-breaking, by evil thoughts!”
“Take it easy, brothers,” Hancock told them. “I’m sorry if I offended you, but—”
“You are not our ‘brothers,’ ” Samuel pointed out. “You are from the Evil World, which means you are evil yourselves! Fallen creatures in league with the demons!”
“No!” Malachi said. “They are Angels of the Rapture!”
“Of that,” Matthew said, eyeing Hancock coldly, “I am not so sure. We need the discernment of the Elders on this.”
“The Elders,” Massarotti repeated. “Is that like your government?”
“Our government is the Church in its holy union with God,” Matthew replied, as if talking to a six-year-old. “But the Elder Council speaks for the Lord, yes.”
“We would like to talk to this Council,” Hancock said. “Are they in Salvation? Or have they gone elsewhere?”
“Where would they go? They are in Salvation, yes.”
“And the demons?” I asked. “Are they in Salvation as well?”
“Sadly, yes.” Caleb shook his head. “A few of us got out before they forced their way in. We’ve been trying to contact the other cities, to organize a defense, a resistance. We’ve not had much luck so far.”
“Hush, Caleb,” Matthew ordered the younger man. “Until we know these . . . these newcomers better, it’s best not to say too much.”
“Will you take us to see your Elders, then?” Hancock asked.
“No,” Matthew said, with an abrupt shake of his head. “No, it’s too dangerous.”
“So,” Hancock said, thoughtful, “why are you five out here? To contact those other cities?”
Matthew looked at him for a long moment before replying. “No. The nearest city is many kilometers to the south, and it’s safer to send our messengers there by boat. We came out of the dome to see if we could find a way to rescue the prisoners.”
“The prisoners,” I repeated. “That line of people in front of the pit?”
“Yes.”
“Hostages for your good behavior?”
“Those eight, and others, resisted the demons when they first arrived,” Samuel told us. “They are to be held there until they die of the poison from those machines. As they die, one by one, other . . . resisters are dragged out to take their place.”
“My daughter is among them,” Matthew said. The pain behind those words dragged at his face, his bearing.
“So, if you succeed in rescuing them,” Hancock said, “what happens then? The demons take more resisters?”
“The demons know some of us are out here,” Caleb said. “They’ve been hunting us. If we can free the prisoners, oth
ers may be staked out there to die, but at least some will have been saved.”
“We might be able to help you,” Hancock said.
That startled me. Our orders were not to get involved, not to risk having the Jackers find out Marine Recon Seven was on the planet.
Matthew looked at Hancock sharply. “Could you? Can you?”
“Possibly. We’ll need your help to plan it, though.”
“Perhaps,” Matthew said. There was a new light behind his eyes, though, a look of hope. “We will need to talk with them first, to see if we can get you inside.”
“That,” Hancock said, “will have to do.”
“How can you help us free the prisoners?”
“By answering a few questions for us,” Hancock said. “We’ll start by finding out about the demons’ numbers. . . .”
“Good call, e-Car,” Leighton told me later. I was outside on the perimeter, looking toward the construction—the deconstruction, I should say—taking place in front of the city of Salvation. In the past couple of hours, the six huge rock eaters had widened the pit considerably, taking the edge close to the foot of the cliffs upon which the city of Salvation uncomfortably rested. Another seismic tremor had struck about an hour before. It looked like all work had stopped for a time until the dust had settled once more.
“What call was that?”
“Picking up on their year being only five weeks long or so. That was pretty sharp.”
“Pretty obvious, you mean. It’s interesting that they still measure out twenty-four-hour periods so they can keep the seventh day holy—but for them a ‘day’ is the rising and setting of the sun above the eastern horizon every two weeks or so.”
“I imagine they had to make a lot of adjustments when they migrated out here.”
In the distance, one of the prisoners, silhouetted against the glare from the pit, collapsed. A centaur standing close by picked the figure up with its single upper arm, shook it once, tried to set it back on its feet. The bound human collapsed again. Using its upper arm together with the next two in line, the Qesh centaur detached the human from the cable binding it to the prisoners to either side, then picked up the body and without ceremony flung it into the pit.