by Ian Douglas
I stifled a shudder. It was damned hard not to think of those alien things as evil, deliberately torturing those prisoners to death by forcing them to stand in the deadly wash of nanodisassemblers.
We were going to go in there and rescue them soon. I knew Gunny Hancock was working out a plan now as he and the squad’s sergeants questioned the Salvation colonists. The question was how we were going to pull such a raid off without alerting the Jackers to our presence on Bloodworld? I could see three . . . four . . . no, five of the centaur shapes near the line of prisoners, two of them carrying what looked like weapons.
As I watched, a sixth centaur led another human out from a small, squat polygon near the base of the cliffs beneath the city and forced him—no, her—into the place in line recently vacated.
I thought about Matthew five-three-one, and his evident pain at the death sentence placed on his daughter.
Gunny Hancock materialized out of the darkness behind us. “You two ready for a bit of an outing?”
“I thought we were already having one, Gunny,” Leighton said.
“Maybe, but this one’s about to get interesting.”
I pointed. “Gunny, you see that small building to the right? Below the city cliffs?”
“Yeah.”
“They just now brought another prisoner out of there. Either that structure is a gate leading into the underground part of the city, or it’s what the Jackers are using for a holding cell for the prisoners.”
“You think there are more prisoners there, Doc?”
“Either there, or that’s where they’re bringing them outside from the city. From here, though, it looks like a building.”
“It’s a building,” Hancock said. “Our guests drew a map.”
“If we’re going to rescue those eight there beside the pit,” I said, “we should at least make a try at releasing the prisoners inside the jailhouse.”
“That about cubes the difficulty of the original assault. You sure there are prisoners in there?”
I pointed to one of the robotic scanners we’d set up on the perimeter, aimed at the city. “It’s probably recorded. Check it and see.”
Hancock stood motionless for a moment as he accessed and downloaded the video from the scanner collected over the past few minutes. I did the same, fast-forwarding to the part where you could just make out a centaur walking up to the building. “File seven, frame nine-eight-two-eight,” I told him. The time stamp showed about three minutes earlier.
“I see it.”
Together, we watched the Qesh go inside the building, and emerge a moment later half dragging, half carrying a struggling female figure.
“Shit,” Hancock said at last, as the woman was secured to the cable between two other prisoners. “I think you’re right.”
“Just how are we going to get in there and do this without tipping the Qesh to our being on the planet?” I asked.
“A little thing Marines call strategy and tactics, Doc.”
“I know, I know. I was twenty-first in my class of forty. I’m working on it, Gunny, okay?”
“Well, you’re about to have a remedial class, Doc. Check out the boys and girls for combat. Full stim.”
“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant. G-boost too?”
“Do it.”
There have been a number of drugs and, later, nanomeds in the military’s arsenal, some going back to the turbulent years of the twenty-first century that have been used to fine-tune the warrior’s P and P, his psychology and physiology. The oldest and most basic obviated the need for sleep. More modern nanomeds, like stim, let a Marine go without sleep for seventy-two hours or more with no adverse effects, while G-boost actually improves human reaction times, tunes up the body’s ability to transport oxygen and carry away metabolites, strengthens muscular response, and allows the brain to think faster and more clearly.
One by one, I visited each of the Marines in the squad, snapping vials of stim and G-boost into the drug locks in their armor, and keying in the appropriate codes. It would take about ten minutes for the new nanobots to link up with the Freitas respirocytes already in each Marine’s circulatory system and begin boosting their performance.
Last of all, I gave myself the injections, feeling the sharp but momentary sting as my armor’s injectors fired a thin spray of nanobots through my skin and into my blood.
“All squared away, Doc?” Gunny Hancock asked me.
“They’re good to go,” I told him.
“Okay, Marines, listen up!” Hancock said over the squad channel. “Here’s the plan. . . .”
Chapter Thirteen
We made our approach on our quantum flitters, our nanoflage reproducing the blacks and dark grays of the rocky plain between the woods and the mining pit as black dirt and vegetation gave way to bare rock. We went in slow, painstakingly slow. Nanoflage can’t provide true invisibility; if you’re a sentry and know what you’re looking for, you can see movement, a kind of ripple against the background as the nanoflaged Marine approaches your position.
We got around this in two different ways. Move slowly enough, and you won’t trigger the motion-sensing program of any watching AI. And if you move directly toward your objective, there’s less of a side-to-side ripple effect to catch the eye or the electronic sensor.
The closer we got to the pit, though, the greater the chances for discovery.
Our biggest problems were the six Qesh rock eaters below the city. Each one appeared to have several weapons turrets mounted on its upper deck and flanks, and the Salvationists assured us that they were heavily armed with heavy beam weapons. At least there were no Rocs or Daityas overhead. Gunny’s plan would have been impossible if any of those monsters had been about.
As it was, with only a poor understanding of Qesh sensor capabilities, we were taking a horrendous chance. There are times, though, when you have to realize that the enemy is only human—even if he, she, or it has seven limbs and looks like a cross between a Greek centaur and a rhinoceros on steroids. Organic beings get tired, they get bored, they get distracted. At night, their optics are adapted to the pool of light within which they work, not to the purple darkness surrounding them.
Machines—artificial intelligences—have the potential of doing a lot better as watchmen than do organic species. We had no idea as to how sharp Qesh computers or AIs might be. We weren’t even sure they had computers, as we understood the term, though their Encylcopedia Galactica entry gave them a data storage/transmission history, a DS/T, of more than nine thousand years, which pretty much guaranteed that they had the technology.
That didn’t tell us whether or not they’d created their own AIs, however. Some species—hell, some humans—preferred not to create machines that could think for themselves.
Well, perhaps we were about to find out.
We’d left the five Salvationists behind in our forward OP, and Kookie, Lance Corporal Kukowicz, was with them, partly to keep an eye on them and partly to serve as overwatch with his accelerator rifle. Through our robot scanners on the perimeter, he could keep an eye on activities in and around the pit that we might not notice once we got in close. He could also relay warnings, if any, from our guests, and serve as sniper, if need be, from more than a kilometer away.
The flit from our OP to the pit seemed to take forever. Our brains, under the influence of the combat nanomeds, were receiving and processing data at something like five times the normal rate, at the very peak of electrochemical efficiency. I felt cool, collected, and sharply focused, but the ten minutes or so it took our flitters to make that crossing passed in what felt like almost an hour.
That pit was enormous. It stretched more than a kilometer across, from just in front of the city cliffs to a point less than a kilometer from the tree line, and the six rock eaters were busily enlarging it as we watched. There was activity in the depths of the pit as well, though we couldn’t see down inside as yet. Whatever was down there was illuminating the belly of the rising dust clouds with de
ep, ruby light, giving the hole the look of a broad, gaping gateway into hell.
What, I wondered, did the hyper-religious Salvationists think of that sight?
For that matter, why were the Qesh carrying out their strip-mining operation here? The city appeared to be undamaged, at least so far, despite the images we’d downloaded days before suggesting the contrary; with the vast majority of Bloodworld’s surface uninhabited, why were the Jackers digging here, within full view of the captured city?
Was the city captured? The Salvationists back at the OP said it had been, but there were still too many questions about what the Qesh were doing here, and why.
As we approached the area lit from overhead by the mast-mounted spotlights, we began to disperse into two assault teams. I stayed with Colby, Masserotti, Kilgore, Lewis, Gregory, with Sergeant Leighton in charge, maintaining a slow but steady creep toward the line of prisoners by the pit. Gunny Hancock took the remaining five Marines with him off to the right, circling around the enemy perimeter, closing on the small building where more prisoners were being held.
In a sense, there was an additional, unseen, Marine with us—the squad AI, which was resident within all of our in-head CDF circuitry, coordinating our movements, guarding our quantum-scrambled communications channels, and scanning our surroundings through the sensors in our armor and within our skimmers. So far as we could tell, there were no Qesh sentries, no perimeter defenses, no force fields or other barriers around the area. We had to assume, at the very least, that they’d deployed microsensors of some sort. If they had nanodisassemblers, they had the technology to build microscopic sensors that could detect movement, magnetic moment, or even the air displaced by our silent passage. We had such devices, and the Qesh were nine millennia beyond us in terms of electronic wizardry.
“I am detecting comnet transmissions,” our AI’s voice said, speaking to all of us at once. “Activity suggests a full alert.”
“Right!” Hancock’s voice added. “Gun it! Go to the assault!”
I gunned it.
A comnet is the many-node communications network linking a sensory net. Our AI had just picked up the telltale surge of energy through the Qesh perimeter that said the enemy’s sensors had detected something and were sounding the alert. At that point, a stealthy approach becomes more or less useless; we went from what the Marines refer to as “sneak and peek” straight to “shoot and scoot,” springing our attack.
I covered the last hundred meters of open ground in seconds, my skimmer sliding centimeters above the bare rock in a programmed zigzag designed to confuse enemy sensors and to avoid the zigzags of my companions. I’d already unshipped my carbine and mounted it to the prow of my skimmer, though my primary focus was not going to be on combat. Calli Lewis fired first, her Mk. 24, sending a megajoule pulse of coherent light into one of the armed Qesh guards.
One megajoule represents about the same energy as two hundred grams of exploding TNT. The intense bolt of energy causes such sudden temperature change in the target that it will gouge out a double-fist-sized chunk of solid steel. Part of the target will vaporize, and what’s left will suffer massive shock damage.
And when that bolt hits organic tissue, the results can be even more spectacular.
The side of the Jacker guard’s helmet flared a dazzling white, erupting in a sudden, expanding cloud of mist. The figure reared up on its hind legs, turning, and then two more laser bolts caught it with explosive bursts side by side on its upper, ventral, surface. Its weapon spun away through the night as the Qesh toppled over backward, vanishing into the open pit behind it.
Contrary to most entertainment downloads and VR interactives, you can’t actually see a laser pulse, even when there’s lots of dust and smoke in the air, as now. It’s light, after all, traveling at the speed of light, and a pulse with a duration of a hundredth of a second is just too brief to register on human vision. What I could see were more and more explosive bursts scoring against the armored giants standing around the line of human prisoners. Two were down . . . then three. A fourth opened fire, but wildly, sweeping a long-duration beam, slicing through the dust cloud in a brilliant thread of green. The shot was high and well off to the left; an instant later, the Qesh gunner collapsed as its chest armor exploded in a gout of white light and molten metal.
The firefight erupted with what seemed to be a surreal unfolding of events in slow motion. I angled my flitter toward the line of prisoners, leaping off the machine as I approached, shouting, “Down! Down! Everyone get down!”
Gregory cut down another Qesh guard with a burst from his laser, then dropped to one knee, mounting guard. “Get the civilians outta here, Doc!” he yelled.
I pulled my cutter from its sheath—a Marine-issue nanoknife. The active surface was coated with disassemblers that sliced through damned near anything, and it snicked through the heavy cables strung from collar to collar of the prisoners, then cut the shackles binding their wrists.
“Who are you?” one bearded man cried as I freed him.
“Marines,” I told him. “From Earth! We’re here to get you out, okay?”
He nodded through his terror. “Thank God!”
I pointed back across the rocky plain toward the distant forest. “You have some friends waiting for you in that direction,” I told him. “Can you make it on your own?”
“I . . . I think so.”
“I can’t walk,” a young man nearby said. He was barefoot, his pants torn off at the knee, his feet and legs showing horrible sores and ulcerations. High concentrations of nano-D in the air can do terrible things to unprotected skin.
“Kookie!” I called over the squad channel. “Send me the cargo flit!”
“On the way, e-Car.”
The cargo flitter was four meters long and one wide, with spin-reversal lift enough to haul several tons.
“You people!” I yelled at the civilians. “Get down and stay down! We’re going to get you out of here!”
The civilians sat or lay in a small huddle, as the Marines around them continued to blaze away at Qesh warriors whenever they showed themselves. Laser fire snapped from the nearest of the titanic rock eaters, exploding against black rock. Joy Leighton raised her plasma gun and triggered a bolt at the huge machine’s right-flank turret.
The man-portable M4-A2 plasma gun uses a high-energy laser to excite a tiny mass of highly compressed hydrogen gas into a plasma state. At the moment it fires, a laser beam drills a straight-line tunnel through the air, through which a magnetic field accelerates the plasma bolt to high velocities. Whatever that bolt hits suffers serious thermal shock and vaporization plus the kinetic impact of the fast-moving plasma mass, making the weapons far more destructive—and heavy—than lasers. Every Marine squad has two plasma gunners; they’re the equivalent of squad machine guns back in the old Corps.
The M4-A3 packs a five-MJ punch—the equivalent of one kilogram of TNT. The explosion shredded the rock eater’s turret and left a crater in the metal, white-hot and furiously steaming. Leighton slammed several more rounds into the machine’s tower, which loomed ten meters above the vehicle’s broad deck, then shifted targets to the next-closest machine, which was slewing about on its tracks, now, to bring its own turrets to bear.
A beam struck Private Kilgore, kneeling near the edge of the pit. I saw him twist and flop over backward, heard Gregory’s shrill yell of “Corpsman!”
Reaching for my M-7, I jumped up and ran.
Dave Kilgore was dying.
I knew it as soon as I saw the front of his combat armor. The enemy beam had struck him low on his torso and to his left. A twenty-centimeter chunk of armor from his hip to his waist was gone, vaporized, and much of what was left was half melted. Skin and muscle had burned away above the lower left quadrant of his abdomen, releasing a mass of intestines and mesentery tissue that had spilled onto the ground, some charred black, some blood-wet and glistening.
There was a lot of blood, bright red and pulsing with the rapid be
at of his heart.
I cleared his visor so I could see his face. His eyes were wide open, glassy, unseeing. Thank God he wasn’t feeling it, but I suspected he’d already lost so much blood he’d gone deep into shock.
“Hang on, buddy!” I told him. There was a chance that he was aware behind that glazed-over stare. If he was, I didn’t want him to slip away on me—and I wanted him to know he wasn’t alone. I keyed in a jolt of nananodynes through his armor, just to make dead certain he wasn’t feeling it.
The actual wound was borderline for field first aid. Under different circumstances, I would have been able to pack his belly with an instant dressing, stabilize his blood pressure, and call in an emergency medevac. In a hospital, even in the Clymer’s sick bay, he would have had a good chance—say ninety-five percent—of coming back.
But there were two major problems here. First of all, he was bleeding badly—badly enough for him to exsanguinate in the next handful of minutes. Worse, though, was the medevac problem. The Clymer was some tens of millions of kilometers away, and with the Qesh in control of local space around Bloodworld, there was simply no way we were going to be able to get him to a decent medical facility.
I wondered what might be available inside the city of Salvation. They would have hospitals there, but if the locals didn’t go in for nanomeds or microintervention, I didn’t think the chances of helping him would be very good.
And if we couldn’t get him to a decent medical facility within the next few hours, he had no chance at all.
First things first. I needed to stop that bleeding or he wouldn’t survive the next five minutes.
No time to inject nanobots or attempt to track them on my N-prog. My gloved fingers probed through the intestinal spill, moving the mass aside as I tried to see. There, just visible as a pool of blood drained away, I could see the throb of an artery—the left external iliac, I thought—a severed end pulsing bright arterial blood.