by Ian Douglas
I reached in and pinched the end between my left thumb and forefinger. It’s damned tough doing that in combat armor, because the pressure receptors in those gloves aren’t really as good as what we have in our fingertips. Besides, what I was trying to grab was slippery, and it had a life of its own as Kilgore’s heart kept beating.
With my right hand I fumbled in my M-7 for my hemostatin foam. The stuff comes from a push-nozzle applicator the size of a pencil, and when it meets blood it gels into an inert plastic that binds with living tissue. It’s way better than a clamp for sealing off leakers.
Kilgore’s external iliac was no longer bleeding, but there was still blood coming out of his belly, a lot of it. In school, you download hundreds of millions of bytes describing and showing every vein and artery in the body, but somehow the reality never looks like the textbook images. Hell, even if it did, the Qesh weapon had done a hell of a lot of damage. The heat had cauterized a lot of blood vessels, but others had simply torn. I kept probing, trying to find where the fresh blood was coming from. The abdominal descending aorta appeared to be intact, thank God, but there was a lot of bleeding coming from higher up in the body cavity, possibly the superior mesenteric.
“Corpsman!”
The new shout brought my head up. I’d been so involved with Kilgore that I hadn’t been watching what was going on nearby. Corporal Hugh Masserotti had been hit.
I opened a med channel from Masserotti as I kept working on Kilgore. One of the worst nightmares a Corpsman can experience is having multiple casualties going down when there’s only one of him. Triage is a term we all hate. It means having to make a judgment—often a snap judgment—as to who we can help and who we’re gong to have to let die.
Okay. Masserotti had taken an energy bolt of some kind in his right shoulder. It looked bad, but not immediately fatal.
The key word there was immediately. Any wound can turn critical on the battlefield in moments. What I was facing now was the realization that no matter what I did, Kilgore’s chances were slim, while Masserotti had a good chance of pulling through if I took care of him now.
I still couldn’t find that second bleeder.
“Who’s with Masserotti?” I called.
“I am!” That was Colby.
“Make sure his suit medsupport is triggered!”
“It is!”
Good. Marine armor has a lot of built-in first aid technology. Besides monitoring your pulse, respiration, BP, and other stats, it can constrict certain parts to restrict blood flow. By tightening on legs and belly, it can help prevent shock. With bleeding from an arm or a leg it can close down tight enough to serve as a tourniquet, or in extreme circumstances—like a mangled limb in hard vacuum—it can cut off the limb and cauterize the stump, saving both blood and air supplies. It wouldn’t work with severe damage, like what had happened to poor Kilgore, but it should keep High-Mass alive until I could get to him.
Damn it, I still couldn’t find that bleeder! I was pretty sure now it was up under the part of Kilgore’s armor that had only partly melted, tucked away inside the more-or-less intact part of his left abdominal cavity. The superior mesenteric supplies blood to the head of the pancreas and the transverse colon . . . but I couldn’t reach it to find out if that was the source of the blood, not without nano probes and more time than I had right now.
The vitals feed from Masserotti was showing in the upper right corner of my in-head display—heart rate 150 and BP at 190 over 105—both elevated but steady.
“High-Mass!” I called over a private channel. “How you holding out?”
“It goddamn fuckin’ hurts, Doc! . . .”
“Colby!” I said. “Open High-Mass’s ACP!”
“Got it!”
“Punch in one . . . five . . . seven . . . three . . . enter!”
“Got it!”
Entering that code into Masserotti’s armor control panel, mounted behind his left shoulder, would direct his suit to autoinject a dose of nananodyne into his carotid artery. The nanobots would converge in the cingulate cortex of his brain and shut down key pain receptors.
While Colby was doing this, I was working quickly to seal off Kilgore. I fired enough hemostatin foam into the gaping body cavity to close up whatever was still bleeding, scooped up the mass of spilled intestines and mesentery and packed it back into Kilgore’s body, then squirted a generous blast of skinseal across the wound. That would hold him together until we could get him into surgery, whenever that might be.
And there was one thing more.
Jacking into his armor, I opened up the CAPTR application resident within his helmet. I noted the last backup time stamp—three days ago, while we were still at Niffelheim-e—and engaged the CAPTR software.
We call it the life preserver, or LP, after the old flotation rings they used to throw to people who were drowning. CAPTR stands for cerebral access polytomographic reconstruction, a mouthful that means that a living brain—together with neural states, synaptic pathways, chemical equilibria, even quantum spin states—can be recorded in a kind of electronic snapshot of brain activity.
With that recording, it’s sometimes possible to pull off a reboot and bring a person back.
It doesn’t always work. There are those who argue that the original person is still dead, that a CAPTR implant at best provides a kind of sad, pale imitation of the original, that within a few minutes of clinical death, the brain tissue deteriorates enough that it can no longer hold the implant data.
Others see CAPTR technology as the golden promise of immortality.
Whatever you believe, the technology isn’t quite there yet, but the military has been working on it. Some day, we might have backups on file for every person, the way we do for AI personalities now. By using the CAPTR software on Kilgore, we were in essence preserving his training and recent experience, a record for debriefing later, and, just possibly, a means of providing closure for his family.
I tried not to think about Paula.
With Kilgore packed up and brain-recorded, I hurried across open rock to Masserotti. He was lying propped up on his bad arm, holding his laser rifle with the other. The firefight was petering out now, with all of the Qesh in the area dead or out of the fight. The six rock eaters had pulled back and were no longer trading shots with us; either Leighton’s covering plasma fire had knocked out their weapons or they’d elected to disengage. Leighton, Colby, Gregory, and Lewis all were keeping up a fairly steady volume of fire, however, snapping away at the huge machines to keep them at a distance.
A hundred meters away, Gunny Hancock and the other Marines of the second assault group were filing out of the small building and heading our way with a ragged group of perhaps twenty civilians.
Masserotti’s arm didn’t need a lot of additional treatment. The nananoynes had switched off the pain, and his suit was both controlling bleeding and keeping the slightly toxic Bloodworld atmosphere out. I took a look at the wound; the Qesh beam or energy bolt had grazed his shoulder, vaporizing some of his pauldron and melting about half of the rest of his armor. It didn’t look like the beam had actually touched him, but droplets of the molten titanium-ceramic composite had melted through the underlying buckyweave layer and burned into the flesh. The outer part of his shoulder was charred black and interlaced with blobs of cooling alloy. The inner part of the wound was raw and bleeding; I could see part of the glenohumeral joint beneath burned flesh.
I checked High-Mass’s nananodyne level, sealed off the bleeding, and sliced away the worst of the half-molten blobs of composite before they could burn their way deeper into bone and soft tissue. After that, I packed Masserotti’s shoulder with skinseal and coded his armor to immobilize his right arm.
“Damn it, Doc!” Masserotti said. “I can’t move my arm!”
“That’s right, Marine. I don’t want you doing more damage trying to use it.”
He gestured with the weapon in his left hand. “Just so I can still pop the bastards!”
The cargo flitter drew up to our perimeter. Lewis began waving to the waiting civilians, getting them to clamber on board.
“How’s Kilgore?” Hancock asked on a private channel. He would, of course, have been following the biofeeds from the entire squad.
“If we could get him back to the Clymer,” I said, “maybe . . .”
“Do what you can for him.”
“A lot of the prisoners are hurt,” I told him. “Nano-D concentrations here are pretty high.”
“That will have to wait. I—”
And then the alarms went off.
A Qesh Roc drifted in out of the east, huge and black and dimly seen against the night sky, but our AI illuminated it on our combat displays. An instant later, beams from the winged disk drifting 30 meters above shot across the ground in coruscating bursts of raw light, as the civilians screamed and scattered.
Masserotti snapped off a number of shots one-handed, without any effect that I could see. Leighton stood almost beneath the thing, firing her plasma gun straight up into its belly. Two of the prisoners freed by Hancock’s team were caught in a high-energy blast that vaporized them both.
Then the prow of the drifting Qesh craft exploded, sending a shower of white-hot fragments scattering across the landscape. The flier lurched, listing heavily to one side; a second blast savaged its smooth ventral surface. The fire, I was pretty sure, was coming from our OP—from the portable robot plasma cannon we’d set up there. The stricken aircraft kept drifting across our position, nosing down. High-energy beams lanced out toward our OP, and then the craft slammed wing-tip first into the rock, cartwheeling slowly, coming apart in flame and ragged debris.
“Everyone saddle up!” Hancock shouted. “We’re getting the hell out of Dodge!”
I helped several of the injured prisoners clamber up onto the cargo flitter, and made sure that Kilgore was strapped down safely on the deck. Kilgore’s flitter folded up and went into the cargo compartment; Masserotti was stubborn and insisted on riding out on his. Since you can control the things through your in-head, and don’t need physical strength or a good right arm, I let him. Our AI was warning of more Qesh aircraft approaching from the south, so we hightailed it, moving fast to clear out of the combat zone before bad-guy reinforcements arrived.
I did take a look inside that infernal pit before mounting up, though, because I was wondering what the hell the Qesh were doing in there. The pit, I saw, was about 50 meters deep, and there was something like a building growing down there in the center, dome-shaped and squat. There were more machines eating away at the rock, but much of the floor of that pit was seething, molten lava—liquid rock with a black, crusty surface and with hot orange light gleaming from underneath. That was the source, I saw, of the eerie, shifting glow on the dust clouds rising above. On the far side of the pit, the curtain of rock separating the pit from the cliffs dropping to the ocean had been eaten through, and streams of lava were oozing out, falling into the ocean, where fire and water exploded into billowing clouds of steam.
I recorded the whole scene with my armor, then hopped onto my flitter and arrowed away after the rest. The downed Qesh flier lay halfway between the pit and the tree line where our OP was located.
And that’s where we found the Qesh pilots.
Chapter Fourteen
The Qesh flier had a cockpit section that had broken free from the wreckage. As we steered past, I could see two Qesh strapped belly-down to what looked like narrow benches. One was motionless, but the other was thrashing about, trying to get free. The main body of wreckage was on fire close by, burning fiercely in the planet’s high-oxygen atmosphere.
“Gunny!” I called. “I’m going to help them out!”
“Colby!” Hancock said. “Give Doc a hand!”
“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”
I hadn’t really thought about the pros and cons of helping the aliens. Corpsmen have a long tradition, though, of helping anyone who’s hurt in a war zone, even the enemy. Your own people come first, of course, and you’re not supposed to jeopardize the mission with heroic gestures—but damn it, I didn’t want to see those Qesh burn.
“Watch for boobies, Doc,” Hancock warned me.
“Roger that.”
Boobies—booby traps—were always a threat. In this case, the danger went a bit deeper. We knew pathetically little about the Qesh, and there was every possibility that they wouldn’t mind triggering an explosion and killing themselves if it meant taking a couple of us with them. Marines—and the Corpsmen who were with them—have faced that kind of insanity before, and not always with alien species on alien worlds.
I let the AI probe the cockpit wreckage before I got close. It reported no electrical activity, which wasn’t a sure-fire guarantee, but it reassured me a little bit. I jumped off my flitter and jogged up to the wreck.
Neither Qesh was wearing much in the way of armor, and this was the first time I’d seen one in the flesh, as it were.
I’d assumed, based on the armored Jackers I’d seen already, that they had huge heads. That wasn’t quite true. Rising from the anterior end of each of their bodies was a pair of massive horns, one curving up to meet the other, which curved out and forward. The structure looked vaguely like an immense claw, a meter or more across. Below and to either side were armored turrets like those possessed by African chameleons on Earth; there were two eyes to a side, four in all, each of them large, deeply set, and jet-black. And as with the chameleon, they appeared to track separately. The thrashing one settled down and watched me as I approached, but there was no way to read the emotion behind that gaze.
“Take it easy there,” I said. I had no way of knowing if they understood English, nor did I know whether what for me was a soothing tone of voice would be soothing or calming to them. I got close enough that I could reach the leg of the motionless one and slap on a blank nano patch. Then I stepped back and pulled out my N-prog. There was a lot of blood around the motionless one, pale-green but turning darker.
After studying the readouts for a long time, I slapped a second nano patch on the active one.
Okay. This was more like it. The first one, I was fairly sure, was dead.
The thing is, we knew nothing about the Qesh except for what was listed on their EG entry—cold and emotionless facts that said little about what these creatures truly were. I knew their vision extended a lot further into the red end of the spectrum than did ours—well into the infrared, in fact, but they couldn’t see the colors blue, blue-green, or violet. Their hearing was better than ours at the low end of the registry, but they couldn’t hear higher-pitched sounds that were easy for us. Humans can hear up to around 10,000 Hertz; Qesh can only hear up to about 6,000 Hz. Instead of DNA, they use TNA for genetic encoding—threose nucleic acid, which on Earth is a precursor of RNA. For blood they have copper-based hemerytherin proteins circulating in something like polyunsaturated vegetable oil.
None of which helped me when the injured Qesh waved its top arm at me and gave vent to something that sounded like a kettle drum solo.
I used a laser scalpel to snick through the restraint harness holding the Qesh to its padded platform. I would have liked to have studied it more, but the fire was spreading and the idea here was to keep it from being incinerated. I stepped well back, watching as it shrugged out of the harness and crawled clear of the wreck.
It didn’t seem badly hurt. Through my N-prog, the nanobots circulating through its body were giving me an interesting look at what appeared to be two massive hearts, a brain considerably larger than a human’s, and a number of organs whose purpose was utterly beyond me. Since I had no idea what readings were normal for a Qesh, there was nothing I could do for it. For blood pressure, I was getting alternating values of 200 and 300 for the systole, but nothing at all for a diastole, and what the hell did that mean? No readings for pain at all, but we measure pain by taking a reading of cortisol, norepinephrine, and other stress hormones in the blood; this critter didn’t have cortisol, o
r any other stress hormone I recognized.
And even if I’d gotten a reading, I knew zero about a Jacker’s central nervous system, about pain receptors, or about how it registered pain; I could as easily kill the being as cure it if I interfered.
It tried to rise up on its rearmost set of legs, and collapsed.
Ah. There was something I could recognize. As the nanobots spread through its circulatory fluid, they were showing me more and more of the being’s internal structure on the N-prog, including its skeleton, massive and alien.
But not that alien. If you have an internal skeleton and you have legs, there are only so many ways the bones can grow, only so many body plans that work. This guy’s legs were digitigrade—meaning the Qesh essentially was standing on its toes, that its lower leg was actually an elongated foot. Lots of non-primate mammals on Earth—dogs, for instance—have the same arrangement. So do birds. I could see the shadows of bones in the Jacker’s legs, and the long one in its upper right leg, just above the rear-pointing “knee”—the equivalent of the tibia in a human—was broken clean through.
“Give me a hand, Colb,” I told the Marine. “We need to get him away from that fire.”
“Right. Damn it, Doc. He’s heavy!”
Heavy was right. The Qesh massed between 400 and 450 kilos. On Bloodworld, that translated to nearly 800 kilos—a good four fifths of a ton.
Colby and I could get a fair amount of leverage with our suit walkers, letting the servo motors do the work, but there was no way we could drag such a weight across the broken and uneven ground. Fortunately, the Jacker itself was able to get its good legs under it and, with our help, hobble clear of the fire. We managed to get it fifty meters from the blaze and the three of us collapsed in a heap, the Qesh thundering a string of bass drum rattles. The skin of its face beneath that massive, double horn, I saw, was true skin rather than leathery plate exoskeletal armor. It had appeared dark gray at first, but I noticed now that it was flushed a deep, rust red, and that in places it was flaring bright orange in complex, rippling patterns. Jackers, I remembered from the EG download I’d seen, communicated both by sound and by changing color patterns. This one obviously was trying to say something important to us, but I had no idea what that might be.