Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One

by Ian Douglas

  One of them nudged Hancock along with the butt of his rifle.

  “Easy there, fella,” Hancock said over his external speaker. “We’re not your enemies.”

  “You are Fallens,” the leader said, using the word like a name. “We’re willing to suffer hell for you, but we will not listen to your lies! Drop your pistols as well!”

  “We’re not Fallens,” I said. “We’re Angels of the Rapture!”

  “That remains to be seen. You will be judged by the Council of Elders. They will determine your relevance to sacred scripture!”

  Once we were disarmed, they herded us into a fairly large airlock, and I watched one of them operate a control that shut the outer door. I could hear pumps operating somewhere overhead, replacing the outside air, laden with sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid, with Earth-normal air.

  “Heads up,” Hancock said over the laser channel. “After they open the inner door for us . . .”

  The inner door began to dilate open.

  “Now!”

  Five of us, against ten of them. What happened next took almost no time at all.

  They outnumbered us, yes, but four of us were Marines extensively trained in hand-to-hand combat. In the centuries since the U.S. Marine Corps has become the principle space-capable combat infantry force for the Commonwealth, Marines have honed their close-quarters combat techniques to an amazing degree—necessary, if they are to conduct VBSS operations—visit, board, search, and seizure—against potentially hostile ships. In the close confines of spacecraft or orbital stations, you often don’t have enough room to employ ranged weapons like lasers, and certainly not high-energy weapons like plasma guns. Close quarters combat generally comes down to hand-to-hand, employing heavily modified jujitsu and tae kwon do to pin and disable opponents, even in zero-G.

  FMF Corpsmen learn some of the basic stuff, though we’re not the masters that the Marines are. I brought my elbow up and into the throat of the Salvationist directly behind me, and snatched his rifle as I shoved him into a second man nearby. Fortunately, we weren’t in zero-G; fighting hand-to-hand is real tricky in an environment where every punch, every movement has an opposite-but-equal reaction that can send you tumbling backward, out of control. My zero-G training had been pretty much limited to just learning how to maneuver through the dark and tangled interior of a disabled ship without becoming hopelessly disoriented, leaving the actual grappling and fighting to the Marines.

  And this, of course, was anything but zero-G. At 1.85 Gs, we were reliant on our exoskeletons to keep us moving without falling and breaking something. Our opponents didn’t have that advantage. All of them had been born and raised in this environment, however, and as a result they were heavily muscled.

  But they were slow, their movements honed by lifetimes of moving carefully and with deliberation in high gravity, even when their reflexes were quickened by the fact that things fell almost twice as quickly here as on Earth.

  With the two Salvationists behind me dancing with each other, I took the laser rifle I’d wrested away from one and slammed the other in the face with the butt, shattering his goggles. The rifle was connected by a flexible metal cable to a backpack worn by the first man; I looped this around his throat and yanked him off his feet. He pounded at me with leather-gloved fists, but I couldn’t even feel the blows through my armor. By the time he hit the deck, hard, perhaps three seconds after Gunny Hancock had given us the word, the fight was over. The deck was covered by writhing, groaning Salvationists. It took another ten seconds for us to cut their lasers from their backpacks, rendering them useless, and making sure they weren’t carrying any other hardware.

  “Tie ’em up,” Gunny said. He found a small surveillance camera mounted above the inner lock door up near the overhead, and disabled it with his knife. “Use the cables. We don’t want to be interrupted.”

  Several of the bad guys were in bad shape after being manhandled by the Marines. I slapped nanopatches on the worst of them—giving them doses of generic nananodynes that would kill the pain and send them into a twilight happyland for twelve hours or so. They protested, of course, loud and angrily, and I threatened to zap all of them if they didn’t sit still and keep quiet; I could not understand their issues with medical nano.

  We took their breath masks so they couldn’t warn anyone else, and left them tied hand and foot inside the airlock. Beyond the inner hatch, a hallway slanted down into darkness; evidently, this outbuilding wasn’t much used and the passageway was not lit. However, bundles of piping along the overhead showed the path of some major electrical connections. Following these down the corridor led us within a few tens of meters to a junction box—and the telltale jacks for a computer connection. They weren’t the same size as the ones we use, but they showed us we were in the right spot.

  “Major bingo,” Leighton said.

  “Yeah?” Hutchison shot back. “Who’s he?”

  “Okay, Doc,” Hancock said. “It’s all yours.”

  “Right.” I stepped up to the input jacks, found a panel release, and opened it. Inside were circuit panels and cables . . . and a configuration totally unlike what we used on Earth.

  “Non-standard config,” I said. “Jesus, it looks like they’ve been patching it with spit and duct tape.”

  “Let me see, Doc,” Leighton said. She was a whiz with all things electrical, one reason she’d been volunteered for this mission. She pulled a multitool from a pouch and probed at the wiring for a moment before pulling a red and a blue free. “These two,” she said. “I think they feed into a fiber-optic data cable through that converter.”

  “Let’s see if you’re right.” I’d opened up a panel on the left forearm of my armor and pulled a pair of wires free. This was definitely the old-tech way of handling things, but sometimes old tech is simple tech, and less prone to failure than the shiny and the new.

  I hardwired the connection, then opened the link for the AI mod.

  I’d downloaded it from the platoon AI back at the OP—a stripped-down version made by copying the original and trimming off all of the unneeded extras—like code for keeping track of supplies and logistics, or personnel health records, or tactical decision making. What was left was a low-functioning AI with some newly written code piggybacked into the body, code designed to enter a strange computer network, explore it, and find certain very specific data files.

  Since the beginning of the information age, we’ve had software constructs like this. They’ve been called agents, netbots, or simply computer viruses, and over the centuries they’ve become extremely sophisticated—as good as Marines at infiltrating hostile and well-defended places.

  Words appeared on my in-head: INITIATING PROGRAM. MAPPING O/S.

  Seconds passed. The Marines spread out around me, kneeling on the deck, watching both directions for the approach of hostiles. “Hurry it the fuck up, e-Car!”

  “The agent is inside, Gunny. I can’t do anything to hurry it.”

  O/S IDENTIFIED. INCORPORATING O/S SHELL.

  “Okay, I said. “It’s figured out the colony’s operating system. It looks like a variant of Core 1230.”

  “Shit, that’s ancient. Will it support the AI?”

  MAPPING TARGET SYSTEM.

  “It ought to. We had AIs running on computer nets long before the Neoessies packed up and moved out here.”

  SEARCHING TARGET SYSTEM.

  More seconds passed, seconds dragging into minutes. What was happening inside the Salvationist network was very much like a virus scan on a non-AI system. As it identified each file, it explored it, looking for certain key strings of characters. Information about Earth and the location of Sol might be encrypted, but more likely it was resident within the computer’s memory banks in the same format and with the same identifiers as when the Neoessies arrived on Bloodworld sixty-four years ago.

  Of course, it was unlikely that the agent would find something with a nice, neat name like “Navigation data: Sol.” It would keep poking aro
und, though, looking for any of a number of possible matches. Whatever was stored in there might be something as simple as a string of coordinates. Such a string wouldn’t do the Qesh a bit of good, however—not without some sort of nav table or algorithm that would relate our standard coordinate system, with Sol at 0, 0, 0. Bloodworld’s coordinates on our computers, for instance, were RA 15h 19m 26s; Dec -07º 43’ 20”; D = 20.3 ly, which identified a precise spot in Earth’s night sky, plus the distance of just over twenty light years. The coordinates would be meaningless to the Qesh, unless they could convert it to whatever system of celestial navigation they used.

  NAVIGATIONAL FILES IDENTIFIED.

  SEARCHING NAVIGATIONAL FILES.

  HISTORICAL FILES IDENTIFIED.

  SEARCHING HISTORICAL FILES.

  The process actually was proceeding fairly quickly, faster than I’d expected. On Earth and the other worlds of the Commonwealth, nearly all computers—some hundreds of thousands to millions of them—are linked together by system nets, with thousands of local systems overlapping and interconnected to create what amounts to an electronic nervous system for an entire world. This means the network is everywhere, and that every citizen can be connected to the local net through the hardware grown inside his own brain, with in-head CDF displays and internal-voice links with anyone else on the web with whom he wishes to converse.

  On Bloodworld, they seemed to have pursued a different way of doing things. So far as my agent had been able to determine, there was only one computer in Salvation, with connections to a number of dumb terminals. One big computer, then, rather than millions of separate ones tied in together.

  TARGET STRNGS FOUND IN SALVATION LOCAL NETWORK:

  NAVSTELLEXE9386

  NAVSTELRECORD284279.

  NAVSTELRECORD284534.

  NO FURTHER LOCAL SYSTEM ENTRIES FOUND.

  Like the lady said, Major bingo!

  I pulled up an abstract of the file listings. The first was the algorithm for creating a representation of three-dimensional space, listing all of the stars visited by humans when they colonized Bloodworld sixty-four years ago. The next gave the position of Sol in Bloodworld’s night sky, using Bloodstar as the central coordinate, 0, 0, 0. The third was the position of Earth on an absolute map, showing all of local interstellar space out to about fifty light years from Sol. Using those three together would make it easy for the Qesh to find Humankind’s homeworld.

  “Hurry it up, Doc!” Hancock said. “Someone’s coming!”

  “We’re nearly there. . . .”

  I sent another search command through, looking for the last time those files had been called up, or the program executed. I was enormously relieved when I saw the answer come up: 1217:10, 15 November, 2181. That appeared to be the date when Salvation’s computer went on-line, and they hadn’t bothered with the information since.

  It made sense. The Salvatonists weren’t interested in staying in touch with Earth, or even finding it again. Mostly what it meant, though, was that the Qesh hadn’t found it . . . yet.

  “Got it,” I told the others. “Permission to delete.”

  “Do it,” Hancock told me.

  I sent the command to delete all three files.

  “Hostiles!” Leighton called.

  “Engage at will!” Hancock replied.

  I heard the shriek and crack of Leighton’s M4-A2 firing in the close confines of the passageway. Hancock was beside her, firing his laser.

  As the system did so, my agent was identifying portals and connections to other computer systems.

  CONNECTION GATE IDENTIFIED: MARTYRDOM.

  CONNECTION GATE IDENTIFIED: WIDE THE GATE.

  CONNECTION GATE IDENTIFIED: RESURRECTION.

  CONNECTION GATE IDENTIFIED: SCRIPTURE’S TRUTH.

  Other cities on Bloodworld. On Earth, computers were tied together through orbital relays up at Geosynch. Here, they seemed to be tied together by landlines—probably fiber-optical cables. Odd. I would have thought that satellite relays would be less prone to disruption by, for instance, massive seismic quakes or lava flows or tidal waves, all of which this crazy planet had in abundance. As I thought about it further, though, I realized that satellites might not be that secure either, not with periodic gales of charged particles blasting in from that too-close red dwarf sun.

  “Damn it, e-Car! Move it!”

  “I’m scanning the systems in the other cities, Gunny. I can’t rush it. . . .”

  ENTERING MARTYRDOM LOCAL NETWORK.

  SEARCHING TARGET SYSTEM.

  I tried to remember how many separate colony cities there were on Bloodworld. About twenty, I thought, though there might be several that were missed by the earlier probes. If we did find and delete information about Sol’s location in the Salvation database, how could we be sure it wasn’t also on some of the other computers on the planet?

  ENTERING RESURRECTION LOCAL NETWORK.

  SEARCHING TARGET SYSTEM.

  TARGET FILE STRINGS NOT LOCATED IN MARTYRDOM LOCAL NETWORK.

  The colony city of Salvation had been established first. As secondary colonies had been built, the programmers had either copied the first set of files in their entirety and installed them on the new systems, or they’d copied just what was needed and installed that. The first method was lazy but common, the second more efficient, especially when the local systems didn’t appear to have AIs to manage the data.

  The disadvantage of the second method was that there were no off-site backups, so if something happened to Salvation, the data might be irretrievably lost.

  TARGET FILE STRINGS NOT LOCATED IN RESURRECTION LOCAL NETWORK.

  It was beginning to look like the Salvationists had done things efficiently, but without worrying about backups.

  Excellent.

  Whoever had been coming up the passageway appeared to have backed off.

  I kept working, directing the stripped-down specialist AI to keep searching. The negative results kept coming back, and I directed my agents to do a second full sweep, just to make sure. As nearly as I could tell, the system was clean. The Qesh would not learn Sol’s location here.

  Of course, there was always the chance that someone had backups of the data on a separate drive, or in an inaccessible data vault someplace. But for that matter, the Qesh might learn where Earth was by any of a number of other possible means. Hell, all it would take would be for one Salvationist to tell one of his Qesh pals that humans had come to Bloodworld from right there, a dim yellow star in Bloodworld’s sky when the sun was below the horizon, located in the constellation of Taurus, a few degrees south of the Pleiades, just twenty light years distant.

  But our mission here had been to eliminate any reference to Sol’s position in the Bloodworld computers, and we’d just accomplished exactly that. I spent another few moments uploading some additional virus-agents to the system, downloaded some additional records that looked interesting, and then unjacked from the box.

  “We’re good to go,” I told Hancock.

  “Right. Everyone, fall back to the airlock.”

  We began retreating up the corridor.

  I wondered if the Qesh ship parked overhead was watching for us.

  The problem, it turned out, wasn’t the Roc so much as the squad of Qesh. They were waiting for us as we emerged from the Salvationist building, guns leveled. One boomed out a drumroll, and we heard the translation behind it. “Rebels! Stop! Under authority of your God!”

  “Not my God!” Leighton shouted. “Back off!” No-Joy, I recalled, was Reformed Gardnerian, just like my parents, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her go public with her faith in a firefight.

  I don’t know if the Qesh understood her reply or not. They opened fire in the next instant, shooting wildly. No-Joy triggered her plasma weapon with deadly accuracy, burning through the armor of one of the Qesh warriors outside.

  Hutchison stood in the doorway beside her, firing his laser, and then a Qesh energy bolt slammed into the building cl
ose beside the door, buckling the wall in a hot wash of white flame.

  Mark 7 armor runs an electrical field over its outer surface, a charge designed to deflect incoming plasma bolts. The Qesh handheld weaponry fired bolts of positively charged plasma similar to our M4-A2 squad heavy weapons, but they had a lot more punch behind them. The kinetic impact of the incoming round picked up both Leighton and Hutchison and slammed them back into the airlock.

  I ducked forward, kneeling next to Hutch. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay! I’m okay!” He was scrambling back to his feet, scooping up his weapon. We were in fearfully tight quarters, an airlock filled with bound prisoners, and it was impossible to move without tripping over them. Part of me was yelling at myself that I needed to move the prisoners back into the building, get them out of the firefight, but my first concern was for my Marines. Leighton waved me off as I turned to check on her. Her armor was scorched, the nanoflage burned clean off in a crinkled gray swath across her side and upper torso, but she appeared to be otherwise intact. Leaning around the shattered outer door of the airlock, she began pumping bolts into the Qesh outside. I saw one rear up on its hindmost legs, its upper five limbs pinwheeling wildly as the heavy helmet covering its crest disintegrated in hot metal and bone. Qesh armor appeared to be less effective than ours at turning aside charged rounds.

  The other Qesh scattered for cover. I saw another one go down, and realized they were taking heavy fire from their rear, from up on the ridge where we’d left Baumgartner and the others. The rest of the platoon was pouring it on, catching the Qesh in a deadly enfilade.

  “We can’t let ourselves be trapped here!” Hancock shouted, firing his laser through the door. “C’mon! Before they get themselves squared away!”