Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One

by Ian Douglas

  That was one reason we’d established Red Tower as a secure advance base some distance from our objective. From Nidavellir, the Clymer could pinpoint the location of Red Tower and send a laser-com beam there with little chance of interception. The Clymer could also communicate with the Misty-Ds, which were submerged offshore at three different sites along the Twilight Coast. On a regular timetable, the landing ships were supposed to extend an antenna mast above the surface, listening for messages from the Clymer.

  Of course, that still left the problem of getting the message out to the Marine recon forces in the field. Quantum-burst transmission were fairly safe—at least we’d seen no evidence yet that the Qesh could detect the ultra-fast pulses of channel-shifting data—but Red Tower was below the horizon for us, meaning the transmissions had to bounce off the local ionosphere to reach us. That was okay much of the time, but the charged particles streaming in from the nearby star could play havoc with the Heaviside layer. Especially during daylight hours over the Twilight Zone, the stellar wind pressed the Heaviside layer close to the planet’s surface, rendering over-the-horizon signal reflections difficult or impossible.

  It was a lot more certain sending a robotic messenger.

  Once again, we employed the spidery-looking RV-90 robots, the same devices we’d used to track Matthew and his friends back to Salvation’s back door. Stilting along at a steady ten to twelve kilometers per hour, never needing rest and recharging from their environment as they moved, they could cover the thirty kilometers between Red Tower and Salvation in a little under three hours.

  The robot had arrived while we were inside the starport building, bringing word from Colonel Corcoran.

  Download

  Mission Recall Order

  Operation Blood Salvation/ OPPLAN#5735/28NOV2245

  [extract]

  . . . All platoons will break off immediately from current operations and fall back to the advance bases at Red Tower and Red Sky. MST/D retrievals will take place at advance bases Red Tower and Red Sky, initiating redeployment to Clymer and rendezvous prepatatory for return to Earth. . . .

  There was more. Evidently, First Platoon had run afoul of Qesh and local human forces at Martyrdom, in the north, and were fighting to break free. Third Platoon, in reserve, had already deployed to help them.

  So much for avoiding contact with the enemy.

  We didn’t yet know, however, if the Qesh had twigged to the fact that warships from Earth were in-system. They might still think we were “rebels” and planet-bound, though we couldn’t count on that fiction holding for very much longer. The fact that the Salvationist government, at the very least, was collaborating with the Qesh vastly complicated things, and made it certain that sooner or later the Qesh and the Council of Elders would compare notes . . . that, or the Qesh would learn the truth from rebel prisoners.

  I assumed that Colonel Corcoran had issued the recall because the Qesh fleet might know human ships were in-system now, and might even be searching for them. He would want to pull the Marine Recon forces off-world as quickly as possible, and then get the hell out of Dodge. Or perhaps it was simply that Baumgartner had flashed the word back to the fleet that it was mission complete, that we’d penetrated the Salvation computer files and deleted any and all navigational data pertaining to Sol.

  I didn’t know and didn’t much care. The most important thing for me was knowing that we might have a chance of getting both Kilgore and Leighton back to the Clymer’s surgery suite.

  And the platoon had been running for a good forty hours now on G-boost. In another ten or twenty hours, we would crash—and we did not want to be anywhere within reach of the Qesh when that happened. I was glad when Hancock passed the order down.

  We did take some time to pull Kilgore’s exoskeleton out of a storage locker and adjust it to my armor. By that time, I could barely walk in Bloodworld’s gravity; doing so was begging for a serious knee or ankle injury, and I would never be able to keep up with the others if we had to go any distance at all on foot.

  That last, long seismic disturbance gradually faded away at last, and we started our trek back to Red Tower.

  Our Misty-D was waiting for us on the beach when we got there.

  Kilgore died on the way up to the Clymer.

  There wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. He’d been slipping away the entire time, going deeper into shock, and hemostatin foam could only do so much. Once on board the Misty, I tried giving him both BVEs and perfluorocarbon-based artificial blood from the ship’s med locker, and I started trying to use medical nano to seal off more of the mesentery leakers, but the damage simply was too extensive, too deep, too serious.

  Maybe if I’d been able to get him medevaced sooner . . .

  Well, we had his CAPTR data, for whatever that was worth.

  Joy Leighton was in medical stasis—a deep, nano-induced coma—and appeared stable, however. So was Hugh Masserotti, though his condition never came close to being as critical as the other two.

  I was thinking a lot about the ethical problems of modern medical technology. It was the Book of Salvation that got me looking at that.

  The Book of Salvation was one of the religious works that defined the Neoessene Temple movement. It had been written by the group’s founder, Yehoshua Michelson, in the 2120s—though, like Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon three centuries earlier, it was now accepted as divinely inspired scripture, at least among believers. A copy was on file in the Salvation computer records, and I snuck a look at it after we reached the Clymer.

  Gods. How can people believe such crap?

  When Michelson wrote the thing in its really bad imitation of King James English, replete with all of those “thees” and “thous” and “verilies,” claiming the thing to be a translation of a lost Greek text, the New Ice Age had been under way for just about a century, and glaciers were starting to form in Maine, Canada, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.

  I say “New Ice Age,” of course, because that’s what the newsfeeds all call it. In fact, the climate change was pretty much localized to eastern Canada, New England, and northwestern Europe, because of the failure of the North Atlantic Conveyor. At the time, there’d been a lot of talk about the imminent extinction of the human race. At the same time, however, there was a countercurrent to the discussion, which held that technology was going to see us through. The Cayambe Space Elevator had been up and running for a couple of decades by then, and numerous plans to push back the ice—by covering it with black powder, by beaming microwaves at it from space, by turning specialized nanodisassemblers loose on it, by pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—were being enthusiastically discussed and massively underfunded. There were also calls for the wholesale abandonment of Earth. The Plottel-Alcubierre Drive had been demonstrated in the first decade of the twenty-second century, and the Chiron colony had been established soon after. If Earth became uninhabitable, why not just migrate to other worlds?

  But by 2100, there’d been a savage backlash against technology, at least within some religious sects and political minorities. Neo-Luddite philosophies were popping up everywhere, especially as reactions against nanotechnology and genetic engineering. Michelson had been neck-deep in the Luddie movement; he’d been imprisoned for a time for his role in the attempted bombing of Cayambe.

  According to him, Humankind was doomed.

  The Book of Salvation had predicted the end of human civilization in ice, you see, and it was all our own fault. Neoessenes pointed to 2018 and the collapse of the North Atlantic Conveyor—a current bringing warm water into the North Atlantic—as the human-caused beginning of it all. Believe it or not, 250 years ago, most people were convinced that we were entering a period of what was called global warming, and that the warming trend had been caused by human industrial activity dumping high levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. By warming the planet enough to melt the Arctic ice sheet, they claimed, humans had catastrophically tipped the balance. Cold, fresh water f
rom the melting ice had derailed the Conveyor current, causing mean temperatures in North America and Europe to plummet. That, coupled with a new cycle of low solar activity—a new Maunder Minimum—had resulted in the Century Without a Summer, and the inexorable growth of the ice sheets.

  Humankind, then, was doomed, at least according to the Neoessenes. Our attempts to control our environment, to rebuild ourselves, to conquer even death itself all had merely hastened God’s final judgment.

  Of course, the Neoessenes themselves were special.

  The original Essenes were a Jewish sect dedicated to daily baptisms and communal living in ancient Israel. The Neoessenes had started off as a fundamentalist Christian cult, and were still at least nominally Christian, believing that God had called them out from the “Breakers of the Covenant,” the fallen, apostate Church. According to Neoessenist doctrine, it was they, the elect of God, who had the privilege to suffer the fires of hell in order to redeem the rest of a doomed humanity.

  That, it seemed, was why the Elders Bryce and Pierson had chartered the Outward Venture, packed a few thousand Neoessenes on board, and headed for the planetary system circling Gliese 581. The Commonwealth Colonization Bureau had made it relatively easy and inexpensive for distinct social groups to plant colonies on other worlds, in the name of social and cultural diversity. But so far as the Neoessene colonists were concerned, they were embarking for a literal hell—a marginally habitable world right out of the pages of Christian mythology, a place where their sufferings somehow could save a portion of the human population left behind on Earth.

  The joke, of course, was that they’d just wanted to go somewhere where it was warm.

  Pretty much the whole idea was laid out in another of the documents I pulled from the Salvation files—something called the Covenant with Hell. By voluntarily living in hell, the sinless believers of the Temple could redeem an apostate Christian Church. It sounded screwy to me, but no worse, I suppose, than some of the stuff in the traditional Bible about blood sacrifice and redemption. Why anyone would volunteer to live in hell to save others was beyond me, though, in fact, Bloodworld wasn’t that bad. You couldn’t breathe the air, the storms were horrific, the volcanoes and seismic quakes were nearly constant, the gravity dragged at you like the weight of a large child constantly riding on your shoulders, and the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere gnawed at everything constantly, but you could live there with only minor technological help. From the little we’d seen from our robot camera, people inside the cities had a pretty good life; it was only when they ventured outside that they needed technological help.

  And that, I gathered, was important. The Neoessenes hadn’t been able to discard all technology, but they were doing their best to banish what they could.

  The Book of Salvation had a lot to say about nanotech and genetic engineering, especially when they trespassed on what it meant to be human, the “image of God,” as the Salvationists liked to say. Reading the passages about “medical abominations” brought me a little closer to understanding why the Bloodworlders were so fanatically opposed to nanomedicine. Tinkering with God’s original design, clearly, was arrogance in the highest degree—and that included everything from artificial blood to nananodyne pain relief to synthetic bone replacement. Same for CAPTR technology, of course, but it also extended even to nanotechnically chelated brain enhancements and implants. The Neoessenes wanted to draw a sharp, absolute dividing line between Mark I Mod. 0 organic humans and machines.

  The trouble is, the line between humans and machines is already fuzzy, and it’s getting fuzzier every day. If you reject Freitas respirocytes, do you also reject old-fashioned blood transfusions as well? If you refuse to accept an injection of nananodyne ’bots, do you also refuse aspirin or other drugs? Do no cranial implants also mean no cochlear implants to correct deafness? How about eyeglasses instead of retinal transplants? Where do you draw the line?

  Theoretically, the Salvationists accepted technology in other, non-medical areas. They used nanotech to grow their breather masks, and to treat their leather survival suits and boots. Their cities had been grown with nanoconstructors brought from Earth. The trouble is, once you accept one technological aid to life, it’s damned hard to reject others as they come along. And once you ban one type of technology, you tend to become suspicious of all technology, rejecting more and more until you no longer use electricity, Net access, or e-cars. The Salvationists appeared to be in an awkward trap between high tech and low, needing the high tech to survive on Bloodworld, while desperately clinging to what they thought made them human.

  Things had really gotten strange when the Qesh showed up.

  The records I’d pulled off the computer net confirmed that there were two factions now—the Acquiescenists and the Militants. Acquiescenists believed that the Qesh were literal demons newly arrived to take over this particular corner of hell. As demons, they belonged here—they were part of the package. The Acquiescenist Council of Elders had surrendered moments after the Jackers had opened fire on the spaceport two weeks before, creating the Covenant with Hell to explain and justify the decision. If the demons belonged here, the Salvationists had to deal with them—ideally, in such a way that the Qesh didn’t obliterate them.

  The Militants, on the other hand, felt that demons were still demons, and it was the Neoessenes’ duty to fight Satan’s kingdom in every way that they could.

  Both groups appeared to believe in divine beings called “the warrior angels of the Rapture,” angelic creatures who would arrive to rescue the Salvationists and destroy hell at the very end of all things. “The Rapture” was an old idea, apparently first expressed by Puritan preachers in the seventeenth century, an interpretation of several verses in the New Testament suggesting that Christian believers would be caught up into the air before a final, terrible judgment on Earth. Since the Salvationists—this group, at any rate—was no longer on Earth, the doctrine had changed somewhat, applying now to the faithful who’d entered the tribulation of hell. According to some rather fuzzy prophecies from the Book of Salvation, warrior angels would arrive in the nick of time to save the faithful and transform hell into paradise.

  The documents I saw didn’t mention how the Acquiescenists expected to obey God by negotiating their survival with invading demons, and they didn’t mention how the Militants expected to survive if the Qesh decided to drop relativistic projectiles on the human cities.

  Nor was there any clue as to what the Qesh thought about all of this.

  I turned all of the information over to the company’s S2. Let the spooks figure out what it all meant. I was just happy that we’d made it off of that miserable hellworld, and were on our way back to Earth.

  Two days later, we were accelerating out-system, heading in a direction well off from the actual direction of Earth, in Taurus. If the Qesh were tracking us, we didn’t want to draw a line for them pointed straight back to Sol.

  The Qesh certainly knew we were there, but they were . . . busy. While we’d been playing our sneak-and-peek games outside of the city of Salvation, the Commonwealth 3rd Interstellar Fleet had arrived in the Gliese 581 system, and was now engaging Qesh naval forces. The battle was still going on four days later, though the combatants now were spread out across a vast volume of space. When we linked into the Clymer’s external cameras, though, we could still see occasional silent, brilliant flares of light as nuclear weapons detonated, or as relativistic projectiles packing the same destructive energy as a nuke slammed home.

  I was in the squad bay with a couple of dozen Marines and Corpsmen, watching the show, a little awed to realize that with each flash, men, women, and Qesh were dying out there. The larger ships had shields strong enough to absorb or deflect the energy of a megaton nuke or a mass driver projectile moving at near-c, but the smaller vessels could only rely on their speed and maneuverability to avoid being hit. My God, thousands must be dying out there.

  I wondered who was winning.

  “So why,�
�� I wondered out loud after a time, “did the government decide to send in a fleet? I thought they were trying to avoid a confrontation.”

  “They were,” Chief Garner said. “But I think it’s just hit home how close the Impies have gotten.”

  “That’s right,” Hancock said. “Take a look at the history of our engagements with the Qesh.”

  I’d downloaded that file during the trip out from Earth. There’d been that first disastrous encounter with them at Gamma Ophiuchi. After Gamma Oph, there’d been four more encounters with the Qesh before they’d turned up on our front porch, so to speak, at Gliese 581. I’d used Clymer’s navigation AI to plot the positions of all those stars, and the distances between them.

  Gamma Ophiuchi was eighty-four light years from Earth. Our next encounter with them was at Psi Serpentis, and that’s the one everyone remembers, of course. An Earthlike world around a Sol-like star seventy-one light years away. Cernunnos, a joint European-American colony at Psi Serp III had been established there in 2198, and just seven years later, the place got smacked by a near-c planet killer. Fifteen thousand people incinerated in an instant, and a world—so much like Earth, it ached—was transformed into lava fields and glaciers.

  That’s when we began to realize just what it was we were up against.

  The next encounter came in 2220, when the Commonwealth’s 5th Fleet bumped into Qesh raiders at Eta Ophiuchi, sixty-three light years from Earth. Twelve of our ships were vaporized before the rest could disengage. We ran into them again two years later at another sunlike star, HD 147513, when they destroyed the research colony on Athirat, sixty light years from Sol. Once again, a relativistic projectile whipped in at near-c and took out damned near half the planet. Seven years later they showed up at Gamma Serpentis, where a Commonwealth deep-space recon base managed to get off a message drone an instant before it was annihilated.