by Ian Douglas
I thought about those huge machines we’d seen digging out the pit beneath Salvation’s walls. They were either some sort of heavy mining equipment using nano-D to eat through rock, or—more likely, given that they’d been devouring basalt, which isn’t exactly hard to come by in the cosmos—they’d been engaged in terraforming.
No, not terraforming. Qeshiforming, perhaps, since we didn’t know the name of their homeworld.
The Qesh felt they owned Bloodworld and its inhabitants.
Perhaps they’d been looking for a species whose members were willing to allow themselves to be owned.
They might have been doing so by seeing if some were willing to passively stand in front of a pit while nano-D dissolved their legs. Or perhaps that was simply a convenient means of getting rid of troublemakers, of leaving behind a population willing to do what they were told, or of conditioning all of the population to obey without question. Acquiescenists.
It didn’t excuse what the Qesh had been doing to those people by any means, but given their likely Qesh-centric attitude—these creatures belong to us, to do with as we please—it made a horrible kind of sense. Humans are cantankerous, contrary creatures, but history is filled with populations that were conditioned to go along with the crowd, to obey orders, to snap to with a loud “sieg, heil” when called upon to do so. Such populations don’t often last for long, but the Qesh wouldn’t have known that about us. They’d been looking for obedience and, perhaps, a population that they could reshape for their own purposes in the same way that their Qeshifying machines had been reshaping the planet.
Reshaping.
That suggested something else. The Encylcopedia Galactica said that the Qesh came from a world circling a type F1 star. Their eyes, however, suggested adaptation to both a brilliant sun and to near darkness.
I’d been assuming ever since downloading the EG data on the Qesh that their homeworld might be like Bloodworld, tidally locked to its primary—either that, or the Qesh had evolved in caves or underwater, and needed two kinds of eyes to handle two kinds of light conditions. The trouble with that was that a planet close enough to be tidally locked with an F1 star would have surface temperatures of a thousand degrees or more, uninhabitable, at least by humans and by Qesh, who were somewhat similar in their basic environmental needs. I doubted that they’d started out underwater or in caves, either. Their physical anatomy showed no evidence of having been adapted to a marine environment at any time in the past 100 million years or so, and creatures that big would be severely restricted in cave systems.
But what if the Qesh had changed themselves, deliberately adapting their physiology through medical nanotechnics to a variety of environments?
It was possible. They had nanotechnology—likely had had it for a long time. I’d already noted that the break in their otherwise bilateral symmetry—their upper, seventh, arm—looked like it might be the fusion of two limbs into one. Possibly, that had been a deliberate self-modification, but it seemed more likely to be evidence that they’d evolved—not on the world of a relatively short-lived type F sun, but rather on the world of a much older star—type K, or type M, like Bloodstar. A world where a species might evolve across 100 million years rather than the half million or so for Homo sapiens.
A world of a dim, blood-red sun, like Bloodworld, where eyes might be large enough to capture low levels of long-wavelength light. The tiny eyes had been deliberately grown later, when they moved to a planet orbiting an F1 star.
Gods, the Qesh were old.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Qesh-Human conference was being held on board that Jotun-class Qesh warship, a cigar-shaped asteroid 10 kilometers long and perhaps 3 wide at its middle. Going in, I noticed a hell of a chunk taken out of one end of the thing. It looked like one of our ships had caught it with a kinetic impactor powerful enough to give it a serious nudge. Seeing that gave me a serious jolt of pride; the Navy had hit the bastards, and hit them hard.
In the time between my release from Ward E on board the Consolation and my collection by Captain Reichert, the company CO, I was able to download an update on the naval engagement so far—the Second Battle of Bloodstar, as it was now being styled. First Bloodstar, of course, had been the diversionary attack launched by 3rd Fleet so that the recon Marines could get off the planet.
Admiral Talbot’s strategy had taken the human fleet a long way, destroying seven of the enemy’s forty-four ships, and seriously damaging nine more. That was a helluva showing, considering how badly their capital ships out-massed ours. But doing that much damage had cost the human fleet 132 ships and almost forty thousand naval and Marine personnel.
We’d been losing. The Marine division that landed on the surface had fought through and taken both Salvation and Redemption, but in space we were getting our asses kicked.
Once the Seabees and heavy engineer battalions had grown the planetary batteries out of solid bedrock on Bloodworld’s surface, though, the Qesh had pulled back out of the batteries’ range, had disengaged, in fact, and taken up a tight defensive position ten million kilometers out.
The logical countermove by the Qesh would have been to drop a high-kinetic planetary crustbuster on Bloodworld to eliminate the batteries. They still had troops and ships on planet, or they might have wanted to keep the world intact for themselves, but Talbot and his staff were bracing for the worst.
Instead, they’d received a message, in English, asking for the conference.
I wondered about Talbot and the Fleet Command Constellation accepting the invitation to board the monster enemy mothership. Yes, they were permitted to keep their sidearms, but those hardly posed any threat at all against the Jotun. And this would have been an opportunity for the Qesh to decapitate the human fleet’s command structure with one blow.
But the message had certainly sounded like a sincere appeal for negotiations. And possibly Talbot didn’t think we had any choice. We’d lost almost half of our fleet at that point, and no longer had the element of surprise. The engagement had deteriorated, I understood, into a static slugging match, and there was absolutely no way we could match the Qesh giants slug for slug.
Captain Reichert and three members of his staff escorted me to a ship’s boat docked with the Consolation, and the AI took us from Bloodworld orbit out to the Jotun. The Qesh ship had been moved to a position about halfway between their fleet and ours. More evidence, perhaps, that they were trying to be honorable.
“So how’s the leg, Carlyle?” Reichert asked. We were in zero-gravity at the moment, and adrift in the boat’s small cabin. The seats had been reabsorbed into the deck, and one bulkhead had become a viewall, showing the feed from the boat’s forward hull cameras. The Jotun-class vessel filled much of the screen, and was slowly expanding as we approached.
I looked down at the contraption growing from my left hip. They’d fitted me with a temporary prosthetic back on board the Consolation, a robotic leg that would do me until they could grow me a new organic leg from my own stem cells. It looked realistic enough inside the material of my dress uniform, and the neurolinkages grown into my spine while I was sleeping gave me both control and sensations of pressure.
“No problems, sir,” I replied. “These things don’t have much of a learning curve at all.”
Walking in it hadn’t posed a problem, though I felt slow and a bit clumsy. In zero-G, of course, there was no problem at all.
“Well, we’re sorry to have rousted you out of your heal-tube,” Lieutenant Kemmerer said. She was Reichert’s exec, his company second in command, and also worked S-2, Intelligence. “Your doctors wanted to keep you out until they’d attached a new leg, but I’m afraid this wouldn’t wait.”
“They told me . . . the Qesh have asked for me?”
“They have,” Reichert said. “Not by name, but they wanted to speak with “the human warrior who saved the Qesh warrior from the fire.”
“According to our records,” Kemmerer added, “that was you.”
“It’s just possible, Carlyle,” a senior chief named Alvarez said, “that you’ve managed to stop this war single-handed.”
I honestly didn’t know how to answer that. Forty thousand men and women had still died just in the one battle, which had been fought after I’d saved that alien’s leather-skinned ass on Bloodworld.
But I was saved having to say anything when the cabin speakers announced that we would be under acceleration in sixty seconds, and that we should take our seats. Acceleration couches rose out of the deck, yawning open, and we allowed ourselves to be folded into their embraces. We felt the heavy drag of Gs as the ship’s boat closed. On the viewall, a minute white speck just visible against a wall of dark gray and cratered rock and dust grew slowly larger and brighter, resolving a few moments later into a hangar bay with an entrance easily 100 meters wide. Still slowing, we entered the Qesh asteroid ship. The viewall had to stop down the brightness; this was definitely the harsh, white glare that might be expected on the world of an F1 sun.
We were met by an escort of seven Qesh in ornate honor, and led deeper into the cavernous depths of that ship.
Gravity. Funny, but I didn’t notice at first. The EG says that the Qesh evolved on a world with a surface gravity of roughly two and half times Earth’s.
“Sir,” I said as we walked along inside the circle of Qesh septapods. “I thought the Qesh were from a high-G planet. This feels about right for Earth.”
“It is. Nine point nine meters per second squared.”
“And nothing rotating. It’s not spin gravity.”
“We’ve noticed that.”
I’ll bet they had. We come close to generating antigravity with our trick with quantum-spin flipping, like our stretchers and the quantum flitters, but that needs a surface—road, open ground, or water—to work against. True antigravity—taking gravity and making it do what you want it to do, including running backward—is something quite else. Some physicists will still tell you it’s impossible. Others say there might be a way to do it, but you need to juggle a couple of artificial black holes to twist the fabric of space, and that’s just too cumbersome for daily applications.
But here was proof positive that the Qesh could do it.
“Sir, they dialed down the ambient gravity for us?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Alvarez said. “We’d really like to know how they manage to do that, too.”
Doorways large enough to admit a frigate dialed open for us, and we entered a hall large enough that it could have had its own weather systems. The air was moist, but . . . yeah. That was puzzling too. I didn’t have a sampler, but it tasted fresh, like Earth after a rainstorm. The EG suggested that the Qesh breathe something that starts off like Earth’s atmosphere, but there’s other stuff like extra CO2 and sulfur dioxide added.
Well, we knew already they could breathe Earth-standard atmosphere. We’d watched them doing so through our spy-cam in Salvation. But apparently they’d gone and special-created an atmosphere that we would find comfortable on board their ship, at least in this hall, and along the passageways through which we’d come.
Was the trick so inconsequential for them? Or were they telling us we were special?
There must have been around a thousand armored Qesh inside that hall, lining the walls, on the deck or standing on floating platforms. There were at least as many Qesh there as there’d been people at the Geosynch Military Assembly Hall when they gave me that medal, but Qesh are a lot bulkier than humans.
There were others there as well: beings like enormous caterpillars on eight legs, striped green, black, and yellow, two meters long and low to the ground. When I saw one rear up on its four hind legs, though, I realized that these were Qesh as well, but with eight limbs, not seven, and no massive head claw. They had the independently mobile, turreted eyes, but all four were the small variety, adapted for high levels of light.
Okay, that might give us a little more insight into their biology. We knew from the EG that the Qesh have three sexes, but had never seen anything indicating how sex worked for them. Apparently there were considerable differences between at least two of those sexes; I wondered what the third one looked like.
“You are Hos-pit-al-man Sec-ond Class El-li-ot Car-lyle,” a deep-rumble of a voice boomed at me. The speaker, astride a long, narrow bench on a raised dais before us, was one of the familiar seven-limbed Qesh, wearing the ornately chased ceremonial armor I’d noticed on the one individual in Salvation. For all I knew, it was the same being.
I couldn’t tell if it was inflected as a question or as a statement, but I decided not to take chances. “I am,” I said.
“In the recent conflict on the surface of the planet you call Bloodworld,” the voice went on, “during the blood-tide of hot battle, you came across Veddah Fall-of-Lightning in the wreckage of her warflier. Though engaged in a withdrawal, you stopped, pulled her clear of her burning craft, and gave her medical assistance.”
Veddah, I assumed, was a rank or title, untranslatable by the software they were using. The her surprised me, though I suppose it shouldn’t have. We’ve long been fuzzy about Qesh sexes and pronouns, and most people use both he and it more or less indiscriminately when they’re talking about them.
Did the sexual differences extend to role differences in Jacker society? Were the females warriors? What were the human-sized eight-limbed individuals?
“Veddah Fall-of-Lightning,” the speaker went on, “is my clan-sibling-daughter, and precious to me. I have asked that combat be honorably suspended, that I might reward your gallantry.”
There was more. Lots more. Other warriors—again, females, I thought—took turns speaking, reciting lists of battles and of generations of warriors. Much was in the rumbling booms and rattles of the Qesh language—untranslatable, perhaps. Or maybe they were words too special to be put into another language.
The entire ceremony struck me as intensely religious, though not, perhaps, in a way the Salvationists would have understood. Sacred, perhaps, was a better word. For perhaps an hour, we listened to what I swear was Qesh opera, with six or eight Qesh bellowing and thundering at one another on a low stage opposite Fall-of-Lightning’s dais, accompanied by creaking, groaning, and rumbling noises that just might have been an alien equivalent of music.
Captain Reichert, the others, and I stood through the entire performance, and I was enormously glad that they’d dialed the gravity down to levels comfortable for humans, because if it had been up to 2.6 Gs we would not have been able to remain standing. The Qesh rarely seemed to bother with furniture; they didn’t need to, with that arrangement of massive legs, though the narrow benches did seem to serve as functional acceleration couches.
At last, the painful sounds died away, and Fall-of-Lightning was addressing me again.
“Hos-pit-al-man Sec-ond Class El-li-ot Car-lyle,” she said, “by your will, you chose to save the life of my sibling-daughter. By your will, you have bound her and her clan to you. Do you, in turn, accept the binding?”
“Say ‘yes,’ ” Lieutenant Kemmerer whispered, her voice close by my ear. “And make it flowery.”
“Did she just ask me to marry her?” I whispered back.
“No, but damned close. She wants you, and your clan, to be her clan siblings.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but had to assume that Intelligence had been studying Qesh and Qesh culture nonstop since the fighting had begun, certainly since the beginning of the truce.
“Thunder-in-the-Valley,” I said, “I would be deeply honored to be your clan-sibling. I accept this binding, and thank you for the honor.”
I hoped I’d sorted it all out straight, and that this was Thunder-in-the-Valley. Lieutenant Kemmerer ha
d said I’d saved Thunder-in-the-Valley’s relative, and it all seemed to fit.
“And are these humans with you of your clan, Hos-pit-al-man Sec-ond Class El-li-ot Car-lyle?”
“They are . . . as are all of the Marines of Deep Recon 7, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Division.”
There was a long pause, and I heard an undercurrent of drumming. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown in that last, made the whole of Marine Force Recon my clan . . . but damn it, they were. My family, more than family.
“Hos-pit-al-man Sec-ond Class El-li-ot Car-lyle, we accept you and your clan as our siblings and daughters. Welcome to the Passage of Night!”
I felt Captain Reichert and the others sag with relief behind me, felt Reichert’s hand pat my shoulder. “Well done.”
Thunder-in-the-Valley came down off her throne and bumped my head with her massive claw. I had the feeling that, had I been a Qesh female, we would have exchanged clunks of our head ornamentation, the way humans might shake hands or give one another a high-five. Hell, she could have brained me with that double-claw horn, but her movement was astonishingly precise for so massive a being, the touch of her horn a delicate kiss.
I saw other Qesh in the room butt heads as well, and the clashes sounded like colliding e-cars.
Eventually, we were escorted back to the ship’s boat, and we returned to the Consolation. I wanted to go back to the Clymer. I wanted to see Doob and the others. But I was told that I’d been transferred to the hospital ship for the duration.
Exactly what that duration might be, I had no idea.
So, was I a zombie, or wasn’t I? I still didn’t know, not for sure. It all hinged, I thought, on whether or not there was such a thing as a soul.
I still remembered looking down on my own body, with Dubois lying beside me. The memory had lost some of its crisp, clean edge, so much so that I now wondered if I had, in fact, dreamed the whole thing. My brain had been starving for oxygen, my circulatory system was on the point of collapse. I could easily believe, now, that I’d hallucinated it.