by Ian Douglas
I also remember the thunderclap when Doob triggered the CAPTR mechanism. I’d gone back into my body. I was certain of that. Surely, if that had been my soul floating outside my dead body, there wouldn’t be that continuity of linkage with my corpse.
And, so far as I was concerned now, here on board the Consolation, it didn’t matter, not a bit. My memories went back in unbroken succession, from now, past the lost days and nights of unconsciousness, and on back into my past. Dad, telling me he was counting on me for General Nanodynamics’ future success. Me, raising my hand and repeating the oath as I was inducted into the Navy. Paula Barton’s eyes sparkling in the Texan sun. And, yes, her eyes growing glassy as our boat pitched and yawed in the glacier-stinging winds.
The cold and barren surface of Niffelheim, the terror as the Rocs passed overhead.
The landing on Bloodworld, the first one, with volcanoes glowing sullen on the horizon. Faces and names. Doob. Lewis. Michael. Joy. Especially Joy.
Howell. What had ever happened to him?
All there. It was me.
So even if my brain had died, me, the essential me, had survived, had returned, was still here.
Lieutenant Baumgartner came over to the Consolation a few days later. Chief Garner and Dr. Francis were with him. I was in one of the hospital ship’s open rec areas, up in the spin section. The compartment was pulling about half a G. I was up there as often as I could manage, breaking in the new leg. The surgery had gone well, everything seemed to be working well, but the leg was weak. Pale white and achingly weak. It would take a while to bring it up to match the other one.
“How are you doing, Carlyle?” Baumgartner seemed affable, even relaxed. “How’s the leg?”
“Good, sir.” I flexed it for him. “Almost good as new.”
“We brought you a little present.”
They attached it with its strip of nanoadhesive to my utilities—a yellow-bordered purple ribbon with a heart-shaped medal beneath, bearing the profile of George Washington. It was the Purple Heart, the medal awarded to service personnel who are wounded in the line of duty.
“Congratulations, son,” Garner said.
“Thank you, Chief. Usually I’m the one writing up reports to give other guys this thing.”
“We’d prefer you kept it that way, actually,” Dr. Francis said.
“So would I.”
“They’ve put you in for the Medal of Honor, too,” Baumgartner said. “Don’t know if that will fly yet. I suppose it depends on the success of the negotiations.”
“Yes, sir? How is that going, anyway?”
“Surprisingly well, actually. Our xenosophontologists are telling us that the Qesh put enormous importance on family, on clan bonds. They don’t think they’re going to want to attack us again, not if it means attacking the Marines. You did good.”
“What’s more important,” Dr. Francis said, “is that we may be able to open trade relations with them. They know a lot of things we’d like to know.”
“Antigravity,” I said. “I know.”
The fiction downloads like to paint glamorous pictures of interstellar trade, of trading empires, of costly cargoes shipped between far-flung worlds. I don’t know where they get that crap from. One solar system is much like another in terms of the distribution of elements. If tellurium is rare on Earth, it’s rare on Alpha Centauri A II as well . . . and on Bloodworld, and on just about any other world you might be able to name. That’s not an absolute, certainly. We haven’t gone very far out into the Galaxy yet. But from what we’ve seen so far, rare minerals and treasures valuable enough to make finding them and shipping them across the light years worthwhile just don’t exist. Same for alien life forms.
In fact, the one commodity worth shipping from one star to another is knowledge—and data can be transmitted quite cheaply indeed. Alien biosystems? Alien art or artifacts? If it can be encoded as data, it can be transmitted by interstellar laser. It might take one year per light year crossed, so you have to be patient, but it’ll get there eventually. That’s how the EG works, after all, a far-flung web of laser light carrying quadrillions upon quadrillions of bits of data, much of it information about worlds and species extinct for a billion years.
The entire point of establishing contact with alien species directly is to trade information.
New star drives. New and better power taps, drawing unlimited energy from the quantum sea. A means of controlling gravity, of bending it to our will. New ways of growing, programming, and disseminating nanobots. Methods for engaging in planetary engineering, reworking entire worlds to our will.
Or—think bigger still. There are species listed in the EG that are so far beyond our ken we may never understand them, or their technology, or their artifacts. There’s someone in toward the core of our own Galaxy, reshaping suns, and drawing energy from the supermassive black hole at the galactic heart.
There’s someone out there reshaping an entire Galaxy. We know it as NGC 4650A and it’s 165 million light years away. For a long time we thought it was a pair of colliding galaxies. Only recently have we learned the truth from the EG—or a very small part of the truth, anyway. As much, perhaps, as we’re currently able to understand.
Trouble is, we can learn only so much from the Encylopedia Galactica. We can learn much more when we actually meet these other starfaring species, learn to communicate with them, learn what they know.
And perhaps the biggest payoff of all is learning more about ourselves.
I must have looked worried. “Problem, Carlyle?” Baumgartner asked.
“Sir . . . you’ve seen my records, right? You know I was . . . captured.”
He nodded.
“Am I going to be transferred to another unit?”
He looked surprised. “Depends. Do you want to be?”
“No, sir!” I was surprised by the strength of my own voice. “I’d like to stay with the Black Wizards, if I can.”
Garner made a face. “You do know what they’ll call you.”
“I know.” Zombie. “It’s just a name.”
“Marines can be damned superstitious, Carlyle,” Baumgartner said. “Especially about anything connected with death and dying.”
“Sure, but there are always at least two ways of seeing things. There are zombies. And there’s resurrection.”
They laughed.
“Good attitude.” Dr. Francis looked at Baumgartner. “I don’t see a problem.”
“Tell you what, Carlyle,” Baumgartner said. “For the Hero of Second Bloodstar? Sure. You can stay aboard, at least for now. If you decide later that you want to put in for a transfer, see me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I wouldn’t like to lose you, Carlyle,” Dr. Francis added. “It’s a pain in the butt to train new Corpsmen.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I’d heard that zombies didn’t always get transferred out to other units—that they generally had a choice or, at the least, could state their preference one way or another.
I wondered if Kilgore had been transferred, or if he was still on board the Clymer. If he was, I would have to look him up when I got back on board.
“Okay, Carlyle,” Baumgartner said. “You’ve got more visitors out there, so we’re going to head back to the ship. You take it easy, okay? Get better. That’s an order.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“Good man, Doc.”
Dubois had been waiting in the compartment outside.
“How’s my man?”
“Excellent,” I told him. “Thanks to you.”
“Aw, shucks and gee whiz.” He weaved a careless hand. “Just doing my part to save the Galaxy.”
“Well, you saved me. And I appreciate it.”
His eyes narrowed. “You, ah . . . you do know . . . uh . . .”
“I know you ran a CAPTR on me, yeah.” I grinned. “I watched you do it.”
“How the hell did you do that?”
I told him about my hallucination
, or whatever it was. “So I was watching over your shoulder the whole time.”
“Huh. I’ve heard of weird shit like that. Never believed it, though.”
“Well, if I’m a zombie, I don’t think it shows.”
“That’s good. Because there’s someone else out there who wants to see you. Although I don’t really think she cares whether you’re a zombie or not.”
My heart quickened a bit. “You mean . . .”
“And, as an extra special one-time-only service, I bribed the ward Corpsman next door. He’s promised to let me stand watch here. Cost me a bottle of my best, but I trust it’ll be worth it.”
“But—”
He pointed toward a pressure door in the bulkhead. “That is the duty room. Complete with rec unit, full sim connections, and a sleep tube. As long as you’re out of there by 2200 so the guy on duty can rack out, you’re golden.”
I was no longer listening to him. Joy had just walked into the compartment, and I wasn’t aware of much at all, save for her smile.
“Well, hey,” Doob said. “Don’t thank me. Just enjoy yourselves.”
I took her hand.
“We intend to,” I said.
The glaciers of Maine, at that point, were very, very far away—more than twenty light years.
They seemed a lot farther.
Epilogue
Six weeks later I was on the space elevator, heading down-El to Earthport after the Clymer docked at Geosynch. The deck was configured as a viewall to show Earth, stretching almost bulkhead to bulkhead in ocean blues and white streaks and streamers of cloud and the dazzling glare of ice over Canada and the Northeast. Doob was with me, and Chief Garner, and a few others from Clymer’s med staff. My new leg felt fine, I’d been given two weeks’ leave, and all was right with the worlds.
Well, mostly.
No, I never got the Medal of Honor and I didn’t come back to Earth with the xenotechnological insights that would put General Nanodynamics on the map and make us all rich. The medal had been downgraded to a cluster on my Silver Star in lieu of a second award. Turns out Congress wanted to award Admiral Talbot the MOH for his role in the Second Battle of Bloodstar, and they certainly didn’t want to detract from that by spreading the glory around to a bunch of mere mortals.
It happens.
As for General Nanodynamics, I think they’re going to have all the shiny new xenotech data they can handle, beginning anytime now.
The question is whether we’re going to have time to do anything with it before the next crisis.
You see, the Treaty of Bloodstar provides for an exchange—Qesh technological data for the right to exploit Gliese 581 IV. It seems my guess was right; the Salvationist leaders want the Qesh there.
That revelation alone beggars belief. The Jackers were slaughtering those rebel prisoners outside Salvation, slaughtering them in the most horrible fashion imaginable, and yet the Council of Elders has formally invited the Qesh in to “restore order.” The gods preserve us from religious fanatics. The bastards were still sniping at our Marines on the planet before we finally withdrew.
The Qesh, if we can believe them, are busily Qeshiforming Bloodworld, and when they’re done, they will leave a single clan behind to complete the domestication of their human property while the rest move on. Where will they go? They haven’t told us. Not Sirius, probably; they’ve told us they already control another node of the EG out at Spica, a B-class double giant only about 120 light years from Gliese 581. In fact, they claimed they’d arrived at Gamma Ophiuchi from Spica, where they apparently had a major base of some sort, 130 light years from Gamma Oph.
But what if they decide to acquire more property rights in our interstellar backyard? What if they find Earth? We’ve checked. All references to Sol and to Sol’s location have indeed been deleted from the Bloodworld networks, but there’s still the possibility, even the likelihood, that their technology is good enough to tease the whispers of our civilization out of the hiss and crackle of background noise.
The Galaxy was already a dark and scary place; it’s just become a bit darker, a bit scarier, and just a bit lonelier.
I’m sure General Nanodynamics and the other xenodata-miner corps will make good use of whatever information the Jackers care to share with us. Maybe we’ll even use it to figure out how to manufacture true antigravity, or figure out how to switch off the new Ice Age and turn all of Earth into a semitropical paradise.
But I wonder if it will be worth it.
I and the whole of Marine Recon 7 are clan sib-daughters of the Qesh, now, yeah, but just how much will that buy us if they come knocking at Earth’s doorstep, maybe with a near-c impactor?
Thanks to the Treaty of Bloodstar, our xenosophontology and x-bio people have a lot more to work with as well. I was wondering what the third Jacker sex looked like; turns out the big septopods are the females, the smaller octopods are “nurturers,” a translation of the Qesh term for the nannies who take care of the babies after they’re born, and the males are . . . well, I’ve seen one, now. They’re glistening, wet, and black, about three centimeters long and look like a terrestrial leech with eight clawed appendages. They’re parasites living inside the female’s reproductive tract—completely mindless, almost completely brainless, and the babies eat them when they’re expelled at parturition.
Charming. The xenosoph teams are going to be working on what that might mean for Qesh social structure and worldview for a long time to come.
“Huh? What?”
I realized Dubois had asked me a question. I’d been staring down at the slow-growing disk of Earth, lost in thought.
“I said, are you still putting in for the Black Wizards?”
“Oh . . . yeah.” I shrugged. “It hasn’t been too bad.”
Some of the Marines had kidded me about my zombie status, and a few had seemed distant or scornful. Most of them, though, just called me Doc.
The thing is, when I’d talked to Lieutenant Baumgartner on board the Consolation, I’d forgotten that I was due for reassignment anyway. My deployment with 1st Battalion, 1st MarDiv had been temporary and provisional, pending my winning my upgrade to FMF. So I’d gone ahead and filled in my dream sheet, requesting assignment to the Black Wizards, Marine Deep Recon 7. I admit that a large part of that revolved around the fact that Joy was Marine 1/1, 1st MarDiv—and right now I was very interested in keeping in touch with her.
Of course, my interests didn’t count for a whole hell of a lot. Now it was up to the gods of Division Personnel and MarDeepSpaRecGru to grant or refuse my prayers.
“If I were you, Carlyle,” Garner told me, “I’d be putting in for xeno-res. Maybe a contact-study team with the Hymies.”
There’d been a lot of scuttlebutt lately about the Hymies, as they were commonly known—the enormous abyssal life forms eight kilometers and more across, living in the lightless depths of Niffelheim-e’s world ocean. The evidence suggested that they were intelligent, though we still didn’t understand the nature of that intelligence, the form it took, its worldview or cultural mapping. The xeno-research groups were excited about the new contact, though I suspected that the Commonwealth’s real interest had more to do with establishing a base inside the Gliese system where they could keep an eye on our new neighbors. We have an embassy ship orbiting Bloodworld now, but if the Jackers decide to do something nasty to Earth, that’ll be the first to go. Maybe they’ll spot the preparations first out at Niffelheim, though, and send a courier with a warning.
It wouldn’t be much warning, but even a little would be better than no warning at all.
“Maybe,” I told Chief Garner. “But I was kind of hoping for something warmer.”
“Well, you discovered the critters. I’m sure the research boys and girls would be glad to have you on the team.” He shrugged. “Hell, after opening the door with the Qesh, you can probably write your own ticket, anywhere you want to go. Maybe even the Xenoscience Bureau at Bethesda!”
So . . . where
did I want to go?
Not Earth. I was going to spend my leave there with relatives, but no. Not Earth.
I was Fleet Marine Force now.
My place was with the fleet—with the Marines.
Star Corpsman Timeline
2069: Discovery of pseudobacterial mats beneath Martian permafrost.
2072: Collapse of the North Atlantic Conveyor. Beginning of the New Ice Age.
2095: Cayambe Space Elevator enters service.
2098: Terran Commonwealth established. Glaciers form across northern hemisphere.
2100: Neo-Luddite revolution against nanotech and genetic engineering.
2105: Alpha Centauri Expedition. Success of Plottel-Alcubierre Drive.
2109: Chiron [Alpha Centauri A IV] colony established.
2115: Terran Commonwealth takes over Cayambe Space Elevator.
2117: Sirius Expedition. Discovery of Encyclopedia Galactica.
2120: Jovian Expedition. Discovery of Europan Medusae.
2131: First AI transcriptions of Encyclopedia Galactica.
2140: White Seraphim Incident on Chiron.
2143: Human Endeavor expedition to Gliese 581.
2146: Establisment of base at Conomara Chaos, in Europa.
2149: Founding of General Nanodynamics.
2150: Contact with the Durga, at Delta Aquarii.
2181: Salvation Colony established on Bloodstar’s World by CCS Outward Venture.
2186: First contact with Qesh by Zeng He at Gamma Ophiuchi, 84 light years from Earth.
2194: Contact Protocol—location of Earth kept secret.
2198: Establishment of Cernunnos, at Psi Serpentis IV.
2204: Hippocrates Expedition. Contact with X’ghr.
2212: Development of cybertelemeric engineering.
2241: Elliott Carlyle joins the Navy.
2245: Bloodstar Rebellion.
2246: Second Battle of Bloodstar. Treaty of Bloodstar.
Star Corpsman Glossary