Bloodstar Read online

  The abyssal monster that had smashed the microsub against the ice ceiling was easy. I dubbed it Luciderm gigans, the “giant with light-emitting skin.”

  I transmitted my choices to Rutherford’s mailbox, feeling somewhat fatalistic about the whole thing. I wasn’t sure my attempts at Latin—even with the AI’s help—would stand close inspection, and it was distinctly possible that the Academy of Xenobiology back on Earth would have different ideas. On the other hand, this was actually a step for me along the path of scientific recognition and legitimacy, something I knew would please my father.

  One thing I did know. If we managed to straighten out the situation with the Qesh at Gliese 581, the xenobiologists would be back, and in force, to bring to the surface the secrets hidden beneath Hymie’s ice.

  The next day, the Clymer and the other ships of MRF-7 returned to Niffelheim-e.

  “Callahan!”

  “Yo!”

  “Cameron!”

  “Here.”

  “Carlyle!”

  “Yup.”

  “Colby!”

  “Yeah!”

  The roll call was an old, old tradition for the military. Hell, by monitoring our implants, they knew we were all here—not to mention our vital signs, general state of health, and probably our attitude and what we’d had for breakfast as well. But the ritual of drawing us up in ranks and having us sound off as they read our names may have had a psychological aspect to it as well.

  Somehow, it reminded us that we all were part of the team, that the familiar names and faces around each of us were brothers and sisters who were the real reasons we were fighting.

  Not for ideology. Not to keep Earth safe for Humankind, or to rescue the Salvationists.

  Brothers and sisters.

  The roll call complete, we left-faced at Gunny Hancock’s barked order, and walked single file through the open lock of the Misty-D waiting in the ceramplast embrace of its launch tube. Clymer boasted ten tubes, enough to launch an entire battalion in three waves. Today, only three misties—carrying the three platoons of Bravo Company—were launching.

  Inside, we squeezed into seats just barely large enough to accommodate a Marine in full Mark 7 armor. A recon platoon consists of forty-eight Marines divided into three squads, all under the command of a second lieutenant. In our case, this was Earnest Baumgartner, already aboard and wired into his command block. Packs and weapons went into the overhead gear lockers, which were sealed from the command deck—and that included our sidearms as well as our primary weapons. Gunny Hancock checked on that part personally; a bored Marine fiddling with a charged weapon in the cramped confines of a Misty could put a very sudden halt to the festivities.

  I jacked in the connectors that linked me to the D/MST-22’s artificial intelligence and the platoon com channel. I could hear the Marines around me engaged in another ancient Corps tradition—griping.

  “It ain’t right, is all I’m sayin’.” According to the ID, that was Corporal Randolph Gregory. “We was deployed already on Hymie! Why’re they sending us out again?”

  “Can it, Orgy,” Sergeant Gibbs growled. “Hymie wasn’t a deployment. It was a picnic.”

  “Yeah,” Lance Corporal Andrews said. “Didn’t you hear? They’re gonna take it off our accumulated leave.”

  “Orgy’s right,” Private Kilgore said. “They still should’ve given it to Alpha Company.”

  “Fuckin’ right,” Gregory said. “Those assholes ain’t done any real work since Tiantan.”

  I listened to them bitch and bicker for a while, then tuned in-head to the mission profile.

  Download

  Mission Profile: Reconnaissance

  Operation Blood Salvation/ OPPLAN#5735/28NOV2245

  [extract]

  . . . Second Platoon will deploy by D/MST-22, entering the target planet’s atmosphere on the nightside. Extreme care must be employed to avoid alerting Qesh forces to MRF presence in-system.

  Landing will take place at LZ Red Tower, located at 1º 14′ N, 179º 02′ W, which will serve as recon advance outpost and headquarters. Mission commander will use best judgment in penetrating objective colony facilities and contacting local political or military authorities.

  Unit will in addition to making contact with locals perform in-depth reconnaissance of objective area and report on Qesh presence, strength, and deportment.

  There was a lot more, but those were the gist of our orders. Get in without being seen by the Qesh. Land at the sea’s edge without being spotted. Slip some people into the human colony domes and make contact with the colony’s leaders. Second Platoon would be at Red Tower; First Platoon would be coming down at LZ Red Sky, near the colony city of Martyrdom, 200 kilometers north of Salvation. Third Platoon would be held in reserve at sea. Because smaller spacecraft were tougher to detect than large ones, we would board our Misties half a million kilometers away from Bloodworld and use stealth tactics for the final approach to our objective.

  It promised to be a long, claustrophobic, and very uncomfortable voyage.

  After studying our orders for a time, I moved on to the ephemeris breakdown of the Gliese system.

  Download

  Commonwealth Planetary Ephemeris

  Entry: Gliese 581

  “Bloodstar”

  [extract]

  Planet I

  Name: Gliese 581 I, Gliese 581 e, Surtr

  Mean orbital radius: 0.02845 AU; Orbital period: 3d 3h 34m 05s

  Planet II

  Name: Gliese 581 II, Gliese 581 b, Logi

  Mean orbital radius: 0.0406 AU; Orbital period: 5d 8h 50m 31s

  Planet III

  Name: Gliese 581 III, Gliese 581 c, Muspelheim

  Mean orbital radius: 0.073 AU; Orbital period: 12d 22h 3m 30s

  Planet IV

  Name: Gliese 581 IV, Gliese 581 g, Bloodworld, Salvation, Midgard

  Mean orbital radius: 0.14601 AU; Orbital period: 36d 13h 29m 17s

  Planet V

  Name: Gliese 581 V, Gliese 581 d, Nidavellir

  Mean orbital radius: 0.218 AU; Orbital period: 66d 20h 52m 48s

  Planet VI

  Name: Gliese 581 VI, Gliese 581 f, Niffelheim

  Mean orbital radius: 0.758 AU; Orbital period: 1y 69d 06h 57m 15s

  When Captain Ludwigson and the crew of the Human Endeavor first explored the Gliese 581 system in 2143, they gave each of the six worlds names drawn from the Norse mythology of Ludwigson’s ancestors.

  Innermost was Surtr, airless, half-molten, and named for the fire-giant who ruled Muspelheim. Next out was Logi, “wildfire,” the giant who represented fire to the Norse. After that, in order, came Muspelheim, Midgard, Nidavellir, and Niffelheim. Ludwigson had dubbed Planet IV, our destination, Midgard—“the enclosure”—the world of man balanced precariously between fire and ice. When the Neoessenists arrived in 2181, of course, they promptly changed Midgard’s name to Bloodworld; no pagan gods or mythological worlds for them, thank you very much!

  There’s no record of what, if anything, they called the other worlds in the system. Presumably they renamed them all, but they haven’t talked much with the rest of their species in the past sixty-some years.

  As you can see from the ephemeral data, Gliese 581’s coterie of planets is tucked in tight and cozy around the cool, dim primary. Surtr, airless and baked, and with a partially molten surface, is just .03 AU from the star, whipping around its primary in just over three days. Logi, a true monster, sixteen times the mass of Earth, is .04 AU out, with a period of about five and a half days. Muspelheim, with six times Earth’s mass and a greenhouse effect worse than the one smothering Venus, is .07 AU from its primary—about 10.5 million kilometers—and has a period of just under two weeks.

  Our objective—originally designated as Gliese 581 g— was a little more than three times Earth’s mass, orbited 0.146 A
Us from its star, and circled it once every 36.5 days. That distance, theoretically, placed it smack in the middle of Gliese 581’s so-called habitable zone, the distance from the star at which water could exist as a liquid.

  Habitable didn’t necessarily mean comfortable, however.

  Of particular interest to the habitability issue was the fact that Bloodworld was almost perfectly balanced between Muspelheim and Nidavellir, massive super-Earths each with about six times Earth’s mass. On the inside, Muspelheim—planet III—frequently passed Bloodworld—IV— at a distance of 10.9 million kilometers. That sounds like a lot, but it’s close enough to deliver a sizeable tidal nudge to planet IV, especially due to III’s huge mass. About once every twenty days, then, Muspelheim passed Bloodworld close enough to be visible as a disk in the dayside sky—and close enough to cause seismic tremors, volcanism, and tidal waves.

  On the outside was the orbit of Nidavellir, the other giant. Bloodworld passed Nidavellir at a distance of 11.1 million kilometers, once every eighty days or so.

  So there was poor little Midgard-Bloodworld, caught between the push and pull of those two giants, kneaded like a ball of putty in a giant’s fist. You find the same situation with Io, Jupiter’s moon, squeezed and stretched in a similar tug-of-war between Jupiter and the other Galilean satellites. No wonder Bloodworld was seismically active! The other planets contributed to the tidally induced chaos as well, as did the local sun, but Muspelheim and Nidavellir were the main culprits.

  The more I downloaded about the place, the less appealing it sounded.

  But the Clymer, escorted by the two destroyers, had slipped through interplanetary space, closing with Bloodworld. Now, just half a million kilometers from the planet, we’d packed ourselves into the Misty-Ds, ready for drop and the last leg of our voyage. The Clymer would return to Hymie and await our call for pickup.

  Jacked into the Misty’s intel system, I could see a graphic representation of Bloodworld, circled by the bright red pinpoints marking the Qesh warships, each with an identifying block of text. We were reading forty-four ships at the moment, although one of them, the Jotun-class monster, was more like a ten-kilometer asteroid than a starship. We couldn’t see it from half a million kilometers out, but the mass and energy readings were literally astronomical, and the light reflected from it at optical wavelengths was irregular and shifting, as if from a rocky surface.

  An interesting coincidence, that. The Jotuns were the ice-giants of Norse mythology, which meant this one fit right in with the planet names suggested by the Human Endeavor survey.

  Bloodstar glowed with sullen intensity ahead, its face mottled by black starspots. The nightside of Bloodworld loomed close by, a slender crescent of red-hued light bowed away from the sun.

  The entire region around Bloodworld was blanketed by radar and lidar searching for intruders like us. The outer skins of our Misty-Ds, however, were coated in reactive nano, stealth screens that literally absorbed all incoming radiation just like the larger ships, and if we weren’t reflecting any of that energy, we were effectively invisible. We had to keep the Plottel Drive idling at very low power, however, to avoid giving ourselves away by the wake the drive dimpled into spacetime. As we drew within 100,000 kilometers or so, our AIs cut the drives and we drifted in, silent and powerless.

  The chatter in the compartment died away with the drive. There was no way the enemy could actually hear us, of course. Sound doesn’t travel through hard vacuum, and our com channels were shielded, isolated form the rest of the universe. Maybe we were all following genetic programming laid down a few million years ago, when our ancestors stopped their screeches and calls as they hid in the foliage and watched the big hunter cats pad silently past in the night.

  As hour followed hour, it started getting hot inside the Misty. If we’re absorbing incoming radiation and keeping our own heat from radiating into space . . . well, there’s only so much we can store up in the shipboard heat sinks or convert to electricity. After a while, the cabin temperature began climbing rapidly. We had our armor set to cool us, of course, but after about six hours, our suits were dumping so much excess heat into the crowded cabin that it became a vicious circle—our armor pumping out more heat into our surroundings to protect us against the increasing heat around us—and before long the heat sinks in our armor were maxed out and we were sweltering, stewing in our own juices. I used the platoon data channel to keep track of everyone’s core temperatures, including my own. If those started climbing, we would have to start taking exceptional measures to avoid heat exhaustion or, far worse, heat stroke.

  “Listen up, everybody,” I said over the platoon channel. “Everyone set your autoinjects for a fifty milligram shot of ’lyte balance.”

  I punched in my own dosage on my armor’s wrist control pad. In the old days, troops swallowed salt tablets to replace electrolytes lost to sweat. This was better—an injection of electrolytes plus nano, programmed to maintain a tailored isotonic balance. I felt the sharp sting beneath the angle of my jaw as the hypo fired the cocktail into my carotid.

  Invisible, we drifted past the nearest of the orbiting Qesh giants, a Titan-class, as large as one of our battleships, at a range of just 500 kilometers. It was invisible to the unaided eye, of course, but through enhanced optics, we could see it as a flattened dagger shape with flaring aft sponsons, painted in the distinctive red-and-white livery of the Qesh warships we’d encountered in the past. I don’t know why they didn’t bother with nanoflage hull coatings. They certainly must have had the technology to employ them.

  Possibly they just figured they were the biggest and meanest kids on the block, and didn’t need to sneak. That, or the warrior tag on their cultural profile meant that sneaking, for them, was the same as cowardice.

  That’s okay. I was happy to play coward if it meant we didn’t get noticed by those bad boys. The Titan gave no notice of our presence as we glided past, entering the upper shreds of Bloodworld’s atmosphere.

  I imagined that we’d already inserted some spy-probes into orbit to get close-up imaging on whatever it was they were doing there, but the higher-ups hadn’t told us anything about what they might have found. It did look like there was a lot of activity, though, with small ships—corvette sized or smaller—shuttling back and forth among the larger vessels, or in transit through the atmosphere, between surface and orbit.

  The glaring red eye of Bloodstar dropped beneath the planetary limb, plunging us into darkness.

  The nightside of Bloodworld, turned eternally away from the sun, was completely black and featureless to the naked eye. Under enhanced optics, though, we could see the ice sheets below, ragged, broken by mountain ranges and following the twists and curves of broad plains and valleys. For some reason, I’d been expecting the ice cap to cover the nightside of Bloodworld neatly and completely. In fact, ice covered only about two thirds of the dark-side hemisphere, giving way in places to empty tundra, in others to open ocean. Several hundred pinpoints of red-orange light glowed against the surface, especially in a broad ring near the edge of the planet’s disk.

  Volcanoes. Hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. The eons-long gravitational tug-of-war between Bloodworld, its sun, and the nearest giant planets kept them erupting on a fairly regular basis. I could see storms below, too, vast spiraling swirls of clouds hugging the dark surface. Most of the clouds were gathered around the periphery between day and night.

  We felt a sudden shock . . . and then another, followed by the steadily increasing sensation of weight as we decelerated. We continued our descent over Bloodworld’s nightside, doing our best imitation of a large meteor as friction ionized the thin air around us. We were certainly showing up on their sensors now, but hours ago our AI had nudged us into a path that let us enter the atmosphere at a flat angle, using aerobraking to sharply reduce our velocity.

  The nearest Qesh warship, a cruiser-sized Leviathan, was now 900 kilometers di
stant, and didn’t appear to be paying us any attention whatsoever.

  We passed low above the vast sweep of a coriolis storm. In my in-head, I could see the clouds seemingly close enough to touch, illuminated from within, from moment to moment, by the silent pulses of lightning. Seconds later, we slid into the clouds, then punched through above open water and a deep purple sky. At the last possible moment, our AI kicked in the Plottel Drive and slowed us to a few hundred kilometers per hour, lowering us into the black water below.

  The added weight first felt during deceleration continued to drag at us. Bloodworld had a surface gravity of almost twice Earth’s. I weighed eighty-three kilos on Earth; here I weighed 153.

  “Systems check, people,” Gunny Hancock called. “Suit power!”

  The order startled us, pulling us up out of a kind of waking sleep as we began running through our pre-debarkation checklist. Power. Life support. Communications. Suit AIs. Suit nanotechnics and fabricators. Exowalker. Jumpjet systems and meta tank. Weapon links. Even though our weapons were all safely stored in the lockers above our heads, we could activate the targeting links to make sure we could connect through our CDF links.

  In my in-head display, I could see nothing but blackness outside, the watery depths of Bloodworld’s major ocean. According to the data feed, we were under open water rather than ice, traveling at nearly 200 kph at a depth of 500 meters. This was a calculated risk, of course; the Plottel Drive created a kind of energy bubble around us that let us zip through deep water at high speeds, but we were still putting out a lot of noise from the interface—sound energy that could be picked up by underwater receivers hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers away.

  But we were gambling that the Qesh couldn’t think of everything, wouldn’t cover every approach, and especially wouldn’t think about an enemy coming in through space, then making the final approach under water. The Qesh might be advanced, but they weren’t gods.