Bloodstar Read online

  Gunny Hancock gave orders to Colby and Gutierrez, who both were armed with standard Corps-issue megajoule-pulse Mk. 24 laser rifles. Calling those things rifles was a bit of a misnomer, of course; they fired bolts of coherent light, and so didn’t have the grooved rifling that gave the old slug-poppers their name. They identified the points on the yards and the sail itself where the running rigging held the mainsail down against the mainmast, and began firing with careful precision. There was a crack, followed by a sudden thunderous flapping as the mainsail boomed and fluttered wildly on the wind. A moment later, the mizzen sail did the same, fluttering hard as the ketch shuddered.

  The two Marines fired again, and both sails parted from the yards, snapping and twisting in the wind as they flew forward and into the water. We were now being carried along solely by the jib, a small, triangular sail stretched from the top of the mainmast to the end of the bowsprit forward. It continued to draw wind from astern, but the sail area was so reduced, now, that the ketch slowed from a headlong race before the wind to a lumbering, shuddering plod.

  I focused on my patient for another moment; pieces of his leather costume—and there was a lot of plastic in there as well—had melted in ragged patches to his skin. I couldn’t pull them free without opening fresh wounds, but they would also be a major source of infection in this guy if I couldn’t get them out. Debriding the wound, it’s called.

  I used a surgical laser scalpel to first cut through the charred tissue that still connected his right arm to his shoulder. The charring and bone loss was far too great for any hope of it healing. I cut the arm away, used more skinseal to stop a few small, leaking blood vessels at the shoulder, then began concentrating on the patches of melted plastic and charred leather imbedded in his side.

  “Hang on, people!” Hancock yelled. “We’re coming up on the beach!”

  An instant later I both heard and felt the vessel’s keel grind along the bottom. I snapped off the laser to avoid cutting too deeply, and then the deck lurched beneath me with a long and drawn-out rumbling crunch. The mainmast swayed alarmingly, and for a moment I thought it was going to fall, but the standing rigging held. The deck canted slightly to starboard, as incoming swells rolled and broke past her bulwarks.

  “Masserotti! Kukowicz! Andrews! Gregory!” Hancock snapped off the names of four more Marines who were still skimming above the water on their flitters. “Get your asses up here and give a hand with these prisoners! Doc? How’s the patient?”

  “Not as bad as he could be,” I said. “We need to get him to sick bay stat.”

  I packed up my med gear as the other Marines swarmed on board. The ketch had come to rest about a hundred meters offshore. The water was waist-deep, perhaps a little more. Two Marines each took an unconscious prisoner, lifting him between them in a two-handed seat-carry, hands joined behind shoulders and beneath knees. Thank God for the exoskeletal walkers strapped to our armor; they would have been hard-pressed to carry those men in Bloodworld’s 1.85 G.

  My patient was a different matter. We might have killed him, trying to lift and awkwardly manhandle him down the side of the boat. Hancock called to the Marines ashore and had them bring a stokes out on a floater pad.

  The floater was a quantum-lift device like the flitters, but with lateral pontoons so that it floated on water. Staff Sergeant Abrams and Sergeant Gibbs brought it out, along with the wire-basket stretcher known as the stokes. Hancock helped me get the patient into the wire basket and strapped down, and together we lowered him over the side to the waiting Marines below.

  I left his severed arm on the deck.

  Golfball-sized hail began rattling around us—a few stones at first, followed by an avalanche of hard, icy projectiles snapping out of the purple sky and smashing against the deck, or lashing the water around us into a white torrent of spray. Mixed with the hail came torrential rain, huge drops plummeting with twice the speed they would have had on Earth, and the wind began gusting so hard it was difficult to stand.

  Our armor kept us dry and breathing, but it was still a long and difficult wade through surf and storm back to the beach. Somehow, we made it with all four locals up the beach and into the HQ dome. Chief Garner led Hancock and me through the freshly grown corridors and into the compartment designated as the sick bay.

  You can only program so much into nanoconstructors when you build a facility like this one, and the sick bay was little more at the moment than walls, lights, tables, and ten bare-pad beds. The banks of diagnostic equipment, sensors, and medical gear would have to be brought in later. At Chief Garner’s order, Leighton made the trip through the storm out to the D/MST and brought back a case of artificial blood, BVEs, and IV gear. Together, we got the patient onto a bed and hung a bag of BVE solution from the frame overhead. A BVE—blood volume expander—was essentially a colloidal-salt-and-protein solution that would help stabilize the guy’s falling blood pressure, quick and dirty. The artificial blood was a perfluorocarbon-based emulsion that mimicked blood in transporting oxygen through the circulatory system. We needed to test the patient for perfluorocarbon sensitivity first, though, and that meant reprogramming some of the ’bots in his system.

  I did that while Garner began working at debriding the burns again. I transmitted the program, then studied my N-prog’s screen for a few moments. “Huh,” I said.

  “What’s ‘huh’?”

  “The nanobots I shot into this guy out there?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Those are the only ones in his system. He’s not carrying any artificial biologicals at all.”

  Garner shrugged. “Not all civilians have internal prostheses,” he said. “He’s obviously not military.”

  “Yeah . . . but a civilian living on a planet like this one? I’d think they’d be bioteched to the gills.”

  Back on Earth, of course, there’s a broad mix of biotech usage, everything from nothing at all—natural biology—to the tech-savvies who’ve replaced their blood cells with respirocytes and gone the cyborg route with artificial limbs, eyes, cerebral implants, and advanced genetic prostheses. Nanomedicines routinely cure everything from cancer and coronary artery disease to colds and old age, and most people have a population of programmable ’bots patrolling their bloodstream, watching, diagnosing, cleaning, and healing.

  And colony planets tend to be high tech. It stands to reason, since none of the worlds we’ve colonized is a perfect double for Earth. Here on Bloodworld, I would have expected to see fairly elaborate nanomedical systems in use to filter sulfur dioxide and heavy metals out of the lungs, nasal passageways, and circulatory systems, to protect the eyes from radiation and atmospheric contaminants, even to help them digest native-grown foods. But this man was a natural, meaning no nanotechnic or genetic prostheses at all.

  What was it he’d yelled at me, before I put him under? What did you put into my temple? Yeah, that was it.

  Curious, I ran “body as temple” through the base library, and got back a Bible reference, something in I Corinthians 6.

  19. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price.

  20. Therefore glorify God in your body.

  It seemed a strange sentiment, but so damned little was known about the Neoessenes, especially the bunch that had left Earth to build a God-centered theocracy at the Bloodstar. I did seem to remember something about them being Luddies, opposed to high-tech, although getting on board a starship to make the move to a new planet twenty light years away seemed to be about as tech-intensive as you could get.

  Did the Neoessies forbid the use of nanomedical technology? It wouldn’t be the first time religions had rejected medical technology. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, I knew, refused blood transfusions because, for them, that was the same as “eating blood,” something forbidden by the Laws of Mos
es. And the Christian Scientists and some of the more extreme Christian fundamentalist sects rejected all medical treatments, on the grounds that only God could heal.

  Shit. Anti-tech fundies? That could be a problem, and I said as much to Chief Garner.

  “Well,” he said with a philosophical shrug, “everyone’s free to go to hell in his own way, including the crazy people.” He continued working on the debridement, deftly slicing away bits of raw tissue adhering to scraps of melted clothing with his scalpel. “We’ll just take it a step at a time.”

  “Yeah, but what if what we’re doing to this guy is taboo in their culture?” I asked.

  “What if it is? Our job is to save lives the best way we can, any way we can, and we’re not responsible for what they believe, or how they think. Or don’t think. . . .”

  “Well, this guy doesn’t show perfluorocarbon sensitivities,” I said, studying the N-prog screen. “So, do we do it?”

  “What, ’tube him with perfluoro? Of course.”

  “Even though it may be against his religion? I think we need to find out more about that.”

  Garner shook his head. “Uh-uh. First we save his life. Then we worry about his immortal soul.”

  Eventually, the debridement was done, and I went back to the barracks. The rain, sleet, and hail outside were so heavy that someone had rigged a guideline between the HQ and the barracks dome. The sea, I noticed, had come inland, and was already ankle deep around the buildings. That wasn’t a particular problem; those domes were designed to survive being completely submerged, and similar structures were used as sea-bottom research facilities. But the fury of the wind had lashed up a storm surge that had all but completely submerged the beach.

  Adding insult to injury, we felt our first seismic quake during the storm. It seemed unlikely that the storm had triggered a 7.5 temblor, but it did seem as though Bloodworld was throwing everything at us that it could.

  At least we were off the operational hook for the moment. Although Baumgartner fumed and fussed a bit, there was no way we were going out on our patrol in that storm. We stayed inside either the HQ dome or the barracks, getting used to the local gravity, catching up on our sleep, and having something hot to eat—a luxury we’d not been able to enjoy during the hours-long flight out from where the Clymer dropped us off.

  And twenty hours after we’d boarded the ketch, Gunny Hancock called me back to the HQ dome, where they were bringing one of the prisoners around.

  “I thought you’d like to be here for this,” he told me. “I heard you were concerned about local taboos.”

  Garner must have told him. “It helps knowing what we’re up against,” I told him.

  Baumgartner was there, along with Staff Sergeant Lloyd and another member of his staff. He was deep in a quiet discussion with the two of them and didn’t notice when I came in. I was amused. Second lieutenants are at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to chain-of-command among the officer types, and don’t generally have their own staff. Our little expedition boasted thirty-nine combat Marines out of a contingent of forty-eight. The leftovers included Baumgartner, four Corpsmen, and an operational staff of two communications-intelligence specialists and two tech specialists.

  Baumy looked like he was in his glory.

  Doob Dubois was working on the unconscious prisoner. With his goggles and respirator off, we could see that he was a young man, probably in his twenties, with dark hair and eyes and pasty white skin. That made me wonder about something right there. Was his skin so pale because he was never exposed to the local sun’s direct rays, to ultraviolet radiation especially? I made a mental note to check both his vitamin D levels and his bone density.

  Dubois was using an N-prog to revive him. People who’d been swiftied could be unconscious for anything from minutes to hours; when we’d gotten them back to shore, Hancock had ordered one of the other Corpsmen to inject the prisoners with nanobots and so we could switch them unconscious, simply because we didn’t have the manpower to guard them full time.

  “Why the hell is it called a swifty, anyway?” I asked. I could have downloaded the answer from the library, of course, but it was meant to be a rhetorical question. It seemed like such a strange term.

  “Early twentieth century,” Hancock told me. “There was a series of kid’s books, The Adventures of Tom Swift, all about a genius inventor who came up with some gadgets that seemed pretty far-out for their time. Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship. Tom Swift and His Bicycle. That sort of thing.”

  “Okay. . . .” I’d never cared much for twentieth-century literature in school, and gotten away with downloading as little as I could.

  “Sixty or so years later,” Hancock continued, “a NASA researcher invented a non-lethal weapon that delivered an electrical charge to the target. He called it the Taser, after one of the adventures of his childhood hero—Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.”

  “Thomas A. Swift . . . oh, I get it.”

  “Exactly.” Hancock drew his swifty from its holster, a HiVolt 3mm stun gun that fired sliverdarts built around ultra–high-density batteries carrying a charge large enough to incapacitate a man. “Tasers didn’t knock people unconscious, usually, but later weapons did. Hence, ‘swifties.’ ”

  The man on the table groaned and opened his eyes. “Where in His name am I?”

  “You’re safe,” Hancock told him. “We’re U.S. Marines, and we’re here to investigate reports that the Qesh have attacked your colony. Who are you?”

  “Hezekiah,” the man said, sounding a little uncertain. “Hezekiah two-fifty-four of Green-two-three. My brothers . . .”

  “They’re safe as well,” Baumgartner told him. “The one who was wounded . . . what is his name?”

  “Ezekiel. Ezekiel oh-four-nine of Green-two-four. How is he?”

  “I’m told he should pull through.”

  “He lost his arm. . . .”

  “Easily fixed, Hezekiah,” Dubois said. “Either regenerative therapy or biomechanical prosthesis will—”

  “No!” The man looked terrified. “That’s not the Way!”

  “Easy, there,” Hancock said. “You say he’s your brother?”

  “All of the Temple are my brothers.”

  “I see. Why did you fire at us?”

  An eloquent shrug. “You obviously weren’t of the Temple Brotherhood. We thought you might be demons.”

  Hancock grinned. “Not quite. We can actually be very nice folks if you don’t get on our bad side. By shooting at us, for instance.”

  Hezekiah spoke English. According to the little we knew about them, the original Neoessenes had first appeared in Southern California, then spread across the Southwest—Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora. For a time they’d been based in Chihuahua, and a lot of them spoke Spanish as well.

  “ ‘Demons,’ ” Baumgartner repeated. “Do you mean the Qesh?”

  “Demons,” the prisoner said, speaking slowly, with great conviction, “are any who stand against the Way.”

  “So what were you doing in that boat, anyway?” Baumgartner asked.

  “The Qesh-demons came to Salvation,” he said with a shrug. “Some of us were attempting to reach Redemption . . . that’s a city south of here, on the Twilight Coast. But the sirocco frio was blowing up, and we needed to find shelter. And then you attacked us.”

  “We weren’t attacking you,” Baumgartner said. “You fired on us first.”

  “It looked like an attack to us.” He hesitated. “On the boat, you . . . one of you, was putting something into Ezekiel’s body.”

  “That was me,” I told him, taking a step closer. “He was in a lot of pain. I gave him a nananodyne blocker.”

  His face darkened. “That is . . . what?” he demanded. “A nanomedicine?”

  “Yes. They’re programmed to break down into harmless constituents in—”

/>   “Satan!” the man howled, and he came up off that table like a rocket, his arms stretched out to grab me.

  Hancock stepped in front of me, grabbed and twisted him sharply, and pinned him in a shoulder hold. “Dubois!” he shouted as the prisoner raged. “Drop him!”

  Doob punched a code into his N-prog, and Ezekiel slumped into happy-happy land.

  “A little touchy on the subject of intrusive nanotechnics, are we?” Baumgartner observed as Hancock and Doob hauled him back onto the table.

  “At least,” Staff Sergeant Naomi Hernandez, one of Baumgartner’s technical people, said, “their lack of nanotechnics means we’ll be able to Clarke them.”

  Arthur C. Clarke, a writer and a promoter of future high tech of two or three hundred years ago, had been responsible for one of human technology’s most famous aphorisms: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. You don’t generally see the actual technology nowadays; the infrastructure is invisible behind the effect, and that certainly can look like magic—growing furniture out of a solid deck, for instance, downloading data directly off the local net into your brain, or using invisibly minute robots to clean the cholesterol out of your arteries. When you “Clarke” someone, you get the advantage on them by using technology that they don’t even know is there.

  “You’re thinking of microprobes?” Baumgartner asked.

  “Yes, sir. It should be easy enough to get a cloud of gnatbots in there, and have a look around. If they don’t know about nanotech, they’ll never know they’re there.”

  “Put it into the operational plan, then,” Baumgartner told her.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Christ!” Baumgartner said, looking up as a deep-voiced rumble sounded, and the room began to shake. “Not again!”

  It was another seismic quake, a bad one—this one shaking us at about 7.1 on the standard modified Mercalli scale.

  “Earthquake,” Hancock said. “Or a Bloodworld-quake, I guess I should say.”

  Well, between the flooding and the seismic events, at least Baumy would be off our cases about getting an early start.