Bloodstar Read online

  “Just how good are the Jackers, anyway?” Corporal Masserotti asked. He was one of the smirking ones.

  “Good enough,” Hancock replied. “The EG puts them at type 1.165 G, with an estimated tech level twenty, and that data is from a long time ago.”

  Humankind was thought to be a type 1.012 C on the Encyclopedia Galactica’s version of the Kardashev scale, with a TL of around eighteen. In other words, we had FTL and quantum power taps too, but theirs were quite a bit ahead of ours, the equivalent, possibly, of a couple of centuries. Estimating the relative technological capabilities of two mutually alien civilizations was always more guesswork than not. Differences in culture, language, and even biology could either mask or exaggerate differences. Take the T-Cets, who evolved just a few light years from Earth within the deep abyss of their world ocean. No fire, and apparently no nuts-and-bolts engineering, but they’re so far ahead of us in chemistry and biological technology that we still don’t understand more than ten percent of what we see in the Encylopedia Galactica, and attempts to communicate with them directly have consistently failed.

  In warfare, a difference of only one on the tech level scale can mean a lot; think about what would happen if the atmospheric fighters from the mid-twentieth century tangled with the wood-and-fabric biplanes of just thirty years earlier.

  We knew damned little about the Qesh or the nature of their technology. Their warships, though, were big, sleek, smooth-surfaced, flattened cigars comprised of domes, flutings, sponsons, and blisters that could be as much as five kilometers in length. Even the smallest were longer and more massive than the Clymer, and our intelligence people believed that all of their warships were built around powerful mass drivers that could slam twelve-ton masses into their targets with a kinetic yield equivalent to a small nuclear warhead. We didn’t know what the Qesh called their own starships. Our intel people had given them designations taken from human mythology, names like Behemoth and Leviathan, to classify them roughly by their sizes.

  The graphic was totaling up the types of ships present around Bloodworld—fourteen Leviathans, eight Behemoths, twenty-one Titans, and even one Jotun.

  It was a full-strength predarian warfleet.

  They appeared to be dismantling the planet’s moons.

  “Hawking Raiders,” Lance Corporal Benjamin Andrews said. There was just the slightest tremor behind his words. “How are we supposed to face them?”

  More than two hundred years ago, no less an authority than Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant physicists ever to delve into cosmology, had suggested that humans might not want to make themselves known to the universe at large. According to him, an alien interstellar civilization might very well care nothing for other sapient species, but travel from star to star stripping worlds of their resources, perhaps preying on less-advanced beings. More primitive races would be unable to stand up to a sufficiently advanced technology, would be unable to stop them from extinguishing all life on the target planet.

  Hawking’s warning had largely been ignored. After all, a sufficiently advanced species ought to be advanced ethically as well as technologically, right? But then we learned how to read the EG, and we started encountering some of the myriad races scattered across our part of the galaxy. We learned that each species out there was ethical within its own framework, and that those frameworks might not have room for other civilizations, or for competition. There were, we learned, entire cultures Out There that roamed the Galaxy in monster fleets, taking apart worlds for whatever they needed. Predarians, we called them. Predator barbarians.

  And the name, along with “Hawking Raiders,” stuck.

  “We’re not going to face them,” Hancock replied. “At least, not right away. And not directly.”

  “That’s right,” Staff Sergeant Thomason added. “This is MDR. We go in quiet. We go in lethal.”

  “Recon rules the night!” several voices chorused.

  “Ooh-rah!” chorused some others.

  I wondered how “rule the night” would apply to the Bloodworld’s twilight zone. I didn’t say anything, though. The Marines were cruising just then on pure, raw emotion.

  From the look of those animated graphics on the squad bay viewall, we were hurtling tail first into a nest of hornets. The situation wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed, though, because the chances were good that they couldn’t see us. Under Plottel Drive, we were warping our own little patch of space to kill our velocity, but the effect couldn’t be detected—at least, we were pretty sure it couldn’t be detected—across more than a few tens of thousands of kilometers. Our ships had deployed their stealth screens as soon as they entered normal space. Stealth screens didn’t render a ship optically invisible, but they did drink up radar, microwave, and even long infrared. As for optical wavelengths, it’s amazing how tiny a starship is, even a ship as large as the Clymer, within a given volume of interplanetary space. The outer hull is a deep, light-drinking black, and you practically have to be on top of the ship to see her. Unless she closed to within a very few kilometers of an enemy vessel, or by very bad luck the enemy happened to notice when she occulted a star, the Clymer was damned near invisible to begin with.

  So how were we able to see all of those Qesh vessels? Well, they weren’t trying to be inconspicuous, for one thing. Each one was cheerfully emitting a cacophony of microwave and infrared wavelengths, pinging one another with radar and lidar, and generally doing just about everything short of hanging out the “Welcome Earth Commonwealth” signs and setting off fireworks. Our AIs could take that data from long-range sensor scans, work out the enemy vessels’ sizes and masses, and display the distillate on the graphic projection.

  In fact, I had the distinct impression that they were deliberately showing off.

  “So how come the bad guys aren’t playing it safe and putting out their stealth screens?” Corporal Latimer asked. She shook her head, as if exasperated. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense. Why show us their numbers like that?”

  “Yeah,” Sergeant Gibbs added. “It’s pretty freakin’ stupid if you ask me.”

  “Nobody asked you, asshole,” Tomacek told him.

  “It’s a fair question,” Hancock said. “And we might have a fair answer if we knew more about the bastards. Best guess is, the Jackers are supposed to be a warrior culture. Think seventeenth-century Samurai in Japan, or maybe ancient Visigoths or Huns. Hiding, sneaking around, that’s for cowards. Their culture demands that they show themselves to the enemy.”

  “The art of intimidation,” I suggested.

  “It’s still freakin’ stupid!”

  “Uh-huh,” Hancock agreed. “But there’s something else to consider, too.”

  “What’s that, Gunny?”

  “What makes you think we’re seeing all of them right now?”

  We all grew a bit more quiet at that as we studied the graphic.

  Maybe that massive fleet we could see orbiting Gliese 581 IV was the bait.

  “So,” Andrews said, “we’re outnumbered and out-teched.”

  “Maybe so,” Hancock said. “But we do have one important advantage.”

  “Yeah, Gunny? What’s that?”

  “We’re Marines.”

  “That’s ay-ffirmative.” Thomason laughed. “The poor bastards’ll never know what hit ’em.”

  Sometimes the sheer arrogance of the Marines amazes me.

  On the other hand, maybe it’s not arrogance when it’s true.

  Since Captain Samuel Nicholas recruited the first Continental Marines at Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern in 1775, the Corps has been America’s first and best line of defense. Are American interests at risk? Are American citizens threatened? Does the Army need a beachhead? Send in the Marines has been the confident response across the past five hundred years. Now that the United States has become a part of the Terran Commonwealth, there’ve been frequent calls for
the Corps to join with the marine forces of other nations and reorganize as the Commonwealth Marines.

  You’ll notice that despite the ebb and flow of politics over the years, they are still the United States Marine Corps.

  Unyielding, uncompromising, never swayed by fad or fashion, utterly and sincerely certain of themselves, of their esprit, of their essential nature and reason for being, the U.S. Marines remain what is perhaps the preeminent elite fighting force of Humankind.

  After training with them, after serving with them, I love them. Every last damned one of them.

  Even the assholes.

  “Enough lollygagging,” Hancock growled at us. “If you ladies and gentlemen will remember, we have a training schedule to keep. So all of you amphibious green rabbits pop back into your holes and jack in!”

  An hour later, I was packed into a D/MST-22 Manta Ray TMV with forty-seven battle-armored Marines . . . or so it seemed, as the Clymer’s training AI fed images, sensations, and BTL impressions into my quivering gray matter.

  I say “BTL,” meaning “better than life,” in the popular lexicon, but “better,” here, is a subjective term wide open to debate.

  It certainly looked and felt like the real thing.

  The Cutlass I’d ridden down to the surface of Mars the week before was a TAV, a trans-atmospheric vehicle, meaning it could travel from the surface of a planet to orbit and back, passing through the planet’s atmosphere to do so. A D/MST-22 TMV was a bit more sophisticated, a trans-media vehicle, capable of operating in any of several environments—in vacuum, in atmosphere, or under water. Shaped vaguely like its extinct namesake, the Manta Ray had a flattened body and large, triangular wings curving downward at the tips. It carried one full Marine platoon packed into its payload deck—forty-eight men and women with armor, exos, and weapons. Somewhere out there in the watery darkness around us were three more Mantas, carrying the rest of Bravo Company—First and Third Platoons, plus the HQ element.

  It wasn’t like the Black Wizards were traveling in comfort.

  We’d inserted on Bloodworld’s nightside, 2,000 kilometers from the twilight zone. Using the laser cutters on the Mantas’ bows, we’d melted down through a thin patch of the ice covering Bloodworld’s ocean, and were traveling now 100 meters beneath the ice, through a realm of absolute and frigid darkness. According to my in-head, almost ten hours had passed.

  I was wondering how much time had really passed.

  You see, a virtual reality simulation will override your own timekeepers. Sitting there in my armor, wedged in shoulder to shoulder between Sergeant Leighton and Private Marshall, I could remember climbing into the Misty in orbit, remember the meteoric descent across the planet’s nightside, remember the ice-melting op and the descent, remember every damned, cramped, claustrophobic minute of the ten-hour passage through the dark.

  In fact, the chances were good that the AI program had simply slipped in every couple of simulated hours or so and updated our memories. We remembered all of that time having passed, but memories are as easy to create as are the illusions of reality. Easier, even. It’s possible to use ’bots to manufacture the appropriate neuropeptides, possible to implant long memory sequences, even to include remembered conversations and cognition.

  This is especially true if the memories happen to be of a time when nothing much is happening. It’s amazing how hours of thumb-twiddling boredom collapse into a few discrete image sequences. Think about it. A typical period of dreaming lasts a few seconds, and yet when we wake up, we remember, or think we remember, long and complicated sequences of dream imagery.

  The brain sucks when it comes to keeping accurate track of time.

  What all of this meant was that my back and legs ached from being wedged into one position for too long, and I could look back in my mind to what seemed like an eternity of just sitting there. I could remember playing some in-head games, pulling a couple of articles on nanomedicine from my RAM, and engaging in a long conversation with Sergeant Leighton on our private channels, wandering from philosophy to combat to emotional trauma to Marine training and back to philosophy again.

  “Hang on, back there,” a voice called in my head, interrupting the memories. “We’re going up on the roof.”

  The deck tilted beneath our feet, and I could feel the surge of acceleration. It didn’t feel like they were stopping to melt a hole through the ice sheet, so they must have found a patch of ice-free ocean or a polinya, and were heading up to grab atmosphere.

  I clicked in to the Misty-D’s bow camera for a look outside. We had that option, of course, when the tactical situation permitted it, but for the past ten hours there’d been nothing to see but blackness.

  Now, though, I could see a wavering patch of blood-red light up ahead. It expanded rapidly . . . and then light exploded around me as the Manta broke through the surface and emerged into the open air.

  The light wasn’t all that was exploding. The Qesh were waiting for us.

  Freaking great, I thought. A doomsday scenario.

  They threw those at us in training every once in a while, simulating a battle or a situation that was impossible to survive. They called it a Kobayashi Maru, though the origin of that term was lost—probably in the pre-computer confusion of World War II. The theory behind it was simple enough; if we’d already struggled through the worst possible scenario, anything else would be tame by comparison when we faced it for real.

  We emerged from the ocean close to a black, rocky beach. We were well into the twilight zone here. The bloody sun was hanging just above the horizon directly ahead, and deep purple clouds boiled across an emerald sky. A quintet of immense, bronze-colored Daitya weapons platforms hovered above the higher ground to the east, spread out to embrace that ragged patch of beach.

  The Manta carrying First Platoon was hit almost the instant it clawed into the air, the fireball smearing across the sky in a spray of white-hot fragments. The Mantas carrying Third Platoon and our HQ were hit two seconds later, almost simultaneously.

  Then we were hit, but not badly enough to knock us down. Our AI pilot kept us airborne long enough for us to reach the beach, though we covered the last fifty meters in a couple of skips across the dark water.

  The Manta’s hull rippled open while we were still ten meters in the air. We dropped a couple of meters before our jets kicked in and gave us a semblance of a soft landing, scattered along that beach. I landed in ankle-deep water just short of the shoreline, dropping to my hands and knees as a pressure wave thundered through thick atmosphere. Our Manta had just exploded almost directly above and ahead of us.

  Second Platoon Marines were all around me, struggling to get to their feet after their unceremonious ejection and drop. Fire swept across the beach; someone was shrieking in agony, the scream going on and on and on.

  “Corpsman!” someone yelled, and I slogged forward out of the water, already reaching for my M-7 kit. “Corpsman front!”

  A lot of Marines were down already. I couldn’t see the energy bolts from those hovering weapons platforms, of course, but arcs of molten rock and vitrified sand crisscrossed the beach already. A Marine thrashed and scrabbled ten meters ahead . . . correction, it was half of a Marine. His legs were gone, burned away at the hips.

  I moved toward him, hunching over as if I were pushing ahead into a savage wind. The surface gravity was almost twice Earth-standard. My exoskeleton compensated, but I could still feel the drag of the extra weight on my torso and head. I felt sluggish.

  I could see Qesh infantry ahead, like giant caterpillars in segmented armor, rippling across the beach toward my position.

  White flame engulfed me. . . .

  Chapter Seven

  I woke up within the narrow, cylindrical confines of my tube-rack, heart pounding, palms sweaty, and scared out of my mind. I took a long moment to get my breathing under control, and bring down that shrieking fligh
t-or-fight urgency that was permeating my brain, throat, and gut.

  It was all a dream. . . .

  “Jesus Freaking Christ!”

  When my heart rate was under control again, I dilated my tube open and hauled myself out. I fumbled for a suitpatch in my locker, slapped it against my bare chest, and let the Marine utilities flow into place over my body. I then made my way a bit unsteadily out to the squad bay.

  The viewall was displaying Bloodstar, still shrunken, smaller, more distant than what I’d seen in the sim. Several Marines were there already, the ones designated as KIA in the disastrous landing scenario. As each man was “killed,” he awoke in his tube and, eventually, wandered out here.

  “Hey, Doc!” Tomacek called. “Don’t you know it’s against regs for the Corpsman to get himself killed?”

  “Someone forgot to tell the Qesh,” I replied.

  “ViRsim Qesh don’t count,” Masserotti said.

  “Fuck,” Andrews said, laughing. “Sims’re BTL, right? Better than the real thing!”

  “S’right!” Gibbs added. “You’re in big trouble now, Doc!”

  Dubois wandered into the squad bay, looking as rattled as I felt. “Someone get the number of that Daitya,” he said.

  “How’d they nail you, Doob?” I asked.

  “We were hit just coming in over the beach. The Misty spilled us, and exploded a moment later. I was still in the water when a bunch of Qesh infantry came storming in.”

  Oh, right. I should have realized. Dubois was the Corpsman for First Platoon, I was in Second. His experience had been exactly the same as mine, because the AI running that little horror show was doing some clever editing to conserve bandwidth. I’d seen the other three Mantas get scratched, then experienced having mine shot out from under me. But First and Third Platoons, plus the HQ element, all had experienced the same point of view, the same tailor-made nightmare. Everyone in four mantas had felt what it was like to be on board the last surviving Manta, to emerge from the sea in a firestorm of high-energy weaponry, to face armored Qesh warriors descending onto the beach beneath that bloody, blotch-faced sun.