Dedication

For Dave Plottel, who first introduced me to the wonders of Godel numbers many years ago …

and, as always, to my beloved Brea.

Contents

Dedication

Armor up!

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Star Corpsman

Epilogue

About the Author

By Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

“Armor up!”

I squeezed into a waiting Mark 10 hanging on the rack, sealed it off, and accepted a helmet from Thomason. “Thanks, Staff Sergeant,” I told him. “What’s going down?”

“Some of our people are on the ice,” he said. “Trapped … by one of those things.”

Wiseman handed me a Mk. 30 carbine. I checked the safety, wondering if a half-megajoule laser pulse would even register in a cuttlewhale’s consciousness. I might have better luck throwing snowballs at the things.

“Open the hatch!” Hancock called. The dim red-dish light of Abyssworld spilled into the lock as the ramp lowered in front of us.

Haldane had touched down on the ice perhaps a kilometer away from the spot where the cuttlewhale had lunged up through the ice. Thirty Marines and two Corpsmen were out here, converging on the ship as quickly as possible. I could see several of them using their meta-thrusters to make low, bounding leaps across the pressure ridges, their combat-armor nanoflage making them almost invisible in the dim light. In the distance, the snaky silhouette of a cuttlewhale weaved against the swollen red face of the sun.

“Perimeter defense!” Hancock called. “Dalton! Set up your weapon to put fire on that thing!”

We spread out, creating a broad circle around the grounded Haldane. Visibility sucked. The wind from the west had picked up, and we were staring into a layer of blowing ice crystals and freezing fog perhaps two meters deep. I dropped to the ice alongside Bob Dalton, helping him unship his M4-A2 plasma weapon.

Chapter One

There’s an old, old expression in the military, one that can probably be traced back to some platoon sergeant in the army of Sargon the Great: hurry up and wait.

In fact, it’s been said that 99 percent of military life ranges from tedium to unbearable boredom, with the remaining 1 percent consisting of stark, abject terror. A lot of that tedium comes with the waiting … especially if what you’re waiting for is that few moments of crisp, cold terror.

“Doc Carlyle!” the gunnery sergeant’s voice called on my private channel. “You okay?”

“Yeah, Gunny. No problems.”

“Remember to breathe, okay?”

I swallowed, trying to center myself into a calm acceptance of whatever was to be. “Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant.” As the platoon’s Corpsman, I was supposed to be monitoring all of the Marines inside the tin can … but Gunnery Sergeant Hancock had been watching my readouts, and noted the increase in pulse and the unevenness of my respiration.

I was packed in with the forty-one Marines of 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, inside the cargo deck of a shotgun Katy. That’s the Marines’ name for the KT-54 orbital cargo transporter, a big, chunky tug with meta-thrusters on one end and a blunt-ended cylinder on the other. We were in full armor—a KT’s cargo can isn’t pressurized—strapped upright to ranks of backboards … and waiting. They hadn’t opened the can yet, so we were in near total darkness. A maddeningly calm voice inside my head, an extremely sexy woman’s voice, said, “Five mikes.”

“Ah, copy that,” another voice said. “Crack ’er open and let’s see what we got.”

In front of me, beyond the lined-up helmet backs of nine Marines, the end cap of the Katy split in two and began to swing open. If we’d been riding in the throat of an alligator, that’s what we would have seen when he yawned. Light blasted in from a slender horizon to my right, silhouetting the closely packed Marines and illuminating the utilitarian interior of the can.

“Four minutes. Brace for course correction in three … two … one … fire.”

I felt a short, sharp kick along my back. The Katy’s AI pilot had just fired the engines, giving us a slight bump up in velocity and making a micro correction to our course. I wondered if the bad guys at Capricorn Zeta had noted the course change, and were getting ready to welcome us.

“Okay, platoon.” That was our platoon CO, Second Lieutenant Paul Singer. “Unship your harnesses.”

I used a thoughtclick to unsnap the harness holding me against the rigid backboard. God knows we didn’t have room in there to fumble with snaps and fasteners with our gauntleted hands. I glanced up and felt claustrophobic. The Marines of 2nd Platoon were lined up on the canister’s bulkheads in four ranks of ten each, plus two extras—Singer and Staff Sergeant Thomason. The helmets of three of them were less than a meter from my own, coming in from either side and one seemingly suspended head-down directly above me.

There is no “up” or “down” in zero-G, of course. From Corporal Gobel’s vantage point, I was the one hanging upside down.

“Three minutes.” Damn, but that AI’s voice sounded sexy. “Two hundred kilometers.”

The seconds trickled away as we continued waiting in ranks. Two hundred kilometers to the target was a long way, too far for us to see the objective yet. But it was out there, probably well above the gleaming curve of the Earth. Then I noticed a bright star directly ahead, and queried my in-head. Was that the objective? The platoon AI responded by putting a red box around the star, together with a fast dwindling set of numerals just to one side. Approaching in a lower, higher-speed orbit, we were closing with the target at just over two kilometers per second. According to the opplan, the shotgun would fire when we were ten kilometers from our objective.

“Okay, Marines,” Lieutenant Singer said, “Listen up. We do this by the book, and we’ll come through this alive.”

Well, most of us, I thought. Maybe …

If we were very, very lucky… .

“Remember to steer for the rock end of the facility,” Singer went on. “The doughnut will navigate itself to the main control hab, and that’s where we’ll make the breach. We don’t know what kind of defenses the tangos might have in there, so stay sharp, and keep an eye on your CT2 displays. Got it?”

“Ooh-rah!” a number of the Marines chorused back, their centuries-old battle cry.

I wondered how the CT2W could sort new fear from what was there already.

Oh, I knew how it worked in theory. The Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System has been around in one form or another since the early twenty-first century. It picks up P300 brainwaves, which are linked to stimulus evaluation and categorization. Back in the 2020s, this was handled by a smart helmet equipped with scalp sensors. For the last century or so, though, it’s been a program running within a soldier’s cerebral implants. The idea is that we can detect a threat subconsciously, well before it actually manifests as a bad guy with a weapon. It sounds wild, using brainwaves to detect subconsciously perceived threats, but tests show Marines pick up about 47 percent of hidden threats with just their eyes or standard optics … compared with 90-plus percent when they’re running a CT2WS.

“Two minutes.”

“Weapons check,” Staff Sergeant Thomason called. “Lock and load!”

I looked at my own weapon, a Mk. 30 Sunbeam-Sony carbine packing a half-megajoule-pulse in a mass of just four kilos. My sidearm was the usual Browning Five, a stubby, mag-accelerator handgun that could hurl a five-millimeter bit of steel-jacketed depleted uranium at a thousand meters per second. Both weapons were charged, hot-linked to my in-head, and safed.

There’s an old myth that says Navy Hospital Corpsmen don’t go into combat armed. That might have been true once, back when the Geneva Convention dictated the rules for civilized warfare. Unfortunately, any nonhuman bad guys we happened to run into weren’t going to be signatories of those documents … and that was definitely true of the human hijackers we were facing now.

“Hey, Gunny,” Sergeant Woznowiec called. “Any intel yet on how many tangos are waiting for us in there?”

“Negative on that, Woz,” Hancock replied. “When I know, you’ll know.”

“Comm silence,” Singer warned. “Stay the hell off the TC.”

Shit. The tactical channel was shielded and short-ranged. There was no way the bad guys could be listening in. Singer was an asshole … worse, a wannabe asshole fresh out of the Naval Academy.

“One minute.”

“We’re getting a warn-off from Zeta station,” Thomason said. “They’ve seen us.”

There was a lot of traffic in low-Earth orbit. The idea had been to slip in close like an innocent cargo tug. Unfortunately, that deception couldn’t provide us with cover indefinitely. The station’s radar would have been tracking us for long minutes already, and collision avoidance alarms might be going off over there already.

“Twenty seconds,” Thomason added. “Dropping the backrests.”

Those rigid boards behind our backs, shaped to fit our armor backpacks and meta tanks with snug precision, were grown from the canister’s internal nanomatrix, just like made-to-order chairs and tables grown from the floor. At an electronic command from our AI, they dissolved back into the deck, leaving each of us moving with the Katy. I felt my boots leaving the deck, just by a few millimeters, as the sexy AI voice sounded off the final countdown.

“Cargo launch in five … four … three … two … one … initiate.”

The Katy fired its forward maneuvering thrusters. From our point of view, the walls of the cargo canister abruptly slid backward, and the entire platoon emerged suddenly into open, empty space. The vast, eye-watering blue and mottled white of Earth filled half of the sky with aching beauty. The sun was squarely at our backs; the sunset terminator stretched along the curve of the horizon ahead.

The Marine version of a KT-54 was called a shotgun Katy for a reason. By decelerating sharply, the vessel’s armored human cargo hurtled from the wide-open bow, moving at the same speed as the tug until it slowed. Now it was dropping away behind us, empty, and 2nd Platoon kept moving at a constant velocity toward our objective. For all intents and purposes, it was as though we’d just been fired into space like a cloud of pellets from an enormous shotgun.

“Platoon, shift to Formation One,” Singer ordered. “Deploy!”

Our Mk. 10 suits were locked into standard M287 dorsal jumpjet packs. On the ground they let us bound across the landscape in twenty-meter jumps. In open space, they turned each of us, in effect, into a small, independent spacecraft. They were fueled by cryo-stabilized N-He64, an exotic fuel commonly called meta that was far denser in terms of available energy than conventional propellants. The thrusters were controlled by our in-head software; I told mine that I wanted to move into Formation One, and my backpack gave a gentle kick to my right.

The Marine formation was opening up, creating a more dispersed target in case the bad guys started taking shots at us. The shift also cleared the way for our doughnut, which was accelerating now on its own, moving up the center of the formation and into the distance ahead, homing on the bright star of Capricorn Zeta.

My jumpjet pack bumped again, halting my outward drift. Around me, the Marines appeared to be unmoving, hanging motionless in space relative to me and to one another. The surface of the Earth, however, drifted past at a steady pace. We were coming up on the west coast of Baja at the moment; north, I saw the cloudless ocher expanses of the Arizona and New Mexico deserts; southeast, bright stars strung in a vertical line stretching up into the sky flashed with a steady wink-wink-wink that marked the space elevator over Cayambe, a thread otherwise made invisible by distance.

And moment by moment, the Zeta facility grew brighter, taking on shape and form—an awkward collection of cylinders dazzling in the sunlight, connected at one end to a black rock a kilometer across.

We’d been thoroughly briefed on the Zeta situation, of course, complete with in-head downloads showing every detail of the five-hundred-meter facility. Asteroid mining was a particular target of the neo-Ludd movement, of course, so Zeta had offered them some highly visible propaganda for the watching global netizens back on Earth.

That small and wrinkled-looking nickel-iron asteroid, listed as Atun 3840, was only a kilometer across, but it contained an estimated 2 trillion dollars’ worth of platinum, 2 trillion in iron and nickel, and perhaps 1.5 trillion dollars’ worth of cobalt … a total of more than 5 trillion dollars of commercial metals.

The first asteroid mining had commenced early in the twenty-first century, with robots that extracted precious metals on-site and slingshotted them back to circum-Earth space where they were captured. There, one-ton slugs of solar-purified metal were injected with inert gas, molded into lightweight glider wings, sheathed in cheap, refractory heat shielding, and sent on down for recovery in the ocean … a cheap and highly efficient system still used to this day. The very first of Humankind’s trillionaires made their fortunes with the various space mining start-ups of the 2020s, paid for our expansion out into the Solar System, helped us survive the return of the Ice Age, and ultimately funded the first starships.

Later, it proved more cost effective to nudge target asteroids out of their original orbits and swing them into Earth orbit. Decelerating one large mass, it turned out, was a lot easier than trying it with millions … and safer as well. That fact was abundantly demonstrated when the catchers missed a slug of iridium in 2094 and it slammed into the Lunar farside.

For a century and a half, now, more or less, we’ve been bringing whole asteroids into Earth orbit and dismantling them there, using a couple of close Lunar passes to decelerate them. The AIs managing their vectors are good … and the meta-thrusters used for precision adjustments are reliable enough that even if something—unthinkable!—goes wrong, they can sling the rock into a higher and safer orbit. Hell, they have to be good just to shift the orbit periodically to avoid cutting the space elevator.

But the neo-Ludds are less accepting of the claims and promises of technology. They’re probably best known for their opposition to cerebral implants and the global Net, but orbital mining is a popular target too. This time, they’d made it a literal target by boarding Capricorn Zeta and threatening to drop Atun 3840 on Earth.

The rock wasn’t a dinosaur-killer, but it would make a hell of a mess if it hit. An ocean strike meant tidal scouring continents for hundreds of kilometers inland; a land strike could annihilate a dozen cities and raise a global dust cloud that would wreck our ongoing attempts to beat back the new ice age, and might even knock us all the way into a “Snowball Earth” scenario. These guys were nuts.

And so the president had given the order: the Marines would take back Capricorn Zeta. Negotiations had been going on for a week already, but had been going nowhere. And then a few hours ago a hostage had been shoved out an airlock. The terrorists’ key and nonnegotiable demand—that humans abandon space industrialization—simply wasn’t going to happen.

The kicker was that there were still fifty-four people on board Capricorn Zeta, not counting an estimated twenty tangos. There reportedly also were two M’nangat on board … and that made it an interstellar incident. Our orders were distressingly precise. Our first priority was to secure Atun 3840—which meant capturing the facility’s meta-thruster controls. Second was to make certain the two visiting M’nangat were safe. Saving the miners and corporate officials in the facility came in only at number three.

My tactical in-head showed the doughnut was almost there. A steady countdown was silently running against my field of view. We were twenty seconds now from touching down.

Thirty meters away, Lance Corporal Stalzar’s armor lit up, a dazzling flare of light consuming the torso of his suit. We all heard the shriek …

“Sniper!” Thomason called. “Marine down!”

I was already checking Stalzar’s readouts on my in-head. There was nothing … nothing I could do… .

A second star appeared close to the asteroid’s horizon, opposite the mining station, growing brilliant, then fading. We had countersnipers both up on Geosynch Center, halfway up the space elevator, and on board a Marine transport a few thousand kilometers above and behind us. They’d seen the pulse of the tango’s laser when he’d shot Stalzar, and vaporized the chunk of asteroid terrain where he’d been hiding.

Ten seconds. What had been a bright star, then a gleaming toy in the sunlight, was expanding now into something much larger. Another silent flare of light on the asteroid marked a second countersniper shot. Maybe they’d spotted a tango’s heat signature against the rock.

Five seconds. The rock drifted off to my right. Directly ahead, the silvery smooth surface of the mining facility’s Hab One now filled my forward view. I could see the alphanumerics painted on the hull, and a corporate logo—Skye Metals—sandblasted by orbiting grit. The doughnut was affixed to the hull high and a little to my left. I shifted my vector slightly, aiming for a flat surface nearby. I gave an in-head order, and my AI flipped me end-for-end. My feet were aimed at the station as my thrusters cut in, slowing me. I hit the hull two seconds later, flexing my knees to absorb the impact. Around me, Marines were raining out of the sky, touching down on the hull, then moving toward the doughnut.

I let the Marines go first, of course. As the platoon’s Corpsman—the “Doc”—I was expected to keep up but not to engage in combat. That was the contract U.S. Navy Corpsmen had shared with the Marine Corp for the past three centuries or so: they do the fighting, and we patch ’em up.

The waiting was over. The first Marine fireteam was plunging into the doughnut, headfirst.

The VBSS Mobile Nano-utility Lock is indispensible for Visit Board Search and Seizure ops in hard vacuum, especially when the visit is being resisted by an armed enemy. It really is a doughnut wheel some three meters across, with what looks like a black sheet stretched taut across the hole. It hits the hull of a target vessel or base, and nanodisassemblers on the business side chew through metal, plastic, and active nano sheathing with ease. The black sheet is a nanomatrix pressure shield just a few molecules thick; it holds in the target vessel’s air, but molds close to a boarder’s armor, letting him pass through without venting atmosphere.

“Rogers! Jorgenson!” Thomason snapped over the platoon channel. “Hold up!”

The next two Marines in line waited, clinging to handholds on the doughnut. Thomason was watching what was happening inside by means of cameras mounted on the helmets of the first four-man fireteam.

“Okay!” Thomason said. “Fireteam two! Go!”

Rogers and Jorgenson slipped through the lock, followed by Beaudet and Tomacek. They were followed by the next fireteam … and the next. I wasn’t tapped in to the visual channels, but I could hear the radio calls of the Marines already inside.

“Watch it! Watch it! Tango at oh-one-five!”

“Moving! Firing!”

“Rogers! Morrisey! To your right!”

“Got him! Tango down!”

“Sobiesky! You and Marshall secure the hatch! The rest of you, with me!”

More and more of the platoon’s Marines vanished through the doughnut, until it was my turn. I grabbed the handholds and pulled myself forward. I could feel the nanoseal closing around me, clinging to me, sliding down my torso as I moved … and then I was through.

The interior was a large compartment some ten meters across, dark except for emergency lights spaced around the bulkheads. Directly ahead, my helmet light illuminated a massive tangle of pipes and conduits—the business end of the nano-D mining equipment eating its way into the heart of Atun 3840. A dead tango floated in the air nearby, wearing what looked like a Chinese space suit without the helmet. A MAW drifted nearby.

Magnetic accelerator weapons aren’t a real good choice for close combat inside a pressurized environment. I wondered how well trained these idiots were.

A Marine fireteam on the far end of the hab module used an applicator gun to smear a two-meter circle of nano-D against the bulkhead, and then one of them gave the smoking ring a hard kick. Gunfire cracked and clanged as magnetic rounds snapped through the opening and punched through bulkheads, a cacophony of noise after the silence of our passage through vacuum. Corporal Tom Morrisey screamed, and I saw a flash of incoming data on my med channel.

“Corpsman!” Thomason yelled. “Marine down!”

I was also getting environmental warnings, and a station Klaxon began sounding an alert. Some of the rounds that had missed Morrisey had punched through the facility’s outer hull. The station’s external nanomatrix would seal the holes, but that would take a few moments, and the air pressure was dropping precipitously in the meantime.

That wouldn’t hurt us, of course, but it put the station’s crew in danger.

I kicked off the bulkhead and glided across the compartment to Morrisey. His right arm was missing below the elbow, the armor there was a tangled mess, and blood was spurting from the wreckage in a bright orange-red arterial stream that was breaking off into darker gobbets as it spiraled with his rotation. I collided with him and stabilized his spin, then jacked into his armor for a direct readout.

The magnetically accelerated slug had sliced through his elbow with kinetic energy enough to shred armor and amputate the lower arm. Normally, Marine armor will guillotine shut above a serious leg or arm wound, stopping the bleeding and, more important, stopping the suit from venting its air into vacuum. That last might be a problem in another few minutes, but right now the cabin pressure was high enough that the armor’s slice-and-seal function hadn’t triggered. Morrisey’s brachial artery was pumping out blood fast; he would be dead in a few minutes if I didn’t stop the bleeding.

I did a quick scan to make certain he didn’t have any head trauma—it looked like it was just his arm that had been hit, but you never know—then thoughtclicked a key directing Morrisey’s suit to autoinject a jolt of anodynic recep blockers into his carotid artery. Heart rate 155 … BP 149 over 90, respiration 36 and gasping, rapidly elevating levels of both adrenalin and noradrenalin.

Morrisey stopped screaming as the nanoanadynes started shutting down the doloric receptors in his thalamus and the insular cortex, blocking the pain signals as they reached his brain. “Jesus, Doc!” he said. “I can still feel it! It feels … weird!”

“That’s because your pressure receptors are still firing. Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine.”

I hoped. His extremities were already starting to cool, which meant he was already shocky. I ordered his suit to clamp down on his upper arm to reduce the brachial artery flow, then raise its internal temp slightly and relax the external pressure on the arteries leading to his head to interrupt the shock response.

I had to make a quick decision, though. The armor clamp would slow the bleeding, but wouldn’t stop it by itself. I could cram a packet of skinseal into the injury, and let that seal off the wound … or I could order his suit to slice off what was left of his arm well above the bleeding stump. The guillotine at his elbow, obviously, was smashed; the next working blade was eight centimeters up, midway up his humerus. The nanonarcs would block the pain, or most of it, but he would still feel it, and that would increase the risk of shock.

Shock or not, I elected to cut. Skinseal is great stuff, but it’s better for minor bleeding. And if the mining station’s outer hull didn’t seal off the leaks, Morrisey would have other problems in a moment if he started losing air.

I again checked his nananodyne levels, then thoughtclicked through the link to trigger the suit’s chopper. Another chunk of his arm came off, a squat cylinder encased in black armor, but the bleeding stopped at once.

“God,” he said. “I’m gonna be sick… .”

“No,” I told him. “You’re not.”

Vomiting inside a space suit is very serious business, and can lead to drowning. Morrisey’s armor was already firing antiemetic ’bots into his carotid artery, but it wasn’t enough.

The vomiting reflex is triggered in the area postrema, a tiny nub on the floor of the brain’s fluid-filled fourth ventricle snugged up against the cerebellum. There are a number of different chemical pathways leading to emeses triggers, but most involve a neuropeptide called substance P, or SP, which is found in both the brain and the spinal cord and which is associated with inflammation, pain, and shock.

I pulled my N-prog from my M-7 medical kit and thought a quick series of commands into it. The device, in turn, reprogrammed some of the nananodyne bots now circulating through Morrisey’s brain, ordering them to block out the SP … and also to shut down the cholinergic receptor input from his inner ears, since his vestibular system—reacting to zero-G—was also screaming at him. The reprogrammed ’bots would add to the suit’s antiemetic response, helping to stifle Morrisey’s nausea before he vomited inside his helmet.

“Yeah,” Morrisey said. “Yeah … that’s … that’s better, Doc. Thanks.”

I gave his readouts a final check. His BP was stabilizing at 125 over 70, and his respiration was a bit slower now. “You’ll be fine,” I told him. “Some time in sick bay, and we’ll grow you a new arm, better than the old.”

He nodded inside his helmet. “I know.”

I sent him back to the doughnut to await a medevac. Now that we had our foothold on board Zeta, more Marines were on the way in, along with support vessels and transports to haul away the wounded. I made my way toward the second breach in the bulkhead, slipping through and into the compartment on the other side. The fighting appeared to be over—here, at least. There was a seething mob of people in brown utilities, more spacesuited bodies, Marines, and a lot more drifting globules of blood, a tangle too confused for me to count. Marines were moving among the rescued hostages, cuffing their hands with zipstrips. Until we were absolutely sure of who was a tango and who was a hostage, we handled them all as potential terrorists. There was a bank of link-in controls along one bulkhead. I saw one deeply padded seat with a dead tango strapped into it, his hands still on the palmpads on the chair’s arms. He’d probably been the terrorist commander, running the station’s defenses by jacking in at this secondary control center, but the ugly crater in his spacesuit’s chest showed that a Marine had taken him out with a laser rifle.

“Corpsman, front!”

I homed on this new call, pushing my way through the milling civilians and Marines. Gunny Hancock was waving to me from an open hatch in the bulkhead beyond. “In here, Doc! On the double!”

Drifting through the opening, I entered a small and bare compartment—probably a storage locker. There were two M’nangat drifting inside, and one of them looked like it was hurt. Another dead tango floated near the overhead, a MAW pistol still clutched his hand.

I drifted over to the alien. “What happened?” I asked.

“That guy shot him,” Hancock said, “just as we came through the door. Is it bad?”

“It’s not good.”

The M’nangat are surprisingly like us biologically—carbon-based oxygen breathers, with metal-chelated tetrapyroles pumped through an enclosed circulatory system by a pair of two-chambered hearts working in synch. They even use DNA for genetic coding rather than one of several other xenobiological possibilities, but that’s where the similarities stop. The being was a couple of meters long, resembling a pale, blue-green pillar of thick, tightly twisted tentacles like a tree’s trunk, which then spread out from the creature’s base like the roots of a tree. At the top end was what looked like a half-meter cluster of grapes—though each grape was the size of an orange—translucent, and shot through with flecks of red and gold. The wounded one had a savage puncture in one side of its leathery trunk, and blue-green liquid was jetting in spurts from the wound with enough force to paint one bulkhead and drive the being into the other like a small rocket. Slits beneath the grape cluster representing mouths and breathing apertures gaped and pulsed, and the being uttered a startlingly human-sounding groan.

“You’ll be okay, fella,” I said. The reassurance was automatic; I didn’t expect the creature to answer. But a link switched on within my in-head, and the words “Thank you” wrote themselves out on an inner window.

I’d not realized that the M’nangat shared something else with us besides our body chemistries, that they had CNS prostheses that, among other things, could connect with an AI residing within their internal hardware and communicate with other software in the area … such as a translator program.

And as soon as I thought about that, something clicked into place … something I’d just seen and not thought about, but which represented a terrible danger to the station and to us.

“Gunny!” I yelled, turning. “That dead tango in the seat out there …”

“What about him, Doc?”

“If he has an AI—”

I saw Hancock’s eyes widen behind his helmet visor. It had clicked for him too. He turned to duck out of the small compartment, but in that same instant I felt a solid jolt, and the sensation of weight tugged at me with a terrifying insistence. It wasn’t much—maybe a tenth of a gravity, but it was terrifying in its implications.

The massive meta-fueled thrusters mounted to the surface of Atun 3840 had just fired. The one-kilometer asteroid and its attached mining station were decelerating … which meant we were now beginning to fall out of orbit and toward the Earth’s surface.

And if we hit we were going to leave one hell of a big crater.

Chapter Two

We were falling out of the sky.

I knew immediately what had happened … and kicked myself for not picking up on it as soon as I’d seen that dead tango in the control seat. The guy might have been a neo-Ludd … but if he was running the control software for Capricorn Zeta—that’s the only reason he would have been strapped into that chair with his hands on the palm interfaces—then he must have had a resident AI inside his in-head hardware, his cerebral implant. I have one; all Marines do as well, and most civilians have them too. It’s how we can interface with all of the thousands of computers and control systems around us every day, from operating devices like my N-prog to pulling down in-head data feeds and scans and communication to telling the deck to grow a chair.

And a person doesn’t have to be alive for the AI to keep working.

Whoever had helped the neo-Ludds take over Capricorn Zeta had had some high-powered technology behind them, and that would include AIs carefully programmed to help carry out their mission. That meant there would have been some sort of backup electronic deadman’s switch; the man controlling the station dies, and his software tells the station to destroy itself … taking out a big part of the planet as it does so.

I heard Thomason’s shouts outside. “Get his hands off of there! Get him out of that fucking seat!” But moment followed moment and the deceleration continued. The neo-Ludd software must have had run-if-interrupted code sequences. Someone would have to regain control of the system to stop those rockets.

That wasn’t my immediate problem, however. The Marines had people who could regain control of the falling asteroid. I had a patient to worry about. If we re-entered Earth’s atmosphere he would die—as would I—but he would die anyway even if we regained a stable orbit and I didn’t patch him up.

There are certain priorities in treating a wounded patient no matter what his, her, or its species might be. The M’nangat was losing blood fast, and that was my immediate priority. M’nangat blood is cupriglobin, copper-based, rather than iron-based as with human hemoglobin. That’s why the blue-green color of the blood. But the different blood chemistry wouldn’t affect skinseal. These guys had a similar body temperature, and their skin, though thicker than in humans, was made up of the same sorts of carbon-based keratinocytes, keratin proteins, and lipids.

I pulled a packet of skinseal from my M-7 kit, thumbed it open, and pressed the whole pack, powder-side-down, over the wound. Skinseal includes both absorbents and binding nanoagents that would work on a variety of more or less similar body building blocks.

As it worked, I pulled down the species EG data from the Orbital Net.

Encyclopedia Galactica/Xenospecies Profile

Entry: Sentient Galactic Species 14566

“M’nangat”

M’nangat, “M’naggies,” “Broccolis,” “Brocs,” “Stalks”

Civilization type: 1.042 G

TL 19: FTL, Genetic Prostheses, Cerebral Prostheses

Societal code: AQCB

Dominant: loose associative/scavenger/defensive/sexual

Cultural library: 4.11 x 1016 bits

Data Storage/Transmission DS/T: 3.07 x 1011s

Biological code: 156.872.119

Genome: 3.8 x 109 bits; Coding/non-coding: 0.028.

Biology: C, N, O, S, H2O, PO4

DNA

Cupric metal-chelated tetrapyroles in aqueous circulatory fluid.

Mobile heterotrophs, omnivores, O2 respiration.

Upright tentacular locomotion.

Mildly gregarious, Polyspecific [1 genera, 12 species]; trisexual.

Communication: modulated sound at 150 to 300 Hz.

Neural connection equivalence NCE = 1.1 x 1014

T = ~260o to 300o K; M = 0.9 x 105 g; L: ~2.5 x 109s

Vision: ~200 nanometers to 720 nanometers; Hearing: 12 Hz to 18,000 Hz

Member: Galactic Polylogue

Receipt galactic nested code: 3.86 x 1010 s ago

Locally initiated contact 0.11 x 109 s ago

Star G1V; Planet: Fourth; “M’gat”

a = 1.669 x 1011m; M = 8.5 x 1027g; R = 7.2 x 106m; p = 3.6 x 107s

Pd = 2.3 x 105s, G = 10.9 m/s2 Atm: O2 20.1, N2 79.6, CO2 0.3;

Patm 0.97 x 105 Pa

Librarian’s note: First direct human contact occurred in 2119 C.E., the very first extraterrestrial space-faring civilization encountered by Humankind. Threat level—8.

I let the numbers cascade through my brain, watching for anything that was so far out of the ordinary that it would put up a red flag. Ordinary when discussing alien biochemistry takes in a huge chunk of territory, of course, but there were some basic rules to play by if the patient was a carbon-based oxygen breather. Hell, compared to some of the critters we’ve encountered out there, methane-breathers and gas giant floaters and fluoro-silicate crystal autotrophs, these guys were practically next of kin.

We’d known the Brocs for over a century, now … since just after the discovery of the local Encylopedia Galactica Node at Sirius. They were our first ET encounter, face-to … whatever it is they have in place of a face. Once we established contact with them, they helped us figure out how to extract the oceans upon oceans of data in the EG, which helped us begin to make some small bit of sense out of the bewildering forest of intelligent life we were encountering as we moved out into the Galaxy. In fact, we were reading parts of the EG only twelve or thirteen years after we logged in; that we were doing so in only thirteen years was due almost entirely to Broc help. They’ve taught us five, so far, of the major Galactic linguae francae, as well as giving us the inside scoop on the slow-motion collapse of the R’agch’lgh Collective in toward the Core. In many ways, they’ve been Humankind’s friendly native guides in our first tentative explorations into the Galaxy jungle at large.

A few have been allowed to come to the Sol System as consultants—so long as they didn’t have astrogation devices that might give away Earth’s most closely guarded secret … exactly where Sol was among the four hundred billion stars of our Galaxy. It pays to be damned cautious in a star wilderness filled with roving predarians and the wreckage of a collapsing galactic empire. These two, according to our pre-mission briefing, had been at Capricorn Zeta to advise us on in-orbit mining techniques.

Unfortunately, they’d been at the wrong place at the wrong time when a Chinese tug declared an emergency and docked alongside. Twenty armed tangos had been hiding on board. As soon as the tug docked, they’d come swarming out of the tug’s cargo compartment and into the mining station.

PLEASE HELP HERM. The words printed themselves out in my in-head as the second, uninjured, M’nangat leaned closer.

Herm. The M’nangat had three sexes, I saw—male, female, and a third that received the fertilized embryo from the female and carried it to term. The wounded one, apparently, was one of those.

They were called life carriers.

I hesitated. I’d already done everything I could for the wounded Broccoli … everything I could, that is, without firing nano into its circulatory system to give me a look from the inside. Putting anything foreign into an alien body was risky, especially if you didn’t know about possible antibody or immune-system responses. The nanobots I carried in my M-7 kit were designed to neatly bypass the human immune response … but how would that play out inside an alien circulatory system?

I pulled out a biochem analyzer and pressed its business end against my patient’s tough, ropy hide. After a moment, I shifted the analyzer to a splatter of blue-green blood near the wound. The readouts downloaded straight into my in-head, giving me a more detailed understanding of the being’s biochemistry than was available on the Net. In particular, I had my AI leapfrog through the incoming data to pinpoint those biochemistries associated with the alien’s immune response.

The immune system for any species is an enormous set of chemistries—varied, complex, and efficient. Even bacteria have their own simple immune system—secreted enzymes that protect the cell against bacteriophage infections. Life forms as complicated as humans have many, many layers of physical and biochemical defenses … and quite a few of those are changing all the time to react to specific threats. I couldn’t expect the M’nangat to be any different.

Our databases on M’nangat physiology weren’t extensive—at least not the ones available to me over the Fleet channels—but I could have my AI run a series of simulations: what would happen if I shot my green patient full of nanobots? The answer came back in a few seconds. There was a solid 86 percent chance that my nano would not trigger an immune response.

Nanobots are designed and programmed with immune responses in mind, of course. They’re coated with buckyweave carbon shells with the active molecular machinery hidden away inside a non-reactive sheath. Still, there was always a small chance—in this case 14 percent—that my nanobots might hit a biochemical trigger and sensitize the organism, telling it in effect that invaders were entering the body and it was time to call out the troops. Those percentages applied to the entire dose of ’bots, of course, and not to each nanobot individually. Otherwise, with a few hundred million foreign particles entering the alien system, sensitization would have been guaranteed.

I looked again at the wound, and decided I would have to accept those odds. The Broc had an entry wound but no exit cavity. The projectile must still be inside.

I felt a shudder through the deck, and then zero-gravity resumed. The meta rockets had switched off. Had the Marines gotten to the controls in time? Or had we just deorbited?

I couldn’t tell, and I was too busy at the moment to link in and query the network. If we hit atmosphere, my work on the alien would be wasted, but if we didn’t burn up on re-entry or slam into the Earth I preferred to have a live patient to a dead one. I kept working.

I used the injector from my M-7 kit to fire a full dose of nanobots into the alien’s hide. As I waited for them to be assimilated, I wondered why we used terms like “Broccoli” or “Stalk” with aliens like the M’nangat. I understood why Marines dehumanized their enemies—especially the human ones—but the M’nangat, as far as we could tell, had been benevolent and helpful galactic neighbors.

The answer, I suppose, was psychological. Friendly the M’nangat may be, but they were still alien, meaning we could never really get inside their heads—or what passes for heads—and understand them nearly as well as, say, a human living in San Antonio can understand a human living in Kyoto. They had their own agenda—all intelligent beings do—and we had no idea what that agenda might be and probably never would. That’s why we were careful not to let them learn where Sol was, why trading and diplomatic exchanges took place at neutral meeting spots like Sirius, just in case.

And that was fair enough, since we had no idea where they hailed from either, other than that their homeworld was the fourth planet of a star only slightly brighter than Sol. In a galaxy of four hundred billion stars, you can’t tell much from that.

But maybe we called the weirdly stalked and tentacled beings Broccoli or Brocs or Stalks to make them seem a little more … comprehensible. Familiar. I glanced up at the sensory cluster, that cluster of orange-sized luminous eyes at one end of the body. Those quivering jelly-globe eyes had no pupils, so I couldn’t tell if it was looking at me, but then, that sphere of light-gathering organs was designed to look in every direction at once.

What kind of brain can see through 360 degrees and straight up at all times? I wondered. What did that suggest about M’nangat psychology?

D’DNAH CARRIES MY BUDS, the uninjured M’nangat said, the translated words typing themselves across my in-head screen. PLEASE …

“I’ll do what I can,” I replied aloud, letting my AI handle the translation and transmission. “I’m just checking to see if your partner is okay on the inside.”

The being floating next to me and my patient was showing no emotion that I could recognize, but the words on my in-head sounded like human pain. Buds … that would be a clutch of young. According to the downloading xeno data, fertilized eggs from the female took root inside the life carrier and grew as buds that eventually tuned into young and chewed their way to freedom.

I tried not to think about that part. M’nangat reproduction was messy, violent, and painful … and the carrier usually didn’t survive. And how did that color their psychology?

The nanobots were clustering now around the wounded being’s internal organs. I used my N-prog to program them to transmit an overlay.

An overlay is a translucent image of a being’s internal structure projected over the image from my unaugmented eyes. I could see the Broc in front of me, but could also see its internal structure in remarkable depth and detail, picked out by hundreds of millions of cell-sized nanobots adhering to every internal surface and transmitting their relative positions to my N-prog. The Broc’s body appeared to fade away, and I could see the muscular system and, just underneath, the crisscrossing weave of cartilage running from tentacles to eyes. They didn’t have true internal skeletons, but the muscles of the body were attached to flexible, cartilaginous scaffolding that doubled as protection for the inner organs. By concentrating, I could let my viewpoint sink deeper. I linked in to the medical data feed from the Net; my AI identified various organs and threw names in so I could tell what I was looking at.

Right away, I could see that my patient was in serious trouble. A ragged cavity extended from the wound into the central core of its body, and a pale, diffuse cloud showed massive internal bleeding. The cartilage had been torn open and several organs damaged, but what really worried me was the bullet.

My nanobots had carefully picked it out: a glittering metal slug now resting immediately above the pulsing two-chambered muscle that was the M’nangat’s upper heart, tucked in beside the artery that corresponded to the aorta in humans. My AI identified the thing from the ’bots’ transmissions. It was an M550ND mag-accelerated nano-D round, and for some reason the thing had not gone off.

And that made it extremely dangerous.

I drew a deep breath, thinking fast. Nanodisassembler rounds are designed to explode on impact, flooding the target with nanobots programmed to dissolve molecular bonds—in essence reducing it to its component atoms. If the nano in that bullet was omnivorous, programmed to dissolve all bonds, it would have been an insanely dangerous round to use inside a space station. More likely, the nano had been programmed to focus on carbon bonds only: deadly for organic chemistries and most plastics, but inert if they slammed into a metal bulkhead.

Which kind were these? I wanted to believe that the tangos hadn’t been that crazy … crazy enough to fire omnivorous nano-D rounds inside Zeta Capricorn’s hull … but their record so far didn’t exactly inspire confidence in their rationality. They’d threatened to drop a one-kilometer rock onto Earth from orbit, for God’s sake … and when the Marines came on board, they’d set the deadly machinery in motion. When Atun 3840 touched down, the impact quite possibly could kill billions.

WHAT DO YOU SEE? the uninjured M’nangat asked. He … no, she—my data link provided that correction—wasn’t linked into my download feed, but could tell that I was peering closely at something inside her friend. She sounded as worried as any human might be.

“Just taking a look …” I said. I opened a private channel to Hancock. “Hey, Gunny? Can you send someone to get this Broc out of my hair?”

“On the way, Doc.” There was a pause. “How’s it going in there? We have two more wounded Marines out here.”

Damn! “Sorry. I’ve got a … a situation here, and it can’t wait. Put ’em on suit med-support.”

Marine Mark 10 MMCA combat armor can provide some extremely sophisticated first aid to the wearer, including nanobot auto-injections for both pain and hemorrhage control. Trouble was, my orders for this mission said that our M’nangat guests had first claim on my professional attentions. I guess the brass was afraid of an interstellar incident if one of them bled to death.

“Already done, Doc,” Hancock said. “But one of ’em’s in a bad way. We’ve already captured her, just in case.”

“Acknowledged.”

And I really didn’t want to think about that. CAPTR stands for cerebral access polytomographic reconstruction, and refers to technology that can record a living brain’s neural states and chemistries, synaptic pathways, and even its quantum spin states to provide a digital picture of brain activity. If a person suffers serious brain trauma, we can often repair the brain, then download the backup CAPTR data. I’d had it happen to me during the Gliese 581 deployment six months earlier.

The question was … was I still me? Or was I a copy of me with all the same memories, so that “I,” the new “I,” didn’t know the difference?

Marines have a name for people brought back by CAPTR technology: zombies.

The tangled philosophies involved made my head hurt, and I hated inflicting the same emotional issues on anyone else. But orders were orders …

And I had a patient to save.

Pulling a bullet out of someone isn’t that hard. In the old days, you took a forceps and a probe and fished around in the wound until you could grab the thing and drag it out … though if you weren’t careful you could do more damage with the fishing than the original shot had caused. I had a better means at my disposal … but the danger was that if I managed to release the bullet’s charge of nano-D, I would kill the patient. I could leave the round where it was, and I seriously considered that option … but it was lodged in a bad place, smack between the M’nangat’s upper heart and the underside of the brain. If it shifted while we were transporting the Broc, it could kill him.

There was also a chance that the round had a timer or a contact switch in it, set to go off when someone like me was trying to pull it out. Tangos had been known to booby-trap their victims that way sometimes.

Wonderful. Just fricking wonderful.

I linked in through my N-prog and began giving commands.

Nanobots are tiny, about one micron in length … one-fifth the width of a human red blood cell. A human hair is anywhere from 40 to 120 times thicker. They propel themselves through blood or interstitial fluid using local magnetic fields—in this case, that of the Earth itself—and can also link themselves together magnetically in order to apply force enough to, say, set a broken bone. Could they generate enough unified force to drag a bullet out of the patient without setting it off?

I was about to find out.

I couldn’t know it at the time, of course, but as I studied my patient, Earth was entering a paroxysm of recriminations, verbal assaults, and counterassaults that were bringing us to the brink of a very nasty war. The Terran Commonwealth doesn’t speak for all of Earth’s teeming billions, not by a damned sight. The North Chinese Socialist Cooperative is an independent nation, for instance, as is Brazil and most of what used to be called India. Most of the Islamic states from Morocco to Indonesia are independents, as is the vast sprawl of Islamic Central Asia.

Even the supposedly happily united nation-states of the Commonwealth have their share of rebellions, popular insurrections, and independence movements, and the neo-Ludd movement, as much religious as political, has roots in every technic society on the planet. We knew the tangos who had attacked Capricorn Zeta were neo-Ludd, but the neo-Ludds don’t have spacecraft. We knew they’d hitched a ride from the space elevator to the mining station on a Chinese tug, but that didn’t prove that North China was behind the attack. In fact, the Chinese tug argued against Beijing’s involvement. The Chinese weren’t stupid, and they knew that endangering the entire planet was certain to call down upon themselves the wrath of almighty God in the form of Commonwealth assault forces, aerospace attacks, and a barrage of orbital railgun strikes.

Logic … but at the moment no one on Earth was feeling like indulging in logic. The president of Germany had just announced that the terror attack on Capricorn Zeta—and its subsequent deorbit burn—was tantamount to a declaration of war by North China. South China had launched a similar verbal assault; Canton wanted full admission to the Commonwealth, and this gave them an opportunity to settle old scores.

And everything was happening so fast. In a global network where mind could speak to mind in an instant, news items more than fifteen minutes old were ancient history, and governments could threaten, be counterthreatened, and war be declared in the space of an hour or less.

Below the hurtling mass of the asteroid and its attendant structures, armies were mobilizing, and everywhere, everywhere, people were waiting to see just exactly where Atun 3840 was going to fall.

The bullet was moving. Encased in a sheath of tightly packed nanobots, it was sliding slowly up through the M’nangat’s cardiac envelope, moving back the way it had come because that path was already open. At each point where the bullet had ripped open tissue, I detailed a few tens of thousands of ’bots to stay behind and begin repairs, closing up torn tissue and, especially, closing open blood vessels. Most of them, though, kept pushing and pulling at the projectile to ease it back up the wound cavity.

Zero-gravity made the task easier. I was holding my breath. The bullet showed no sign of being live … but if it exploded now my patient was dead. Nano-D works fast, eating the target from the inside out. It burns out quickly, but the nano in a half-centimeter disassembler round would create a spherical cavity inside the M’nangat a tenth of a meter across, filled with a hot chemical goo of dissociated atoms and a lot of suddenly released energy.

I considered the possibility of using my own ’bots to encase any emerging nano-D if things did go bad, containing the release. They were packed in closely now, sealing the bullet off from its surroundings like a glistening coat of paint. Unfortunately, any nano-D inside the M550 round would be programmed to target the bonds between carbon atoms, and my ’bots were coated in nothing but carbon.

And the energy released from broken molecular bonds … I didn’t have the exact figures, but the explosion would rip the wounded being in half, and might breach my own armor.

Five centimeters to go. On a human scale—if my ’bots had been humans—that was only another one hundred kilometers. I had a momentary, surreal mental image of hundreds of millions of Egyptian laborers hauling one of the stone blocks destined for a pyramid with sledges and ropes … except that the bullet in this case would have been a completed pyramid one kilometer high.

With smooth surfaces unreactive to the surrounding tissue, however, the ’bots squeezed the bullet along as if it were a watermelon seed, gathering behind it, opening the path ahead, sliding it through glistening wet tissue. I had it clear of the heart and brain, finally, but if the round detonated it would still kill my patient.

Easy … easy …

Dimly, I was aware of Corporal Lewis coming up behind me and saying something to the other M’nangat, something about needing her help with a report. Good. I don’t like an audience when I work, even if the audience can’t see what the hell I’m doing.

Three more centimeters. Through my N-prog, I’d programmed the ’bots to work together as a single organism, contracting, and then expanding as it moved, clawing against the local magnetic field. I was approaching now the part of the wound that I’d already covered with skinseal. I didn’t want to disturb the congealing powder, and would have to route my microscopic parade around that region. That way, I decided, just beneath the M’nangat’s tough, outer layer of skin.

I would have to slice through the skin to remove the bullet, just there, two centimeters to one side of the skinsealed wound.

“I’m going to have to make a small cut in your skin,” I said, allowing my AI to translate for me. I touched her side. “Right about here. But I don’t have anything to keep it from hurting.”

IT . . . HURTS … NOW, was the reply.

I hated working without anesthetic, but the way a species transmits signals through its central nervous system—pain, temperature, pressure, or the more esoteric impulses for emotions or thoughts—is as unique as the way it deals with immune responses. I can block pain in a human patient easily enough because we understand how human pain works through the doloric receptors inside the thalamus and the insular cortex of the brain, but we have no idea how the analogous system works in the M’nangat. We just don’t understand their biochemistry well enough yet.

“Okay,” I said, slipping a laser scalpel from my M-7 pack and snapping it on. “Brace yourself.”

I made a single quick, short incision, trying to slice through just the tough and gnarled outer integument without touching the nano-clad bullet just underneath. The M’nangat tensed, and its tentacles whiplashed for an instant, threatening to put us both into a microgravity tumble.

“Steady,” I told herm. “Hold on now …”

Several tentacles flicked up and wrapped themselves around my legs, gripping me tightly. That hadn’t been what I’d meant by “hold on,” but it seemed to serve as the Broc equivalent of biting the bullet. Green blood emerged from the cut in a dense, expanding cloud … and the nano-D round came with it.

I let the bullet float free as I released the scalpel and snatched another bag of skinseal, thumbing it open. Right about then, I felt another shudder and weight returned … again, about a tenth of a gravity.

The meta thrusters were firing again.

Chapter Three

For a terrifying moment I was way too busy for only two hands, but I slapped the sealant in place, then pulled out a glass specimen container for the M550 round, which was now drifting toward the bulkhead at a bit less than a meter per second, reached out, and scooped it up just before it hit the wall. As I sealed the cap, the bullet abruptly dissolved, filling the vial with an inky black syrup. My breath caught in my throat; if the stuff was programmed to disassemble everything, the vial would dissolve in less than a second, and then we would have a cloud of charged nano-D floating into the interior of Capricorn Zeta.

But … no. The glass contained the ink, and I let out a deep and fervent breath of relief. The stuff must have been programmed to go after carbon, and the silica molecules—silicon dioxide—of the glass were beyond its scope. The scalpel and the N-prog both hit the bulkhead and clung there, and a second later my patient and I thumped against the wall as well.

WHAT … IS … HAPPENING?

“I’m hoping the Marines managed to hack into the station’s drive,” I told herm, “and are boosting us back into a stable orbit. Um … can you let go of my legs now?” The largest of those tentacles, as thick as my thigh and a couple of meters long, were strong.

Obligingly, they unfurled, then coiled up again into a tight ball. I picked up the N-prog and used it to call up a scan of the being’s internal systems, ordering the nanobots still inside to spread out and give me a full-body image.

The major bleeders, I noted, had been sealed off. Good. Both hearts were throbbing in lockstep with each other, first one, then the other, and both appeared to be beating steadily. My downloaded medical data suggested that the M’nangat’s temperature, respiration, and heart rate all were more or less within normal ranges. That was a damned good thing, too, since I didn’t have the nano programming or drugs to change them if they were off.

Down near the creature’s base I saw three small shadows. Buds. The growing young that in all probability would kill the M’nangat at parturition.

The shudder of the base’s engines cut off, and once again, we were in microgravity. I completed my examination. What I could understand appeared to be working okay; I just wished I understood more.

“Okay, Gunny?” I called. “I’ve got the patient stabilized. We need a medevac, though, to someplace that understands Broc physiology.”

“We have a couple of medevacs inbound, Doc.” Hancock replied. “Your friend’ll be heading down to San Antone.”

“Excellent.”

The San Antonio Military Medical Center—usually abbreviated as “SAMMC” and pronounced “Sam-sea”—was an enormous installation located at Fort Sam Houston on the northeast edge of San Antonio, Texas. It was where I’d had my Navy Hospital Corps training and where I’d gone to Advanced Medical Technology School a few months later. The naval hospital there is our biggest and best, and if any human facility could handle M’nangat physiology, they could.

“How about our wounded?” I asked.

“Sergeant Rutherford is doing okay,” Hancock replied. “Private Donohue is tech-dead.”

“How long?”

“Six … six and a half mikes.”

Fuck.

The human brain starts to break down the moment blood stops flowing through it. After three minutes, it might just be possible to bring a person back with little or no brain damage. Longer than that, though, and the damage from oxygen starvation is irreversible. The person is “tech-dead,” technically dead, and is going to need extensive stem-cell grafts and transplants for the brain to be brought back on-line again.

And that’s why we use CAPTR technology to try to put the patient’s mind back in his brain after we’ve repaired it. It doesn’t always work. More often than not it doesn’t. If there’s been too much damage and neuron replacement, the CAPTR download won’t take.

And if it does, the Marine becomes a “zombie,” shunned or worse by other Marines. They’re usually redeployed to a different unit after they recover, to avoid being ostracized by superstitious nonsense.

Caryl Donohue had been brain dead too long for me to be able to pull her back.

Would it have made a difference if I’d been able to treat her within a minute or two of being hit? There was no way to tell. Everything depended on the severity of the wound.

But I did know that she would have had a better chance if I’d been there, if I hadn’t been trying to gentle that nano-D round out of the M’nangat carrier’s chest.

And that made me feel … guilty, somehow. Like I’d not been doing my job. Like I’d let down another member of the platoon.

I didn’t want to think about that. “What’s the situation, Gunny?” I asked, changing the topic. In any case, I wanted to know if the mission had succeeded … or if it had all been for nothing.

“We’re in good shape,” Hancock replied. “The bastards planted a blocker virus in the thruster control system, but First Platoon touched down on the rock and took direct control of the thrusters. They hardwired a new control system into the jets, and that let us stabilize the rock’s orbit.”

So, the bad guys had sabotaged Capricorn Zeta’s controls so that no matter what we’d done, the station and a one-kilometer asteroid would have burned into Earth’s atmosphere and impacted somewhere on the surface moments later. First Platoon had been on an approach vector above and behind us, with the goal of landing on the asteroid itself and securing the thruster complex. Evidently, the plan had worked.

“We were thirty-five minutes from re-entry,” Hancock added, “and about forty from impact.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere just south of Japan.”

In many ways, an ocean impact is far worse for the planet than having an asteroid come down on solid ground. Billions of tons of water flashed into vapor … a thick cloud ceiling over most of the planet reflecting the heat of the sun back into space … and, oh yes, titanic tidal waves racing across the ocean at the speed of sound. The western coast of the Americas would have been hard hit.

But it would have been a hell of a lot worse for Japan and both Chinas. Again, it didn’t seem logical that the North Chinese were behind the terror attack on Capricorn Zeta. They would have been vulnerable to an impact anywhere in the Pacific basin—a bull’s-eye covering one-third of the planet. But if not them, who?

That, however, was for the politicians to argue about. Right now, it was our job to finish securing the mining station, making sure the black hats hadn’t planted any bombs or otherwise compromised the base. We also had to process the rescued hostages, still floating around with their hands zip-tied behind them. This meant interviewing each one, comparing their story with both station computer records and records off the Net, checking their DNA to make sure each man or woman was who he or she claimed to be, and evacuating the wounded shoreside. The Marines were taking care of that part of the evolution.

My job was to prep our wounded for evac … and to pull suit recordings on the Marines who’d been hit. Marine combat armor has simple-minded AIs resident within the electronics that keep a log of events in a battle. What a Marine does wrong during a firefight can be helpful as a basis for Marine training sims, a means of keeping other Marines from making the same mistakes.

Second Platoon had suffered three wounded and one dead—not a bad casualty ratio, actually, for space combat, where even minor damage to vacuum armor can very easily mean a fast and unpleasant death. We’d lost Lance Corporal Stalzar going in; the others we’d been able to treat or stabilize. We still didn’t know about Private Donohue … wouldn’t know about her until we could get her to a proper med facility. I didn’t have a report yet from 1st Platoon. I tagged HM2 Michael C. Dubois, the 1st Platoon Corpsman, over the company Net. If he needed help out there on the rock’s surface, he could yell for me.

“Carlyle!” Lieutenant Singer called. “What are you doing?”

“Grabbing suit recordings, sir,” I replied.

“That can wait. I need you sweeping the station for goo threats.”

I sighed. No rest for the Wiccans …

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“That includes the prisoners. Especially the prisoners. We can’t allow the medevacs in until the mining station is declared clean.”

Shit. “I’m on it, sir.”

I wondered whether that order was coming down from Washington, or if it represented the technoparanoia of the local brass—at a battalion or company level, or even of Second Lieutenant Singer himself.

No matter. Orders were orders. I pulled out my N-prog and began resetting it.

Gray goo. That was the old and fear-entangled term invented by Eric Drexler, one of the twentieth-century fathers of nanotechnology—though he’d later said he wished he’d never come up with the phrase. Back in those early days, before the first molecular disassemblers had even been brought on-line, there’d been a widespread concern about nanomachines programmed to take apart raw materials and create more of themselves. Since human beings are as good as sources of raw materials as an ancient landfill, the fear was that nano-D would keep on eating and eating until the entire planet was converted to so-called gray goo.

It couldn’t happen, of course. Run until the raw material is used up is a piss-poor way to program molecular machines, first off. They also require energy, a lot of it, to break molecular bonds, and are generally fairly limited in range. Nanodisassemblers are designed to reach an end point and quit. They’re also easily shut down by an ultraviolet radiation bath, or by transmission of a seek-kill signal in their immediate vicinity.

But Humankind has had a love-hate relationship with nano since the beginning. Medical nano has effectively tripled our expected life span, ended the tyranny of pain, overturned the death sentences of cancer and heart disease, and even holds out the eventual promise of … if not immortality, then the next best thing: lifetimes measured by millennia rather than years. Some people with full-course nananagathics in their systems have been around for well over a century, now, and still look like they’re in their thirties. Not only that, nanotechnology has completely transformed the way we control and interact with our material surroundings, allowing us to grow everything from a sizzling steak to a house, and pull what we need from the background matrix—furniture, workstations, nanufactories, anything that can be stored in digital AI memory and retrieved by a thoughtclick.

But the term gray goo remains a bugaboo, a terror phrase for anyone nervous about the ever-increasing pace of our technology. Washington in particular was afraid of what would happen if terrorists got hold of so-called black nano, which when released would proceed to chow down on Earth’s ecosphere.

Ecophagia—devouring the ecosphere.

Machines—even very tiny ones—only did what humans told them to do.

But then, humans were always the weak part of the equation, capable of the most incredibly stupid or irresponsible of acts.

I started scanning the compartment with my N-prog, looking for the telltale electronic signature of nanobots. The trouble was, there were ’bots everywhere. When my N-prog detected active nano, it transmitted the data to my in-head, which painted green pinpoints against my vision, marking objects that otherwise would have been invisibly small. I looked at the station bulkhead in front of me, gray-painted and consisting entirely of massive pipes running from deck to overhead. The biggest, I knew, were sorting pipes, carrying the component elements of Atun 3840 into storage and assembly bays. The thinner tubes were nano-D feeders, sending microscopic disassemblers into the depths of the captive asteroid. The pipes were silent at the moment, the mining process shut down. But they showed as solid masses of green, each packed with trillions upon uncountable trillions of live nanobots—motionless, but still powered and on standby. Most of the Marines around me showed diffuse green masses within the outlines of their bodies—the medical nano we all carried to improve our combat efficiency, react to wounds, and keep us healthy.

There was loose nano drifting in the air too. The damned things are so tiny that there’s always leakage, and any environment with active nano running will have escapees. I pointed my N-prog at several, interrogating them; a lot of the floaters actually were disassemblers—leftovers from the rounds the tangos had used. They’d shut down but were still broadcasting. Damn, they were everywhere.

This was freaking hopeless.

“Lieutenant Singer?”

“Go ahead.”

“We’ve got nano soup in here. It appears inert, but there’s so much it’s overloading my readings. I recommend a UV bath. The whole station, top to bottom.”

Facilities like Capricorn Zeta were required by law to have ultraviolet lights installed in every compartment, a means of turning off any loose nano that leaked into the environment or came inside on workers’ spacesuits. It was the simplest solution, and the only one we had time for.

“Very well,” Singer said. “But check out the tangos. One of them might be a carrier.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The prisoners were being held in the next compartment out from the rock, a common area that served as lounge and mess hall for the miners. One entire bulkhead was transplas, looking down on the cloud tops hugging the Earth. We were crossing the terminator into night, and the clouds were red and flaming orange. The planet looked fragile and terribly vulnerable.

Sergeant Aguirre and a couple of privates had the tangos under guard—five of them. They’d been yanked out of their spacesuits, stripped naked, and tied hand and foot. We were taking no chances with these animals.

They watched with large, dark, and angry eyes as I scanned the first one with my N-prog. No RFID tag, no edentity. “Name?” I asked him.

He spat at me, the shimmering glob of saliva drifting past my helmet in microgravity to splat against the transparent bulkhead at my back. I shrugged and kept scanning. There was, of course, nothing.

Neo-Ludds. They’ve been with us forever, I think. When Tharg the caveman first discovered fire, there were probably members of the tribe who wanted to make the stuff illegal, a clear and present danger to the community. The original Luddites had been early-nineteenth-century textile workers who’d sabotaged the machinery introduced by the Industrial Revolution, machinery that was putting them out of work. Toward the end of the twentieth century neo-Luddism had arisen—a rejection of those technologies perceived as having a negative impact on both individuals and communities.

Nanotechnology was at the top of the neo-Ludds’ hit list, of course, not only because of the whole “gray goo” scenario, but because it was changing the very meaning of what it meant to be human. Nano-chelated circuitry grown inside the human brain, control contacts in the palms of our hands, genetic reconfiguration … sure, we might have cured cancer with the stuff, but was it safe?

I would have been extremely surprised if any of these people had nanobots in them, or any of the nanotech extensions—cerebral implants, neural circuitry, or other internal hardware.

For neo-Ludds, asteroid mining came right behind nanotech as a key target—especially when that industry involved moving asteroids into Earth orbit. Proponents suggested that the technology, with massively redundant backups, was failsafe. The neo-Ludds pointed out that sooner or later technology always fails, and that Earth could not risk even a single such failure.

But did it make sense, I wondered, for them to protest the technology by bringing about the very disaster they feared? That simply wasn’t rational.

But then, I had trouble thinking of neo-Ludds as rational.

I went down the line, scanning each man in turn. All of them were clean—no active nano circulating inside their bodies. Curious, I put the N-prog away and pulled out a DNA tester. Approaching the first man, I touched it to his upper arm. He yelped when it bit him, and cut loose with a torrent of invective in a language I didn’t understand.

“You understand any of that, Sarge?” I asked Aguirre.

“Negative, Doc,” he replied. “The station translators aren’t programmed for it, whatever it is.”

Figured. The station AI could translate between us and the Brocs, but we couldn’t understand this group of humans. I studied them as my analyzer churned away. They weren’t Chinese, certainly. No epicanthic folds. Their skin was swarthy; Middle Eastern, possibly.

I took samples from the rest of them, eliciting reactions that ran the gamut from bored indifference to angry hostility.

A few minutes later, my analyzer started to send back data, scrolling it down through my in-head in a sudden cascade of alphanumerics. I couldn’t follow it all; genetics is not my specialty. But I caught a couple of key indicators as they flicked by: macro-haplogroup K … paragroup L … haplogroups R1a1 and R2 … mutation M198 …

The analyzer popped up a series of possible answers: a 65 percent probability of Central Asia, 22 percent South Asia, lesser percentages for portions of western China, Siberia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

I looked at the first man, who was still scowling at me. “Kazakh?” I asked.

His nostrils flared, and he barked at me in the same unknown harsh and vehement language. The others looked frightened.

“We know they speak English,” Aguirre told me. “Some of ’em, anyway.”

“Betcha that’s Turkic,” I told him. “Kazakh. Kyrgyz, Uzbek—one of those.”

“Damned Cackies,” Aguirre said.

I looked at the sullen prisoners. “We don’t know it’s the Caliphate, Sarge.”

“Aw, c’mon, Doc! Who the fuck else would it be?”

He had a point. The Central Asian Caliphate—the western name usually shortened to “CAC” and pronounced “cack”—was the Islamic theocracy sprawling from Azerbaijan to Sinkiang, notoriously volatile, notoriously anti-Western, notoriously anti-technology. They were known to sponsor neo-Ludd terror all over the world. Allah, after all, hates anything not found in the holy Qur’an, including nanomedical life extension, educational downloads, and anything at all that changes the eternal heavens.

I opened a channel to operations HQ back at Synchorbit. They had access to more complete haplogroup records than I did through the Net, and would be able to confirm the results. As the results came back down then link, a call came through my in-head from Major Lansky, the Battalion CO. “This is … who? Carlyle?”

“HM2 Elliot Carlyle, sir,” I said. “Second Platoon Corpsman.”

“What’s this stuff you’re uploading?”

“DNA readouts from five prisoners, sir. They would appear to be Central Asian.”

“Shit. You’re sure of that?”

“About sixty-five percent, sir.”

“Okay. I—” The transmission cut off in mid-sentence.

I waited, wondering what was going on up-El. Abruptly, a sign popped up in my in-head: SECURITY BREACH: CONVERSATION TERMINATED.

What the fuck? And then something queried my AI.

Normally my in-head software handles routine e-queries, everything from sales pitches for masculine enhancement genetic prosthetics to calls from home. It’s got a fairly comprehensive response list that lets it act as my personal secretary. It can even imitate me—audio and video—if need be, and most incoming traffic is either flagged for my attention or spam-slammed.

The thing is, nothing should have queried my personal AI while I was in the middle of a mission. Bad operational security, that. The only things that should be able to get through are military traffic or …

I slapped a trace on the query. I didn’t catch it … but I did get an ID.

GNN.

The Global News Network would have a particular interest in this mission, I imagined. Though we certainly hadn’t told them we were going in—why tip off the tangos who had access to GNN feeds on Capricorn Zeta?—the newsies knew about the station’s takeover, of course, and would have been flooding local virtual space with netbots and snoopers. There were reporters embedded with the unit, I knew, and—shit. They were up-El, up in Synchorbit with Major Lansky.

I felt a sinking feeling in my gut, something like a realization of impending doom.

“Carlyle!”

It was Singer. “Yes, sir.”

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m with the prisoners, sir. They’re clean. I, ah, went ahead and pulled a DNA analysis on them. They’re Central Asian … probably CAC.”

There was a long pause. “I ordered you to sweep them for nanobots, Carlyle, not play geneticist!”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“No buts. Get your ass in here!”

I looked at Aguirre. He wouldn’t have heard the conversation going on in my head, but the glazed look in my eyes would have told him I was talking with someone. “Gotta go,” I told him.

“Keep your ass covered, Doc,” he said. I wondered how he knew, or if that was just a lucky guess.

“In here” turned out to be Capricorn Zeta’s primary command center, two levels farther out from the rock. It was cramped and high tech, filled with microgravity consoles, bulkhead vidscreens, and couches with palmlinks on the armrests, so that mining personnel could connect directly with the facility’s computers and operational controls. A smaller version of the transplas window on the lounge deck looked down on Earth’s nightside. Glowing cities drifted past as the station orbited above them. A soft-glowing mass of cloud flickered and pulsed with lightning deep inside.

Singer was floating beside the main console, talking with a man in corporate utilities bearing the rank tabs of a senior administrator. A couple of command staff people floated nearby, obviously just released.

I thumped the side of the hatch. “HM2 Carlyle reporting as ordered, sir.”

Singer ignored me for a long moment, continuing his conversation. Then the admin guy nodded, said, “You’re the boss,” and pushed off for the hatch, followed by his staff. Singer turned then, glaring.

“Why did you link through to Synchorbit?” he demanded.

“I needed access to a better DNA library,” I told him. “The ones we have in-head aren’t that comprehensive.”

“What the hell were you doing running a DNA scan? That’s a job for our S-2.”

I started to reply, then stopped myself. Singer was furious, and if I said anything, anything at all, I was just going to make things worse.

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, Doc! You broke SCP and got tagged by a fucking newsie!”

It was worse than I’d imagined. Secure Communications Protocol is like radio silence, but more flexible. It allows us to talk to others on our command Net, and query local, secure subnets, but not link in to unsecured networks or AIs. Breaking SCP during combat was serious, a potential court-martial offense.

“Sir, I thought Ops Command was secure.”

Singer started to give a sharp retort, then softened a bit. The scowl didn’t leave his face, though. “Normally it would be, Doc. But those damned embeds are up there now, following the hijacking. And they obviously had netbots on the prowl. You understand? You bypassed the chain of command, you idiot, and you told Major Lansky we had CAC prisoners on an open channel. Don’t you think GNN would be all over that?”

“Yes, sir.”

I could just imagine. As soon as the neo-Ludd ultimatum had hit the GNN newsfeeds hours before, the whole world would have been wondering who was behind it, what government. Neo-Ludds couldn’t get to orbit without help. Who had helped them?

There were probably netbots—electronic agents on the Net programmed to listen for certain key words and phrases. Hijack. Marines. Terrorists. DNA. That kind of thing. When they picked up something of interest, they would start probing, looking for more information. That tag I’d sensed had been a netbot shooting down the open radio channel and into my in-head, copying my personal contact data, and slipping away again. With my name, rate, rank, and number, they would be able to figure out who I was, know I was with Deep Recon 7, the Black Wizards … 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 1MARDIV, and that was news. It would be all over the Net; hell, it was probably all over the Net already.

And Deep Recon really hates that kind of publicity.

In short, I was now in a world of shit.

Chapter Four

At least I wasn’t under arrest, or even restricted to base. Twenty-four hours later I was up-El, 35,800 kilometers above Earth’s equator at the Cayambe Space Elevator’s Geosynch Center. The place is a bustling hive of space industry, communications, orbital hotels, and offices. From the Universe View of the sprawling Hilton Orbital Wheel, I could look down at the shrunken Earth with the nearby elevator cable vanishing with perspective into the blue planet’s center. She was a little past full at the moment, spanning just twenty degrees. If I held up both hands side by side at arm’s length with fingers outstretched, I could just about block half of her from view. Off to one side, several of the big, free-orbiting solar reflector mirrors and microwave antenna arrays hung in open space, angled to reflect sunlight onto Earth’s northern hemisphere. Bit by bit, in tiny steps, we were winning against the grinding southward advance of the ice sheets.

At least that’s what the newsnets told us. Sometimes I wasn’t sure I believed them. A good third of the planet’s northern hemisphere was locked in ice, gleaming in the glare of daylight. I stifled a small, cold shudder.

“What is it, E-Car?” Leighton asked, looking at me askance. “You okay?”

Sergeant Joy Leighton, U.S. Marines, was a friend … a very dear friend. Military regulations frowned on enlisted personnel becoming sexually involved, but military regulations rarely acknowledged that personnel are human, not machines. Joy and I had been in combat together, out on Bloodworld, and that counts for a lot. I’d patched her up and dragged her ass out of a firefight. That counted for more. And as long as we didn’t go around flaunting the relationship, rubbing it in the brass’s collective face, no one was going to say a word.

“I’m fine, No-Joy,” I told her, lying through my teeth. “Just fine.”

“I think they’re going to let that whole security-breach thing drop,” she said, knowing I was lying, but misunderstanding the reason for it. “Everything is too public now. They don’t want to be seen as punishing a genu-wine hero.”

I didn’t answer right away, watching the Earth instead. The Hilton’s viewing lounge counter-rotated to the rest of the habitat, providing a half-G of spin gravity but cancelling the dizzying spin of the rest of the universe.

“What hero?” I asked after a moment. “Taking down Capricorn Zeta? We all did that.”

“Actually, I was thinking about the Hero of Bloodworld, the doc who brokered peace with the Qesh. You’re still a highly newsworthy commodity, you know. GNN probably had a whole army of newsbots programmed to follow you, sniff you out as soon as you popped onto an unsecure channel. In any case …” She leaned over and kissed me. “You’re still my hero.”

“Ooh-rah,” I said quietly, a lackluster rendition of the old Marine battle cry.

“That’s not what’s bugging you, is it?” she asked. “It’s Paula again.”

No-Joy is sharp. Paula Barton was the woman I almost married back in ’forty-four when I was still in Hospital Corps training … until she had a stroke while we were in a robot-skippered day sailer off the Maine Glacier. The boat’s first-aid suite didn’t include a CAPTR device—most civilians don’t have access to that technology on a routine basis—and by the time the EMTs got to her, I’d lost her.

I always thought of her when I looked down the North American ice sheet like that. Paula’s death and the ice—the two were inextricably locked together for me now. I hated the ice now, as if it were a living, despicable thing.

“I suppose it is,” I admitted. “Damn it, I just felt so fucking helpless.”

I don’t think Joy resented Paula, the fact of her. I’d been able to talk to her about what had happened off the Maine coast, about what I still felt.

Or didn’t feel. Often all I felt was numb, even yet, three years later.

“There was nothing you could have done, Elliot.” She’d only said those words a few thousand times since I’d met her.

“I know. I know.” I managed a grin. “It’ll be better when they finally manage to melt the damned ice.”

The New Ice Age got its official start in the late twenty-first century as a result of—of all things—what used to be called global warming. Rising temperatures all over the planet—but especially in the polar regions—began melting the polar ice caps, especially the one that covered the Arctic Ocean. Cold, fresh water poured out through the Davis Strait into the North Atlantic, short-circuiting the Atlantic Conveyor—that part of the globe-circulating currents that brought warm water north from the tropics, keeping New England and Northern Europe livable.

The last time that happened was twelve thousand years ago. The planet was warming, the ice sheets of the Pleistocene were retreating, and suddenly the ice collapsed—quite possibly as the result of a small asteroid impact—and fresh water poured into the Atlantic. The Earth plunged back into a short-lived ice age known today as the Younger Dryas. The megafauna of North America—mammoth and mastodon and short-faced bear and countless other species—abruptly went extinct. Human communities known as the Clovis people, who’d crossed in skin boats along the edge of the ice from Europe hunting seals, were wiped out as well, or forced to migrate to the American Southwest. The renewed cold and drought may well have stimulated the growth of agriculture in the near East when climactic change led to starvation among hunter-gatherer cultures.

The same thing was happening today. This time, however, instead of Clovis spear points and skin boats, we had the space elevator and orbital solar arrays. The North Hemisphere Reclamation Project had been reflecting sunlight and beaming high-energy microwaves onto the ice for well over a century now, but carefully. The Commonwealth didn’t want to eliminate the ice entirely; that would toss us back into the bad old days of the pre-ice twenty-first century, when cities like Miami, D.C., New York, and London all were in danger of being swallowed up entirely or in part by the rising sea levels. The idea was to gradually increase the temperatures of both the ice sheets and the cold North Atlantic until a comfortable balance was struck, a balance that could be indefinitely maintained by the Commonwealth’s NHRP and applied global climate engineering. It was the biggest-scale piece of applied engineering ever attempted, and the one that promises to affect a larger percentage of Earth’s population than any other by far.

And there’s just a chance that it killed Paula.

Oh, the theory is largely discredited now after some four centuries of study—the idea that high-frequency microwaves can cause everything from cancer and Alzheimer’s to high blood pressure and stroke. There’s never been a provable link, but the neo-Ludds and other anti-space groups often trot out various statistics that show increases in those conditions when they started beaming microwaves down from Geosynch along with reflected visible light. Paula and I were out on the fringes of the beam, which should have been diffuse enough not to cause a problem.

Still, sometimes I wonder how much I have in common with some of the neo-Luddite crazies. It would be so easy to blame the NHRP and its synchorbital microwave arrays for my pain.

“You know, Doc,” Joy said gently, emphasizing the title, “there’s stuff you can do for that. Nanomeds and neuroengineering and all of that.”

I nodded, but said nothing. Of course there’s stuff that can be done, just as we can block the doloric receptors in the brain and switch off physical pain. Grief is just chemicals in the system, same as love and anger and any other emotion you care to name. You lose a loved one, and the pituitary gland at the base of the brain secretes adrenocorticotrophin hormone—ACTH—which is part of the fight-or-flight response. Among other things, ACTH acts on the adrenal glands, perched on top of the kidneys, to release a cascade of reactions that lead to the production of a steroid hormone called cortisone.

Normally, cortisone switches off the production of ACTH, but if the stress, the grief, continues, cortisone levels rise … and rise … and rise, eventually reaching ten or twenty times their normal levels.

And that does all sorts of nasty things, among them shutting down our thalamus and switching off the production of leukocytes. No white blood cells, no way to fight bacteria, viruses, and even precancerous cells.

There’s also CRF—corticotrophin releasing factor. That is a stress-related neurotransmitter and peptide hormone that shoots sky high with the loss of a loved one. It stimulates the production of ACTH, and can lead to a number of truly nasty conditions, including major depression. You find elevated levels of CRFs in the spinal fluid of most suicides.

I’d gone through therapy after Paula’s death—been required to do it, I should say. They’d given me the option of nanomeds—including CRF nanoblockers—to kill the emotional pain associated with my memories of Paula. Problem was, I didn’t want to lose Paula. I know it sounds crazy, but the memories, and the emotional pain connected with them, were all I had left, and I didn’t want to give them up.

So I went on a nanomed routine aimed at boosting my immune response, circulatory support, and anticarcinogen ’bots. Treating the symptoms rather than the cause, yeah, but at least I wouldn’t die of grief, as a lot of other people still do. As for the grief itself, well, lots of other people were able to get through it, had been getting through it since long before nanomeds and thalamic receptor blocking. I would get over it. Eventually.

In the meantime, I had my career in the Hospital Corps, and I had Joy, and if I occasionally felt overwhelmed by grief or by those nightmare memories of helplessness when Paula had her stroke, well, that was all part of the territory, as my father likes to say. He’s senior VP of research and development for General Nanodynamics, and he’s the one who suggested I go into the Hospital Corps in the first place. Out on the frontier, interacting with newfound cultures and civilizations, that’s where Humankind will learn new technologies, develop new nanopharmaceuticals, and make new fortunes.

That was the original idea, anyway. I’d long since given up on making fortunes—you don’t enter military service with that as your goal—but I think Spencer Carlyle still had hopes for his Navy med-tech son.

Too bad. I hadn’t been home since shortly after Paula’s death.

“C’mon,” Joy said, grabbing my arm and tugging me closer to her. “We’re here to have fun.”

Yeah … fun. Specifically, losing ourselves for a few hours in the Hilton’s Free Fall … a combination restaurant and microgravity swimming sphere that’s a bit on the pricey side, but well worth it. We managed to go there once every few months, for celebrations, as often as the budget allowed. And this was a celebration. We’d survived the assault on Capricorn Zeta … and while I was under an official cloud, I hadn’t been court-martialed.

At least, not yet.

We’d been to the Free Fall before. Hell, the first time Joy and I had had sex with each other had been up there, in that shimmering blue sphere of water suspended in microgravity.

We weren’t here for swimming this time. We entered the rotating sphere at one pole, in zero-gravity, the interior rotating around us. A human hostess met us, and led us down along the curving deck through exotic tropical foliage to a table between sky and water, with every step taking us into a higher G level until we reached our table near the equator.

Directly overhead, the big, ten-meter hydrosphere flashed and rippled blue-green in the constantly shifting beams of sunlight, hovering at the center of the fifty-meter hollow globe rotating around it. Where we sat, the turning of the main hab sphere generated four-tenths of a gravity, about the same as on Mars, and a transplas viewall section in the deck showed the stars and Earth sliding past beneath, making a complete circuit once every twenty-some seconds.

A human waitress arrived to take our drink orders. That’s one reason the place is so expensive, of course—human waitstaff instead of robots. In keeping with the jungle theme of the place, they wore either skin nano or animated tattoos—I couldn’t tell which—that gave their skin constantly shifting dapplings of sunlight and shadow.

“So … what do you think of the latest from Earthside?” Joy asked after she’d left.

“I haven’t been paying attention,” I told her, truthfully enough. I’d told my AI secretary to put a block on all of my auto news alerts and downloads. “At this point I’m afraid to download anything. What is the latest?”

“Oh, come on, e-Car!” She laughed. “Get with the program!”

“I’ve had other stuff on my mind,” I said. “Like maybe getting court-martialed and ending up in Atlantica for ten years?” Atlantica was a seafloor colony off the coast of Florida, mostly a civilian facility with a scientific research community, but which included a Commonwealth submarine base and a high-security naval prison.

“Well, there is that. Don’t worry, though. If you go to Atlantica, I’ll bake you a cake with nano-D in the flour.”

“Thanks so much. I’ll have to remember to practice holding my breath before I use it, though.”

“Seriously, Elliot. If they were going to lock you away, or even send you for deep neurophysiological rehab, you would not be walking around free now. They might decide to kick you out of the Navy just to be rid of you, but nothing more. Okay?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure you’re right.” What I didn’t add was that getting booted out of the Navy would be as bad as having my brain rewired. I’d found a home here, a place of my own, a meaningful career.

Not to mention Joy. We were still deep in the initial rampant lust phase of our relationship, but I could see it moving beyond sex and pleasant companionship to something more permanent. Maybe.

If I could just shake off Paula’s ghost, and put her to rest at last.

The waitress returned with our drinks—a Cosmic Dehibitor for Joy, a Metafuel Thruster for me. I paid her by linking through to the restaurant’s e-pay AI, and included a generous tip for her. She thanked me, then took our orders for dinner. Meat from Earthside has to be shipped up-El and is expensive, but there are some locally nanufactured proteins indistinguishable from nature. Real cow meat from the Amazon prairies is just for status; the stuff built up molecule by molecule really can’t be distinguished from the real thing. We both ordered local cultures, mine in the form of lobster tail, hers looking and tasting like steak.

“So what’s the news?” I asked when we were alone again.

“War, of course. At least there’s serious talk of war. The Commonwealth is blaming the CAC for hijacking that mining station … and for trying to drop an asteroid into the ocean. That’s an act of war in anyone’s manual.”

I shook my head. “I have trouble believing that the CAC government would be openly behind something like that. Some extremist Islamic sect, maybe … or a rogue paramilitary group operating in the shadows. But the people, the ruling council in Dushanbe, they aren’t crazy.”

“They are neo-Ludd,” Joy pointed out. “Or strongly supportive of the movement. And a tidal wave in the Pacific wouldn’t touch them.”

“No, but the outraged survivors of the rest of the world would.”

“True. But maybe they didn’t count on you figuring out where those tangos hailed from.”

A shrill squeal sounded from overhead and we both looked up. A couple had managed to propel themselves clear of the hydrosphere and had landed in the nearly invisible netting surrounding the water in case of just such an eventuality. Laughing, naked and glistening wet, they half-scrambled and half-flew across the netting toward the sphere’s zero-gravity poles to re-enter the water. I half expected some of the flying spray to reach us … but subtly directed air jets were in place to whisk away any stray flying droplets and keep the diners below from getting rained on. The illusion of dining in a rain forest did have reasonable limits, after all.

“I don’t buy it,” I told her, as the squeals died away again. “Those men had to know that someone would pull a DNA analysis on them if they were killed or captured.”

“Maybe they just didn’t count on the U.S. Marines coming in and spoiling their party,” she said. “Either they would have their demands met … or they would all be incinerated on impact. Either way, no DNA left to sample.”

“I suppose.”

But I wasn’t convinced.

The terrorists who’d seized Capricorn Zeta had clearly had a neo-Ludd agenda. Their demands had been that all asteroid mining be stopped—not only in Earth orbit, which was a song they’d been singing for a long time, but out in trans-lunar space as well.

They needed high-tech help. The Chinese were out, because if something had gone wrong and the asteroid had come down anywhere in the Pacific, the tidal waves would have washed them away. The CACs had the ideology, yeah, and they were far inland, but why use their own people in the attack, inviting military retaliation? It seemed likelier to me that those Central Asians we’d captured had been mercenaries, hirelings being used by someone else, possibly with an eye to calling attention to Dushanbe and away from the real masterminds.

Who would profit, I wondered, from having asteroid mining stopped? Or from having a one-kilometer asteroid fall out of the sky, killing a few hundred million people or more?

And with their plan for extortion blocked, what would they do next?

An inner ping alerted me to an incoming call request. I glanced at it, saw that it was another GNN e-comm request, and dismissed it. I’d become a pretty popular guy, it seemed. “A highly newsworthy commodity,” like Joy had said. Reporters, both on Earth and embedded at HQ, wanted to talk to me.

Well, I didn’t want to talk to them. I felt used and ambushed, and I wouldn’t have opened the channel even if Gunny Hancock hadn’t told me he would skin me alive and hang me out an airlock to dry if I did.

“Let’s change the subject,” I told Joy. “I don’t really want to discuss work when the most gorgeous U.S. Marine in the Galaxy is sitting here right across from me.”

“Flatterer.”

“I like the utilities.”

She dimpled. “Thank you. I put so much work into it.”

In fact, she was wearing ordinary ship utilities, a black skinsuit that clung to her like paint. She’d stroked the top away, though, to give her the currently fashionable Minoan Princess look, proudly bare breasted. She’d programmed the remaining nanofabric to give it an illusion of depth, scattered through and through with gleaming stars.

She was radiantly beautiful.

“Elliot, someone is pinging our ID.”

The voice wasn’t Joy’s. It was my AI secretary, a smart bit of AI software that normally resided silently within my in-head hardware without making its presence known. That it was speaking now, interrupting my conversation with Joy, meant that it had detected a close-in attempt to physically locate me by homing in on my personal electronics. Normally that stuff is pretty heavily firewalled, with name and rank only out there for public access, but I’d opened it wider in order to pay for the drinks and the meal.

Or maybe the name and rank had been enough. Damn it!

“Where is he?” I asked my secretary.

“Highlighting. To your left.”

I looked, and saw a conservatively dressed man coming through the restaurant entrance, about forty meters away, painted with a green nimbus by my in-head. He stopped, looked around … and our eyes met. He smiled and started walking toward us. His pace was slow, shuffling, and a bit awkward; I pegged him as a groundpounder, someone who hadn’t been in space much and wasn’t used to walking in low-G.

“What’s the matter?” Joy asked. She must have seen the blank look on my face while I talked with my secretary.

“We’ve got company,” I told her. “Wait here.”

I got up and walked over to meet the guy. I pinged his ID as I approached, and got a readout: Christpher Ivarson, Global Net News. By the time I reached him, three-quarters of the way up the curve of the sphere, I was at a slow simmer but well on my way to coming to a boil.

“Petty Officer Carlyle—”

“What the fuck are you doing, following me around?” I demanded. “Can’t a guy have any privacy?”

“You’ve been blocking our newsbots, sir, and we really would like to have you answer a few questions.”

“Maybe there’s a reason I’ve been blocking you,” I told him. “Such as … I don’t want to answer your questions.”

“This will only take a moment, really.”

“No. This ends now. I’m having dinner with a friend and I will not have it spoiled by the likes of you!”

“Now, don’t be like that, Elliot! If the Central Asian Caliphate was behind the hijacking of that asteroid, the public has a right to know! And after all, the Hero of Bloodworld will have a unique perspective on the attack! You might not know it, but Elliot Carlyle is big news right now! First Bloodworld and the Qesh, and now you’re charging a terrorist stronghold with the U.S. Marines! Great stuff!”

“Oh … you want a … what did you say? A unique perspective?”

“Absolutely! If you could just—”

“Here you go,” I told him, reaching out with both hands and grabbing the lapels of his stylish maroon tunic. Bending my knees, I shoved upward … hard.

As noted, the spin gravity at the Free Fall’s equator was around four-tenths of a G. Three-quarters of the way to the sphere’s pole, which was at zero-G, the gravity was a lot lower … maybe a tenth of a G, or even a bit less. The GNN reporter probably massed eighty kilos, but he only weighed about eight here … about as much as a large cat, so once I got him moving he kept moving, moving hard. My shove sent him sailing up into the air, arms and legs thrashing … and he yelled bloody murder when he realized he wasn’t coming down again.

Gravity inside rotating systems like the Free Fall is tricky. Ignoring things like air resistance, he technically was in zero-gravity as soon as he left the deck, but the Coriolis effect caused his straight-line path to curve alarmingly against the hab module’s spin. For a moment I thought I’d misjudged, that he was going to miss.

Then one thrashing arm snagged the safety net surrounding the central sphere of water thirty meters above the restaurant’s deck. He screamed again and grabbed hold with both arms and both legs, dangling far overhead.

Of course, the net was turning with the rest of the module, so hanging on up there he probably felt a spin gravity of something like fifteen hundredths of a gravity … maybe twelve kilos. If he let go, he’d drift back to the sphere’s inner surface with a tangential velocity of, oh, a few meters per second, and if he didn’t fall into some diner’s salad, he’d be just fine.

But for someone born and raised on Earth, the possibility of that thirty-meter drop between the outside of the safety net and the restaurant floor was terrifying. The net enclosed the water sphere from pole to pole; it was designed to catch people falling out of the water and keep them from dropping onto the restaurant clientele. Ivarson only needed to clamber along the outside of the net until he reached one of the access tubes at the sphere’s axis.

But panic had set in, and all he could do was cling to the outside of the net and howl.

I returned to Joy, who was watching the spectacle overhead. “What in the world …?”

“Out of the world, I’m afraid.”

“Why did you—”

“Reporter,” I told her. “The bastards have been dogging me electronically ever since Zeta Capricorn, and now it looks like they’re siccing humans on me.”

“Excuse me, Petty Officer Carlyle?”

I turned and found myself facing a polite but stern Free Fall employee. I didn’t know they had bouncers in places like that.

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I looked up at Ivarson, whose shouts and screams by now had become the focus of attention for every patron in the Free Fall. A couple of men in work utilities were making their way across the net to reach him.

“He’s a reporter,” I said. “Gross invasion of privacy.”

“I quite understand, sir. Still, our guests have a right to enjoy their meals without … spectacles of this nature. I can ask you to leave, or I can summon the shore patrol.”

“No need,” I said. “Joy? You can stay and enjoy your meal, if you like… .”

“What, and miss a date with a man who can throw an asshole thirty meters? You’ve got to be kidding!”

So we left. We never did get our homegrown steak and lobster.

But it turned out to be a spectacular evening nonetheless.

Chapter Five

I got the call next morning to report to Second Lieutenant Singer’s office on board the Clymer, up-El at Starport.

The Commonwealth’s Starport One Naval Base occupies the five-kilometer asteroid suspended at the high end of the space elevator, the stone spun at the end of a whirling string that keeps the string nice and taut. The docking facility is on the asteroid’s far side; centrifugal force at that distance, 70,000 kilometers from Earth, amounts to just about one six-hundredth of a gravity. Ships departing the docks get a small but measurable nudge of delta-V when they release.

As her designation “APA” declared, the George Clymer was an attack transport, and she carried on board a battalion-strength MEU, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, consisting of 1,200 Marines, an aerospace strike force, heavy weapons, and vehicles, plus logistics and command elements. The Clymer’s habitation module was a fifty-meter rotating ring amidships, spinning two and a half times per minute to provide four-tenths of a gravity, roughly the same as on Mars. Singer’s office was in the ring’s outer level, right under the skin.

“HM2 Carlyle, reporting as ordered, sir.”

Singer glanced up from his holographic computer display. “Stand at ease, Doc. Hang on a sec.”

I waited as he completed whatever holowork he was doing—reports, probably, that were easier to read on an external screen than in-head. Fred Singer had come aboard just four months ago, after our last CO, Earnest Baumgartner, had gotten himself bumped up the pole to full lieutenant and transferred to Mars. I hadn’t formed any real opinions of the new CO yet, beyond his essential assholitude. He was meticulous, a bit on the prissy side, and, like all second lieutenants fresh out of the Academy, he was inexperienced. Capricorn Zeta, I’d heard, had been his first time in combat.

That by itself is no crime, of course. The fact that he’d been tasked with taking his platoon in on a direct assault against Capricorn Zeta suggested that his superiors thought he could do the job. But for the enlisted pukes under him, both Marine and Navy, there was going to be a trial period when we were all keeping a wary eye on the guy. Would he be a prima donna? A perfectionist? A martinet? Or a decent Marine who listened to his NCOs and looked after his people?

“Okay, Doc,” Singer said after a moment, switching off the holographic screen. “Thanks for coming.”

“You wanted to see me, sir.” Any maybe ream me a brand-new asshole.

“Thought you’d like to hear,” he said. “You are officially off the hook.”

I blinked. “Sir?”

“Headquarters has chosen to see your actions at Capricorn Zeta—in particular your unauthorized sampling of the prisoners’ DNA—as ‘an appropriate display of initiative in a combat situation.’ ”

“That’s … uh … good news, sir.” Singer seemed a little too cheerful, and I was waiting for the other combat boot to land.

“We will ignore the fact that you went over my head and failed to ask my permission to take those samples … and your failure to observe established protocol in the handling of prisoners … and your use of a comm channel compromised by newsbots. This time!”

The sheer threat wrapped into those last two words was like a blow. “Yes, sir.”

“There’s also the small matter of your assaulting a civilian at the Free Fall last night. I can not overlook that.”

“It was a reporter, sir. He tracked me to the Free Fall! All I did was … push him a little. Sir.”

“You pushed him. Witnesses say you threw him thirty meters! What were you on, G-Boost?”

“No, sir!” G-Boost is an artificial protein that bonds with the respirocytes all FMF personnel carry in their bloodstreams. It temporarily makes us stronger, faster, more alert, with better endurance. It’s also tightly controlled, and you do not use it casually. The Freitas respirocytes in my blood had boosted my strength a little, of course, by improving the efficiency of my oxygen metabolism. But no, I’d not been Boosting.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely, sir! It will not happen again, sir.”

“It had damned well better not!” He gave me a sour look. “Okay, you have a choice. Accept my NJP here and now … or you can request to see Captain Reichert.”

Shit. I hadn’t realized I was in that much trouble. NJP meant non-judicial punishment. The Marines called it being NJP’d, while the Navy referred to is as captain’s mast, and military slang called it being booked. Lieutenant Singer, as my immediate CO, could impose any of several punishments on me. Reichert was the Bravo Company commanding officer, and next up the command ladder from Singer. If I asked to see him, he might throw it out—fat chance—or he could give me more and worse than a mere second lieutenant could hand out, including, if he thought it serious enough, a court-martial, and that’s when things got really serious.

It wasn’t a real choice. Getting NJP’d was definitely preferable to a court, and having Second Lieutenant Singer come down on me was better than the company commander.

“Sir, I will accept whatever punishment you think fit. Sir.”

“You have any excuses for your behavior? Extenuating circumstances?”

They drilled the correct and acceptable reply to that question into your head in boot camp. “No excuses, sir.”

Yeah, the more I thought about it, the more I knew I’d screwed up big-time. It hadn’t seemed that way at the time … but laying hands on a civilian like that, tossing him across the compartment? If he’d missed the net he might have gone on to hit the rotating deck hard enough to hurt himself, especially since he obviously wasn’t experienced with low-G.

“Okay, Doc. I understand your problem with the newsies, so I’ll go easy on you. Fourteen days’ restriction, fourteen days’ extra duty.”

This was going easy on me? Singer had hit me with just about the hardest punishment he could manage as a lowly O-2 imposing Article 15 punishment.

But then, if he’d chosen to hand me company-grade punishment, I could have lost seven days of base pay, taken a reduction in grade, from HM2 back to HM3, and had a written reprimand put into my personnel folder. And if I’d gone up in front of the Old Man, I could have been slapped with restriction and extra duty for forty-five days, forfeiture of half my pay for two months, reduction in grade, a written reprimand—hell, even bread and water for three days if he was feeling real generous.

So maybe I was getting off light after all.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“I also want a written letter of apology to Mr. Ivarson on my desk by oh eight thirty tomorrow.”

I started to bristle, and I almost said something like “I’m so sorry you’re an asshole, Mr. Ivarson,” but bit my tongue. This wasn’t the time to try to win points with insulting comments that could only make things worse.

“Aye, aye, sir.” I hesitated. “Uh … will this be going on my record, sir?”

“Do a good job, keep your nose clean … and no. No it won’t.”

I sagged with relief. A downgrudge letter in your file will pursue you to the end of your naval career. “Thank you, sir.”

“Okay. That takes care of you and your reporter friend. Back to what happened at Zeta Capricorn. Damn it, Doc, do you have any idea what kind of a firestorm you’ve released around here?”

“I wasn’t aware of any firestorm, sir.”

“Jesus, Doc! Where’s your head, up your ass? To start with, we just might be looking at a shooting war, and all because you released information about the ethnic and political identity of our prisoners onto the open Net! Half the world wants to nuke or railgun Dushanbe into a kilometer-deep crater right now. And Dushanbe claims we’re lying, that we set the whole thing up to discredit them, to create a causus bellum.”

Well, they would claim something like that, I thought. But I didn’t say so out loud.

“Captain Reichert has been ragging my ass, asking me how I plan to tighten my operational security in my platoon. What the hell am I going to tell him?”

“Sir. You can tell him that the man responsible has learned his lesson and promises not to open channels directly to the HQ Net again.”

“Why’d you do it, Doc?” The anger evaporated, and he seemed friendly again … a bit puzzled, perhaps, at why I’d been so careless. Or maybe the anger had all been a put-on, a bit of drama designed to show me he cared.

“I saw a chance to gather some useful intel, sir. This is Deep Recon, after all.”

I didn’t think he could fault me there. “Deep Recon” is the designation used for elite Marine units normally operating in deep space on interstellar deployments. They’re supposed to be the first ones in, usually, to scout out the terrain and the ecology, determine what and where the enemy is, and, if necessary, pin that enemy until heavier forces can be deployed. Our primary business is gathering intelligence.

That doesn’t mean we’re not occasionally tapped for other missions—like taking down a bunch of terrorists holed up in an orbital mining facility. We’d been the closest available assault force when the bad guys stormed the mining facility the other day. We are FMF—Fleet Marine Force—and we go where we’re told. But above all else we’re trained to gather intelligence, any intelligence that may be of use to someone farther up the chain of command.

And the Black Wizards, Deep Recon 7 of the One MarDiv, were the best.

When Singer didn’t respond right away, I added, “Sir, I really didn’t know the channel had been compromised. How the hell was I supposed to know?”

“Ahh … you couldn’t know, Doc. Hell, I didn’t know either. The damned newsies slipped their netbots in to spy on the operation. I should have known they’d be keeping an eye on you, especially.”

“I’m nothing special, sir.”

“Maybe. But they know your name, and they have your ID tagged so they can track you on the Net. They remember you from the Bloodworld affair, so the second you go on-line with a query or a message, they’re going to be swarming all over you. You been getting harassed by the sons-of-bitches at all?”

“My secretary tells me I’ve had a lot of calls, requests for interviews, requests for bios and backgrounds, that sort of thing.” I managed a grin. “I haven’t been answering them. In fact, that’s why Ivarson came looking for me.”

“Good. And in another couple of days, they won’t be able to find you.”

That made my blood run cold for a moment. “Sir? You’re shipping me out?”

“That we are, Doc. Your new orders just came through.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Between you and me, I think General Craig just wants to be rid of you.”

Major General William Craig was the commander of One MarDiv. Shit. It’s never a good idea for a lowly enlisted man to attract the attention of a general.

“Yes, sir.” I desperately wanted to ask where they were sending me, but knew better than to appear anxious. He would tell me, but he’d tell me in his own time.

He must have read the worried expression on my face. “Don’t worry, Doc. You’re not going alone.”

“I’m pleased to hear it.”

“You’ll be deploying on the Haldane with a Marine scout-recon element. Five Corpsmen, pulled from the company as science-tech staff, plus a couple of xeno experts. One of the other docs will be your buddy Dubois. Net media has been after him as well.”

“They have?” It was news to me. “Why Doob?”

Singer shrugged. “Maybe one doc is as good as another, to them. He was at Bloodworld too. And he’s your buddy.”

“Not for long. The guy’s gonna kill me.” HM2 Michael C. Dubois had a snug and happy billet for himself in Alpha Company. He had an under-the-counter deal with the lab to use their assemblers to manufacture paint stripper … ah, ethanol, rather, and he was the original cumshaw artist. He wasn’t going to appreciate being yanked out of his comfortable little world because he associated with the likes of me.

“The seven of you will be the expedition’s scientific survey team.”

That caught my attention. “What are we surveying?”

“Ever hear of a place called Abyss Deep?”

I refrained from pulling down the data off the ship’s Net. “No, sir.”

“It’s not much. GJ 1214 I. A lot like Bloodworld, so you ought to feel right at home. Just be sure you pack your long flannel undies. It’s a hundreds-of-kilometers-deep ocean covered over by ice. Doc, this place is cold.”

Great, I thought. Just what I really like. Ice …

As soon as I left Singer’s office and got back to my quarters, I downloaded the Net information available on GJ 1214.

I had a strong sense of déjà vu as the data scrolled through my in-head window. GJ 1214 was another red dwarf, one even smaller and cooler than the primary of Bloodworld we’d visited the year before. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at that. In all the Galaxy, out of 400 billion stars, something like 80 percent are class-M red dwarfs, at least out in our general stellar neighborhood. Red dwarfs range from something like half the mass of our sun down to cool, red stars of only .075 solar masses—the cut-off line. Any smaller and they’re not stars anymore, but brown dwarfs.

In our galactic neighborhood, twenty of the thirty nearest stars are red dwarfs, but they’re so small and dim that we can’t see any of them with the naked eye. The closest star to us outside of the Sol System, Proxima Centauri, is a Type M5 red dwarf, and you need a pretty powerful telescope to see it from Earth at all.

Proxima’s partners in the cosmic dance, Alpha Centauri A and B, are very much like our sun … and, damn it, someday I’d like to be deployed to an Earthlike world of that kind of star, instead of another of these dim, cool, blood-red misers.

This time, though, I was stuck with another tide-locked split-personality planet: half ice, half steam. The readout wasn’t pretty at all.

Download

Commonwealth Planetary Ephemeris

Entry: GJ 1214 I

“Abyssworld”

Star: GJ 1214

Type: M4.5V

M = .157 Sol; R = 0.206 Sol; L = .0033 Sol; T = 3000oK

Coordinates: RA 17h 15m 19s; Dec +04o 57’ 50”; D = 42 ly

Planet I

Name: GJ 1214 I; Gliese 1214b, Abyssworld, Abyss Deep

Type: Terrestrial/rocky core, ocean planet; “super-Earth”

Mean orbital radius: 0.0143 AU; Orbital period: 1d 13h 55m 47s

Inclination: 0.0o; Rotational period: 1d 13h 55m 47s (tide-locked with primary)

Mass: 3.914 x 1028 g = 6.55 Earth; Equatorial diameter: 34,160 km = 2.678 Earth

Mean planetary density: 1.87 g/cc = 0.34 Earth

Surface gravity: 0.91 G

Surface temperature range: ~ -120oC [nightside] to 220oC [dayside]

Surface atmospheric pressure: ~0.47 x 103 kPa [0.47 Earth average]

Percentage composition (mean): H2 54.3, CO2 20.3, H2O 11.2, CH4 9.3, CO 4.2, NH3 3.1, Ar 0.5; others < 500 ppm

Age: 6 billion years

Biology: H2O (exotic ices), C, N, O, H2O, S, PO4: mobile submarine heterotrophs in reducing aquatic medium in presumed symbiosis with unknown deep marine auto- or chemotrophs.

Human presence: The Murdock Expedition of 2238 established the existence of large deep-marine organisms known as cuttlewhales. Subsequent research at the colony designated Murdock Base demonstrated possible intelligent activity, and attempts were made to establish communications in 2244. Contact with the colony abruptly ended in early 2247, and there has been no futher contact since… .

The Commonwealth government had decided that word from the research colony on the ice out there on Abyssworld was too long overdue, and they were dispatching a small Navy task force and some Marines to find out what had happened. The Marines were volunteers drawn from First, Second, and Third Platoons, plus the headquarters platoon of Bravo Company, forty-two men and women in all, and all of them blooded both by combat and by experience on extrasolar worlds. Lieutenant Lyssa Kemmerer, Captain Reichert’s exec, would be leading us.

The five Navy Corpsmen, however, were not volunteers. Where the Marines went, we would go as well.

The company’s senior Corpsman was Chief Richard R. Garner, an old hand with gold hash marks running halfway up his dress uniform sleeve, each stripe showing four years of good-conduct duty. He was a bluff, craggy, no-nonsense sort, and when he barked at you he meant business.

Garner called us to a briefing the next morning. There were four of us sitting in the lounge in front of Garner—me and Dubois, plus HM1 Charlie “Machine” McKean and HM2 Kari Harris.

There was another man present as well, a Navy lieutenant commander with the gold caduceus at his throat indicating he was Medical Corps.

“Good morning, people,” Garner began. “We’ve been tapped as tech support for an important mission, and it’s important to get this off on the right foot. We’ll be transferring to the USRS Haldane tomorrow. There’s a download waiting for each of you giving billeting information and duty schedules.”

DuBoise and McKean both groaned. Harris remained impassive.

“Knock it off,” Garner said. “First off, it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Lyman Kirchner, fresh up-El from Sam-Sea. He will be our department head on this expedition.”

I looked at Kirchner with curiosity. He was a small older man with an intense gaze that made me uncomfortable. If he was from SAMMC, though, he would be good. I wondered about his age, though. His white hair was thickly interspersed with black, and his face, with deep-set wrinkles, was an odd mixture of weathered skin and baby-pink new.

Anagathic treatments. He was under treatment for that most deadly of the diseases to afflict Humankind—old age.

“Dr. Kirchner,” Garner continued, “was chief of the xenopathology department at Sam-Sea, so he will be our expedition xenologist as well as ship’s doctor. We’re very lucky to have him on board.”

And that was a relief. I’d been wondering since Singer had told me I was being assigned to this mission whether we’d have a medical officer on board. I knew that Garner was IDC, but none of the rest of us were.

Independent-duty Corpsmen were the medical department on ships or bases too small to have a ship’s doctor, and that was a hellacious responsibility. Oh, we operated independently in the field as often as not … but it was always good to have a real doctor backing you up.

You know, even today, we still hear the story of an independent-duty Corpsman during the Second World War—we were called Pharmacy Mates in those days—who successfully performed an appendectomy while on board a submarine, the USS Seadragon, while she was on her fourth war patrol, in 1942. He was twenty-three-year-old PhM1/c Wheeler B. Lipes—a first class, like McKean.

In fact, though it’s not well known, there were three emergency appendectomies carried out by Pharmacy Mates on board Navy submarines during that war, this when the only commonly available antibiotics were powdered sulfanilamide and phenol, and the only anesthetic was ether. My God! The responsibility those guys faced was staggering! But, damn it, when there were no qualified surgeons within a thousand miles, you did what you had to do… .

Kirchner stood and acknowledged Garner’s introduction. “Thank you, Chief.” He glared at us. “No speeches, people. I know you’re well trained, I know you’re experienced, and I know you’re going to do your jobs competently and well. With pre-screening of the ship’s complement, we shouldn’t have any major health issues, and Haldane’s medical department will be able to focus on the tech support at GJ 1214. So do your jobs, do what you’re told, and we’ll all get along just fine. Chief Garner?”

“Thank you, sir.” Garner turned to face us again. “Okay, I want all of you to pull down the Abyss Deep docuinteractive from the Clymer’s library. On your own time.”

“Aw, Chief,” Dubois said. “What for? The place is nothing but a freaking ice ball.” He’d been angry ever since his orders had come down telling him he was deploying to Abyss Deep, and he didn’t mind letting everyone else within range know it.

“Can the gripeload, Doobie. That goddamn bleak ball of ice can kill you faster and in more ways than a Qesh Daitya platform.”

McKean and Harris both grumbled a bit, too, and, I have to admit, I did as well. Sailors hate having official shit intrude on their precious downtime, and I already had the extra duty tagged onto my daily schedule by my NJP. But as the ancient adage has it, a griping sailor is a happy sailor. Garner had scored a point by bringing up the Daityas, heavy-weapons platforms named for a class of giant or demon in Hindu mythology. We’d faced Qesh Daityas out on Bloodworld, and had a healthy respect for the things.

“Okay,” Garner went on, “we’re slated to board the Haldane tomorrow evening. Our civilian … guests will be joining us on board. They are Dr. Carla Montgomery and Dr. Raúl Ortega. Montgomery is an expert on exobiology. Ortega is an expert on planets and environments with extreme temperatures or other exotic conditions.

“We have absolutely no idea what happened to Murdock Base. None. The last report from there, via robot courier, mentioned sightings of the autochthones, the native life, but no contact … and no danger. The next courier was due from them four days later. It’s been three weeks, now, with no word from them whatsoever. We must assume that the base has suffered some significant problem. It may be as minor as a failure in the AIs they use to launch and transmit to the couriers. Or it may be more serious. A lot more serious.

“So they’re sending in the Marines. And us.”

More download information flooded through our in-heads, a schematic view of a multilevel dome equipped with living quarters, common areas, airlocks, and a large central laboratory space.

“The base,” Garner went on, “is a standard nano-grown all-climate dome, with several outlying structures … but only the main dome is pressurized. The colony consists of eighty-five men and women—mostly science staff, but including admin and support—plus twelve M’nangat in four family triads. The M’nangat are there to liaise with the EG, if need be, in order to conduct deep research on any locals that they might manage to contact.”

The Brocs had become more and more important as we researched the labyrinth of data that was the Encyclopedia Galactica. Our best guess right now is that we have been able to access something less than one hundredth of 1 percent of the EG data that’s out there, and we wouldn’t have been able to tap that much if not for M’nangat help. If the organisms discovered on GJ 1214 I were intelligent—and that was by no means certain yet—there ought to be a listing and a lot more data available on the local EG nodes.

As yet we could find nothing, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. There are an estimated 50 to 100 million intelligent species scattered through our Galaxy, and perhaps a thousand times that number that have existed during the past billion years, but which now are extinct. Many, though by no means all, of these have entries in the EG. Technic species that discover the EG and learn how to tap in, sometimes, though not always, list themselves. Atechnic species—marine organisms that have never discovered fire and metal smelting, for instance—or the more inwardly focused species who have turned their backs on space travel are often described by others who encounter them.

For a billion years—as long as multicellular life has existed on Earth—the Encyclopedia Galactica has grown in both size and complexity, with millions of separate channels, nested frequencies, and deep-heterodyned polylogues. Lots of channels we can’t even access yet; we’re certain there are neutrino channels, for instance, but we don’t know how to read them. When we discovered the local node at Sirius, just 8.6 light years from Earth, we swiftly decided that we needed friendly native guides to lead us through the data jungles.

We would have copies of small parts of the EG with us at GJ 1214, as much as could be accommodated by the Haldane’s sizeable quantum computer storage. We’re still working out how the EG is organized, but we think it includes data on all nearby stars in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus, which is where GJ 1214 is located in the night sky. With luck, we’d scooped up the still-hidden entry on Abyssworld along with known nearby stars in that region—70 and 36 Ophiuchi, Sabik, Raselhague, and others—and our AIs could be hacking through the jungle while we worked.

Eventually the briefing ended—a lot of talk with no surprises—and I went back to work. I was working in the Clymer’s main sick bay that week, which meant the usual shipboard morning routine of sick call, screening Marines and naval personnel who were showing up with problems ranging from colds to an eye infection to a full-blown case of pneumonia. The pneumonia actually was easier to treat than the colds. Despite our much-vaunted advances in medical technology over the past couple of centuries, the collection of minor infections and immune-system failures known as “the common cold” is still tough to treat other than purely symptomatically. Rather than being a single malady, the complaint we call a cold can be caused by any of some two hundred different viruses. The rhinovirus associated with the majority of colds alone has ninety-nine serotypes. That makes it tough to program an injection of nanobots to go in and kill the viruses, and the preferred treatment remains taking care of the symptoms rather than the cause.

There were an unusual number of colds this morning, though, so I pulled some nasopharyngeal samples and sent them up to the lab for a full serotypal workup. We often had these little micro epidemics running their course of the ship when we were in port. Sailors and Marines went ashore on liberty, of course—even taking the elevator down-El to Earth—and they were exposed to bugs they wouldn’t have otherwise encountered if they’d stayed on board. If we could identify a specific strain of virus, we could whip up a nanobot to attack it. In the meantime, though, I’d stick with the old-fashioned treatment—acetaminophen, chlorpheniramine maleate, phenylephrine hydrochloride, and dextromethorphan, plus lots of water. The pain reliever, the antihistamine, the decongestant, and the cough suppressant would do everything a round of nanobots would, and—heresy!—might even do it better.

At a few past 1700 hours I checked out of sick bay and reported to Chief Garner, who was in charge of handing out my extra-duty hours each evening. He just grinned at me and said, “You have your duty assignment, Carlyle. Go bone up on Abyss Deep.”

So after a quick sonoshower back in my quarters, I prepared to climb into my rack-tube to take the sim. Just as I slipped inside, though, a call came through from Doob, suggesting that we rack out together in the ship’s lounge. I told him I’d meet him there.

“E-Car!” he called as I entered the lounge. “Let’s get this fucking sim out of the way, okay? I have a hot date tonight and I’m damned if I’m going to miss it.”

“Who is it, Doob? Carla again?” HM3 Carla Harper was a lab assistant whom Dubois had bedded … a lot. There was a pool running among some of the platoon Corpsmen as to whether or not he would pop the question, and when.

“Nah. Someone new.”

“Someone new? My God, it’s the end of life as we know it!”

“Knock it off.”

“Who is it?”

“None of your damned business!” He scowled at me. “What I wanna know is how come you get in trouble, but I get to share in the punishment!”

“Welcome to the Navy,” I told him. “At least you didn’t get two weeks’ restriction.”

“What restriction? We boost for Abyssworld day after tomorrow, we’ll be gone a couple of months at least, and all you miss is a couple of liberties!”

That stopped me. I hadn’t thought about that. Restriction means you stay in your quarters except when you’re going about your normal day-to-day duties, or eating in the mess hall, or doing whatever your CO tells you to do … so Doob was right. Maybe I had gotten off light.

“Okay, Doobie,” I told him. “You wanna tag the ’interactive together? It’ll go faster that way, and you can be off to your mystery date.”

“My thought exactly, E-Car.”

I thoughtclicked an internal control. “Compartment, two chairs, downloungers with full link capability. Here and here.”

The active nanomatrix in the deck obediently shaped two areas into egg-shaped chairs, both almost completely enclosed except for the oval front openings, and with deeply padded interiors that let you stretch out and back in fair comfort. I backed into one, brought my palm contacts down on the link board, and ordered a library download of the required docuinteractive.

Dubois dropped into the second seat. “I hate these things.”

“I kind of like ’em,” I replied. “Just like being there, but you don’t get eaten by the bug-eyed monster.”

“That’s the problem. You get used to ignoring dangers in a sim, they could bite you for real when you’re actually there.”

“So? Don’t be complacent. The idea is that we can step into another world and learn about it experientially. No surprises when you step into the world for real.”

“So, what did the chief call it? ‘That goddamn bleak ball of ice?’ No fun at all, man!”

“I didn’t realize we were going out there to have fun!” I nestled back into the yielding foam of the seat and put my palm on the contact pad.

There was a burst of in-head static, and then I was standing on the surface of Abyssworld.

My God, I thought. “Goddamn bleak” doesn’t even begin to cover it… .

Chapter Six

A bit of background came down the link first.

The formal name of the place is GJ 1214 I, but most people call it either Abyssworld or Abyss Deep. The data we were simming had been sent back to Earth just five years ago, but in fact the world has been known since the early twenty-first century. It was discovered by the MEarth Project, which was searching for extrasolar planets by watching for minute dips in the brightness of some thousands of red dwarfs, an indicator of a planet transiting the star’s face. They used red dwarfs because it was easier to record light fluctuations against a dimmer light source, and because planets circling red dwarfs tended to be tucked in a lot closer to their parent suns, and therefore had orbital periods measured in days as opposed to months or years. In 2009, the planet named—by the astronomical convention of the day—GJ 1214b was first detected, and subsequent observations showed that it was a so-called super-Earth, with more than six and a half times Earth’s mass and over two and a half times Earth’s diameter.

The real surprise came when they did the math and determined that the new planet had a density of just one-third of Earth’s, which meant that the huge world had a quite small rocky core covered by either ice or liquid water.

It was, in fact, the first true ocean exoplanet discovered; the side of the world eternally locked beneath a small sun just 2 million and some kilometers away was hot, well above the boiling point of water. At first it was assumed that the surface of any world so close to its parent would have to be well above habitable temperatures. The measured equilibrium temperatures, however, turned out to be from dayside cloud decks; the nightside was cold enough that the global ocean was half covered by a permanent ice cap, with the entire night hemisphere locked in ice.

The extreme differences in temperature between the day and night hemispheres, though, resulted in some absolutely incredible storms.

If Dubois and I had really been standing on the edge of the Abyss Deep icepack in nothing but our shipboard utilities, we would have been dead in moments. The environment was nothing short of hellish, balanced precariously between frigid ice and scalding steam, with a poisonous pea-soup-fog atmosphere and a wind thundering in from the day with tornadic force. The docuinteracive wasn’t recreating all of the possible physical sensations, though. I could see water spray and surface clouds whipping past me, hear the deafening roar of moving air, but the wind didn’t sweep me off my feet. The two of us could stand there, at the very edge of the ice, and take in the view.

And the view was … spectacular.

Despite both high-altitude cloud decks and the scud whipping across the surface of water and ice, I could see the star on the knife-edge horizon across the purple-red ocean, a swollen, deep ruby dome mottled by vast, ragged sunspots. Clouds—black, green, and purple—banked hugely to either side in an emerald sky; lightning played along the horizon. As I watched, fast-moving clouds filled the momentary crack in the sky that had revealed the star, blotting it out.

In the opposite direction, the sky grew darker still and heavy with snow. Ice, undulating and raw, ran off into the distance in a barren white desert, punctuated here and there by upthrusts—slabs, pillars, daggers, and tumbled blocks of ice, some of them hundreds of meters across. A hundred meters away, a low, bright orange dome added a spot of color to the endless white—the colony’s main dome. Smaller domes and Quonset-style huts were scattered about nearby, and I could see a large, bright yellow quantum spin-floater grounded outside the main entrance to the base.

The colony was obscured by a sudden gust of spray and windblown snow. It made me shiver just looking at it, though I couldn’t feel the actual cold.

“The place is a lot like Bloodworld,” Dubois said, turning to look back out to sea. We were standing at the edge of the icepack, though waves and spray made it a little difficult to tell exactly where the sea ended, and the ice began. “Hurricanes, high winds, hellacious storms …”

“It’s worse,” a voice told us. We turned and faced the program’s interactive agent, an older man with the look of a college professor. “I’m Dr. Murdock. I’ll be your guide to Abyss Deep this evening.”

Well, it wasn’t the real Dr. Murdock, of course, since the Abyssworld Expedition’s science team leader was currently on the planet some forty-two light years away … assuming he was even alive now. Based on the real James Eric Murdock, the man in a civilian tunic and dark slacks was a computer-generated image, data seamlessly woven together inside our heads by Clymer’s library AI. This simulation component was the whole point of a docuinteractive; we could ask the program questions, and it could take us through the landscape as if we were really there. The AI running the show was programmed to incorporate the voice, mannerisms, and recorded thoughts of the real Murdock, and present them as though we were actually there.

The simulated Murdock held out his hand, palm up, and a small globe representing the planet came up between us. He rotated it in front of us.

“We call the main atmospheric disturbance Abysstorm,” he said. “It’s generated by the heat of the star, and serves to transfer that heat across the planet.”

On the globe, Abyss Deep’s dayside was blanketed by a perpetual hurricane many thousands of kilometers across, pinned in place by the glare of the star directly over its eye. It showed vast, far-reaching spirals of cloud that reached across half the planet. The nightside was completely covered by ice.

“Hang on a sec,” Dubois said, pointing. “Something’s wrong. Hurricanes are caused by the spin of the planet. Coriolis effect, right? Abyss Deep doesn’t rotate, so the winds ought to blow straight back from dayside to night.”

The simulated Dr. Murdock gave him a sharp look. “Idiot. Why do you say the planet doesn’t rotate? Of course it does.”

“Hey!” Doob said. Evidently he wasn’t used to personality coming through in a sim along with basic information. Murdock reminded me of an acid, acerbic professor of A and P—anatomy and physiology—I remembered from my training in San Antonio. He’d called students “idiot,” and worse, as well.

“ ‘Tidally locked means the planet rotates once in its year,” I put in.

“Precisely,” Murdock said. “GJ 1214 I does spin, and does so fairly quickly, quickly enough that it generates its own magnetic field, which is a damned good thing considering the background radiation flux from the star. It makes one rotation in just over a day and a half as it moves around its star, its day perfectly matching its year.

“The storm dynamics are quite complex, with smaller storms constantly spinning off of the one big one and following gently curved tracks around the planet and into the night. The atmosphere is fairly thin, about half of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at the surface, so a lot of the heat dissipates before it reaches the nightside. The world-ocean traps a lot of it. Most of the dissipation, however, appears to be through molecular escape. The star turns water into steam, which rises high in the atmosphere above the Abysstorm. Solar radiation then blasts a lot of that water completely away from the planet. See?”

The model of Abyss Deep floating above Murdock’s hand developed a faint, ghostly tail streaming away from the daylight side. “In many ways,” he continued, “Abyssworld is similar to a comet … a very large comet with a tail of hot gasses blowing away from the local star.”

“That can’t be a stable configuration,” I said. “It’s losing so much mass that the whole planet is going to boil away.”

“Correct. We believe Abyssworld formed much farther out in the planetary system, then migrated inward as a result of gravitational interactions with the two outer gas giants. We don’t have a solid dating system with which to work, but it’s possible that the planet began losing significant mass as much as five billion years ago, when it would have been perhaps six times the diameter it is now.

“Abyssworld is now losing mass, which has the advantage of bleeding away excess heat. Within another billion years, though, this ongoing loss of mass will significantly reduce the planet’s size, until the entire world ocean has boiled away. At that point, Abyssworld will be dead.”

“There’s life here now?” Dubois asked. He looked around the encircling landscape, wind-blasted waves and spray in one direction, and in the other an endless plain of undulating white ice beneath black and lightning-shot clouds.

“Of course,” Murdock told him. “The cuttlewhales.”

Murdock turned, sweeping the ocean panorama with his arm. In the distance, halfway to the horizon, something sinuous emerged from the sea.

The thing wasn’t close enough to get a decent look at it. It was large, obviously, perhaps fifty meters or more in length, and a good half of that was arcing high above the wind-whipped surface of the ocean. It was also obviously alive, twisting and arcing and writhing as it plowed ahead through the water, tantalizing in its mist-shrouded obscurity. It put me in mind of a mythical Earthly sea serpent, and I wanted to see it up close.

“Can we get out there?” I asked. “Or bring that thing in close? I can’t see through the spray.”

“Sorry, no,” Murdock told me. “This is the best data we had prior to sending the last courier to Earth.”

I had to remind myself that the information I was seeing was five years out of date. Had the colony managed to make contact since then?

Had something gone wrong with that meeting … something that had ended with the colony’s destruction?

That was what we were going to try to find out.

“Some of our people saw one close up,” Murdock continued, “but they didn’t get any images. They said the head is something like the head of a terrestrial squid or cuttlefish … and that it could change the coloration on its body in pretty complex patterns. Dr. Samuelson believes they may use their chromataphores to communicate fairly complex ideas … which is why he reported that they may be intelligent.”

A number of species on Earth could change the color and patterning and even the apparent texture of their skin by controlling their chromataphores, which are pigment-containing organelles in their skin. That didn’t make them intelligent, however. They used it for camouflage or to display emotion rather than for more complex communication. Sure, an octopus flashes dark red when it’s angry and white if it’s afraid, which is pretty complex when you think about it, but that doesn’t make them starship builders, either.

I found it interesting that one of the toughest jobs in xenobiology is determining whether a given species is intelligent in the first place. The jury was still out on these Abyss cuttlewhales. Hell, we still aren’t sure what intelligence is, though we know there are many different kinds, and that it includes things like problem-solving skills, curiosity, and self-awareness. Wegener, the guy who made first contact with the Brocs, is supposed to have said, “I don’t know what intelligence is, but I know it when I see it.”

The trouble is that often we don’t know it when we see it … or we find we’ve been looking for all the wrong things. The Europan Medusea are a case in point. Are they intelligent? Beats me. And we may well never know, simply because we don’t have enough in common with them to even begin to communicate with them on a meaningful level.

“Come on,” Murdock said. “I’ll show you the base.”

Two hours later, we’d been through the dome top to bottom, and met a number of the researchers there. They seemed like nice people, most of them, and that left me with a nagging depression. It was entirely possible, even likely, that every one of them was already dead, that I was speaking, in a way, to their digitized ghosts.

But the ordeal ended at last, and I emerged back in the lounge area on board the Clymer.

“That’s it, E-Car,” Doobie said. “I’m outta here!”

“Have fun,” I told him.

And I resolved to have chow in the mess hall, then retire to my quarters for a quiet evening alone.

Supper was a mystery-meat culture that was actually pretty tasty if you dialed up the habanero sauce. It was well past the main mess period, and the place was nearly empty. I finished up, then went back to my quarters.

“Elliot?” It was Joy. My secretary had orders to always route her calls through. I was surprised to find she was standing right outside my compartment. “Can I come in?”

I thoughtclicked the hatch open and she stepped inside. She palmed the touchpoint on her shipboard utilities just below the throat and they evaporated as she came into my arms, gloriously nude. “I had to see you,” she said. “I … I volunteered for the Haldane expedition, but they wouldn’t take me!”

“I know. I looked up the personnel manifest.” They were only taking twenty-four Marines, after all, out of a company numbering almost two hundred people. Someone had to stay behind.

“I was trying to swap assignments with Gibbs, but he wouldn’t agree to it.” She looked disgusted. “The idiot wants to go.”

“Well, apparently, so do you.”

“Because I want to be with you.”

I reached up for my own touchpoint and clicked my uniform away. By that time, I didn’t even need to go to my in-head menu and turn on my CC-PDE5 inhibitors. I was ready… .

But of course Sergeant Tomacek chose that moment to come through the door.

Bruce Tomacek was one of the three Second Platoon Marines with whom I shared a berthing compartment, a nice enough guy, but with a nasty tendency to tease newbies unmercifully.

“What the fuck?” he asked when he saw our embrace. “Hey, E-Car, if you’re on restriction you’re not supposed to enjoy it!”

“Do you mind?” I asked. “We’re saying good-bye.”

“Nope,” he said, grinning as he dropped into the chair at the compartment’s small desk. “I don’t mind at all!”

Privacy was always tough to come by on board a Navy vessel, but we did have an answer. The compartment’s rack-tube hatches occupied the bulkhead to the left of the door, four circular openings that cold be sealed shut with a thoughtclick. At just a meter wide, they were a bit on the claustrophobic side for two, but it could be done. I helped Joy into mine, gave the leering Tomacek a dirty look, then skinnied in next to her. I thoughtclicked the hatch shut, and we were alone.

Each rack-tube had internal lighting, Net connection pads, environment controls, and a flow of fresh air from hidden vents. The padding was warm and soft, as was Joy. I took her in my arms and we snuggled close.

“Just like the hoteru,” she said, smiling into my face.

“Well, except for the gravity, yeah.”

Rabu Hoteru was the Japanese honeymoon hotel in Geosynch. Joy and I had spent a couple of nights there on liberty once, just after we’d come back from Bloodworld. Zero-gravity sex is a lot of fun, but it helps if you and your partner are … restrained, somewhat. In microgravity, every movement has an equal and opposite reaction, and what is euphemistically called “the docking maneuver”—and staying docked—can be a bit tricky.

The answer was softly padded tubes in the honeymoon suites, where you and your partner could get plenty of purchase for your more energetic acrobatics. The ends were left open, so you could look toward the head end of your tube and see the endlessly wondrous spectacle of Earth hanging in star-clotted space.

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