Читать книгу Battlespace - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 18

Hospitalman Second Class Phillip K. Lee was trying to run, but he was having a bit of trouble. His feet kept leaving the ground, turning him into a small low-altitude spacecraft, and he was having a hard time controlling his vector.

Overhead, Earth hung half-full in a midnight sky, an achingly beautiful glory of blue and white; the sun was just above the horizon at Lee’s back, and the shadows he and the dust cloud cast stretched for long meters across a flat and barren plain.

“Slow down, damn it!” he heard over his helmet headphones. “What are ya tryin’ to do, bounce into orbit?”

His feet hit powdery gray dust, kicking up a spray of the stuff. He tried to stop, overbalanced, and tumbled onto the ground. For a moment, he lay there, listening to the rasp of his own breathing. Readouts beneath his visor showed the workings of both his suit and his body. His heart rate and respiration were up, but otherwise he was okay. His armored suit, built to take rough usage in the field, was intact.

Good. Because if it wasn’t, he was in deep trouble.

Awkwardly, he tried to roll over. He was wearing Mark VIII vac armor, bulky and massive. In some ways, it was a self-contained spacecraft. And he was having some trouble developing the coordination and skills he needed to fly the damned thing.

“Lee, you fucking idiot!”

“Sorry, Gunnery Sergeant,” he said. “Got a bit carried away there.”

“You get carried away in this environment, sailor,” the voice told him with a growl, “and you are dead. Move slow. Move deliberate. Move methodical. Know what the fuck you’re doing, and why.”

Well, he knew what he was doing. He was trying to reach the form of a space-suited Marine sprawled in the dust eighty meters ahead. And why?

Well, he was a Navy hospital corpsman. And that’s what corpsmen did, even if this was a particularly realistic bit of training, rather than a real combat deployment.

Carefully, he rose on unsteady feet and began moving forward again, more cautiously this time. Under lunar gravity, his body weight plus his armored suit and equipment weighed less than 24 kilos … but it still massed 144, which meant that once he got himself moving in any direction, stopping or turning could be a bit tricky. He’d done this sort of thing plenty of times in simulation … but this was his first time in a suit working in hard vacuum.

It was tough to see his target. Marine chamelearmor responded to ambient lighting and reflected the colors and forms of the environment, allowing it to blend in with the background to an amazing degree. The effect wasn’t perfect in a complicated environment like a city or forest, but the surroundings here were simple: stark black sky and gray powder dust. At this range, Lee couldn’t see his target at all with his own eyes; his helmet display, responding to a suit transponder, threw a bright green reticule onto his visor to mark the target’s position.

Moving more deliberately now, he crossed the gently rolling regolith, following his own leaping shadow. Ahead, a featureless mound, one among many, resolved itself into a space-suited male figure, lying on his side.

He put on the metaphorical brakes before he reached the body, dropping to a kneeling position as he came to a halt in a spray of powder-fine dust. The patient had his back to Lee. He pulled the man over, peering down into the helmet visor. A fist-sized hole high in the right shoulder was leaking air; Lee could see the sparkle of ice crystals dancing above the tear and see crimson blood bubble as it welled up into a vacuum and froze. An ugly mass of frozen blood partly filled the wound.

“You’re gonna be okay, mac,” he called over the combat frequency. “Hang on and we’ll get you patched right up!” There was no response—not that he was really expecting one. The patient’s suit display on his chest showed winking patterns of red, green, and yellow. The suit breach was sealed around the wound, but the heaters were out, commo was out, and O₂ partial pressure was dropping fast.

The suit’s AI was still working, though. Lee pulled a cable connect from the left sleeve of his own armor and snicked it home in the receptacle at the side of the patient’s helmet. A second later, a full readout on the patient’s condition was scrolling down through his awareness, the words overlaid on the lower-right side of his visual field. The wound, he learned, had been caused by a probable laser hit estimated at 0.8 megajoule. The bolt had burned through his shoulder armor, which had scattered much of the energy. There was no exit hole, so the energy that had not been dispersed by armor or the explosive release of fluid from superheated tissue had stayed put, cooking muscle and bone. Nasty.

Lee began going through the oft-practiced checklist. The challenge with giving combat field first-aid to someone in a vacuum was that you had to work through the guy’s suit. On Earth—or in an Earthlike environment—the order of medical priorities was fairly straightforward: restore breathing, stop catastrophic bleeding, treat for shock … and only then tend to such lesser concerns as immobilizing broken bones or bandaging wounds. The old mnemonic “ABC” established the order of treatment: airway, breathing, circulation. First establish an open airway, then restore breathing, and finally stop the bleeding and treat the shock caused by blood loss and trauma.

That order held true in space as well, but things became a lot more complicated. Suit integrity was the first concern; the larger the hole in a Marine’s vac armor, the faster and more explosive the loss of air. In space combat, a corpsman also had to be part suit mechanic. Keeping a Marine’s space armor alive was vital to keeping the Marine inside alive as well.

Mark VIII vac armor was smart enough to seal off a hole to prevent pressure loss. A spongy, inner layer of the armor laminate was a memory plastic designed to press tightly around the man’s body at the point of a leak, serving both as tourniquet and as a seal against further air loss. Sometimes, though, a complete seal just wasn’t possible. This one, for instance. The suit had formed a seal around the hole in order to maintain internal pressure, but the laser burst had punctured the Marine’s thoracic cavity … and penetrated the left lung as well. Air was spilling from the Marine’s bronchial tubes into his chest cavity—a condition called pneumothorax—and the air, mixed with blood, was bubbling away into space through the punctured suit. As the air drained away, the condition became the opposite of pneumothorax—vacuthorax—and massive lung tissue trauma.

And suddenly, things were getting much worse very quickly. As Lee rolled the armored form over, a crusty, glittering patch of frozen blood and water clinging to the wound suddenly dissolved in a spray of red vapor. He caught his mistake immediately. When he’d changed the Marine’s position, he’d moved the wound from shade into direct sunlight. The wound had been partly plugged with blood-ice, but in the harsh light of the sun just above the eastern lunar horizon, the temperature on that part of the armor soared from around −80° Celsius to almost boiling. In seconds, the ice plug had vaporized, reopening both the wound and the partly plugged hole in the armor.

There was no time for anything but plugging that leak. Reaching into the case mounted on his right thigh, he pulled out a loaded sealant gun, pressed the muzzle up against the hole, and squeezed the trigger. Gray goo, a quick-setting polymer heavily laced with programmed nano, squirted over the hole and wound together, almost instantly firming to a claylike consistency, then hardening solid. He checked the Marine’s suit readout again. Internal pressure was low, but steady.

But the guy was still bleeding internally—probably hemorrhaging into his thoracic cavity—and his heart was fluttering, atrial fibrillation. The patient was on the verge of going into arrest.

Lee reached for another tool, a Frahlich Probe, and slammed the needle down against the armor, directly above the heart. The probe’s tip was housed in a nano sheath, which literally slipped between the molecules of the man’s vac armor, then through skin, muscle, and bone to penetrate the patient’s chest while maintaining an almost perfect air-tight seal. Leaving the needle in place, he pulled off the injector, then attached a reader. The device fed his implant a noumenal image of a glistening red, pulsating mass—the beating heart—and let him position the tip of the needle more precisely, at the sinus node at the top of the right atrium. Easy … easy … there!

Now he could program the probe to administer a rapid-fire series of minute electric shocks directly into the sinus node, regularizing the beat. He watched the readout a moment longer as the probe’s computer continued to feed electrical impulses into the patient’s heart. The fibrillation ceased, the heartbeat slowing to a fast but acceptable 112 beats per minute.

The patient’s breathing was labored. He couldn’t tell, but he suspected that the left lung had collapsed. Certainly, it had been badly damaged by both wound and vacuum trauma. With the wound sealed over, the best Lee could do for the patient now was evacuate him.

“Nightingale, Nightingale,” he called. “This is Fox-Sierra One-niner. I need an emergency evac. Patient has suffered massive internal vacuum trauma. Suit leak is plugged and wound is stable. Heart monitor in place and operational. Over!”

A voice came back through his implant a moment later. “Copy that, Fox-Sierra. This is Alpha Three-One, inbound to your position, ETA two-point-five mikes. Ready your patient for pickup, and transmit suit data, over.”

“We’re ready to go at this end. Uploading data now.”

He spent the time checking for other wounds, monitoring the patient’s heart and vitals, and entering the computer code that caused the man’s armor to go rigid, locking him immobile against the chance of further injury. The patient’s condition continued to deteriorate, and Lee was beginning to guess that he’d made a wrong choice, a wrong guess somewhere along the line.

His patient was dying.

Two and a half minutes later, a silent swirl of lunar dust marked the arrival of Alpha 3/1, a UT-40 battlefield transport converted to use as a medevac flier. Bulbous and insect-faced, it settled to the lunar regolith on spindly legs. A pair of space-suited men dropped from the cargo deck and jogged over to Lee and the patient.

Lee stepped back as they attached a harness to the rigid armor. He was already scanning for another casualty. His suit scanners were giving him another target, bearing one-one-seven, range two kilometers. …

“Belay that, Lee,” Gunnery Sergeant Eckhart’s voice told him. “The exercise is concluded.”

“But Gunnery Sergeant—”

“I said belay that! Mount up on the Bug and come on home.”

“Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant,” he replied. From the sound of Eckhart’s voice, he’d screwed this one up pretty badly. He looked over one of the Marine’s shoulders at the patient and saw the deadly wink of red lights: PATIENT TERMINATED.

Damn, what had he missed? He’d followed procedure right down the list.

He mounted the UT-40, popularly known as a “medibug,” or “bug” for short. The passenger compartment wasn’t much more than an open framework of struts, with a bit of decking underfoot. The two Marines were strapping the patient onto a carry stretcher slung portside outboard, but without the usual formalities of connecting life support and condition monitors. The exercise was over.

The patient, of course, wasn’t really dead, had never been alive to begin with in the traditional sense. It was a high-tech dummy, a quite sophisticated robot, actually, with a very good onboard AI that let it realistically simulate a wide range of combat wounds, injuries, traumas, various diseases, and even potentially fatal conditions such as drop-sickness-induced vomiting, followed by choking inside a sealed helmet. He was called “Misery Mike,” and he and his brothers had helped train a lot of Navy corpsmen for SMF duty. He couldn’t really die of vacuthorax because he wasn’t alive to begin with … but how Lee had treated his problems could mean life or death for Lee’s hopes to ship out with the Marines.

The UT-40’s plasma thrusters fired, the blasts both silent and invisible in the lunar vacuum. Dust billowed out from beneath the bug’s belly as the ugly little vehicle rose into the black sky. After a moment’s acceleration, the thrusters cut out, and the medibug drifted along on a carefully calculated suborbital trajectory, the cratered and dust-cloaked terrain slipping smoothly past a hundred meters below.

He spent the time going over his treatment of the last casualty. He knew he should have been more careful about moving the suit. If he’d left the wound in the shade, kept it below freezing, he might not have damaged the patient’s lungs as badly. But the lungs had already been damaged and vacuthorax would still have been an issue. Damn, what had he missed?

Minutes later, the medibug was descending over the powdery desert of Fra Mauro. Ahead, the Navy–Marine Lunar Facility was spread out in the glare of the early morning sun, its masts, domes, and Quonset cylinders casting oversized shadows across the surface.

The Fra Mauro facility had started life a century and a half ago as a U.N. base, with attendant spaceport. Taken over by U.S. Marines in the U.N. War of 2042, it had been converted into a joint Navy–Marine lunar base. It now consisted of over one hundred habitat and storage modules clustered about the sunken landing bay, including the blunt, pyramidal tower of the Fra Mauro Naval Hospital, ablaze with lights. A secondary landing dome at the base of the hospital was already open to receive the bug, which bounced roughly—still in complete silence—as the pilot jockeyed the balky little craft in for a landing.

Twenty minutes later, Lee, shed of his armor but still wearing the utility undergarment with its weave of heat-transfer tubes and medinano shunts, palmed the access panel to a door marked GSGT ECKHART. “Enter,” sounded in Lee’s thoughts over his implant and the door slid aside.

The room was small and tightly organized, as were all work spaces in the older part of the facility. Deck space was almost completely occupied by a desk and two chairs. Most of the bulkheads were taken up with storage access panels, though there was room for a holoportrait of President Connors, another of Commandant Marshke, and a framed photograph of an FT-90 in low orbit, the dazzling curve of Earth’s horizon below and beyond its sleek-gleaming hull.

“Hospitalman Second Class Lee, reporting as ordered, Gunnery Sergeant.”

“At ease, at ease,” Eckhart waved him toward the chair. “I’m not an officer and we don’t need the formal crap. Copy?”

“Uh … sure, Gunnery Sergeant. Copy.” He took the offered seat. Was this the prelude to a chewing out? Or to his being booted out of the program?

“Relax, son,” Eckhart told him. “And call me ‘Gunny.’”

“Okay, Gunny. Uh, look. I’ve been reviewing my procedure for that last casualty and I see what went wrong. I shouldn’t have rolled the wound into sunlight—”

Eckhart waved him to silence. “Your dedication is duly noted, son. And we’ll debrief your session later, with the rest of the class. Right now I want to review your request for SMF.”

Lee went cold, as cold as the shade on the Lunar surface, inside. “Is there a problem?”

“Not really. I just think you need to have your head examined, is all. What the hell do you want to ship out-system for, anyway?”

Lee took a deep breath, hesitated, then let it out again. How did you answer a question like that?

“Gunny … I just want to go, that’s all. I’ve been space-happy since I was a kid, reet? ‘Join the Navy and see the stars.’”

“You’re in space now, in case you haven’t noticed. Most space-happy kids never get as far out as the moon. Or even low-Earth orbit. You know that.” He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desktop before him. “You made it! You’re in space. Why are you so all-fired eager to take the Big Leap?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call the moon space, Gunny.” He pointed at the overhead. “I mean, Earth’s right there, and everything, in plain view.”

“There are always billets on Mars. Or Europa. Or on Navy ships on High Watch patrol. I want to know why you want to go to another fucking star. That’s what you put in for on your dreamsheet, right?”

He sighed. “Yes, Gunny. I did.”

“You want to sign on for a deployment that might last twenty to thirty years objective. You come back home aged maybe four years and find yourself completely out of pace with everything. Everyone you knew is thirty years older. Your implant is out of date. You don’t understand the language. Hell, the culture might seem as alien to you as anything you’ll run into XT. You won’t fit in anymore.”

“Gunny, I don’t really have anything here, on Earth, I mean. Nothing but the Corps.”

“Uh-huh.” Eckhart’s eyes glazed over as he reviewed some inner download of data. “It says here you just went through a divorce.”

“Yes, Gunny.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “My wife and husband both filed for divorce. I came home from my last deployment and found the locks had been changed on my condhome. They didn’t recognize my palmprint any longer. I found out later they’d filed a couple of months earlier, but the formal DL hadn’t caught up with me yet.”

“Why the split? They tell you why?”

“‘Irreconcilable differences,’ but what the fuck does that mean?”

“Problems with you in the service?”

“Well, yeah, I guess. I know Nance didn’t like me always going on long deployments. Egypt. Siberia. That last six months at the LEO spaceport. Still, she could’ve waited, could’ve talked to me, damn it! Ten years of marriage, zip! Down the black hole. I know now that Chris is a slimy, two-faced, twisted sick-fuck bastard who’s in love with melodrama and the sound of his own voice. I’m not sure how he convinced Nance, though. I … I thought we really had something. Something permanent.”

“Right. So you find it’s not permanent and you figure twenty years or so out-system will let you get away from your problems. Or … maybe you’re in it for the revenge? Come back four years older, when your siggos, your significant others, are twenty years older?”

“What’s the point of that? We’d all still be middle-aged. But I guess I do want to get away from everything, yeah.”

“Well, I damn well guess you do. But is cutting yourself off from every soul you’ve known on Earth, cutting yourself off from the ties you were born to, is that all really worth it? You can’t run away from yourself, you know.”

“I’m not running away from myself. If anything, I’m running away from them.”

“Son, I’ve heard this story before, you know. Maybe about a thousand times. You’re not the first poor schmuck to get shit-canned by a dearly beloved siggo or kicked in the teeth by people he believed in and trusted. And it hurts, I know. Gods of Battle, I know. And I also know you’re carrying the pain here.” He pointed at Lee’s chest. “That’s what you really want to get away from, and that’s what you’re going to carry with you. You can run all the way to Andromeda, son, and the pain will still be there. Question is, is the attempt worth losing everything else you know on Earth as well?”

“Gunny,” Lee said, “I’d still have the Corps. Even in Andromeda. Semper fi.”

“Ooh-rah,” Eckhart said, but with a flat inflection utterly devoid of enthusiasm. “Son, it’s my job to talk you out of this, if I can.”

“Huh? Why?”

“To stop you from screwing up your life.”

“Well, you’ve got my request, Gunny. All you need to do is add your request denied to the form, and it’s as good as shit-canned.”

“I may still do that, Lee, if you don’t convince me pretty quick. Trouble is, I have to tell you that we need volunteers for SMF. And we need them bad. We have a big one coming up soon, a big deployment. And your class, frankly, is all we have to work with. It’s worse than that, actually. Three of you have a Famsit rating of one, out of a class of thirty-eight, and seven have a rating of two. Everybody else has close family.”

“So, let me get this straight. You need Corpsmen for SMF, but you have to try to get us to back out after we volunteer? That doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”

Eckhart sighed. “This is the Marine Corps, son. It doesn’t always make sense. I’ll approve your request—if you can convince me that you are not making the big mistake of your sorry young life.”

“I … see. …”

And he did. His heart leaped. Eckhart was just giving him a chance to back out of this.

Yes! He was going to the stars! …

“I’m not sure what you want to hear, Gunny. I want to go. I have nobody I’m attached to on Earth. You said the culture here would be different, that I might have trouble fitting in when I got back. Well, you know what? I’ve never fit in, not really. Not until I joined the Navy. Hell, maybe I’ll like what I find here better in twenty years, fit in better than I do now, y’know?”

Eckhart nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I do know. Tell me something. Why did you become a corpsman?”

“Huh? Well, when I first enlisted, I had this idea of going on someday and becoming a doctor. I figured what I learned in Corps School would give me a leg up, know what I mean? And then there was the fact that my dad was a Marine. He used to tell me stories about the company’s ‘Doc,’ that special relationship between the Marines and their corpsmen. I’d always been interested in biology, physiology, stuff like that, and I was good at them in school. It just seemed like the right choice.”

Damn it, he wanted to go Space Marine Force. As a Navy Hospital Corpsman, the equivalent of an Army medic for Navy and Marine personnel, he’d enjoyed working with the Marines already. Going SFM simply took things a step or ten farther.

A century or two back, the equivalent of today’s SMF had been assignment with the Navy’s FMF—the Fleet Marine Force. The force included Navy doctors and corpsmen who shipped out with the Marines, sailed with them on their transports, and went ashore with them in combat. It was a long and venerable tradition, one that went back at least as far as the Navy pharmacy mates who hit the beaches in the Pacific with the Marines during World War II, and arguably went even further back to the surgeon’s mate’s loblolly boys of the sailing ships of a century before that.

He’d volunteered for SMF almost two months ago, just after the completion of his six-month deployment to LEO.

Just after the divorce became final.

Damn it, the hell with Earth. He wanted to go to the stars.

“Gunny, the Navy … and, well, now the Marines, if I go SMF, they’re my family now. I’ve been taking overseas and off-world deployments for the last four years, since I joined up. It’s time for me to re-up. I want to re-up. I’ve always wanted the Navy to be my career.”

Eckhart grinned. “A lifer, huh?”

“Yeah, a lifer. And it’s my life.”

“The government might point out that your life belongs to it.”

“Okay, but in so far as I do have a free choice, this is what I want to do with my life. ‘Join the Navy and see other worlds,’ right? So why can’t I re-up with a shot at really seeing some new territory?”

“How does Sirius sound to you, son?”

“Sirius? I thought there were no planets there?”

Eckhart grinned. “There aren’t. But there’s … something. An artifact. A space habitat. They didn’t tell me much in the report I saw, but there’s something. And the word is, a full MIEU is being sent out there. And they need Corpsmen. A bunch of ’em.”

An artifact. Another remnant of one of the ancient civilizations that had been kicking around this part of the galaxy thousands of years ago. Maybe the An. Or maybe it was something really special … something left by the Builders at about the same time that Homo erectus was in the process of making the transition to Homo sapiens.

“Sirius sounds just fine, Gunny.”

Okay, there wouldn’t be a planetfall. But a chance to see a high-tech artifact left by a vanished, starfaring civilization? And whatever the thing was, it would have to be damned huge if they were sending a whole Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit—a force that would number over a thousand men and women, all told. What the hell had they found out there?

“Does that mean I’m in?”

Eckhart grinned. “You’re in, Doc.”

I’m going to Sirius! I’m going to another star! …

He almost didn’t hear what Eckhart said next.

“You’ll continue your training here for the rest of the month,” Eckhart was saying. “After that, you and the other Corpsmen from this class who make the grade, the ones who’ve volunteered for extrasolar deployment, will ship for L-4 for your XS training and final assignment. And just let me say, Doc … welcome aboard!”

“Thanks, Gunny! Uh, does that mean you’re coming too?”

“Yes, it does. The brass is doing some scrambling right now, looking for famsit ones and twos.” He grinned. “I figured you damned squids’d need me to keep an eye on you!”

“That sounds decent, Gunny.”

“Now get your sorry ass down to debrief. We’re gonna want to hear, in exacting detail, just what you did wrong on that last field exercise!”

Vacation over. “Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”

“For one thing, you could’ve used a thermalslick.” He grinned. “Chief Hart is gonna tell you all about that!”

Lee blinked. He hadn’t even thought of that. Thermal-slicks were part of each corpsman’s field kit—a tough, polymylar sheet like aluminum foil on one side, jet black on the other. It could reflect sunlight or absorb it and the black side had the added trick of a layer of carbon buckyball spheres that made it almost frictionless—great for dragging the dead weight of an injured man.

But then, he hadn’t even thought about the problem of sunlight melting the wound’s clot until it was too late.

At the moment, none of that mattered.

I’m going to Sirius. …